The life and works of William Morris continue to excite the imaginations of fresh generations of scholars working in many traditions, from the history of art and design to literary criticism and the history of socialism and socialist thought. This book concentrates on Morris's social and political acheivements as well as his artistic talents.
The life and works of William Morris continue to excite the imaginations of fresh generations of scholars working in many traditions, from the history of art and design to literary criticism and the history of socialism and socialist thought. This book concentrates on Morris's social and political acheivements as well as his artistic talents.
Is it true that Christianity is being marginalised by the secular media, at the expense of Islam? Are the mass media Islamophobic? Is atheism on the rise in media coverage? Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred explores such questions and argues that television and newspapers remain key sources of popular information about religion. They are particularly significant at a time when religious participation in Europe is declining yet the public visibility and influence of religions seems to be increasing. Based on analysis of mainstream media, the book is set in the context of wider debates about the sociology of religion and media representation. The authors draw on research conducted in the 1980s and 2008–10 to examine British media coverage and representation of religion and contemporary secular values, and to consider what has changed in the last 25 years. Exploring the portrayal of Christianity and public life, Islam and religious diversity, atheism and secularism, and popular beliefs and practices, several media events are also examined in detail: the Papal visit to the UK in 2010 and the ban of the controversial Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, in 2009. Religion is shown to be deeply embedded in the language and images of the press and television, and present in all types of coverage from news and documentaries to entertainment, sports reporting and advertising. A final chapter engages with global debates about religion and media.
The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic acceleration in the use, demand, and need for telecommunications, data communication, and mass communication transmitted and integrated into networks. Through a synthesis of contemporary theories about modernization, this book offers a broad-ranging introduction to the 'network' society in all its aspects.
Tracing a path through Kierkegaard's writings, this book brings the reader into close contact with the texts and purposes of this remarkable 19th-century Danish writer and thinker. Kierkegaard writes in a number of voices and registers: as a sharp observer and critic of Danish culture, or as a moral psychologist, and as a writer concerned to evoke the religious way of life of Socrates, Abraham, or a Christian exemplar. In developing these themes, Mooney sketches Kierkegaard's Socratic vocation, gives a close reading of several central texts, and traces "The Ethical Sublime" as a recurrent theme. He unfolds an affirmative relationship between philosophy and theology and the potentialities for a religiousness that defies dogmatic creeds, secular chauvinisms, and restrictive philosophies.
Perfectionism is one of the great moralities of the Western tradition. It holds that certain states of humans, such as knowledge, achievement, and friendship, are good apart from any pleasure they may bring, and that the morally right act is always the one that most promotes these states. Defined more narrowly, perfectionism identifies the human good by reference to human nature: if knowledge and achievement are good, it is because they realize aspects of human nature. This book gives an account of perfectionism, first in the narrower sense, analyzing its central concepts and defending a theory of human nature in which rationality plays a central role. It then uses this theory to construct an elaborate account of the intrinsic value of beliefs and actions that embody rationality, and applies this account to political questions about liberty and equality. The book attempts to formulate the most defensible version of perfectionism, using contemporary analytic techniques. It aims both to regain for perfectionism a central place in contemporary moral debate and to shed light on the writings of classical perfectionists such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and T.H. Green.
Evangelicals, once at the periphery of American life, now wield power in the White House and on Wall Street, at Harvard and in Hollywood. How have they reached the pinnacles of power in such a short time? And what does this mean for evangelicals--and for America? Drawing on personal interviews with an astonishing array of prominent Americans--including two former Presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes, and other powerful figures--D. Michael Lindsay shows first-hand how they are bringing their vision of moral leadership into the public square. This riveting volume tells us who the real evangelical power brokers are, how they rose to prominence, and what they're doing with their clout. Lindsay reveals that evangelicals are now at home in the executive suite and on the studio lot, and from those lofty perches they have used their influence, money, and ideas to build up the evangelical movement and introduce it to the wider American society. They are leaders of powerful institutions and their goals are ambitious--to bring Christian principles to bear on virtually every aspect of American life. Along the way, the book is packed with fascinating stories and striking insights. Lindsay shows how evangelicals became a force in American foreign policy, how Fortune 500 companies are becoming faith-friendly, and how the new generation of the faithful is led by cosmopolitan evangelicals. These are well-educated men and women who read both The New York Times and Christianity Today, and who are wary of the evangelical masses' penchant for polarizing rhetoric, apocalyptic pot-boilers, and bad Christian rock. Perhaps most startling is the importance of personal relationships between leaders--a quiet conversation after Bible study can have more impact than thousands of people marching in the streets. Faith in the Halls of Power takes us inside the rarified world of the evangelical elite--beyond the hysterical panic and chest-thumping pride--to give us the real story behind the evangelical ascendancy in America.
