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These papers by four social scientists were prepared for a conference to analyze the current absence of a value consensus in American life and to examine grounds for a consensus. Further, the contribution of education and the media to the shaping and dissemination of values is explored. Kenneth Boulding contends that underlying moral diversity is a "constitutional consensus," or agreement about the legitimacy of processes by which differing values are coordinated. A greater tolerance of diversity develops as the constitutional consensus becomes more secure. Robert N. Bellah suggests that the dominance of "liberal individualism" accounts for the current loss of moral consensus. Marvin Bressler examines the role of the university and notes that the components of scholarly investigation (integrity, open-mindedness, humility, communalism, accountability) may aid in defining the moral functions of undergraduate education. William Miller points out the all-pervasiveness of television, which is not morally neutral, but rather an "enormously powerful phenomenon. . . about which society needs to make conscious social decisions." He emphasizes that the primary purpose of television is to deliver people to advertisers and that content is a secondary consideration. Miller concludes, however, that television justifies itself in its coverage of public events. A summary of discussions following the speeches is included. (KC)

These National Humanities Faculty working papers are presentations from the Question of Authority Workshop. Frithjof Bergmann's "The Logic of Freedom" distinguishes two approaches to the concept of freedom--that freedom is the ultimate good and that freedom is a burden. A theory of freedom is constructed in the second part of Bergmann's presentation. It states that an act is free if the agent identifies with the element from which it flows; it is coerced if the agent disassociates himself from that generating element. This theory requires identification or self-knowledge prior to freedom. Leon Sinder contributes "What Makes an American an American" and "The Authority of Biosocial Factors." American culture is delineated in the first presentation according to an underlying system of American values. Some of those values are puritanism, efficiency, and the ideal of the man of action. The biosocial factors that exert authority on man, chosen for discussion in the second presentation, include not only requirements common to all living things, such as reproduction, but also those more peculiar to man, such as the need to belong, the passage of time, the will to power, and conservatism. Societal and individual accomodation of these biosocial factors is also considered. (JH)

The study attempts to specify and verify the decisionmaking processes utilized by groups when faced with a multistage rating task. It is also designed to upgrade group efficacy by introducing some procedural guidelines which group members are asked to follow in resolving differences. This "structured" intervention encourages members to seek out differences of opinion and dissuades them from using "conflict-reducing" techniques such as majority vote or trading. In addition the study examines aspects of interpersonal styles on group functioning, in particular self-oriented, individualistic behavior which is apparently dysfunctional to group processes. The major implication of the study is that it is indeed possible to improve group performance, even in groups with potentially"poor" members, via a simple structures intervention. (Author/WM)

Criticizes the book reviewed as a right-wing policy potboiler. Rebuts five main claims that devalue bilingual education and affirmative action while assuming that all Hispanics strive for the goal of measurable individual attainment, even at the cost of communal and cultural impoverishment. Suggests that the book glorifies the immigrant good old days of hard work and assimilation. (TD)

This document contains three papers on human resource development (HRD) and trust in organizations. "Organizational Trust: An Orientation for the HRD Practitioner" (Christina L. Lafferty, Brad D. Lafferty) reviews research on organizational trust that was conducted with a focus on cognitive-based theories, affect-based theories, and combined cognitive- and affect-based theories. The paper explores what studies based on these theories have contributed to HRD knowledge about the mechanisms of organizational trust and the relationship between organizational trust and performance. "A Conceptualization of Interpersonal Trust in the Workplace" (Sandra L. Williams) examines the existing literature on interpersonal trust in the workplace and develops a conceptual framework for understanding interpersonal trust in work settings. The framework includes consideration of the multidimensional characteristics of personal trust as well as the antecedents to and outcomes of interpersonal trust. "Organizational Trust and Attachment to an Immediate Leader: A Pilot Study" (Colleen E. Duffy, Christina L. Lafferty, Brad D. Lafferty) reports on a pilot study that examined the organizational trust scores of individuals having positive attachment to an immediate leader and demonstrated that attachment to an immediate leader does not significantly affect organizational trust scores. All three papers include substantial bibliographies. (MN)

This paper identifies and analyzes some of the arguments employed by those who feel that "we have done enough" for the less fortunate members of society, who wish to curtail or end Federal involvement in social change, and who have lost sight of the dual goals of individualism and equality of opportunity. These arguments fall roughly into three categories--biological, social, and political--and can be summarized as follows: (1) certain races are genetically inferior; (2) poverty is due to the improvidence or sloth of the poor; and (3) governmental institutions (especially education) are not effective in implementing positive change in individual circumstances. This paper calls attention to the facts that the debate is a very old one and that the critical choice is not between one set of scholarly arguments and another; it is a choice of values and ideals. Social science research is a valuable and necessary tool or map but not a determiner of our destination. Citizens individually and collectively, not just social scientists, must examine their values and their ideals and on that basis determine which way America is to move. (Author/JH)

