Workers and Intellectuals

Workers and Intellectuals PDF Author: Michele Ford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1990s, Indonesia’s independent labor movement re-emerged after decades of repression. The revival was led by students and NGO activists, who organized industrial workers and spoke on their behalf. Workers and Intellectuals explores how these middle-class activists struggled to define their place in a labor movement shaped by a history of fierce debate about the role of nonworker intellectuals. Drawing on extensive interviews, Michele Ford documents the contribution made by NGOs and student groups to the resurgence of labor activism, explaining how activists and workers perceived their roles and how the situation evolved in the decade after Suharto’s authoritarian regime crumbled in 1998. This fine-grained study of labor organization in a developing country will appeal to scholars of labor history, politics, and sociology, as well as Indonesia specialists.

Workers and Intellectuals

Workers and Intellectuals PDF Author: Michele Ford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1990s, Indonesia’s independent labor movement re-emerged after decades of repression. The revival was led by students and NGO activists, who organized industrial workers and spoke on their behalf. Workers and Intellectuals explores how these middle-class activists struggled to define their place in a labor movement shaped by a history of fierce debate about the role of nonworker intellectuals. Drawing on extensive interviews, Michele Ford documents the contribution made by NGOs and student groups to the resurgence of labor activism, explaining how activists and workers perceived their roles and how the situation evolved in the decade after Suharto’s authoritarian regime crumbled in 1998. This fine-grained study of labor organization in a developing country will appeal to scholars of labor history, politics, and sociology, as well as Indonesia specialists.

Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-class Mentality in Germany, 1887-1912

Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-class Mentality in Germany, 1887-1912 PDF Author: Stanley Pierson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674551237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
How does one explain the presence of educated recruits in movements that were overwhelmingly working class in composition? How did intellectuals function within the movements? In the first in-depth exploration of this question, Stanley Pierson examines the rise, development, and ultimate failure of the German Social Democrats, the largest of the European socialist parties, from 1887 to 1912. Prominent figures, such as Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eduard Bernstein are discussed, but the book focuses primarily on the younger generation. These forgotten intellectuals--Max Schippel, Paul Kampffmeyer, Conrad Schmidt, Paul Ernst, and others--struggled most directly with the dilemmas arising out of the attempt to translate Marxist doctrines into practical and personal terms. These young writers, speakers, and politicians set out to supplant old ways of thinking with a Marxist understanding of history and society. Pierson weaves together over thirty intellectual biographies to explore the relationship between ideology and politics in Germany. He examines the conflict within Social Democracy between the "revisionist" intellectuals, who sought to adapt Marxist theory to changing economic and social realities, and those "orthodox" and "radical" intellectuals who attempted to remain faithful to the Marxist vision. By examining the struggles of the socialist intellectuals in Germany, Pierson brings out the special features of German cultural, social, and political life before World War I. His study of this critical time in the development of the German Social Democratic party also illuminates the wider development of Marxism in Europe during the twentieth century.

Labor's Mind

Labor's Mind PDF Author: Tobias Higbie
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051092
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.

Working Knowledge

Working Knowledge PDF Author: Catherine L. Fisk
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833029
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their "property," or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundati

Public Intellectuals

Public Intellectuals PDF Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042271
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.

Blue Collar Intellectuals

Blue Collar Intellectuals PDF Author: Daniel J. Flynn
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497620821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone—intellectual and everyman alike—has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.

Believe and Destroy

Believe and Destroy PDF Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 685

Get Book Here

Book Description
There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.

Intellectuals and Race

Intellectuals and Race PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465058728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence-- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.

Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals and Society PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465031102
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes PDF Author: Jonathan Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Get Book Here

Book Description
What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind?".