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This collection considers the relationship between religion, state, and market. In so doing, it also illustrates that the market is a powerful site for the cultural work of secularizing religious conflict. Though expressed as a simile, with religious freedom functioning like market freedom, “free market religion” has achieved the status of general knowledge about the nature of religion as either good or bad. It legislates good religion as that which operates according to free market principles: it is private, with no formal relationship to government; and personal: a matter of belief and conscience. As naturalized elements of historically contingent and discursively maintained beliefs about religion, these criteria have ethical and regulatory force. Thus, in culture and law, the effect of the metaphor has become instrumental, not merely descriptive. This volume seeks to productively complicate and invite further analysis of this easy conflation of democracy, religion, and the market. It invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider more intentionally the extent to which markets are implicated and illuminate the place of religion in public life. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics working in the areas of law and religion, ethics, and economics.
"A ground-breaking study of the views of the greatest theorist of democracy writing about one of our most pressing issues. Alan S. Kahan, a leading Tocqueville scholar, shows how Tocqueville's analysis of religion is simultaneously deeply rooted in his thoughts on nineteenth-century France and America and pertinent to us today"--Back cover.
In a major original study, Graham Maddox analyses the role of religion in the development of democracy from the tribes of ancient Israel to the present day. The book contrasts Athenian direct democracy with the Old Testament monarchy in which the concept of religious opposition - vital to modern democracy - arose. Maddox then develops his discussion of the relationship between religion and democracy through early christianity to the Reformation and Calvinism, ending with a chapter on modern democracy. Maddox's contentious thesis concerning the development of democracy is truly interdisciplinary drawing on political science, religious history and theology.
In a book that has been raising hackles far and wide, the social critic Thomas Frank skewers one of the most sacred cows of the go-go '90s: the idea that the new free-market economy is good for everyone. Frank's target is "market populism"—the widely held belief that markets are a more democratic form of organization than democratically elected governments. Refuting the idea that billionaire CEOs are looking out for the interests of the little guy, he argues that "the great euphoria of the late nineties was never as much about the return of good times as it was the giddy triumph of one America over another." Frank is a latter-day Mencken, as readers of his journal The Baffler and his book The Conquest of Cool know. With incisive analysis, passionate advocacy, and razor-sharp wit, he asks where we are headed—and whether we're going to like it when we get there.
"This collection considers the relationship between religion, state, and market. In so doing, it also illustrates that the market is a powerful site for the cultural work of secularizing religious conflict. Though expressed as a simile, with religious freedom functioning like market freedom, 'free market religion' has achieved the status of general knowledge about the nature of religion as either good or bad. It legislates good religion as that which operates according to free market principles: it is private, with no formal relationship to government; and personal: a matter of belief and conscience. As naturalized elements of historically contingent and discursively maintained beliefs about religion, these criteria have ethical and regulatory force. Thus, in culture and law, the effect of the metaphor has become instrumental, not merely descriptive. This volume seeks to productively complicate and invite further analysis of this easy conflation of democracy, religion and the market. It invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider more intentionally the extent to which markets are implicated in and illuminate the place of religion in public life. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics working in the areas of law and religion, ethics and economics"--
This book provides a narrative historical, postcolonial account of African American religions. It examines the intersection of Black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom. Rather than treating freedom and its others (colonialism, slavery and racism) as opposites, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets multiple periods of Black religious history to discern how Atlantic empires (particularly that of the United States) simultaneously enabled the emergence of particular forms of religious experience and freedom movements as well as disturbing patterns of violent domination. Johnson explains theories of matter and spirit that shaped early indigenous religious movements in Africa, Black political religion responding to the American racial state, the creation of Liberia, and FBI repression of Black religious movements in the twentieth century. By combining historical methods with theoretical analysis, Johnson explains the seeming contradictions that have shaped Black religions in the modern era.
