Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Modernity And Progress
Download Modernity And Progress full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Modernity And Progress ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Modernity and Progress by : Ronald Berman
Download or read book Modernity and Progress written by Ronald Berman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007-03-18 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the 1920s and for a generation thereafter, understandings of time, place, and civilization were subjected to a barrage of new conceptions. Berman probes the work of three writers--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell--who wrestled with one or more of these issues in ways of lasting significance. At stake for each is a sense of what constitutes true civilization"--Back cover.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Progress by : Tom Wessels
Download or read book The Myth of Progress written by Tom Wessels and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative critique of Western progress from a scientific perspective
Book Synopsis Spectacular Modernity by : Lisa Blackmore
Download or read book Spectacular Modernity written by Lisa Blackmore and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-07-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
Download or read book Progress written by Peter Wagner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress guided human expectations and actions for over two centuries. From the Enlightenment onwards, it was widely believed that the condition of humankind could be radically improved. History had embarked on an unstoppable forward trajectory, realizing the promise of freedom and reason. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the French Revolution, in some views also the socialist revolution, were milestones on this march of progress. But since the late twentieth century the idea of progress has largely disappeared from public debate. Sometimes it has been explicitly declared dead. The wide horizon of future possibilities has closed. The best we can hope for, some say, is to avoid regress. What happened to progress? Why did we stop believing in it, if indeed we did? This book offers answers to these questions. It reviews both the conceptual history of progress and the social and political experiences with progress over the past two centuries, and it comes to a surprising conclusion: The idea of progress was misconceived from its beginnings, and the failure of progress in practice was a result of this flawed conception. The experiences of the past half century, in turn, has allowed us to rethink progress in a more adequate way. Rather than the end of progress, they may herald the beginning of a new, reconstructed idea of progress.
Book Synopsis History of the Idea of Progress by : Robert Nisbet
Download or read book History of the Idea of Progress written by Robert Nisbet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.
Book Synopsis Ordinary Cities by : Jennifer Robinson
Download or read book Ordinary Cities written by Jennifer Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book - a postcolonial critique of urban studies - traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.
Download or read book Autos and Progress written by Joel Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autos and Progress reinterprets twentieth-century Brazilian history through automobiles, using them as a window for understanding the nation's struggle for modernity in the face of its massive geographical size, weak central government, and dependence on agricultural exports. Among the topics Wolfe touches upon are the first sports cars and elite consumerism; intellectuals' embrace of cars as the key for transformation and unification of Brazil; Henry Ford's building of a company town in the Brazilian jungle; the creation of a transportation infrastructure; democratization and consumer culture; auto workers and their creation of a national political party; and the economic and environmental impact of autos on Brazil. This focus on Brazilians' fascination with automobiles and their reliance on auto production and consumption as keys to their economic and social transformation, explains how Brazil--which enshrined its belief in science and technology in its national slogan of Order and Progress--has differentiated itself from other Latin American nations. Autos and Progress engages key issues in Brazil around the meaning and role of race in society and also addresses several classic debates in Brazilian studies about the nature of Brazil's great size and diversity and how they shaped state-making.
Download or read book The End of Progress written by Amy Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Modernity and Its Discontents by : Steven B. Smith
Download or read book Modernity and Its Discontents written by Steven B. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.
Book Synopsis Kant and the Possibility of Progress by : Paul T. Wilford
Download or read book Kant and the Possibility of Progress written by Paul T. Wilford and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a reexamination of Immanuel Kant and his philosophical legacy, this volume explores the philosophic presuppositions of the possibility of progress and our belief in reason's capacity not only to improve the material well-being of humanity but also to promote our true vocation as moral beings.
Book Synopsis Sport and Modernity by : Richard Gruneau
Download or read book Sport and Modernity written by Richard Gruneau and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new book from one of the world's leading sociologists of sport weaves together social theory, history and political economy to provide a highly original analysis of the complex relationship between sport and modernity. Incorporating a powerful set of theoretical insights from traditions and thinkers ranging from classical Marxism and the Frankfurt School to Foucault and Bourdieu, Gruneau analyzes the emergence of "sport" as a distinctive field of practice in western societies. Examining subjects including the legacy of Greek and Roman antiquity, representations of sport in nineteenth-century England, Nazism, and modern "mega-events" such as the Olympics and the World Cup, he seeks to show how sport developed into an arena which articulated competing understandings of the kinds of people, bodies and practices best suited to the modern western world. This book thereby explores with brio and sophistication how the ever-changing economic, social, and political relations of modernity have been produced and reproduced, and sometimes also opposed and escaped, through sport, from the Enlightenment to the rise of neoliberalism, as well as examining how the study of exercise, athletics, the body, and the spectacle of sport can deepen our understanding of the nature of modernity. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the sociology and history of sport, sociology of culture, cultural history, and cultural studies.
Book Synopsis The End of Illusions by : Andreas Reckwitz
Download or read book The End of Illusions written by Andreas Reckwitz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
Download or read book Beyond Progress written by Hugh De Santis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-05-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that in a world of dwindling resources, economic inequality, and unremitting violence, the belief in endless progress can no longer be sustained. Asserts that we have arrived at a great historic divide, in which the old modern order is giving way to an age of "mutualism". Draws on world history and the study of international relations to explore the emerging future, in which new forms of social and political identity and regional associations and alignments will be needed to solve global problems. Argues that mutualism will require a dramatical change in the way states, international institutions, corporations, and local communities interact, and that this transformation will be especially difficult for the United States, which will have to abandon its exceptionalist identity and rejoin a world it can no longer escape.
Book Synopsis The Dark Side of Modernity by : Jeffrey C. Alexander
Download or read book The Dark Side of Modernity written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, one of the world’s leading social theorists presents a critical, alarmed, but also nuanced understanding of the post-traditional world we inhabit today. Jeffrey Alexander writes about modernity as historical time and social condition, but also as ideology and utopia. The idea of modernity embodies the Enlightenment’s noble hopes for progress and rationality, but its reality brings great suffering and exposes the destructive impulses that continue to motivate humankind. Alexander examines how twentieth-century theorists struggled to comprehend the Janus-faced character of modernity, which looks backward and forward at the same time. Weber linked the triumph of worldly asceticism to liberating autonomy but also ruthless domination, describing flights from rationalization as systemic and dangerous. Simmel pointed to the otherness haunting modernity, even as he normalized the stranger. Eisenstadt celebrated Axial Age transcendence, but acknowledged its increasing capacity for barbarity. Parsons heralded American community, but ignored modernity’s fragmentations. Rather than seeking to resolve modernity’s contradictions, Alexander argues that social theory should accept its Janus-faced character. It is a dangerous delusion to think that modernity can eliminate evil. Civil inclusion and anti-civil exclusion are intertwined. Alexander enumerates dangerous frictions endemic to modernity, but he also suggests new lines of social amelioration and emotional repair.
Download or read book Modernity written by Peter Wagner and published by Polity. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brief, authoritative and accessible introduction to the idea of modernity, written by a leading social theorist. Wagner shows that modernity was based on ideas of freedom, reason and progress, but he examines the extent to which these ideas have been, and can be, realized in the modern world.
Book Synopsis The Emergence of a Scientific Culture by : Stephen Gaukroger
Download or read book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Book Synopsis Disposing of Modernity by : Rebecca S. Graff
Download or read book Disposing of Modernity written by Rebecca S. Graff and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its-kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present. Published in cooperation with the Society for Historical Archaeology
