|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline
in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are
experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do
top historians think about Pinker’s reading of the past? Does his
argument stand up to historical analysis? In The Darker Angels of
our Nature, seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate
Pinker’s arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of
violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England
and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of
non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human
violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex
than Pinker’s sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests,
and bests, ‘fake history’ with expert knowledge.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the study of intellectual and cultural
history was often denigrated for its alleged elitist and canonical
nature. Today, the situation has changed dramatically. Enriched by
the methods and insights of such neighboring areas of inquiry as
social history, the history of mentalites, linguistics,
anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and
cultural history is experiencing a renewed vitality. The
far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally
distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of
these new studies.
The book is in five parts: The Enlightenment and Its Heritages;
Mind and Culture in the Victorian Middle Classes; European Cultural
Modernism; Culture, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century
Germany; and Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. Striking for
its interdisciplinarity, the volume includes essays in political
theory, historical philosophy, cultural criticism, theology,
literature, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Among the topics are
Thomas Hobbes's civil science, Enlightenment philosophies of
history, "ancien regime" pornography, German modernist
architecture, T. S. Eliot's social criticism, the history of
cultural censorship in Germany, German-Jewish women during the Nazi
persecution, and Freud's attitudes toward death and dying.
The essays have been written in honor of Peter Gay, one of the most
provocative and influential historians of the twentieth century and
one of the leading American scholars of European thought and
culture today; the essays reflect themes and issues running through
his work. The contributors are W. F. Bynum, David Cannadine, Stefan
Collini, Robert Darnton, Robert L. Dietle, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis,
Judith Hughes, Martin Jay, Peter Jelavich, Marion A. Kaplan, Thomas
A. Kohut, Peter Loewenberg, Mark S. Micale, Harry C. Payne, Quentin
Skinner, John Toews, R. K. Webb, Dora B. Weiner, and Jay Winter.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline
in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are
experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do
top historians think about Pinker’s reading of the past? Does his
argument stand up to historical analysis? In The Darker Angels of
our Nature, seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate
Pinker’s arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of
violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England
and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of
non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human
violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex
than Pinker’s sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests,
and bests, ‘fake history’ with expert knowledge.
|
You may like...
Morgan
Kate Mara, Jennifer Jason Leigh, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R70
Discovery Miles 700
|