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Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

2011-02-01 History
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Release : 2011-02-01
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 541/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution by : Michal Jan Rozbicki

Download or read book Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution written by Michal Jan Rozbicki. This book was released on 2011-02-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding. Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty—one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital—a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms—at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.

Commerce, Culture, and Liberty

2003 Business & Economics
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Release : 2003
Genre : Business & Economics
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Commerce, Culture, and Liberty by : Henry C. Clark

Download or read book Commerce, Culture, and Liberty written by Henry C. Clark. This book was released on 2003. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Commerce, Culture, and Liberty" presents rich and provocative writings on the relationship between commerce and luxury, virtue, nobility, agriculture, the state, religion, civility, and liberty. The book restores the voice of a rich body of reflections on the larger import of the birth of the modern economy that has been largely silent in academic discourse on the topic. Moreover, it presents significant though hard-to-find writings by a host of well-known authors, including a little-known essay by Rousseau. It also presents important writings that have been pre-empted by Adam Smith, writings that say as much about our age as about the age in which they were written.

The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture

2012-11-05 Social Science
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Release : 2012-11-05
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 82X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture by : Paul Arthur Cantor

Download or read book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture written by Paul Arthur Cantor. This book was released on 2012-11-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America -- particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order -- with the Marxist understanding of the "culture industry" and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.

Spheres of Liberty

2009-09-28 History
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Release : 2009-09-28
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 737/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Spheres of Liberty by : Michael Kammen

Download or read book Spheres of Liberty written by Michael Kammen. This book was released on 2009-09-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberty, one of the most consequential words in our language, is one of the most treasured concepts in American thought—and one of the most intensely debated. Its meaning is constantly shifting, changing not only from one culture to another but also, over time, within the same culture. No two definitions of liberty seem alike. In this subtle and illuminating work Michael Kammen traces the evolving concept of liberty throughout American history and provides a solid framework for understanding the meaning of the term today. He shows that by the early seventeenth century a tension between liberty and authority was well recognized. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially during the American Revolution a bond between liberty and property was asserted. By the end of the eighteenth century this concept of liberty was so well established that it remained dominant throughout the nineteenth. By the early twentieth century, as the notion of social justice gained prominence, liberty and justice were paired frequently, and by midcentury the two had become allied to general American values. Since the 1960s the union of liberty and equality has been the prevailing notion and achieving them has proved a major objective. In a lively and learned manner Kammen also shows that Americans have subscribed to different definitions of liberty concurrently. Above all, there has been a steady expansion of what is embraced by the concept of liberty. This expansion has created difficulties in public discourse, causing groups to misunderstand one another. On the other hand, interpretations of liberty have broadened to include such concepts as constraints on authority, a right to privacy, and the protection of personal freedoms. In a new preface for this Banner Books edition, Kammen responds to evaluations of earlier editions and places his views within the context of more recent studies.

Some Reflections on Culture and Liberty

1933 Free will and determinism
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Release : 1933
Genre : Free will and determinism
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Book Synopsis Some Reflections on Culture and Liberty by : Jacques Maritain

Download or read book Some Reflections on Culture and Liberty written by Jacques Maritain. This book was released on 1933. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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