Let's Use Free Speech to Prepare for a Revolutionary Life
Title | Let's Use Free Speech to Prepare for a Revolutionary Life PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Bushard |
Publisher | Free Press Media Press |
Pages | 26 |
Release | |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN |
Like the say, preparation determines success. Thus revolutionaries better do everything possible to prepare themselves for revolution. Sometimes, one does not know exactly how to prepare for revolution, so this work provides key principles for revolution preparation. If you want to become a successful revolutionary, read this book! 26 pages.
There's No Such Thing As Free Speech
Title | There's No Such Thing As Free Speech PDF eBook |
Author | Stanley Fish |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 345 |
Release | 1994-12-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0198024193 |
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.
Revolutionary Dissent
Title | Revolutionary Dissent PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen D. Solomon |
Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
Pages | 368 |
Release | 2016-04-26 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1466879394 |
When members of the founding generation protested against British authority, debated separation, and then ratified the Constitution, they formed the American political character we know today-raucous, intemperate, and often mean-spirited. Revolutionary Dissent brings alive a world of colorful and stormy protests that included effigies, pamphlets, songs, sermons, cartoons, letters and liberty trees. Solomon explores through a series of chronological narratives how Americans of the Revolutionary period employed robust speech against the British and against each other. Uninhibited dissent provided a distinctly American meaning to the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and press at a time when the legal doctrine inherited from England allowed prosecutions of those who criticized government. Solomon discovers the wellspring in our revolutionary past for today's satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, and protests like flag burning and street demonstrations. From the inflammatory engravings of Paul Revere, the political theater of Alexander McDougall, the liberty tree protests of Ebenezer McIntosh and the oratory of Patrick Henry, Solomon shares the stories of the dissenters who created the American idea of the liberty of thought. This is truly a revelatory work on the history of free expression in America.
Let's Use Free Speech to Promote Revolution
Title | Let's Use Free Speech to Promote Revolution PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Bushard |
Publisher | Free Press Media Press |
Pages | 26 |
Release | 2014-06-15 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN |
Revolt, Revolt, Revolt Revolutions have occurred Revolutions do occur Revolutions will occur You better play your part So you can win the victor's spoils! 26 pages; 25 poems.
Let's Use Free Speech to Overthrow
Title | Let's Use Free Speech to Overthrow PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Bushard |
Publisher | Free Press Media Press |
Pages | 26 |
Release | 2014-07-21 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN |
Now is the time to overthrow! Let's overthrow right now! Who and what and how and why? Well, you gotta read this book to find out! 26 pages.
Let's Use Free Speech to Define Heroism
Title | Let's Use Free Speech to Define Heroism PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Bushard |
Publisher | Free Press Media Press Inc. |
Pages | 26 |
Release | |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
Heroes make the world much better and we need to exalt them. Yet how do we define heroism? This work offers ten criteria to consider. 26 pages.
Preparing for Power
Title | Preparing for Power PDF eBook |
Author | Jack Hepworth |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 191 |
Release | 2023-08-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 135024239X |
This book employs a history of ideas approach to trace the complex journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its afterlives. Although the RCP existed for barely two decades, it left a curiously lasting impact on British politics, and its legacies have provoked bewilderment, suspicion, and animosity. Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, the RCP represented a distinct and often controversial offshoot of the Trotskyist left. Campaigning principally around 'unconditional support for Irish freedom' and anti-racism, RCP cadres expounded an independent revolutionary politics to supersede capitalism. In the 1990s, however, the RCP leadership ruefully declared that the working class had suffered an historic defeat, and the party dissolved in 1996. Combining wide-ranging archival research and twenty-four life-history interviews with former activists, Preparing for Power examines ideological continuity and change among the ex-RCP milieu. Explaining the party's key ideas, their evolution, and their retrospective contestation, Jack Hepworth analyses the RCP's trajectory in a broader political context. In doing so, Hepworth illuminates a network which has been the subject of considerable media sensation and polemical attention.