scholarly journals Freedom from God: Periyar and Religion

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Karthick Ram Manoharan
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Power ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
Lower Castes

This paper looks at South Indian rationalist and anti-caste leader Periyar EV Ramasamy’s approach to religion. Periyar saw Hinduism as a fundamental degradation of the non-Brahmin community in general, the Dalits in particular. Here, I draw parallels between Periyar and Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, especially with regards to their radical readings of religion and social power. Similar to Bakunin who inverts Christianity to look at Satan as the original free thinker, Periyar inverts Ramayana to consider the asura Ravana as a Dravidian hero and a victim of Brahminical supremacy. A militant atheist and an avowed enemy of God, Periyar was nevertheless aware of the importance of religion in social life, and I briefly explore his qualified support for Islam and Buddhism and his rationale for urging the lower castes to convert to these religions. I conclude that reading Periyar in the anarchist tradition might open up new ways of understanding his political thought.

Language as social practice

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Amouzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Analytical Investigation ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Discourse Processes ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Media ◽  
Stage Development ◽  
The One

This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran. More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to represent relevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly from critical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes, media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with this theoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform two complementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in social life; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the use of language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iran lends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of three competing discourse processes of ‘Islamization’, ‘Iranian Nationalism’ and ‘Western liberalism’, relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran.

The Nature of Political Thought

1923 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-215
Author(s):  
Raymond G. Gettell
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Philosophy Professor ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

In the introduction to his readings in political philosophy, Professor Coker says, “since the time of Plato there has been, in every philosophic age, some inquiry as to the justification of political organization in general, as to the relative merits of different political forms, and as to the appropriate position and privileges of the individual as master, member, or subject of the political order of society. Why do we have political organization? What in our present condition do we owe to it? What future benefits may we properly expect to derive from it? Are its purposes characteristically manifold and changing, or are they ultimately reducible to a few limited objects or to some single end? What is its best form? Who should control it? What is its proper relation to the ideas and sentiments of the community at its basis? What spheres of individual and social life is it incompetent to enter? Philosophers and publicists of various types have sought to answer these questions in abstract terms.”If an analysis be made of the questions with which political thought has been concerned, it is found that emphasis was placed at various periods upon widely different types of problems. In the medieval period political controversy centered in the contest for supremacy between spiritual and temporal authorities; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dominant interest was in the contest between monarchic and democratic theories of political organization; at present, the extent of state activities has come into prominence, and the connection between political and economic interests is especially close. Besides, political conditions have changed so greatly from age to age that the same problem had quite different meanings at different periods.

scholarly journals Przestrogi dla utopistów. Wizje optimum dóbr w historii idei w książce Andrzeja Waśkiewicza

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Orders

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.

Anonymous glory

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patchen Markell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Anonymous Processes ◽  
The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt’s political theory is often understood to rest on a celebration of action, the memorable words and deeds of named individuals, over against the anonymous processes constitutive of ‘labor’ and ‘society’. Yet at key moments in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt seems to signal a different relationship between political action and anonymity; and she does so in part via citations of the novels of William Faulkner. Using the apparently contradictory notion of ‘anonymous glory’ as a heuristic, this essay reconsiders Arendt’s political thought through readings of the novels she cites, A Fable and Intruder in the Dust. The essay argues that, for Arendt, a conception of action adequate to the scale of modern social power must somehow be both indelibly tied to individual deeds and immersed in a processual field that is indifferent to the needs for meaning or purpose or satisfaction that individuals bring to what they do; and that Arendt’s engagement with this problem both complicates the relation of action to its supposed opposites, and makes it more difficult to conceive of action’s recovery as a reliable source of theoretical or political redemption.

Justice in Western Political Thought (John Rawles model)

2019 ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Shtewi Abd Mutar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Public Beliefs

John Rawls is one of the most prominent Western philosophers of contemporary political thought in the 20th century. Through his writings he tried to establish the foundations on which the theory of justice was built in practice and in order to achieve and establish the foundations of justice among peoples. Justice is one of the most important values of civil society, The conflicts of individuals in all their colors and controls the laws of civil society and the construction of the theory is consistent with the results of the public beliefs of what is fair and what is not fair and makes this theory a pattern stands on what is said by the doctrine of public utility and the consequences of a process that can serve as a framework for social life valid and John Rawls believes that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as is the truth of intellectual systems. Whatever the theory is elegant and economical, it has to be rejected if it is not so honest. The rules and institutions, however efficient and well-formed, must be reformed or revoked if they are unfair.

