Selected by Newsweek as one of “14 nonfiction books you’ll want to read this fall” Fifty years after it first appeared, one of Noam Chomsky’s greatest essays will be published for the first time as a timely stand-alone book, with a new preface by the author As a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1947, Noam Chomsky was deeply affected by articles about the responsibility of intellectuals written by Dwight Macdonald, an editor of Partisan Review and then of Politics. Twenty years later, as the Vietnam War was escalating, Chomsky turned to the question himself, noting that "intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments" and to analyze their "often hidden intentions." Originally published in the New York Review of Books, Chomsky's essay eviscerated the "hypocritical moralism of the past" (such as when Woodrow Wilson set out to teach Latin Americans "the art of good government") and exposed the shameful policies in Vietnam and the role of intellectuals in justifying it. Also included in this volume is the brilliant "The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux," written on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which makes the case for using privilege to challenge the state. As relevant now as it was in 1967, The Responsibility of Intellectuals reminds us that "privilege yields opportunity and opportunity confers responsibilities." All of us have choices, even in desperate times.

J.M.R. Lenz is remembered as the most creative and original of Goethe's Strasbourg friends and, because of failures in his personal life, as a figure of pathos. The son of a Lutheran pastor who received a theological education at the university of Koenigsberg, Lenz was a religious thinker who saw himself as prophet as well as poet. Timothy Pope's Holy Fool is the first study of Lenz to consider how Christian faith shaped his literary theory and practice and was responsible for his unwise expectations about the increasingly secular world for which he wrote. phenomenon that was linked to the temporary lapses into insanity that he experienced after he was banished, at Goethe's insistence, from the court and city of Weimar. Pope reveals, however, that a dynamic shift in Lenz's faith had occurred four years before the debacle of Weimar. Coherent statements during those four years concerning the articles of his new faith, and a consistent application of faith to questions of poetry and dramatic theory, indicate that Lenz's contribution to the literary revolution of the 1770s was conditioned as much by a personal religious renewal as by enthusiasm for the aims and ideals of his generation. Theologically, Lenz's new convictions followed a path that led away from the neology of the late Enlightenment and pointed not only back to conservative traditions but also forward to the Christology of more modern times.

Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving, learning and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living and as a formative tradition of embodied radical eco post-humanism. Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions of anti-humanism that, for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming, we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies that tacitly continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies as part of a decolonising practice questioning Eurocentric colonising modernity. In doing so it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy, social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.

This work analyses the development of a modern consciousness through the eyes of the most fervent critics of modernity - adherents to the moral and value systems associated with Canada's tory tradition.

Consists of English translations of articles in the Spanish American press.

This study examines the ways in which the moral community is "talked into being" in relation to crime, and the objects of concern that typically occupy its attention. It maps the imagined moral universe of the virtuous and the criminal and charts the relations between these two groups in the "history of the present." It examines the calls to action which symbolically endow the moral community with power. And it looks at the character and content of collective moralizing. The source materials are commentaries about crime and criminal justice appearing in selected newspapers across the Americas. The moral "talk" found there is stylized, routine, trivial and occasionally dramatic. It looks nothing like the weightier renderings of morality that derive from the reconstruction of a particular "ethic" or from the systematic probing of values and moral reasoning. And its fuzzy, offhand, unexceptional and frequently unsystematic nature makes it a difficult candidate for explaining either stability or change in crime policies. But moral talk has intrinsic importance as the creator and sustainer of an imagined moral community, a community that symbolizes the existence and vigor of morality itself and confers a crucially important identity on its self-proclaimed members. And moral talk reveals inherent intersections between normative, empirical and technical discourses, highlighting the relationships between morality, science and social engineering. Thus, a prosaic, instrumental, model of morality is particularly strong in North America, but only found in a more abstract form in Latin America, where it sits alongside a stirring vision of morality, more directly anchored in virtue. Research on social problems, moral panics and the sociology of morality has largely overlooked the type of moral discourse studied here. While emphasizing the culturally contingent nature of the findings, the conclusion reflects on their significance for understanding the nature of moralizing, the artifacts of talk and the construction of identity.