Search Results

Seeking the Formula, 1938–1939

Simon Morrison

in The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years

This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's activities from the spring of 1938 to the winter of 1939, a period that witnessed the loss of his ability to travel abroad, the arrest (at the height of the ... More

This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's activities from the spring of 1938 to the winter of 1939, a period that witnessed the loss of his ability to travel abroad, the arrest (at the height of the Stalinist purges) of his mentor Vsevolod Meyerhold, his embrace of the aesthetic of Socialist Realism in his opera Semyon Kotko, and his composition of a cantata in honor of Stalin's sixtieth birthday for Soviet Radio (the signing of the Molotov-Rippentrop non-aggression pact in 1939 necessitated a rewriting of the libretto of Semyon Kotko). Beyond these conformist works, the chapter also discusses Prokofiev's unknown music for athletic display.Less

 English Historical Documents, 1660–1832

Timothy Fitzgerald

in Discourse on Civility and Barbarity

The changes in typical usage of the various key categories discussed in previous chapters become more pronounced in certain contexts after the late seventeenth century, and the connection with ... More

The changes in typical usage of the various key categories discussed in previous chapters become more pronounced in certain contexts after the late seventeenth century, and the connection with colonies, plantations, and the increasing need for new forms of classification tends to relativize Religion as Christian Truth. This should not be exaggerated. In England the dominance of the church state continues, and the social order is still characterized more in terms of a hierarchy of rank and degree than in terms of Dissenting Individuals motivated by the need for justification and economic salvation. Even Locke's contemporary John Bunyan, whose pilgrimage is an interior moral one, and whose use of the term religious does not refer at all to monastic orders but to a special kind of inner life, still has no concept of a world which is neutral to religion. However, by the early nineteenth century in England there is a clearly gathering momentum to the discourse on “politics” as essentially separate from “religion,” even though the boundaries are hotly disputed and thus by no means yet inscribed into the order of things.Less

Steps toward an Evolutionary Psychology of a Culture‐Dependent Specie s

Daniel M. T. Fessler

in The Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition

Socially-transmitted information allows humans to survive in diverse social and ecological systems, a pattern that is as old as — and perhaps even predates — our species. This suggests that natural ... More

Socially-transmitted information allows humans to survive in diverse social and ecological systems, a pattern that is as old as — and perhaps even predates — our species. This suggests that natural selection can be expected to have shaped the human mind to enhance the ability to acquire and exploit such information. After reviewing existing approaches to the question, this chapter argues for a dissection of the cognitive and motivational architectures underlying this ability. Key questions addressed include how models for imitative learning are selected; the ultimate benefits of conformism, normative moralization, and moral outrage; and the nature and function of internalization.Less

Human Groups as Adaptive Units: Toward a Permanent Consensus

David Sloan Wilson

in The Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition

Foundational changes are taking place in the understanding of human groups. For decades, the biological and social sciences have been dominated by a form of individualism that renders groups as ... More

Foundational changes are taking place in the understanding of human groups. For decades, the biological and social sciences have been dominated by a form of individualism that renders groups as nothing more than collections of self-interested individuals. Now groups themselves are being interpreted as adaptive units, organisms in the own right, in which individuals play supportive roles. This chapter attempts to establish a permanent consensus for human groups as adaptive units, based on multilevel selection theory.Less

A Justificationist View of Disagreement's Epistemic Significance

Jennifer Lackey

in Social Epistemology

This chapter developes a justificationist account of the significance of disagreement between epistemic peers. Whereas current views maintain that disagreement, by itself, either simply does or does ... More

This chapter developes a justificationist account of the significance of disagreement between epistemic peers. Whereas current views maintain that disagreement, by itself, either simply does or does not possess epistemic power, this chapter's account holds that its epistemic power, or lack thereof, is explainable in terms of the degree of justified confidence with which the belief in question is held. In this sense, the chapter rejects nonconformism—the absence of doxastic revision in the face of peer disagreement is never justified merely by virtue of the fact that the beliefs in question are either mine or are the product of correct reasoning—and conformism—substantial doxastic revision in the face of peer disagreement is never justified merely by virtue of equal weight being given to my own beliefs and to those held by my epistemic peers. Despite this, however, one advantage of my justificationist account is that it is able to explain why nonconformism provides the intuitively correct result in some cases, while conformism gives the intuitively correct result in other cases. A further advantage is that this chapter's justificationist account is generalizable in a way that neither of these rival views is.Less

