Download or read book Knowledge and Politics written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1976-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Simon & Schuster, Knowledge and Politics by Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a philosophical classic. Knowledge and Politics is a 1975 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In it, Unger criticizes classical liberal doctrine, which originated with European social theorists in the mid-17th century and continues to exercise a tight grip over contemporary thought, as an untenable system of ideas.
Download or read book On Rules Politics and Knowledge written by Oliver Kessler and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2010-10-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a symposium celebrating Fritz Kratochwil's life and work at Columbia University, Feb. 14, 2009--Acknowledgments.
Download or read book The Politics of Knowledge written by Richard K. Laird and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether or not the U.S. is in decline can be debated, but there is evidence that its political system is becoming less able to solve major problems. This is in part because loyalty to a belief or an ideology may be taking priority over learning how to understand the problems. This work attempts to revitalize the importance of learnability by reviewing some fundamentals of who we are, how the system works, and why learning is difficult. Humans driven by opinions and perceptions tend to discount politics similar to the way they might discount science, yet it was the study of science and politics that brought much of mankind to remarkably higher standards of living. Government, and the economic system it implemented, was initially designed for the purpose of channeling self-interests into public benefits. Understanding what an inclusive political culture is, or why there is a Constitution, for example, could be useful toward restoring the credibility of our central political organization, the core of society’s stability and development. We are losing respect for our government’s decision-making ability, but in a democracy, citizens must be held more accountable for who their government is. The hypothesis is that if more humans are more learnable, we will increase the possibilities for finding the “best” solutions to big problems.
Download or read book The Evolution of Political Knowledge written by American Political Science Association. Annual Meeting and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in research on comparative politics and international relations, fields in which concerns for the public interest have stimulated various important insights. This volume systematically analyzes the major developments within the fields of comparative politics and international relations over the past three decades. Each chapter is composed of a core paper that addresses the major puzzles, conversations, and debates that have attended major areas of concern and inquiry within the discipline. These papers examine and evaluate the intellectual evolution and natural history of major areas of political inquiry and chart particularly promising trajectories, puzzles, and concerns for future work. Each core paper is accompanied by a set of shorter commentaries that engage the issues it takes up, thus contributing to an ongoing and lively dialogue among key figures in the field.
Download or read book The Politics of Knowledge written by David L. Szanton and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The State and the Politics of Knowledge written by Michael W. Apple and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Knowledge Democracy written by Roel in 't Veld and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge democracy is an emerging concept that addresses the relationships between knowledge production and dissemination, as well as the functions of the media and democratic institutions. Although democracy has been the most successful concept of governance for societies for the last two centuries, representative democracy, which became the hallmark of advanced nation-states, seems to be in decline. Media politics is an important factor in the downfall of the original meaning of representation, yet more direct forms of democracy have not yet found an institutional embedding. Further, the Internet has also drastically changed the rules of the game, and a better educated public has broad access to information, selects for itself which types to examine, and ignores media filters. Some citizens have even become "media" themselves. In a time where the political agendas are filled with combatting so-called evils, new designs for the relationships between science, politics and media are needed. This book outlines the challenges entailed in pursuing a vital knowledge democracy.
Download or read book Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom written by Maxwell A. Cameron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Societies create rules that govern our practices. Such rules can only be effective, however, if the intermediaries between rules and practices--institutions--harness the skill, knowledge, and motivation of practitioners. Yet, everywhere institutions seem to be failing. Over-reliance on rules and incentives has not only corrupted the intrinsic motivations that arise from practice, it has also promoted the spread of competitive utility maximizing and thereby discouraged the kind of moral agency necessary for institutions to work well. In Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom, Maxwell Cameron takes this basic insight as his starting point to argue that the rapid spread of the tenets of a neoliberal political-economic philosophy in our era has contributed to the erosion of institutional capacity. The book contributes to an emerging field of social science research grounded in the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Cameron not only shows how good institutions depend on wise practitioners, he argues that contemporary democratic institutions are being assaulted by excessive partisanship and the hollowing-out of democratic deliberation, by the corrupting effects of money in politics, and by the use of neoliberal techniques of governance that are designed to foster competition rather than the pursuit of common goods. At once a valuable guide to designing effective institutions and a trenchant critique of contemporary institutional failure, Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom promises to reshape our understanding of one of the most basic building blocks of contemporary social and political life.
Download or read book Knowledge Politics written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rules for the World written by Michael Barnett and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators. Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.
Download or read book Uninformed written by Arthur Lupia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance. Some experts even think that less informed citizens should stay out of politics altogether. As Arthur Lupia shows in Uninformed, this is not constructive. At root, critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem. Many experts believe that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters. However, these experts fail to understand how most people learn, and hence don't really know what types of information are even relevant to voters. Feeding them information they don't find relevant does not address the problem. In other words, before educating the public, we need to educate the educators. Lupia offers not just a critique, though; he also has solutions. Drawing from a variety of areas of research on topics like attention span and political psychology, he shows how we can actually increase issue competence among voters in areas ranging from gun regulation to climate change. To attack the problem, he develops an arsenal of techniques to effectively convey to people information they actually care about. Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don't care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to and knowing how to best convey it to them.
Download or read book The Constitution of Knowledge written by Jonathan Rauch and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts “In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.” —Newsweek A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood. In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony. In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.
