Download Free The Nature Of Authority Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Nature Of Authority and write the review.

From Ancient Greek philosophy to the French Revolution to the modern welfare state, in Authority and the Individual Bertrand Russell tackles the perennial questions about the balance between authority and human freedom. With characteristic clarity and deep understanding, he explores the formation and purpose of society, education, moral evolution and social, economical and intellectual progress. First of the famous BBC Reith lectures, this wonderful collection delivers Russell at his intellectual best.
Authority is one of the key issues in political studies, for the question of by what right one person or several persons govern others is at the very root of political activity. In selecting key readings for this volume Joseph Raz concerns himself primarily with the moral aspect of political authority, choosing pieces that examine its justification, determine who is subject to it and who is entitled to hold it, and whether there are any general moral limits to it. The readings—by such modern political thinkeres as Robert Paul Wolff, H. L. A. Hart, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Ronald Dworkin—examine the basic moral issues and provide an essential introduction to the debate about the nature of authority for all students of political theory.
For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal
England was the most centralised state in medieval Europe. The Tudors built on this situation to reduce still further the provincial power of the nobility, and to eliminate the remaining jurisdictional franchises. But sixteenth century England was not monolithic, nor homogeneous. There were still strong local identities, both political and culture, and the Tudors achieved success by working through the local elites, rather than against them.
A General Theory of Authority was first printed in 1962 and is a classic treatment of authority and its relation to justice, life, truth, and order. In recent years authority has been seen as an enemy of freedom, autonomy, and development. In this book the renowned philosopher Yves R. Simon, himself a passionate proponent of liberty, analyzes the idea of authority and defends it as an essential concomitant of liberty. Simon sees authority as the catalyst necessary to bring together the seemingly disparate demands of liberty on one hand and order on the other. Simon’s perceptive discussion of how authority differs from law enables him to highlight the effective and personal role that authority can play in the life of the individual and for the good of the community. Professor Yves R. Simon was an esteemed philosopher and teacher at several American universities, including Notre Dame and the University of Chicago. He published numerous books and articles, many of which remain as classic pieces of political and social philosophy. Professor Simon died in 1961.
The West is currently witnessing the slow destruction of the classical liberal tradition. The casualties are reason, the willingness to question political or religious authority, and the validity of natural science. Replacing these are a crippling intellectual relativism, political apathy, and a grave misunderstanding of natural science and its concomitant ethic. In this work, Diana M. Judd gets to the root of the matter by directly addressing the following questions: What is modern natural science? What effect did it have on how we think about politics? What are the dangers surrounding the marginalization of natural science and the liberal intellectual and political tradition? This is a work of political theory. It seeks to engage the political by addressing the question first posed by the ancient Greeks: How ought we to live? If we have indeed entered the age of endarkenment where religious dogma, intellectual apathy, and unquestioned authority increasingly hold sway, there is a need now, more than ever, to explore the meaning and significance of the origins of the modern political and scientific traditions Americans take for granted. It is from these traditions that Americans received the ideas of legitimate political resistance, reason, individual rights, religious freedom, and natural science. The importance of modern natural science and its relationship to these tenets of classical liberalism is the central concern of this book. Claims that science is dogmatic and ideological, and that the tenets of liberalism divide individuals, have become commonplace. It is Judd's intention to show how these claims err, by exploring what natural science is and how it evolved. This ethic centers on the radical idea that authority must be questioned. We ignore this to our peril. If individuals do not question what leaders say, we abdicate the rights and responsibility of self-rule and individual freedom.
In this book Joseph Raz develops his views on some of the central questions in practical philosophy: legal, political, and moral. The book provides an overview of Raz's work on jurisprudence and the nature of law in the context of broader questions in the philosophy of practical reason. The book opens with a discussion of methodological issues, focusing on understanding the nature of jurisprudence. It asks how the nature of law can be explained, and how the success of a legal theory can be established. The book then addresses central questions on the nature of law, its relation to morality, the nature and justification of authority, and the nature of legal reasoning. It explains how legitimate law, while being a branch of applied morality, is also a relatively autonomous system, which has the potential to bridge moral differences among its subjects. Raz offers responses to some critical reactions to his theory of authority, adumbrating, and modifying the theory to meet some of them. The final part of the book brings together for the first time Raz's work on the nature of interpretation in law and the humanities. It includes a new essay explaining interpretive pluralism and the possibility of interpretive innovation. Taken together, the essays in the volume offer a valuable introduction for students coming for the first time to Raz's work in the philosophy of law, and an original contribution to many of the current debates in practical philosophy.
Introduction to Politics and Society comprehensively demonstrates how key theoretical and concepts in political science have foretold, rationalized and shaped politics in the contemporary world. Students will discover the meaning of `power′, `authority′, `coercion′, `surveillance′ and `legitimacy′. The ideas of Weber, Marx, Foucault, Bauman, Sennett, Habermas, Baudrillard and Giddens are explained with clarity and precision. Well-chosen examples, many from popular political culture illustrate the relevance of fundamental theoretical debates. This book also examines: - The central tendencies in the movement from modern to post-modern society - The significance, strengths and weaknesses of `Third Way′ politics - The decline of organized party politics - The development of new social movements Developed with an understanding of the requirements of students and lecturers, this book is an extraordinary resource for undergraduate teaching and study needs. It will be required reading for undergraduate students in sociology, politics and social policy.
How do social institutions exist? How do they direct our conduct? The Opposite Mirrors defends the thesis that the existence of institutions is a conventional matter. Ultimately they exist because we believe in their existence, and because they play a role in our practical reasoning. Human action necessarily has an unpredictable aspect; human institutions perform an important task by reducing uncertainty in our interactions. The author applies this thesis to the most important institutions: the law and the monetary system. In his analysis he connects many traditional topics of the philosophy of law, social philosophy and the philosophy of social sciences in a new way. He discusses the nature of rules, authority, and power and analyzes the Hobbesian presuppositions which have been dominant in legal theory and in the economic analyses of the state. The book is written for legal theorists as well as for political and social philosophers, and theoretically oriented social scientists.