Interaction of Global Crisis and Social and Political Thought

2011 ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
O. Bogomolov
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political System ◽  
Urgent Problem ◽  
Economic Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Reform Model

The relative weakness of the modern social and political thought is especially visible against the background of the global economic crisis and historical changes in the world. We see a trampling on outdated ideological and historical positions, as well as a lack of the ability to produce a generalized vision of the new trends and realities of social life, correctly assessing their meaning, direction, possible consequence. Most importantly, there is a failure to offer an adequate practical political vector of actions. The definition of the post-reform model of social and political system remains an urgent problem for Russia as well. Academic thought must provide political and economic practice by adequate indicators enabling to evaluate spiritual, moral and physical health of the society, efficiency of the governmental apparatus, the quality and professionalism of managers.

Performance, performativity and melodrama as dramatic substance in Hindi film song sequences

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-147
Author(s):  
Anna Morcom
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
New Method ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Key Nodes ◽  
Hindi Film

Abstract In this article, I explore the dramatic substance of Hindi film songs through an approach based in performance studies, which presents performance as the very stuff of social life, social identities and social power. Given this, the enactment of song sequences in the Hindi film narrative cannot be dramatically benign, or just excess, or just pleasure (however intense). I describe how song sequences perform and thereby manifest and reify love and romance in the film narrative. Using work on public spectacle and power by Foucault and the public sphere by Vasudevan, I further analyse how they connect the public, emotions of love, and social or familial struggle in various ways, embodying key nodes of melodrama. I then reflect, in these terms, on the recent curtailment of performed songs in Hindi films. I thereby present a new method for analysing the dramatic agency of screened or background songs in films.

Recognition and Redistribution

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patchen Markell
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Critical Theorist ◽  
Economic Injustice

This article engages in discussion on the concepts of recognition and redistribution in contemporary politic theory. It discusses the debate on the problem of identity-based injustice and the problem of economic injustice and charts the surprisingly diverse range of uses of the term recognition in recent political thought. It evaluates whether recognition is a discrete good or a general medium of social life and discusses the object of recognition and its relation to the idea of justice. It also analyses American critical theorist Nancy Fraser's views about the conflicts that arise between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution.

scholarly journals Kilka uwag o kryzysie i potrzebie filozofii polityki

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 151-177
Author(s):  
Michał R. Węsierski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Engineer

A philosopher of politics should not be a social engineer, even if he were to dabble in piecemeal engineering, in Popper’s sense; he should rather be a social surveyor, responsible for measuring a plot of land for development, for which politicians should in turn be responsible. That measured land is ordered by a system of philosophical notions and critical studies, together with comments on the history of political thought. One of the outcomes of a philosopher’s work should be an ordered thought, i.e. objective knowledge that includes genesis and evolution of philosophical notions, relationships between ideas, and presentation of the cultural background, from which those ideas originated. In this reconstruction work a philosopher of politics needs to move in between the allowed boundaries of the text under analysis. A philosopher does what others cannot do due to the separation of exact sciences from philosophy. Therefore, a philosopher is not beyond scientific inquiries; he can use them as confidently as representatives of those sciences. It can be argued that a philosopher has a unique position in the social life of every group.

scholarly journals “If happiness is not the aim of politics, then what is?”: Rorty versus Foucault

2011 ◽  
pp. 106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Małecki
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life

In this paper, I present a new account of Richard Rorty’s interpretation of Michel Foucault, which demonstrates that in the course of his career, Rorty presented several diverse (often mutually exclusive) criticisms of Foucault’s political thought. These give different interpretations of what he took to be the flaws of that thought, but also provide different explanations as to the sources of these flaws. I argue that Rorty’s specific criticisms can be divided into two overall groups. Sometimes he saw Foucault’s rejection of bourgeois democracies and bourgeois utopias as a specific case of his general critique regarding the structures of social life as inherently oppressive. At other times he seemed to attribute to Foucault a view that—while not all forms of social life are inherently oppressive—bourgeois democracies certainly are, in a very specific and radical way. In conclusion I show that Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault should be understood in the context of his approach toward the ‘American Cultural Left.’

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