For thousands of years, political leaders have unified communities by aligning them against common enemies. However, today more than ever, the search for “common” enemies results in anything but unanimity. Scapegoats like Saddam Hussein, for example, led to a stark polarization in the United States. Renowned neuropsychiatrist and psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian proposes that the only authentic enemy is the one responsible for both everyday frustrations and global dangers, such as climate change—ourselves. Oughourlian, who pioneered an “interdividual” psychology with René Girard, reveals how all people are bound together in a dynamic, contingent process of imitation, and shows that the same patterns of irrational mimetic desire that bring individuals together and push them apart also explain the behavior of nations.
A provocative look at America on the couch.In Psychotherapy as Religion, William Epstein sets out to debunk claims that psychotherapy provides successful clinical treatment for a wide range of personal and social problems. He argues that the practice is not a science at all but rather the civil religion of America, reflecting the principles of radical self-invention and self-reliance deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation. Epstein begins by analyzing a number of clinical studies conducted over the past two decades that purport to establish the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatments. He finds that each study violates in some way the standard criteria of scientific credibility and that the field has completely failed to establish objective procedures and measurements to assess clinical outcomes. Epstein exposes psychotherapy’s deep roots in the religious and intellectual movements of the early nineteenth century by demonstrating striking parallels between various types of therapy and such popular practices as Christian Science and spiritualism. Psychotherapy has taken root in our culture because it so effectively reflects our national faith in individual responsibility for social and personal problems. It thrives as the foundation of American social welfare policy, blaming deviance and misery on deficiencies of character rather than on the imperfections of society and ignoring the influence of unequal and deficient social conditions while requiring miscreants to undergo the moral reeducation that psychotherapy represents. This is a provocative, brilliantly argued look at America on the couch. Psychotherapy as Religion is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and current state of mental health.
In this critical examination of public administration's pervasive vision of a powerful state, Spicer thoughtfully reconsiders the relationship between activities of governance and concepts of the state.
Woodrow Wilson argued for a state led by a powerful government, guided by science and enlightened experts, for the accomplishment of a set of collective purposes—in other words, a purposive state. Michael Spicer contends that though Wilson and those who followed him have not typically explored questions of political and constitutional theory in their writing, a clear and strong vision of the state has emerged in their work nonetheless.
Building upon the work of Dwight Waldo and others who have sought to explore and reveal the political theory behind the seemingly neutral language of administration, Spicer explores the roots—both historical and philosophical—of the purposive state. He considers the administrative experience of 18th-century Prussia and its relationship to the vision of the purposive state, and examines the ways this idea has been expressed in the 20th century. He then looks at the practical problems such a vision creates for public policy in a fragmented postmodern political culture. Finally, Spicer explores an alternative view of public administration—one based on a civil association model appropriate to our constitutional traditions and contemporary culture.
In this collection of essays, which covers the years from 1934 to1939, we see Eric Voegelin in the role of both scholar and public intellectual in Vienna until he was forced to flee the Nazi terror that descended on Austria in 1938. Revealing the broad spectrum of thinking and scientific study of this relatively young scholar, Voegelin's essays range from Austrian politics, Austrian constitutional history, and European racism to questions of the formation and expression of public opinion, theories of administrative law, and the role of political science in public university education. Several essays serve as useful commentaries on, elaborations of, or synopses of arguments Voegelin made in the five books he had published between 1928 and 1938.
Within these topical headings, there are multiple thematic threads that wind their way through these essays and that remain of interest to contemporary readers. Thirteen of the pieces contained in this collection are short items that Voegelin published in trade journals and newspapers, of which nine appeared in the Wiener Zeitung in 1934 and the Neue Freie Presse in 1937. In these we see two brief periods in which Voegelin played the role of public intellectual not only as a lecturer but also in print.
These essays will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including constitutional historians, historians of political science, political theorists, and students of Voegelin's later work.
Published Essays, 1940-1952, includes some of Eric Voegelin's most provocative and interesting essays. Containing his first publications after he fled Vienna and settled in the United States following Hitler's annexation of Austria, this volume provides eyewitness commentary on the rise of National Socialism from the first days of World War II onward. A major study entitled "Growth of the Race Idea" presents a masterful summary of the two volumes on that subject Voegelin first published in 1933. A related essay of wide interest is entitled "Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War."
Another facet of Voegelin's thought incorporated within this volume of the Essays is his extraordinary analysis of the diplomatic correspondence conducted between the Western powers, the papacy, and the Great Khans, whose breathtaking expansion of the Mongol Empire for a time threatened to extinguish Western civilization itself and resulted in a two-century domination of Russia. Another major study is "The Origins of Scientism," an illuminating analysis of the grounds of much of modern philosophy and of all modern political ideologies.
