A unique reinterpretation of democracy that shows how history's most vocal champions of democracy from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls have contributed to a pervasive, anti-democratic ideology, effectively redefining democracy to mean "rule by the elites." The rise of global populism reveals a tension in Western thinking about democracy. Warnings about the "populist threat" to democracy and "authoritarian" populism are now commonplace. However, as Emily B. Finley argues in The Ideology of Democratism, dismissing "populism" as anti-democratic is highly problematic. In effect, such arguments essentially reject the actual popular will in favor of a purely theoretical and abstract "will of the people." She contends that the West has conceptualized democracy-not just its populist doppelgänger-as an ideal that has all of the features of a thoroughgoing political ideology which she labels "democratism." As she shows, this understanding of democracy, which constitutes an entire view of life and politics, has been and remains a powerful influence in America and leading Western European nations and their colonial satellites. Through a careful analysis of several of history's most vocal champions of democracy, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, John Rawls, and American neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, Finley identifies an interpretation of democracy that effectively transforms the meaning of "rule by the people" into nearly its opposite. Making use of democratic language and claiming to speak for the people, many politicians, philosophers, academics, and others advocate a more "complete" and "genuine" form of democracy that in practice has little regard for the actual popular will. A heterodox argument that challenges the prevailing consensus of what democracy is and what it is supposed be, The Ideology of Democratism offers a timely and comprehensive assessment of the features and thrust of this powerful new view of democracy that has enchanted the West.
Metaphor magazine publishes pieces from authors of different backgrounds. Poems from different parts of the world define literature beyond literature. In this poetry magazine, we seek to bring out the fresh voices echoing lost in the wilderness. In this issue, we showcase poems that not only delight the senses but also leaves an imprint to one's soul. Featuring works by Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena, Christy Bharath, A. J. Binash, Cassandra Dallett, Adonis Enricuso, Jason Constantine Ford, Dah Helmer, John De Herrera, Gary Hewitt, Mark Hummel, Peggy Insula, Steve Klepetar, N. M. Leepsa, Sarah Lilius, JP Lorence, Mark A. Murphy, BZ Niditch, Karlo Jose R. Pineda, Samuel Mack-Poole, Hisham M. Nazer, Ngoc Nguyen, Nalini Priyadarshni, Haimanti Dutta Ray, Sunil Sharma, Ndaba Sibanda, Krystal Sierra, Emeniano Acain Somoza, Jr., Emily Strauss, Paul M. Strohm, Sushant Supriye, Bernard Tuwond, Robert Walicki, S. Wallace, Ginna Wilkerson, Dana Wright and Alyssa Yankwitt.
A revealing look at the Jewish American encounter with Buddhism Today, many Jewish Americans are embracing a dual religious identity, practicing Buddhism while also staying connected to their Jewish roots. This book tells the story of Judaism's encounter with Buddhism in the United States, showing how it has given rise to new contemplative forms within American Judaism—and shaped the way Americans understand and practice Buddhism. Taking readers from the nineteenth century to today, Emily Sigalow traces the history of these two traditions in America and explains how they came together. She argues that the distinctive social position of American Jews led them to their unique engagement with Buddhism, and describes how they incorporate aspects of both Judaism and Buddhism into their everyday lives. Drawing on a wealth of original in-depth interviews conducted across the nation, Sigalow explores how Jewish American Buddhists experience their dual religious identities. She reveals how Jewish Buddhists confound prevailing expectations of minority religions in America. Rather than simply adapting to the majority religion, Jews and Buddhists have borrowed and integrated elements from each other, and in doing so they have left an enduring mark on the American consciousness. American JewBu highlights the leading role that American Jews have played in the popularization of meditation and mindfulness in the United States, and the profound impact that these two venerable traditions have had on one another.
Foundations in the United States have long exerted considerable power over education and scholarly production. Although today’s titans of philanthropy proclaim more loudly their desire to transform schools and universities than did some of their predecessors, philanthropic programs designed to reshape educational institutions are at least a century old. In Foundations and American Political Science, Emily Hauptmann focuses on the postwar Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller programs that reshaped political science. She shows how significant changes in the methods and research interests of postwar political scientists began as responses to the priorities set by their philanthropic patrons. Informed by years of research in foundation and university archives, Foundations and American Political Science follows the course of several streams of private philanthropic money as they wended their way through public universities and political science departments in the postwar period. The programs launched by the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies as well as their reception at the universities of California and Michigan steered political scientists towards particular problems and particular ways of studying them. The rise of statistical analyses of survey data, the decline of public administration, and persistent conflicts over the discipline’s purpose and the best methods for understanding politics, Hauptmann argues, all had their roots in the ways that postwar universities responded to foundations’ programs. Additionally, the new emphasis universities placed on sponsored research sparked sharp disputes among political scientists over what should count as legitimate knowledge about politics and what the ultimate purpose of the discipline should be.
Medicine finally has discovered fatigue. Recent articles about various diseases conclude that fatigue has been underrecognized, underdiagnosed, and undertreated. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities have also ignored the phenomenon. As a result, we know little about what it means to live with this condition, especially given its diverse symptoms and causes. Emily K. Abel offers the first history of fatigue, one that is scrupulously researched but also informed by her own experiences as a cancer survivor. Abel reveals how the limits of medicine and the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue. Without an agreed-upon approach to confirm the problem through medical diagnosis, it is difficult to convince others that it is real. When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as burdens or worse. With her engaging and informative style, Abel gives us a synthetic history of fatigue and elucidates how it has been ignored or misunderstood, not only by medical professionals but also by American society as a whole.
Deemed by Heinrich Heine a city of merchants where poets go to die, Hamburg was an improbable setting for a major intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at the end of World War I, at a new university in this commercial center, that a trio of twentieth-century pioneers in the humanities emerged. Working side by side, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky developed new avenues in art history, cultural history, and philosophy, changing the course of cultural and intellectual history in Weimar Germany and throughout the world. In Dreamland of Humanists, Emily J. Levine considers not just these men, but the historical significance of the time and place where their ideas took form. Shedding light on the origins of their work on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Levine clarifies the social, political, and economic pressures faced by German-Jewish scholars on the periphery of Germany’s intellectual world. By examining the role that context plays in our analysis of ideas, Levine confirms that great ideas—like great intellectuals—must come from somewhere.
Russia and the United States have over two hundred years of diplomatic history and have never gone to war against each other. Here are THE AMBASSADORS who are partly responsible for this, ours to them, and theirs to us...ALL of them to date in a historical biographical book.
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