Contradictions of Modernity - Böcker

The first comprehensive history of one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century.Structuralism has had a profound impact on disciplines ranging from literary theory to sociology, from anthropology to philosophy, from history to psychoanalysis. FranÇois Dosse tells the story of structuralism from its beginnings in postwar Paris to its culmination as a movement that would reconfigure French intellectual life and reverberate throughout the Western world. This first volume of his study, The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, cogently maps the dizzying array of personalities and ideas of the early structuralist movement, paving the way for later developments.

Can humanity escape segregating behavior or master the tendency to exclusion? Where does the force of prejudice come from? How might one conceive the philosophical foundations of an effective antiracism? Pursuing these questions, Pierre-AndrÉ Taguieff puts forward a powerful thesis: that racism has evolved from an argument about races, naturalizing inequality between "biologically" defined groups on the basis of fear of the other, to an argument about cultures, naturalizing historical differences and justifying exclusion. Correspondingly, he shows how antiracism must adopt the strategy that fits the variety of racism it opposes.Looking at racial and racist theories one by one and then at their antiracist counterparts, Taguieff traces an intellectual genealogy of differentialist and inegalitarian ways of thinking. Already viewed as an essential work of reference in France, The Force of Prejudice is an invaluable tool for identifying and understanding both racism and its antidote in our day.

Internationalism and Its Betrayal was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.A new world order, proclaimed Western leaders after the cold war, could extend liberal democracy and human rights around the globe. Yet the specter of nationalism once again haunts the world, threatening to extinguish the spirit of internationalism.Although internationalism is typically understood to be diametrically opposed to nationalism, Micheline Ishay argues to the contrary, maintaining that internationalism often incorporates an individualist element that manifests itself as nationalism during critical periods such as war. For example, the new liberal internationalism invoked after the cold war is now revealing its limits-as reflected by the UN's inability to interfere promptly to stop ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.Internationalism and Its Betrayal explores the tensions and contradictions between ideas of nationalism and internationalism, focusing on the major political thinkers from the early modern period into the nineteenth century. Ishay examines the writings of Vico, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant, Paine, Robespierre, Burke, Fichte, de Maistre, and Hegel. She speaks to an audience of individuals interested in the spread of democracy, students of human rights and international relations, historians of the French Revolution, and political theorists.

Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people of East Germany had little use for the dissident intellectuals who had helped bring it down. Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent offers a penetrating look into the circumstances of this fall from grace, unique among the former Communist states.John Torpey traces the dissident intellectuals' fate to the peculiar situation of the East German regime, which sought to build "socialism in a quarter of a country" on the anti-fascist foundations of Communist opposition to Nazism. He shows how the regime's unusual history and subnational status helped sustain the East German intelligentsia's conviction that socialism could be reformed and humane-that there was a "third way" between Soviet-style socialism and the capitalism that took root in West Germany. How the pursuit of this third way both supported and undermined the regime, and both galvanized and alienated the East German people, becomes clear in Torpey's nuanced analysis. His book makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the politics of intellectuals during one of the most painful chapters in modern German history.John C. Torpey is currently a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

Eminent contributors consider what Hannah Arendt means in today’s public debates.Is politics really nothing more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of “simple” truths? No thinker has argued more passionately against this narrow view than Hannah Arendt, and no one has more to say to those who bring questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life. This volume brings leading figures in philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary theory into a dialogue about Arendt’s work and its significance for today’s fractious identity politics, public ethics, and civic life.For each essay-on the fate of politics in a postmodern, post-Marxist era; on the connection of nonfoundationalist ethics and epistemology to democracy; on the conditions conducive to a vital public sphere; on the recalcitrant problems of violence and evil-the volume includes extended responses, and a concluding essay by Martin Jay responding to all the others. Ranging from feminism to aesthetics to the discourse of democracy, the essays explore how an encounter with Arendt reconfigures, disrupts, and revitalizes what passes for public debate in our day. Together they forcefully demonstrate the power of Arendt’s work as a splendid provocation and a living resource.Contributors: Richard Bernstein, New School; Anthony Cascardi, U of California, Berkeley; Susan Bickford, U of North Carolina; Kim Curtis, Duke U; Lisa Disch, U of Minnesota; Nancy Fraser, New School; Martin Jay; U of California, Berkeley, Steven Leonard, U of North Carolina; Kirstie McClure, Johns Hopkins U; Dana Villa, Amherst College; and Eli Zaretsky, U of Missouri.

Well-known contributors offer an illuminating look at how modernity develops in non-Western contexts.Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty-which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society. Contributors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia U; Dipesh Chakrabarty, U of Chicago; Partha Chatterjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; Veena Das, U of Delhi; Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia U; Stefania Pandolfo, UC Berkeley; and Gyan Prakash, Princeton U.