Introduction

Christensen David and Lackey Christensen Jennifer

in The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays

The introduction by David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey briefly explains some of the main themes that have surfaced in the literature on disagreement. It sketches the distinction between ... More

The introduction by David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey briefly explains some of the main themes that have surfaced in the literature on disagreement. It sketches the distinction between “conciliatory/conformist” views and “steadfast/non-conformist” views about the extent to which disagreement with peers should undermine rational confidence in one's opinions. It raises the issue of how one is to evaluate the epistemic credentials of those with whom one disagrees (in particular, whether this needs to be done in a way independent of the relevant dispute), and indicates how this issue interacts with the debate between conciliatory and steadfast views. Finally, it gives a brief tour of the papers in the volume. It divides them into three categories: those focusing on the conciliatory/steadfast dispute, those that concentrate on disagreement about philosophy, and those that address more general theoretical issues that bear on the disagreement debate.Less

The Deep Past

Alexander Somek

in Individualism: An Essay on the Authority of the European Union

This final chapter returns to the core theme of the book, namely, citizenship. As a conception of citizenship, however, individualism is systematically prone to conceive of collective autonomy in ... More

This final chapter returns to the core theme of the book, namely, citizenship. As a conception of citizenship, however, individualism is systematically prone to conceive of collective autonomy in private terms. The resulting negative attitude towards difference in the public realm explains why individualism is continuous with the predicament of political modernity; the experience, that is, of emancipation threatening to give rise to new forms of oppression. An authoritarian threat resides in individualism or, more broadly speaking, in economic liberalism. The chapter attempts an explanation with an eye to various eruptions of intolerance in individualistic societies.Less

Routes of Escape: Cold War Individualism and Community Ties

Benjamin Looker

in A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

Fears over physical blight soon intersected with cold-war anxieties over infiltration and subversion. Chapter 4 surveys prominent cold-war interpretations of the city neighborhood's functions, where ... More

Fears over physical blight soon intersected with cold-war anxieties over infiltration and subversion. Chapter 4 surveys prominent cold-war interpretations of the city neighborhood's functions, where narratives of peril and decline overwhelmed the progressive neighborhood aspirations of the early 1940s. As commentators warned that even the smallest-scale institutions of American life were vulnerable to ideological infection, sociologists such as Morris Janowitz and Robert Nisbet debated the traditional neighborhood's function with reference to questions of statism, consumerism, authority, and individualism. At the same time, cold-war liberals increasingly suspected that neighborhood solidarity—a value once celebrated—led only to conformism or collectivism, social prejudice or narrow forms of group-think. As this chapter relates, in the works of figures ranging from screenwriter Reginald Rose to pundit John Keats, and from opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti to novelist Edwin O’Connor, older ideals of neighborhood unity had come to seem clannish and constricting.Less

Encouraging Coreligionists in the Academy: “Let’s Be Extremely Catholic and Extremely Scientific at Once”

Nicholas K. Rademacher

in Paul Hanly Furfey: Priest, Scientist, Social Reformer

Furfey pursued an intellectual apostolate according to which he advanced social justice in theory and practice through his scholarship and correspondence. In the mid-1930’s Furfey concentrated on ... More

Furfey pursued an intellectual apostolate according to which he advanced social justice in theory and practice through his scholarship and correspondence. In the mid-1930’s Furfey concentrated on developing and articulating a specifically Catholic response to social problems. He revised his objective, concentrating on developing a Catholic technique and corresponding foundational Catholic motivation to address social problems. Furfey advanced and defended his position in print, writing several books and many articles on the topic, and through voluminous correspondence with leading Catholic intellectuals in the United States. Il Poverello House and Fides House represented his and his colleagues’ attempt to develop a social reform technique that was both thoroughly Catholic and rigorously scientific. He received support and cooperation from his colleagues at CUA and in the broader Catholic community. A rift emerged at his home institution. Mary Elizabeth Walsh most prominently supported and advanced supernatural sociology while Gladys Sellew wavered, expressing distress and dissatisfaction with respect to the meaning and application of supernatural sociology. The chapter also considers the challenges to Furfey’s theological society levelled by Raymond McGowan, Wilfred Parsons, and John Courtney Murray.Less

Emerson's Close Encounters with Madness

in Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

This chapter poses the question of what the transcendentalist movement would look like if we placed McLean Asylum as the central institution against which the group defined its relation to New ... More