At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together? In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not lie solely in the protection of religious freedom. Instead, he reveals how American culture was transformed to accommodate the religious differences within it. The expansion of individual rights, the mixing of believers and churches in the same institutions, and the introduction of more civility into public life all played an instrumental role in creating the religious pluralism for which the United States has become renowned. These changes also established important precedents for future civil rights movements in which dignity, as much as equality, would be at stake. Beyond Toleration is the first book to offer a systematic explanation of how early Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them --and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly. Today when religious conflicts once again pose a grave danger to democratic experiments across the globe, Beneke's book serves as a timely reminder of how one country moved past toleration and towards religious pluralism.
In a culture obsessed with law, judgment, and violence, this book challenges Christians to remember that Jesus urged his followers to judge no one, bring harm upon no one, and follow no law save the law of altruistic love. It traces Christian history first to show that Christians of an earlier age took very seriously the gospel injunctions against punitive legal judgment and then how the advent of formal legal codes and philosophical dualism undermined that perspective to create a division between a private Christian spirituality and a public morality of order and legally sanctioned violence. This historical approach is accompanied by an argument that the recovery of a Christian ethic based upon unconditional love and forgiveness cannot be accomplished without the renewal of a Christian spirituality that mirrors the contemplative spirituality of Jesus.
While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ‘Romanticism’.
In The Wild Irish Girl, the powerful Irish heroine's marriage to a heroic Englishman symbolizes the Anglo-Irish novelist Lady Morgan's re-imagining of the relationship between Ireland and Britain and between men and women. Using this most influential of pro-union novels as his point of departure, Thomas J. Tracy argues that nineteenth-century debates over what constitutes British national identity often revolved around representations of Irishness, especially Irish womanhood. He maps out the genealogy of this development, from Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent through Trollope's Irish novels, focusing on the pivotal period from 1806 through the 1870s. Tracy's model enables him to elaborate the ways in which gender ideals are specifically contested in fiction, the discourses of political debate and social reform, and the popular press, for the purpose of defining not only the place of the Irish in the union with Great Britain, but the nature of Britishness itself.
War, as Clausewitz reminds, is the most uncertain of human political and social activities. It also imposes burdens. In an alliance among states for the promotion of collective defense or security, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), burdens have to be shared. This study looks at the experience of the United States and other member states of NATO in four situations of multinational military intervention - Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and South Asia - and considers the implications of nuclear arms reductions and nonproliferation for the US and NATO. Each case study represents an important period in the distribution of power, interest, and values, amounting to more than a sequential consideration of incidents of military intervention and/or conflict prevention. These politico-military challenges include a major coalition war, a traditional peacekeeping operation, an exercise in peace enforcement, and a conflict that combines counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism with stability and security operations.
The career of the prolific pop artist Prince has become inextricably intertwined with the history of popular music since the late 1970s. This multi-instrumental icon, who remains one of the highest-grossing live performers in America, has been called a genius for his musicianship, composition and incredible performances. But Prince holds iconic status for more than his music. Best known for his racial blurring and extravagant sexual persona, Prince's music and visual iconography has always chimed with the ambiguity of subjectivity at any given moment. 'Prince' the sign offers a space for fans to evaluate and reconfigure their attitudes towards their own identities, and towards their position as subjects within the socio-cultural sphere. This much-needed interdisciplinary analysis is the first of its kind to examine critically Prince's popular music, performances, sounds, lyrics and the plethora of accompanying visual material such as album covers, posters, fashions, promotional videos and feature films. Specifically, the book explores how and why he has played such a profoundly meaningful and significant role in his fans' lives.
