Barack Obama and the Traditions of Progressive Reform

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Kloppenberg
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
First Century ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
National Purpose

This chapter discusses the Progressivism of President Barack Obama. Obama's progressivism is broadly based. First, he aspired to the ideals of the Social Gospel and invoked the idea of a shared national purpose, a common good that transcended the particular interests of the separate classes, ethnic groups, and regions that have shaped American political struggles. Second, he resurrected the Progressives' emphasis on political and economic reforms. Third, Obama inherited the Progressives' pragmatism, their uneasiness with dogma, their commitment to achieving moderate, incremental progress through trial and error, and their confidence in the application of the scientific method to politics. The obstacles to Obama's progressivism run deep as well. He has had to wrestle with four stubborn features of American culture that have hamstrung reformers since the nation's founding: persistent localism; distrust of the federal government; a deep ambivalence about engaging in world affairs; and a racism that appears nearly as entrenched in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

What Theology Should and Should Not Learn from the Social Sciences About the Common Good

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary L. Hirschfeld
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Catholic Social Thought ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.

Reflections on Lawrence Freedman’s ‘Deterrence’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
International Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Social Strategy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

The Truncated German Social Investment Turn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Seeleib-Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Political Determinants ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Regime ◽  
Policy Transformations ◽  
Veto Points

Traditionally Germany has been categorized as the archetypical conservative welfare state, a categorization not systematically questioned in much of the comparative welfare state regime literature. For many scholars Germany was largely stuck and unable to reform its coordinated market economy and welfare state arrangements at the turn of the twenty-first century, due to a large number of veto points and players and the dominance of two ‘welfare state parties’. More recent research has highlighted a widening and deepening of the historically institutionalized social protection dualism, whilst at the same time significant family policy transformations, which can be considered as partially in line with the social investment paradigm, have been emphasized. This chapter sets out to sketch the main policy developments and aims to identify political determinants of social policy change in Germany.

Three Challenges for the Social Investment Strategy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Myles
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Investment Strategy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Current Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Wage Outcomes

Three challenges are highlighted in this chapter to the realization of the social investment strategy in our twenty-first-century world. The first such challenge—intertemporal politics—lies in the term ‘investment’, a willingness to forego some measure of current consumption in order to realize often uncertain gains in the future that would not occur otherwise, such as better schooling, employment, and wage outcomes for the next generation. Second, the conditions that enabled our post-war predecessors to invest heavily in future-oriented public goods—a sustained period of economic growth and historically exceptional tolerance for high levels of taxation—no longer obtain. Third, the millennial cohorts who will bear the costs of a new, post-industrial, investment strategy are more economically divided than earlier cohorts and face multiple demands raised by issues such as population aging and global warming, among others.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Global Restructuring ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Political Decision Making ◽  
Mode Of Production

This book investigates two questions, how did finance become hegemonic in the capitalist system; and what are the social consequences of the rise of finance? We do not dwell on other topics, such as the evolution of the mode of production or the development of class conflict over the longer run. Our theme is not the genesis, history, dynamics, or contradictions of capitalism but, instead, we address the rise of financialization beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. Therefore, we investigate the transnationalization of the circuits and processes of capital accumulation that originated the expansion and financialization of the mechanisms of production, social reproduction, and hegemony, including the ideology, the functioning of the states, and the political decision making. We do not discuss the prevailing neoliberalism as an ideology, although we pay attention to the creation and diffusion of ideas, since we sketch an overview of the process of global restructuring of production and finance leading to the prevalence of the shadow economy....

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