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"From the 1920s and for a generation thereafter, understandings of time, place, and civilization were subjected to a barrage of new conceptions. Berman probes the work of three writers--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell--who wrestled with one or more of these issues in ways of lasting significance. At stake for each is a sense of what constitutes true civilization"--Back cover.
The idea of progress guided human expectations and actions for over two centuries. From the Enlightenment onwards, it was widely believed that the condition of humankind could be radically improved. History had embarked on an unstoppable forward trajectory, realizing the promise of freedom and reason. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the French Revolution, in some views also the socialist revolution, were milestones on this march of progress. But since the late twentieth century the idea of progress has largely disappeared from public debate. Sometimes it has been explicitly declared dead. The wide horizon of future possibilities has closed. The best we can hope for, some say, is to avoid regress. What happened to progress? Why did we stop believing in it, if indeed we did? This book offers answers to these questions. It reviews both the conceptual history of progress and the social and political experiences with progress over the past two centuries, and it comes to a surprising conclusion: The idea of progress was misconceived from its beginnings, and the failure of progress in practice was a result of this flawed conception. The experiences of the past half century, in turn, has allowed us to rethink progress in a more adequate way. Rather than the end of progress, they may herald the beginning of a new, reconstructed idea of progress.
Winner of the Fernando Coronil Prize for best book about Venezuela, awarded by the Venezuelan Studies Section of LASA. In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumer culture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century by Volker Schmidt Pdf
Modernity is back on sociology's agenda. From the beginnings of sociology as an academic discipline, questions surrounding the meaning and consequences of modernity have fascinated generations of sociologists. The initial interest in the concept was inspired by a sense of a deep rupture (and crisis) afflicting European society, a sense that society was approaching something fundamentally different from the past, an entirely new form of societal organization that bore little resemblance to anything known before. Where exactly this transformation was headed was by no means clear, but around the 18th century a growing number of European intellectuals and scholars realized that the changes that had been in the making since the late 15th century were irreversible and could not be contained in any particular region or confined to particular sectors of society, but would ultimately transform all spheres of life. Like other thinkers, sociologists observed this transformation with awe, and their attitude towards it has always been ambivalent. The 20th century, during which modernity gradually began to break through globally, was also a century during which many sociologists became increasingly disillusioned with the promises of "the modern project". But with the exhaustion of the energies of "postmodernism", the intellectual movement that wanted to bury modernity, the interest in modernity began to resurface again; not least because it became increasingly clear that the world is far from approaching a societal condition pointing systematically beyond modernity. Instead, we are witnessing an intensification of modernization processes around the world. But what is modernity, anyway? The aim of the present volume is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the meaning of modernity and about the significance of modernization processes in non-Western societies. As befits a subject matter as controversial and complex at this one, the book's chapters offer no conclusive answers to the questions they raise and address. The debate about modernity must and will continue, and one hopes that it will be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect despite sometimes fierce disagreement between the participants. For only if we listen to each other can we make genuine intellectual progress.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School—Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana Pdf
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.
An urgent and passionate plea for a new and ecologically sustainable vision of the good life. The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on? In Post-Growth Living, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.
Author : Steven B. Smith Publisher : Yale University Press Page : 417 pages File Size : 45,7 Mb Release : 2016-01-01 Category : Civilization, Modern ISBN : 9780300198393
Modernity and Its Discontents by Steven B. Smith Pdf
11 Flaubert and the Aesthetics of the Antibourgeois -- 12 The Apocalyptic Imagination: Nietzsche, Sorel, Schmitt -- 13 The Tragic Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin -- 14 Leo Strauss on Philosophy as a Way of Life -- 15 The Political Teaching of Lampedusa's The Leopard -- 16 Mr. Sammler's Redemption -- Part Four: Conclusion -- 17 Modernity and Its Doubles -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z
This important new book from one of the world's leading sociologists of sport weaves together social theory, history and political economy to provide a highly original analysis of the complex relationship between sport and modernity. Incorporating a powerful set of theoretical insights from traditions and thinkers ranging from classical Marxism and the Frankfurt School to Foucault and Bourdieu, Gruneau analyzes the emergence of "sport" as a distinctive field of practice in western societies. Examining subjects including the legacy of Greek and Roman antiquity, representations of sport in nineteenth-century England, Nazism, and modern "mega-events" such as the Olympics and the World Cup, he seeks to show how sport developed into an arena which articulated competing understandings of the kinds of people, bodies and practices best suited to the modern western world. This book thereby explores with brio and sophistication how the ever-changing economic, social, and political relations of modernity have been produced and reproduced, and sometimes also opposed and escaped, through sport, from the Enlightenment to the rise of neoliberalism, as well as examining how the study of exercise, athletics, the body, and the spectacle of sport can deepen our understanding of the nature of modernity. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the sociology and history of sport, sociology of culture, cultural history, and cultural studies.
Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
After Progress by Martin Savransky,Craig Lundy Pdf
The notion of "progress" is arguably the defining idea of modernity: a civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be "better" than the present. It was this notion that placed techno-science at the heart of modern political culture, it was in its name that modernity ploughed the Earth, and it was the uneven geography of "progress" that imagined European imperialism as a civilising mission inflicted upon "backward" others for their own sake. In the wake its devastating social, political and ecological histories, this bold and innovative collection argues that the imperative of progress is now one we cannot live with but do not know how to live without. What might it take to learn to think and live after progress? Thinking of progress not as one modern value among others but as the very mode of evaluation from which modern values are derived, this book delivers a range of essays and experiments in the radical revaluation of our values. By exploring the complex connections between progress and knowledge, ecology, politics, science, culture, and justice, this original book offers critical and speculative perspectives on the making of social life after progress.
Europeans - or "Westerners" - have long been inclined to think that their form of socio-political organisation, often referred to as "modern", is superior to others in both normative and functional terms. In both political philosophy and comparative-historical sociology, however, this claim has recently been critically debated and re-assessed. After reviewing the recent debate, this volume addresses the following key questions: if there is now a plurality of forms of modern socio-political organisation, what does this entail for our time-honoured idea of progress, or in other words, for our hope that the future world can be better than the present one? And: if despite all nuance our concept of modernity is in some way inextricably tied to the history of Europe, how can we compare different forms of modernity in a 'symmetric', non-biased or non-Eurocentric way? These questions gain a particular sense of urgency in our era of so-called globalisation, of radical time-space compression, because the claims and expectations of modernity have now become inescapable in ever more walks of life and for many more people than ever.
History of the Idea of Progress by Robert Nisbet Pdf
The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.
