William Watts Miller's Books

A Durkheimian Quest

Solidarity and the Sacred

By: William Watts Miller

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A Durkheimian Quest

Solidarity and the Sacred

By: William Watts Miller

Durkheim, in his very role as a ‘founding father’ of a new social science, sociology, has become like a figure in an old religious painting, enshrouded in myth and encrusted in layers of thick, impenetrable varnish. This book undertakes detailed, up-to-date investigations of Durkheim’s work in an effort to restore its freshness and reveal it as originally created. These investigations explore his particular ideas, within an overall narrative of his initial problematic search for solidarity, how it became a quest for the sacred and how, at the end of his life, he embarked on a project for a new great work on ethics. A theme running through this is his concern with a modern world in crisis and his hope in social and moral reform. Accordingly, the book concludes with a set of essays on modern times and on a crisis that Durkheim thought would pass but which now seems here to stay.

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Page Count

278

Publisher

Berghahn Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0857455672

ISBN 13

9780857455673

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective

By: William E. Paden

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New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective

By: William E. Paden

The cross-cultural study of religion has always gone hand in hand with the worldview, sciences, or intellectual frameworks of the time. These frames, whether focused on psychology or politics, gender or colonialism, bring out perspectives for understanding religious behavior. Today one of our common civic worldviews is represented in the shift from scriptural to evolutionary history. This volume brings together in one place key essays by professor emeritus William Paden, showing a progression of steps he has taken in exploring bridgeworks between comparative religion and evolutionary models of religious behavior. One of the leading scholars in religious studies, Paden shows ways that religion can be contextualized as part of the natural world and thus seen as reflecting the ingrained sociality and world-making drive of the human species. Paden argues that although comparativism has been challenged as too culture-bound, too western, or too gendered, cross-over categories and concepts between religious traditions cannot be avoided. Arguing that there are recurrent patterns of human behavior common to our species and that thereby underlie all cultures, he proposes that the missing link in the Religion Evolution debate is comparative religion, a global, cross-cultural perspective on religious behaviours throughout time. Each article is contextualized within this overall trajectory of thought within Paden's work and the history of the discipline as a whole.

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Page Count

265

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474252125

ISBN 13

9781474252126

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law

By: William E. Scheuerman

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Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law

By: William E. Scheuerman

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law makes use of the work of first-generation Frankfurt School theorist Franz L. Neumann, in conjunction with his famous successor, Jürgen Habermas, to try to understand the momentous political and legal transformations generated by globalization. This volume demonstrates that the Frankfurt School tradition speaks directly to some pressing political and social concerns, including globalization, the reform of the welfare state, and the environmental crisis. Despite widespread claims to the contrary, the legal substructure of economic globalization tends to conflict with traditional models of the "rule of law." Neumann’s prediction that contemporary capitalism would decreasingly depend on generality, clarity, publicity, and stability in the law is supported by a surprising variety of empirical evidence. Habermas’s recent work is then interrogated in order to pursue the question of how we might counteract the deleterious trends accurately predicted by Neumann. How might democracy and the rule of law flourish in the context of globalization? The book is intended for scholars and advanced students in political science, sociology, philosophy and cultural studies.

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Page Count

405

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1134003536

ISBN 13

9781134003532

Book's by William Watts Miller

A Durkheimian Quest

A Durkheimian Quest

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law

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