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Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (Bloomsbury Revelations)
by Edward T. ChambersThe successor to the legendary activist Saul Alinsky, Edward T. Chambers pioneered a set of principles and practices that have guided community organizations throughout the US and the world. Roots for Radicals remains his definitive reflection on these fundamental principles of community activism: how, as public citizens, we can navigate the gap between the world as it is and as it should be, between self-interest and self-sacrifice and in doing so create lasting change for our communities.In the face of the increasingly turbulent politics of the 21st-century, Chambers's book has never been more relevant.
The Roots of American Exceptionalism: Institutions, Culture, and Policies
by C.Draws on societies' unique histories, distinctive paths of institutional development and contrasting cultures to explain why they adopt different policies for common problems. It compares the United States with Sweden on tax policy, Canada on financing medical care, France on abortion policy, and Japan on immigration.
The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson
by Alex ZakarasA panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politicsIndividualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture.Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man.The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.
The Roots of Ethics: Science, Religion, and Values (The Hastings Center Series in Ethics)
by Sidney CallahanOUR AGE IS CHARACTERIZED by an uncertainty about the na ture of moral obligations, about what one can hope for in an afterlife, and about the limits of human knowledge. These uncertainties were captured by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he noted three basic human questions: what can we know, what ought we to do, and what can we hope for. Those questions and the uncer tainties about their answers still in great part define our cultural per spective. In particular, we are not clear about the foundations of ethics, or about their relationship to religion and to science. This volume brings together previously published essays that focus on these inter relationships and their uncertainties. It offers an attempt to sketch the interrelationship among three major intellectual efforts: determining moral obligations, the ultimate purpose and goals of man and the cosmos, and the nature of empirical reality. Though imperfect, it is an effort to frame the unity of the human condition, which is captured in part by ethics, in part by religion, and in part by the sciences. Put another way, this collection of essays springs from an attempt to see the unity of humans who engage in the diverse roles of valuers, be lievers, and knowers, while still remaining single, individual humans.
The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: From Grievance to Violence
by Wanjala S. Nasong'OThis book focuses on the problem of ethnic conflict in Africa and seeks to explain its root causes. The main thesis of the book is that ethnic political mobilization is essentially a function of deeply-felt grievances on the part of the groups so mobilized.
The Roots of Evil
by John Kekes"Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain why people act in these ways and what can be done about it."—John KekesThe first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793–94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943–44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.
The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant's Reflective-Teleological Judgment (Contributions to Hermeneutics #11)
by Horst RuthrofThis book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant’s Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
The Roots of Metaphor: A Multidisciplinary Study in Aesthetics (Routledge Revivals)
by Norman KreitmanFirst published in 1999, this study begins with a review of basic biological functions, stressing the importance to the organism of various kinds of information. The 'biology of information' must consider how the brain reacts to new, as contrasted with expected, inputs; these differences are discussed chiefly in relation to language. In language processing predictability is of prime importance, but to clarify what this entails it is necessary to consider just how our concepts are organized. Personal construct theory throws considerable light on this question, but is less informative about fantasy, which requires separate exploration. The main chapter focuses on the origins and interpretation of metaphor, in which quite disparate concepts are united but which we understand nevertheless. Existing theories of metaphor are unsatisfactory, but personal construct theory again helps resolve the psychological-linguistic issues. Finally, the question is raised as to why a good metaphor produces a response which is recognizably aesthetic in character, and its implications for our aesthetic responses to other art forms are explored.
The Roots of Metaphor: A Multidisciplinary Study in Aesthetics (Routledge Revivals)
by Norman KreitmanFirst published in 1999, this study begins with a review of basic biological functions, stressing the importance to the organism of various kinds of information. The 'biology of information' must consider how the brain reacts to new, as contrasted with expected, inputs; these differences are discussed chiefly in relation to language. In language processing predictability is of prime importance, but to clarify what this entails it is necessary to consider just how our concepts are organized. Personal construct theory throws considerable light on this question, but is less informative about fantasy, which requires separate exploration. The main chapter focuses on the origins and interpretation of metaphor, in which quite disparate concepts are united but which we understand nevertheless. Existing theories of metaphor are unsatisfactory, but personal construct theory again helps resolve the psychological-linguistic issues. Finally, the question is raised as to why a good metaphor produces a response which is recognizably aesthetic in character, and its implications for our aesthetic responses to other art forms are explored.
The Roots of Normativity
by Joseph RazThe Roots of Normativity concerns one of the most basic philosophical questions: how to explain normativity in its many guises. Over many decades, Joseph Raz has sought to develop an answer to this question, according to which understanding normativity is understanding the roles and structures of normative reasons which, when they are reasons for action, are based on values. This volume collects twelve chapters which succinctly lay out his view, and determine its contours through some of its applications. The chapters also aim to clarify the ways in which normative reasons are made for rational beings like us. Raz's value-based account of normativity is brought to bear on many aspects of the lives of rational beings and their agency, and in particular, their ability to form and maintain relationships, and to live their lives as social beings with a sense of their identity.