How can the simple choice of a men’s suit be a moral statement and a political act? When the suit is made of free-labor wool rather than slave-grown cotton. In Moral Commerce, Julie L. Holcomb traces the genealogy of the boycott of slave labor from its seventeenth-century Quaker origins through its late nineteenth-century decline. In their failures and in their successes, in their resilience and their persistence, antislavery consumers help us understand the possibilities and the limitations of moral commerce. Quaker antislavery rhetoric began with protests against the slave trade before expanding to include boycotts of the use and products of slave labor. For more than one hundred years, British and American abolitionists highlighted consumers’ complicity in sustaining slavery. The boycott of slave labor was the first consumer movement to transcend the boundaries of nation, gender, and race in an effort by reformers to change the conditions of production. The movement attracted a broad cross-section of abolitionists: conservative and radical, Quaker and non-Quaker, male and female, white and black. The men and women who boycotted slave labor created diverse, biracial networks that worked to reorganize the transatlantic economy on an ethical basis. Even when they acted locally, supporters embraced a global vision, mobilizing the boycott as a powerful force that could transform the marketplace. For supporters of the boycott, the abolition of slavery was a step toward a broader goal of a just and humane economy. The boycott failed to overcome the power structures that kept slave labor in place; nonetheless, the movement’s historic successes and failures have important implications for modern consumers.
This book explains how the leaders of the world's largest Islamic organizations understand tolerance, explicating how politics works in a Muslim-majority democracy.
Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.
Inequality is ballooning in the land of equal opportunity. This is inevitable due to the false belief held by almost everyone: that American capitalism is democratic and freedom loving. This book aims to shed some light on that misconception and take some air out of the balloon. As a foundation for the discussion, the book traces in broad outline the histories of work and belief. It denies that the Christian religion is Christian and shows that Jesus Christ was a pacifist and a liberal and that his words and nature are barely represented, if at all, in the dogmas and practices of those who call themselves Christians in today’s America. The labels seem to be opposites: democracy and totalitarianism; capitalism, communism, fascism. But in practice, all the politico-economic systems we have on earth today have ended up looking disturbingly similar. While there are important differences, the author claims that they all consist of "ruler-owners" and bosses at the top - money kings - and powerless workers and consumers at the bottom. He also contends that workers and consumers are the only necessary parts of a natural economic system and that corporations are an artificial and tyrannical imposition based on greed and dominance. He urges the defeat of the "corporate collective" with its tiered arrangement of work and wealth, with only the "fit" and "successful" at the top as supervisors and the rest of us beneath them as servants, wage slaves, or even chattel slaves. In short, this book is radical and extreme in its view of all the world’s systems as authoritarian despite their differing economic, political, and religious conglomerations. As a foundation for the discussion, the book traces in broad outline the histories of work and belief. It denies that the Christian religion is Christian and shows that Jesus Christ was a pacifist and a liberal and that his words and nature are barely represented, if at all, in the dogmas and practices of those who call themselves Christians in today’s America. Attacking the dominant institutional belief systems regarding work and religion, this book spares no existing supervisory arrangement and suggests the peaceful unraveling of authority structures and a new form of egalitarian cooperation. Since this book is extreme in its condemnation of existing supervisory arrangements and authority structures, it should be interesting - perhaps dismaying - to everyone who is dissatisfied with their own subservience to others whether at work, in church, or in any political party. Anyone who yearns for relief from entangling authority should find this book at least stirring, if not entirely convincing. It presents new ways of looking at the world and at all systems of control and belief. Those who like ideas and those who do not quite fit into the molds into which they have been placed will find the writing refreshing and stimulating. The ideas in this book were influenced by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Noam Chomsky’s Power & Prosperity, Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism, Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, Hugh J. Schonfield’s Those Incredible Christians, and by such television programs as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now and the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. The Libertarian belief system is at the heart of many of the contrary arguments presented in this book and its baleful influence can be seen in just about any of the writings, presentations, speeches, and gatherings of Republicans. It is the number one enemy of democracy in America today.