This chapter poses the question of what the transcendentalist movement would look like if we placed McLean Asylum as the central institution against which the group defined its relation to New England culture. The key figures in the story are Ralph Waldo Emerson and his acolyte Jones Very, the self-proclaimed Second Coming of Christ and writer of visionary poetry, who was confined in McLean Asylum shortly after hearing Emerson's infamous “Divinity School Address” in 1838. Through the writings on Very by Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and others in this philosophical-literary movement, the chapter examines the transcendentalists' guarded accommodation to early psychiatry—a profession that would seem to cut against the core of their anti-institutional thinking, their emphasis on non-conformism, and their radical individualism, but that intersected with the movement in surprisingly frequent and intimate ways. What emerges is a glimpse of the uneasily shared ground of American literary romanticism and psychiatry, both of which movements saw themselves as fortifying the individual against the threats of modernization and social atomization. The chapter concludes with a reading of Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance.”Less

‘Community of Action’ and Diversity of Attitudes: Reflections on Mechanisms of Social Integration in National Socialist Germany, 1933–45

Frank Bajohr

in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives

While foreign diplomats in Germany recorded a wide diversity of attitudes towards the Nazi regime, they underscored its growing social support among the population. Indeed, everyday social ... More

While foreign diplomats in Germany recorded a wide diversity of attitudes towards the Nazi regime, they underscored its growing social support among the population. Indeed, everyday social interaction shows a high level of accommodation and cooperation with the regime, almost regardless of individual political views. The integration of the great majority of German society into the new political order of Volksgemeinschaft was not carried out as an ideological conversion, this chapter argues. This process went on smoothly by stimulating personal interests and leaving space for manoeuvre for individual adaptations. Nonetheless, most Germans formed a community of action, because their inner convictions did not automatically guide their daily social behaviour. Thereby they conformed to the norms of Volksgemeinschaft without necessarily sharing them.Less

Centralizing Control: The Politics of Bodily Conformism

Erica Fox Brindley

in Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics

In recent years, scholars have begun focusing on the relationships among the body, space, and the cosmic ideal of spiritual attainment in early China. This chapter adds to these seminal accounts by ... More

In recent years, scholars have begun focusing on the relationships among the body, space, and the cosmic ideal of spiritual attainment in early China. This chapter adds to these seminal accounts by stressing the historicity of a particular stance on individual agency—that of “bodily conformism.” By analyzing such a stance across a variety of intellectual traditions, it attempts to reveal larger cultural connections that might be missed in discussions of a single tradition or specific cults and practices. It shows that this “bodily turn” was not limited to any single region or intellectual practice but was pervasive throughout many different circles of thought associated with the increasingly centralized courts of the day. The writings examined can be grouped into two main categories: those that supported the exclusive link between a sovereign's conforming body and the cosmos; and those that encouraged the universal bodily conformism of every individual alike, irrespective of one's political position and role. The former group of texts, the topic of this chapter, bears a relationship to the needs of the centralizing state. The chapter begins with those authors that justified a highly centralized state structure, focusing on their characterizations of the ideal relationship between the sovereign and the cosmos.Less

Decentralizing Control and Naturalizing Cosmic Agency: Bodily Conformism and Individualism

Erica Fox Brindley

in Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics

This chapter examines fourth-century BCE writings that address bodily conformism at a more universal level. Zhuangzi in particular spoke of spiritual attainment in terms of the relatively ... More

This chapter examines fourth-century BCE writings that address bodily conformism at a more universal level. Zhuangzi in particular spoke of spiritual attainment in terms of the relatively decentralized power of the Dao that might obtain in each individual, and not merely in leaders of the state. While he still stressed each individual's conformity to or communion with the single higher authority, Zhuangzi addressed bodily agency in terms of an individual's personal and unique link to the cosmos. This approach to human agency, which viewed self-cultivation in terms of a universal and directly accessible ideal of attaining cosmic agency, was but one step removed from the full-fledged empowerment of the individual—or “individualism”—that developed some time in the fourth century BCE as well. The chapter also examines writings that shifted the locus of cosmic power and authority from outside or separate from the self and person to inside or intrinsic to the self and person. Through the concept of xing (human nature), such texts began to naturalize idealized, often divine, agency as an inherent part of the self, rather than as something apart or distinct from it. They therefore moved away from the goal of conformism to an external power—or, conformism to an authority not intrinsically associated with agencies of the self. Instead, they supported a type of conformism to the inherent powers and authorities of the individual itself, dubbed “individualism” in this book.Less

