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Reconciles seemingly conflicting views of Asian transcendence and American freedom to argue that post-WWII American writers envision a more enlightened individualism.
Today, American "rugged individualism" is in a fight for its life on two battlegrounds: in the policy realm and in the intellectual world of ideas that may lead to new policies. In this book, the authors look at the political context in which rugged individualism flourishes or declines and offer a balanced assessment of its future prospects. They outline its path from its founding—marked by the Declaration of Independence—to today, focusing on different periods in our history when rugged individualism was thriving or was under attack. The authors ultimately look with some optimism toward new frontiers of the twenty-first century that may nourish rugged individualism. They assert that we cannot tip the delicate balance between equality and liberty so heavily in favor of equality that there is no liberty left for individual Americans to enjoy. In considering reasons to be pessimistic as well as reasons to be optimistic about it, they also suggest where supporters of rugged individualism might focus greater encouragement and resources.
Gospel of the Open Road reclaims Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau as America’s spiritual birthright. It rescues them from literary history, and reveals them in their true light: as democracy’s prophets of the soul. Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau were religious seers who developed a new form of spirituality, and Gospel of the Open Road explains, in scholarly yet passionate fashion, the deep wisdom that is their enduring legacy. It presents them as a viable spiritual path for those who do not belong, and do not want to belong, to any organized religion.But this book does more. It draws fascinating parallels between the new spirituality taught by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and ancient spiritual wisdom as found in shamanism, Goddess worship, Tantra, Taoism, Confucianism, Vajrayana and Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. This book is an evocative synthesis of humanity’s most venerable spiritual wisdom and the most modern of philosophical, social, psychological, political, scientific, and Humanistic concepts. It traces the New Age spiritual revolution to its source in Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and explains how to apply their spiritual teachings to our everyday life here on Earth.
Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.
A cogent blueprint for the development of a "public philosophy" that integrates shared principles and values into our troubled social structure and articulates a consensus vision of society's future. The continuing vitality of American thought stems, to a large extent, from the application of its historical roots embedded in contemporary problems and issues. Yet for some time the signal contributions of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) have been overlooked in the formulation and shaping of critical areas of public policy. In this brilliantly articulated new book, ethicist Jacquelyn Kegley carefully explicates and enlarges the scope of Roycean thought and shows that Royce's views on public philosophy have direct and valuable application to current social problems. Working from the assumption that issues of family, education, and health care are not merely exigent political tempests but areas of genuine, long-lasting concern, Kegley opens fresh perspectives on Royce's philosophy by introducing and applying his ideas to discussions of how we care for ourselves and our society today. She analyzes Roycean criteria that can be successfully used to nourish developmental stages within families, promote intellectual and social growth in schooling and scholarship, and sustain physical and mental well-being throughout the life cycle. Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities should be a springboard for the reassessment of contemporary public policy and the reapplication of the American philosophical legacy to current issues and decisions. Kegley's work serves as a solid contribution both to public philosophy and to the continued vitality of American thought, and it extends the range of both.
This book introduces the notion of the soul and explores some of the indications, causes, and consequences for its being missing, especially in discussions of individuality.
In Dumont's words, the Frenchman sees himself "as being a man by nature, and a Frenchman by accident" while the German feels he is "a German in the first place, and a man through his being a German." Furthermore, while individualism in the French fashion stresses equality and centers in the sociopolitical domain, in Germany it focuses on the uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the individual subject and the duty to cultivate it by self-education (Bildung).
One of the few self-named historical movements, the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe was a powerful intellectual reaction to the dominance of absolutist monarchies and religious authorities. Building upon the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers—philosophes—set out to improve humanity through reason, knowledge, and experience of the natural world rather than religious doctrine or moral absolutes. Their emphasis on truth through observable phenomena set the standard of thought for the modern age, deeply influencing the areas of government, the modern state, science, technology, religious tolerance and social structure. The Enlightenment's legacy is particularly visible in the United States, where its ideals inspired a revolution and served as the building blocks for the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Narrative chapters, photos, biographical sketches, primary document excerpts, and an extensive bibliography expand the readers' understanding of the event, providing a current perspective on this key turning point in Western ideology. Comprehensive narrative chapters explore the historical background of the movement, as well as its relationship to nature and natural philosophy, religious belief and church institutions, society and the state, and the French Revolution. Photos, biographical sketches of key figures, excerpts from important primary documents of the time, and an extensive bibliography expand the reader's understanding of the movement that ushered in the modern era.
More than Kings and Less than Men: Tocqueville on the Promises and Perils of Democratic Induvidualism examines Alexis de Tocqueville's hopes and fears for modern democracy, arguing that the distinctive political philosophy informing Democracy in America can help us to think more profoundly about the problems facing liberal democratic society today. L. Joseph Hebert, Jr. argues that Tocqueville saw the historical power of democracy as originating in its promise to liberate human nature, and the greatness it is capable of achieving, from the artificial constraints of conventional hierarchy. He probes Tocqueville's fear that the momentum of democratic change may violate that promise by neglecting or even stifling human greatness in the name of an artificial equality of conditions. Hebert explains why Tocqueville saw the need for a 'new political science' to regulate democracy, and why Tocqueville thought that the central task of this science, supported by enlightened statesmanship, was to combat 'individualism,' an extreme form of civic, moral, and intellectual apathy capable of ushering in a historically unprecedented form of despotism. Hebert looks in depth at the principles of Tocqueville's political science, their relation to classical, modern, and contemporary political thought, and their practical applications in his time and ours. He outlines the model Tocqueville recommended for a free and flourishing modern democratic order and analyzes the primary mechanisms Tocqueville proposed for avoiding the perils and securing the promise of democracy in his own day. Hebert observes that many of Tocqueville's fears regarding individualism are occurring today, and analyzes how Tocqueville's insights might be applied to combat individualism and promote genuine liberty in our own time.
This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the evolution or emergence of specific formal innovations in narrative genres. While the prominence of questions of cultural identity in postcolonial studies has prevented due attention to concerns of literary form and aesthetics, this book gives premium to the literary, aiming to delineate the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays delineate elements of an emergent postcolonial narratology across a variety of seminal generic forms, such as the epic, the novel, the short story, the autobiography, and the folk tale, focusing on genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature and orature within cultural discourses. Investigating the heuristic value of concepts such as mimicry, writing back, translation, negotiation, or subversion, the book considers the value of explanatory paradigms for postcolonial generic models. It also explores the status of postcolonial comparative aesthetics versus globalization studies and liberal concepts of the transnational, taking issue with the prominence of Western concepts of identity in discussions of postcolonial literature and the favoring of mimetic forms. This volume offers a unique contribution to the study of narrative genre in postcolonial literatures and provides valuable insight into the field of postcolonial studies on the whole.