scholarly journals The Ethics and Economics of Middle Class Romance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roos Slegers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Ethics And Economics ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThis article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it.

Uma União de Mentes: Casamento e educação das mulheres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elen Biguelini
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Female Education ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
English Society ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Book Studies

English society at the end of the end of the 18th century viewed women in association with, and dependent on, men. Marriage was an important part of society, since it was the only accepted future for young ladies. Therefore marriage was the main focus of middle class and aristocratic women’s education and an education based on accomplishments that could, as Mary Wollstonecraft has noted, make them vain and superficial. The book studies ; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wedding Day, Everyone has his fault, Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are and Lover’s Vows, although coherent with their time, show independent female characters whose education allows them to think for themselves and not merely repeat opinions that they do not even understand; or just obey male orders and desires. That allows them to have a marriage based on equality. In Austen and Inchbald’s work marriage is based on love, being a union of equal minds that love and understand each other. This book discusses the situation of women at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, how the authors approch the issue of choice, female education, and marriage for love as a union of equal minds.

Sentiment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Chandler
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Practical Criticism ◽  
Made In

“Sentiment” is a term that signifies differently in its different English forms (sentiments, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalism), and these forms themselves signify differently at different times and in different languages. In French, whence it derives, the verb sentir means “to feel” or “to sense,” and a relatively clear distinction can be made in that language between sentir and penser (“to think”), and likewise between un sentiment and une pensée. In English, however, especially in the 18th century when the notion of the sentiment became central to empiricist moral philosophy, the term tends to straddle thought and feeling. In the accelerated development of the concept in the work of David Hume and his friend Adam Smith, sentiment might best be understood as feeling reflected in thought, which later figured centrally in William Wordsworth’s account of the poetic process. Even before Wordsworth, Laurence Sterne had deployed the recently coined English adjective sentimental, and he exploited this new understanding to develop a new and massively influential mode of ambivalence in fiction. Such an understanding also helped to underwrite the fully elaborated 1795 theoretical intervention of the Anglophile German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had to invent the German adjective sentimentalisch from the Anglo-French term. Schiller distinguished the sentimental mode in poetry from the naive on the dual grounds, already established in British writings on the subject, that the sentimental involved “mixed feelings” born of an act of “reflection.” Even as this more technical understanding of the sentimental mode was being developed, however, critique of “sentimentality” in a strictly pejorative sense was underway. In modernist literary theory, certainly, much energy is mobilized around this critique, as is clear from a foundational work in the institution of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards at Cambridge, who produced a full taxonomy of the forms of sentimentality, a deviant kind of emotional responsiveness he opposed to another, which he called “inhibition.” The modernist intolerance of what it called “sentimentality” would be taken up as part of a broader and more programmatic critique of commercialized culture under capitalism in later work by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno and by Jean Baudrillard.

Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity

1996 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric L. Haralson
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Socioeconomic Environment ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Cultural Service ◽  
Gender Traits ◽  
The Village

From "A Psalm of Life" and "The Village Blacksmith" to Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow provided middle-class Americans with models of self-comportment and means for coping with the anxieties and stresses of a commercial society on the move. Mixing tones of melancholy and patient resolution, the poetry served to attenuate polarized gender roles and, especially, to authorize a sentimental or domestic style of masculinity in opposition to more aggresive, competitive, business-oriented modes of "manliness." Though this body of verse employs martial imagery and masculinist terms in order to evoke the tenor of mind and will required by an increasingly complex socioeconomic environment, Longfellow converts these images and terms to elaborate a "feminized" ideal of personal and social behavior: sublimative, spiritualized, quietly persistent. The figure of Evangeline crosses gender lines to instruct both men and women how to bear up under the burden of American "modernity," while that of Hiawatha blends gender traits to embody a soft-but-still-manly masculinity, with implications for both heterosexual and homosocial relations. The efficacy and the very premises of Longfellow's cultural service, which secured his enormous popularity in the antebellum period, were called into question with the advent of realist antisentimentalism, and the poet's work suffered permanent devaluation under the canons of the modernist taste.

scholarly journals WORK LIFE BALANCE AND ITS EFFECTS ON ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY AMONG THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS IN KOLKATA, WEST BENGAL

2021 ◽  
pp. 66-70
Author(s):  
Kahini Palit
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Commitment ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Work Life Balance ◽  
Life Balance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Organizational Behaviour ◽  
New Middle Class

