The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Neo-Realism and the future of strategy

1993 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Warsaw Pact ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

To speak of the ‘future’ of strategy is to reveal a deep tension in the way we commonly think about the subject. On the one hand we are confronted by revolutionary changes in the geo-political landscape. The transformation of Europe, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, for example, encourage the belief that the Cold War—a term which has been almost synonymous with-strategy for nearly half a century—is now an historical artifact. These events, analyzed so intensively by leaders and commentators, open up significant questions about the future of strategy.

What Changes in Summer and Autumn 1989?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
The Other ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nondemocratic Regimes

This chapter addresses why November 1989 became the moment that the models for the future were launched. By the night of November 9, five developments had permanently altered the Cold War and produced a causal chain that resulted in the unintentional opening of the Berlin Wall. The nature of this causal chain suggests that theorists of power and theorists of ideas need to pay attention to each other to understand what happened. On the one hand, some developments were based on old-fashioned realist calculations. On the other hand, some developments were ones of attitude rather than capability, of ideas rather than material abilities. In the course of 1989, half of Europe had come to the conclusion that it need not continue to live under nondemocratic regimes in the interest of maintaining the stability of the whole.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Necessity

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician, social theorist, and musician, Adorno throughout his life remained committed to a decidedly secular and socialist European consciousness, even when dissecting German anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Yet his notion of utopian political transformation owed much to his early reading of Ernst Bloch’s insistence on a hunger for the transcendent that Bloch added to Marxian materialism. Adorno’s understanding of the work of art—a crucial element of his thinking, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory—was equally in tension over the historical necessity of its progressive secularization and rationalization. On the one hand, any "contamination of art with revelation" would uncritically embrace the mystical, fetish character of art. On the other hand, "the eradication of every trace of revelation from art" would reduce the artwork to a mere repetition of the status quo—that is, the lifeless routines of an administered society, including film and jazz, both of which Adorno denigrated.

Political World

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Brian Langille
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political World ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Legal Theory ◽  
The One

It is not transparently obvious why legal theorists are increasingly attracted to the ideas and methods of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After all, Wittgenstein’s writings are notoriously difficult and he said almost nothing, and certainly nothing sustained, about law. And why would self-proclaimed legal theorists be attracted to someone who was quite explicitly hostile to “theory”, who viewed philosophy as a sort of therapy, and who said, famously, “philosophy leaves everything as it is”? But a still more interesting question is, why has Wittgenstein received such curious and conflicting treatment at the hands of the critical legal theorists? On the one hand critical legal theory celebrates Wittgenstein’s work as a key to the dismantling of traditional jurisprudence, but on the other hand critical scholars bemoan his alleged debilitating endorsement of the status quo. It is this last question upon which this essay is focussed.

A Delicate Balance: Religious Autonomy Rights and lgbti Rights in Australia

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Baines
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The Status ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

This article addresses a research gap by analysing the way the Australian legal system is balancing the right to religious autonomy of organisations and the right of lgbti individuals not to be discriminated against, and considers what ought to be the case. I argue that the Australian legal system recognises the value of religious freedom on the one hand, and on the other hand, does not place a high priority on protecting it as an existing human right. My findings reveal that the Australian legal system is not always defining the religion and society relationship in ways that reflect the lived reality of religion in society. The issue is compounded by the wording of religious exemptions under anti-discrimination law which is contested within faith communities. As a consequence, religious freedom can be unfairly restricted. I conclude with recommendations to improve the status quo.

Textual Genetics and Manuscript in Word Processing. A new Definition of the Text?

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 45-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irène Fenoglio
Keyword(s):  
Word Processing ◽  
Text Processing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract: Very little research has been devoted to the way in which the textual genetics approaches the manuscripts in the text processing. However the future of the genetics depends, partly, on the interest which one can carry to this new materiality of the manuscript. The notion of text, the concept of what text is, have they been changed, or at least modified by the use of text processing? To write a text is to elaborate a discourse in the form of an utterance and to record it. The order of the discourse, in other words, the semiotic (the linguistic recognizable) / semantic (the meaning expressed (uttered) in the discourse) ratio should in no way be modified by the use of text processing. What changes, on the other hand, it is the materialization of the paper support of the text and consequently the status of this materialization.

How much is global governance changing? The G20 as international practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F Cooper ◽  
Vincent Pouliot
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Evolutionary Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Stability And Change ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The One ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Is the G20 transforming global governance, or does it reinforce the status quo? In this article we argue that as innovative as some diplomatic practices of the G20 may be, we should not overstate their potential impact. More specifically, we show that G20 diplomacy often reproduces many oligarchic tendencies in global governance, while also relaxing club dynamics in some ways. On the one hand, the G20 has more inductees who operate along new rules of the game and under a new multilateral ethos of difference. But, on the other hand, the G20 still comprises self-appointed rulers, with arbitrary rules of membership and many processes of cooption and discipline. In overall terms, approaching G20 diplomacy from a practice perspective not only provides us with the necessary analytical granularity to tell the old from the new, it also sheds different light on the dialectics of stability and change on the world stage. Practices are processes and as such they are always subject to evolutionary change. However, because of their structuring effects, diplomatic practices also tend to inhibit global transformation and reproduce the existing order.

The First Years of the Cold War

1952 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-547
Author(s):  
Dana G. Munro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War

We rarely have an opportunity to study the intimate reactions of two members of the President's cabinet to a series of very recent and very important events. Both Speaking Frankly and The Forrestal Diaries cover about the same period—the period when the United States was slowly awakening to the realities of the postwar world—but they are very different in other respects. Secretary Byrnes' book was written to give a picture of the problems that he encountered during his tenure as Secretary of State and to express his considered views about policy for the future. The Diaries, on the other hand, were never intended for publication, and without connective matter supplied by the editor they would be merely a collection of memoranda of meetings and conversations, copies or summaries of documents prepared by other people, personal letters, and less frequent entries in which Mr. Forrestal recorded his own opinions or impressions.

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