Thoreau's Alternative Economics: Work, Liberty, and Democratic Cultivation

1998 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-856 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Walker
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Employment Conditions ◽  
Alternative Economics ◽  
Political Ideal ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Advice Book

Henry Thoreau's Walden is frequently read as the tale of a disaffected Romantic individualist escaping the rigors of community and modern society to seek refuge in a pondside idyll. I argue that this is a fundamental misreading which misses the political import of the book. Walden reveals itself to be a democratic advice-book focusing on the tensions between the political ideal of free self-direction and the unfavorable work conditions that laborers often face. Thoreau's goal is to set out a strategy by which economically vulnerable citizens may enact their liberty and autonomy in threatening employment conditions. To that end, Thoreau reformats themes and practices from various ancient philosophical traditions. Walden is one of the few texts in our tradition in which strategies are thought through for the individual laborer attempting to maintain freedom while at the same time making a living. It therefore merits our closest attention.

LEADERSHIP AS A FACTOR OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY: RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN RESEARCHES

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 12-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Комлева ◽  
Valentina Komleva
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Function Integration ◽  
The Individual

Events of recent years have shown the importance of the individual political leaders in choosing the ways and models of development of different societies, the ability to successful governance. The article investigates the political leadership and its role and place in the sustainable development of society, domestic and foreign theories and approaches to the study of this phenomenon are analyzed. The author discusses features, problems and trends in the study of political leadership, which is understood as the political capital of the company in most modern Western research, as a condition of its successful development; and a political leader (in terms of importance for the sustainable development of society) as a significant person of the political process, to make political decisions, exercising public political activity, function integration and consolidation of the social forces that specifies the activity of state and / or public institutions, political movements to influence policy situation. The research results suggest that the specificity of the present stage of the study of political leadership is to increase the attention of scientists to the subject of the crisis of political leadership, the needs of leaders by modern society who influence the members of society positively, develop the state effectively.

The individual and mass housing: the delicate balance

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-256
Author(s):  
Michael Trencher
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Housing ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
Communal Living ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Point Of Departure

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

scholarly journals The Institutionalization of Political Humor as a Form of Reflection

2014 ◽  
pp. 219-227
Author(s):  
S. S. Melnikov
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Political Humor ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

The paper analyzes the genesis of modern political humor and determines its position in the system of spiritual relations in society. The formation of the need to comprehend social relations by means of humor during progressive transition from traditional to modern society is investigated. We note that humor is essentially a social phenomenon. A fundamental distinction between humor formed in the modern period and humor of previous times is the presence of reflexivity. New kind of humor has also dealt with political relations began to be interpreted by means of humor culture. In the course of research we found that comic interpretation of politics became feasible due to the legislative fixation of individual rights as a part of modern political culture. The emancipated personality demonstrates more complicated expectations to a political institute and experiences acute dissatisfaction as state authorities have often made decisions not appropriate to such expectations. For the individual as sovereign entity political humor became a sort of social and psychological compensation. An author pays attention to the fact that the social subject having shown such a reaction was formed during the second half of XIX and the beginning of XX centuries because of the dissemination of the print media and was named «the audience». The audience became a key agent of humorous reflection about the political institute. As a case that grounds the applicability of this theory to the practice the paper considers the example of inclusion of specific comic genre (political caricature) in the social discourse in the West and in Russia.

scholarly journals Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Zied Khamari
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
The Political ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
Similar Tendency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
The Individual

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.

Geheimnis und Tod

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Samuel Salzborn
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

The contribution is based on the findings of the theoretical research on antisemitism, while a proposal for a theory of modern antisemitism is formulated. Structural formations of civil society and the socialization of the individual are taken into account. Because antisemitism have to be understood as a negative guiding principle of modernity, a theory of antisemitism must start with the structural forms and contradictions of modern society itself. But it must also go beyond that – and locate the theoretical core of antisemitism in the political itself. At the center of these considerations, the relationship the public, private, and the secret is located, and also the enchanted disenchantment of modern society in its relationship to death.

Three questions to political economy (An attempt of system introspection)

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kleiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Linear Component ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
System Paradigm

The development of the system paradigm in economic science leads to the formulation of a number of important questions to the political economy as one of the basic directions of economic theory. In this article, on the basis of system introspection, three questions are considered. The first is the relevance of the class approach to the structuring of the socio-economic space; the second is the feasibility of revising the notion of property in the modern world; the third is the validity of the notion of changing formations as the sequence of “slave-owning system — feudal system — capitalist system”. It is shown that in modern society the system approach to the structuring of socio-economic space is more relevant than the class one. Today the classical notion of “property” does not reflect the diversity of production and economic relations in society and should be replaced by the notion of “system property”, which provides a significant expansion of the concepts of “subject of property” and “object of property”. The change of social formations along with the linear component has a more influential cyclic constituent and obeys the system-wide cyclic regularity that reflects the four-cycle sequence of the dominance of one of the subsystems of the macrosystem: project, object, environment and process.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Transformation of power sources in post-modern conditions: (macro)sociological implementation of M. Mann's concept

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Nikita Ravochkin
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Sources ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Military Forces

From the standpoint of historical (macro) sociology, the article examines the main directions of transformation of the sources of power identified by the English scientist M. Mann in the realities of post-modern society. The essential characteristics of the four sources of social power, which include ideology, military forces, economics and political characteristics of the organization of states, are considered. The vectors of transformations of these sources of power, contributing to changes in the image of power at the present time, are noted. The interdependence of transformations and the specificity of their manifestation at the institutional level in the political and legal sphere of public life are shown.

PHILOSOPHICAL PROPAEDEUTICS IN THE SYSTEM OF PRESCHOOL EDUCATION

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Gan N.Yu. ◽  
Ponomareva L.I. ◽  
Obukhova K.A.
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Preschool Education ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Training

Today, worldview, spiritual and moral problems that have always been reflected in education and upbringing come to the fore in society. In this situation, there is a demand for philosophical categories. One of the priority goals of education in modern conditions is the formation of a reasonable, reflexive person who is able to analyze their actions and the actions of other people. Modern science is characterized by an understanding of the absolute value and significance of childhood in the development of the individual, which implies the need for its multilateral study. In the conditions of democratization of all spheres of life, the child ceases to be a passive object of education and training, and becomes an active carrier of their own meanings of being and the subject of world creation. One of the realities of childhood is philosophizing, so it is extremely timely to address the identification of its place and role in the world of childhood. Children's philosophizing is extremely poorly studied, although the need for its analysis is becoming more obvious. Children's philosophizing is one of the forms of philosophical reflection, which has its own qualitative specificity, on the one hand, and commonality with all other forms of philosophizing, on the other. The social relevance of the proposed research lies in the fact that children's philosophizing can be considered as an intellectual indicator of a child's socialization, since the process of reflection involves the adoption and development of culture. Modern society, in contrast to the traditional one, is ready to "accept" a philosophizing child, which means that it is necessary to determine the main characteristics and conditions of children's philosophizing.

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