Download or read book The Myth of the State written by Ernst Cassirer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1946-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the nature and functions of myth and its role in the development of political thought from the time of the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century

Download or read book The Symbolic Construction of Reality written by Jeffrey Andrew Barash and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic interaction, exploring how human cultures—from early myth-based ones to our own modern, scientifically oriented time—have used symbols to mediate the basic forms of experience. Following this work, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes: from investigations into Western epistemological and scientific traditions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history to anthropology and political philosophy. Reflecting this diversity in Cassirer’s own work, The Symbolic Construction of Reality collects eleven essays by a wide range of contributors from different fields. Each essay analyzes a different aspect of his legacy, reassessing its significance for our contemporary world and bringing much-needed attention to this seminal thinker.

Download or read book The Myth of the State written by Ernst Cassirer and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Myth of the Free Market written by Mark Anthony Martinez and published by Kumarian Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Explains how the 2008 financial meltdown came about and how to revitalize global and domestic economies * Shows how capitalist economies developed and why the state matters in their functioning Free market purists claim that the state is an inefficient institution that does little for society beyond providing stability and protection. The activities related to distributing resources and economic growth, they say, are better left to the invisible hand of the marketplace. These notions now seem tragically misguided in the wake of the 2008 market collapse and bailout. Mark Martinez describes how the flawed myth of the "invisible hand" distorted our understanding of how modern capitalist markets developed and actually work. Martinez draws from history to illustrate that political processes and the state are not only instrumental in making capitalist markets work but that there would be no capitalist markets or wealth creation without state intervention. He brings his story up to the present day to show how the seeds of an unprecedented government intervention in the financial markets were sown in past actions. The Myth of the Free Market is a fascinating and accessible introduction to comparative economic systems as well as an incisive refutation of the standard mantras of neoclassical free market economic theory.

Download or read book The Myth of International Order written by Arjun Chowdhury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incapable yet central : the paradox of the modern state -- The self-undermining state -- Europe as an other -- Restaging the state -- Sympathy for the neoliberal -- Origins of anarchy : anti-colonial movements and postcolonial order -- Suffering spectators of development -- Full circle -- A world of weak states

Download or read book The Myth of American Religious Freedom written by David Sehat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

Download or read book The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State written by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and published by American Institute for Economic Research. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A common narrative of the post-World War II economists was that the State is indispensable for guiding investment and fostering innovation. They claimed that the wealth of the modern world is the result of past State guidance and that what is needed for future economic growth is more State guidance. This position has recently been rejuvenated in reaction to the Great Recession of 2008. The truth is that the enriched modern economy was not a product of State coercion. It was a product of a change in political and social rhetoric in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789. The Great Enrichment, that is, came from human ingenuity emancipated from the bottom up, not human ingenuity directed from the top down. The true question is what on balance is the best way to organize innovation—by the “wise State” or by commercially tested betterment? The American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1933 as the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it publishes ongoing research, hosts educational programs, publishes books, sponsors interns and scholars, and is home to the world-renowned Bastiat Society and the highly respected Sound Money Project. The American Institute for Economic Research is a 501c3 public charity. The Adam Smith Institute is one of the world's leading think tanks, recognised as the best domestic and international economic policy think-tank in the UK and ranked 2nd in the world among Independent Think Tanks by the University of Pennsylvania. Independent, non-profit and non-partisan, the Adam Smith Institute works to promote free market, neoliberal ideas through research, publishing, media outreach, and education. The Institute is today at the forefront of making the case for free markets and a free society in the United Kingdom. The Institute was founded in the 1970s, as post-war socialism reached its high-watermark. Then, as now, its purpose was to educate the public about free markets and economic policy, and to inject sound ideas into the public debate.

Download or read book The Myth of the Welfare State written by Jack D. Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Myth of the Welfare Stale is a basic and sweeping explanation of the rise and fall of great powers, and of the profound impacts of these megastates on ordinary lives. Its central theme is the rise of bureaucratic collectivization in American society. It is Douglas's conviction, which he supports with a wealth of detail, that statist bureaucracies produce siagnation, often exacerbated by inflation, which in turn produces the waning of state power.Douglas has his own set of ""isms"" that require concerted attention: mass mediated rationalism, scientism, technologism, credentialism, and expertism. People who make policies have little, if any, awareness of the actual way social processes evolve: agricultural policy is set by people who know little of farming, arid manufacturing policy is set by people who have never set foot on a factory floor. In light of this ""soaring average ignorance,"" it is little wonder that policy-making has Alice-in-Wonderland characteristics and effects.Douglas sees the notion of a welfare state as a contradiction in terms; its widespread insinuation into the culture is made possible by its weak mythological form and benign-sounding characteristics. In fact, welfare states in whatever form they appear have failed in their purpose: to redistribute income or increase real wealth. The megastates are the source of social instability and economic downturn. They grow like a tidal drift. They start out to correct the historical grievances of the laissez-faire states, only to increase the problems they seek to correct. In this, the welfare state is a weakened form of the totalitarian state, producing similarly unhappy results.Professor Douglas has produced a work of ""anti-policy"" - arguing that freedom leavened by an ordinary sense of self-interest and social concern can overcome the shortfalls of the megastates and their myth-making, self-serving, propensities.

