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Author: Kevin Railey
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2012-06-04
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 0817357270
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRailey uses a materialist critical approach to argue that Faulkner'sobsession with history and his struggle with specific ideologies affecting southern society and his family guided his development as an artist. Faulkner may have written himself into history in a way that satisfied the image he had of himself as a natural, artistic aristocrat.
Author: Adrian Wooldridge
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-07-13
Total Pages: 594
ISBN-13: 1510768629
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Times (UK) book of the year! Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth. While this initially seemed like a novel concept, by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world's ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left? In The Aristocracy of Talent, esteemed journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities, and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system. Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
Author: William G. Bowen
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 200?
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9780813933399
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas Jefferson once stated that the foremost goal of American education must be to nurture the "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue." Although in many ways American higher education has fulfilled Jefferson's vision by achieving a widespread level of excellence, it has not achieved the objective of equity implicit in Jefferson's statement. In Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin explore the cause for this divide. Employing historical research, examination of the most recent social science and public policy scholarship, international comparisons, and detailed empirical analysis of rich new data, the authors study the intersection between "excellence" and "equity" objectives. Beginning with a time line tracing efforts to achieve equity and excellence in higher education from the American Revolution to the early Cold War years, this narrative reveals the halting, episodic progress in broadening access across the dividing lines of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The authors argue that despite our rhetoric of inclusiveness, a significant number of youth from poor families do not share equal access to America's elite colleges and universities. While America has achieved the highest level of educational attainment of any country, it runs the risk of losing this position unless it can markedly improve the precollegiate preparation of students from racial minorities and lower-income families. After identifying the "equity" problem at the national level and studying nineteen selective colleges and universities, the authors propose a set of potential actions to be taken at federal, state, local, and institutional levels. With recommendations ranging from reform of the admissions process, to restructuring of federal financial aid and state support of public universities, to addressing the various precollegiate obstacles that disadvantaged students face at home and in school, the authors urge all selective colleges and universities to continue race-sensitive admissions policies, while urging the most selective (and privileged) institutions to enroll more well-qualified students from families with low socioeconomic status.
Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-10-12
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 1982114207
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA “brilliant” (The Washington Post), “clear-eyed and incisive” (The New Republic) analysis of how the wealthiest group in American society is making life miserable for everyone—including themselves. In 21st-century America, the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution have walked away with the big prizes even while the bottom 90% have lost ground. What’s left of the American Dream has taken refuge in the 9.9% that lies just below the tip of extreme wealth. Collectively, the members of this group control more than half of the wealth in the country—and they are doing whatever it takes to hang on to their piece of the action in an increasingly unjust system. They log insane hours at the office and then turn their leisure time into an excuse for more career-building, even as they rely on an underpaid servant class to power their economic success and satisfy their personal needs. They have segregated themselves into zip codes designed to exclude as many people as possible. They have made fitness a national obsession even as swaths of the population lose healthcare and grow sicker. They have created an unprecedented demand for admission to elite schools and helped to fuel the dramatic cost of higher education. They channel their political energy into symbolic conflicts over identity in order to avoid acknowledging the economic roots of their privilege. And they have created an ethos of “merit” to justify their advantages. They are all around us. In fact, they are us—or what we are supposed to want to be. In this “captivating account” (Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone), Matthew Stewart argues that a new aristocracy is emerging in American society and it is repeating the mistakes of history. It is entrenching inequality, warping our culture, eroding democracy, and transforming an abundant economy into a source of misery. He calls for a regrounding of American culture and politics on a foundation closer to the original promise of America.
Author: Luke Mayville
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-12-04
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 0691183244
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy American founding father John Adams feared the political power of the rich—and how his ideas illuminate today's debates about inequality and its consequences Long before the "one percent" became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply "the few"—the wellborn, the beautiful, and especially the rich. In John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville explores Adams’s deep concern with the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. Adams believed that wealth is politically powerful not merely because money buys influence, but also because citizens admire and even identify with the rich. Mayville explores Adams’s theory of wealth and power in the context of his broader concern about social and economic disparities—reflections that promise to illuminate contemporary debates about inequality and its political consequences. He also examines Adams’s ideas about how oligarchy might be countered. A compelling work of intellectual history, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy has important lessons for today’s world.
Author: William Doyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-11-25
Total Pages: 138
ISBN-13: 0199206783
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis engaging introduction shows how ideas of aristocracy originated in ancient times, were transformed in the middle ages, and have only fallen apart over the last two centuries.
