Download or read book The Iron Cage of Liberalism written by Daniel P. Ritter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last forty years the world has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of a new political phenomenon - unarmed revolution. This book explores why some nonviolent revolutionary movements lead to unarmed revolution, and others result in devastating failure.
Download or read book The Iron Cage Revisited written by R. Bruce Douglass and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the start of the twentieth century, when Germany, among other nations, was undergoing industrialization, Max Weber famously characterized modern life in words that have often been translated as "iron cage." During the industrial era, that image caught on and was often used by scholars to express concerns about the extent to which the actual character of modern life contradicted its emancipatory promise. But we are living in a different time now, when the conditions under which we live seem to be quite different from the ones that pertained in Weber's day. It is a time when, in some respects at least, life seems to be freer and more conducive to experimentation, which has led some people to conclude that our societies have escaped from Weber's "cage." But is that really true? This book challenges that notion, considering the consequences for our way of life of the triumph of neoliberalism as a political force.
Download or read book Hayek written by Andrew Gamble and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hayek has been one of the key liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He has also been much misunderstood. His work has crossed disciplines -- economics, philosophy and political science -- and national boundaries. He was an early critic of Keynes, and became famous in the 1940s for his warnings that the advance of collectivism in western democr
Download or read book The Iron Cage of Liberalism written by Daniel P. Ritter and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last forty years the world has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of a new political phenomenon - unarmed revolution. This book explores why some nonviolent revolutionary movements lead to unarmed revolution, and others result in devastating failure.
Download or read book The Iron Cage written by Catherine Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major study of the father of modern sociology explores the intimate relationship between the events of Max Weber's personal history and the development of his thought. When it was first published in 1970, Paul Roazen described The Iron Cage as ""an example of the history of ideas at its very best""; while Robert A. Nisbet said that ""we learn more about Weber's life in this volume than from any other in the English language.""Weber's life and work developed in reaction to the rigidities of familial and social structures in Imperial Germany. In his youth he was torn by irreconcilable tensions between the Bismarckian authoritarianism of his father and the ethical puritanism of his mother. These tensions led to a psychic crisis when, in his thirties, he expelled his father (who died soon thereafter) from his house. His reaction to the collapse of the European social order before and during World War I was no less personal and profound. It is the triumph of Professor Mitzman's approach that he convincingly demonstrates how the internalizing of these severe experiences led to Weber's pessimistic vision of the future as an ""iron cage"" and to such seminal ideas as the notion of charisma and the concept of the Protestant ethic and its connection with the spirit of capitalism. The author's thesis also serves as a vehicle for describing the social, political, and personal plight of the European bourgeois intellectual of Weber's generation.In synthesizing Weber's life and thought, Arthur Mitzman has expanded and refined our understanding of this central twentieth-century figure. As Lewis Coser writes in the preface, until now ""there has been little attempt to bring together the work and the man, to show the ways in which Weber's cognitive intentions, his choice of problems, were linked with the details of his personal biography. Arthur Mitzman fills this gap brilliantly.
Download or read book The Theology of Liberalism written by Eric Nelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing. We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake. Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.
Download or read book Fleeing the Iron Cage written by Lawrence A. Scaff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber written by Edith Hanke and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Active at the time when the social sciences were founded, Max Weber's social theory contributed significantly to a wide range of fields and disciplines. Considering his prominence, it makes sense to take stock of the Weberian heritage and to explore the ways in which Weber's work and ideas have contributed to our understanding of the modern world. Using his work as a point of departure, The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber investigates the Weberian legacy today, identifying the enduring problems and themes associated with his thought that have contemporary significance: the nature of modern capitalism, neo-liberal global economic policy, nationalism, religion and secularization, threats to legality, the culture of modernity, bureaucratic rule and leadership, politics and ethics, the value of science, power and inequality. These problems are global in scope, and the Weberian approach has been used to address them in very different societies. Thus, the Handbook also features chapters on Europe, Turkey, Islam, Judaism, China, India, and international politics. The Handbook emphasizes the use and application of Weber's ideas. It offers a journey through the intellectual terrain that scholars continue to explore using the tools and perspectives of Weberian analysis. The essays explore how Weber's concepts, hypotheses, and perspectives have been applied in practice, and how they can be applied in the future in social inquiry, not only in Europe and North America, but globally. The volume is divided into six parts exploring, in turn: Capitalism in a Globalized World, Society and Social Structure, Politics and the State, Religion, Culture, and Science and Knowledge.
