The Modernization of the Population

2020 ◽  
pp. 391-420
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
The Core ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Scientific Terms

The ‘civilizing process’ comes to be articulated in scientific terms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Central to this exercise is the establishment of norms for everything from bodily proportions to social behaviour. These developments were linked to worries about the degeneration of the population. Eugenics, which identified favourable and unfavourable inherited traits, promoted the former and advocated measures to inhibit reproduction of the latter. As part of this process, what emerged was the invention of the modern notion of ‘intelligence’, which now becomes a criterion of social standing, notionally replacing those of class, race, and birth. This chapter examines a shift of mentality inherent in these developments, in the concern to shape the population into the kinds of people who can occupy a scientifically modelled form of civilization. At the core of this lies the shift from reason to rationality, and we explore some of the consequences of this shift.

The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Mike Chasar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Creative Forces

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)

The unease with civilization

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Pepperell
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Depth Level ◽  
The Core ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Level I ◽  
Controversial Aspect ◽  
Frequent Criticism

Norbert Elias’s concept of the civilizing process is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his work, attracting frequent criticism for its perceived Eurocentrism, as well as impassioned defences that critics have misunderstood the concept. In this piece, I explore how The Civilizing Process channels unacknowledged Eurocentric stereotypes in ways that infuse the theory at a depth level. I then examine the downstream ramifications of these stereotypes by contrasting Elias’s analysis of the Holocaust, as presented in The Germans, with his analysis of colonialism as presented in The Civilizing Process. I argue that Elias’s failure to integrate forms of state violence directed at the colonial periphery undermines his ability to analyse state violence in the core. A more adequate approach would theorize ‘civilization’ as an ambivalent and contradictory process whose violent character is often – though not always – more exposed and visible on the periphery.

Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abram de Swaan
Keyword(s):  
Mass Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
The Core ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
Extreme Violence

Are massive violence and destruction a manifestation of ‘modernity’, even its very essence, or rather its total opposite: ‘a breakdown of civilization’? Although ostensibly Norbert Elias mainly occupied himself with the civilizing process, he was always, though mostly implicitly so, preoccupied with its complement and counterpart: violence, regression and anomie. In recent years, a number of his students have returned to these themes. Whether they wanted to or not, they were drawn into a debate that never subsided for long in the last century. I shall argue a position that transcends this opposition between ‘modernization’ and ‘regression’: at the core of the civilizing process, another contrary current may manifest itself, allowing extreme violence on a mass scale to be perpetrated towards specific categories of people, while civilized relations and modes of expression are maintained in other sections of society. The concepts of identification, disidentification and compartmentalization should help to describe and explain these ‘dyscivilizing’ processes in their complex relations to processes of civilization.

scholarly journals What’s the right thing to do? Increasing pro-sociality with simple moral nudges

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerio Capraro ◽  
Glorianna Jagfeld ◽  
Rana Klein ◽  
Mathijs Mul ◽  
Iris van de Pol
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Economic Games ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
Over Time

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mechanisms that can change people’s behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, the so-called “nudges”. Previous research has found that moral nudges (e.g., making social norms salient) can promote pro-social behaviour. However, little is known about whether their effect persists over time and spills across context. This question is key in light of research showing that prosocial actions are often followed by selfish actions, thus suggesting that some moral manipulations may backfire. Here we present a class of simple moral nudges that have a great positive impact on pro-sociality. In Studies 1-4, we use economic games to demonstrate that asking subjects to tell “what they think is the morally right thing to do” does not only increase pro-sociality in the choice immediately after, but also in subsequent choices, and even when the social context changes. In Study 5, we demonstrate that moral nudges increase charity donations by about 44 percent.

Libertarianism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Mack
Keyword(s):  
Hard Core ◽  
The Other ◽  
Voluntary Agreements ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Ayn Rand ◽  
The Core ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The core prescriptive postulate of libertarianism is that individuals have strong moral claims to the peaceful enjoyment of their own persons and their own legitimate extra-personal possessions along with similarly strong claims to the fulfillment of their voluntary agreements with others. All (non-pacifist) libertarians take these moral claims to be so strong and salient that force and the threat of force may permissibly be employed to defend against and to rectify their infringement. On the other hand, only infringements of these core claims trigger the permissible use or threat of force. Other deployments of force or the threat of force are taken themselves to be violations of the moral claims asserted by the prescriptive postulate. This article presents a brief history of libertarian political philosophy, focusing on six hard-core libertarian theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, Gustav de Molinari, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick.

scholarly journals Dissecting Sites of Punishment: Penal Colonies and Their Borders

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-425
Author(s):  
Zhanna Popova ◽  
Francesca Di Pasquale
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
The Core ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Prison Systems

AbstractAlthough a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, “Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of “border”, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.

IX. Between Empire Building and State Formation. Official Elites in Java and Mughal India

Itinerario ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-194
Author(s):  
V.J.H. Houben ◽  
D.H.A. Kolff
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Core Region ◽  
The South ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
The Core ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The reason to compare the recent histories of India and Indonesia was that they were the scenes of the two most extensive and populous colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decision to push back the comparison to the pre-colonial era meant loosing track of the vital focus of the enterprise. Moreover, pre-colonial India presents a unity in only some respects whereas Indonesia as a territorial concept did not even exist then. The tendency of Indonesianists to focus, for convenience's sake, on the island of Java seems to become inescapable. This confronts those on the Indian wing of the comparison with the dilemma to what extent they are entitled to give up Indian unity and if they do, what part of India compares best with insular Java. Especially fit for comparison seem the regional states of South India: Vijayanagar, Madurai etc. Both the rice-based economies of the South Indian states and their size suggests this. Although Java became the core region of one of the colonial empires, whereas the South Indian states would stay at the periphery of the other, such a comparison could well be fruitful.

scholarly journals Challenges concerning terminology and methodology in forest sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Tomasz J. Wodzicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Population ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Forest Ecosystems ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Scientific Terminology ◽  
The Core ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Scientific Terms

AbstractCommonly used scientific terms and their specific meaning in the context of forest sciences and services were the focus of this article. Special attention was devoted to analyzing the meaning of ecological terminology such as “niche”, “homeostasis”, “natural” and “succession” in order to better understand problems related to the interaction between and within complex biological structures such as forest multi population ecosystems and the human population. Especially the role of Homo sapiens occupying an ecological niche in forest ecosystems, as well as in the Earth’s biosphere, formed the core in this discussion. One important challenge in terms of terminology and methodology concerns the considerable progress and interaction between achievements in the general sciences such as biology, physics, physiology, mathematics, sociology and economy as compared to forest sciences. Challenges are obviously accompanying the development in scientific terminology and are thus an important factor when conveying knowledge to the future doctors of forest sciences.

What face familiarity feelings say about the lateralization of specific entities within the core system

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Gainotti
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory System ◽  
Core System ◽  
The Core ◽  
Memory Traces ◽  
Specific Memory ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
The Right

Abstract The target article carefully describes the memory system, centered on the temporal lobe that builds specific memory traces. It does not, however, mention the laterality effects that exist within this system. This commentary briefly surveys evidence showing that clear asymmetries exist within the temporal lobe structures subserving the core system and that the right temporal structures mainly underpin face familiarity feelings.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document