Conclusion

Erica Fox Brindley

in Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book outlined a variety of beliefs that support the power and agency of the individual in one way or another, as ... More

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book outlined a variety of beliefs that support the power and agency of the individual in one way or another, as well as a widespread belief in the importance of universal conformism to the greater cosmos, which appears to have been closely linked to the formation of an explicit form of individualism. By discussing early Chinese views on human agency and the self in terms of cosmic and holistic individualism, it is hoped that readers will withdraw their commitment to a narrow, historically specific meaning of the term and embrace it as a theoretically powerful and useful tool in cross-cultural comparison. The concept of individualism as a hermeneutic device can probe any culture and historical context for beliefs relating to the self-determining powers and personal authorities of individuals. When applied to the context of early China, it shows that there were many authors who supported a belief that the individual could and should rely on his or her own powers of self-determination and spiritual fulfillment in perceiving of and acting in the world.Less

What’s Causing Secularization? Insecurity

Ronald F. Inglehart

in Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

Evolutionary modernization theory holds that both religiosity and pro-fertility norms are linked with existential insecurity, and a massive body of empirical evidence confirms this: secure people and ... More

Evolutionary modernization theory holds that both religiosity and pro-fertility norms are linked with existential insecurity, and a massive body of empirical evidence confirms this: secure people and secure countries show the lowest levels of religiosity. Existential security reflects not only a society’s per capita GDP but how evenly it is distributed, making income inequality a strong predictor of religiosity. Similarly, high levels of social welfare expenditures have a strong negative impact on religious attendance. Historic vulnerability to disease also has a persisting impact on religiosity: countries that were vulnerable to disease tend to be relatively poor and have low life expectancy and high infant mortality and high religiosity today. Overall, various indicators of existential security have a strong impact on religiosity, but this impact has a generational delay: the strongest predictor of religiosity around 2018 is the society’s level of infant mortality, not at the time of the survey but almost 40 years earlier, in 1980.Less

Secularization Accelerates in High-Income Countries

Ronald F. Inglehart

in Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms become dominant. Social desirability effects then reverse ... More

Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms become dominant. Social desirability effects then reverse polarity: instead of retarding cultural changes, they accelerate them. In the shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms, this point has been reached in a growing number of settings, starting with the younger and more secure strata of high-income societies, accelerating secularization. Analysis of religious change in countries from which time-series survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 found that the publics of 33 of the 49 countries had become more religious during this period. From 2007 to 2020, the dominant trend reversed itself, with 42 of the 49 countries showing declining religiosity. The most dramatic shift was found among the American public, which in 2007 had shown virtually no change since 1981, but from 2007 to 2020 showed the largest shift away from religion of any country for which we have data.Less

Introduction

Manata Hashemi

in Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity

The introduction lays the groundwork for the arguments made in the rest of the book. It maps out how, contrary to popular assumptions, some marginalized youth in Iran—termed the face-savers—are not a ... More

The introduction lays the groundwork for the arguments made in the rest of the book. It maps out how, contrary to popular assumptions, some marginalized youth in Iran—termed the face-savers—are not a “generation in wait” prone to oppositional practices, but active agents who conform to social norms in an effort to change their lot in life. Through the repeated, daily practice of saving face, these youth increase public perceptions of their moral worth, which can subsequently lead them to gain incremental mobility within poverty. A historical overview of the interplay between state policies and struggles from below to make the most of life’s circumstances provides additional contextual detail of how the poor’s aspirations for the good life have been shaped by the perceived structures of constraints and opportunities that surround them. The introduction further provides a brief social history of the primary field site, Sari, Mazandaran, and incorporates details of the methodology of the study.Less

A Very Quiet Tragedy

Elijah Millgram

in John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life

A precondition on having a life project is that one stays ruthlessly on point. A second precondition is that one is ruthless in pressing forward in one’s intellectual explorations. These conditions ... More

A precondition on having a life project is that one stays ruthlessly on point. A second precondition is that one is ruthless in pressing forward in one’s intellectual explorations. These conditions cannot be jointly satisfied, and providing scaffolding or restricting the scope of a life project in order to make that possible undercuts the reasons to have one.Less