Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Natural Right And The American Imagination
Download Natural Right And The American Imagination full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Natural Right And The American Imagination ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Natural Right and the American Imagination by : Catherine H. Zuckert
Download or read book Natural Right and the American Imagination written by Catherine H. Zuckert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1990 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses ways in which works by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner explore the central issue of political philosophy.
Book Synopsis A Hideous Monster of the Mind by : Bruce Dain
Download or read book A Hideous Monster of the Mind written by Bruce Dain and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.
Book Synopsis Natural Right and History by : Leo Strauss
Download or read book Natural Right and History written by Leo Strauss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever. "Strauss . . . makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves . . . [and] brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."—John H. Hallowell, American Political Science Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Book Synopsis The Environmental Imagination by : Lawrence Buell
Download or read book The Environmental Imagination written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.
Book Synopsis Politics and the Imagination by : Raymond Geuss
Download or read book Politics and the Imagination written by Raymond Geuss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.
Book Synopsis Collective Dreams by : Keally D. McBride
Download or read book Collective Dreams written by Keally D. McBride and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2007-08-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?
Download or read book Origins of Order written by Paul W. Kahn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how two fundamental concepts of order influence our ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, law, and history Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a system, order is immanent in the world. In the former, order is made; in the latter, discovered. Paul W. Kahn shows how project and system have long been at work in our theological and philosophical tradition. Against this background, Kahn explains the development of the modern legal imagination in the nineteenth century as a movement from project to system. Americans began the century imagining the constitutional order as their common project: a deliberate construction of We the People. They ended the century imagining that order is continuous with the common law: an immanent development of the principles of civilization. This imaginative shift affected ideas of legal text, sovereignty, citizenship, interpretation, history, and science.
Book Synopsis America, the West, and Liberal Education by : Ralph C. Hancock
Download or read book America, the West, and Liberal Education written by Ralph C. Hancock and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a decade ago, Allan BloomOs The Closing of the American Mind raised the philosophical stakes of the debate concerning the proper role of the study of the great books in higher education. BloomOs argument for the Western tradition employed both the rhetoric of knowledge for its own sake, and that of the broadly political uses of education. But the question of the precise relationship between the intellectual and the moral-political ends of liberal education was not BloomOs theme; though he clearly opposed the political radicalization of the curriculum espoused by many who styled themselves post modernists, he may not have adequately addressed their contention that all education is deeply political. The essays in America, the West and Liberal Education attempt to advance our understanding of the proper purposes of liberal education in America by exploring the relationship between the free pursuit of truth and the practical ends embedded in a particular tradition or political community.
Book Synopsis James Fenimore Cooper by : W. M. Verhoeven
Download or read book James Fenimore Cooper written by W. M. Verhoeven and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1993 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the essays in James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts are either directly or indirectly informed by the need to confront Cooper's tales with the indeterminate historical context from which they arose. Others start from the premise that our understanding of Cooper's work can benefit significantly from displacing it from its traditional position in American literary history and by repositioning it in a new literary context. What unites all the essays is a commitment to read Cooper's works as culturally-encoded documents that both reflect and give us access to the complex, equivocal mind that created them. This is not to say that the essays share a common critical or methodological approach; indeed, they were commissioned and selected with the specific intention of applying contending approaches in contemporary literary discourse to the canonical Cooper. While the array of critical approaches represented in the book is by no means exhaustive, interpretive strategies vary from textual, formalistic New Critical readings to old historical, contextual readings, and from new historical, revisionist readings to deconstructive readings. Through their critical diversity these essays will cast a new light on Cooper's work in relation to its historical context, and on the relevance of Cooper's work to both nineteenth-century and modern literary, historical, and ideological debates.
Book Synopsis The Catholic Social Imagination by : Joseph M. Palacios
Download or read book The Catholic Social Imagination written by Joseph M. Palacios and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reach of the Catholic Church is arguably greater than that of any other religion, extending across diverse political, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries. But what is it about Catholicism that resonates so profoundly with followers who live under disparate conditions? What is it, for instance, that binds parishioners in America with those in Mexico? For Joseph M. Palacios, what unites Catholics is a sense of being Catholic—a social imagination that motivates them to promote justice and build a better world. In The Catholic Social Imagination, Palacios gives readers a feeling for what it means to be Catholic and put one’s faith into action. Tracing the practices of a group of parishioners in Oakland, California, and another in Guadalajara, Mexico, Palacios reveals parallels—and contrasts—in the ways these ordinary Catholics receive and act on a church doctrine that emphasizes social justice. Whether they are building a supermarket for the low-income elderly or waging protests to promote school reform, these parishioners provide important insights into the construction of the Catholic social imagination. Throughout, Palacios also offers important new cultural and sociological interpretations of Catholic doctrine on issues such as poverty, civil and human rights, political participation, and the natural law.
Book Synopsis Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination by : Joyce Appleby
Download or read book Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination written by Joyce Appleby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author claims that liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential campaign; liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. The author contrasts this view with classical republicanism--ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good. The two concepts, as the author shows, posed choices in their day and in ours, specifically in addressing the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.