This book, which was written for students of education and social policy and education practitioners in Great Britain, contains 13 papers concerning the interface between education, social welfare, and community within the British welfare state. The following papers are included: "Histories of Community Education: A Feminist Critique" (Susan Mansfield); "The State, Ideology and the Community School Movement" (Tony Jeffs); "Community Education: LEAs (Local Education Authorities) and the Dilemmas of Possessive Individualism" (Ian S. Martin); "Defending Community Education in Schools: An LEA Strategy" (Roger Giles); "The Politics of Parental Involvement" (Emma Beresford); "Equal Opportunities and Educational Values in the Assessment of Prior Learning" (Beth Humphries); "Education and Unwaged Adults: Relevance, Social Control and Empowerment" (Rennie Johnston); "'Straightening the Bend': From Psychiatric Hospital to Care in the Community" (Liz Foster); "Community Development and 'Customer Care': Conflict or Convergence?" (Sue Charteris); "Networking: Tactics of Survival" (Pam Flynn); "The Possibilities of Public Life: Educating in the Community" (Mark Smith); "Education for Community in the 1990s: A Christian Perspective" (David Clark); and "Active Citizenship: A Rationale for the Education of Citizens". Contains name and subject indexes. (MN)

This paper traces the ideology (assertions, theories, and aims) of public schooling from Plato through the first Prussian state school system under Bismarck, through Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. It contends that public schooling contradicts and works to destroy the United States' libertarian traditions of freedom and self-rule. Though not often reported in America's history, responsible critics of the public school ideology have continued to resist it both in this country and in Europe. Critics of public schooling reason as follows: in a republic, citizens have the power to shape society and government so that society's structure will be along the lines that its leaders think best. Leaders must employ the public schools to mold the citizens to retain the leaders' idea of the good society. As a minimum, the schools must condition citizens not to exercise their power against the leaders. Finally, whether the goal of the moment is homogeneity or social betterment, the chief role of public schooling is to condition the individual to serve first the interests of society and the state. The paper concludes that the future of America's liberty requires separation of the school from the state. (Author/JK)

The purposes of this paper are to identify the current trends in social studies curriculum and teaching strategies and to make some projections about the future. Three conflicting movements, or paradoxes, are identified. The first paradox is the back-to-the-basics movement vs. an expanded curriculum. This is due to conservative reactions to useless courses and teaching methods that change basic American values, which conflict with a trend toward broader, more diversified curricula that deemphasize traditional courses. A conflict between emphasizing the individual vs. creating a responsible "community-ship" is the second paradox. On one side is a trend toward exploring feelings and values, and on the other is renewed emphasis on responsible participation in the community. The third paradox involves interest in the local community vs. global awareness. An increasingly fragmented society causes family relationships and background to become more important but also creates the need for global studies and global education. It is advised that educators use parts of all the trends to create a new, synthesized curriculum. Conflicts involved in the first paradox appear to be nonresolvable, the second is a choice that must be made, and the third conflict will probably continue for a long time. It is the teacher's responsibility to know these trends so they can make qualified curriculum decisions and choices. (ND)

The paper will deal with two topics of comparative interest: how scholarship especially of the last twenty years has described literature of the late Middle Ages and early modern period in terms that reflect the state of things before the emergence of individualism -- that is, refusing to ascribe an anachronistic 'selfhood' to the works of an era before such a term became current, and having to recover or invent an approach that is historically responsible -- and how recent scholarship has developed models of cultural interpretation particular to our own period of post-individualist thinking. That is, the first phase of the paper will address a kind of historical scholarship that has had some success in unlocking the outlook of the late medieval and early modern periods, while the second phase will describe a general approach in comparative literature that can be adapted to any historical and cultural situation. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the differences between these two complementary approaches. The primary materials discussed include Petrarch, La Celestina, Vaz de Caminha's Carta, and Shakespeare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper Bruce Naumans' self-presentation (in video art) is considered in relation to the avant-garde idea of symbioses between the artists' individuality and the specific manipulation of the medium. Both the proliferation of sense-experience in the 1960s' (influenced by Samuel Becketts' writtings) and the transformation of artistic practice from private event into public condition are considered as impulses for Naumans' intensive and recurring self-presentations. Self objectivation is looked at via a distinctive use of Bakhtins' concept of the dialogical and his ideas on the (im)possibility of a self-portrait and the concept of the supperaddressee. The later is identified with the audience, a vector within contemporary art determining the artists' presence within the work of art. These ideas on reader-criticism will then be linked to Rosalind Krauss's devastating critique on video art and its characterisation as 'aesthetics of narcissism.' Her obliteration of the audience as a constitutive factor within the visual artists' self-presentation and the influence it has on the choice of a particular medium is criticised. Naumans' self-presentation is hereby lifted from the negative sphere of (Freudian and Lacanian) narcisism and considered an aspect within the larger sphere of media specific reflections and their relation to the artists' self-objectification in an artistic reality that can be identified as a public rather than a private condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and social philosophies of the "New Right" which emphasise individualism and self-fulfillment have become widespread. In the last two decades it has grown particularly strong in Western societies. Sell-fulfillment of the individual now commands its own moral imperative, and promotes the shutting out of the greater issues and concerns (political, historical and religious) that transcend the self. This paper examines the impact of "New Right" ideologies on social workers and social work practice, with particular reference to social workers in New Zealand's largest mental health institution, Porirua Hospital. It argues that a life course approach is necessary to understand social variations in health. It explores the accumulation of risk for the underprivileged in the market environment, with its concomitant constraints on human services. The paper reviews the inherent and fundamental conflict of objectives in the ethical positioning or social organizations, as against those of the "New Right." Finally, the paper argues for social and economic policies that would defend the socio-economically disadvantaged against an accumulation of risk in the critical periods of their life. It highlights survival strategies for social work in a marginalizing practice environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book examines family traditions of over two centuries in the United States and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans have celebrated holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Passover, and Chinese New Year as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, birthdays, coming of age, marriage, and death. The book notes that by the early nineteenth century, celebrations outside the home were becoming sentimental occasions that used consumer culture and displays of status and wealth to celebrate the idea of home and family. The 1960s saw the full emergence of a post-sentimental approach to holiday celebration, which takes place outside as often as inside the home and recognizes changes in the family and women's roles as well as the growth of ethnic group consciousness. The book traces three phases in the development of family ritual: (1) carnivalesque, outdoor celebrations lacking attention to ritual, beginning in colonial America; (2) dating from the early 1800s, with the rise of the sentimental occasion, a family ritual inside or outside the home centering around consumerism and a display of status and wealth to celebrate home and family; and (3) beginning after World War I but especially increasing in the 1970s, a post-sentimental attitude celebrating family diversity, ethnicity, and racial pluralism. The book demonstrates that Americans have invented and reinvented family rituals several times since the Victorians and have used consumer and popular culture both as symbols to rail against and as tools to enhance their celebrations. (Each chapter contains references.) (KB)

