Europe in Crisis

Europe in Crisis

Author: Mark Hewitson

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0857457276

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The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.


Routine Crisis

Routine Crisis

Author: Sarah Muir

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 022675278X

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Speaking of crisis -- A suspicious history -- Economies of loss -- Exhausted futures -- Solidary selves -- Argentine afterword.


Crisis Under Critique

Crisis Under Critique

Author: Didier Fassin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 711

ISBN-13: 0231555482

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The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.


The Existentialist Moment

The Existentialist Moment

Author: Patrick Baert

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-08-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0745685439

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre's career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.


State of Crisis

State of Crisis

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0745685293

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Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.


On the Doorstep of Europe

On the Doorstep of Europe

Author: Heath Cabot

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1512825220

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Since the global financial crisis of 2008, Greece has shouldered a heavy burden struggling with internal political and financial insecurity as well as hosting enormous numbers of migrants and asylum seekers who arrive by land and sea. In On the Doorstep of Europe, Heath Cabot presents an ethnographic study of the asylum system in Greece, tracing the ways asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and social relations that emerge through this legal process. Centering on the work of an asylum advocacy NGO in Athens, Cabot explores how workers and clients grapple with predicaments endemic to Europeanization and rights-based protection. Drawing inspiration from classical Greek tragedy to highlight both the transformative potential and violence of law, Cabot charts the structural violence effected through European governance, rights frameworks, and humanitarian intervention while also exploring how Greek society is being remade from the inside out. She shows how, in contemporary Greece, relationships between insiders and outsiders are radically reconfigured through legal, political, and economic crises. Now updated with a preface reflecting on the critical stakes of the book's exploration of refuge in light of events that have transpired in and beyond Europe since its initial publication, On the Doorstep of Europe highlights how border crossers and residents in countries of arrival navigate legal and political violence. Cabot's on-the-ground account of asylum and immigration in Europe's borderlands, based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011, shows how the difficulties encountered by asylum seekers in an earlier time remain relevant and revealing in the face of ongoing crises and challenges today.


The Age of the Crisis of Man

The Age of the Crisis of Man

Author: Mark Greif

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-01-18

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1400852102

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A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities—race, religious faith, and the rise of technology—that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.


Empirical Futures

Empirical Futures

Author: George Baca

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-05-07

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 1458755576

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Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique globalization studies. However, a strong...