Against Progress

Against Progress PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350515876
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns essayist to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and ask: Can things, which have never seemed worse, get better? What would a better world be? And how, when we are constantly besieged by doomers, degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises? In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures. Nor does Žižek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?

Against Progress

Against Progress PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350515876
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Get Book Here

Book Description
To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns essayist to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and ask: Can things, which have never seemed worse, get better? What would a better world be? And how, when we are constantly besieged by doomers, degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises? In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures. Nor does Žižek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?

Against Progress

Against Progress PDF Author: Jessica Silbey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631923
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
When first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate "progress of science and the useful arts" by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of "progress" may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP's emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests. Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today's internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of "progress" and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.

Feminism against Progress

Feminism against Progress PDF Author: Mary Harrington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684514967
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Modern feminism increasingly benefits only a small class of professional women. There is no reason to sacrifice everyone else's happiness for their sake. Mary Harrington shows that women's liberation was less the result of moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We've now left the industrial era for the digital age, in which technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. This shift may benefit the elites, but it also makes it easier to commodify women's bodies, human intimacy, and female reproductive abilities. "Feminism" has been captured by well-off white-collar women, who use it to advance their own economic and political interests under the pretense that these are the interests of all women—all the while wielding the term like a club against anyone, male or female, who dissents. Feminism against Progress is a stark warning against a dystopian future in which poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. "Progress" no longer benefits the majority of women, and only a feminism that is skeptical of it can truly defend their interests in the twenty-first century.

Populism Against Progress

Populism Against Progress PDF Author: Robert Corfe
Publisher: Arena books
ISBN: 9780954316181
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In this text Corfe discusses how the standards of education and good citizenship are declining due to populism and the increasing complexity of the financial-industrial infrastructure. (Education/Teaching)

The Antimodern Condition

The Antimodern Condition PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044940
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Much of social and political thought over the last three centuries has been concerned with transgression and change, with progress and a focus on creating something ’better’ than we have now. But when many of these ideas are put into practice the result has been violence, turmoil and human misery. This, we might say, has been the result of grand ideals taking precedence over the interests of ordinary people. This book presents an alternative view: the antimodern condition. This involves the rejection of change and progress and instead seeks to promote certainty, permanence and settlement. The antimodern condition is where we are in place and settled. It is where we are part of the world around us and not at war with it. It is where we accept our place: we are with those who we care for, and so we are theirs. The antimodern condition is where we recognise that we dwell within traditions, which may evolve and change, but which keep us within the bounds of what is known and what works. This book takes a cross-disciplinary approach, integrating ideas from politics, philosophy, social theory and architecture to present an alternative to progress and other modern conceits.

Progress Against Poverty

Progress Against Poverty PDF Author: Santiago Levy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815752229
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In 1997, Mexico launched a new incentive-based poverty reduction program to enhance the human capital of those living in extreme poverty. This book presents a case study of Progresa-Oportunidades, focusing on the main factors that have contributed to the program's sustainability, policies that have allowed it to operate at the national level, and future challenges.

International Justice Against Impunity

International Justice Against Impunity PDF Author: Yves Beigbeder
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
ISBN: 900414451X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This volume reviews the achievements and limitations of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the creation of mixed national/international courts: the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Cambodia Tribunal. The major, unexpected and promising judiciary innovation is however the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998, supported by the UN, European Union members and other countries, effectively promoted by NGOs, but strongly opposed by the USA. The Court will have to show that it is a fair and valuable instrument in fighting impunity at the international level.

The End of Progress

The End of Progress PDF Author: Amy Allen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540639
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School—Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

Progress Against Growth

Progress Against Growth PDF Author: Thomas R. Vale
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9780898626650
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Poverty and Progress

Poverty and Progress PDF Author: Stephan THERNSTROM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Embedded in the consciousness of Americans throughout much of the country's history has been the American Dream: that every citizen, no matter how humble his beginnings, is free to climb to the top of the social and economic ladder. Poverty and Progress assesses the claims of the American Dream against the actual structure of economic and social opportunities in a typical nineteenth century industrial community--Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here is local history. With the aid of newspapers, census reports, and local tax, school, and savings bank records Stephan Thernstrom constructs a detailed and vivid portrait of working class life in Newburyport from 1850 to 1880, the critical years in which this old New England town was transformed into a booming industrial city. To determine how many self-made men there really were in the community, he traces the career patterns of hundreds of obscure laborers and their sons over this thirty year period, exploring in depth the differing mobility patterns of native-born and Irish immigrant workmen. Out of this analysis emerges the conclusion that opportunities for occupational mobility were distinctly limited. Common laborers and their sons were rarely able to attain middle class status, although many rose from unskilled to semiskilled or skilled occupations. But another kind of mobility was widespread. Men who remained in lowly laboring jobs were often strikingly successful in accumulating savings and purchasing homes and a plot of land. As a result, the working class was more easily integrated into the community; a new basis for social stability was produced which offset the disruptive influences that accompanied the first shock of urbanization and industrialization. Since Newburyport underwent changes common to other American cities, Thernstrom argues, his findings help to illuminate the social history of nineteenth century America and provide a new point of departure for gauging mobility trends in our society today. Correlating the Newburyport evidence with comparable studies of twentieth century cities, he refutes the popular belief that it is now more difficult to rise from the bottom of the social ladder than it was in the idyllic past. The "blocked mobility" theory was proposed by Lloyd Warner in his famous "Yankee City" studies of Newburyport; Thernstrom provides a thorough critique of the "Yankee City" volumes and of the ahistorical style of social research which they embody.