There are also surveys of the state of political theory in the late forties, penetrating studies of utopian thought with essays on Thomas More and Goethe, and a concluding essay that explores the intricacies of "Gnostic Politics"—a familiar theme from Voegelin's contemporaneous New Science of Politics. This volume of published essays shows Eric Voegelin at his most accessible best.
The period covered by the material published in this volume marks the transition in Eric Voegelin's career from Louisiana to Munich. After twenty years in the United States, in 1958 Voegelin accepted an invitation to fill the political science chair at Ludwig Maximilian University, a position left vacant throughout the Nazi period and last occupied by the famous Max Weber, who had died in 1920.
The themes most prominent in the fourteen items reprinted here reflect the concerns of a transition, not only in a scholar's career, and in the momentous shifts in world politics taking place around him, but also in the development of his understanding of the stratification of reality and the attendant demands for a science of human affairs adequate to the challenges posed by the persistent crisis of the West in its latest configurations and by contemporary philosophy.
Several of the items herein originated as talks to a specific organization on problems facing German democratization and the development of a market economy amid the ruins of a fragmented culture and infrastructure in a society without historically evolved institutional supports for a satisfactory social and political order. Accordingly, pragmatic matters occupy a central place in a number of these pieces, especially the overriding question of how Germany could move from an illiberal and ideological political order into a modern liberal democratic one.
Those accustomed to the theoretical profundity of Voegelin's writings may find welcome relief in the down-to-earth, commonsensical drift of this material addressed, often, to laymen and businessmen. But, of course, the philosophical subject matter lurks everywhere. It finds full expression in several instances as the controlling context of even the least pretentious presentations. One of the attractions of these essays is what the author brings forward as serviceable elementary guideposts under adverse conditions of intellectual disarray, social decay, and turmoil.
As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.
Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.
Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.
Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski
"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead
"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment
"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley
"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review
Most of us think of punishment as an ugly display of power. But punishment also tells us something about the ideals and aspirations of a people and their government. How a state punishes reveals whether or not it is confident in its own legitimacy and sovereignty. Punishment and Political Order examines the questions raised by the state’s exercise of punitive power—from what it is about human psychology that desires sanction and order to how the state can administer pain while calling for justice. Keally McBride's book demonstrates punishment's place at the core of political administration and the stated ideals of the polity.
"From start to finish this is a terrific, engaging book. McBride offers a fascinating perspective on punishment, calling attention to its utility in understanding political regimes and their ideals. She succeeds in reminding us of the centrality of punishment in political theory and, at the same time, in providing a framework for understanding contemporary events. I know of no other book that does as much to make the subject of punishment so compelling."
—Austin Sarat, Amherst College
"Punishment and Political Order will be welcome reading for anyone interested in understanding law in society, punishment and political spectacle, or governing through crime control. This is a clear, accessible, and persuasive examination of punishment—as rhetoric and reality. Arguing that punishment is a complex product of the social contract, this book demonstrates the ways in which understanding the symbolic power and violence of the law provides analytical tools for examining the ideological function of prison labor today, as well as the crosscutting and contingent connections between language and identity, legitimation and violence, sovereignty and agency more generally."
—Bill Lyons, Director, Center for Conflict Management, University of Akron
"Philosophical explorations of punishment have often stopped with a theory of responsibility. McBride's book moves well beyond this. It shows that the problem of punishment is a central issue for any coherent theory of the state, and thus that punishment is at the heart of political theory. This is a stunning achievement."
—Malcolm M. Feeley, University of California at Berkeley
Keally McBride is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco.
Understanding and expressing unconditional love—also called agape love—can be a lifelong quest. First, however, we must ask ourselves and others what it is. Is it an action, a universal energy, or a creative principle? And if we understand it, can its expression ever be realized, or is it simply a divine attribute?
These and other questions are addressed in an inspirational and practical style in this philosophical essay from Sir John Templeton. He seeks to define pure, unlimited love as the "transcendent power of divine love that expresses itself through our hearts and minds when we are open and receptive to it." Its greatest attributes are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Another important concept is that God's love is given to us because we seek and accept it, not because we deserve it. It is the humble and sincere person who is most receptive to God's perfect love. This love can be awakened in other people through the action of love itself. We learn what it is from those who have it, and we can begin to recognize it through loving service to others.
