Download or read book Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism written by Thomas Kemple and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique and accessible way of conceptualizing the vocations of art, science, and politics in the capitalist world through an examination of some neglected features of the work of the scholar who first traced their origins and consequences in 'the West': Max Weber.

Download or read book Nobody s Normal How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness written by Roy Richard Grinker and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Download or read book The New Spirit of Capitalism written by Luc Boltanski and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Download or read book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism written by Max Weber and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's best-known and most controversial study relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan belief that hard work and good deeds were outward signs of faith and salvation.

Download or read book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism written by Max Weber and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is Max Weber's groundbreaking study of the psychological and spiritual conditions that allowed for the development of capitalist culture. Weber's thesis takes off from startling twin reversals. First, in a reversal of the Marxian thesis that material conditions form the basis for "states of mind," Weber asserts that it is these very mental conditions and associated cultural values that shaped the capitalist world and the human quest for prosperity. More specifically, Weber's insight is that the belief in the moral value of work, encouraged by Calvinist strains of Protestantism, fostered a this-worldly asceticism -- reversing and supplanting the medieval monastic ideal of an other-worldly asceticism. Thus grew, in early modern England and Northern Europe, a new attitude toward the fulfillment of worldly duties -- baptizing, as it were, what would become the unapologetic pursuit of wealth. As a trenchant and still controversial analysis of how the historical phases of Christianity have conditioned the ethical, political, economic, and social lives of the peoples of the West -- and, later, the world -- Weber's work continues to be a touchstone for the ongoing debate on the origins of capitalism and the future course of economic history.

Download or read book The Spirit Vs the Souls written by Christopher McAuley and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the extensive scholarship on Max Weber (1864-1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), very little of it examines the contact between the two founding figures of Western sociology. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906, and comparing the sociological work that they produced during this period and afterward, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism. What emerges from this examination is that their ideas on these matters clashed far more than they converged, contrary to the tone of their letters and to the interpretations of the few scholars who have commented on the correspondence between Weber and Du Bois. Christopher McAuley provides close readings of key texts by the two scholars, including Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, to demonstrate their different views on a number of issues, including the economic benefits of unfree labor in capitalism. The book addresses the distinctly different treatment of the two figures's political sympathies in past scholarship, especially that which discredits some of Du Bois's openly antiracist academic work while failing to consider the markedly imperialist-serving content of some of Weber's. McAuley argues for the acknowledgment and demarginalization of Du Bois's contributions to the scholarly world that academics have generally accorded to Weber. This book will interest students and scholars of black studies, history, and sociology for whom Du Bois and Weber are central figures.

Download or read book Capitalism and Disability written by Marta Russell and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Download or read book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism written by Michael Novak and published by . This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 30 years after the release of his ground-breaking work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak returns to answer the question of what gives rise to democratic capitalism - that intricate blend of commerce and rule of law that encourages peace and global trade. This essay is vital to understanding the intangible environment that best inspires human flourishing, as it discovers capitalism's essence, and uncovers what truly fosters creativity.Novak articulates how democratic capitalism works toward creating, not just consuming, wealth, along with encouraging ambition, discipline, and mutual benefit. He explains how critics fail to consider the interaction between the system and the role that economic, political, and moral liberties play in comprehensive human flourishing.This new and exciting work enlivens the connection between the Bible and democratic capitalism by showcasing how seamlessly the dynamic polity fits with the imperatives of human capacity and drive.

Download or read book The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic written by Michael Harry Lessnoff and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber was fascinated by the differing historical paths traced by Western civilizaiton and the civilizations of the East. His essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism addresses the forces behind the social transformations of the industrial revolution. Weber's thesis proposes a causal link between the forces of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

Download or read book Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic written by Peter Ghosh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-26 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories presents an entirely new portrait of Max Weber, one of the most prestigious social theorists in recent history, using his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, as its central point of reference. It offers an intellectual biography of Weber framed along historical lines - something which has never been done before. It re-evaluates The Protestant Ethic — a text surprisingly neglected by scholars — supplying a missing intellectual and chronological centre to Weber's life and work. Peter Ghosh suggests that The Protestant Ethic is the link which unites the earlier (pre-1900) and later (post-1910) phases of his career. He offers a series of fresh perspectives on Weber's thought in various areas — charisma, capitalism, law, politics, rationality, bourgeois life, and (not least) Weber's unusual religious thinking, which was 'remote from god' yet based on close dialogue with Christian theology. This approach produces a convincing view of Max Weber as a whole; while previously the sheer breadth of his intellectual interests has caused him to be read in a fragmentary way according to a series of specialized viewpoints, this volume seeks to put him back together again as a real individual.

Download or read book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism written by Jonathan Tran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.

Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century

Download or read book Economic Life in the Modern Age written by Werner Sombart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Werner Sombart (1863-1941) may well have been the most famous and controversial social scientist in Germany during the early twentieth century. Highly influential, his work and reputation have been indelibly tainted by his embrace of National Socialism in the last decade of his life. Although Sombart left an enormous opus spanning disciplinary boundaries, intellectual reaction to his work inside and outside of Germany is divided and ambivalent. Sombart consistently responded to the social and political developments that have shaped the twentieth century. Economic Life in the Modern Age provides a representative sampling of those portions of Sombart's work that have stood the test of time.The volume opens with a substantial introduction reviewing Sombart's life and career, the evolution of his major intellectual concerns, his relation to Marx and Weber, and his political affiliation with the Nazis. The editors' selection of texts emphasizes areas of Sombart's economic and cultural thought that remain relevant, particularly to those intellectual trends that seek a more broadly based, cross-disciplinary approach to culture and economics. Sombart's writings on capitalism are represented by essays on the nature and origin of the market system and the diversity of motives among the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Also included is an excerpt from Sombart's controversial The Jews and Modern Capitalism, exploring the widely perceived relation between economic life and Judaism as a religion. In essays on the economics of cultural processes, Sombart's comprehensive and expansive idea of cultural science yields prophetic insights into the nature of urbanism, luxury consumption, fashion, and the cultural secularization of love. The volume's final section consists of Sombart's reflections on the social influences of technology, the economic life of the future, and on socialism, including the influential essay "Why is there no Socialism in the United States."Encapsulating the most valuable aspects of his work, Economic Life in the Modern Age provides clear demonstration of Sombart's sense for fine cultural distinctions and broad cultural developments and the predictive power of his analyses. It will be of interest to sociologists, economists, political scientists, and specialists in cultural studies.Nico Stehr is professor at the Max Planck-Instit3t f3r Meteorologie in Hamburg. Reiner Grundmann is professor at the Aston Business School of Aston University in Birmingham, U.K.

Download or read book The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China written by Ying-shih Yü and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did modern capitalism not arise in late imperial China? One famous answer comes from Max Weber, whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism gave a canonical analysis of religious and cultural factors in early modern European economic development. In The Religions of China, Weber contended that China lacked the crucial religious impetus to capitalist growth that Protestantism gave Europe. The preeminent historian Ying-shih Yü offers a magisterial examination of religious and cultural influences in the development of China’s early modern economy, both complement and counterpoint to Weber’s inquiry. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China investigates how evolving forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism created and promulgated their own concepts of the work ethic from the late seventh century into the Qing dynasty. The book traces how religious leaders developed the spiritual significance of labor and how merchants adopted this religious work ethic, raising their status in Chinese society. However, Yü argues, China’s early modern mercantile spirit was restricted by the imperial bureaucratic priority on social order. He challenges Marxists who championed China’s “sprouts of capitalism” during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries as well as other modern scholars who credit Confucianism with producing dramatic economic growth in East Asian countries. Yü rejects the premise that China needed an early capitalist stage of development; moreover, the East Asian capitalism that flourished in the later half of the twentieth century was essentially part of the spread of global capitalism. Now available in English translation, this landmark work has been greatly influential among scholars in East Asia since its publication in Chinese in 1987.

Download or read book All Things Made New written by Diarmaid MacCulloch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most profound characteristic of Western Europe in the Middle Ages was its cultural and religious unity, a unity secured by a common alignment with the Pope in Rome, and a common language - Latin - for worship and scholarship. The Reformation shattered that unity, and the consequences are still with us today. In All Things Made New, Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the New York Times bestseller Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, examines not only the Reformation's impact across Europe, but also the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the special evolution of religion in England, revealing how one of the most turbulent, bloody, and transformational events in Western history has shaped modern society. The Reformation may have launched a social revolution, MacCulloch argues, but it was not caused by social and economic forces, or even by a secular idea like nationalism; it sprang from a big idea about death, salvation, and the afterlife. This idea - that salvation was entirely in God's hands and there was nothing humans could do to alter his decision - ended the Catholic Church's monopoly in Europe and altered the trajectory of the entire future of the West. By turns passionate, funny, meditative, and subversive, All Things Made New takes readers onto fascinating new ground, exploring the original conflicts of the Reformation and cutting through prejudices that continue to distort popular conceptions of a religious divide still with us after five centuries. This monumental work, from one of the most distinguished scholars of Christianity writing today, explores the ways in which historians have told the tale of the Reformation, why their interpretations have changed so dramatically over time, and ultimately, how the contested legacy of this revolution continues to impact the world today.

Download or read book The Spirit of Capitalism written by Liah Greenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or spirit, behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the rational economic actor, but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness. Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American economic civilization spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.

Download or read book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism written by Kathryn Tanner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethic In his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber's work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism. Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism's unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.