Download or read book Max Weber et les dilemmes de la raison moderne written by Philippe Raynaud and published by Presses Universitaires de France - PUF. This book was released on 1996 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Selon Weber, la politique moderne aboutit à l'alternative entre la domination bureaucratique et le maintien, chez les grands hommes politiques, d'une capacité de décision qui présuppose la possibilité de transcender les pseudo-contraintes techniques (et qui témoigne ainsi pour tous des limites de l'expansion bureaucratique), mais qui repose sur des choix en dernière analyse non rationalisables. Il ne s'agit pas là simplement d'une " morale héroïque " qu'un penseur romantique opposerait abstraitement à la prose du monde moderne l'exigence essentielle, pour Weber, est que la question des fins de l'action reste ouverte, ce qui exclut tout autant l'éloge sans nuances des " chefs " politiques ou le mépris des libertés que la soumission à la rationalité bureaucratique. " Philippe Raynaud.
Download or read book Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought Since Max Weber 2nd ed written by Richard Wellen and published by Richard Wellen. This book was released on 1996-05-31 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought since Max Weber establishes Max Weber's work as a touchstone for surveying the theoretical dilemmas of the liberal democratic tradition. Through a subtle examination of Weber's status as a political thinker we are invited to consider new interpretations of later figures such as MacIntyre, Rorty, Strauss, and Habermas. Perhaps the most important contribution is Wellen's account of the tacit alternatives liberal thought has discovered in its own foundation and practical implications.
Download or read book Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason written by John C. McCarthy and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Alan Charles Kors / Just and Arbitrary Authority in Enlightenment Thought -- 2. Richard Kennington / Bacon's Reform of Nature -- 3. Pamela Kraus / Method and Metaphysics: The Foundation of Philosophy in the Discourse on Method -- 4. Robert P. Kraynak / Hobbes and the Dogmatism of the Enlightenment -- 5. John C. Mccarthy / Pascal on Certainty and Utility -- 6. Paul J. Bagley / Spinoza, Biblical Criticism, and the Enlightenment -- 7. Philippe Raynaud / Leibniz, Reason -- and Evil -- 8. F.J. Crosson / Hume's Unnatural Religion (Some Humean Footnotes) -- 9. Terence E. Marshall / Poetry and Praxis in Rousseau's Emile: Human Rights and the Sentiment of Humanity -- 10. Kenneth L. Schmitz / Lessing at God's Left Hand -- 11. John R. Silber / Kant and the Mythic Roots of Morality -- 12. Nicholas Capaldi / The Enlightenment Project in Twentieth-Century Philosophy -- Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book Max Weber s Interpretive Sociology of Law written by Michel Coutu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a clear and precise account of the structure and content of Max Weber's sociology of law: situating its methodological and epistemological specificity in relation to other approaches to the sociology of law; as well as offering a critical evaluation of Weber's usefulness for contemporary socio-legal research. The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the methodological foundations of Weber's sociology of law. The second analyses the central theme of this sociology, the rationalisation of law, from the perspective of its internal logical coherence, its empirical validity, and finally its legitimacy. The third part questions the present-day relevance of the Weberian sociology of law for socio-legal research, notably with regard to legal pluralism. Max Weber, it is demonstrated, is not merely a 'founding father' of the sociology of law; rather, his methodology, concepts, and empirical analyses remain highly useful to the further development of work in this area.
Download or read book Why We Are Not Nietzscheans written by Luc Ferry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-06-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface to the 1991 French Edition 1 Hierarchy and Truth 1 2 The Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete: "Art in the Service of Illusion" 21 3 Nietzsche's French Moment 70 4 "What Must First Be Proved Is Worth Little" 92 5 The Nietzschean Metaphysics of Life 110 6 Nietzsche as Educator 141 7 The Traditional Paradigm - Horror of Modernity and Antiliberalism: Nietzsche in Reactionary Rhetoric 158 Index 225.
Download or read book The City of Man written by Pierre Manent and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "City of God" or the "City of Man"? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human. In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human "self-consciousness." But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis--economic, sociological, and historical--that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity. In the second half of the book, titled "Self-Affirmation," Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other. This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common. The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In "giving birth" to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.
Download or read book In the Name of Social Democracy written by Gerassimos Moschonas and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-siècle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic “modernisation” of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas’s study is the emergent “new social democracy” of the twenty-first century. As Moschonas demonstrates, change has been a constant of social-democratic history: the core dominant reformist tendency of working-class politic notwithstanding, capitalism has transformed social democracy more than it has succeeded in transforming capitalism. Now, in the “great transformation” of recent years, a process of “de-social-democratization” has been set in train, affecting every aspect of the social-democratic phenomenon, from ideology and programs to organization and electorates. Analytically incisive and empirically meticulous, In the Name of Social Democracy will establish itself as the standard reference work on the logic and dynamics of a major mutation in European politics.