The essay discusses the relationship among schools, the federal government, and American society in an attempt to heighten awareness that positive cultural, political, and economic influences are necessary for educational excellence and world leadership. The essay is presented in two parts. Part I proposes that American national educational policy has favored spiritual neutrality to a degree which has hindered Americans in their search for meaning in life. Recommended to solve this dilemma is transformation of state and federally controlled and supported public schools into self-governing, independent institutions which offer a choice between spiritually grounded and anti-spiritual forms of education. Section II presents consideration of some problems which might arise if Americans were given freedom of choice in matters of education. Problems include: use of independent schools by teachers for bigoted, elitist, or otherwise separatist purposes; segregation of students; power centralization in the hands of teachers; variable standards; and financial problems. Ways of solving all these problems under a system of independent schools are described. (Author/DB)

One of the peculiarities of the British political tradition was the Conservatives' emergence as the party of the market and, more ambivalently, the party of free trade. Like much in the British political tradition, the origins both of Conservatism and the Conservative Party are deep, ambiguous and contested. The modalities of the constitutional crises of the 1680s and 1690s gave birth to a fiercely bi-polar politics, whose convulsions were only stilled by the political improvisations of Sir Robert Walpole who, after 1720, imposed a powerful and persistent Whig ascendancy. What emerged was a political culture quite different from that anywhere else in Europe. This was a political culture in which a still predominantly landed polity embraced mercantile and commercial dynamism, and thereby created the political and cultural preconditions for prodigious economic growth. The confidence, and the first British Empire, on which this prosperity was predicated might have been decisively punctured by the trauma of defeat in the American War of Independence. In the event, though, Britain's trading and manufacturing ascendancy proved reliant, and between 1783 and 1789 its young Prime Minister, William Pitt, embarked on a bold reconstructing of Britain's fiscal system designed to enhance its economic position. The American War, the French Revolution and Pittite politics conspired to transform the British political system, and from this crucible new party alignments and new party ideologies were forged. This too was a complex and ambiguous process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Panopticon project came to an end in March 1801, when the Treasury recorded their decision to substitute for Bentham's scheme a smaller one and one unacceptable to Bentham. It took Bentham more than a year to recognize that he could not, by persuasion or the pressure of public opinion, induce the Government to reverse that decision. He devoted most of 1802 to agitation among his friends and to the drafting of a long critique of the Government's policies and conduct, provisionally entitled ‘A Picture of the Treasury, with a Sketch of the Secretary of State's Office…’ By the end, however, that had ceased to be a means of bringing about a change of mind and had become merely an instrument for punishing the Government. In 1803 Bentham recognized, though with many backward glances, that the episode was over and he began to turn his mind to other subjects. While he continued to see his tracts on the Panopticon as among the most valuable and most characteristic of his works, it did not again occupy a central place in his thoughts except for short periods in 1807–8 and 1811–13 when he was involved in negotiations with the Government concerning the financial and legal problems left unsettled in 1801. From 1802 onwards his activities and writings display what appear to be rapid changes and a wide range of interests and subject-matters until he began to concentrate mainly (but not exclusively) on the Constitutional Code in 1822. The bare record of his life and achievements between 1802 and 1822 suggests that this was a blank period in his progress towards a comprehensive theory of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chronological division between the two different kinds of speculation is marked roughly by Bentham's return to England from Russia in the winter of 1787–88. The change was not immediate or absolute. He did not immediately give up his work on the principles of jurisprudence, and he took it up again from time to time in the 1790s, possibly in order to help Dumont in the preparation of the Traités de législation. But after 1789 he was occupied mainly in studies of policies and institutions, above all in his work on the Panopticon. The shift in the pattern of his interests was in part the consequence of what he had done in Russia, but in part the consequence of a mass of other events; both public events such as the French Revolution, and events occurring in his own life or within the boundaries of his family. It made the 1790s the period in which he advanced most rapidly towards the detailed contents of the Constitutional Code. The first edition of the Defence of Usury had been published by the time Bentham got back to England, and his draft of the first Panopticon essay was then also complete. The modest but definite success of the former work encouraged him to think of a second edition of it, and this in turn led him to raise new economic issues in his own mind. He was eventually able to find time to take these up, and to be drawn into the consideration of important problems in the field of money and banking as well as into attempts to draft elementary outlines of (or introductions to) political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now possible to answer the questions posed in the introduction, to show how Bentham was able to develop his very detailed and in many respects prescient programme for the reform and re-arrangement of British government, and to show how he was able to develop the sophisticated theory of administrative processes and other matters which accompanied his programme. But, as was also foreshadowed in the introduction, the answers must be lengthy and complex. Their starting point is that many elements in both Bentham's programme and his theory were borrowed from others. He was immersed in a certain kind of thinking about politics and government that was common in the eighteenth century. Its fundamental feature was that it brought together in a particular way the two great themes of modern political thought, individualism and the modern sovereign state. It respected and tried to preserve individualist notions and values, especially the beliefs that individual interests should have moral priority, that individuals are naturally autonomous and that social and political institutions are artifacts. At the same time it recognized the fragility of groupings composed only of autonomous individuals and held together only by their interests, and it offered the state, that is the central government, as an additional and decisive source of cohesion and discipline. It therefore aspired to make the government the effective master of the community in which it was located, and it sought to do so by equipping the state with institutions and instruments which would render the community responsive to its wishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a large and rapidly growing body of ideas bearing upon government was available to anyone who might want to develop a systematic view of the subject. It was to be found in the assumptions underlying contemporary practices in government and some other institutions, and in those aspects of political thought which historians have classified as individualism and the theory of the modern state. These two closely related modes of thinking, whose foundations had been laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Bodin, Hobbes and a host of lesser thinkers, had become by the middle of the eighteenth century a standard approach to problems of government. They were still being extended and developed and, while retaining most of their original character, were being made to yield new and far-reaching conclusions about institutions and their workings. Individualism and the theory of the modern state were a commentary on and a response to the several processes that most clearly differentiated the modern from the medieval world: the centralization of legal authority and military power within the territories of any one government, the concomitant decay or destruction of corporate privileges and autonomous jurisdictions, and changes in the position of individuals as they ceased to be subject to local or corporate authorities and thus ceased to be constrained