Work life balance has become a noteworthy issue having implications both for the organization as well as the employees. The present research inquired into the experiences of the individuals experiencing issues of work life balance, its effects on the life of the individuals and whether it has any relation with their commitments towards their organizations. The methodology for the research was ethnography. 50 respondents, having equal number of working men and women aged between 25-30 years participated in the study. In order to understand the issues in depth, the researcher engaged in long discussions with the respondents to get the insider’s perspective of the issue. The findings indicated that work life imbalance was extremely stressful for the employees, and led to reduced output and less organizational commitment from the employees. It also encouraged the employees to quit the job, or look for other opportunities. Work life imbalance for the employees also proved to be detrimental for the organization, who lose committed employees or have employees suffering from fatigue due to stress arising from work life conflict. KEYWORDS: work life balance, organizational commitment, organizational behaviour, human resource management, stress

Macaulay’s (Cyber) Children

Dead Ringers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shehzad Nadeem
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The West ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Foreign Accents ◽  
Morality Play ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Executives And Managers

This chapter examines how globalization affects the identities and aspirations of outsourcing workers, managers, and employers. It first considers the rise of a “new middle class” in India and whether middle-class Indians can be meaningfully described as today's “mimic men” (and women) before discussing the ways that companies shape the identities and behavior of the employees within the workplace. It shows that Indian workers find the adoption of foreign accents, identities, and timings both exciting and disorienting. They increasingly identify with lifestyles and customs that are global in reach. Executives and managers, too, use their close engagement with the West to define themselves as something other than the “traditional” Indian. The chapter argues that globalization gives rise to an Indian morality play where the pleasure principle clashes with the demands of custom and obligation, where an uneasy relationship between kama (pleasure) and dharma (duty) is established.

scholarly journals Idleness and the Very Sparing Hand of God: The invisible tie between Hume’s "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" and Smith’s "Wealth of Nations"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Santori
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

In the eighteenth-century Scottish and British cultural context, idleness was a central issue for religion, literature, art, and philosophy. This paper analyzes the reflections of David Hume and Adam Smith on idleness and commercial society. Hume advanced his most provocative view on the subject in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), where idleness is represented as the endowment made by the “very sparing hand” of the “author of nature” to humanity. My argument is that Smith’s view on idleness advanced in the Wealth of Nations (1776) is connected to Hume’s Dialogues, as Smith’s invisible hand defeats idleness through a combination of self-interest, the propensity to exchange, and the division of labor. The broader aim of this study is to add to the philosophical relationship between the Scottish philosophers.

العربية المقاربة المقاصديّة في ردّ ابن فودي على القادح في جلستهم الدعويّة

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alawiye Abdulmumin Abdurrazzaq ◽  
Ahmad Wifaq Mokhtar ◽  
Abdul Manan Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Subject

This article is aimed to examine the extent of the application of Islamic legal objectives by Sheikh Abdullah bn Fudi in his rejoinder against one of their contemporary scholars who accused them of being over-liberal about the religion. He claimed that there has been a careless intermingling of men and women in the preaching and counselling gathering they used to hold, under the leadership of Sheikh Uthman bn Fudi (the Islamic reformer of the nineteenth century in Nigeria and West Africa). Thus, in this study, the researchers seek to answer the following interrogations: who was Abdullah bn Fudi? who was their critic? what was the subject matter of the criticism? How did the rebutter get equipped with some guidelines of higher objectives of Sharĩʻah in his rejoinder to the critic? To this end, this study had tackled the questions afore-stated by using inductive, descriptive and analytical methods to identify the personalities involved, define and analyze some concepts and matters considered as the hub of the study.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Der fatale Blick in den Spiegel – Zum Zusammenhang von Medialität und Reflexivität

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Jahraus
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Specular Reflections ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Literature And Film

Der Beitrag untersucht den Zusammenhang von Reflexivität und Medialität (das, was ein Medium zum Medium macht), indem er die Idee der Reflexion an den konkreten Formen von Spiegelungen in Literatur und Film wie zum Beispiel Doppelgänger oder Figurenspaltungen darstellt. Dabei zeigt sich, daß jedes Medium autoreflexiv verfasst ist und daß die Vorstellung von Subjektivität seit dem 18. Jahrhundert selbst auf diesem Zusammenspiel von Reflexivität und Medialität beruht. Das Subjekt gilt demnach als reflexiver Effekt der Medialität, wie es an einer Betrachtung von Foucaults berühmter Meninas-Interpretation nachverfolgt werden kann.<br><br>This article analyses the relation between reflexivity and mediality (what makes a medium a medium) by presenting concrete situations of optical and specular reflections in literature and film, such as doubles (Doppelgänger) and split figures. Thus it can be shown that since the 18th century every medium is self-reflexive and that the concept of subjectivity has its basis in the interplay of reflexivity and mediality. The subject is an effect of medialitity as may be demonstrated by a new recapitulation of Foucault’s famous Meninas-interpretation.

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