The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public. Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design. This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.
Addressing an important social and political issue which is still much debated today, this volume explores the connections between religious conversions and gendered identity against the backdrop of a world undergoing significant social transformations. Adopting a collaborative approach to their research, the authors explore the connections and differences in conversion experiences, tracing the local and regional rootedness of individual conversions as reflected in conversion narratives in three different locations: Germany and German missions in South Africa and colonial Australia, at a time of massive social changes in the 1860s.
This book explores how people may use music in ways that are helpful for them, especially in relation to a sense of wellbeing, belonging and participation. The central premise for the study is that help is not a decontextualized effect that music produces. The book contributes to the current discourse on music, culture and society and it is developed in dialogue with related areas of study, such as music sociology, ethnomusicology, community psychology and health promotion. Where Music Helps describes the emerging movement that has been labelled Community Music Therapy, and it presents ethnographically informed case studies of eight music projects (localized in England, Israel, Norway, and South Africa). The various chapters of the book portray "music's help" in action within a broad range of contexts; with individuals, groups and communities – all of whom have been challenged by illness or disability, social and cultural disadvantage or injustice. Music and musicing has helped these people find their voice (literally and metaphorically); to be welcomed and to welcome, to be accepted and to accept, to be together in different and better ways, to project alternative messages about themselves or their community and to connect with others beyond their immediate environment. The overriding theme that is explored is how music comes to afford things in concert with its environments, which may suggest a way of accounting for the role of music in music therapy without reducing music to a secondary role in relation to the "therapeutic," that is, being "just" a symbol of psychological states, a stimulus, or a text reflecting socio-cultural content.
In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Seeing human formation as interrelated with aesthetics makes art a vital dimension of human existence. Contributing to the debate about Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood argues that Kierkegaard's primary concern is to provocatively explore how a self becomes Christian, with aesthetics being a vital dimension for such self-formation. At a broader level, Peder Jothen also focuses on the role, authority, and meaning of aesthetic expression within religious thought generally and Christianity in particular.
In this original study, Jamie Mayerfeld undertakes a careful inquiry into the meaning and moral significance of suffering. Understanding suffering in hedonistic terms as an affliction of feeling, he addresses difficulties associated with its identification and measurement. He then turns to an examination of the duty to relieve suffering: its content, its weight relative to other moral considerations, and the role it should play in our lives. Among the claims defended in the book are that suffering needs to be distinguished from both physical pain and the frustration of desire, that interpersonal comparisons of the intensity of happiness and suffering are possible, that several psychological processes hinder our awareness of other people's suffering, and that the prevention of suffering should often be pursued indirectly. Mayerfeld concludes his discussion by arguing that the reduction of suffering is morally more important than the promotion of happiness, and that most of us greatly underestimate the force of the duty to prevent suffering. As the first systematic book-length inquiry into the moral significance of suffering, Suffering and Moral Responsibility makes an important contribution to moral philosophy and political theory, and will interest specialists in each of these areas.
When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of in terms of diaspora, can also be thought of as postmodern in that it reverses the modern flow which took colonizers, and sometimes settlers, from European countries to other places in the world. Stratton explores the concept of ‘song careers’, referring to how a song is picked up and then transformed by being revisioned by different artists and in different cultural contexts. The idea of the song career extends the descriptive term ‘cover’ in order to examine the transformations a song undergoes from artist to artist and cultural context to cultural context. Stratton focuses on the British faultline between the post-war African-Caribbean settlers and the white Britons. Central to the book is the question of identity. For example, how African-Caribbean people have constructed their identity in Britain can be considered through an examination of when ‘Police on My Back’ was written and how it has been revisioned by Lethal Bizzle in its most recent iteration. At the same time, this song, written by the Guyanese migrant Eddy Grant for his mixed-race group The Equals, crossed the racial faultline when it was picked up by the punk-rock group, The Clash. Conversely, ‘Johnny Reggae’, originally a pop-ska track written about a skinhead by Jonathan King and performed by a group of studio artists whom King named The Piglets, was revisioned by a Jamaican studio group called The Roosevelt Singers. After this, the character of Johnny Reggae takes on a life of his own and appears in tracks by Jamaican toasters as a Rastafarian. Johnny’s identity is, then, totally transformed. It is this migration of music that will appeal not only to those studying popular music, but also cultural studies and race.