Download or read book The McDonaldization of Society written by George Ritzer and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author is a proud sponsor of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. The book that made "McDonaldization" part of the lexicon of contemporary sociological theory, read by hundreds of thousands of students, is now in its Ninth Edition! George Ritzer′s seminal work of critical sociology, The McDonaldization of Society, continues to stand as one of the pillars of modern day sociological thought. Building on the argument that the fast food restaurant has become the model for the rationalization process today, this book links theory to contemporary life in a globalized world and resonates with students in a way that few other books do. Ritzer opens students’ eyes to many current issues and shows how McDonaldization’s principles apply to other settings, especially in the areas of consumption and globalization. This new edition has been significantly reoriented to reflect our experience of McDonaldization in the world of online consumption. New to this Edition Examines how retailers like Amazon represent a new era of "datafication," the transformation of vast amounts of information into quantifiable data. Discusses how the digital world has almost unlimited potential to turn consumers into "prosumers" doing volunteer work formerly done by paid employees. This edition is more streamlined than previous editions to sharpen its argument and message, and make it more useable as a secondary reading in a wide range of courses
Download or read book Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism written by Howard Brick and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances--in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the "Old Left" intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell's emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell's route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war's end, Bell shared the "new radicalism" that infused Dwight MacDonald's Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills' early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick's study finds, however, that the "new radicalism" of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell's mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell's mature social theory in the historical context of his early work--particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell's thinking, can be located in the years 1947-49. After that point, the different strands of Bell's thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the "iron cage" of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell's social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell's generation, Brick's work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.
Download or read book Against Management written by Martin Parker and published by Polity. This book was released on 2002-10-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Management argues that management is increasingly being seen as a problem, and not a solution. Martin Parker argues that managing is not the only way to organize and that managerialism is a global form of ideology, which is being used to justify considerable cruelty and inequality. He also suggests that, in a variety of places, an odd collection of people seem to be coming to similar conclusions. It is possible to identify cracks in the religion of managerialism as some of its converts begin to lapse and others intensify their protest. In order to illustrate his argument, Parker draws from a wide variety of sources - anti-corporate activism; books and films which use management as their backdrop; the movement for business ethics and corporate social responsibility; as well as critical management studies and general social theories of the present. Parker's overall argument is that we can see the beginnings of a cultural shift in the image of management and that this is a significant historical change. Perhaps most importantly, it opens up the possibility of exploring non-managerial alternatives to contemporary assumptions about organizing. Against Management deliberately attempts to blur the boundaries between academic and popular writing, and encourages some radical questioning of the common sense that tells us that we need management, managers and management schools. This will be essential reading for second-year undergraduates and above in business and management studies (including MBA), sociology and cultural studies.
Download or read book Public Policy and the Neo Weberian State written by Stanisław Mazur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The neo-Weberian state constitutes an attempt to combine the Weberian model of administration with the principles laid down during the retreat from the bureaucratic management paradigm (new public management and public governance). The concept of neo-Weberian state involves changing the model of operation of administrative structures from an inward-oriented one, focused on compliance with internal rules, into a model focused on meeting citizens’ needs (not by resorting to commercialisation, as is the case with new public management, but by building appropriate quality of administration). This book discusses the context of the neo-Weberian approach and its impact on the processes of societal transformation. Further, it identifies and systematises the theoretical and functional elements of the approach under consideration. This volume includes comparative analyses of the neo-Weberian state and public management paradigms. In the empirical part of the work, its authors review selected policies (economic, innovation, industrial, labour, territorial, urban management, and health) from the perspective of tools typical of the neo-Weberian approach. This part also includes a critical scrutiny of changes which have taken place in the framework of selected policies in recent decades. The study assesses the appropriateness of the neo-Weberian approach to the management of public affairs regarding countries which have modernised their public administrations in its spirit. One of the aims of this analysis is to answer the question whether the application of neo-Weberian ideas may result in qualitative changes in the context of public policies. The final part of the book covers implications for public management resulting from the concept of neo-Weberian state. Public Policy and the Neo-Weberian State is suitable for researchers and students who study political economy, public policy and modern political theory.
Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Download or read book Hayek s Liberalism and Its Origins written by Christina Petsoulas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring the writings of Mandeville, Hume and Smith, this book offers a critique of Hayek's theory of cultural evolution and explores the roots of his powerful defence of liberalism. This book is an original contribution to the debate, and vital reading for researchers in politics, political theory, and economics.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism written by David Farber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of modern conservatism through the lives of six leading figures The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism tells the gripping story of perhaps the most significant political force of our time through the lives and careers of six leading figures at the heart of the movement. David Farber traces the history of modern conservatism from its revolt against New Deal liberalism, to its breathtaking resurgence under Ronald Reagan, to its spectacular defeat with the election of Barack Obama. Farber paints vivid portraits of Robert Taft, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. He shows how these outspoken, charismatic, and frequently controversial conservative leaders were united by a shared insistence on the primacy of social order, national security, and economic liberty. Farber demonstrates how they built a versatile movement capable of gaining and holding power, from Taft's opposition to the New Deal to Buckley's founding of the National Review as the intellectual standard-bearer of modern conservatism; from Goldwater's crusade against leftist politics and his failed 1964 bid for the presidency to Schlafly's rejection of feminism in favor of traditional gender roles and family values; and from Reagan's city upon a hill to conservatism's downfall with Bush's ambitious presidency. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism provides rare insight into how conservatives captured the American political imagination by claiming moral superiority, downplaying economic inequality, relishing bellicosity, and embracing nationalism. This concise and accessible history reveals how these conservative leaders discovered a winning formula that enabled them to forge a powerful and formidable political majority. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Download or read book Varieties of Capitalism written by Peter A. Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.
Download or read book Why Liberalism Failed written by Patrick J. Deneen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, American Conservative Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