or protected by intermediate authorities between themselves and the state. In the beginning, the attention of theorists had been directed especially to the legal and psychological foundations of the new political and social relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is an essay in the history of ideas, the report of an inquiry into the sources and evolution of Jeremy Bentham's ideas about the functions, structure and activities of government. Its starting point is the programme for the organization of government that Bentham set out in his Constitutional Code, which was the last and in a sense the culminating major product of his many years' work on jurisprudence and codification. The Constitutional Code is in some respects a repellent work. Its arrangement is obscure and its language is obsolete and contorted. It represents, nevertheless, a remarkable achievement. It far surpasses in comprehensiveness and in attention to detail the many Constitutions that were drafted during Bentham's own lifetime, in North and South America, in France, in Norway, in Spain, in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. In particular, the five chapters relating to the Executive display these qualities and other important ones as well. They are much more extensive and go into much more detail than the material that Bentham's contemporaries provided for this branch of government: their 250 pages of double-column print contrast strikingly with, for example, the couple of score of Articles in the French Constitution of 1791, the 4 Sections in the Constitution of the United States of 1789, the 33 Articles in the Greek Constitution of 1822 or even the 100 Articles in the Spanish Constitution of 1812. And Bentham's chapters possess a theoretical consistency and sophistication and a prescience that are quite unusual among constitutional draftsmen at any time or in any place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is never easy to say when a man first develops a thought or adopts a set of values, but it seems clear that Bentham worked out the bases of his own position between about 1769 and 1782. He was admitted to the Bar in 1769 at the age of twenty-one, and in the same year (according to Bowring) read thoroughly the works of Montesquieu, Helvétius, Beccaria and Barrington. Soon afterwards he settled into the life of a private scholar and semi-professional author and translator. For a time, law and public affairs had to compete with botany and other physical sciences for his energies and attention, but within a few years the legal and political studies prevailed over the scientific. He embarked on the systematic study of offences and punishment not later than 1772, and on his critical analysis of Blackstone's Commentaries not later than 1774. From these topics he moved in one direction to explore the foundations of law and its social functions, and in others to begin investigating a series of more particular topics, including reward, procedure, evidence and penal policy, and to start constructing a model penal code. A great deal of that work remained unfinished in 1782, but it is nevertheless appropriate to see that date as marking a turningpoint in his intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Bentham was still building up his stock of fundamental principles, he was already beginning to think about some of their applications to particular situations. The first fruits of this style of thinking were some writings about religion, the little pamphlet entitled View of the Hard-Labour Bill (a commentary on a preliminary draft of what became the Penitentiary Act of 1779), a sketchy plan for a Board of Shipbuilding to stimulate inventions and experiments in naval architecture, and a similar plan for an Office of Intelligence to collect information about the merits, defects and operations of existing laws. The essays on religion displayed the awareness of the political significance of churches, liturgies and doctrines that was so prominent in Bentham's later writings on that subject. The three institutional schemes were not, in contemporary terms, very distinguished essays in institution building, but they served as pilot studies or exercises for the construction of the more complex institutions that Bentham later undertook, and in the meantime they led him to think carefully about some of the principles and devices of preventive police. He did not, however, persevere with these topics once he began serious work on the introduction to his code. And when, in 1782, he laid aside the manuscript of his incomplete masterpiece, he did not return to them but concentrated instead on the three essays that he saw as its natural sequel. They occupied him intermittently for much of the rest of the decade, and intensively in its middle years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Radicalism’ has become an established term with regard to the late eighteenth-century movement for political reform in England, whereas the term radicalisme is not normally used to designate a particular political group during the French Revolution. We are wont to speak of a radicalisation of the Revolution. But the radicals themselves we call Jacobins, sans-culottes or some other contemporaneous name. Any attempt to compare English and French radicalism in the period of the French Revolution should therefore make clear to which political currents it refers. The term ‘radicalism’ enters the political language(s) of Europe during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. It seems to have been first used in Britain, from where it migrated to France during the 1820s and via France to Germany during the 1830s. Just like the term ‘conservative’ which appeared at about the same time, it was used to describe a particular way of dealing with the political heritage of the eighteenth-century revolution in government. Whereas the adjective ‘radical’ came eventually to be used in a politically neutral sense, the noun never lost the original semantic link with the later eighteenth-century demand to enforce the principle of government by consent without any social reservation. Uncompromising conservatives were never called radicals but found themselves, equally tellingly, labelled die-hards or ultras. A radical was someone who adhered unflinchingly to the leading principles of what Robert Palmer has named the ‘democratic revolution’ of the later eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights have always been and remain a controversial matter. This chapter addresses and answers what are likely the most general and lasting criticisms of human rights. The answers are summarized in the following sentences: 1. Human rights have Western origins but have become universal ethical values. 2. Human rights are individualistic, by their very nature, but do not overlook the sociability of human beings. 3. The ethical universality and cultural diversity of human rights form an undeconstructible unity. 4. Human rights are an ideal and a struggle. We should be realistic without being pessimistic. The Human Rights Revolution is an individual, collective, everyday and endless struggle… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[War] … is a true chameleon … because it changes its nature a little in each concrete manifestation. Introduction What is war? Until relatively recently, the answer was coined almost invariably in Clausewitzian terms (von Clausewitz 1982): the continuation of politics by other (violent) means. Then, two new notions challenged – apparently with success – the Clausewitzian canon, at least in regard to civil wars. On the one hand, Mary Kaldor (2001) described contemporary civil conflicts as “new wars” that exhibited a distinct set of features – rent-seeking, strong links with criminal networks, violence against civilians, etc. War, thus, is not what it used to be. “Modern conflict … challenges the very distinction between war and peace. It takes place typically not between armies, or even between an army of a state and its armed opposition in some easily defined guerrilla movement. The forces of both government and opposition, from Cambodia to Colombia, blend into illicit business and organized crime” (Cairns, quoted in Azam 2002, 131). On the other hand, rational-choice theorists came to the conclusion that, as Keen (2000) has aptly put it, “war is the continuation of economy by other means.” Individuals join insurgent groups as maximizers of expected utility, and those (the groups) offer selective incentives to lure the military “work force” into them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short," by Robert Wuthnow is presented. It examines the changing arguments which have been made on the role of the individual in American culture. It states that the social scientists and other social observers are conflicted about how much and what kinds of attention to focus on individual. It also discusses American individualism and self-reflections.

