Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination

Author: Patrick McGee

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501320068

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Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.


Book Synopsis Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination by : Patrick McGee

Download or read book Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination written by Patrick McGee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination

Author: Patrick McGee

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 150132005X

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Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.


Book Synopsis Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination by : Patrick McGee

Download or read book Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination written by Patrick McGee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd

Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd

Author: Judith Paltin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1108842232

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This book argues that literary modernists engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities; their work clarifies how popular subjectivity evolves from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with conditions of oppression.


Book Synopsis Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by : Judith Paltin

Download or read book Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd written by Judith Paltin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that literary modernists engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities; their work clarifies how popular subjectivity evolves from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with conditions of oppression.

Imagined Democracies

Imagined Democracies

Author: Yaron Ezrahi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107529922

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This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism, and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace, not violence, and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.


Book Synopsis Imagined Democracies by : Yaron Ezrahi

Download or read book Imagined Democracies written by Yaron Ezrahi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism, and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace, not violence, and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Comedy, Book One

Comedy, Book One

Author: Patrick McGee

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1725266776

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Comedy is a philosophical poem for the twenty-first century inspired by Dante’s Commedia. It can be read as an ironic dream or fantasy that addresses the democratic idea. Book One, Archival Resurrections, explores the transindividual nature of human thought, which autonomously expands while it passes through different minds in historical time. On a walk in Seattle, the Narrator encounters his dead teacher, who becomes his guide through a world inside his own head where he encounters people from his personal past and past philosophers, poets, and statesmen, including Dante, Christine de Pizan, Spinoza, William Blake, Jefferson, Hamilton, Sally Hemings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and others. Part of the poem takes place in a library in the shape of an inverted cone, the antithesis of Dante’s purgatory. Later, under the assumption that imagination is topological or plastic, there are visitations to Blake’s cottage in Felpham, Lincoln’s White House, Marx’s London, and Wilde’s and Joyce’s Dublin. Joyce’s Volta cinema is the gateway to Book Two, entitled Cinematic Revolutions, which will envision the twentieth century through its signature aesthetic form. Book Three, as yet untitled, will explore lived cityscapes as forms of life that gestate in themselves different possibilities for the future.


Book Synopsis Comedy, Book One by : Patrick McGee

Download or read book Comedy, Book One written by Patrick McGee and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is a philosophical poem for the twenty-first century inspired by Dante’s Commedia. It can be read as an ironic dream or fantasy that addresses the democratic idea. Book One, Archival Resurrections, explores the transindividual nature of human thought, which autonomously expands while it passes through different minds in historical time. On a walk in Seattle, the Narrator encounters his dead teacher, who becomes his guide through a world inside his own head where he encounters people from his personal past and past philosophers, poets, and statesmen, including Dante, Christine de Pizan, Spinoza, William Blake, Jefferson, Hamilton, Sally Hemings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and others. Part of the poem takes place in a library in the shape of an inverted cone, the antithesis of Dante’s purgatory. Later, under the assumption that imagination is topological or plastic, there are visitations to Blake’s cottage in Felpham, Lincoln’s White House, Marx’s London, and Wilde’s and Joyce’s Dublin. Joyce’s Volta cinema is the gateway to Book Two, entitled Cinematic Revolutions, which will envision the twentieth century through its signature aesthetic form. Book Three, as yet untitled, will explore lived cityscapes as forms of life that gestate in themselves different possibilities for the future.

Comedy, Book Two

Comedy, Book Two

Author: Patrick McGee

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 166674171X

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Comedy is a philosophical poem in the form of waking dream, inspired by Dante and William Blake. In book two, Cinematic Revolutions, the narrator, having passed through a cinema screen at the end of book one, arrives in the middle of a World War I field of dying men. An indescribable human figure appears who warns that these cinematic images are not real but projections of the cinematic mind with its power of empathy. Assuming different shapes and identities, this generic being becomes the narrator’s guide. Through a series of dialogues and encounters, cinema and the visual culture it generates are identified with a cultural revolution—the nonviolent revolution—that surpasses the violent revolutions of the twentieth century. This view is articulated through encounters with Russian revolutionary Trotsky, twelve modernist writers and the philosopher Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, three dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao), a cinematic Jesus Christ, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Interspersed among these encounters are cinematic visions from directors like Eisenstein, Chaplin, and others. From Paris to Memphis, passing through Pasolini’s black and white desert in Gospel according to Saint Matthew, descending into the dark underworld of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rising into a Hollywood heaven of the forties, and standing on top of the Empire State Building with King Kong, cinematic images channel revolutionary desires and the necessity of nonviolence.


Book Synopsis Comedy, Book Two by : Patrick McGee

Download or read book Comedy, Book Two written by Patrick McGee and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is a philosophical poem in the form of waking dream, inspired by Dante and William Blake. In book two, Cinematic Revolutions, the narrator, having passed through a cinema screen at the end of book one, arrives in the middle of a World War I field of dying men. An indescribable human figure appears who warns that these cinematic images are not real but projections of the cinematic mind with its power of empathy. Assuming different shapes and identities, this generic being becomes the narrator’s guide. Through a series of dialogues and encounters, cinema and the visual culture it generates are identified with a cultural revolution—the nonviolent revolution—that surpasses the violent revolutions of the twentieth century. This view is articulated through encounters with Russian revolutionary Trotsky, twelve modernist writers and the philosopher Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, three dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao), a cinematic Jesus Christ, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Interspersed among these encounters are cinematic visions from directors like Eisenstein, Chaplin, and others. From Paris to Memphis, passing through Pasolini’s black and white desert in Gospel according to Saint Matthew, descending into the dark underworld of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rising into a Hollywood heaven of the forties, and standing on top of the Empire State Building with King Kong, cinematic images channel revolutionary desires and the necessity of nonviolence.

Rule Breaking and Political Imagination

Rule Breaking and Political Imagination

Author: Kenneth A. Shepsle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-09-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 022647335X

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“Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.


Book Synopsis Rule Breaking and Political Imagination by : Kenneth A. Shepsle

Download or read book Rule Breaking and Political Imagination written by Kenneth A. Shepsle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.

Not for Profit

Not for Profit

Author: Martha C. Nussbaum

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 069117332X

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In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.


Book Synopsis Not for Profit by : Martha C. Nussbaum

Download or read book Not for Profit written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

Monstrous Imagination

Monstrous Imagination

Author: Marie-Hélène Huet

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780674586512

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What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.


Book Synopsis Monstrous Imagination by : Marie-Hélène Huet

Download or read book Monstrous Imagination written by Marie-Hélène Huet and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.

Democracy Incorporated

Democracy Incorporated

Author: Sheldon S. Wolin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0691178488

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Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.


Book Synopsis Democracy Incorporated by : Sheldon S. Wolin

Download or read book Democracy Incorporated written by Sheldon S. Wolin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.