Why is the public presentation of the war on terror suffused with sexualised racism? What does this tell us about ideas of gender, sexuality, religious and political identity and the role of the state in the Western powers? Can we diffuse inter-ethnic conflicts and change the way the West pursues its security agenda by understanding the role of sexualised racism in the war on terror? In asking such questions, Gargi Bhattacharyya considers how the concepts of imperialism, feminism, terror and security can be applied, in order to build on the influential debates about the sexualised character of colonialism. She examines the way in which western imperial violence has been associated with the rhetoric of rights and democracy - a project of bombing for freedom that has called into question the validity of western conceptions of democracy, rights and feminism. Such rhetoric has given rise to actions that go beyond simply protecting western interests or securing access to scarce resources and appear to be beyond instrumental reason. The articulations of racism that appear with the war on terror are animated by fears and sexual fantasies inexplicable by rational interest alone. There can be no resolution to this seemingly endless conflict without understanding the highly sexualised racism that animates it. Such an understanding threatens to pierce the heart of imperial relations, revealing their intense contradictions and uncovering attempts to normalise violent expropriation.
Privatizing public resources by creating stronger property rights, including so-called rights to pollute, is an increasingly popular environmental policy option. While advocates of this type of market-based environmental policy tend to focus on its efficiency and ecological implications, such policies also raise important considerations of equity and distributive justice. Private Rights in Public Resources confronts these ethical implications directly, balancing political theory and philosophy with detailed analysis of the politics surrounding three important policy instruments--the Kyoto Protocol, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, and the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. Author Leigh Raymond reviews legislative records and administrative documents and interviews key policymakers. Confirming that much of the debate in the selected policies centers on the equity or fairness of the initial allocation of property rights, he applies the theories of John Locke, Morris Cohen, and others to build a framework for identifying the competing norms of equity in play. Raymond's study reveals that, despite the different historical and ecological settings, the political actors struggled to reconcile similar arguments-and were often able to achieve a similar synthesis of conflicting ownership ideas. Rather than offering a familiar argument for or against these policies on ethical grounds, the book explains how ideas about equity help determine a policy's political fate. Shedding light on the complex equity principles used to shape and evaluate these controversial initiatives, this empirical analysis will be of interest to those on all sides of the debate over market-based policies, as well as those interested in the role of normative principles in politics more generally.
Fully revised and updated, and drawing on developments in the author's own thinking, Siderits's second edition explores the conversation between Buddhist and Western Philosophy showing how concepts and tools drawn from one philosophical tradition can help solve problems arising in another. Siderits discusses afresh areas involved in the philosophical investigation of persons, including recent attempts by scholars of Buddhist philosophy to defend the attribution of an emergentist account of personhood to at least some Buddhists, and whether a distinctively Buddhist antirealism can avoid problems that beset other forms of ontological anti-foundationalism.
In this innovative and learned study, Dennis Kezar examines how Renaissance poets conceive the theme of killing as a specifically representational and interpretive form of violence. Closely reading both major poets and lesser known authors of the early modern period, Kezar explores the ethical self-consciousness and accountability that attend literary killing, paying particular attention to the ways in which this reflection indicates the poet's understanding of his audience. Among the many poems through which Kezar explores the concept of authorial guilt elicited by violent representation are Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the multi-authored Witch of Edmonton, and Milton's Samson Agonistes.
Allan F. Moore presents a study of recorded popular song, from the recordings of the 1920s through to the present day. Analysis and interpretation are treated as separable but interdependent approaches to song. Analytical theory is revisited, covering conventional domains such as harmony, melody and rhythm, but does not privilege these at the expense of domains such as texture, the soundbox, vocal tone, lyrics. Moore continues by developing a range of hermeneutic strategies largely drawn from outside the field (in the most part, within psychology and philosophy) but still deeply relevant to the experience of song.