Author: True Blue Indigo
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1556438664
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Book of the Courtier meets Eckhart Tolle in this essential work of new consciousness literature. Jesus, Buddha, Baha-u'llah, Martin Luther King, Guru Nanek, Mohammed, Gandhi, Mother Theresa and others are widely considered the spiritual nobility of the world. In contrast to the ancient material nobility whose power is based upon material wealth acquired through force, the power of this spiritual nobility is based upon the true power of spiritual wealth and an endless capacity to give, love, and uplift humanity. This impulse to replicate the energetic signature of the spiritual nobility is arising spontaneously all around the world, a new love-based form of humanity dawning. When everyday people embark upon the path of their own personal self-ennoblement they are taking the most important journey any human being will take in their lifetime to become the change they desire to see in the world. This new form of humanity will be the basis for a 21st Century spiritual nobility, a new aristocracy, a leap in human development into fully realized human beings. True Blue Indigo's A Personal Aristrocracy encourages the exploration of beauty and graciousness that surpass the old forms by imbuing the best of the secular with spirit. Short, meditative chapters open with an illuminating epigraph and move on to consider such qualities as dignity, honor, reverence, truth, and forbearance, followed by sound strategies for integrating these traits into daily life.
Author: Jeffrey Church
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9781316419892
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNietzsche scholars have long been divided over whether Nietzsche is an aristocratic or a democratic thinker. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity overcomes this debate by proving both sides wrong. Jeffrey Church argues that in his early period writings, Nietzsche envisioned a cultural meritocracy that drew on the classical German tradition of Kant and Herder. The young Nietzsche's 'culture of humanity' synthesized the high and low, the genius and the people, the nation and humanity. Nietzsche's early ideal of culture can shed light on his mature period thought, since, Church argues, Nietzsche does not abandon this fundamental commitment to a cultural meritocracy. Nietzche's Culture of Humanity argues that Nietzsche's novel defense of culture can overcome some persisting problems in contemporary liberal theories of culture. As such, this book should interest Nietzsche scholars, political theorists and philosophers interested in modern thought, as well as contemporary thinkers concerned with the politics of culture.
Author: Richard Avramenko
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2018-05-07
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 1498553273
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGreat statesmen and gentlemen, men of honor and rank, seem to be phenomena of a bygone Aristocratic era. Aristocracies, which emphasize rank, and value difference, quality, beauty, rootedness, continuity, stand in direct contrast to democracies, which value equality, autonomy, novelty, standardization, quantity, utility and mobility. Is there any place for aristocratic values and virtues in the modern democratic social and political order? This volume consists of essays by political theorists, historians, and literary theorists that explore this question in the works of aristocratic thinkers, both ancient and modern. The volume includes analyses of aristocratic virtues, interpretations of aristocratic assemblies and constitutions, both historic and contemporary, as well as critiques of liberal virtues and institutions. Essays on Tacitus, Hobbes, Burke, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, as well as some lesser known figures, such as Henri de Boulainvilliers, John Randolph of Roanoke, Louis de Bonald, Konstantin Leontiev, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Richard Weaver, and the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, explore ways of preserving and adapting the salutary aspects of the aristocratic ethos to the needs of modern liberal societies.
Author: Anthony T. Kronman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2019-08-20
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 150119951X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it’s more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.” —Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is a threat to our democracy. College education is under attack from all sides these days. Most of the handwringing—over free speech, safe zones, trigger warnings, and the babying of students—has focused on the excesses of political correctness. That may be true, but as Anthony Kronman shows, it’s not the real problem. “Necessary, humane, and brave” (Bret Stephens, The New York Times), The Assault on American Excellence makes the case that the boundless impulse for democratic equality gripping college campuses today is a threat to institutions whose job is to prepare citizens to live in a vibrant democracy. Three centuries ago, the founders of our nation saw that for this country to have a robust government, it must have citizens trained to have tough skins, to make up their own minds, and to win arguments not on the basis of emotion but because their side is closer to the truth. Without that, Americans would risk electing demagogues. Kronman is the first to tie today’s campus clashes to the history of American values, drawing on luminaries like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Adams to argue that our modern controversies threaten the best of our intellectual traditions. His tone is warm and wise, that of an educator who has devoted his life to helping students be capable of living up to the demands of a free society—and to do so, they must first be tested in a system that isn’t focused on sympathy at the expense of rigor and that values excellence above all.
