Download or read book The Revolt Against the Masses written by Fred Siegel and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism—the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama—began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWI, in disillusionment with American society. In the 1920s, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalism’s founders—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken—was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism. Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights. The neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960s did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class. Today’s brand of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of elite style and taste.
Download or read book Fascism and the Masses written by Ishay Landa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the "mass" nature of interwar European fascism has long become commonplace. Throughout the years, numerous critics have construed fascism as a phenomenon of mass society, perhaps the ultimate expression of mass politics. This study deconstructs this long-standing perception. It argues that the entwining of fascism with the masses is a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics, and indeed of mass society and mass culture more broadly conceived. Thus, rather than "massifying" society, fascism was the culmination of a long effort on the part of the élites and the middle-classes to de-massify it. The perennially menacing mass – seen as plebeian and insubordinate – was to be drilled into submission, replaced by supposedly superior collective entities, such as the nation, the race, or the people. Focusing on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, but consulting fascist movements and individuals elsewhere in interwar Europe, the book incisively shows how fascism is best understood as ferociously resisting what Elias referred to as "the civilizing process" and what Marx termed "the social individual." Fascism, notably, was a revolt against what Nietzsche described as the peaceful, middling and egalitarian "Last Humans."
Download or read book Against the Masses written by Joseph V. Femia and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-08-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the almost universal assumption that democracy is a 'good thing', the goal of mankind, it is easy to forget that 'rule by the people' has been vehemently opposed by some of the most distinguished thinkers in the Western tradition. The author attempts to combat collective amnesia by systematically exploring and evaluating anti-democratic thought since the French Revolution. Using categories first introduced by A. O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, Femia examines the various arguments under the headings of 'perversity', 'futility', and 'jeopardy'. This classification scheme enables him to highlight the fatalism and pessimism of anti-democratic thinkers, their conviction that democratic reform would be either pointless or destructive. Femia shows how they failed to understand the adaptability of democracy, its ability to co-exist with the traditional and elitist values. But, controversially, he also argues that some of their predictions and observations have been confirmed by history.
Download or read book Mobilizing the Masses written by Elizabeth Schmidt and published by Heinemann Educational Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on previously unexamined archival records and oral interviews with rank-and-file RDA members, this book reinterprets nationalist history by approaching it from the bottom up.
Download or read book The Slumbering Masses written by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes and critiques how sleep and sleep disorders are understood and treated.
Download or read book Black Mass written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers.
Download or read book The Mass Psychology of Fascism written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1970 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic study, Reich repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. Instead he sees fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.
Download or read book General Instruction of the Roman Missal written by Catholic Church and published by USCCB Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From USCCB Publishing, this revision of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) seeks to promote more conscious, active, and full participation of the faithful in the mystery of the Eucharist. While the Missale Romanum contains the rite and prayers for Mass, the GIRM provides specific detail about each element of the Order of Mass as well as other information related to the Mass.
Download or read book Vulgarity for the Masses written by J. S. Lawhead and published by . This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A whole history of madness and struggle lie ahead for the disfigured children of Adam in this collection of nine tales from J.S. Lawhead. Stories include: The Whale Story - Well-intentioned, apocalyptic adventurer Meteo Xavier seeks the rare Blue Whale and ends up fighting for his life in a litigious, courtroom battle that threatens to annihilate the human condition as we know it. On a Sunday Afternoon, This Happened - A crack-addicted, alcoholic, pothead on the rag tries to rob two banks on Sunday and defies the gods, the universe, the laws of nature regarding drug use and teleportation, a rival crook, and a large guardian sphincter on his quest to repay a drug debt to a holiday icon. Aurora Terminus - A horrible tragedy marks the symbolic end of the British Empire for two aristocratic men (animals, actually) as their friend is betrayed and murdered by Lady Britannia herself; forcing the two to take revenge for whats left of their country's dignity and the pride of being British. (Inspired by Genesis' Selling England By the Pound) The Wisdom of My Father - A first person memoir of the narrator's father and the usual father-son adventures through life that all of us go through - like getting gang-raped in Atlanta, building a guitar out of a fish, taking the heat for a Mexican drug deal gone bad and exploding your bowels on live TV. The White Screamer (Three Incidents) - Across the generations in Tennessee, an unfathomable evil grows stronger as it absorbs innocent men and women in an eternal, soulthirsty mission to cleanse the lands and history from the white man's influence. The Book of the Three Little Pigs (Bible Version) - Exactly what it says it is. HOPEBLISS - A two-headed boy meets a woman with no head (and unprovoked antagonism against Jesus for some reason) and offers to exchange heads with her so she can go about her life, but the results become disastrous and incomprehensible. Ouroborus - A bizarre, ancient phenomenon grips the mountains of Tennessee and slowly wraps two students from a secluded academy into a spiraling conspiracy to keep the world hidden from God's influence and lock the human condition into a cold world of icy logic. The Feast of 1000 Famines - Meteo Xavier returns to bookend the book for a date, a charity event and an assassination/vengeance plot all gone horribly wrong. Book ends on a relatively positive note, readers are satisfied, they recommend it to their friends, and life continues on as it should until the sun swallows the planet whole and everything we have lived and died for vanishes in a layer of chromosphere.
Download or read book The Intellectuals and the Masses written by John Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the 'masses' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler. Carey's assault on the founders of modern culture caused consternation throughout the artistic and academic establishments when it was first published in 1992.
Download or read book Mobilizing Without the Masses written by Diana Fu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do weak activists organize under repression? This book theorizes a dynamic of contention called mobilizing without the masses.
Download or read book Critical Mass written by Philip Ball and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2006-05-16 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs. Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.
Download or read book Dreamworld and Catastrophe written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study develops the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept. Stressing the similarites between East/West the book examines extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.
Download or read book Glitter Stucco Dumpster Diving written by John Chase and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An architectural designer and an important architectural critic, Chase explores a myriad of locales and examines their architectural features - from the gay community space of West Hollywood, to the stucco box apartment complexes of the 1950s, to the truly weird mix of domestic arrangements in Venice Beach, to gated communities, to some of the historic houses of Hollywood and Beverly Hills and to the most recent transformations of the casino architecture in Las Vegas."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Opium for the Masses written by Jim Hogshire and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opium. Known as 'The Mother of All Analgesics,' it's probably the greatest pain killer ever discovered. Opium is the parent of morphine, heroin, laudanum, Darvocet, Darvon, and many other pain relievers. Opium causes poets to rhapsodize and nations to go to war. 'Religion... is the opium of the people,' said Karl Marx, but some people insist on the real thing. In Opium for the Masses, Jim Hogshire tells you everything you want to know about the beloved poppy and its amazing properties [...] As he reveals the secrets of the seductive opium poppy, he tells the sad story of prescription drugs: doctors, drug makers and governments prohibiting natural remedies in favor of harsh synthetic derivatives. Opium for the Masses includes rare photographs and detailed illustrations that bring this magnificent plant to life."--From cover.
Download or read book Dictators and Democrats written by Stephan Haggard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the world From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.
