Illusions of Emancipation
Illusions of Emancipation

Author: Joseph P. Reidy

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 1469648377

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As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

Burning All Illusions
Burning All Illusions

Author: David Edwards

Publisher: South End Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780896085312

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This is a book about freedom. Above all about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained. What prison, after all, could be more secure than that deemed to be "the world," where boundaries of action and thought are assumed to define not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible. In the past we have been prisoners of tyrants and dictators, and consequently have needed to win our freedom in very concrete, physical terms. We now need to free ourselves not from a slave ship or a concentration camp, but from many of the illusions fostered in our democratic society. "[A] wise and acute analysis of the way our minds are controlled, not in a totalitarian state, but in a 'democratic' one. Edwards also suggests how we can escape this control in a self-help book which, unlike other books of this genre, connects our inner world of alienation with the world outside."--Howard Zinn "[A] treatise on what freedom truly means.... Burning All Illusions is an important philosophical and psychology text that should be on every political science curriculum reading list!"--Wisconsin Book Watch

Freedom from Illusion
Freedom from Illusion

Author: Osho

Publisher: Osho Media

Published: 2019-10

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780991237821

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An anthology of the complex issues of the ego, ambition, power and destructiveness from the perspective of a contemporary mystic. Osho shows the way to liberation from the illusions of the personality through an internal revolution - the psychology of the Buddhas. The ego is just the opposite of your real self. The ego is not you. It never allows you even a glimpse of your real authentic self, and your life is there, in your authenticity. Hence, this ego only produces misery, suffering, fighting, frustration, madness, suicide, murder -- all kinds of crime.

Life, A Better Way
Life, A Better Way

Author: John Nolan

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2005-09

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 0595360122

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Life, A Better Way asserts that all of us are in more control of the direction of our lives than we realize and because this is true, each of us are in a position to experience a significantly more rewarding life than we have attained up to this point. If we stopped for a few moments and thought about what we have accomplished during the day-week-month, we will begin to realize that most of what we do is from habit or to meet standards set by society. There seems to be very little, if any, quality choices available to change our direction and this is the main reason why our society is surrounded by problems, unhappiness and chaos. Life, A Better Way challenges each person to honestly look at their life by examining the activities, thoughts and values that are behind our actions. The author discusses the core problems that are holding us back from reaching our true potential and how we can eliminate these problems and reach a higher level of happiness, stability and peace of mind. The answer is in our thinking, through the proper use of our mind which is our greatest asset and the most underused.

The Melancholy of Race
The Melancholy of Race

Author: Anne Anlin Cheng

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0195151623

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Cheng proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--a social category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasoned account of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressive politics.

The Illusions of Egalitarianism
The Illusions of Egalitarianism

Author: John Kekes

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780801473395

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In this systematic and scathing attack on the dominant contemporary version of liberalism, John Kekes challenges political assumptions shared by the majority of people in Western societies. Egalitarianism, as it's widely known, holds that a government ought to treat all citizens with equal consideration. Kekes charges that belief in egalitarianism rests on illusions that prevent people from facing unpleasant truths.Kekes, a major voice in modern political thought, argues that differences among human beings in the areas of morality, reasonability, legality, and citizenship are too important for governance to ignore. In a rigorous criticism of prominent egalitarian thinkers, including Dworkin, Nagel, Nussbaum, Rawls, Raz, and Singer, Kekes charges that their views present a serious threat to both morality and reason. For Kekes, certain "inegalitarian truths" are obvious: people should get what they deserve, those who are good and those who are evil should not be treated as if they had the same moral worth, people should not be denied what they have earned in order to benefit those who have not earned it, and individuals should be held responsible for their actions. His provocative book will compel many readers to question their faith in liberalism.

Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry
Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry

Author: Christopher Caudwell

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1528769716

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This book contains Christopher Caudwell’s 1937 treatise, “Illusion and Reality”. It is a work of Marxist literary criticism that develops the idea that each individual era of British poetry stems from a novel economical paradigm in bourgeois society. Christopher St John Sprigg (1907–1937), more commonly known by his pseudonym 'Christopher Caudwell', was a British Marxist poet and thinker. In early life, he made his way to Marxism and set about rethinking everything in light of it, from poetry to philosophy to physics, and became a staunch member of the 'Communist Party of Great Britain'. Many vintage texts such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now, in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Homo Novus - A Human Without Illusions
Homo Novus - A Human Without Illusions

Author: Ulrich J. Frey

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-08-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 364212142X

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Converging evidence from disciplines including sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and human biology forces us to adopt a new idea of what it means to be a human. As cherished concepts such as free will, naïve realism, humans as creation's crowning glory fall and our moral roots in ape group dynamics become clearer, we have to take leave of many concepts that have been central to defining our humanness. What emerges is a new human, the homo novus, a human being without illusions. Leading authors from many different fields explore these issues by addressing a range of illusions and providing evidence for the need, despite considerable reluctance, to relinquish some of our most cherished ideas about ourselves.