Gottlob Frege is one of the greatest logicians ever and also a philosopher of great significance. In this book Rosado Haddock offers a critical presentation of the main topics of Frege's philosophy, including, among others, his philosophy of arithmetic, his sense-referent distinction, his distinction between function and object, and his criticisms of formalism and psychologism. More than just an introduction to Frege's philosophy this book is also a highly critical and mature assessment of it as a whole in which the limitations, confusions and other weaknesses of Frege's thought are closely examined. The author is also a Husserlian scholar and this book contains valuable discussions of Husserl's neglected views and comparisons between the two great philosophers.
How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? Jeffrey Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others--the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest--are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. A grand and sweeping statement, The Civil Sphere is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.
It is a very impressive book. Its coverage of contemporary discourses of fatherhood is comprehensive. The theoretical stance is one that allows for complexity and fluidity. The authors write well, making even esoteric sociological and cultural theory accessible. I recommend it' - "British Journal of Social Work " Constructing Fatherhood provides an analysis of the social, cultural and symbolic meanings of fatherhood in contemporary western societies. The authors draw on poststructuralist theory to analyze the representation of fatherhood in the expert' literature of psychology, sociology and the health sciences, and in popular sources such as television, film, advertisements and child-care and parenting manuals and magazines. Men's own accounts of first-time fatherhood are also drawn upon, including four individual case studies.
In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression.
For centuries, revolutionaries have spoken of the emotional arousal that motivated them to revolt. Studies of revolutions, however, rarely give these emotional narratives the power that actors themselves recount. This book argues that revolutionary waves, from 1848 to the present, cannot be explained without the emotions that motivated potential revolutionaries to imitate revolts in neighboring states. The shared identity of revolutionaries across borders leads to a shared emotional arousal and adoption of protest frames and methods. By grounding the theory in revolutionaries' emotional narratives and breaking down the dichotomies that plague revolution research-structure/agency, domestic/ international--Revolutionary Emotions provides a powerful new theory of revolutionary diffusion and success.
Drawing extensively on the research findings of natural and social sciences both in America and Europe, Reframing the Social argues for a critical realist and systemist social ontology, designed to shed light on current debates in social theory concerning the relationship of social ontology to practical social research, and the nature of 'the social'. It explores the works of the systems theorist Mario Bunge in comparison with the approach of Niklas Luhmann and critical social systems theorists, to challenge the commonly held view that the systems-based approach is holistic in nature and necessarily downplays the role of human agency. Theoretically sophisticated and investigating the work of a theorist whose work has until now received insufficient attention in Anglo-American thought, this book will be of interest to those working in the field of social theory, as well as scholars concerned with philosophy of social science, the project of analytical sociology, and the nature of the relationship between the natural and social sciences.
The past hundred years of Europe are distilled in the experiences of the citizens of Strasbourg. From the turn of the twentieth century until 1945, Europe's ruling idea of nationalism rendered Strasbourg/Straβburg the prize in a tug-of-war between the two greatest continental powers, France and Germany. Then, in the immediate post-war period, ideals for European unity set up various European institutions, some headquartered in Strasbourg, which have gradually created a partially supranational Europe. At the end of the 1950s, a third theme arises: the large-scale settling in Strasbourg and other such richer, western European cities of persons from poorer lands, frequently ex-colonial territories, whose appearance and cultural practices render them essentially "different" to local eyes: expressions of racism thereby jostle with professions of multiculturalism. Now in the globalisation era, the issue of "immigration" has broadened yet further into transnationalism: the experience of persons who are embedded in varying manner in both Strasbourg and in their land of origin. Based on in-depth, lively interviews with 80 men and 80 women ranging from 101 to 20 years, and from all over the world (France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, Portugal, Italy, ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Cameroon, and Afghanistan amongst other countries), the author draws out of these compelling testimonies all sorts of compelling insights into issues of identity, race, nationality, culture, politics, heritage and representation, giving a unique and valuable view of what it means (and has meant over the past century) to be a European.
This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. It traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use his talent in coordination with others to contribute to the common good of a republican civil order that seeks to protect its own liberty and that of its citizens. It stresses the importance and urgency, of restoring traditional practices so that we can build just, beautiful, and sustainable cities and rural districts.