During the silent feature film era (c. 1914-1928), Mary Pickford was the most famous movie star in the world. Dubbed 'Our Mary,' 'Little Mary,' and 'America's Sweetheart,' Pickford's public persona was that of the child-woman, a young girl on the verge of adulthood who represented and defended America's most cherished ideals: equality, liberty, morality, and patriotism. The star's persona was a consciously self-made image and celebrated the Protestant ideal of self-sufficiency and individualism, but it was equally an image shaped and polished by the movie-going audience and therefore also democratic at heart. Pickford's public self offered a figure of consensus, neutralizing the ambiguities inherent in the American experiment (individual/community; freedom/restriction; nature/ culture), and proof of the possibility of a straightforward and wholesome 'Americanness.' If we consider Lévi-Strauss' notion of the reconciliatory function of myths, it is no surprise to find how Pickford's self-image was mythologized and became in many ways the guiding light in America's search for self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 14 of the book "Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum," Volume Three, is presented. It explores John Dewey's view of democracy, as a middle ground to individualism and communitarianism, in which the individual and the community is seen to be mutually constitutive. It focuses on Dewey's view as it relates to education and makes a distinction between individuality and individualism. He cites an answer to his question about pluralism and democracy to require individuality but not individualism.

Chapter 6 of the book "Christian Political Ethics," edited by John A. Coleman is presented. It offers information on the attributes and ambiguities of ethical pluralism. It features the properties of conscientious individualism theory developed by Roger Williams, and its application on social regulation, citizenship duties, human sexuality and life-and-death issues.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the evolution of official policy regarding national youth identity in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. After all, official policy represents one important aspect of collective identity formation, and serves as the framework for local negotiations and interventions concerning such matters. I begin with a brief discussion of the key features of “indigenous nationalism,” including myths of origin and officially propounded constellations of social values and norms. Beyond describing such idealized constructs, however, my main concern is to examine how the formal process of state building is implicated in efforts to articulate and enact an official national identity. As we will see, youth policy is inextricably bound up with nation building, given the importance of youth identity for the prospects of coherent nationhood. This requires not only an apparatus for formulating policy, but also a vision of governance, including desirable modes of institutionalizing the processes of youth socialization and politicization. I therefore consider, first, the development of official policymaking in each country. Next, I review the nature of the official policy statements which have resulted, and compare them to the analytical categories of hybridization examined in the previous chapter. Finally, I assess the prevailing perspectives, in each state, on how to manage relations between central governing structures and youth organizations. Nation building Since the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet states have attempted to establish their legitimacy through the process of nation-building, involving the creation of new systems of social meaning and order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of hybridization In one sense, “explaining” hybridization is far beyond the scope of this book. After all, even accounting for absorption, rejection, or assertion alone, in an empirically grounded fashion, requires a truly intimidating amount of cross-cultural and comparative research. One might, of course, reduce each strand to a small sub-set of concrete referents in order to simplify the analytical problem, but only at the expense of eliding the interconnectedness among ideas and practices which is so essential to globalization and the social response it engenders. Moreover, as the above discussion suggests and as the remainder of this book will argue in greater detail, the distinct strands of hybridization are best understood as interrelated, meaning that any effort to comprehend each separately is doomed to failure. This, I would suggest, is because there is something truly foundational about the dialectic described by the patterned responses to globalization – which explains why the pattern recurs so widely all over the world. That is, the combination of absorption, rejection, and assertion represents a basic imperative of national identity formation, which consists of becoming an integral part of global society while at the same time remaining unique. And yet, this process operates at such a high level of abstraction that falsification becomes virtually impossible: alternative explanations are not only equally plausible, but are equally supportable in general terms. Attempting to explain the entire pattern of hybridization thus seems bound to lead to rather bland theoretical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the former Soviet Union, one finds a veritable preoccupation with cultural globalization. Many people – like Volkov, the Astrakhan official we met in the Introduction – tend to experience it as Westernization (or, often, as “Americanization”), which is widely understood as conveying a massive pressure for homogeneity. This in turn generates a powerful mix of emotions: excitement, pride, anxiety, and disgust. After all, the perceived trend of homogenization is perceived to carry with it a range of potentially positive and negative effects, both with regard to national integrity and autonomy as well as pedestrian, everyday matters. Left unmediated to intermingle with locally produced ideas and practices, therefore, global influences beckon with opportunity, but also with danger. As a result, strikingly ambivalent attitudes percolate up into social discourse, in the form of an intense engagement with globalization. In a variety of public forums people in all walks of life struggle to come to terms with the influx of foreign ideas, groping for their underlying significance and spinning out narratives of the future, upon which they project their hopes and fears for the nation. And naturally, such hopes and fears are especially vivid where they surface in the discourse of youth culture. Disentangling the strands of social discourse As the following sections describe, what we find in this discourse is a typical pattern of hybridization: selective absorption, rejection, and assertion of national identity constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter reviews the literature on cultural globalization. My argument is that globalization produces a strikingly similar pattern, virtually wherever it is encountered. First, the combination of seductive content, disparities in power, and the sheer volume of flows comprising globalization produces a homogenizing tendency, to which post-Soviet elites and mass publics alike are highly sensitive. Rather than being perceived in terms of innocuous “flows,” globalization is therefore widely understood as an inundating wave of uniformity that threatens to wash away all cultural difference, undermining the foundation of distinct social and political institutions. Due to the globally dominant discourse of nationalism and the singular legitimacy of the nation-state model, this generates a specific pattern of reaction, marked by desire, anxiety, and the wish to affirm an autonomous (national) self. I illustrate this prevailing response to global cultural flows with examples drawn from a wide variety of countries, and by briefly focusing on the cases of postcolonial India and post-Maoist China. In doing so, I emphasize the deeply ambivalent nature of this process, as well as the abiding ambiguities associated with it. Comparative hybridization Much of the controversy over globalization has focused on its ultimate consequences, including the question of whether national identities are likely to be supplanted by local and/or transnational affiliations. A related question is whether, over the longue durée, the underlying content of national identities will come to mirror each other through the proliferation of international flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 12 of the book "A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm" is presented. The chapter discusses the Parker J. Palmer's concepts of insistent individualism and relational individualism as components of educational spiritualities. In this section, the author elaborates on Palmer's conviction that education should be restored as a life-giving activity and experience. In relation to this, the chapter analyzes Palmer's argument against objectivism using the relational theories of Alfred North Whitehead.

Chapter 5 of the book "Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity," by Ross Posnock is presented. It examines the temptation of irresponsibility and abjection that mocks the proprietary logic of American individualism in Philip Roth's novel "Sabbath's Theater." It highlights how Roth's characters turned persuasively into the very condition of intimacy and empathy. It explores Roth's attachment to his obstinately peculiar hero several literary precedents, named and unnamed in the text.

