Download or read book Germany written by Neil MacGregor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Wolfgang von Geothe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years. German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places that still resonate in the new Germany—porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald—to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it.

Download or read book The Capital A Novel written by Robert Menasse and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A dark comedy of manners packed with urgency” (H. W. Vail, Vanity Fair), The Capital is an instant classic of world literature. A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union’s symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic “union.” Recalling the Balzacian conceit of assembling a vast parade of characters whose lives conspire to form a driving central plot, Menasse adapts this technique with modern sensibility to reveal the hastily assembled capital in all of its eccentricities. We meet, among others, Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek Cypriot recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace—of course, to the horror of the other nation states. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets. These narratives and more are masterfully woven, revealing the absurdities—and real dangers—of a fracturing Europe. A tour de force from one of Austria’s most esteemed novelists, The Capital is a mordantly funny and piercingly urgent saga of the European Union, and an aerial feat of sublime world literature.

Download or read book Landscape Theories written by Olaf Kühne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decades, the discussion about theoretical approaches to the topic of 'landscape' has increased. This book presents the currently discussed theoretical approaches to landscape and shows its potentials and limits. The theoretical approaches are discussed on the basis of current questions, such as socialisation and the hybridisation of landscape, and combined with empirical results. This is followed by a discussion of the landscape policy operationalisation of theoretical considerations and empirical findings.

Download or read book Code written by Gerfried Stocker and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schepf. Essays by Peter J. Bentley, Erkki Huhtamo, Friedrich Kittler and Pierre Levy.

Download or read book Walls to Bridges written by Günther Gebhardt and published by Ipub Global Connection, LLC. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the religions and ideologies of the world have in common? Why should we focus first on their similarities rather than their differences? What's next in the evolution of the global ethic?Professor and theologian Hans Küng has devoted much of his life to answering these questions.A controversial figure, Küng achieved global notoriety in the late 60's when he became the first major Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th century to question the notion of papal infallibility. For this, he was stripped of his license to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian, but carried on teaching as a tenured professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany until his retirement in 1996. In the 1990s, Küng initiated a project subsequently referred to the Movement for a "Global Ethic" ("Weltethos" in the original German). After massive world-wide research into past and present ethical principles carried out with the collaboration of many scholars, including Professor Leonard Swidler-who continues their joint work-he spelled out clearly the foundational ethical principles that the world's religions and ideologies, past and present, de facto held/hold in common, that is: The minimal code of behavior that everyone in fact accepts (e.g., "Do not lie, steal, kill innocent persons....") Kung's goal is to highlight how the great religions/ideologies of the world converge on moral values and how this has revealed minimal, but expanding standards: e.g., slavery once was, but no longer is ethically acceptable... equality for women is painfully on that expanding path now! This English translation of The Global Ethic Handbook is a culmination of the "Movement" Küng began in the 90s. In clear language, he describes his vision for a Global Ethic, and step by step he takes the reader on a journey through the essential aspects of a Global Ethic, including its social, political, legal, economics, communications, esthetics, and philosophical applications. It even describes his translation of the Global Ethic/Weltethos into musical compositions-indeed, a full-blown opera! While Engaging the Global Ethic is a broad and comprehensive work, the actualization of a Global Ethic is concrete-not abstract. Professor Küng's vision into the future, built on the expanding Global Ethic is an inspiring read and call to action for all!

Download or read book Constitutional Democracy in Crisis written by Mark A. Graber and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the world facing a serious threat to the protection of constitutional democracy? There is a genuine debate about the meaning of the various political events that have, for many scholars and observers, generated a feeling of deep foreboding about our collective futures all over the world. Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or do they instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989? Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? addresses these questions head-on: Are the forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world general or nation-specific? Why have some major democracies seemingly not experienced these problems? How can we as scholars and citizens think clearly about the ideas of "constitutional crisis" or "constitutional degeneration"? What are the impacts of forces such as globalization, immigration, income inequality, populism, nationalism, religious sectarianism? Bringing together leading scholars to engage critically with the crises facing constitutional democracies in the 21st century, these essays diagnose the causes of the present afflictions in regimes, regions, and across the globe, believing at this stage that diagnosis is of central importance - as Abraham Lincoln said in his "House Divided" speech, "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Download or read book Political Uses of Utopia written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.

Download or read book Rethinking Utopia written by David M. Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over five hundred years since it was named, utopia remains a vital concept for understanding and challenging the world(s) we inhabit, even in – or rather because of – the condition of ‘post-utopianism’ that supposedly permeates them. In Rethinking Utopia David M. Bell offers a diagnosis of the present through the lens of utopia and then, by rethinking the concept through engagement with utopian studies, a variety of ‘radical’ theories and the need for decolonizing praxis, shows how utopianism might work within, against and beyond that which exists in order to provide us with hope for a better future. He proposes paying a ‘subversive fidelity’ to utopia, in which its three constituent terms: ‘good’ (eu), ‘place’ (topos), and ‘no’ (ou) are rethought to assert the importance of immanent, affective relations. The volume engages with a variety of practices and forms to articulate such a utopianism, including popular education/critical pedagogy; musical improvisation; and utopian literature. The problems as well as the possibilities of this utopianism are explored, although the problems are often revealed to be possibilities, provided they are subject to material challenge. Rethinking Utopia offers a way of thinking about (and perhaps realising) utopia that helps overcome some of the binary oppositions structuring much thinking about the topic. It allows utopia to be thought in terms of place and process; affirmation and negation; and the real and the not-yet. It engages with the spatial and affective turns in the social sciences without ever uncritically being subsumed by them; and seeks to make connections to indigenous cosmologies. It is a cautious, careful, critical work punctuated by both pessimism and hope; and a refusal to accept the finality of this or any world.

