Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair

Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair
Author: Ashis Nandy
Publisher: OUP India
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780198089650

In this rare collection of essays, Ashis Nandy talks about an India where things have changed drastically in recent years. Looking at the nationalism of Gandhi and Tagore, Savarkar, and Madanlal Pahwa, and cultural psychology, terror and counter-terror, humiliation and human degradation, happiness, and modernity and the sense of loss, the essays open up the future for the next generation of intellectuals and political activists in India and in other societies.

Post-Liberalism

Post-Liberalism
Author: Fred Dallmayr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-04-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190949910

Liberal democracy is the dominant political ideology in the West today. Taken at face value it suggests an equivalency between its two central components--liberalism and democracy--but as Fred Dallmayr argues here, the two operate in very different registers. The two frequently conflict, endangering our public life.This is evident in the rise of self-centered neo-liberalism as well as autocratic movements in our world today. More specifically, the conflict within liberal democracy is between the pursuit of individual or coporate interest, on the one hand, and a "people" increasingly fractured by economic and cultural clashes, on the other. Dallmayr asks whether there is still room for genuine privacy and authentic democracy when all public goods, from schools to parks, police, and armies, have been made the target of privatization. In this book, Dallmayr sets out to rescue democracy as a shared public and post-liberal regime. Nonetheless, "post-liberalism" does not involve the denial of human freedom nor does it suggest the endorsement of illiberal collectivism or nationalism. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary political, religious, and secular thought, Dallmayr charts a possible path to a liberal socialism that is devoid of egalitarian imperatives and a private sphere free from acquisitiveness.

Truth and Politics

Truth and Politics
Author: Fred Dallmayr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2022-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1438489714

Oppositions found in nearly every element of society readily give way to antagonism and hostility and, ultimately, to war and destruction. Both historically and analytically, this condition can be traced to an outlook called "the modern paradigm," launched by Descartes' "cogito ergo sum." The paradigm shift explored in this study is proposed on three levels: faith, society, and ecology. On the faith (human-divine relations) level, Fred Dallmayr suggests a shift where faith and world are seen in symbiosis rather than set against each other in the dualism that modernity has caused. On the societal (inter-human relations) level, he suggests a shift that would repair modernity's trend of sundering individuals from any communal background, which has caused people to increasingly act (solely) in their own interests. On the ecology (man-nature relations) level, Dallmayr explores how nature has responded to human exploitation and constant intervention, underscoring the need for a paradigm shift here as well. Truth and Politics seeks to remedy the "underside" of modernity and thus to inaugurate a "postmodern" (not anti-modern") and "post-secular" (not anti-secular) perspective.

Gandhi's Assassin

Gandhi's Assassin
Author: Dhirendra Jha
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-01-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1804292990

The life of Nathuram Godse, the man who shot Gandhi Dhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationalism. On a wintry Delhi evening on 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot Gandhi at point-blank range, forever silencing the man who had delivered independence to his nation. Godse’s journey to this moment of international notoriety from small towns in western India is, by turns, both riveting and wrenching. Drawing from previously unpublished archival material, Jha challenges the standard account of Gandhi’s assassination, and offers a stunning view on the making of independent India. Born to Brahmin parents, Godse started off as a child mystic. However, success eluded him. The caste system placed him at the top of society but the turbulent times meant that he soon became a disaffected youth, desperately seeking a position in the infant nation. In such confusing times, Godse was one of hundreds, and later thousands, of young Indian men to be steered into the sheltering fold of early Hindutva, Indian nationalism. His association with early formations of the RSS and far-right thinkers such as Sarvakar proves that he was not working alone. Today he is considered to be a patriotic hero by many for his act of bravery, despite being found guilty in court and executed in 1949.

Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy
Author: Ramin Jahanbegloo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2018-04-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199093318

This volume is an adda of great minds, spanning generations and multiple nationalities. While one discusses creativity and aesthetics through Indian classical music, another recounts the pleasure of a simple walk. Another questions how it would be if Rabindranath Tagore lived in the twenty-first century; yet another, how ‘cool’ Indians are or might be in the future. Subjects as far apart as war and solitude find space in these musings. Through these lively engagements emerge key insights into the ideas, writings, and life of one of the foremost intellectuals of our time in Indian and global scholarship, thought, and dissent—Ashis Nandy.

Religious Perspectives on Bioethics and Human Rights

Religious Perspectives on Bioethics and Human Rights
Author: Joseph Tham
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2017-09-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319584316

This book deals with the thorny issue of human rights in different cultures and religions, especially in the light of bioethical issues. In this book, experts from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism and Confucianism discuss the tension between their religious traditions and the claim of universality of human rights. The East-West contrast is particularly evident with regards to human rights. Some writers find the human rights language too individualistic and it is foreign to major religions where the self does not exist in isolation, but is normally immersed in a web of relations and duties towards family, friends, religion community, and society. Is the human rights discourse a predominantly Western liberal ideal, which in bioethics is translated to mean autonomy and free choice? In today’s democratic societies, laws have been drafted to protect individuals and communities against slavery, discrimination, torture or genocide. Yet, it appears unclear at what moment universal rights supersede respect for cultural diversity and pluralism. This collection of articles demonstrates a rich spectrum of positions among different religions, as they confront the ever more pressing issues of bioethics and human rights in the modern world. This book is intended for those interested in the contemporary debates on religious ethics, human rights, bioethics, cultural diversity and multiculturalism.

Gandhi and Tagore

Gandhi and Tagore
Author: Gangeya Mukherji
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317368746

This book brings together the political thought of Gandhi and Tagore to examine the relationship between politics, truth and conscience. It explores truth and conscience as viable public virtues with regard to two exemplars of ethical politics, addressing in turn the concerns of an evolving modern Indian political community. The comprehensive and textually argued discussion frames the subject of the validity of ethical politics in inhospitable contexts such as the fanatically despotic state and energised nationalism. The book studies in nuanced detail Tagore’s opposition to political violence in colonial Bengal, the scope of non-violence and satyagraha as recommended by Gandhi to Jews in Nazi Germany, his response to the complexity of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the differently constituted nationalism of Gandhi and Tagore. It presents their famous debate in a new light, embedded within the dynamics of cultural identification, political praxis and the capacity of a community to imbibe the principles of ethical politics. Comprehensive and perceptive in analysis, this book will be a valuable addition for scholars and researchers of political science with specialisation in Indian political thought, philosophy and history. Gangeya Mukherji is Reader in English at Mahamati Prannath Mahavidyalaya, Mau-Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Divorce and Democracy

Divorce and Democracy
Author: Saumya Saxena
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2022-07-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108999654

This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

Family Memory

Family Memory
Author: Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000527166

In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept. Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies’past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide. This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.

Sociology of Rationality

Sociology of Rationality
Author: Soumyajit Patra
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040165001

This book is a socio-historical analysis of rationalism as a world view – that guides many of our actions in concrete everyday life – and as a philosophy – that guides our epistemological understanding of the reality around us. It explores the multifaceted manifestations of the idea in the Enlightenment philosophy, modern sociological theorising and post-structural standpoints. The volume also critiques rationality from feminist, subaltern and postcolonial perspectives. Finally, it delves into the multi-layered sociological significances of rationalisation of different domains of life. Transdisciplinary in scope and with essays by foremost scholars in the field, this volume will be a major intervention across the humanities and the social sciences. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, gender studies, political science, cultural anthropology, education, and religious studies.