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Damn Great Empires offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass -- his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines -- as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the conventional view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with a transatlantic critique of modernity, as well as with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.
The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world? In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.
In No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us, John J. Stuhr utilizes the thought of American philosopher and psychologist William James to develop an original world view that addresses both enduring philosophical problems and contemporary cultural issues. Drawing on and illuminating the entirety of James's work, Stuhr explores James's psychology, his account of religious experience and his "will to believe" thesis, his pragmatism, his radical empiricism, his pluralism, and his writing on politics, democracy, and imperialism. Throughout, Stuhr engages the wide-ranging scholarship on James's philosophy and explores connections between James and the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Dewey, Peirce, Rorty, and Whitehead, as well as intellectual movements including contemporary democratic theory, positive psychology, and philosophical naturalism. After establishing the need to approach James's writings as intimately interwoven, Stuhr turns to each of James's major texts, including The Will to Believe, Principles of Psychology, Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth, and Essays in Radical Empiricism. His focus throughout is practical, showing the concrete differences it makes in one's life should one take up a broadly Jamesian perspective across the "ever not quite" endeavors of our finite lives. "From this unsparing practical ordeal," James noted, "no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In this spirit, this book does not by itself, promise salvation. Instead, it is a master class not only in the philosophy of William James but in a new philosophy through James's thought.
In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise.
“Continues and adds to a rich conversation among American philosophers concerning the origins of pragmatism and its possibilities for the future.” —William Gavin, University of Southern Maine William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in nineteenth-century America. Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture.
How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.
William James (1842–1910) argued for a philosophy of democracy and pluralism that advocates individual and collective responsibility for our social arrangements, our morality, and our religion. In James' view, democracy resides first and foremost not in governmental institutions or in procedures such as voting, but rather in the characteristics of individuals, and in qualities of mind and conduct. It is a philosophy for social change, counselling action and hope despite the manifold challenges facing democratic politics, and these issues still resonate strongly today. In this book, Stephen Bush explores how these themes connect to James' philosophy of religion, his moral thought, his epistemology, his psychology, and his metaphysics. His fresh and original study highlights the relevance of James' thought to modern debates, and will appeal to scholars and students of moral and political philosophy.
A transdisciplinary Mormon history, this book is a work of American religious history, theology, science history, and cultural and historical geography. It deconstructs the “race” creationism, White supremacy, and Christian imperialism of leading interwar Mormon theologian B.H. Roberts. Roberts hoped to introduce the front-rank post-Darwinian, scientific, and philosophical postulates of his time—polygeny, preadamitism, electromagnetism, idealism, the multiverse, infinity, and interstellar travel—to an increasingly fundamentalist Mormon establishment. Church authorities, however, including eventual “prophet” Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., proscribed and rejected Roberts’ modernist manuscript, The Truth, The, Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, circa 1930. Paradoxically, however, Roberts’ thinking appeared uncited in Smith’s 1954 theology, Man, His Origin and Destiny. Here, Smith accelerated Roberts’ racism toward African Americans, while reviling science, philosophy, and free thought. This book contextualizes all such fundamentalist Mormon thinking within today’s struggle for social and environmental justice, and especially the Black Lives Matter movement.