Author: Edward Shils
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1461720605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Edward Shils's The Torment of Secrecy is one of the few minor classics to emerge from the cold war years of anticommunism and McCarthyism in the United States. Mr. Shils's "torment" is not only that of the individual caught up in loyalty and security procedures; it is also the torment of the accuser and judge. This essay in sociological analysis and political philosophy considers the cold war preoccupation with espionage, sabotage, and subversion at home, assessing the magnitude of such threats and contrasting it to the agitation—by lawmakers, investigators, and administrators—so wildly directed against the "enemy." Mr. Shils's examination of a recurring American characteristic is as timely as ever. "Brief...lucid... brilliant."—American Political Science Review. "A fine, sophisticated analysis of American social metabolism."—New Republic. "An excitingly lucid and intelligent work on a subject of staggering importance...the social preconditions of political democracy."—Social Forces.
Author: Clark Chilson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485134X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Shin has long been one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan. As a devotional tradition that emphasizes gratitude and trust in Amida Buddha, it is thought to have little to do with secrecy. Yet for centuries, Shin Buddhists met on secluded mountains, in homes, and in the backrooms of stores to teach their hidden doctrines and hold clandestine rites. Among their adherents was D. T. Suzuki’s mother, who took her son to covert Shin meetings when he was a boy. Even among Shin experts, covert followers were relatively unknown; historians who studied them claimed they had disappeared more than a century ago. A serendipitous encounter, however, led to author Clark Chilson’s introduction to the leader of a covert Shin Buddhist group—one of several that to this day conceal the very existence of their beliefs and practices. In Secrecy’s Power Chilson explains how and why they have remained hidden. Drawing on historical and ethnographic sources, as well as fieldwork among covert Shin Buddhists in central Japan, Secrecy’s Power introduces the histories, doctrines, and practices of different covert Shin Buddhists. It shows how, despite assumptions to the contrary, secrecy has been a significant part of Shin’s history since the thirteenth century, when Shinran disowned his eldest son for claiming secret knowledge. The work also demonstrates how secrecy in Shin has long been both a source of conflict and a response to it. Some covert Shin Buddhists were persecuted because of their secrecy, while others used it to protect themselves from persecution under rulers hostile to Shin. Secrecy’s Power is a groundbreaking work that makes an important contribution to our knowledge on secrecy and Shin Buddhism. Organized around the various consequences concealment has had for covert Shin Buddhists, it provides new insights into the power of secrecy to produce multiple effects—even polar opposite ones. It also sheds light on ignored corners of Shin Buddhism to reveal a much richer, more diverse, and more contested tradition than commonly is understood.
Author: Sissela Bok
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776172X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The author of Lying shows how the ethical issues raised by secrets and secrecy in our careers or private lives take us to the heart of the critical questions of private and public morality.
Author: Susan Maret
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 085724390X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
Divided into six sections, this title examines Government secrecy (GS) in a variety of contexts, including comparative examination of government control of information, new definitions, categories, censorship, ethics, and secrecy's relationship with freedom of information and transparency.
Author: Edward Shils
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351535609
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Edward Shils was one of the giants of sociological theory in the period after World War II. In this autobiography, written three years before his death in 1995, Shils reflects on the remarkable range of his life's work and activities, including founding and editing the journal "Minerva", being a central figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving as a founding member of the editorial board of "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists", and being a member of the International Council on the Future of the University. Shils recognizes that a unity of concern runs through his many theoretical writings and activities. Early in his life, the concern was expressed as understanding the character of consensus. During the last fifteen years of his life, he refined his understanding of consensus through investigation of the nature of "collective self-consciousness." That concern was the structure and character of the moral order of a society, and, in particular, liberal, democratic society. Accompanying the autobiography are two unpublished essays, "Society, Collective Self-Consciousness and Collective Self-Consciousnesses" and "Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice," two areas of intellectual concern discussed in the autobiography. The book contains fascinating discussion of many of the people Shils knew throughout his illustrious career: Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, Audrey Richards, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, and many others. They represent Shils' final formulations on the character of society and its moral order. As such, it is a most important contribution both to the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century and to sociological theory.
Author: Edward Shils
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Author: Gary D. Jaworski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666936812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Erving Goffman and the Cold War presents a provocative new reading of the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Instead of viewing him as a “marginal man” or academic outsider, Gary D. Jaworski explores Goffman as a social theorist of the Cold War. Goffman was deeply connected to both the ethos of his time and to a range of cold warriors and their critics, such as Edward A. Shils, Thomas C. Schelling, and the researchers on “brainwashing” associated with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, among others. Chapters on loyalty, betrayal, secrecy, strategy, interrogation, provocation, and aggression concretely illustrate these connections. Erving Goffman and the Cold War shows that Goffman was much more than a microsociologist of mundane life; he was a perceptive analyst of the Cold War America.
Author: Mladen Popović
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110593661
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.
Author: David Tavárez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192694081
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
This volume brings together representative case studies and surveys that explore research into ritual language, covering theoretical and methodological approaches that reflect traditional inquiries and more recent studies. This recent literature contends that ritual language hinges on the construction of authoritative ontological models about the cosmos and its inhabitants. Ritual speech also orchestrates performances that articulate representations of collective identities, and rests on the diversity of hierarchical forms of authoritative knowledge, displayed in both oblique and direct terms. Moreover, performances, texts, and narratives associated with ritual practices are closely entwined with historical accounts that navigate current memories, recast in a diversity of ways, about ancestral beings and distant or recent pasts, or delimit a terrain in which dialectical relationships with colonial hegemony and Christian indoctrination emerge to transform the social order. Ritual narrative often offers in its structure and delivery momentous representation of the social order, social institutions, social difference, and collective identities, and may also be constituted by claims about relations among species, non-human actors, and material culture. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language addresses foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, use, and consequences of ritual language. The chapters examine the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social world. As the study of ritual speech hinges on extensive analyses of linguistic choices and styles, the contributors draw on data from a wide range of language groups and societies in the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean.
Author: Sam Lebovic
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674969596
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First Amendment protections that shield the press from government censorship. But in this comprehensive history of American press freedom as it has existed in theory, law, and practice, Sam Lebovic shows that, on its own, the right of free speech has been insufficient to guarantee a free press. Lebovic recovers a vision of press freedom, prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, based on the idea of unfettered public access to accurate information. This “right to the news” responded to persistent worries about the quality and diversity of the information circulating in the nation’s news. Yet as the meaning of press freedom was contested in various arenas—Supreme Court cases on government censorship, efforts to regulate the corporate newspaper industry, the drafting of state secrecy and freedom of information laws, the unionization of journalists, and the rise of the New Journalism—Americans chose to define freedom of the press as nothing more than the right to publish without government censorship. The idea of a public right to all the news and information was abandoned, and is today largely forgotten. Free Speech and Unfree News compels us to reexamine assumptions about what freedom of the press means in a democratic society—and helps us make better sense of the crises that beset the press in an age of aggressive corporate consolidation in media industries, an increasingly secretive national security state, and the daily newspaper’s continued decline.
