The Illusions of Progress


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.




The End of Illusions


Book Description

We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.




Voluntary Sustainability Standards


Book Description

Sustainability standards, their systems, role and impact -- VSS at a crossroads -- Is there any future perspective for VSS and what might it look like?




Illusions of Progress


Book Description

Today, the word "neoliberal" is used to describe an epochal shift toward market-oriented governance begun in the 1970s. Yet the roots of many of neoliberalism's policy tools can be traced to the ideas and practices of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms "supply-side liberalism," a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and, later, racial progress to a variety of economic development initiatives. In communities across the country, otherwise conservative business elites administered liberal public works, urban redevelopment, and housing programs. But by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving. When President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty--which prioritized direct partnerships with poor and racially marginalized citizens--businesspeople, Republicans, and soon, a rising generation of New Democrats sought to rein in its seeming excesses by reinventing and redeploying many of the policy tools and commitments pioneered on liberalism's supply side: public-private partnerships, market-oriented solutions, fiscal "realism," and, above all, subsidies for business-led growth now promised to blunt, and perhaps ultimately replace, programs for poor and marginalized Americans. In this wide-ranging book, Brent Cebul illuminates the often-overlooked structures of governance, markets, and public debt through which America's warring political ideologies have been expressed and transformed. From Washington, D.C. to the declining Rustbelt and emerging Sunbelt and back again, Illusions of Progress reveals the centrality of public and private forms of profit that have defined the enduring boundaries of American politics, opportunity, and inequality-- in an era of liberal ascendance and an age of neoliberal retrenchment.




By the Grace of Guile


Book Description

Only a noble lie can save us from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of skepticism about the meaning of life and the universe.




From Georges Sorel (Volume 2)


Book Description

As his editor John L. Stanley points out, Georges Sorel was "that fascinating polymath." This volume, the third in his selected works in the English language published by Transaction, emphasizes Sorel's extraordinary writings in the philosophy of science, religion, culture, and art. For those who know Sorel only as author of Reflections on Violence, the present volume will come as a forceful reminder of the range and depth of Sorelian efforts to construct a world view. Sorel is throughout concerned with the moral development of human beings. In this sense, his writings on politics are of a piece with his writings on religion, "facticity" of human history and society. Sorel's earliest writings were on religion, and key portions of that period are reflected in selections here. And he went on from there to study the sociology of science, the ways in which science fits into the cultural history of civilization and present day social relationships of industrial society. Stanley provides a profound framework based on two decades of close study and translation of Sorel's texts. He helps to explain how the partial theories of Sorel lead to holistic intellectual consequences, how the psychological method does not foreclose political activism, and how historical limits can be transformed against a background of aesthetics or considerations of taste. He shows that Sorel comes as a close as Manheim and Simmel and Durkheim to the creation of a modern social science--albeit he lacks the overall philosophical theorems of people like Marx and Weber. In Sorel we have a first-class mind at work. And in Stanley, we have a first-class analyst at work. Together, the volume adds up to something special for the political scientist, sociologist, art historian, theologian--in short for those to whom the ideal of a human science endures. John L. Stanley is professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside. He is the author of The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel. He has written many articles and reviews on the history of European political theory. With his wife, Charlotte Stanley, he has been long engaged in the translation of the works of Georges Sorel.




Behind the Mirrors


Book Description

Reproduction of the original: Behind the Mirrors by Clinton W. Gilbert




The Unitarian Register


Book Description




George Bernard Shaw: Lectures & Essays


Book Description

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) was an Irish playwright, essayist, novelist and short story writer and wrote more than 60 plays. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (an adaptation of his own play). This edition includes: Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) The Impossibilities Of Anarchism (1895) The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (1898) The Revolutionist's Handbook And Pocket Companion (1903) Maxims For Revolutionists (1903) First Aid to Critics: Preface to Major Barbara (1905) On Doctors: Preface to The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) The New Theology (1907) On Marriage: Preface to Getting Married How to Write A Popular Play: An Essay (1909) A Treatise on Parents and Children: An Essay (1910) On the Prospects of Christianity: Preface to Androcles and the Lion (1912) What do Men of Letters Say?: The New York Times Articles on War (1915) "Common Sense About the War" "Bennett States the German Case" Open Letter to President Wilson Memories of Oscar Wilde (1916) On Darwinism and Evolution: Preface to Back to Methuselah (1921) A Letter and A Speech by Bernard Shaw: Letter to Beatrice Webb (1898) On Socialism: A Speech (1885) George Bernard Shaw: A Biography By G. K. Chesterton The Quintessence of Shaw By James Huneker Old and New Masters: Bernard Shaw By Robert Lynd George Bernard Shaw: A Poem by Oliver Herford




Radicalism In The Contemporary Age, Volume 2


Book Description

To understand contemporary society, it has become more and more essential to understand the phenomenon of radicalism—the aspirations of radical movements, the strategies and tactics of radicalism, and the impact of radicalism on contemporary society. Radicalism in the Contemporary Age grew out of the recognition of this need. A study in three volum