This book studies individual works by twelve major writers of German modernism, including Thomas Mann, Musil, Brecht and Rilke, in relation to the history of the twentieth century. It explores the theme of the 'dear purchase', an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche, and reveals the underlying flaw in this notion as a self-justifying value. In this context, it considers the renaissance of German poetry after 1900, the impact of the War of 1914, its aftermath in uncertainty and relativism, and attitudes to the Hitler period, and finally juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story Josephine as a deliverance from the value-system of the title. The Introduction, partly autobiographical, traces J. P. Stern's preoccupation with this interpretation of his material in many of the books he published (especially those concerned with Nietzsche and Hitler), and pays tribute to Wittgenstein's influence on his thinking.
Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this book is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beck
Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this book is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beck
Current knowledge of the genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems of inheritance requires a revision and extension of the mid-twentieth-century, gene-based, 'Modern Synthesis' version of Darwinian evolutionary theory. We present the case for this by first outlining the history that led to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. In the second section we describe and compare different types of inheritance, and in the third discuss the implications of a broad view of heredity for various aspects of evolutionary theory. We end with an examination of the philosophical and conceptual ramifications of evolutionary thinking that incorporates multiple inheritance systems.
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society is an annual collection of major articles representing some of the best historical research by some of the world's most distinguished historians. Volume twenty-one of the sixth series includes the following articles: 'French crossings II: laughing over boundaries', 'Thinking with Byzantium', 'Why were some tenth-century English kings presented as rulers of Britain?', 'The Reformation of the generations: youth, age and religious change in England, c.1500–1700', 'Markets and cultures: medical specifics and reconfiguration of the body in early modern Europe', 'Troubling memories: nineteenth-century histories of the slave trade and slavery', 'The meaning of 'life': biology and biography in the work of J. S. Haldane (1860–1936)' and 'The demise of the asylum in late twentieth-century Britain: a personal history'. The volume also carries the Report of Council from 2010–11.
The 'New Liberalism' of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is an unjustifiably neglected strand of the liberal tradition. By emphasising community as well as rights and liberty, thinkers such as T. H. Green, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse support, but in distinctive ways, recent challenges to the established dichotomy between communitarianism and liberalism. These essays examine new liberal thinking and conclude that liberal and communitarian concerns are compatible, even mutually reinforcing. The 'common good', the empowerment of individuals to exercise their freedom, and a regulated free market are among a new liberal 'basket of ideas' which, these essays argue, can revitalise the liberal tradition. This collection of essays by leading scholars provides exciting new insights into current debates within the liberal tradition, and will be of great interest to scholars of political theory and the history of political thought.
Natural law ethics centres on the idea that ethical norms derive from human nature. The field has seen a remarkable revival since the millennium, with new work in Aristotelian metaphysics complementing innovative applied work in bioethics, economics and political theory. Starting with three chapters on the history of natural law ethics, this volume moves on to various twentieth-century theoretical innovations in the tradition, and then to natural law as embedded in the three Abrahamic faiths. It closes with sections on applied natural law ethics and the challenges and prospects for natural law ethics in the twenty-first century. Uniquely interdisciplinary and written without technical jargon, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, theology, political theory and economics. They will find this the go-to resource for cutting-edge thinking in natural law ethics.
Natural law ethics centres on the idea that ethical norms derive from human nature. The field has seen a remarkable revival since the millennium, with new work in Aristotelian metaphysics complementing innovative applied work in bioethics, economics and political theory. Starting with three chapters on the history of natural law ethics, this volume moves on to various twentieth-century theoretical innovations in the tradition, and then to natural law as embedded in the three Abrahamic faiths. It closes with sections on applied natural law ethics and the challenges and prospects for natural law ethics in the twenty-first century. Uniquely interdisciplinary and written without technical jargon, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, theology, political theory and economics. They will find this the go-to resource for cutting-edge thinking in natural law ethics.
More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar trac
More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar trac
In the early twentieth century, women fought for the right to professional employment and political influence outside the home. Yet if liberation from household 'drudgery' meant employing another woman to do it, where did this leave domestic servants? Both inspired and frustrated by the growing feminist movement, servants began forming their own trade unions, demanding better conditions and rights at work. Feminism and the Servant Problem is the first ever history of how these militant maids and their mistresses joined forces in the struggle for the vote but also clashed over competing class interests. Laura Schwartz uncovers a forgotten history of domestic worker organising and early feminist thinking on reproductive labour, and offers a new perspective on the class politics of the suffrage movement, challenging traditional notions of who made up the British working-class.
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the
In the early twentieth century, women fought for the right to professional employment and political influence outside the home. Yet if liberation from household 'drudgery' meant employing another woman to do it, where did this leave domestic servants? Both inspired and frustrated by the growing feminist movement, servants began forming their own trade unions, demanding better conditions and rights at work. Feminism and the Servant Problem is the first ever history of how these militant maids and their mistresses joined forces in the struggle for the vote but also clashed over competing class interests. Laura Schwartz uncovers a forgotten history of domestic worker organising and early feminist thinking on reproductive labour, and offers a new perspective on the class politics of the suffrage movement, challenging traditional notions of who made up the British working-class.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music has said of John Cage that he "had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer in the twentieth century," and his musical thinking forms a whole
This is the first book-length study of the ideological foundations of British imperialism in the twentieth century. Drawing on the thinking of imperial activists, publicists, ideologues, and travelers
Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the
Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michal Kalecki made important contributions to twentieth century political economy that guided the thinking of their student Tadeusz Kowalik and his reinterpretation of
Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and th
Many political regimes today draw such legitimacy as they have from a revolution: the destruction of an existing political elite and its replacement by a different group or groups drawn from inside the same society. A large part of the ideological dispute in world politics has come in consequence to turn on an interpretation of the character of revolutions as political and social events. It is extremely difficult to separate ideological assessments of the desirability or otherwise of what has occured in revolutions from causal explanations of why these revolutions occurred, and both major traditions in the analysis of revolutionary phenomena have been damaged by their failure to distinguish clearly between explanation and assessment. In examining eight major revolutions of the twentieth century, John Dunn helps readers to remedy this state of affairs by thinking for themselves.
The Individual, Communication, and Society is a collection of original essays on communication written by leading scholars in honor of the work of the late Gregory Bateson. Bateson, who began his career as a zoologist at Cambridge University, was one of the most provocative social scientists of the twentieth century. His major contribution was a theory of communication that integrated biological, psychological, and social phenomena. The theory had an important impact on the thinking of a number of influential anthropologists, psychologists, zoologists, and psychiatrists, who found Bateson's ideas not only relevant in their own research settings, but productive for the practical insights they offered into the nature of broader cultural systems. All of the chapters were written by scholars whose own work has been inspired by Bateson. The contributions are diverse, but each extends the implications of Bateson's concepts to the problems of human communication. The volume is designed not on
