Author: Stephen W. Sawyer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226833399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.
Author: Milton Hindus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000950999
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
This is a sustained inquiry into the thought of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. Milton Hindus considers the subjects that most interested Babbitt: ethics, literature, education, and social and political conservatism in the United States. In their most general sense, his concerns were man and his nature as the root of all social order. For Babbitt, efforts to improve social conditions must begin and end with the individual human being.In rejecting notions that society is primarily responsible for moral deficiencies in the individual, or that the individual is bom good only to be corrupted by society, Babbitt places responsibility squarely with the individual. As Hindus shows, Babbitt sees human beings as a mixture of good and evil impulses, shaped by what he called "the inner check." Virtue is thus a result of self-discipline, reinforced and confirmed by habit.Babbitt's thinking, emphasizing as it does proven values and accepted wisdom, calls upon us to advance ourselves by rediscovery of the lessons of the past. Hindus demonstrates that Babbitt has much to offer us as we consider contemporary social and political issues. In contrast to those who emphasize avant-garde postures and fashionable ideologies, as well as those conservative followers of outdated theories and dead-end formulas, Babbitt's reinvigorating spirit inspires new insights.Although there have been a number of studies of Irving Babbitt and the New Humanism, Hindus is singular in his combination of detailed consideration of a number of Babbitt's books with his own essays on contemporary issues, approached in what Hindus calls a Babbitian spirit. Like Babbitt's own writings, this book is addressed to the general reader. It will be of particular importance to teachers of comparative literature and those interested in the connections between literature and social thought and philosophy.
Author: Antonio García-Trevijano
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761848568
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
The author builds a realistic theory of democracy to end the false idea that corruption, state crime, and public immorality are democracy's (undesirable) products, not the natural and inevitable fruits of oligarchic regimes. Important theories of the state and constitution exist, but none can be called a theory of democracy.
Author: David Fisher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351492632
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
This intellectual portrait of Romain Rolland (1866-1944)--French novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in 1915--focuses on his experiments with political commitment against the backdrop of European history between the two world wars. Best known as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel, Jean-Christophe, Rolland was one of those nonconforming writers who perceived a crisis of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great War, and who consciously worked to discredit and reshape that society in the interwar period. Analyzing Rolland's itinerary of engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies aspects of European cultural history and helps decipher the ambiguities at the heart of all forms of intellectual engagement.Moving from text to context, Fisher organizes the book around a series of debates--Rolland's public and private collisions over specific committed stands--introducing the reader to the polemical style of French intellectual discourse and offering insight into what it means to be a responsible intellectual. Fisher presents Rolland's private ruminations, extensive research, and reexamination of the function and style of the French man of letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with five styles of commitment: oceanic mysticism linked to progressive, democratic politics; free thinking linked to antiwar dissent; pacifism and, ultimately, Gandhism; antifacism linked to anti-imperialism, antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, most controversially, fellow traveling as a form of socialist humanism and the positive side of antifascism. Fisher views Rolland's engagement historically and critically, showing that engaged intellectuals of that time were neither naive propagandists nor dupes of political parties.David James Fisher makes a case for the committed writer and hopes to re-ignite the debate about commitment. For him, Romain Rolland sums up engagement in a striking, dialectical formula:
Author: Hermann Fernau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Author: David James Fisher
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412833426
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Author: Roger Benjamin
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700602623
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
One outcome of the declining economic growth and rising political conflict of the 1980s has been a renewed interest in political theory and increased questioning about the durability of the capitalist state. More and more political scientists are critically assessing the prevailing pluralist vision of the relationships between the state and the economy. Is the capitalist state able to adjust to crises and contradictions? What is the role of the state in changing—deteriorating—economic circumstances? How should we understand competing interpretations on the relative autonomy of the state, the nature of property rights, the legitimation crisis? This collection of five original essays by seven of the best-known political-economy theorists addresses the interconnections between the economy and the polity and embodies the leading theoretical approaches to the political economy of the state.
Author: John Hunter Harley
Publisher: London, King
ISBN:
Category : Socialism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Author: Roland N. Stromberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317473175
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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This text sums up the democratic experience in modern Western civilisation. It defines the term and notes the confusions in it, and its changing meanings over the past two centuries or so. It records criticisms, and is especially concerned with the conditions that are neccessary for it to exist. This encompasses a comprehensive literature which the author seeks to summarise and present to the reader in accessible form. It is appropriate material for course reading in Westen civilisation, intellectual history, political thought, and philosophy.
Author: Vladimir I. Lenin
Publisher: Resistance Books
ISBN: 9781876646004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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