Paradoxes of Utopia
Author: Juan Suriano
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 184935006X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA social history of revolutionary ideas and lifestyles.
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Paradoxes of Free Will
Author: Gunther Siegmund Stent
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780871699268
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDriving human reason too far in the analysis of deep problems often leads to irresolvable inconsistencies and contradictions. In this 2002 J.F. Lewis Award-winning monograph, Gunther Stent traces the origins and development of the paradoxes of free will in this well-crafted introduction to philosophical debates regarding freedom of will. Free will poses one of the oldest and most vexatious philosophical problems, dating back to the beginnings of moral philosophy in ancient Greece. Pure theoretical reason implies that our actions are determined, while practical theoretical reason tells us that our will is free. Stent examines the arguments of moral responsibility versus determinism, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, Niels Bohr, and Max Planck.
The Utopia of Rules
Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2015-02-24
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1612193757
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
The Paradox of German Power
Author: Hans Kundnani
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 156
ISBN-13: 0190245506
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince the Euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last three years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. So what does it mean to have a "German Europe" in the twenty-first century? In The Paradox of German Power, Hans Kundnani explains how Germany got to where it is now and where it might go in future. He explores German national identity and foreign policy through a series of tensions in German thinking and action: between continuity and change, between "normality" and "abnormality," between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world.
Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures
Author: Bill Ashcroft
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-10
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 1317284437
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPostcolonial Studies is more often found looking back at the past, but in this brand new book, Bill Ashcroft looks to the future and the irrepressible demands of utopia. The concept of utopia – whether playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community – is examined in relation to the postcolonial and the communities with which it engages. Studying a very broad range of literature, poetry and art, with chapters focussing on specific regions – Africa, India, Chicano, Caribbean and Pacific – this book is written in a clear and engaging prose which make it accessible to undergraduates as well as academics. This important book speaks to the past and future of postcolonial scholarship.
Paradoxes of European Legal Integration
Author: Anne Lise Kjær
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05
Total Pages: 558
ISBN-13: 1351912887
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on paradoxes and tensions of European legal integration, this book investigates four complex and inherently contradictory processes - constitutionalization and democratization, institution-building and market-making, cross-cultural communication and European discourse, and cultural exceptionalism and normalization - to offer a new framework for understanding contemporary European integration. The volume features contributions from some of the biggest names in European legal philosophy, to include Neil MacCormick, Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, Pierre Legrand, Heikki Mattila and David Nelken. It presents a timely, interdisciplinary approach to an important and topical area and will be of interest to those concerned with the place of socio-legal processes, language and culture in the continuous advancement of the EU project.
Visions of Utopia
Author: Edward Rothstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-02-06
Total Pages: 106
ISBN-13: 0198033044
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the sex-free paradise of the Shakers to the worker's paradise of Marx, utopian ideas seem to have two things in common--they all are wonderfully plausible at the start and they all end up as disasters. In Visions of Utopia, three leading cultural critics--Edward Rothstein, Martin Marty, and Herbert Muschamp--look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing. Edward Rothstein, New York Times cultural critic, contends that every utopia is really a dystopia--a disaster in the making--one that overlooks the nature of humanity and the impossibilities of paradise. He traces the ideal in politics and technology and suggests that only in art--and especially in music--does the desire for utopia find satisfaction. Martin Marty examines several models of utopia--from Thomas More's to a 1960s experimental city that he helped to plan--to show that, even though utopias can never be realized, we should not be too quick to condemn them. They can express dimensions of the human spirit that might otherwise be stifled and can plant ideas that may germinate in more realistic and practical soil. And Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architectural critic, looks at Utopianism as exemplified in two different ways: the Buddhist tradition and the work of visionary Viennese architect Adolph Loos. Utopian thinking embodies humanity's noblest impulses, yet it can lead to horrors such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Regime. In Visions of Utopia, these leading thinkers offer an intriguing look at the paradoxes of paradise.
The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes
Author: Patrizia Lombardo
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2010-03-01
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13: 0820334936
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRevolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess.—Roland Barthes In the field of contemporary literary studies, Roland Barthes remains an inestimably influential figure—perhaps more influential in America than in his native France. The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes proposes a new method of viewing Barthes's critical enterprise. Patrizia Lombardo, who studied with Barthes, rejects an absolutist or developmental assessment of his career. Insisting that his world can best be understood in terms of the paradoxes he perceived in the very activity of writing, Lombardo similarly sees in Barthes the crucial ambiguity that determines the modern writer—an irresistible attraction for something new, different, breaking with the past, yet also an unavoidable scorn for the contemporary world. Lombardo demonstrates that her mentor's critical endeavor was not a linear progression of thought but was, as Barthes described his work, a romance, a “dance with a pen.”
Other Englands
Author: Sarah Hogan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-05-29
Total Pages: 357
ISBN-13: 1503606139
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOther Englands examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism. Above all, it asserts that this literary genre was always already an expression of social crisis and economic transition, a context refracted in the origin stories and imagined geographies common to its early modern form. Beginning with the paradigmatic popular utopias of Thomas More and Francis Bacon but attentive to non-canonical examples from the margins of the tradition, the study charts a shifting and, by the time of the English Revolution, self-critical effort to think communities in dynamic socio-spatial forms. Arguing that early utopias have been widely misunderstood and maligned as static, finished polities, Sarah Hogan makes the case that utopian literature offered readers and writers a transformational and transitional social imaginary. She shows how a genre associated with imagining systemic alternatives both contested and contributed to the ideological construction of capitalist imperialism. In the early English utopia, she finds both a precursor to the Enlightenment discourse of political economy and another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital.
Paradoxes of Utopia
Author: Juan Suriano
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2010-08-17
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1849350442
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn engaging historical look at fin de siécle Buenos Aires that brings to life the vibrant culture behind one of the world’s largest anarchist movements: the radical schools, newspapers, theaters, and social clubs that made revolution a way of life. Cultural history in the best sense, Paradoxes of Utopia explores how a revolutionary ideology was woven into the ordinary lives of tens of thousands of people, creating a complex tapestry of symbols, rituals, and daily practices that supported—and indeed created the possibility of—the Argentine labor movement. Juan Suriano is a professor of social history at the University of Buenos Aires.
