Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx

Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx
Author: Spencer J. Pack
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1849805474

. . . a very valuable introduction to Aristotle s economics. History of Economic Ideas Spencer Pack is completely at home with the difficult works of Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. To walk with him through their writings is to discover that they are surprisingly helpful in understanding the modern world of computers, credit crunches, religious differences, international conflicts, and unemployment due to oversaving in China and undersaving in America. One is left after reading them with growing admiration for the giants of past intellectual history. This is only one lesson that Pack teaches in this illuminating book. Mark Blaug, University of London and University of Buckingham, UK This is an unusually ambitious and unpretentious work. And it is successful. Pack effectively compares the ideas of each of the three great men without forcing those of one upon the others. The topics are exchange value, money, capital, character, government, and change, which the author considers to be the fundamental issues in 21st century political economy. Pack is especially successful in utilizing a wide spectrum of secondary (including contemporary) sources to enrich the analysis of the expected primary sources. Student readers will be exposed to the opportunities and problems of variation in interpretation. The author has studiously avoided insinuating and privileging his own views and naively repeating well-worn and misleading, if not also erroneous, ideology-laden positions. Warren J. Samuels, Michigan State University, US Spencer Pack has written a most illuminating and insightful book. Beginning from Aristotelian foundations, Pack focuses our attention on an essential economic and moral issue: the difference between value in use and value in exchange. From this vantage point, he evaluates the arguments of Smith and Marx, demonstrating how their theories, both drawing on Aristotle, unfold into a general analysis of capitalism. His account forces us to think deeply about the nature of capitalist society. I recommend it highly. John F. Henry, University of Missouri-Kansas City, US Spencer Pack compares and contrasts Aristotle s, Smith s and Marx s theoretical systems on six fundamental issues: exchange value, money, capital, character, government, and change. This book also provides insights on issues concerning the continuing development of world money, saving, managerial capitalism, corrupt governments, and various secular and religious movements for social change.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand
Author: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2015-06-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271063742

Author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet, despite the sale of over thirty million copies of her works, there have been few serious scholarly examinations of her thought. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual roots and philosophy of this controversial thinker. It has been nearly twenty years since the original publication of Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Those years have witnessed an explosive increase in Rand sightings across the social landscape: in books on philosophy, politics, and culture; in film and literature; and in contemporary American politics, from the rise of the Tea Party to recent presidential campaigns. During this time Sciabarra continued to work toward the reclamation of the dialectical method in the service of a radical libertarian politics, culminating in his book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State, 2000). In this new edition of Ayn Rand, Chris Sciabarra adds two chapters that present in-depth analysis of the most complete transcripts to date documenting Rand’s education at Petrograd State University. A new preface places the book in the context of Sciabarra’s own research and the recent expansion of interest in Rand’s philosophy. Finally, this edition includes a postscript that answers a recent critic of Sciabarra’s historical work on Rand. Shoshana Milgram, Rand’s biographer, has tried to cast doubt on Rand’s own recollections of having studied with the famous Russian philosopher N. O. Lossky. Sciabarra shows that Milgram’s analysis fails to cast doubt on Rand’s recollections—or on Sciabarra’s historical thesis.

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia
Author: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1995-08-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438419236

This book develops a critique of utopianism through a provocative comparison of the works of Karl Marx and F. A. Hayek, thus engaging two vastly different traditions in critical dialogue. By emphasizing the methodological and substantive similarities between Marxian and Hayekian perspectives, it challenges each tradition's most precious assumptions about the other. Through this comparative analysis, the book articulates the crucial distinctions between utopian and radical theorizing. Sciabarra examines the dialectical method of social inquiry common to both Marxian and Hayekian thought and argues that both Marx and Hayek rejected utopian theorizing because it internalizes an abstract, ahistorical, exaggerated sense of human possibility. The chief disagreement between Marx and Hayek, he shows, is not political but epistemological, reflecting their differing assumptions about the limits of reason.

Light Touches

Light Touches
Author: Alice Barnaby
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315407698

Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination, 1800-1900 explores how urban lives in the nineteenth century were increasingly touched by innovations in the technologies and aesthetics of illumination. Dramatic changes in qualities of light – and darkness – became acutely palpable to the human sensorium; using, seeing, feeling, and being in light were now matters of intense personal and cultural concern. Light gave meaningful vitality to the period’s material culture, and light itself became something to be perceptually consumed. Over the course of six chapters Alice Barnaby traces how light was used in amateur artistic pastimes, interior design and clothing fashions, spectacular public amusements, volatile street demonstrations, and art gallery designs. From these previously unexplored examples a more complex history of light in the period emerges. Society’s fascination with illumination, its desire to work with it and make meaning from it gave rise to a distinctly new set of cultural practices. Through these practices unexpected discoveries about the modern world were revealed. Light proved to be instrumental in everyday acts of experimentation and imaginative enquiry. Barnaby offers an intervention into the dominant scholarly narrative of the nineteenth century which traditionally reads modernity as synonymous with the formation of a spectacular, disembodied visuality. Light Touches, in contrast, returns vision to the body and foregrounds the actively felt - as well as seen - sensation of light. In coming to understand these cultural practices of illumination, the book reconsiders many assumptions about nineteenth-century modernity.

