Author: Timothy Miller File Type: pdf Communes in America 19752000 is the final volume in Millers trilogy on the history of American intentional communities. Providing a comprehensive survey of communities during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Miller offers a detailed study of their character, scope, and evolution.Between 1975 and 2000, the American communal experience evolved dramatically in response to social and environmental challenges that confronted American society as a whole. Long-accepted social norms and institutionsfamily, religion, medicine, and politicswere questioned as the divorce rate increased, interest in spiritual teachings from Asia grew, and alternative medicine gained ground. Cohousing flourished as a response to an increasing sense of alienation and a need to balance community and private lives. At the same time, Americans became increasingly concerned with environmental protection and preservation of our limited resources. In the face of these social changes, communal living flourished as people sought out communities oflike-minded individuals to pursue a higher purpose. Organized topically, each chapter in the volume provides basic information about various types of communities and detailed examples of each type, from ecovillages and radical Christian communities to pagan communes and cohousing experiments. Miller also takes a step back to look at the prevalence of communal living in American life over the twentieth century. Based on exhaustive research, Millers final volume provides an indispensable survey and guide to understanding utopianisms enduring presence in American culture.
Author: Raymond Geuss
File Type: pdf
Much political thinking today, particularly that influenced by liberalism, assumes a clear distinction between the public and the private, and holds that the correct understanding of this should weigh heavily in our attitude to human goods. It is, for instance, widely held that the state may address human action in the public realm but not in the private. In Public Goods, Private Goods Raymond Geuss exposes the profound flaws of such thinking and calls for a more nuanced approach. Drawing on a series of colorful examples from the ancient world, he illustrates some of the many ways in which actions can in fact be understood as public or private.The first chapter discusses Diogenes the Cynic, who flouted conventions about what should be public and what should be private by, among other things, masturbating in the Athenian marketplace. Next comes an analysis of Julius Caesars decision to defy the Senate by crossing the Rubicon with his army in doing so, Caesar asserted his dignity as a private person while acting in a public capacity. The third chapter considers St. Augustines retreat from public life to contemplate his own, private spiritual condition. In the fourth, Geuss goes on to examine recent liberal views, questioning, in particular, common assumptions about the importance of public dialogue and the purportedly unlimited possibilities humans have for reaching consensus. He suggests that the liberal concern to maintain and protect, even at a very high cost, an inviolable private sphere for each individual is confused.Geuss concludes that a view of politics and morality derived from Hobbes and Nietzsche is a more realistic and enlightening way than modern liberalism to think about human goods. Ultimately, he cautions, a simplistic understanding of privacy leads to simplistic ideas about what the state is and is not justified in doing.**
Author: Andrew Szasz
File Type: pdf
Not long ago, people did not worry about the food they ate. They did not worry about the water they drank or the air they breathed. It never occurred to them that eating, drinking water, satisfying basic, mundane bodily needs might be a dangerous thing to do. Parents thought it was good for their kids to go outside, get some sun. Thats all changed now. from the Introduction Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate environment tap water is contaminated with chemicals foods contain pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics even the air we breathe, outside and indoors, carries invisible poisons. Yet we have responded not by pushing for governmental regulation, but instead by shopping. What accounts for this swift and dramatic response? And what are its unintended consequences? Andrew Szasz examines this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety. Within a couple of decades, he reveals, bottled water and water filters, organic food, green household cleaners and personal hygiene products, and natural bedding and clothing have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Szasz sees these fatalistic, individual responses to collective environmental threats as an inverted form of quarantine, aiming to shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out. Sharply critiquing these products effectiveness as well as the unforeseen political consequences of relying on them to keep us safe from harm, Szasz argues that when consumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them. To achieve real protection, real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive reform. Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994).
Author: David Cole
File Type: epub
From the national legal director of the ACLU, an essential guidebook for anyone seeking to stand up for fundamental civil liberties and rights One of Washington Posts Notable Nonfiction Books of 2016 In an age of executive overreach, what role do American citizens have in safeguarding our Constitution and defending liberty? Must we rely on the federal courts, and the Supreme Court above all, to protect our rights? In Engines of Liberty, the esteemed legal scholar David Cole argues that we all have a part to play in the grand civic dramas of our era--and in a revised introduction and conclusion, he proposes specific tactics for fighting Donald Trumps policies.Examining the most successful rights movements of the last thirty years, Cole reveals how groups of ordinary Americans confronting long odds have managed, time and time again, to convince the courts to grant new rights and protect existing ones. Engines of Liberty is a fundamentally new explanation of how our Constitution works and the part citizens play in it. **
Author: Frederik Coene
File Type: pdf
The Caucasus is one of the most complicated regions in the world with many different peoples and political units, differing religious allegiances, and frequent conflicts, and where historically major world powers have clashed with each other. Until now there has been no single book for those wishing to learn about this complex region. This book fills the gap, providing a clear, comprehensive introduction to the Caucasus, which is suitable for all readers. It covers the geography the historical development of the region economics politics and government population religion and society culture and traditions alongside its conflicts and international relations. Written throughout in an accessible style, it requires no prior knowledge of the Caucasus. The book will be invaluable for those researching specific issues, as well as for readers needing a thorough introduction to the region.
Author: Ana MarĂa Ochoa Gautier
File Type: azw3
In this audacious book, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her acoustically tuned analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautiers groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.
Author: Andrew Cornell
File Type: pdf
Where do the tactics, strategies, and lifestyles of todays activists come from? Many ways of doing radical politics pioneered by Movement for a New Society in the 1970s and 1980s have become central to anti-authoritarian social movements consensus decision making, spokescouncils, communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, and co-operatively owned businesses. Andrew Cornells important contribution to US political history uses this story to raise crucial questions for activists today. Oppose and Propose is an engaging and accessible study, every page offers new insights. Andrew Cornells work appears in Letters from Young Activists and The University Against Itself. He helps produce the quarterly anti-capitalist magazine Left Turn. **About the Author Andrew Cornell Andrew Cornells doctoral work at NYUs American Studies Program traces the development of post-WWI anarchism in the United States. He has been active in anti-prison, global justice, and academic labor movements. His work appears in Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books, 2005) and The University Against Itself (Temple University Press, 2008). He helps produce the quarterly anti-capitalist magazine Left Turn.
Author: Richard Kearney
File Type: pdf
Kearney is one of the most exciting thinkers in the English-speaking world of continental philosophy.... and [he] joins hands with its fundamental project, asking the question whator whocomes after the God of metaphysics? -- John D. Caputo Engaging some of the most urgent issues in the philosophy of religion today, in this lively book Richard Kearney proposes that instead of thinking of God as actual, God might best be thought of as the possibility of the impossible. By pulling away from biblical perceptions of God and breaking with dominant theological traditions, Kearney draws on the work of Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, Heidegger, and others to provide a surprising and original answer to who or what God might be. For Kearney, the intersecting dimensions of impossibility propel religious experience and faith in new directions, notably toward views of God that are unforeseeable, unprogrammable, and uncertain. Important themes such as the phenomenology of the persona, the meaning of the unity of God, God and desire, notions of existence and differance, and faith in philosophy are taken up in this penetrating and original work. Richard Kearney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and University College, Dublin. He is author of many books on modern philosophy and culture, including Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, The Wake of Imagination, and The Poetics of Modernity. **