Download or read book Suspect Citizens written by Jocelyn M. Boryczka and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What drives the cycle of backlashes against women's on-going struggle for equality, freedom, and inclusion in American politics? In her innovative and provocative book, Suspect Citizens, Jocelyn Boryczka presents a feminist conceptual history that shows how American politics have largely defined women in terms of their reproductive and socializing functions. This moral framework not only denies women full citizenship, but also devalues the active political engagement of all citizens who hold each other and their government under suspicion. Using the gendered notions of virtue and vice, Boryczka exposes the paradox of how women are perceived as virtuous moral guardians and vice-ridden suspect citizens capable of jeopardizing the entire nation's exceptional future. Shifting from virtue and vice to a democratic feminist ethics, Suspect Citizens advances a politics of collective responsibility and belonging.
Download or read book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For written by Peter Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In September 2011, two leading civic engagement advocacy organizations headed, respectively, by Robert Putnam and Peter Levine released a joint report showing that a region's level of civic engagement was a strong predictor of its ability to recover from the Great Recession. This finding confirms what advocates of civic engagement have long hypothesized: that strengthening the networks between government and civil society and increasing citizen participation results in better government and better community outcomes. However, citizens concerned about the economic crisis need more than just deliberation or community organizing alone to achieve these outcomes. What they need, according to Peter Levine, is a movement devoted to civic renewal. Deliberative democracy-the idea that true democratic legitimacy derives from open, inclusive discussion and dialogue rather than simple voting-has become an extremely influential concept in the last two decades. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, Peter Levine contends that effective deliberative democracy depends upon effective community advocacy. Deliberation, he shows, is most valuable when talk and debate are integrated into a community's everyday life. To illustrate how it works, Levine draws lessons from both community organizing and developmental psychology, and uses examples of successful efforts from communities across America as well as fledgling democracies in Africa and Eastern Europe. By engaging in this type of civic work, American citizens can meaningfully contribute to civic renewal, which, in turn, will address serious social problems that cannot be fixed in any other way"--
Download or read book The Virtuous Citizen written by Tim Soutphommasane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be a citizen in a multicultural society? And what role must patriotism play in defining our relationship with our country and fellow citizens? In The Virtuous Citizen Tim Soutphommasane answers these questions with a critical defence of liberal nationalism. Considering a range of contemporary political debates from Europe, North America and Australia, over issues including multiculturalism, national history, civic education and immigration, Soutphommasane argues that a love of country should be valued alongside tolerance, mutual respect and public reasonableness as a civic virtue. A liberal form of patriotism, grounded in national identity, is, if anything, essential for political stability in a diverse society. This book is required reading not only for political theorists and philosophers but also for researchers and professionals in political science, sociology, history and public policy.
Download or read book Virtuous Citizens written by Kendall McClellan and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates how contemporary manifestations of civic publics trace directly to the early days of nationhood The rise of the bourgeois public sphere and the contemporaneous appearance of counterpublics in the eighteenth century deeply influenced not only how politicians and philosophers understood the relationships among citizens, disenfranchised subjects, and the state but also how members of the polity understood themselves. In Virtuous Citizens: Counterpublics and Sociopolitical Agency in Transatlantic Literature, Kendall McClellan uncovers a fundamental and still redolent transformation in conceptions of civic identity that occurred over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literature of this period exposes an emotional investment in questions of civic selfhood born out of concern for national stability and power, which were considered products of both economic strength and a nation’s moral fiber. McClellan shows how these debates traversed the Atlantic to become a prominent component of early American literature, evident in works by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Underlying popular opinion about who could participate in the political public, McClellan argues, was an impassioned rhetorical wrestling match over the right and wrong ways to demonstrate civic virtue. Relying on long-established tropes of republican virtue that lauded self-sacrifice and disregard for personal safety, abolitionist writers represented loyalty to an ideals-based community as the surest safeguard of both private and public virtue. This evolution in civic virtue sanctioned acts of protest against the state, offered disenfranchised citizens a role in politics, and helped usher in the modern transnational public sphere. Virtuous Citizens shows that the modern public sphere has always constituted a vital and powerful space for those invested in addressing injustice and expanding democracy. To illuminate some of the fundamental issues underlying today’s sociopolitical unrest, McClellan traces the transatlantic origins of questions still central to the representation of movements like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and the Alt-Right: What is the primary loyalty of a virtuous citizen? Are patriots those who defend the current government against attacks, external and internal, or those who challenge the government to fulfill sociopolitical ideals?
