[PDF] Revolt Against Modernity eBook

Author : Ted V. McAllister
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 21,18 MB
Release : 1996-01-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0700608737

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Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are two of the most provocative and durable political philosophers of this century. Ted McAllister's superbly written study provides the first comprehensive comparison of their thought and its profound influence on contemporary American conservatism. Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss's Natural Right and History and Voegelin's Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset. Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity' amorality-personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche-and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. While both disdained the reductionist "conservative" label, conservatives nevertheless appropriated their philosophy, in part because it restored theology and classical tradition to the moral core of civil society. For both men, modernity's debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity's insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself. McAllister's thorough reevaluation of Strauss and Voegelin expands our understanding of their thought and restores balance to a literature that has been dominated by political theorists and disciples of Strauss and Voegelin. Neither reverential nor dismissive, he reveals the social, historical, political, and philosophical foundations of their work and effectively decodes their frequently opaque or esoteric thinking. Well written and persuasively argued, McAllister's study will appeal to anyone engaged in the volatile debates over liberalism's demise and conservatism's rise.

Author : Julius Evola
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 39,63 MB
Release : 2018-07-13
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 1620558548

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With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being. The revolt advocated by Evola does not resemble the familiar protests of either liberals or conservatives. His criticisms are not limited to exposing the mindless nature of consumerism, the march of progress, the rise of technocracy, or the dominance of unalloyed individualism, although these and other subjects come under his scrutiny. Rather, he attempts to trace in space and time the remote causes and processes that have exercised corrosive influence on what he considers to be the higher values, ideals, beliefs, and codes of conduct--the world of Tradition--that are at the foundation of Western civilization and described in the myths and sacred literature of the Indo‑Europeans. Agreeing with the Hindu philosophers that history is the movement of huge cycles and that we are now in the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution and decadence, Evola finds revolt to be the only logical response for those who oppose the materialism and ritualized meaninglessness of life in the twentieth century. Through a sweeping study of the structures, myths, beliefs, and spiritual traditions of the major Western civilizations, the author compares the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies. The domains explored include politics, law, the rise and fall of empires, the history of the Church, the doctrine of the two natures, life and death, social institutions and the caste system, the limits of racial theories, capitalism and communism, relations between the sexes, and the meaning of warriorhood. At every turn Evola challenges the reader’s most cherished assumptions about fundamental aspects of modern life. A controversial scholar, philosopher, and social thinker, JULIUS EVOLA (1898-1974) has only recently become known to more than a handful of English‑speaking readers. An authority on the world’s esoteric traditions, Evola wrote extensively on ancient civilizations and the world of Tradition in both East and West. Other books by Evola published by Inner Traditions include Eros and the Mysteries of Love, The Yoga of Power, The Hermetic Tradition, and The Doctrine of Awakening.

Author : Claude Alphonso Alvares
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 49,18 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN :

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This book offers a lively and acute assessment of the actual aims, methods, and results of the development process, as against its ostensible aims. The author asks several questions: Why is there such a mystical aura about the term 'development'? What are its underlying assumptions? Who is being 'developed', and to whose advantage? He also considers the fact that such 'development', which had promised a golden future to the 'backward' countries of the South, is now increasingly an excuse for mere plunder and violence directed both against Man and his environment. Can such views of development be countered? The author discusses resistance movements in India and other countries, such as the Philippines, and the reasons for the success of such resistance. Finally, there is the question of alternatives: if the clock cannot be turned back, can it be slowed down? Or turned in another direction? The author's views on these questions, which concern the thinking observer as much as the 'development expert' or policy-maker, make this book of enormous topical relevance.

Author : Martin Gurri
Publisher : Stripe Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 16,30 MB
Release : 2018-12-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1953953344

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How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Author : Wendy Martin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 50,92 MB
Release : 1988-07-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521314459

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When The Awakening was first published in 1899 it was an extraordinarily controversial book. One of the first American novels to concern itself with themes of adultery and divorce, it was widely attacked as 'vulgar' and 'unhealthy'. In her introduction to this collection, Wendy Martin discusses the historical background of the novel and analyses the heroine's evolution from a role of traditional femininity to one of autonomous individualism. The essays that follow explore other central themes of the novel, as well as locating Chopin in the tradition of American women novelists and discussing her status as a pre-modernist writer.

Author : Bernhard Dietz
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 10,32 MB
Release : 2018-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1472570030

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The danger to British democracy in the interwar period came from a different source to that which has thus far been assumed. It came from a network of radical conservatives who challenged the political system and sought to replace it with an authoritarian corporate state. In this book, Bernhard Dietz provides the first systematic analysis of this network and its members, which are called Neo-Tories. With strong links to the European right, yet a minority back home, this group of British conservatives are all the more fascinating today because it is on their ultimate failure that the success of British democracy rested.

Author : Bob T. Wakabayashi
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 18,20 MB
Release : 1998-03-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521588102

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A comprehensive intellectual history describing the forces that made Japanese thinkers both receptive and hostile to Western ideas and values.