Conspicuous and Inconspicuous Discriminations in Everyday Life
Conspicuous and Inconspicuous Discriminations in Everyday Life

Author: Victor N. Shaw

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-19

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1135021759

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In everyday life, people negotiate on issues, entertain offers and counteroffers, and gain or lose in terms of economic capital, political power, communal status, and social influence. Although life goes on in the form of compromise, feelings of discrimination or misfortune haunt consciously or unconsciously in the minds of living individuals. History continues in the spirit of forgiveness, but residues of exploitation or injustice remain conspicuously or inconspicuously on the records of progressing civilizations. This study follows an average everyday life to compare individuals with individuals, individuals with organizations, and organizations with organizations in their everyday interactions. Through the eyes of the person, conspicuous and inconspicuous discriminations by one against another, whether individual or organizational, are identified in different occasions, on a typical day, at home, in the workplace, in the community, within the country, around the world, and throughout the course of life. In the style of Socrates, Plato, Wittgenstein, and other classical scholarship, this study uses ordinary, typical situations to demonstrate critical points, reveal subtle connections, and present important arguments. It offers vivid examples for what social scientists strive to find: the extraordinary from the ordinary, the unfamiliar from the familiar, the different from the similar, and the significant from the trivial. This study offers an opportunity for readers to reflect upon their social experiences, and rethink and reshape their everyday acts and actions.

Three Worlds of Collective Human Experience: Individual Life, Social Change, and Human Evolution
Three Worlds of Collective Human Experience: Individual Life, Social Change, and Human Evolution

Author: Victor N. Shaw

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-22

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 3319981951

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This book explores three worlds shared by the humans in their collective experiences. It identifies and explores the world of commonsense, the world of religion, and the world of science as three essential dimensions of human experience. The book helps understand that humans can gain comfort and pleasure in commonsense, achieve meaning and purpose from religion, and attain truth and rationality through science. It actively applies theories to and develops theoretical explanations from different domains or situations of human existence. This book is of interest to theorists, researchers, instructors, and students across major academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy
From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy

Author: Victor N. Shaw

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1527560953

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This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.

Deconstructing Happiness
Deconstructing Happiness

Author: Jordan McKenzie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1317565460

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This book offers an original account of the good life in late modernity through a uniquely sociological lens. It considers the various ways that social and cultural factors can encourage or impede genuine efforts to live a good life by deconstructing the concepts of happiness and contentment within cultural narratives of the good life. While empirical studies have dominated the discourse on happiness in recent decades, the emphasis on finding causal and correlational relationships has led to a field of research that arguably lacks a reliable theoretical foundation. Deconstructing Happiness offers a step toward developing that foundation by offering characteristically sociological perspectives on the contemporary fascination with happiness and well-being. In doing so, it seeks to understand the good life as a socially mediated experience rather than a purely personal or individually defined way of living. The outcome is a book on happiness, contentment and the good life that considers the influence of democracy, capitalism and progress, while also focusing on the more theoretical challenges of self-knowledge, reason and interaction.

Rosa Luxemburg in Action
Rosa Luxemburg in Action

Author: Rosemary H. T. O'Kane

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-20

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 131769337X

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Neither a work concerned only with her Marxist writings nor a personal biography concerned with her private life, this book examines Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas on revolution and democracy and how the two are bound together by her views on the importance of political action. Stretching, historically, from 1863 to the present, this book covers in great detail the history and developments within the German SPD during her time, the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, the German Revolution, the outbreak of World War I and the imperialism that fuelled it. It then moves on to consider political and historical developments after her death and examines her arguments on revolution and democracy in the light of the post-revolutionary government in Nicaragua: the one violent revolution that sought to establish social democracy (but failed). Also covered are aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s life, her important writings and actions, the relevant Marxist debates in which she was involved, including, for example Bernstein’s arguments on social democracy through reform and, with Lenin, on revolutionary organization. A welcomed and timely collection presenting an important examination of the political and social context in which Luxemburg developed her activities and views and a complete understanding of the history of social democracy, the revolutionary times of a century ago and the relevance of their events and ideas for more recent revolutions for democracy in the twenty-first century.

The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences
The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences

Author: David Baronov

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1317975014

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This book turns conventional global-historical analysis on its head, demonstrating, first, that local events cannot be derived — logically or historically — from large-scale, global-historical structures and processes and, second, that it is these structures and processes that, in fact, emerge from our analysis of local events. This is made evident via an analysis of three disparate events: the New York City Draft Riots, AIDS in Mozambique, and a 2007 flood in central Uruguay. In each case, Baronov chronicles how expressions of human agency at the level of those caught up in each event give form and substance to various abstract global-historical concepts — such as slavery in the Americas, global capitalist production, and colonial/postcolonial Africa. Underlying this repositioning of the local and the ephemeral is an immanent, phenomenological analysis that illustrates how mere transient events are the progenitors of otherwise abstract, global-historical concepts. Traversing the intersections of human agency and structural determinism, Baronov deftly retains the nuance and serendipity of everyday life, while deploying this nuance and serendipity to further embellish our understanding of those enduring global-historical structures and processes that shape large-scale, long-term, historical accounts of social and cultural change across the historical social sciences.