Download or read book The Myth of the Powerless State written by Linda Weiss and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom argues that the integration of the world economy is making national governments less powerful, but Linda Weiss disagrees. In an era when global society and the transnational market are trendy concepts, she suggests that state capacities for domestic transformative strategies provide a competitive advantage. Some of the most successful economies rely on state-informed and state-embedded institutions for governing the economy. In fact, she contends, the strength of external economic pressures is largely determined domestically, and the effect of such pressures varies with the strength of domestic institutions. Weiss analyzes the sources and varieties of state capacity for governing industrial transformation in contemporary cases: the unraveling of Sweden's distributive model of adjustment, the evolution of developmental states in Northeast Asia, and the parallel strengths of the German and Japanese systems of industrial coordination. Her comparative perspective allows her to show how different types of state capacity affect industrial vitality and domestic adjustment to global forces. As economic integration proceeds, she concludes, state capabilities will matter more rather than less in fostering social well-being and the creation of wealth.

Download or read book The Transformation of the State written by Georg Sørensen and published by Red Globe Press. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book The Myth of Digital Democracy written by Matthew Hindman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.

Download or read book The Myth of 1648 written by Benno Teschke and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize This book rejects a commonplace of European history: that the treaties of Westphalia not only closed the Thirty Years' War but also inaugurated a new international order driven by the interaction of territorial sovereign states. Benno Teschke, through this thorough and incisive critique, argues that this is not the case. Domestic 'social property relations' shaped international relations in continental Europe down to 1789 and even beyond. The dynastic monarchies that ruled during this time differed from their medieval predecessors in degree and form of personalization, but not in underlying dynamic. 1648, therefore, is a false caesura in the history of international relations. For real change we must wait until relatively recent times and the development of modern states and true capitalism. In effect, it's not until governments are run impersonally, with no function other than the exercise of its monopoly on violence, that modern international relations are born.

Download or read book The Myth of the State written by Ernst Cassirer and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Between History and Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln illuminates the way a state's foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle - or not so subtle - modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure.

Download or read book The Myth of Choice written by Kent Greenfield and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of choice is at the core of the American story. But what if choice is fake?Americans are fixated on the idea of choice. Our political theory is based on the consent of the governed. Our legal system is built upon the argument that people freely make choices and bear responsibility for them. And what slogan could better express the heart of our consumer culture than "Have it your way"?In this provocative book, Kent Greenfield poses unsettling questions about the choices we make. What if they are more constrained and limited than we like to think? If we have less free will than we realize, what are the implications for us as individuals and for our society? To uncover the answers, Greenfield taps into scholarship on topics ranging from brain science to economics, political theory to sociology. His discoveries—told through an entertaining array of news events, personal anecdotes, crime stories, and legal decisions—confirm that many factors, conscious and unconscious, limit our free will. Worse, by failing to perceive them we leave ourselves open to manipulation. But Greenfield offers useful suggestions to help us become better decision makers as individuals, and to ensure that in our laws and public policy we acknowledge the complexity of choice.

Download or read book The Myth of the Common School written by Charles Leslie Glenn and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Myth of Voter Fraud written by Lorraine C. Minnite and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegations that widespread voter fraud is threatening to the integrity of American elections and American democracy itself have intensified since the disputed 2000 presidential election. The claim that elections are being stolen by illegal immigrants and unscrupulous voter registration activists and vote buyers has been used to persuade the public that voter malfeasance is of greater concern than structural inequities in the ways votes are gathered and tallied, justifying ever tighter restrictions on access to the polls. Yet, that claim is a myth. In The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite presents the results of her meticulous search for evidence of voter fraud. She concludes that while voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process in the United States are common, incidents of deliberate voter fraud are actually quite rare. Based on painstaking research aggregating and sifting through data from a variety of sources, including public records requests to all fifty state governments and the U.S. Justice Department, Minnite contends that voter fraud is in reality a politically constructed myth intended to further complicate the voting process and reduce voter turnout. She refutes several high-profile charges of alleged voter fraud, such as the assertion that eight of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote, and makes the question of voter fraud more precise by distinguishing fraud from the manifold ways in which electoral democracy can be distorted. Effectively disentangling misunderstandings and deliberate distortions from reality, The Myth of Voter Fraud provides rigorous empirical evidence for those fighting to make the electoral process more efficient, more equitable, and more democratic.