In 1989, from East Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest to Moscow, communism was falling. The walls were coming down and the world was being changed in ways that seemed entirely new. The conflict of ideas and ideals that began with the French Revolution of 1789 culminated in these revolutions, which raised the prospects of the "return to Europe" of East and Central European nations, the "restarting of their history," even, for some, the "end of history." What such assertions and aspirations meant, and what the larger events that inspired them mean-not just for the world of history and politics, but for our very understanding of that world-are the questions Krishan Kumar explores in 1989.    A well-known and widely respected scholar, Kumar places these revolutions of 1989 in the broadest framework of political and social thought, helping us see how certain ideas, traditions, and ideological developments influenced or accompanied these movements-and how they might continue to play out. Asking questions about some of the central dilemmas facing modern society in the new century, Kumar offers critical insight into how these questions might be answered and how political, social, and historical ideas and ideals can shape our destiny.       Contradictions Series, volume 12

An international best seller dissects the globalization of penal policies “made in U.S.A.” as part of the spread of neoliberalismIn the early 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched a zero-tolerance campaign aimed at street disorders and petty offenders, incarnated in the infamous “squeegee man.” New York City soon became a planetary showcase for an aggressive approach to law enforcement that, despite its extravagant costs and the absence of connection to the crime drop, came to be admired and imitated by other cities in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America.In Prisons of Poverty, LoÏc Wacquant tracks the incubation and internationalization of the slogans, theories, and measures composing this new punitive “common sense,” fashioned to curb mounting urban inequality and marginality in the metropolis. He finds that a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks (led by the Manhattan Institute) forged them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, to criminalize poverty. He traces their import and export through the agency of the media and the pro-market policy institutes that have mushroomed across the European Union, particularly in Tony Blair’s Britain. And he shows how academics helped smuggle U.S. techniques of penalization into their countries by dressing them up in scholarly garb.Now available in English for the first time in an expanded edition, Prisons of Poverty reveals how the Washington consensus on economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment was extended to encompass punitive crime control because the invisible hand of the market necessitates and calls forth the iron fist of the penal state.

Explores the role of the sacred in the response of French intellectuals to the rise of fascism during the 1930sHow is it that the most radical cultural iconoclasts of the interwar years-Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris-could have responded to the rise of fascism by taking refuge in a "sacred sociology"? This is the question that MichÈle H. Richman poses in a work that examines this seemingly paradoxical development. Her book traces the overall implications for French social thought of the "ethnographic detour" that began with Durkheim’s interest in Australian aboriginal religion-implications that reach back to the Revolution of 1789 and forward to the student protests of May 1968.Richman argues that by revising a phenomenon at once as familiar and as exotic as the sacred, these intellectuals forged a point of view relevant to politics, art, and eroticism in the modern period. Assimilating sociology to this revised notion of the sacred, they revitalized a critical discourse based on anthropological thinking dating back to Montaigne and culminating in Rousseau. Her work thus supplies an important chapter in the history of the human sciences while demonstrating the formation of an innovative critical discourse that straddles literary theory, social thought, and religious and cultural studies.

A significant intervention in contemporary debates about cross-cultural understandingFuyuki Kurasawa unearths what he terms “the ethnological imagination,” a substantial countercurrent of thought that interprets and contests Western modernity’s existing social order through comparison and contrast to a non-Western other. Accordingly, Kurasawa traces and critiques, through this prism of cultural alterity, the writings of some of the key architects of this way of thinking: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude LÉvi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault. In the work of these thinkers, Kurasawa finds little justification for two of the most prevalent claims about social theory: the wholesale “postmodern” dismissal of the social-theoretical enterprise because of its supposedly intractable ethnocentrism and imperialism, or, on the other hand, the traditionalist and historicist revival of a canon stripped of its intercultural foundations. Rather, Kurasawa’s book defends a cultural perspective that eschews both the false universalism of “end of history” scenarios and the radical particularism embodied in the vision of “the clash of civilizations.” It contends that the ethnological imagination can invigorate critical social theory by informing its response to an increasingly multicultural world-a response that calls for a reconsideration of the identity and boundaries of the West as well of modernity itself.

A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political usesHearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for “the disappeared” in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance. Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin’s work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory.

If, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, the problem of the twenty-first century may be one that reaches back to premodernity: religious identity. Even before 9/11 it was becoming evident that Muslims, not blacks, were perceived as the "other" most threatening to Western society, even in a relatively pluralist nation such as Britain. In Multcultural Politics, one of the most respected thinkers on ethnic minority experience in England describes how what began as a black-white division has been complicated by cultural racism, Islamophobia, and a challenge to secular modernity. Tariq Modood explores the tensions that have risen among advocates of multiculturalism as Muslims assert themselves to catch up with existing equality agendas while challenging some of the secularist, liberal, and feminist assumptions of multiculturalists. If an Islam-West divide is to be avoided in our time, Modood suggests, then Britain, with its relatively successful ethnic pluralism and its easygoing attitude toward religion, will provide a particularly revealing case and promising site for understanding.