Is Nature Priceless?

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Collier
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rain Forest ◽  
Organic Food ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Left Flank ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Recent Variation

The indignant tears of a child command attention. Daniel, aged eight, has just learned about the Brazilian rain forest and it has moved him to his first expression of political outrage. It is directed at me, not as his father, but as representative of the generation of adults who are destroying something precious before he reaches the age at which he can stop us. Through sobs and rage he shouts, “Tell the president!” Having seen me on television, Daniel has a somewhat inflated impression of my influence. Eight-year-olds are not, on the whole, always repositories of good sense, and Daniel is no exception. But by chance his anger is right on target: son and father are ethically aligned in the battleground of natural assets. First, the left flank. I agree with environmentalists that nature is special: at some level most of us recognize that. But why is it special? Mainstream environmentalists, such as Stewart Brand, offer one answer. Nature is especially vulnerable and that matters because, being dependent upon it, mankind is thereby vulnerable. But as Brand argues, many environmentalists are carrying ideological baggage that needs to be discarded. For romantic environmentalists nature is incommensurate with the mundane business of the economy: it is in some way ethically prior. Echoing Baron d’Holbach’s diagnosis of modern angst, they see industrial capitalism as having divorced us from the natural world which it is rapidly destroying. You can sense their discomfort with modern industrial society in the language that they use, replete with words such as “organic” and “holistic.” For a recent variation on the theme of Holbach, watch Prince Charles delivering the BBC’s 2009 distinguished Dimbleby Lecture. Perhaps man needs to return to a simpler, nonindustrial lifestyle. Prince Charles produces organic food, and he has created a village, Poundsbury, in the style of the eighteenth century—the last age prior to industrialization. At the extreme end of romantic environmentalism the diagnosis is more radical: mankind itself has become the enemy of what is truly good. Reflecting these sentiments, there is now a considerable cult that relishes the prospect of the extinction of mankind.

Capital and Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit K. Majumdar
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Policy ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
The State ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Laws And Regulations

The chapter summarizes the nature of capital and capitalism. The chapter also highlights concepts related to the role of the State in economic activity, and the nature of industrial policy. The initial concepts dealt with are that of capital as a fund, capital as structure and capital as capabilities. Capitalism necessitates socially organizing production. Assessing organizational and administrative contingencies is important for understanding capitalism. Institutions are the bedrock of capitalism. The broad roles of Government, in designing laws and regulations, building infrastructure and acting as entrepreneur, are discussed. The implementation of national industrial strategies facilitates growth. The nature of industrial strategies is highlighted. Industrial policy activities, as defined by the three facets of institutions, innovation and involvement, are discussed. With respect to India’s industrial strategy, independent India’s founders’ visions of a modern industrial society, grounded in a need to involve Government in institution building, are introduced.

scholarly journals O jovem Lukács e Dostoiévski

Numen ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Löwy
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Decisive Influence

A referência decisiva para o pensamento religioso de Lukács não é o misticismo católico, judeu ou hindu, mas muito mais (como para todo o círculo Max Weber) a espiritualidade russa, e notadamente, Dostoiévski. Nessa época, Bloch e Lukács estavam fascinados pela literatura e filosofia religiosas russas, e o seu reino coletivista-religioso sobre a terra era concebido como “uma vida no espírito de Dostoiévski”3. Somente podemos compreender essa atração deles pela Rússia entre eles, assim como de os outros membros do círculo, através da sua repulsa contra o mundo individualista e seelenlos da sociedade industrial daEuropa ocidental.The decisive influence in Lukács’religious thought is not Catholic, Jewish or Hindu mysticism, but above all (as it was for all Mar Weber’s circle) Russian spirituality and, particularly, Dostoyevsky. In those times, Bloch and Lukács were fascinated by Russian religious literature and philosophy, and their religiously collectivist kingdom on earth was conceived as a “life in the spirit of Dostoyevsky”. We can only understand the attraction towards Russia among them, as well as among other members of the circle, if we have in mind their rejection of an individualistic world and the seelenlos of western modern industrial society.

Body Semiotics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Man-Fung Yip
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Martial Arts Cinema

This chapter considers how the (male) action bodies in martial arts cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, posed between mastery and vulnerability, served as a site/sight through which the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong people living in the flux of a rapidly modernizing society were articulated and made visible. Specifically, it identifies three types of action body—the narcissistic body, the sacrificial body, and the ascetic body—and discusses how each crystallized out of the changing social and ideological dynamics of Hong Kong during the period. As socially symbolic signs, these diverse but interrelated representations of the body are extremely rich in meanings, inscribing within themselves not only fantasies of nationalist pride and liberated labor but also the historical experience of violence, in the form of both colonization and unbridled growth, that lay beneath the transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

Hermann Diels on the Presocratics: Empedocles' double destruction of the cosmos (Aetius ii 4.8)

Phronesis ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Sixth Edition ◽  
The World ◽  
Total Separation

AbstractStobaeus records a placitum where Empedocles says that the world is destroyed by the domination in turn of Love and of Strife. The placitum makes perfectly good sense in the context of Empedocles' belief that Love and Strife produce, in turn, a non-cosmic state of total unity (Love) and of total separation (Strife). But for over two hundred years scholars have been unable to hear that simple message. Sturz (1805) emended the text so as to make it fit the non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles that he had taken over from the pages of Tiedemann (1791). When Diels included Stobaeus' text in his edition of Aetius, in the Doxographi graeci (1879), he failed to remove the emendation, although his own reconstruction of the chapter heading in Aetius made the emendation impossible. Twenty years later, Diels saw the light, and printed Stobaeus' placitum, unemended, in his Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (1901) and in successive editions of his Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (from 1903 onwards). But Kranz resurrected the emendation in the Nachträge to his sixth edition of the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1951). The emended placitum is used again by Uvo Hölscher (1965) to support a non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles and is repeated in the latest collection of the fragments and testimonia (Brad Inwood, 1992). Hölscher fails to appreciate that the text that he uses to support his reconstruction is merely Sturz's translation into Greek of the non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles proposed by Tiedemann at the end of the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The Social Thought of the Action Française

1961 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Edward R. Tannenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Charles Maurras ◽  
The Church

The Action Française was the most notorious reactionary movement in twentieth-century France. From the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of the Vichy Regime it carried on its campaign against “the principles of 789”, which many Frenchmen (and other Western Europeans) mistakenly blamed for the “evils” of modern industrial society. But it represented neither the frustrated lower-middle classes that were attracted to fascism, nor the genteel bien-pensants who pined for the good old days” under Louis XVI or Charles X. Its leaders were café intellectuals who flaunted their newly acquired devotion to the monarchy and the church. They were professional nativists clamoring or a return to the traditional virtues of a golden age that never insisted. Their utopia was a highly intellectualized daydream invented by charles Maurras.

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