Author: Toivo Koivukoski Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739190008 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 151
Book Description
Liberalism is being called into question both in practice and in principle, from insurgencies at its bloody hinterlands and from the illiberal responses those insurgencies engender within the so-called civilized world, with technological integration creating the conditions for new forms of barbarism. What then are the chances of progress towards a substantial equality of freedoms within this new context of retrograde attitudes framed by the occlusion of others as somehow essentially different? How can we register the significances of cultural distinctions without letting those ‘we's’ and ‘they's’ split an emergent global civil society into parochial retro-nations, where belonging knows itself only by exclusion? What is it that is being called out of the spirit of modernity in our seemingly backward-moving age of essentialized others and self-righteous rage? And to the end of inter-cultural understanding, how can we come to know the other, both through the care of others and in ourselves? This work of political theory reflects on how cultures imagine their barbarians in the form of essentialized others, focusing specifically on the kinds of barbarism associated with a civilization devoted to technological progress. In response to the excesses of modernity, the author looks to advances an ethic of difference, inverting the golden rule so as to do unto others as those others would do unto themselves.
Author: Bernard-Henri Lévy Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812974727 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
In this unprecedented critique, Bernard-Henri Lévy revisits his political roots, scrutinizes the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those on the horizon, and argues powerfully for a new political and moral vision for our times. Are human rights Western or universal? Does anti-Semitism have a future, and, if so, what will it look like? And how is it that progressives themselves–those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism–have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes: an unthinking loathing of Israel; an obsessive anti-Americanism; an idea of “tolerance” that, in its justification of Islamic fanaticism, for example, could become the “cemetery of democracies”; and an indifference, masked by relativism, to the greatest human tragedies facing the world today? At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times articulates the threats we all face–in many cases without our even being aware of it–and offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere.
Author: M. Frassetto Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0312299672 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe considers the various attitudes of European religious and secular writers towards Islam during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Examining works from England, France, Italy, the Holy Lands, and Spain, the essays in this volume explore the reactions of Westerners to the culture and religion of Islam. Many of the works studied reveal the hostility toward Islam of Europeans and the creation of negative stereotypes of Muslims by Western writers. These essays also reveal attempts at accommodation and understanding that stand in contrast to the prevailing hostility that existed then and, in some ways, exists still today.
Author: J. G. A. Pocock Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316300307 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 543
Book Description
This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence of works on Barbarism and Religion examines Volumes II and III of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carrying Gibbon's narrative to the end of empire in the west. It makes two general assertions: first, that this is in reality a mosaic of narratives, written on diverse premises and never fully synthesized with one another; and second, that these chapters assert a progress of both barbarism and religion from east to west, leaving much history behind as they do so. The magnitude of Barbarism and Religion is already apparent. Barbarism: Triumph in the West represents the culmination of a remarkable attempt to discover and present what Gibbon was saying, what he meant by it, and why he said it in the ways that he did, as well as an unparalleled contribution to the historiography of Enlightened Europe.
Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos Publisher: ISBN: 1009353578 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 824
Book Description
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination - capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy - to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.
Author: Arnold Toynbee Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780195001990 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 442
Book Description
Arnold Toynbee's ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations is acknowledged as one of the great achievements of modern scholarship. D.C. Somervell's extraordinary two-volume abridgement has captured the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. This volume contains the second half of Toynbee's masterpiece.
Author: Ilia Dorontchenkov Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520221036 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
From the first Modernist exhibitions in the late 1890s to the Soviet rupture with the West in the mid-1930s, Russian artists and writers came into wide contact with modern European art and ideas. Introducing a wealth of little-known material set in an illuminating interpretive context, this sourcebook presents Russian and Soviet views of Western art during this critical period of cultural transformation. The writings document complex responses to these works and ideas before the Russians lost contact with them almost entirely. Many of these writings have been unavailable to foreign readers and, until recently, were not widely known even to Russian scholars. Both an important reference and a valuable resource for classrooms, the book includes an introductory essay and shorter introductions to the individual sections.
Author: Arthur Herman Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451603134 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 652
Book Description
Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.
Author: Toivo Koivukoski
Author: Bernard-Henri Lévy
Author: M. Frassetto
Author: J. G. A. Pocock
Author: Bernard Wasserstein
Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Author: Arnold Toynbee
Author: Ramananda Chatterjee
Author: Ilia Dorontchenkov
Author: Arthur Herman