The De-moralization of Society PDF Download

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
As the debate over values grows ever more divisive, one of the most eminent historians of the Victorian era reminds readers that values are no substitute for virtues--and that the Victorian considered hard work, thrift, respectability, and charity virtues essential to a worthwhile life

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375704108
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines. One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures."

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe. The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674013841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
For this updated edition of her acclaimed work on historians and historiography, Himmelfarb adds four new essays. In examining the effects of postmodernism, the illusions of cosmopolitanism, A. J. P. Taylor and revisionism, and Fukuyama's "end of history," Himmelfarb enriches her exploration of the ways historians make sense of the past.

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566630770
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
A study of intellectuals in crisis and of ideologies in transition, elegant in style and thought. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of 19th-century England as immediately....The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship." --Lionel Trilling.

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Gertrude Himmelfarb, like so many Americans, is appalled by crime, drug addiction, illiteracy, juvenile delinquency, illegitimacy and welfare dependency. The solution she proposes, in this follow-up to her much-praised On Looking into the Abyss, is as simple as it is radical - and has the further advantage of solid historical substantiation. We must look back on the Victorians with open minds; they must cease to irk us. And then, Himmelfarb hopes, we can begin to learn from them.

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1623569818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Author: Peter-Paul Verbeek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226852903
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology. Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.

Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442218290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In The Moral Imagination, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times. In their distinctive ways, she argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the "moral imagination." Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, and writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. It is this passion that makes their reflections--on politics and literature, religion and society, marriage and sex--sometimes unpredictable, often controversial, always exciting, and as illuminating and pertinent today as they were then. The second edition includes a revised introduction and three new essays on Adam Smith, Lord Acton, and Alfred Marshall.