Download or read book Rationality And Nature written by Raymond Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-07 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divergent beliefs about humanity's relationship to nature collide as the second millenium ends. One belief emphasizes that a distinctive characteristic of humans—reason—enables them to reshape and master nature. Another insists that nature is not so plastic, hence humans must adapt to nature and render development sustainable, or even limit growth. "Social ecology" asserts that environmental problems result from institutional hierarchies and suggests decentralized institutions and egalitarian ethics. According to "deep ecology" such problems originate in cultures assuming only humans are worthwhile, thus it stresses the intrinsic value of nature. Feminists are torn between values based on the equality of men and women and ecofeminist values postulating that women are inherently closer to nature than men. Rationality and Nature critically assesses these conflicting cultural tendencies. Waste has been the forgotten element of political economy. Western society has sophisticated methods of financial accounting but does little to account for the losses—financial and human—of waste. Raymond Murphy proposes in this book a theory of environmental debt as a source of capital accumulation. He develops a model of "environmental classes" that helps us to understand the political and economic basis of conflict over the environment. Environmental degradation did not occur on a vast scale until science and applied science were developed. Are they responsible for it and can they be reoriented toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature? Other ways of bringing about a symbiotic relationship are also explored in this book: compulsion, ecological values, ecological experience, and ecological knowledge.
Download or read book Globalization written by Arjun Appadurai and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-03 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization. While including discussions about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term, the volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence. Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China, Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally. Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Jean François Bayart, Jérôme Bindé, Néstor García Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Achille Mbembe, Philipe Rekacewicz, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen
Download or read book Legitimacy and Politics written by Jean-Marc Coicaud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-31 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past few years, the increase in cases of political corruption, the loss of politicians credibility, the development of social and political forms of pathology (notably the rise of the extreme right along with exclusionist ideologies), and the role of the State have been at the center of political debates. In one way or another, these problems raise the question of the legitimacy of the established powers. The result is that legitimacy, a key notion of political thought in general, has today become a burning issue. Coicaud examines all these issues and proffers insightful answers to questions such as the connections between morality and politics, how rulers acquire or lose the right to govern, and how one can become the advocate of a theory of political justice that, while establishing limits, respects and even ensures the promotion of plurality within societies.
Download or read book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity written by Michael Löwy and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romanticism is a worldview that finds expression over a whole range of cultural fields—not only in literature and art but in philosophy, theology, political theory, and social movements. In Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre formulate a theory that defines romanticism as a cultural protest against modern bourgeois industrial civilization and work to reveal the unity that underlies the extraordinary diversity of romanticism from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. After critiquing previous conceptions of romanticism and discussing its first European manifestations, Löwy and Sayre propose a typology of the sociopolitical positions held by romantic writers-from “restitutionist” to various revolutionary/utopian forms. In subsequent chapters, they give extended treatment to writers as diverse as Coleridge and Ruskin, Charles Peguy, Ernst Bloch and Christa Wolf. Among other topics, they discuss the complex relationship between Marxism and romanticism before closing with a reflection on more contemporary manifestations of romanticism (for example, surrealism, the events of May 1968, and the ecological movement) as well as its future. Students and scholars of literature, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies will be interested in this elegant and thoroughly original book.
Download or read book Tensions of Social History written by Alessandro Stanziani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to overcome the tension between 'western' and 'non-western' categories and tools in the study of global history, showing how most western approaches to the social sciences and history have developed through transnational and colonial interactions. Offering a transnational and global history of the main tools we have to understand the word and its transformations over the last three centuries, Tensions of Social History explores the construction of archives and historical memory, the making of statistics and their use in politics, the identification of social actors, and the emergence of key social theories. Providing key insights into how to write history and develop social sciences in the global era while avoiding eurocentrism and cultural exceptionalism, this ambitious book shows how global history is made of encounters rather than confrontations between civilizations.
Download or read book Raymond Aron and International Relations written by Olivier Schmitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the field of International Relations (IR) is diverting from grand theoretical debates, rediscovering the value of classical realism and exploring its own intellectual history, this book contributes to these debates by presenting a cohesive view of Raymond Aron’s theory of IR. It explores how a careful reading of Aron can contribute to important current debates, in particular what a theory of IR can be (and thus, what is within or outside the scope of this theory), how to bridge the gap that emerged in the 1970s between a "normative" and a "scientific" theory of IR, and finally how multidisciplinarity is possible (and desirable) in the study of IR. This edited collection offers a synthetic approach to Raymond Aron’s theory of International Relations by bringing together some of the most prominent specialists on Raymond Aron, thus filling an important gap in the current market of books devoted to IR theories and the historiography of the field. The volume is divided into three parts: the first part explores Aron’s intellectual contribution to the theoretical debates in IR, thus showing his originality and prescience; the second part traces Aron’s influence and explores his relations with other prominent scholars of his time, thus contributing to the historiography of the field; and the third part analyses Aron’s contemporary relevance. This comprehensive volume contributes to current debates in the field by showing the originality and breadth of Aron’s thought. This book will be of great interest to academics and students interested in IR theories, strategic studies and the historiography of the field.