In the spring of 1887, during the heyday of the Gilded Age, the Contemporary Review printed an article by the chief editorial writer of a Midwestern newspaper which voiced the heretical opinion that ‘the laissez-faire doctrine of government is as foreign to the true genius of social and political life in the Western States as is the ultra-socialistic doctrine’. The author listed public land policies, railroad land grants, inspection laws, agricultural loans, public health legislation, schooling, and licensing laws as examples of widely accepted domains of government intervention. ‘Legislation intended to enforce certain standards of morality’, he added, ‘is perhaps more prolific and vigorous in the United States … than anywhere else in the world.’ What appeared to be the outburst of a minor prairie radical was in fact the considered view of Albert Shaw, a genteel reformer who became a leading light in progressive journalism, was a friend of Woodrow Wilson's, and later advised Theodore Roosevelt. More importantly, Shaw's article reflected not only homegrown scepticism about free market capitalism, but also the growing significance of European social thought in American reform. Shaw was a prominent member of the newly established American Economic Association (AEA), which at the time was not only a professional organization of dissenting economists, but also a clearinghouse for European ideas critical of laissez faire. The AEA included social scientists, politicians, reformers and journalists, and provided a microcosm of the growing transnational network of reformers and academics in US reform politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on factors that have shaped the trend of marriages over the past 30 years. Marriages have become less attractive and satisfying and contemporary married individuals experience less dependence on their marriages compared to past cohorts. Cultural and societal factors affect the resources men and women bring to marital exchanges. In the American society, the heavy historical emphasis on individualism and an emerging and greater emphasis on egalitarianism over the past 30 years influence the prevailing normative expectations that men and women bring to their marriages. Within the past 30 years, two distinct societal trends have been observed with respect to marriage, that is, divorce replaced death as the most common end point of a marriage, and rates of divorce dramatically increased. Marital instability, tension, and conflict can also be fueled by economic anxiety or provider role anxiety. A new paradigm of marriage has been evolving--a shift driven in large part by feminist discourse.

Chapter Three of the book "Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence," by Adam B. Seligman is presented. It continues the arguments regarding constituted understanding of selves while using the themes of moral luck, collective responsibility, and the experience of shame to contend for an extended but not fully autonomous comprehension of self. It allows for a deeper understanding of personhood than more liberal-individualistic and autonomous readings.

This article presents a definition of the terms INSCAPE and INSTRESS. Inscape is Gerard Manley Hopkins' term for the pattern of attributes in a physical object that, gives it at once both its individuality and its unity. In his critical study, Peters defines inscape as "the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing, or a sensible copy or representation of its individual essence." Closely related to inscape, the principle of individuation, is instress, which is "that energy or stress of being which holds the "inscape together" and, as a projective force, "carries it whole into the mind of the receiver."

