Download or read book Adam Ferguson Philosophy Politics and Society written by Eugene Heath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains a set of essays that analyse Ferguson's philosophical, political and sociological writings and the discourse which they prompted between Ferguson and other important figures.
Download or read book An Essay on the History of Civil Society written by Adam Ferguson and published by . This book was released on 1767 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment written by Iain McDaniel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.
Download or read book The Passionate Society written by Lisa Hill and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose thought was, in many respects, original and distinctive. This book is a study of his ideas and of the intellectual forces that shaped them. Though somewhat overlooked in the nineteenth century, Ferguson was rescued from obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century by scholars interested in the origins of sociology and early critiques of modernity. Ferguson’s interest in the mechanics of social life and especially social change led him to many groundbreaking insights. In fact, he is sometimes identified as the 'Father of Modern Sociology'. In addition to exploring whether or not he merits this title, this study examines the whole of Ferguson’s thought as a system and includes his moral and faculty psychology, historiography, theology, politics and social science. Ferguson is distinguished by his deep appreciation of the complexity of the human condition; his study of society is based on the belief that it is not only reason, but the unseen, unplanned, sub-rational and visceral forces that keep the human universe in motion. Ferguson’s appreciation of this fact, and his ability to make social science of it, is his major achievement.
Download or read book Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment written by Christopher J. Berry and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'.
Download or read book Political Vanity written by Matthew B. Arbo and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Vanity aims to illuminate the central debates over the historical, moral, and political legitimacy of market capitalism as though still profoundly theological in character. This theological sensitivity is achieved by keeping conversation with central theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular the philosopher and sociologist Adam Ferguson. Ferguson was a contemporary of Hume and Smith, and actively questioned many of the pillars of early capitalism on theological grounds.
Download or read book Adam Ferguson His Social and Political Thought written by David Kettler and published by Transaction Pub. This book was released on 1965 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thought of Adam Ferguson generated great excitement among many of his philosophic contemporaries in the late eighteenth century, and it continues to inspire the modern reader. This major study by David Kettler is an ideal introduction to Ferguson's life and thought. The new introduction to this first paperback edition discusses Ferguson's work in relation to his better-known contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, while the afterword offers an in-depth reconsideration of Ferguson's most renowned work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, with emphasis on present-day disputes about the concept of civil society. Ferguson welcomed the advent of critical and analytical philosophy as an ally against superstitious credulity and confused obscurantism, but he was afraid that it might also dissolve into incomprehensible technical complexity and ethical relativism. He was attracted by the manifest practical accomplishments of modern science, as well as by its masterful ordering of natural phenomena into a unified theoretical structure, but he feared that its adherents would debase the notion of man to that of a machine at the mercy of mechanical forces. Ferguson thought well of ambition, but he also believed that a frenzy of ambition and frustration, might tear at man's self-respect and peace of mind. The decisive phenomenon manifested by Ferguson's writing is the emergence of an intellectual's point of view toward the conditions of modern society. Many of the questions that he posed have been restated in more profound ways, some of the questions and most of the answers have been eliminated or transformed beyond recognition; and all of the issues he raises are now expressed by others in harsh, new words. But, however formulated, Ferguson's concerns clearly foreshadow the problems of over-rationalization, dehumanization, atomization, alienation, and bureaucratization that have been repeatedly canvassed by intellectuals in our time. David Kettler is Research Professor at Bard College in New York. Before that he held senior positions at the Ohio State University and Trent University. True to the spirit of his interests, he served a term at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Edinburgh. He is a well published, widely read scholar.
Download or read book Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society written by Smith Craig Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Ferguson, a friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, was among the leading Scottish Enlightenment figures who worked to develop a science of man. He created a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising. He was among the first in the English-speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society and political science. Craig Smith explores Ferguson's thought, and examines his attempt to develop a genuine moral science and its place in providing a secure basis for the virtuous education of the new elite of Hanoverian Britain. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a republican sceptical about commercial society and much closer to the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment and its defence of the new British commercial order.