Solidly grounded in Milton's prose works and the long history of Milton scholarship, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism challenges many received ideas about Milton's brand of Christianity, philosophy, and poetry. It does so chiefly by retracing his history as a great "Puritan poet" and reexamining the surprisingly tenuous Whig paradigm upon which this history has been built. Catherine Martin not only questions the current habit of "lumping" Milton with the religious Puritans but agrees with a long line of literary scholars who find his values and lifestyle markedly inconsistent with their beliefs and practices. Pursuing this argument, Martin carefully reexamines the whole spectrum of seventeenth-century English Puritanism from the standpoint of the most recent and respected scholarship on the subject. Martin also explores other, more secular sources of Milton's thought, including his Baconianism, his Christian Stoic ethics, and his classical republicanism; she establishes the importance of these influences through numerous direct references, silent but clear citations, and typical tropes. All in all, Milton among the Puritans presents a radical reassessment of Milton's religious identity; it shows that many received ideas about the "Puritan Milton" are neither as long-established as most scholars believe nor as historically defensible as most literary critics still assume, and resituates Milton's great poems in the period when they were written, the Restoration.
Much writing on men in the field of gender studies tends to focus unduly, almost exclusively, on portraying men as villains and women as victims in a moral bi-polar paradigm. Re-Thinking Men reverses the proclivity which ignores not only the positive contributions of men to society, but also the male victims of life including the homeless, the incarcerated, the victims of homicide, suicide, accidents, war and the draft, and sexism, as well as those affected by the failures of the health, education, political and justice systems. Proceeding from a radically different perspective in seeking a more positive, balanced and inclusive view of men (and women), this book presents three contrasting paradigms of men as Heroes, Villains and Victims. With the development of a comparative and revised gender perspective drawing on US, Canadian and UK sources, this book will be of interest to scholars across a range of social sciences.
The idea of risk has recently risen to prominence in political debate and in matters of public policy. Cognitive psychology treats decision-making as a private personal act. But in real life dangers are presented in standardized forms which pre-code the individual's choices. This collection follows on from the programme for studying risk and blame that was implied in Purity and Danger and has been developed in subsequent publications. Its first six essays argue that any analysis of risk perception that ignores cultural and political bias is worthless. For the sake of a mistaken idea of objectivity, research on risk perception tries to avoid politics, but the idea of nature is inherently politicized. The study of risk needs a systematic framework of political and cultural comparison. The next five essays range over questions in cultural theory. A culture is viewed as a way of life which standardizes concepts and values. It is held steady by the institutions in which it is articulated. Questions of autonomy, credibility and gullibility, the social origins of wants, and the recognition of distinctive thought styles are at present only beginning to be treated systematically in a framework of cultural analysis. Now that risk is moving centre-stage as the dominant idiom of policy analysis, many other key topics, such as the notion of the self, will need to be radically revised. In Risk and Blame, Mary Douglas argues that the prominence of risk discourse will force upon the social sciences a programme of rethinking and consolidation which will include the anthropological approaches studied in these pages.
An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion provides an overview of sociological theories of contemporary religious life. Some chapters are organized according to topic. Others offer brief presentations of classical and contemporary sociologists from Karl Marx to Zygmunt Bauman and their perspectives on social life, including religion. Throughout the book, illustrations and examples are taken from several religious traditions.
The first full-length study of animals in Jane Austen, Barbara K. Seeber’s book situates the author’s work within the serious debates about human-animal relations that began in the eighteenth century and continued into Austen’s lifetime. Seeber shows that Austen’s writings consistently align the objectification of nature with that of women and that Austen associates the hunting, shooting, racing, and consuming of animals with the domination of women. Austen’s complicated depictions of the use and abuse of nature also challenge postcolonial readings that interpret, for example, Fanny Price’s rejoicing in nature as a celebration of England’s imperial power. In Austen, hunting and the owning of animals are markers of station and a prerogative of power over others, while her representation of the hierarchy of food, where meat occupies top position, is identified with a human-nature dualism that objectifies not only nature, but also the women who are expected to serve food to men. In placing Austen’s texts in the context of animal-rights arguments that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Seeber expands our understanding of Austen’s participation in significant societal concerns and makes an important contribution to animal, gender, food, and empire studies in the nineteenth century.
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