Caro and Murphy introduce the philosophy of Quantum Aesthetics--a theoretical framework developed by Spanish-language theorists that has spread throughout the world in the last three years--to an English-speaking audience. In order to achieve this, writers from around the world were asked to either apply quantum aesthetics philosophy to their respective areas of study, or write about their current work within this theoretical framework.

Chapters are devoted to the history of quantum aesthetics, quantum art, quantum literature, quantum politics, quantum anthropology, and so forth. In the end, the general elements of a quantum culture are outlined, and the differences that this culture shows with respect to old conceptualizations of this domain are explained. With respect to the field of cultural studies, this new approach to cultural analysis changes how societies can be investigated as well as provides cultural studies with a more comprehensive and integrated framework. Specifically noteworthy is that quantum aesthetics is less reductionistic than research strategies of the past. A provocative collection for scholars, students, and other researchers involved with the sociology of culture, cultural studies, social philosophy, and sociological theory.

This expansive volume traces the rhetoric of reform across American history, examining such pivotal periods as the American Revolution, slavery, McCarthyism, and today's gay liberation movement. At a time when social movements led by religious leaders, from Louis Farrakhan to Pat Buchanan, are playing a central role in American politics, James Darsey connects this radical tradition with its prophetic roots.

Public discourse in the West is derived from the Greek principles of civility, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. On this model, radical speech is often taken to be a sympton of social disorder. Not so, contends Darsey, who argues that the rhetoric of reform in America represents the continuation of a tradition separate from the commonly accepted principles of the Greeks. Though the links have gone unrecognized, the American radical tradition stems not from Aristotle, he maintains, but from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Tracing Austrian intellectual life from Maria Theresa to Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, this innovative book offers a precise and engaging account of Austrian intellectual history since the Enlightenment. Here, David S. Luft begins by locating his narrative in the region known as Cisleithanian Austria, the area to the west of the Leitha River that was the basis for the modern Austrian state after 1740. Chapter 2 provides a history of the German-speaking intellectual life of these central lands of the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria and Bohemia) from the Enlightenment to annexation by Nazi Germany. Chapters 3 to 5 identify the most important philosophers, writers, and social thinkers who contributed to Austrian intellectual life in the period between 1740 and 1938/1939 and address the intellectual significance of their work. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Luft's book brings out the contributions of major figures such as Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Kafka, Rilke, and Freud, but also draws attention to less well-known figures such as Bolzano, Brentano, Grillparzer, Stifter, Broch, and Hayek.

This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for studying nature and society-a new science that would enlighten all of humankind. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Uncovering these worlds of positivism, the volume ranges from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe, Russia, and Brazil, examining positivism's impact as one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the modern world. Positivists reinvented science, claiming it to be distinct from and superior to the humanities. They predicated political governance on their refashioned science of society, and as political activists, they sought and often failed to reconcile their universalism with the values of multiculturalism. Providing a genealogy of scientific governance that is sorely needed in an age of post-truth politics, this volume breaks new ground in the fields of intellectual and global history, the history of science, and philosophy.

Cafes and coffee shops have become core venues in the urban landscape, places to be social, chat with friends or colleagues, take a break or relax, or work in companionable solitude. In this edited volume, researchers from a range of social sciences and countries examine the practices, histories, and meanings of cafes, thus contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the contemporary cafe. The essays that make up this text are as heterogeneous as they are complementary; they are at once a synthesis of what we know and an invitation to investigate further the concept of a 'cafe society'.

Challenging the view that managerialism is a form of capitalism and that capitalism has eclipsed socialism, Pena shows that the managerial or new class is an exploiting class. The work of Thorstein Veblen, James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kevin Phillips, he suggests, forms a little-known century-long tradition of reflection on the managerial revolution as well as on the conflux of values and socioeconomic practices that Pena dubs economic barbarism. Building on the work of these thinkers, he argues that industrial barbarism and the managerial revolution led to the decline of U.S. capitalism and its replacement by managerialism, a form of nationalistic socialism in which educated white-collar personnel employed by the state and corporate bureaucracies have become a new exploiting class that receives the bulk of the national wealth. Thus managerialism replaced industrial barbarism with a new form of economic barbarism.