Download or read book Virtues in the Public Sphere written by James Arthur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtues in the Public Sphere features seventeen chapters by experts from a variety of different perspectives on the broad theme of virtue in the public sphere. Spanning issues such as the notion of civic friendship and civic virtue, it sheds light on the role that these virtues play in the public sphere and their importance in safeguarding communities from the threats of a lack of concern for truth, poor leadership, charlatanism, and bigotry. This book highlights the theoretical complexity of putting virtue ethics into practice in the public domain at a time when it has been shaken by unpredictable political, social, technological, and cultural developments. With contributions from internationally acclaimed scholars in the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and education, this book highlights the main issues, both theoretical and practical, of putting virtue ethics into practice in the public domain. Split into three sections – "Virtues and vices in the public sphere", "Civic friendship and virtue", and "Perspectives on virtue and the public sphere" – the chapters offer a timely commentary on the roles that virtues have to play in the public sphere. This timely book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education, character and virtue studies, and will also appeal to practitioners.
Download or read book American Virtues written by Jean M. Yarbrough and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1998-09-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early days of the republic, Americans have recognized Thomas Jefferson's distinctive role in helping to shape the American national character. As Founder and statesman, Jefferson thought broadly about the virtues Americans would need to cultivate in order to preserve and perfect their experiment in republican self-government. Now in an age preoccupied with rights and divided over questions of character in public and private life, Jefferson can help us to think more clearly about our most urgent concerns. American Virtues is the first comprehensive analysis of Jefferson's moral and political philosophy in over twenty years and the first ever to focus exclusively on the full range of moral, civic, and intellectual virtues that together form the American character. It asks what kind of character Americans as a people must cultivate to ensure their freedom and happiness and how we as a free society can nurture moral and intellectual excellence in our citizens and statesmen. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, Jean Yarbrough explores how Jefferson's conception of rights helps to form the American character. In subsequent chapters, she examines the moral sense virtues of justice and benevolence; the "agrarian" virtues of industry, moderation, patience, self-reliance, and independence; patriotism and modern republicanism; slavery and agrarian vice; the effect of commerce on character; the virtues connected with private property; the civic virtues of vigilance and spirited participation; the meaning of virtue and happiness for women; the virtues of republican statesmen; the place of the Epicurean virtues of wisdom and friendship in liberal republicanism; and piety and the secularized virtues of charity, toleration, and hope. In broadening the examination of virtue to include not only civic or republican virtue but the whole range of moral and intellectual excellence that perfect the individual character, American Virtues moves beyond the liberal-republican debates and makes a fresh contribution to the Jeffersonian literature.
Download or read book America the Virtuous written by Claes G. Ryn and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urged on by a powerful ideological and political movement, George W. Bush committed the United States to a quest for empire. American values and principles were universal, he asserted, and should guide the transformation of the world. Claes Ryn sees this drive for virtuous empire as the triumph of forces that in the last several decades acquired decisive influence in both the American parties, the foreign policy establishment, and the media. Public intellectuals like William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz argued that the United States was an exceptional nation and should bring "democracy," "freedom," and "capitalism" to countries not yet enjoying them. Ryn finds the ideology of American empire strongly reminiscent of the French Jacobinism of the eighteenth century. He describes the drive for armed world hegemony as part of a larger ideological whole that both expresses and aggravates a crisis of democracy and, more generally, of American and Western civilization. America the Virtuous sees the new Jacobinism as symptomatic of America shedding an older sense of the need for restraints on power. Checks provided by the US Constitution have been greatly weakened with the erosion of traditional moral and other culture.