Download or read book The Marketplace of Print written by Alexandra Halasz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining the print culture of the time, and especially the developing entanglement between technology and capitalism. Combining close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney and others with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology, The Marketplace of Print is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.

Download or read book Germany and The West written by Riccardo Bavaj and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The West” is a central idea in German public discourse, yet historians know surprisingly little about the evolution of the concept. Contrary to common assumptions, this volume argues that the German concept of the West was not born in the twentieth century, but can be traced from a much earlier time. In the nineteenth century, “the West” became associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization, and modernity. It signified the future through the opposition to antonyms such as “Russia” and “the East,” and was deployed as a tool for forging German identities. Examining the shifting meanings, political uses, and transnational circulations of the idea of “the West” sheds new light on German intellectual history from the post-Napoleonic era to the Cold War.

Download or read book Enraged Citizens European Peace and Democratic Deficits written by Robert Menasse and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 2010, Robert Menasse went to Brussels to begin researching a novel about the European Union. Instead of producing a work of fiction, however, his extended stay in Brussels resulted in The European Courier, a text in which he examines the European community from its beginnings in the transnational "Montanunion" (European Coal and Steel Community, 1951) to the current "financial crisis" of the European Union. In the course of his analysis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces that work to advance--or obstruct--the European project and its goal of a truly postnational European democracy. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council, Menasse argues that what is frequently misunderstood as a financial crisis is, in fact, a political one. As Menasse claims in The European Courier, "Either the Europe of nation-states will perish or the project of transcending the nation-states will."

Download or read book Disgust written by Winfried Menninghaus and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art."

Download or read book Utopian Thought in the Western World written by Frank Edward MANUEL and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time.

Download or read book Rational Choice and British Politics written by Iain McLean and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-04-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and original study, by one of Britain's leading scholars of rational choice theory, explores the course of British parliamentary politics over the last 150 years. McLean marries an appealing combination of social science and analytical narrative history to the great turning points in British politics - the Repeal of the Corn Law; the Victorian crisis of the Liberal and Conservative Parties; the Irish Question and Lloyd George's solution to it; the New Liberal origins of the welfare state; the politics of race and empire under Chamberlain and Powell; and the politics of 'there is no alternative' under Margaret Thatcher.

Download or read book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy written by Tom Ginsburg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self-rule. In the United States, the tenure of Donald Trump has seemed decisive turning point for many. What kind of president intimidates jurors, calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” and seeks foreign assistance investigating domestic political rivals? Whatever one thinks of President Trump, many think the Constitution will safeguard us from lasting damage. But is that assumption justified? How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Drawing on a rich array of other countries’ experiences with democratic backsliding, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq show how constitutional rules can both hinder and hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—often fail as bulwarks against democratic decline. The sobering reality for the United States, Ginsburg and Huq contend, is that the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. Its structural rigidity has had unforeseen consequence—leaving the presidency weakly regulated and empowering the Supreme Court conjure up doctrines that ultimately facilitate rather than inhibit rights violations. Even the bright spots in the Constitution—the First Amendment, for example—may have perverse consequences in the hands of a deft communicator who can degrade the public sphere by wielding hateful language banned in many other democracies. We—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.

Download or read book Political Creativity written by Gerald Berk and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Creativity intervenes in the lively debate currently underway in the social sciences on institutional change. Editors Gerald Berk, Dennis C. Galvan, and Victoria Hattam, along with the contributors to the volume, show how institutions inevitably combine order and change, because formal rules and roles are always available for reconfiguration. Creative action is not the exception but the very process through which all political formations are built, promulgated and changed. Drawing on the rich cache of antidualist theoretical traditions, from poststructuralism and ecological theory to constructivism and pragmatism, a diverse group of scholars probes acts of social innovation in many locations: land boards in Botswana, Russian labor relations, international statistics, global supply chains, Islamic economics in Algeria, Islamic sects and state authority in Senegal, and civil rights reform, colonization, industrial policy, and political consulting in the United States. These political scientists reconceptualize agency as a relational process that continually reorders the nature and meaning of people and things, order as an assemblage that necessitates creative tinkering and interpretation, and change as the unruly politics of time that confounds the conventional ordering of past, present, and future. Political Creativity offers analytical tools for reimagining order and change as entangled processes. Contributors: Stephen Amberg, Chris Ansell, Gerald Berk, Kevin Bruyneel, Dennis C. Galvan, Deborah Harrold, Victoria Hattam, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Gary Herrigel, Joseph Lowndes, Ato Kwamena Onoma, Adam Sheingate, Rudra Sil, Ulrich Voskamp, Volker Wittke.

Download or read book G nter Grass and His Critics written by Siegfried Mews and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive narrative overview and analysis of the criticism of the controversial German author's works. When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel The Tin Drum (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled thepostwar rebirth of German letters, auguring "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with The Tin Drum, Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. SiegfriedMews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in publicdiscourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additionalinsight into the reception of Grass's works. Siegfried Mews is Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.