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Author: Anthony Elliott
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780415351522
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis fascinating and easy to read book offers new insights into the interplay between increasing globalization and the rise of the new individualism. It will be of interest to everyone concerned with the future of the public spheres, progressive
Author: Margaret Hoover
Publisher: Crown Forum
Published: 2012-08-15
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0307718166
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Fox News analyst argues for a redefinition of conservatism that will modernize outdated Republican ideas and enable a younger generation to embrace the party, defining her views about Individualism while contending that universal, conservative beliefs can be adapted to revitalize Republican political strength.
Author: William A. Donohue
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-28
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 1000664171
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe root cause of contemporary American psychological and social disorders, argues William Donohue in this major new book, is the dominant culture's embracement of a fraudulent conception of freedom. In fact, the tension between an individual liberty without limits and the social need for civility and community has created havoc in the lives of many Americans.Conventional wisdom about the nature of freedom is characterized by both the uncoupling of a concept of rights from a concept of responsibilities and by an overweening doctrine of moral neutrality. This preoccupation with individual liberty, to the neglect of other competing values, has left a trail of social discord that will be difficult to redress. Constraint of any kind is now seen as the enemy of liberty, and all that limits or burdens the individual in any way is seen as anathema to freedom.The New Freedom critically examines how this new concept of freedom developed historically and why it exploded on the American scene in the 1960s. Its impact on the deepest recesses of American society, including marriage, the family, sexuality, the schools, the churches, and the criminal justice system, are fully explored. The costs have been high. Information on the psychological and social health of Americans suggests that all is not well. But the ultimate cost, says Qonohue, may be the ultimate failure of liberty, as the fraudulent new freedom collides with the human need for community.Sure to be controversial, The New Freedom will provide policymakers, social scientists, and specialists in the family, education, and religion a compelling new perspective on old questions. The book will also appeal to general readers who seek to understand the root causes of the nation's unprecedented volume of social and psychological problems.
Author: Anthony Elliott
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-10
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 1135260346
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a new and revised edition of a book which has had a major impact upon the social sciences and public political debate. Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert's THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM inspired readers with the dramatic suggestion that 'the reinvention craze' - from self-help and therapy culture to management restructurings and corporate downsizings - is central to a 'new individualism' sweeping the globe. Giving particular attention to the narratives of people seeking to define anew their lives in an age of globalization, the authors contend that an endless hunger for instant change and relentless emphasis on self-reinvention is fundamental to grasping the disorientating effects of the new individualism. This edition contains a substantial new Introduction in which Elliott and Lemert reply to some of the standard criticisms made of the theory of the new individualism, and also addresses the escalation of new individualist thinking in the wake of recent global crises.
Author: Gordon Wheeler
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-04-15
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1135061491
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this pathbreaking and provocative new treatment of some of the oldest dilemmas of psychology and relationship, Gordon Wheeler challenges the most basic tenet of the West cultural tradition: the individualist self. Characteristics of this self-model are our embedded yet pervasive ideas that the individual self precedes and transcends relationship and social field conditions and that interpersonal experience is somehow secondary and even opposed to the needs of the inner self. Assumptions like these, Wheeler argues, which are taken to be inherent to human nature and development, amount to a controlling cultural paradigm that does considerable violence to both our evolutionary self-nature and our intuitive self-experience. He asserts that we are actually far more relational and intersubjective than our cultural generally allows and that these relational capacities are deeply built into our inherent evolutionary nature. His argument progresses from the origins and lineage of the Western individualist self-model, into the basis for a new model of the self, relationship, and experience out of the insights and implications of Gestalt psychology and its philosophical derivatives, deconstructivism and social constructionism. From there, in a linked series of experiential chapters, each of them a groundbreaking essay in its own right, he takes up the essential dynamic themes of self-experience and relational life: interpersonal orientation, meaning-making and adaptation, support, shame, intimacy, and finally narrative and gender, culminating in considerations of health, ethics, politics, and spirit. The result is a picture and an experience of self that is grounded in the active dynamics of attention, problem solving, imagination, interpretation, evaluation, emotion, meaning-making, narration, and, above all, relationship. By the final section, the reader comes away with a new sense of what it means to be human and a new and more usable definition of health.
Author: Ulrich Beck
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2002-02-04
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780761961123
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIndividualization argues that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the nature of society and politics. This change hinges around two processes: globalization and individualization. The book demonstrates that individualization is a structural characteristic of highly differentiated societies, and does not imperil social cohesion, but actually makes it possible. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim argue that it is vital to distinguish between the neo-liberal idea of the free-market individual and the concept of individualization. The result is the most complete discussion of individualization currently available, showing how individualization relates to basic social rights and also paid employment; and concluding that in
Author: Barry Alan Shain
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1996-08-25
Total Pages: 422
ISBN-13: 9780691029122
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.
Author: Paul Hopper
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 1351906259
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs modern societies become increasingly individualistic, this fascinating book examines how we can maintain and revive local communities and community life. It demonstrates how the major developments and processes of our time, notably globalization, post-industrialism and de-traditionalization, contribute to this individualism to the detriment of community life. The author examines how community is a necessary and important component of human life and discusses possible ways in which to arrest its decline. In this regard, strategies geared to fostering trust and social capital are outlined as the basis for reinvigorating community life. The volume provides a coherent and distinct analysis of community as well as offering concrete policy prescriptions to counter the excessive individualism of our times. In both the nature and scope of its analysis, it offers a unique contribution to an extremely important issue in the contemporary period, one that increasingly preoccupies politicians, academics and ordinary citizens.
Author: Zubin Meer
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2011-05-26
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 0739122649
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIndividualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity explores ideas of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Divided into two sections, this volume surveys the history of western individualism in both its early and later forms: chiefly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and then individualism in the twentieth century. These essays boldly challenge not only the exclusionary framework and self-assured teleology, but also the metaphysical certainty of that remarkablytenacious narrative on "the rise of the individual." Some essays question the correlation of realist characterization to the eighteenth-century British novel, while others champion the continuing political relevance of selfhood in modernist fiction overand against postmodern nihilism. Yet others move to the foreground underappreciated topics, such as the role of courtly cultures in the development of individualism. Taken together, the essays provocatively revise and enrich our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself. Authors especially considered include Locke, Defoe, Freud, and Adorno. The essays in this volume first began as papers presented at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association held atPrinceton University. Among the contributors are Nancy Armstrong, Deborah Cook, James Cruise, David Jenemann, Lucy McNeece, Vivasvan Soni, Frederick Turner, and Philip Weinstein.
Author: Mark G. E. Kelly
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2022-03-18
Total Pages: 97
ISBN-13: 1509550968
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a book about what we consider normal. It details how the very concept of normality emerged in the modern era, and how it has changed over the centuries. By the mid-twentieth century, the expansion of norms across various areas of human endeavour generated a governing normative order in Western societies. Normality was defined as conformity with a narrow model of conventional human behaviour. However, this model has since been displaced by an anti-conformism, in which normality is defined as absolute self-fulfilment, defying older restrictions on our behaviour. Paradoxically, narcissistic individualism and rebellion against conformity have become compulsory. Normal Now explores in detail how this new normative order plays out today in the arenas of politics, health, and sex and sexuality. In all these areas, the uncompromising perfectionism of our norms of self-expression leads to increasingly deep-seated and ubiquitous anger, anxiety and dissatisfaction.