Basic reality seems to be that the more you try to be like God by radiating unlimited love, the more you become flooded by waves of love from others and from God. Sir John summarizes with the statement, "How wonderful it would be if we could begin to say whenever we meet or depart, 'God loves you and I do too.'" This, in fact, is the essence of pure, unlimited love—a concept we can understand and can begin to practice in our daily lives. This thoughtful book can serve as an inspiration as well as a step-by-step guide on how to put this into practice.
During combat, soldiers make life-and-death choices dozens of times a day. These individual decisions accumulate to determine the outcome of wars. This work examines the theory and practice of military ethics in counterinsurgency operations. Marcus Schulzke surveys the ethical traditions that militaries borrow from; compares ethics in practice in the US Army, British Army and Royal Marines Commandos, and Israel Defense Forces; and draws conclusions that may help militaries refine their approaches in future conflicts. The work is based on interviews with veterans and military personnel responsible for ethics training, review of training materials and other official publications, published accounts from combat veterans, and observation of US Army focus groups with active-duty soldiers. Schulzke makes a convincing argument that though military ethics cannot guarantee flawless conduct, incremental improvements can be made to reduce war’s destructiveness while improving the success of counterinsurgency operations.
One of the world’s foremost historians of Western political and legal thought proposes a bold new model for thinking about equality at a time when its absence threatens democracies everywhere.
How much equality does democracy need to survive? Political thinkers have wrestled with that question for millennia. Aristotle argued that some are born to command and others to obey. Antiphon believed that men, at least, were born equal. Later the Romans upended the debate by asking whether citizens were equals not in ruling but in standing before the law. Aldo Schiavone guides us through these and other historical thickets, from the first democracy to the present day, seeking solutions to the enduring tension between democracy and inequality.
Turning from Antiquity to the modern world, Schiavone shows how the American and the French revolutions attempted to settle old debates, introducing a new way of thinking about equality. Both the French revolutionaries and the American colonists sought democracy and equality together, but the European tradition (British Labour, Russian and Eastern European Marxists, and Northern European social democrats) saw formal equality—equality before the law—as a means of obtaining economic equality. The American model, in contrast, adopted formal equality while setting aside the goal of economic equality.
The Pursuit of Equality in the West argues that the United States and European models were compatible with industrial-age democracy, but neither suffices in the face of today’s technological revolution. Opposing both atomization and the obsolete myths of the collective, Schiavone thinks equality anew, proposing a model founded on neither individualism nor the erasure of the individual but rather on the universality of the impersonal human, which coexists with the sea of differences that makes each of us unique.
Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.
In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: “In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge.”
The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine’s efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise. Notions like “idea” and ”meaning” are vague, but a sentence—now there’s something you can sink your teeth into. Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.
In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns: evidence, reference, meaning, intention, and truth. “Some points,” he writes, “have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better.”
This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life’s work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader’s previous acquaintance with Quine’s writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine’s wit and economy of style.
In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: "In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge?'The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine's efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega ofthe scientific enterprise. Notions like "idea" and "meaning" are vague, but a sentence-now there's something you can sink your teeth into.
Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns-evidence, reference, meaning, intension, and truth. "Some points;' he writes, "have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better." This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader's previous acquaintance with Quine's writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine's wit and economy of style.
Marking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume’s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.
Excerpts from Hume’s autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume’s philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy’s punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church’s emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier’s clear interpretation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature explains the link between Hume’s growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma.
Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier’s more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way Hume lived and the way he thought—insights unavailable to Hume himself, perhaps, despite his lifelong introspection.
As a logical concept, identity refers to one and the same thing. So why, Vincent Descombes asks, do we routinely use “identity” to describe the feelings associated with membership in a number of different communities, as when we speak of our ethnic identity and religious identity? And how can we ascribe the same “identity” to more than one individual in a group? In Puzzling Identities, one of the leading figures in French philosophy seeks to bridge the abyss between the logical meaning of identity and the psychological sense of “being oneself.”
Bringing together an analytic conception of identity derived from Gottlob Frege with a psychosocial understanding stemming from Erik Erikson, Descombes contrasts a rigorously philosophical notion of identity with ideas of collective identity that have become crucial in contemporary cultural and political discourse. He returns to an argument of ancient Greek philosophy about the impossibility of change for a material individual. Distinguishing between reflexive and expressive views of “being oneself,” he shows the connections between subjective identity and one’s life and achievements. We form profound attachments to the particular communities by which we define ourselves. At the same time, becoming oneself as a modern individual requires a process of disembedding oneself from one’s social milieu. This is how undergoing a crisis of identity while coming of age has become for us a normal stage in human life.
Puzzling Identities demonstrates why a person has more than one answer to the essential question “Who am I?”
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