Download or read book The Democracy of Knowledge written by Daniel Innerarity and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series extends democracy to knowledge in two ways. First, it argues that the issues science seeks to clarify are relevant for all citizens. Second, it explains that the fundamental problems faced by any democracy, such as the economic crisis, are not so much problems of political will as cognitive failures that must be resolved through both a greater knowledge of the realities over which we govern and a fine-tuning of the tools of governance. In fact, knowledge and related fields are spheres in which not only economic prosperity, but also democratic quality, are determined. Thus politics of knowledge and through knowledge has become a question of democratic citizenship. After introducing the concept of governing knowledge, the book discusses the political action of collective organization of uncertainty, before developing the idea of the cognitive challenge of the economy, revealed by today's economic crisis. A groundbreaking work by a renowned philosopher, it will be an accessible and fundamental resource for anyone interested in the relation of power to knowledge.
Download or read book Common Knowledge written by W. Russell Neuman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-10-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions written by Jennifer Gandhi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions (HCPI) is designed to serve as a comprehensive reference guide to our accumulated knowledge and the cutting edge of scholarship about political institutions in the comparative context. It differs from existing handbooks in that it focuses squarely on institutions but also discusses how they intersect with the study of mass behaviour and explain important outcomes, drawing on the perspective of comparative politics. The Handbook is organized into three sections: The first section, consisting of six chapters, is organized around broad theoretical and empirical challenges affecting the study of institutions. It highlights the major issues that emerge among scholars defining, measuring, and analyzing institutions. The second section includes fifteen chapters, each of which handles a different substantive institution of importance in comparative politics. This section covers traditional topics, such as electoral rules and federalism, as well as less conventional but equally important areas, including authoritarian institutions, labor market institutions, and the military. Each chapter not only provides a summary of our current state of knowledge on the topic, but also advances claims that emphasise the research frontier on the topic and that should encourage greater investigation. The final section, encompassing seven chapters, examines the relationship between institutions and a variety of important outcomes, such as political violence, economic performance, and voting behavior. The idea is to consider what features of the political, sociological, and economic world we understand better because of the scholarly attention to institutions. Featuring contributions from leading researchers in the field from the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere, this Handbook will be of great interest to all students and scholars of political institutions, political behaviour and comparative politics. Jennifer Gandhi is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University. Rubén Ruiz-Rufino is Lecturer in International Politics, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Knowledge written by Larry D. Spence and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proper task of the social sciences, this book argues, is to understand and control the impact of social and political institutions on human life--not to predict and control human behavior. Such a reorientation must start, in the author's view, with a rejection of the assumptions of traditional Western political thought. Whether or not a reader can agree in full with the argument here, he is sure to find it a stimulating challenge to his own presuppositions. Chief among the assumptions of Western political thought is the inevitability of hierarchy, which in turn assumes the inevitability of widespread social ignorance. The latter assumption flows from a view of the human species as wanting in motivation, character, and intelligence. These assumptions, according to Dr. Spence, have attained the power of myth, in the sense that no facts known or imaginable would be permitted to falsify them or even seriously to modify them. Thus a work-loving, responsible, intelligent person is regarded as an exception to human nature, produced by hierarchical institutions; and a group of cooperating procedures without structured positions of domination is treated as a case of hidden hierarchy. Humankind never ceases its struggle for autonomy, but is thwarted by social ignorance--from Plato's allegory of the cave to the latest research in political socialization--compound the ignorance, because such explanations force the investigator to assert his intellectual (and political) superiority. The weight of evidence from modern psychology is that learned is a self-activated seeking process rather than a passive reception and recording of data. That being so, Kuhn's theory of scientific development wrongly emphasizes dogmatism, with individual creativity as the exception; the emphasis should be reversed. Moreover, Trigant Burrow was right--as are Bateson and Laing--in challenging Freud's view that so-called normal behavior constitutes mental health. Social scientists should teach citizens to free themselves from social deception, no matter how pervasive and accepted. Respect for our intellectual heritage, as the author writes in his preface, "demands more than the study of the so-called masters; it requires our willingness to philosophize and to create theories just as they did."
Download or read book The Governance of Knowledge written by Nico Stehr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social surveillance and regulation of knowledge will be one of the most important issues in the near future, one that will give rise to unending controversy. In The Governance of Knowledge, Nico Stehr predicts that such concerns will create a new political field, namely, knowledge policy, which will entail regulating dissemination of the anticipated results of rapidly increasing knowledge. The number and range of institutionalized standards for monitoring new knowledge has hitherto been relatively small. Only in cases of technological applications has social control, in the form of political regulation, so far intervened. All modern societies today have complex regulations and extensive concerns with the registration, licensing, testing, and monitoring of pharmaceutical products. The increasingly important and extensive area of intellectual property legislation and administration is an example of social control in which certain measures selectively determine the use of scientific finds and technical knowledge. The Governance of Knowledge assembles a range of essays that attempt to explore the new field of knowledge politics for the first time. It is divided into four parts: The Emergence of Knowledge Politics: Origins, Context, and Consequences; Major Social Institutions and Knowledge Politics; Case Studies on the Governance of Knowledge; and Issues in Knowledge Politics as a New Political Field. Individual chapters concern the emergence of knowledge policy, the embeddedness of such regulations in major social institutions, and offer case studies of the governance of knowledge and discuss controversial issues that are bound to accompany efforts to regulate new knowledge. Professionals and graduate students in the fields of scoiology, political science, social science, and law, including policymakers and natural scientists, will find this book extremely informative.
