Why Liberalism Failed

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Deneen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
State System ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Human History ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Centripetal Forces

Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded? Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As this book argues, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. The book offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

scholarly journals Hegemony and mediations in melodrama of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dave Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
Mexican Cinema ◽  
The Family ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Revolutionary Period

<p>The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them.</p>

scholarly journals POLITICS AND PREACHING: CHIEFLY CONVERTS TO THE NAZARETHA CHURCH, OBEDIENT SUBJECTS, AND SERMON PERFORMANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL CABRITA
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Narrative Practice ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTTwentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentieth century, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, however, new narrative occasions for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power arose in Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used their conversion testimonies to narrate themselves as divinely appointed to their subjects. An alliance between the Nazaretha Church and KwaZulu chiefs of the last hundred years meant that the Church could position itself as an institution of national stature, and chiefs told stories that exhorted unruly subjects to obedience as a spiritual virtue.

Political Culture in the Islamic World: The Socioeconomic Roots of the Islamic Leviathan

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 612-640
Author(s):  
Amir Abdul Reda
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
State System ◽  
Socioeconomic Class ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Public Opinions ◽  
Independent Variables

Abstract In this paper, the author explores how development affects public opinions on an Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate political system in the Middle East. He asks the following: In the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), what influences political attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan? To answer this question, he looks at the influence of seven independent variables on attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as a state system. The seven variables are (1) society’s overall development, (2) the socioeconomic class of respondents, (3) society’s corruption, (4) religiosity, (5) education, (6) gender, and (7) age. The author finds the observations needed to assess his theory in the Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset 1988-2014 (CMEGID), which includes 15,194 relevant observations throughout the MENA region. His findings show that societies’ overall development has the most influence over Arab attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate state system.

The Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920: facts, legends, speculations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balázs Ablonczy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Mass Consciousness ◽  
Opinion Polls

The signing of the peace treaty between the winners of World War One and the defeated Austria-Hungary in the Grand Trianon Chateau in the suburbs of Paris in 1920 was one of the most dramatic events in twentieth-century Hungarian history. It left traces in the mass consciousness and political culture of Hungary, and is still a controversial historical topic. According to recent opinion polls, the vast majority of the population believes that the treaty signed in Versailles was unjust. This book explores the mythical nature of this popular conviction, legends born around the signing of this document, and conspiracy theories that are still used to plausibly explain the past. The book is intended for the reader who wants to go beyond a mere reconstruction of the formal sequence of events, who searches for deeper explanations of the non-evident interdependences of the present day with the past, and who does not take “hot” news, journalistic speculations, and gossip at face value.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Korean War ◽  
State System ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
The Korean War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells a story of the changing script of warfare in the mid-twentieth century through the Korean War. At stake in this conflict was not simply the usual question of territorial sovereignty and the nation-state. The heart of the struggles revolved around the question of political recognition, the key relational dynamic that formed the foundation for the post-1945 nation-state system. This book argues that in order to understand how the act of recognition became the essential terrain of war, one must step away from the traditional landscape of warfare—the battlefield—and into the interrogation room.

Cuban Revolutionary Politics in Diaspora

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Antonia Muller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
National Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
And Gender

This chapter tells the story of two key and connected institutions of the Cuban Independence movement outside of Cuba: the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) and the National Association of Cuban Revolutionary Émigrés (ANERC). These institutions and their records have much to teach us about the political culture of Cubans in exile during the second half of the nineteenth century. More specifically, the chapter explores the tension between inclusion and exclusion that marked both institutions during the 1890s and the first few decades of the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on race, class and gender.

Deification in the Long Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Ruth Coates
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Expressions ◽  
Russian Religious Thought ◽  
The Church

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the reception of deification in Russia in the long nineteenth century, drawing attention to the breadth and diversity of the theme’s manifestation, and pointing to the connections with inter-revolutionary religious thought. It examines how deification is understood variously in the spheres of monasticism, Orthodox institutions of higher education, and political culture. It identifies the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the most influential elite cultural expressions of the idea of deification, and the primary conduits through which Western European philosophical expressions of deification reach early twentieth-century Russian religious thought. Inspired by the anthropotheism of Feuerbach, and Stirner’s response to this, Dostoevsky brings to the fore the problem of illegitimate self-apotheosis, whilst Soloviev, in his philosophy of divine humanity, bequeaths deification to his successors both as this is understood by the church and in its iteration in German metaphysical idealism.

Ecología y Bioética. La insuficiencia de los límites

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Miguel Serrano Ruiz-Calderón
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Problem ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Humanae Vitae ◽  
Individual Aspect ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Made In

La ecología y la bioética como disciplinas nuevas aparecen durante el siglo XX como consecuencia del horror producido por los abusos técnico-industriales. Tienen pues un origen común y positivo, como está generalmente admitido. Sin embargo, autores críticos han observado que principalmente la bioética ha derivado en una actitud complaciente que, en definitiva, ha servido como coartada moral a buena parte de los abusos realizados en nombre de la Ciencia. Todo lo que es técnicamente posible hacer se acaba haciendo y además encuentra una justificación bioética construida por los expertos de forma analítica. Se puede sospechar que lo mismo sucede con la ecología. Esto constituye en definitiva una traición a las pretensiones de los fundadores de las nuevas ciencias. No se trata de algo nuevo en la Historia humana donde los hallazgos más valiosos o los valores más altos han sido habitualmente manipulados. Parte del problema actual radica en la divinización del hombre, ya sea en su aspecto individual o bajo el concepto de Humanidad. Paradójicamente esta divinización causa la perdida de la noción de dignidad y favorece la conversión del hombre concreto en mero instrumento de la acción técnica. Nuestra época alberga, sin embargo, motivos para el optimismo. La respuesta fundamental se encuentra en la noción de “límite” o si se prefiere de marco que sitúa al hombre en su lugar en el universo, distinto del puro mundo natural y relacionado con la divinidad. La Humanae Vitae es un ejemplo claro de esta concepción globalizadora. ---------- Ecology and bioethics as new disciplines appear during the twentieth century as a result of horror produced by industrial technical abuses. Therefore they have a common and positive origin, as is generally admitted. However, critics mainly authors have observed that bioethics has led to a complacent attitude that ultimately served as a moral alibi for much of the abuses made in the name of science possible. All that is technically possible is just doing and also finds a justification built by bioethics experts analytically. You may suspect that the same is true in the field of ecology. This is definitely a betrayal of the claims of the founders of the new sciences. This is not something new in human history where the most valuable findings or higher values have been routinely manipulated. Part of the current problem is the deification of man, either in its individual aspect or under the concept of humanity. Paradoxically, this deification causes the loss of the notion of dignity and promotes the conversion of concrete man into a mere instrument of technical action. Our era houses, however, grounds for optimism. The fundamental answer lies in the notion of “limit” or “frame” which puts man in his place in the universe, other than pure natural world and related to divinity. Humanae Vitae is a clear example of this globalizing conception.

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