Author: Janine R. Wedel File Type: pdf It can feel like were swimming in a sea of corruption. Its unclear who exactly is in charge and what role they play. The same influential people seem to reappear time after time in different professional guises, pressing their own agendas in one venue after another. According to award-winning public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine Wedel, these are the powerful shadow elite, the main players in a vexing new system of power and influence.In this groundbreaking book, Wedel charts how this shadow elite, loyal only to their own, challenge both governments rules of accountability and business codes of competition to accomplish their own goals. From the Harvard economists who helped privatize post-Soviet Russia and the neoconservatives who have helped privatize American foreign policy (culminating with the debacle that is Iraq) to the many private players who daily make public decisions without public input, these manipulators both grace the front pages and operate behind the scenes. Wherever they maneuver, they flout once-sacrosanct boundaries between state and private. Profoundly original, Shadow Elite gives us the tools we need to recognize these powerful yet elusive players and comprehend the new system. Nothing less than our ability for self-government and our freedom are at stake.**

Author: Mario Poceski File Type: pdf Under the leadership of Mazu Daoyi (709-788) and his numerous disciples, the Hongzhou School emerged as the dominant tradition of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China during the middle part of the Tang dynasty(618-907). Mario Poceski offers a systematic examination of the Hongzhou Schools momentous growth and rise to preeminence as the bearer of Chan orthodoxy, and analyzes its doctrines against the backdrop of the intellectual and religious milieus of Tang China. Poceski demonstrates that the Hongzhou School represented the first emergence of an empire-wide Chan tradition that had strongholds throughout China and replaced the various fragmented Schools of early Chan with an inclusive orthodoxy. Poceskis study is based on the earliest strata of permanent sources, rather than on the later apocryphal encounter dialogue stories regularly used to construe widely-accepted but historically unwarranted interpretations about the nature of Chan in the Tang dynasty. He challenges the traditional and popularly-accepted view of the Hongzhou School as a revolutionary movement that rejected mainstream mores and teachings, charting a new path for Chans independent growth as a unique Buddhist tradition. This view, he argues, rests on a misreading of key elements of the Hongzhou Schools history. Rather than acting as an unorthodox movement, the Hongzhou Schools success was actually based largely on its ability to mediate tensions between traditionalist and iconoclastic tendencies. Going beyond conventional romanticized interpretations that highlight the radical character of the Hongzhou School, Poceski shows that there was much greater continuity between early and classical Chan-and between the Hongzhou School and the rest of Tang Buddhism-than previously thought. **

Author: Martin van Gelderen File Type: pdf These volumes offer the first comprehensive study of republicanism as a shared European heritage. Professors Skinner and van Gelderen have assembled an internationally distinguished set of contributors whose studies highlight the richness and diversity of European republican traditions. Volume I looks at anti-monarchism in Europe, humanist theories of citizenship and the constitutional nature of the republic. Volume II is devoted to the study of key republican values --liberty, virtue, politeness and toleration. It also addresses the role of women and relationship between republicanism and the rise of a commercial society.ReviewThese columes will add much to the understanding of republicanism in early modern Europe. Highly recommended. Choice Book DescriptionThese volumes offer the first comprehensive study of republicanism as a shared European heritage. Professors Skinner and van Gelderen have assembled an internationally distinguished set of contributors whose studies highlight the richness and diversity of European republican traditions. Volume I looks at anti-monarchism in Europe, humanist theories of citizenship and the constitutional nature of the republic. Volume II is devoted to the study of key republican values --liberty, virtue, politeness and toleration. It also addresses the role of women and relationship between republicanism and the rise of a commercial society.

Author: Howard Pickett File Type: pdf This above all To thine own self be true, is an idealor pretensebelonging as much to Hamlet as to the carefully choreographed realms of todays politics and social media. But what if our true selves arent our best selves? Instagrams curated portraits of authenticity often betray the paradox of our performative selves sincerity obliges us to be who we actually are, yet ethics would have us be better. Drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant, Sren Kierkegaard, and Emmanuel Levinas, Howard Pickett presents a vivid defense of virtuous hypocrisy. Our fetish for transparency tends to allow us to forget that the self may not be worthy of expression, and may become unethically narcissistic in the act of expression. Alert to this ambivalence, these great thinkers advocate incongruent ways of being. Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity offers an engaging new appraisal not only of the ethics of theatricality but of the theatricality of ethics, contending that pursuit of ones ideal self entails a relational and ironic performance of identity that lies beyond the pure notion of expressive individualism.