Download or read book Virtuous Violence written by Alan Page Fiske and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This radical and thought-provoking book argues that violence does not result from a breakdown of morality, but is morally motivated.
Download or read book Sovereign Virtue written by Ronald Dworkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.
Download or read book Civic Virtue written by Gerard van Ark and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of the U.S. Constitution was influenced by tenets of a republican government. Civic virtue, or concern for the common good, guides how U.S. citizens go about living their daily lives. This book defines civic virtue and gives concrete examples of civic virtue in practice. Civic virtue requires citizens to put the common good ahead of their own personal desires to make sure that the republican government operates fairly for all citizens. The Constitution stresses the importance of the government existing for the people and being run by the people, which of course heavily relies upon the peoples' interpretation of Civic virtue.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Virtue written by John Shovlin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Political Economy of Virtue' offers an interpretation of political economy in the second half of the 18th century. It covers the key turning points in the development of French political economy.
Download or read book American Ethics and the Virtuous Citizen written by Robert Grant and published by Humanist Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Virtue Politics written by James Hankins and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.” —Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement “Magisterial...Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.” —Wall Street Journal “Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way...For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be...nothing less than transformative.” —Noel Malcolm, American Affairs “[A] masterpiece...It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents...and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.” —Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement “The lessons for today are clear and profound.” —Robert D. Kaplan Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft. A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
Download or read book Justice and Reciprocity in Aristotle s Political Philosophy written by Kazutaka Inamura and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Aristotle's approaches to how to develop a political community based on the notions of justice and friendship.
Download or read book Our Virtuous Republic written by Richard D. Baris and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America was founded as a republic, a collective nation of tightly knit families and autonomous communities, who relied upon each other to fulfill their needs and achieve their dreams. As never before, "Our Virtuous Republic" provides a comprehensive explanation to how and why our nation - once held together only by an empowering national identity - has now become increasingly dependent on a powerful, centralized government. Conservative academics and politicians have failed to make a decisive argument for our founding principles, which were born out of the blended wisdom of English common law, Natural Law and the Protestant ethic. Richard D. Baris, Creator and Editor of People's Pundit Daily, identifies the unique characteristics that define the traditional American identity; to which, the progressive narrative has attached an unsubstantiated, "backward" stigma. Past conservative arguments have focused only on the impact of progressive legal reforms, such as the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, but beneath this structural shift is a deeper problem of values. They have overshadowed the true danger posed to Americans from big government; its strong, innate ability to destroy the human connection, which is threatening to "fundamentally transform" American citizens into a people that the Constitution was never designed to govern. Baris uses an all-encompassing approach, tapping history, philosophy, psychology, economics, and even science to deconstruct the progressive argument to its regressive core. Breaking through the superficial partisanship, he explains how our human nature interacts with the different elements of each political philosophy in American politics, and how it is exploited by politicians, special interest and bureaucrats. The evidence, in total, points to one conclusion. There is a Natural Law that illuminates our path to human happiness, empowerment and well-being. American history tells a story about the natural power of close, intimate human relationships. Our Founding Fathers designed the American social contract in accordance with their belief in a Natural Law that - when observed - ensures that we all have the opportunity to achieve the highest state of being. Honoring the terms of that social contract is the true path to progress..
Download or read book Roman Political Thought written by Jed W. Atkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thematic introduction to Roman political thought that shows the Romans' enduring contribution to key political ideas.
Download or read book A Virtuous Circle written by Pippa Norris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-04 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the process of political communications by the news media and by parties responsible for civic malaise? A Virtuous Circle sets out to challenge and critique the conventional wisdom. Based on a comparative examination of the role of the news media and parties in 29 postindustrial societies, focusing in particular on Western Europe and the United States, this study argues that rather than mistakenly 'blaming the messenger' we need to understand and confront more deep-rooted flaws in systems of representative democracy.