Download or read book New French Thought written by Mark Lilla and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past fifteen years in France have seen a remarkable flourishing of new work in political philosophy. This anthology brings into English for the first time essays by some of the best young French political thinkers writing today, including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut. The central theme of these essays is liberal democracy: its nature, its development, its problems, its fundamental legitimacy. Although these themes are familiar to American and British readers, the French approach to them--which is profoundly historical and rooted in the tradition of continental philosophy--is quite different from our customary one. Included in this collection is a series of reconsiderations of French critics of liberal society (Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Bourdieu) and of classical European liberals (Kant, Constant, Tocqueville). The continuing controversies over the nature of the modern era and the place of religion within it play a central role throughout the collection. The book includes a debate on the foundations of human rights and on the nature of a liberal political order. The concluding section presents some of the new sociological writing on modern individualism, its pleasures and its discontents. An introduction by Mark Lilla provides the historical background to the revival of French political thought about liberalism, and offers an analysis of what American and English readers might learn from it. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Integrated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism written by S. Steiner-Aeschliman and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory and data of environmental science suggest that growth in rates of population, consumption and environmental degradation, as a result of the activities of industrialized societies, has created an ecological crisis to which modern societies must adapt. However, adaptation is problematic. Max Weber studied adaptive social change during the industrial revolution. The evolution of this new way of life was initially problematic because individuals who established industrialism were socialized under feudalism. In this dissertation, I consider The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a theoretical treatise framed by modern human ecology in order to study social change in the context of the ecological crisis of industrialism. The Protestant Ethic is known for describing how religious ideas influenced the unfolding of modern capitalism in the West. However, there is nothing inherent in Protestantism that requires linkage to industrialism. I argue that Protestantism has evolved, and that it need not necessarily promote environmental exploitation, although under industrialism it has. I identify a "green" subculture within Protestantism, and consider how Protestantism's weakness may also be its strength. The very sociological structure that, in the absence of ecologically realistic norms, permits widespread ecosystem degradation by industrial capitalism may also generate ecologically realistic norms for a natural capitalism. Weber contended that rationality was problematic because it paradoxically results in a dual crisis of management and meaning where human agency becomes "imprisoned" as if in an "iron cage." The irrational continuation of environmentally degrading social practices eventually contributes to a legitimation crisis. People turn to religion as an alternative authority. If science and religion converge on environmental values, they might catalyze social change, unless they are too distorted by ideological bias. Adaptive social change only occurs if ethical and ecological values are in accordance with the sustainability of ecosystems. Hence, to adapt to the ecological crisis, sociocultural systems require socialization into ecological realism, because ecologically rational societies may still be maladaptively organized around environmentally unsustainable trajectories.
Download or read book Does Truth Matter written by Ronald Tinnevelt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-11-30 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The claim once made by philosophers of unique knowledge of the essence of humanity and society has fallen into disrepute. Neither Platonic forms, divine revelation nor metaphysical truth can serve as the ground for legitimating social and political norms. On the political level many seem to agree that democracy doesn’t need foundations. Nor are its citizens expected to discuss the worth of their comprehensive conceptions of the good life. According to Rawls, for example, we have to accept that “politics in a democratic society can never be guided by what we see as the whole truth (...)”. (1993: 243) And yet we still call upon truth when we participate in defining the basic structure our society and argue why our opinions, beliefs and preferences need to be taken seriously. We do not think that our views need to be taken into account by others because they are our views, but because we think they are true. If in a democratic society citizens have to deal with the challenge of affirming their claims as true, we need to analyse the precise relationship between truth and democracy. Does truth matter to democracy and if so, what is the place of truth in democratic politics? How can citizens affirm the truth of their claims and accept - at the same time - that their truth is just one amongst many? Our book centers on the role of the public sphere in these pressing questions. It tries to give a comprehensive answer to these questions from the perspective of the main approaches of contemporary democratic theory: deliberative democracy, political pragmatism and liberalism. A confrontation of these approaches, will result in a more encompassing philosophical understanding of our plural democracy, which – in this era of globalization – is more complex than ever before. Because a good understanding of the function, meaning and shortcomings of the public sphere is essential to answering these questions, a good deal of the book addresses these issues. Historically, after all, the idea that citizens have to engage each other in discussion in order to determine the structure and goals of society, is connected to the rational ideal of a public sphere where conflicting views can be expressed, formed, and transformed. But hasn’t the collective decision making in which everyone participates on an equal footing turned out to be a deceptive ideal or a simple illusion? Not every individual in society has equal access to the podium. Furthermore, power, being an inevitable feature of the public sphere, seems to permanently endanger its democratic value. Moreover, the existence of this sphere depends on a specific ethos and particular public spaces where citizens are called upon to present themselves as citizens, as people taking responsibility for their society. It is not clear whether this ethos and these spaces exist at all, and if so, if they preserved their ascribed capacity for constituting ‘democratic’ truth? By answering these questions we expect to deepen our understanding of the relation between truth and democracy.
