Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-154
Author(s):  
Tobias Boes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The World

This chapter illustrates how Thomas Mann created a novel role for the artist: fully engaged with the political events of the day through a variety of twentieth-century media and yet fiercely protective of an independent stance. The 1930s was a decade in which governments of various stripes throughout the world discovered the value of employing artists to drum up support within a populist base. And Mann was a patriotic resident of the United States who throughout the war years carefully refrained from criticizing his adoptive country. But his voice and his aims were always unmistakably his own, and he agitated for the United States because he equated the American cause with that of liberal democracy, not because of any government commission. The chapter further explains that Mann's relocation to California can serve as a symbolic marker of this transition. Indeed, it was during his residency in Pacific Palisades as well that he reached the apogee of his trajectory as an anti-Nazi celebrity in the eyes of the American public.

Illusion as a Basic Psychic Principle: Winnicott, Freud, Oedipus, and Trump

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Seligman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Psychosocial Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Healthy Living ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The World

Illusion can be viewed as a creative engagement with the world, and as a central psychic motivation and capacity, rather than as a form of self-deception. Winnicott and other Middle Group writers have understood integrative, imaginative illusion as an essential part of healthy living and psychosocial development. As such, it emerges and presents itself in a variety of ways, in transaction with the realities that support or degrade it. In its absence, varied difficulties in living ensue. To elaborate and illustrate this conceptualization, Freud’s notion that the oedipus complex is resolved is reconsidered as a creative misreading of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, one based on the plausible illusion of a civilizing psychosocial development that would serve as a protective bastion against his experience of the political chaos and violence of the first decades of twentieth-century European history. Finally, the place of illusion and disillusionment among those most disillusioned by the recent election of Donald Trump in the United States is considered in relation to the recent right-wing populist turn.

Reading “America” Across and Against the Grain of Public Discourse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane C. Desmond
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
The World ◽  
Russian Military

Recent political events like the violent rise of ISIS (the so-called Islamic State), the war in Syria, continuing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, U.S. participation in fighting the pandemic of Ebola in West Africa, Russian military interventions in Ukraine and their effects on U.S.-Europe relations, plans for strengthening the U.S.-India relationship as part of a wider strategy of Asian diplomacy, and, after fifty years of firm disengagement, the striking easing of relations between the United States and Cuba, all signal the continuing interlocking political spheres of action of the United States and so many other parts of the world. Beyond these political events, ever expanding flows of goods, people, and ideas into and out of the United States demand our attention as scholars with expertise on the political entity and cultural imaginary that gets called “America.”...

Histoire du mot «démocratie» au Canada et au Québec. Analyse politique des stratégies rhétoriques

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Le Canada

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

The “Separation” of Religion and Polities: The Paradoxes of Spinoza

1988 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillel G. Fradkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Founding Fathers

Benedict Spinoza is the first philosophical proponent of liberal democracy. In his Theologico-Political Tractate he calls for the liberation of philosophy from theology and for the subordination of religion to politics. Though Spinoza may have not influenced the American Founding Fathers directly, both the clarity and the paradoxes of his arguments are perhaps the best guide to understanding better the present-day conflicts over religion and politics in the United States. Spinoza's insistence on the prerogative of the political sovereign to exercise absolute authority in the sphere of moral action necessarily complicates religious values. But the “inconveniences” resulting from liberal democracy are justified in terms of justice.

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

The Journey of Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Erikson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The University ◽  
Migrant Stream

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.

The Realist–Pacifist Summit Meeting of March 1942 and the Political Reorientation of Ecumenical Protestantism in the United States

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Summit Meeting ◽  
The World ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
First Moment

This chapter analyzes the consolidation in 1942 of the two major, religiously defined institutional forces of the entire period from World War II to the present. The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, was the first moment at which rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together and agreed upon an agenda for the postwar world. The chapter addresses the following questions: Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?

Conclusions

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government

I have tried in this book to summarize where the world economy has come from in the past three centuries and to set out the core of the agenda that lies before us as we face the century ahead. This century, for the first time since the mid-18th century, will come to be dominated by stagnant or falling populations. The conclusions at which I have arrived can usefully be divided in two parts: one relates to what can be called the political economy of the 21st century; the other relates to the links between the problem of the United States playing steadily the role of critical margin on the world scene and moving at home toward a solution to the multiple facets of the urban problem. As for the political economy of the 21st century, the following points relate both to U.S. domestic policy and U.S. policy within the OECD, APEC, OAS, and other relevant international organizations. There is a good chance that the economic rise of China and Asia as well as Latin America, plus the convergence of economic stagnation and population increase in Africa, will raise for a time the relative prices of food and industrial materials, as well as lead to an increase in expen ditures in support of the environment. This should occur in the early part of the next century, If corrective action is taken in the private markets and the political process, these strains on the supply side should diminish with the passage of time, the advance of science and innovation, and the progressively reduced rate of population increase. The government, the universities, the private sector, and the professions might soon place on their common agenda the delicate balance of maintaining full employment with stagnant or falling populations. The existing literature, which largely stems from the 1930s, is quite illuminating but inadequate. And the experience with stagnant or falling population in the the world economy during post-Industrial Revolution times is extremely limited. This is a subject best approached in the United States on a bipartisan basis, abroad as an international problem. It is much too serious to be dealt with, as it is at present, as a domestic political football.

John Adams's Machiavellian Moment

1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Bradley Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Epistemology

John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document