Download or read book A Genealogy of Self Interest in Economics written by Susumu Egashira and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to describe the entire developmental history of the human aspects of economics. The issue of “self-interest” is discussed throughout, from pre-Adam Smith to contemporary neuroeconomics, representing a unique contribution to economics. Though the notion of self-interest has been interpreted in several ways by various schools of economics and economists since Smith first placed it at the heart of the field, this is the first book to focus on this important but overlooked topic. Traditionally, economic theory has presupposed that the core of human behavior is self-interest. Nevertheless, some economists, e.g. recent behavioral economists, have cast doubt on this “self-interested” explanation. Further, though many economists have agreed on the central role of self-interest in economic behavior, each economist’s positioning of self-interest in economic theory differs to some degree. This book helps to elucidate the position of self-interest in economic theory. Given its focus, it is a must-read companion, not only on the history of economic thought but also on economic theory. Furthermore, as today’s capitalism is increasingly causing people to wonder just where self-interest lies, it also appeals to general readers.
Download or read book The Scottish Enlightenment written by Alexander Broadie and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.
Download or read book Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity written by Jack A. Hill and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about learning how to live the good life. Part biography and part philosophical inquiry, it is a fresh, original interpretation of the intellectual world of the largely forgotten, eighteenth-century professor, Adam Ferguson. Although less well-known today than his famous Scottish contemporaries, Adam Smith and David Hume, Ferguson was considered their equal in the 18th century. The book shows how Ferguson, who grew up speaking Gaelic and English, and spent a decade ministering to a Highlander regiment, developed a distinctive, cross-cultural approach to moral philosophy that is relevant for doing comparative ethics in today’s global village. The premise is that life in the twenty-first century is plagued by a moral disorientation that has affinities with the materialism, privatization, social fragmentation and spiritual crises that were emerging in 18th-century, urban Scotland. Like his peers in medical science, Ferguson pursued what was then known as moral science with a particular concern to diagnose and treat moral “dis-ease.” The book contends that his moral philosophy lectures became strikingly modern experiments in recovering moral moorings—disclosing epitomes of moral dynamics, investigating the use of moral terms in ordinary language, and crafting moral principles, such as probity, which preserved classical moral virtues but also incorporated the practical wisdom of ‘peoples of the mountains.’ Although focused on re-discovering Ferguson as a full-blown ethicist before his time, the book is also intended as a primer for the reader’s own quest for living a life which is emblematic of ethical integrity The primary audience for this book is philosophers, historians, religious studies scholars who specialize in ethics, eighteenth-century English literature scholars, and social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists) who focus on the eighteenth-century.
Download or read book The Civil Society Reader written by Virginia Hodgkinson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "civil society" anthology for experts and students alike.
Download or read book Inventing America written by Garry Wills and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)
Download or read book Civil Society written by Sudipta Kaviraj and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil society is one of the most used - and abused - concepts in current political thinking. In this important collection of essays, the concept is subjected to rigorous analysis by an international team of contributors, all of whom seek to encourage the historical and comparative understanding of political thought. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section analyses the meaning of civil society in different theoretical traditions of Western philosophy. In the second section, contributors consider the theoretical and practical contexts in which the notion of civil society has been invoked in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These essays demonstrate how an influential Western idea like civil society is itself altered and innovatively modified by the specific contexts of intellectual and practical life in the societies of the South.
Download or read book Golden Rule written by Thomas Ferguson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money." Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy. Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns. This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.
Download or read book A History of Political Theories Ancient and Mediaeval written by William Archibald Dunning and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Declarations of Dependence written by Scott Ferguson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique after modern monetary theory -- Transcending the aesthetic -- Declarations of dependence -- Medium congruentissimum -- Allegories of the aesthetic -- Becoming second nature