Citizen Designs

Citizen Designs
Author: Eli Elinoff
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082488826X

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007, Citizen Designs describes how residents of Khon Kaen’s railway squatter communities used Thailand’s experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. It also shows how the Thai state used participatory planning and design to manage both situated political claims and emerging politics. Through ethnographic analysis of contentious collaborations between residents, urban activists, state planners, participatory architects, and city officials, Eli Elinoff’s analysis reveals how the Khon Kaen’s railway settlements became sites of contestation over political inclusion and the meaning and value of democracy as a political form in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elinoff examines how as residents embraced politics to enact their equality, they inspired new debates about what good citizenship might mean and how democracy might look and feel. The disagreements over citizenship, like those Elinoff describes in Khon Kaen, reflect the kinds of aspirations for political equality that have been fundamental to Thailand’s political transformation over the last two decades, which has seen new political actors asserting themselves at the ballot box and in the streets alongside the retrenchment of military authoritarianism. Citizen Designs offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the lived effects of Thailand’s political volatility and into the current moment of democratic ambivalence, mass urbanization, and authoritarian resurgence.

Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea

Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea
Author: David Brancaleone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501316982

How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini's idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.

Modern Legal and Political Thought

Modern Legal and Political Thought
Author: Larry May
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1527590720

This book covers modern legal and political thought from roughly 1450 to 1950, from the beginning of the Renaissance, with a unique turn to secularism, until the end of World War II with the Nuremberg Trial and the founding of the United Nations. It argues that there is not a sharp break between the end of the Medieval period and the Renaissance, at least in terms of humaneness. In addition to the canonical works of political philosophy, it also looks at certain non-Western societies, including the Ottoman Empire, India, Japan, Yoruba, and the Cherokee Nation, noting various forms of liberalism and conservativism, socialism and communism, fascism and anti-colonialism, all having distinct influences on how law and justice are understood. This work will appeal to all students and educated adults who are interested in how politics and law are intertwined in the Modern Age.

Reading Sartre's Second Ethics

Reading Sartre's Second Ethics
Author: Elizabeth A. Bowman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2023-03-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 179364652X

In Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics, Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone provide a comprehensive, reconstructive, and critical interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. The key Sartrean texts are two posthumously published lectures, one delivered at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, the other scheduled to be delivered at Cornell University in 1965 but cancelled by Sartre in protest of U.S. foreign policy. Though different in content, method, and intended audience, Sartre gave both lectures the shared title “Morality and History.” As Bowman and Stone argue, these texts comprise a single, systematic ethic in two parts. The Cornell lecture focuses primarily on a regressive and phenomenological analysis of normativity and its ambiguous place in lived moral experience; the Rome lecture focuses primarily on a progressive and dialectical synthesis of the ends or goals of historical conduct. Taken together, the two texts demonstrate that “integral humanity” is always possible because the means to it can always be freely invented.

On Hegel

On Hegel
Author: George L. Kline
Publisher: Gegensatz Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1621307352

Fifteen important papers about Hegel covering forty-five years of work by one of America's most prominent Hegel scholars: 1. "What Marx Could ... and Should Have Learned from Hegel" (1974) 2. "Hegel and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Religion" and "Reply to Commentators" (1970) 3. "Present, Past, and Future in the Writings of Alexander Herzen" (1990) 4. "The Use and Abuse of Hegel by Nietzsche and Marx" (1989) 5. "Hegel and Solovyov" (1974) 6. "The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx" (1971) 7. "Concept and Concrescence: An Essay in Hegelian-Whiteheadian Ontology" (1986) 8. "Some Recent Reinterpretations of Hegel's Philosophy" (1964) 9. "Gustav G. Shpet as Interpreter of Hegel" (1999) 10. "The Hegelian Roots of S.L. Frank's Ethics and Social Philosophy" (1994) 11. "Lukács's Use and Abuse of Hegel and Marx" (1987) 12. "Pierre Macherey's Hegel ou Spinoza" (1990) 13. "The Dialectic of Action and Passion in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" (1970) 14. "Life as Ontological Category: A Whiteheadian Note on Hegel" (1980) 15. "Shpet as Translator of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes" (2009)