3,288 research outputs found
Learning one's native tongue: citizenship, contestation and conflict in America
No full textCitizenship is much more than the right to vote. It is a collection of political capacities constantly up for debate. From Socrates to contemporary American politics, the question of what it means to be an authentic citizen is an inherently political one. With Learning One’s Native Tongue, Tracy B. Strong explores the development of the concept of American citizenship and what it means to belong to this country,starting with the Puritans in the seventeenth century and continuing to the present day. He examines the conflicts over the meaning of citizenship in the writings and speeches of prominent thinkers and leaders ranging from John Winthrop and Roger Williams to Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin Roosevelt, among many others who have participated in these important cultural and political debates. The criteria that define what being a citizen entails change over time and in response to historical developments, and they are thus also often the source of controversy and conflict, as with voting rights for women and African Americans. Strong looks closely at these conflicts and the ensuing changes in the conception of citizenship, paying attention to what difference each change makes and what each particular conception entails socially and politically
Politics without vision: thinking without a banister in the twentieth century
No full textFrom Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively “thinking without a banister.”Politics without Vision takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse.Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured—without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, Politics without Vision is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields
Nietzsche and rhetoric as self-education
No full textNietzsche writings as inducing self-education and critiqu
Hawthorne, the politics of sin and puritanism
No full textAnalysis of the Scarlett Letter and other works
The social and political construction of the Cold War
No full textAnalysis of the multiple factors that led to the Cold Wa
Review: Lincoln’s political thought, George Kateb, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015, xiii+236pp., ISBN: 978-0674368163
No full textExgended review of this boo
Society, politics and music in Rousseau
No full textDiscussion of music and representation in relation to the work of B. Barbe
The Politics of Objectivity. An Essay on the Foundations of Political Conflict. By Steinberger Peter J. . Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 275p.
No full text- …