The Politics of Rationality
The Politics of Rationality

Author: Charles Webel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1134490445

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What are reason and rationality? How significant are recent postmodernist and neuroscientific challenges to these longheld notions? Should we abandon a belief in reason and an adherence to rationality? Or can reason and rationality be reformulated and reframed? And what does politics have to do with how we think about reason and why we act more or less rationally? The Politics of Rationality differs from other books with "reason" or “rationality” due to its historical, political, depth-psychological, and multidisciplinary approach to understanding reason through history. Charles P. Webel eloquently clarifies the links among ideas, their creators, the relevant mental processes, and the political cultures within which such important concepts as reasons and rationality take hold. He demonstrates how reason and rationality/irrationality have become what they mean for us today and proposes a way to rethink reason and rationality in light of the withering critiques leveled against them. In doing so, he presents a "history of reason and rationality" by examining the intellectual and political contexts of four representative theorists of reason and rationality-- Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, and Weber—and by addressing contemporary challenges posed by postmodernism, depth psychology, and neurophilosophy.

Gramsci, Materialism, and Philosophy
Gramsci, Materialism, and Philosophy

Author: Esteve Morera

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1317746309

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Western critical theory, Marxism included, has largely been based on a view of historical materialism that Gramsci, among others, developed in his prison notebooks. For many, Gramsci’s philosophical reflections in prison offered a new foundation for the philosophy of the future. His reflections on the philosophy of praxis and absolute historicism find echoes in much of what today is considered to be a materialist philosophy. That form of materialism was unable to provide a sound foundation for a progressive social project, the possibility of a meaningful and creative ethical life, and the forms of activity or praxis that would be conducive to creating good society. In this book, Esteve Morera connects Marxist philosophy to the broader philosophical discussion of materialism in metaphysics, the philosophy science, philosophy of mind, and naturalised ethics. Each chapter deals with a particular aspect related to materialism and its consequences, the sorts of things that, if materialism is true, need to be confronted. Morera critiques, and rejects Gramsci’s conception of matter and materialism and concludes that that philosophical materialism is compatible with freedom, and as a consequence, offers a good foundation for ethical life. Gramsci, Materialism, and Philosophy is an original contribution to the philosophically vital debates around the meaning, limitations, implications, and possibilities of philosophical materialism as it is a contribution to the critical literature on Gramsci.

Authenticity, Autonomy and Multiculturalism
Authenticity, Autonomy and Multiculturalism

Author: Geoffrey Brahm Levey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 131753591X

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The concept of "authenticity" enters multicultural politics in three distinct but interrelated senses: as an ideal of individual and group identity that commands recognition by others; as a condition of individuals’ autonomy that bestows legitimacy on their values, beliefs and preferences as being their own; and as a form of cultural pedigree that bestows legitimacy on particular beliefs and practices (commonly called "cultural authenticity"). In each case, the authenticity idea is called on to anchor or legitimate claims to some kind of public recognition. The considerable work asked of this concept raises a number of vital questions: Should "authenticity" be accorded the importance it holds in multicultural politics? Do its pitfalls outweigh its utility? Is the notion of "authenticity" avoidable in making sense of and evaluating cultural claims? Or does it, perhaps, need to be rethought or recalibrated? Geoffrey Brahm Levey and his distinguished group of philosophers, political theorists, and anthropologists challenge conventional assumptions about "authenticity" that inform liberal responses to minority cultural claims in Western democracies today. Discussing a wide range of cases drawn from Britain and continental Europe, North America, Australia and the Middle East, they press beyond theories to consider also the practical and policy implications at stake. A helpful resource to scholars worldwide in Political and Social Theory, Political Philosophy, Legal Anthropology, Multiculturalism, and, more generally, of cultural identity and diversity in liberal democracies today.

Understanding the Tacit
Understanding the Tacit

Author: Stephen P. Turner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1134644027

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This book outlines a new account of the tacit, meaning tacit knowledge, presuppositions, practices, traditions, and so forth. It includes essays on topics such as underdetermination and mutual understanding, and critical discussions of the major alternative approaches to the tacit, including Bourdieu’s habitus and various practice theories, Oakeshott’s account of tradition, Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical meaning, Harry Collins’s idea of collective tacit knowledge, as well as discussions of relevant cognitive science concepts, such as non-conceptual content, connectionism, and mirror neurons. The new account of tacit knowledge focuses on the fact that in making the tacit explicit, a person is not, as many past accounts have supposed, reading off the content of some sort of shared and fixed tacit scheme of presuppositions, but rather responding to the needs of the Other for understanding.