Cyril Levitt – författare

Written by authorities on the legal systems of France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Israel, and Canada, this book explores the growing confrontation between democracy and racist incitement. The authors consider existing and prospective laws as they trace the efforts to enact and enforce laws that can curb racism in the early stages of its growth without violating democratic freedoms.Throughout the book, the authors discuss their own legal and political cultures and how the subject countries are affected by historical encounters with racism. Both France and Britain have strong racist political forces and existing laws to combat them. Special attention is given to Le Pen, whose electoral support has been estimated nationally at more than twenty percent, and to the effect Britain's new legislation has had on the country's racist movement. The United States represents a case where strong constitutional guarantees against impingement upon freedom of expression have prevented the passage or juridical validation of laws restricting racist incitement. Israel finds itself struggling to define a legal remedy that can be used against racist incitement by the Kahane movement. Canada, now seeking a legal climate that will foster multiculturalism, strives to define laws against incitement that will be consistent with its newly established Charter of Freedom. And Germany, as it faces the enormous problems resulting from unification, is forced to reflect upon its own past and the challenges that an active racist movement poses for the country's future. Recommended for sociologists, political scientists, and criminal law specialists.

Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Psychoanalytic Approaches represents the leading edge of work in the field by members of the International Psychoanalytical Association's Committee on Prejudice (Including Anti-Semitism), psychoanalysts who hail from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Peru, Sweden, the United States, and Uruguay. It pursues the issues surrounding hostile and malignant prejudice as defined in the first chapter by Henri Parens, whose path-breaking work over four generations with children and their mothers uncovered the sources of aggression and prejudice on a scale from jocular slurs to murderous genocide. One chapter examines the effects of Latin America's colonial past on the psychic development of a 'mixed race' young man whose analysis implicates a major racial and social divide in the heart of his society. In another chapter we learn of the identity conflicts of children who were separated from their parents during the Holocaust and hidden or 'hidden in plain sight' by adopting a Christian persona.

The essays contained in Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture represent an attempt by scholars from Canada, Germany, and Mexico to come to grips with the innovative work of the American philosopher and anthropologist Lawrence Krader who has proposed nothing less than a new theory of nature, according to which there are at least three different orders—the material-biotic, the quantum, and the human—which differ from one another according to their different configurations of space-time, and which cannot be reduced the one to the others. Each author takes up Krader’s theory in relation to its impact on their own discipline: sociology, anthropology, the study of myth, the theory of labor and value, economics, linguistics, and aesthetics. The question of how nature and culture can be integrated within a theoretical framework which links them in difference and nexus and allows each their non-reductive space leads each of the contributors to move in their thinking beyond the old dualisms of materialism and idealism, fact and value, nature and culture.

This posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (in classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, China), in the Biblical traditions, of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. It also covers the various approaches to the study of myth in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century; it discusses evolutionist, structuralist, hermeneutic, and linguistic approaches. The book covers on the one hand the treatment of myth from the inside, that is from the experience of those committed to the myth, and on the other the perspective of those ethnologists, philosophers and other students of myth who are outsiders. Krader takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as he rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth from the past while singling out others for approval and inclusion in his general theory of myth. The book includes a discussion of myth in science and in infinitesimal mathematics. It also considers the relationship between myth and ideology in the twentieth century in relation to politics and power. It both incorporates and broadens Krader’s theory of nature as a manifold consisting of different orders of space-time which he developed in his magnum opus Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing.

This book focuses on the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe with emphasis on the German-speaking areas from the 14th to the 17th century. It also reviews and assesses the writings on the topic by the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. At the center of the presentation are the developments in mining, metallurgy, smelting, book publishing, clock making, ship building and advances in trade, commerce and finance. This book will be of interest to students of medieval and early modern European history, the so-called transition debate of feudalism to capitalism, social scientists and historians who are interested in the various transitions in human history, and philosophers who follow developments in the changing issues regarding freedom and bondage over the course of human development. Anthropologists who are familiar with Krader’s writings on the development of the Asiatic mode of production will be interested to see how Krader treats this transition from feudalism to capitalism by way of comparison and contrast.

Lawrence Krader (1919-1998) was an American philosopher and anthropologist. His extensive writings addressed a wide range of subjects in the fields of history, ethnology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and political economy. Much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death. This book contains excerpts from Krader’s unpublished manuscripts held at McMaster University. These include writings on the peoples of Central and Northeast Asia, the persona in Western thought, the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe, myth and ideology, noetics and the theory of nature, linguistics and semantics, as well as assessments of Marx’s theory of value, considerations of the Russian Revolution and a critical view of Leninism. The book also provides readers with a biographical overview of Krader’s intellectual development and his involvement with leading intellectuals – including Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, Isaiah Berlin, Karl August Wittfogel, Roman Jakobson, Alfred Tarski, Morris R. Cohen, and Rudolf Carnap – in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.This book will appeal to anyone interested in Lawrence Krader’s life, work, influence, and legacy.

Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Psychoanalytic Approaches represents the leading edge of work in the field by members of the International Psychoanalytical Association's Committee on Prejudice (Including Anti-Semitism), psychoanalysts who hail from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Peru, Sweden, the United States, and Uruguay. It pursues the issues surrounding hostile and malignant prejudice as defined in the first chapter by Henri Parens, whose path-breaking work over four generations with children and their mothers uncovered the sources of aggression and prejudice on a scale from jocular slurs to murderous genocide. One chapter examines the effects of Latin America's colonial past on the psychic development of a 'mixed race' young man whose analysis implicates a major racial and social divide in the heart of his society. In another chapter we learn of the identity conflicts of children who were separated from their parents during the Holocaust and hidden or 'hidden in plain sight' by adopting a Christian persona. Other chapters examine the philosophical implications of the psychoanalytic approaches to hostile and malignant prejudice in human history, and the application of psychoanalysis to international relations. The various chapters and aproaches of the book take psychoanalysis to the borderline areas of anthropology, philosophy, politics, and sociology to illuminate and offer ways to understand and treat in a practical way one of the greatest scourges in human history.