Book Synopsis Culture in the Commercial Republic by : Will Morrisey
Download or read book Culture in the Commercial Republic written by Will Morrisey and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1996 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the cultural intentions of the founders of the first thoroughly commercial republic, the United States. The typical book on 'the culture' takes the view that commercial republicanism is the enemy of culture; this book tells a much more complex story, and measures the benefits and deficits of commercial republicanism in a way that does not sleight the very substantial achievements of commercial republicanism. The book looks at several critics of the commercial republic, 'left' and 'right'. These writers include Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dewey, and Pound. The book concludes with chapters on two very different writers who take a comprehensive view of culture, nature, and the commercial republic: Allan Bloom and Jane Austen. Contents: Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction: The Statesmanlike Sources of American Culture; Victorians Contra Commerce; Natural Right and the American Intellectual; American Historicist-Poets: Holmes and Whitman; An American Fascist: Ezra Pound; The American Left and the Culture of Sophistry; An American Philosopher?; The Politics of Self-Knowledge: Mansfield Park and the Refounding of the English Aristocracy; Conclusion: The Arts of Satiation; Endnotes; Index; Biographical Note.
Book Synopsis A Political Companion to Herman Melville by : Jason Frank
Download or read book A Political Companion to Herman Melville written by Jason Frank and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing "strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition." This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work -- from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.
Book Synopsis The Ethical Foundations of Postmodernity by : Nina Michaela von Dahlern
Download or read book The Ethical Foundations of Postmodernity written by Nina Michaela von Dahlern and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2013-07 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A (re-)turn to ethics, which began in the 1980s and 1990s and is still predominant today, has been ascribed to literary studies and theory. In this book theoretical issues within ethics are discussed based on the examples of literary analyses. The authors examined are Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Robert M. Pirsig. The main questions concern the foundation on which ethical concepts are based, and the way in which such concepts function. These topics are evidently connected to matters of human concepts and human nature in general, which are understood to be fundamentally communicative. Contrary to popular conclusions of relativity, the need for a realist foundation of ethics - implying universal validity - will be revealed. It is not only possible, but also necessary to develop such an idea of ethics within a postmodern relativist framework. A communicative foundationalist ethics will thus be designed. With regard to literature an increasing emergence of first-person narrative can be witnessed in addition to a new focus on a realist and more mimetic style after a peak of pluralist conceptions at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The analysis of such narrative situations will reveal the significance of the narrative generation of individual personalities for an understanding of ethical questions. The conflict between relativist and realist points of view centers on the postmodern critique of the individual. The study of the literary generation of individuals will elucidate means of confronting this critique. The theoretical background includes the poststructuralist and communicative concepts of Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib as well as Ernst Tugendhat's analytical approach. Nina von Dahlern studied English language and literature, philosophy, sociology, and educational sciences at the Universities of Hamburg and Heidelberg. This book is based on her Ph.D. thesis.
Book Synopsis Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher by : John E. Alvis
Download or read book Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher written by John E. Alvis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a case study, John E. Alvis shows that a novelist can be a political philosopher. He demonstrates that much of Hawthorne's works are rooted in the American political tradition. Once we view his writings in connection with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, we grasp that what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had stated explicitly, Hawthorne's fiction conveys dramatically. With examples drawn from Hawthorne's shorter works, as well as acknowledged classics, such as The Scarlet Letter, John E. Alvis shows that Hawthorne's characters bear something sacred in their generic humanity, yet are subject to moral judgment. He conveys reciprocity between obligations regulating individual relations and the responsibilities of individuals to their community.From America's founding proclamations in the Declaration of Independence we take a sense of national aspirations for a political order that conforms to laws of nature and nature's God. From this higher law emerge the principles enumerated in that revolutionary document. Are these principles confined to the political, or do they reach into the experience of citizens to inform conduct? Do they include family, local community, and individual face-to-face relations with neighbors and strangers? Can one make a distinct way of life by fidelity to such standards as higher law, equality, liberty, natural rights, and consent?This study is distinguished from other writings on Hawthorne in its largely positive focus on America. Alvis characterizes Hawthorne as a rational patriot who endorses America's new terms for human association. This fascinating study provides new insights into the mind of one of the greatest American writers.
Book Synopsis Freud, Religion, and the Roaring Twenties by : Henry Idema
Download or read book Freud, Religion, and the Roaring Twenties written by Henry Idema and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1990 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Henry Idema has developed a theory of religion and culture indebted to the psychological work of Sigmund Freud and the sociological work of Weinstein and Platt, and he has shown the validity of his theory through illustrations from the life and times and work of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and F.Scott Fitzgerald. Idema brings a psychoanalytic perspective to his analysis of religion and culture. He starts out by developing a theory of religion focusing on early relationships with the mother and father, and then shows how social forces such as urbanization, industrialization etc. weakened religion in the institutional church, especially in its function of helping men and women to cope with anxiety.
Download or read book On Trial written by George Anastaplo and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and ending with O.J. Simpson, author George Anastaplo offers an exploration of justice and the rule of law through well-known trials both ancient and modern, real and fictional. On Trial is a detailed and fascinating discussion of legal reason, moral judgment, political life, and the events that give them meaning.