The Roots of Normativity
by Joseph RazThe Roots of Normativity concerns one of the most basic philosophical questions: how to explain normativity in its many guises. Over many decades, Joseph Raz has sought to develop an answer to this question, according to which understanding normativity is understanding the roles and structures of normative reasons which, when they are reasons for action, are based on values. This volume collects twelve chapters which succinctly lay out his view, and determine its contours through some of its applications. The chapters also aim to clarify the ways in which normative reasons are made for rational beings like us. Raz's value-based account of normativity is brought to bear on many aspects of the lives of rational beings and their agency, and in particular, their ability to form and maintain relationships, and to live their lives as social beings with a sense of their identity.
The Roots Of Normativity (PDF)
by Joseph Raz Ulrike HeuerThe Roots of Normativity concerns one of the most basic philosophical questions: how to explain normativity in its many guises. Over many decades, Joseph Raz has sought to develop an answer to this question, according to which understanding normativity is understanding the roles and structures of normative reasons which, when they are reasons for action, are based on values. This volume collects twelve chapters which succinctly lay out his view, and determine its contours through some of its applications. The chapters also aim to clarify the ways in which normative reasons are made for rational beings like us. Raz's value-based account of normativity is brought to bear on many aspects of the lives of rational beings and their agency, and in particular, their ability to form and maintain relationships, and to live their lives as social beings with a sense of their identity.
The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India
by M. WilliamsThis book compares the Communist parties of India and South Africa in their pursuits of socialist democracy. Williams looks at their organizational characteristics, party history, and their competing tendencies, as well as how they have pushed forward their similar ideologies within their unique political and economic environments.
The roots of populism: Neoliberalism and working-class lives
by Brian ElliottSince the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What has led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers’ movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years.
The roots of populism: Neoliberalism and working-class lives
by Brian ElliottSince the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What has led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers’ movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years.
The Roots Of Romanticism: Conferencias A. W. Mellon En Bellas Artes, 1965, The National Gallery Of Art, Washington Dc (A. W. Mellon Lectures In The Fine Arts Ser. #179)
by Isaiah BerlinThe Roots of Romanticism is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated set of lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard since by a much wider audience on BBC radio. For Berli, the Romantics set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in ethicsm with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted tour de force Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our outlook today.
The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts #45)
by Isaiah BerlinA brilliant brief account of romanticism and its influence from one of the most important philosophers and intellectual historians of the twentieth centuryIn The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to them.
The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
by Isaiah Berlin Henry Hardy John GrayIn The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to them.
The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
by Isaiah Berlin Henry Hardy John GrayIn The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to them.
The Roots of Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics
by Alan A. GrometsteinGrometstein explains modern physics with enthusiasm, wit and insight. As he presents the usual milestones in the history of modern physics, his central focus is the historical debate regarding the nature of light: is it a particle or is it a wave? This book will be read by generations of students in physical science who seek a well written discussion of these important issues. Grometstein includes material which is quite recent, thus making the present volume particularly useful.
Roots of Underdevelopment: A New Economic and Political History of Latin America and the Caribbean
by Felipe Valencia CaicedoThis book brings together world-renowned experts and rising scholars to provide a collection of chapters examining the long-term impact of historical events on modern-day economic and political developments in Latin America. It uses a novel approach, stressing empirical contributions and state-of-the-art empirical methods for causal identification. Contributing authors apply these cutting-edge tools to their topics of expertise, giving readers a compendium of frontier research in the region. Important questions of colonialism, migration, elites, land tenure, corruption, and conflict are examined and discussed in an approachable style. The book features a conclusion from Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. This book is critical reader for scholars and students of economic history, political science, political economy, development studies, and Latin American, and Caribbean studies.
Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance: The Banality of Good
by Leonidas K. CheliotisWhich practices count as resistance? Why, where, and how does resistance emerge? When is resistance effective, and when is it truly progressive? In addressing these questions, this book brings together novel theoretical and empirical perspectives from a diverse range of disciplinary and geographical locales.
Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures
by Ananta Kumar GiriThis book seeks to find creative and transformative relationship among roots and routes and create a new dynamics of awakening so that we can overcome the problems of closed and xenopbhobic roots and rootless cosmopolitanism. The book draws upon multiple philosophical and spiritual traditions of the world such as Siva Tantra, Buddhist phenomenology and Peircean Semiotics and discusses the works of Ibn-Arabi, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Raimon Panikkar,among others.The book is transdiscipinary building on creative thinking from philosophy, anthropology, political studies and literature. It is a unique contribution for forging a new relationship between roots and routes in our contemporary fragile and complex world.
Rorty: Rorty (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Gideon CalderPopular Great Philosopher's Series.An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy - most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) - Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe. There is no real school of Rortianism. But Rorty-bashing is almost an industry in itself. He is a renegade to purists, a reactionary to radicals and a subversive to conservatives. And yet he presents his ideas as the culmination and extension of many of the most familiar and fashionable trends in contemporary thinking.
Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections
by B. FrazierThis book seeks to clarify the concept of irony and its relation to moral commitment. Frazier provides a discussion of the contrasting accounts of Richard Rorty and Søren Kierkegaard. He argues that, while Rorty's position is much more defensible and thoughtful than his detractors acknowledge, it is surprisingly more parochial than Kierkegaard's.