This managerial barbarism has fostered an unequal distribution of wealth that has penalized the middle and lower classes with stagnant or declining incomes, growing job insecurity, unemployment, and underemployment. Unless managerialism can find a way out of persistent poverty and declining living-wage job opportunities, these problems are likely to continue afflicting a sizable portion of the population. If managers put an end to economic barbarism, they have a chance to create a society characterized by generalized prosperity, leisure, and opportunity. It is more likely, however, that economic barbarism will continue to be an integral part of managerialism and, consequently, managerialism will face a sudden social upheaval or a gradual decline.

Bringing together the work of historians and political theorists to examine the complex relationships among nineteenth century democracy, nationalism, and authoritarianism, this study pays special attention to the careers of Napoleon I and III, and of Bismarck. An important contribution is consideration of not only the momentous episodes of coup d'etat, revolution, and imperial foundation which the Napoleonic era heralded, but also the contested political language with which these events were described and assessed. Political thinkers were faced with a battery of new terms--"Bonapartism," "Caesarism," and "Imperialism" etc...--with which to define their era.

Christian Thomasius (1655 1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this first book-length study in English of Thomasius' political thought, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius' work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke's arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state's duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In a unique approach to historical representations, the central question of this book is 'what is history?' By describing 'history' through its supplementary function to the field of history, rather than the ground of a study, this collection considers new insights into historical thinking and historiography across the humanities. It fosters engagement from around the disciplines in historical thinking and, from that, invites historians and philosophers of history to see clearly the impact of their work outside of their own specific fields, and encourages deep reflection on the role of historical production in society. As such, Theories of History opens up for the first time a truly cross-disciplinary dialogue on history and is a unique intervention in the study of historical representation. Essays in this volume discuss music history, linguistics, theater studies, paintings, film, archaeology and more. This book is essential reading for those interested in the practice and theories of history, philosophy, and the humanities more broadly. Readers of this volume are not only witness to, but also part of the creation of, radical new discourses in and ways of thinking about, doing and experiencing history.

Certain English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whom scholars often associate with classical republicanism, were not, in fact, hostile to liberalism. Indeed, these thinkers contributed to a synthesis of liberalism and modern republicanism. As this book argues, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the co-authors of a series of editorials entitled Cato's Letters, provide a synthesis that responds to the demands of both republicans and liberals by offering a politically engaged citizenry as well as the protection of individual rights. The book also reinterprets the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes to show that each contributed in a fundamental way to the formation of this liberal republicanism.

One of Victorian England s most famous philosophers harbored a secret: Herbert Spencer suffered from an illness so laden with stigma that he feared its revelation would ruin him. He therefore went to extraordinary lengths to hide his malady from the public. Exceptionally, he drew two of his closest friends the novelist George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes into his secret. Years later, he also shared it with a remarkable neurologist, John Hughlings-Jackson, better placed than anyone else in England to understand his illness. Spencer insisted that all three support him without betraying his condition to others and two of them did so. But George Eliot, still smarting from Spencer s rejection, years earlier, of her offer of love, did not. Ingeniously, she devised a means both of nominally respecting (for their contemporaries) and of violating (for our benefit) Spencer s injunction. What she hid from her peers she reveals to us in an act of deferred, but audacious literary revenge. It s here decoded for the first time. Indeed The Complicity of Friends comprises the first disclosure of Spencer s hidden frailty but also, more importantly, of the responses it generated in the lives and works of his three notable friends. This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes, her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the twentieth century, certain of Spencer s own intuitions about the nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after reading The Complicity of Friends."

Everyday Utopia presents an uplifting tour of better ways to live together, own property, have families and raise children, as pioneered by experimental communities throughout the world and across history. The traditional 'nuclear' family home can be a challenging place, but the problem is bigger than that: as a way of organising daily life, it places unfair and unnecessary burdens on women (and men too); it entrenches inequalities, entraps us financially, hinders certain kinds of child development and is in some ways the most fundamental obstacle we face to a fairer society. Also, it doesn't seem to make us very happy. And yet throughout history, and in numerous forward-thinking communities around the world today, great minds and pioneering spirits have sought and often succeeded at alternative ways of living - from the all-female 'beguinages' of medieval Belgium to the matriarchal ecovillages of contemporary Colombia; from the ancient Greek commune founded by Pythagoras, where men and women lived as equals and shared property, to present-day Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra 'alloparents' to help raise children not their own. Some of these experiments burned brightly and briefly; others are living proof of what is possible. One of those startlingly rare books that upends our assumptions and raises our sights, Everyday Utopia gathers these and many more inspiring examples into a radically hopeful vision of how to build more contented and connected societies, as well as a practical guide to what we all can do to live the good life every day.