A man on the point of making a decisive choice resembles a calculator doing a long addition. The one counts the figures, the other calculates the reasons. The man without resolution begins his addition again and again. The man of decision is pleased with the total sum, and proceeds on the soundness of his first calculation. In this book, I have asked my readers to follow me along an indirect path to the birth of Tocqueville's conviction that the study of history would release answers to the past and future of Western civilization. To plot the critical points that lead to Tocqueville's final gesture as a historian in L'Ancien Régime, I wove together several strands of Tocqueville's complex and rich themes. As I reach the end of my efforts, readers will doubtless discover that I have said both more and less than I intended. Almost from the beginning of Tocqueville's work as an observer of how rapidly Europe was experiencing change at many levels and on many fronts, many but not all of his contemporaries singled him out as an unusually gifted thinker. Many works on America were popular, but no other inquiry into the mechanisms of the new society across the Atlantic fascinated so many educated Europeans, who held up a mirror to his study of American democracy and found in it an image, however imperfect, of their own future. Many members of the upper classes recoiled from it, while others, thinking about their own experience with revolution and war, began to recognize that European civilization might not be immune from further change, even democratic change. Tocqueville was instrumental in alerting some minds to the kinds and gravity of the changes that lay ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter I develop two ideas about resistance in social processes in a speculative manner, with the help of a functional analogy: (a) resistance is primarily a functional event in social processes – dysfunctionality is possible but secondary; and (b) resistance is a contribution that urges consideration of whether to sustain a process, in analogy to ‘acute pain’, and if so, how. In whatever context, political, technological or economic, resistance is an action attribution, and as such the achievement of a communication system (Heidenscheder 1992). This analysis of resistance is mainly concerned with resistance in areas of present day technology, but makes use of ideas from other historical and political contexts. I explore a discursive schema with two main actors: an innovator and a resistant. Further differentiation is conceivable according to the various roles of the change agency (Ottaway 1983) and resistance (see Bauer, Chapter 1). The innovator proposes a project that is not acceptable and rejected tel-quel by the resistant part; in that mismatch mutually unexpected expectations meet. Concrete actors may change their roles in two ways. First, the innovator resists changes to the project; and resistance may become an initiator. Second, these parts of innovator and resistant are not scripted: they change as they are enacted. Being interested in the function of resistance in a process, I focus on effects: how does resistance affect the process that is its target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the public resistance to technology in America, one is immediately struck with a paradox. Some technologies provoke organized opposition; others, no less invasive, no more benign, are welcomed, or, at the least, they are accepted with comparatively little debate. The contrast is rather extraordinary when we compare the response to two important technologies that have burgeoned over the past decade: information technology and biotechnology. These are both pervasive and rapidly expanding technologies, and both have their share of social costs as well as benefits. But they have evoked a very different public reaction. In this chapter, I will first briefly remark on the diverse responses to these two technologies in the United States, and then explore these differences along several dimensions. Note that by resistance, I refer to overt opposition, not to the passive reluctance of individuals to use word processors or to buy bio-engineered products (see Bauer, Chapter 5). My purpose in the comparison is to shed light on the values and priorities that shape the public response to new technologies in America, and to highlight some fundamental contradictions between the rhetoric of support for science and technology and the reality of public attitudes as expressed in behaviour. Responses to information technologies Information technologies – from computers to communications – have obviously had an overwhelming social impact and their economic and social benefits hardly need explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a commonplace in the history of jurisprudence that later generations fasten on a few aspects of a jurist's achievement and thereby distort the nature of his work. Recent scholarship has argued very forcibly that this has happened in the case of thinkers as contrasted as St Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Gianbattista Vico, Sir William Blackstone, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. The later use of their ideas often appears to bear little relationship either to the specific intentions of the jurists concerned, or to the very broad themes in their works which come to the fore when the reader has in mind the historical context in which their books were produced. If Maine's thought suffered a similar fate it should come as no surprise. We have seen that his own selection of Austin's ideas was unbalanced in the extreme; it is such a strange selection that it is difficult