Examining the role of memory in the transition from totalitarian to democratic systems, this book makes an important contribution to memory studies. It explores memory as a medium of and impediment to change, looking at memory's biological, cultural, narrative and socio-psychological dimensions.

The world is too complex for anyone to ever hope to understand all of its interrelationships simultaneously. Yet small aspects of the world we live in can be represented by comprehensible models. This is why economists use models in their analysis and research. In Economic Models and Methodology, Holcombe examines the way in which models are used in economics, and makes specific methodological recommendations more restrictive than the methodological doctrine of pluralism. Holcombe's book is not an encyclopedia of methodology, but rather an analysis of mainstream methodology, and an examination of the use of models in economics. Holcombe examines the role of assumptions in models, the use of empirical models in economics, and specific applications of models in both macroeconomics and microeconomics.

Often called Kant's "first critique," this is a foundational work of modern philosophy, one that attempts to define the very nature of reason, and to join the two schools of thought dominant in the late 18th century: that of Empiricism and Rationalism. At the border between thinking subject to religion and realities as the burgeoning sciences were demonstrating at the time, Kant explores ethics, the limits of human knowledge, logic, deduction, observation, and intuition, and in the process laid the groundwork for the modern intellect. First published in 1781, this is required reading for anyone wishing to be considered well educated. German metaphysician IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) served as a librarian of the Royal Library, a prestigious government position, and as a professor at Knigsberg University. His other works include Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Tracing the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s, this book explores the far-reaching implications of Roland Barthes' claim that modern literature is "saturated with style." It offers both a broad, comparative survey of European modernism and an inventive re-reading of the major genres of the period, namely poetry, prose, and the manifesto. With reference to a wide range of canonical figures, including Aragon, Baudelaire, Eliot, Remy de Gourmont, Joyce, Mina Loy, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Proust, Rilke, Tzara, Valery, and Virginia Woolf, Hutchinson argues that modernism oscillates between embracing a literature of "pure" style and rejecting a literature that is "purely" style. Between these two poles, style emerges, in the words of John Middleton Murry, not as "an isolable quality of writing, but as writing itself."

Immanuel Wallerstein and Istvan Meszaros are prolific scholars whose analyses of global capitalism in crisis offer distinctive insights for research across the social sciences. This book engages readers with their main theses, encouraging their application in analysis of social reality and of its institutions of mass education, which aim to prepare workers for the global economy. Using the theoretical lenses offered by these two scholars, Tom G. Griffiths and Robert Imre develop a timely and provocative critique of mass education for this century, challenging readers to contribute to the construction of radical alternatives.

In this book, the author provides a comprehensive overview of the intense and sustained work on the relationship between collective memory and history, retracing the royal roads pioneering scholars have traveled in their research and writing on this topic: notably, the politics of commemoration (purposes and practices of public remembrance); the changing uses of memory worked by new technologies of communication (from the threshold of literacy to the digital age); the immobilizing effects of trauma upon memory (with particular attention to the remembered legacy of the Holocaust). He follows with an analysis of the implications of this scholarship for our thinking about history itself, with attention to such issues as the mnemonics of historical time, and the encounter between representation and experience in historical understanding. His book provides insight into the way interest in the concept of memory - as opposed to long-standing alternatives, such as myth, tradition, and heritage - has opened new vistas for scholarship not only in cultural history but also in shared ventures in memory studies in related fields in the humanities and social sciences.

This book uses a previously overlooked Neo-Latin treatise, Cicero Illustratus, to provide insight into the status and function of the Ciceronian tradition at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and consequently to more broadly illuminate the fate of that tradition in the early Enlightenment. Cicero Illustratus itself is the first subject for inquiry, mined for what its deliberately erudite and colorfully polemical passages of scholarly stratagems reveal about Ciceronian scholarship and the motives for exploring it within the context of early Enlightenment thought. It also includes an analysis of the role played by the Ciceronian tradition in the broader political and radical movements that existed in the Enlightenment, with particular attention paid to Cicero's unexpectedly prominent position in major political and philosophical Republican and Erastian works. The subject of this book together with the conclusions reached will provide scholars and students with crucial new material relating to the classical tradition, the history of scholarship, and the intellectual history of the early Enlightenment.

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing of action, starting with "What Is Historical Meaningfulness?" and ending with "How Can History Have an Aim?" Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action.