to believe that Maine was even attempting an objective assessment and he may have expected that he himself would fare no better at the hands of others. Also, because of their references to numerous topics, there was a quality to Maine's works which made them susceptible to inappropriate quotation; the critic can choose from such a variety of themes and topics. When he died in 1888 it was likely that the reception of Maine's ideas would be full of contrasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part one is an analysis of Locke's concept of natural and civil liberty in the Two treatises. His account of liberty in the Essay is interpreted within the framework laid down in the Two treatises. I continue to believe that this early interpretation of natural and civil liberty is substantially correct and crucially important for understanding the formation of the concept of civil society or ‘public sphere’ in which citizens actively judge the policies of government in light of the public good. Whereas Hobbes and the absolutists argue that citizens alienate their independent political judgement as a condition of subjection, civic humanists uphold independent political judgement but tend to restrict its exercise to those directly engaged in government. Locke, in contrast to both, grants to citizens not in government the right to discuss and judge their governors in public, to dissent, and, if necessary, resist, when they transgress the public good. However, as I worked on chapter 6 I came to see that the interpretation of Locke's natural law as ‘rationalist’ rather than ‘voluntarist’ was mistaken. I took Hobbes' extreme form of moral and legal voluntarism as a benchmark and assumed that any theory short of that was rationalist. But it became clear that Locke developed his theory of natural law within an intellectual context set by Pufendorf of ‘mitigated’ voluntarism in which the creation of the world is purely contingent, as in all forms of voluntarism, yet once it is created certain unalterable and rational rules of human conduct follow that god ordinarily binds himself to obey, as in rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VOCATIONS, CAREERS, AND OFFICES In the hagiography of every modern profession there is a heroic age of struggle. For German schoolmen, the struggle on one front pitted a fledgling profession against the clerical legacy that kept it fastened to an archaic identity. But when the schoolmen's act of secession is set in a larger process – when it is understood as a stage in the transformation of the learned estate into a Bildüngsburgertum – it can be seen to have occurred within the formation of a new consensus. In many respects teachers and clergymen fashioned similar ideological responses to analogous conditions, opportunities, and threats. There are underlying parallels in the initial impetus behind their formulations of professional ideologies and in their rhetorical shifts in gear from utilitarianism to neohumanism at the end of the century. While teachers reached for an entirely new status, reform-minded clergymen in the last decades of the eighteenth century felt compelled to react against a precipitous decline in the prestige of their order. There was nothing new about this theme; one encounters the same lament in the early eighteenth century, especially among Pietist clergymen, and indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. But whereas the early Pietists traced the corruption of church life to the disruptions of war, clergymen a century later attributed the spread of irreligiosity to a superficial but nonetheless corrosive secular rationalism. Were popular attitudes toward the clergy actually changing? The very recurrence of alarm on this score gives pause for skepticism, and it is reinforced by clergymen's equally incessant complaints about popular attachment to obsolete confessional traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climb up the academic ranks to a clerical appointment was also an advance along a patronage chain, formed by the men who singled out bright boys without means, distributed the public and private charity that made possible their studies, and filled vacancies in clerical and teaching offices. These sponsors represented a many-tiered hierarchy of wealth, status, and institutional authority, both within the educated Bürgertum and in the social networks binding it to other groups. For poor boys, the corporate initiation into the clergy was also an experience of class inequality on more or less polarized terms. The social hinge in the initiation, patronage was also an instrument of class power. The actual workings of patronage in eighteenth-century society have received little attention, despite its obvious importance in both securing the advantages of birth and creating channels for merit. Instead class inequality has been conceived as a static hierarchy of wealth and power, and quantitative research has demonstrated how academic education reflected and perpetuated a social “structure” in this sense, above all by overrepresenting an academic and official elite and virtually excluding groups at the bottom. In the workings of patronage – in the skeins of personal ties and mutual loyalties between sponsors and poor boys – class can be comprehended as a process, a series of one-to-one relationships with a formative impact on consciousness. Clearly structural realities underlay those relationships and lent them coercive force; but it was cultural norms, at once sanctioning inequality and setting limits to its terms, that made patronage seem a legitimate exercise of authority rather than an abuse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]