Moral Purity and Persecution in History

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Release : 2021-09-14
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 463/5 ( reviews)

Moral Purity and Persecution in History - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Moral Purity and Persecution in History write by Barrington Moore Jr.. This book was released on 2021-09-14. Moral Purity and Persecution in History available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The intellectual scope and courage to contend with the largest puzzles of human existence and organization distinguish great social thinkers. Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was a foundational work of historical sociology that influenced a generation of social scientists and, decades later, continues to be widely read and taught. Here, Moore takes up the same tools of historical comparison to investigate why groups of people kill and torture each other. His answer is arrestingly simple: people persecute those whom they perceive as polluting due to their "impure" religious, political, or economic ideas. Moore's search begins with the Old Testament's restrictions on sexual behavior, idolatry, diet, and handling unclean objects. He argues that religious authorities seeking to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from competing groups invented, along with monotheism, the association of impure things with moral failure and the violation of God's will. This allowed people to view those holding competing ideas as contaminated and, more important, contaminating. Moore moves next to the French Wars of Religion, in which Protestants and Catholics massacred each other over the control of purity, and the French Revolution, which perfected terror and secularized purity. He then combs the major Asian religions and finds--to his surprise--that violent efforts to eradicate the "impure" were largely absent before substantial Western influence. Moore's provocative conclusion is that monotheism--with its monopoly on virtue and failure to provide supernatural scapegoats--is responsible for some of the most virulent forms of intolerance and is a major cause of human nastiness and suffering. Moore does not say that the monotheist tradition was the primary source of Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, violent Hindu fundamentalism, or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but he does identify it as an indispensable cause because it justified, encouraged, and spread vindictive persecution throughout the world. Once again, Moore has drawn on his comprehensive understanding of history and talent for speaking directly to readers to address one of the most crucial questions about human past and future. This book is for anyone who has ever heard the word genocide and asked why.

Religion and the State

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Release : 2009-07-14
Genre : Religion
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Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

Religion and the State - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Religion and the State write by Scott A. Merriman. This book was released on 2009-07-14. Religion and the State available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This timely and authoritative resource combines both topical and country-by-country coverage to help readers understand the coexistence of church and state in nations around the world today. At a time when faith-based groups have become more politically active in the United States, and with religious conflicts at the epicenter of many of the world's most dangerous hotspots, Religion and the State: An International Analysis of Roles and Relationships could not be more welcomed or timely. Country by country, faith by faith, it unravels the historic underpinnings and long-range effects of the relationship between religious principles and the operations of government in its many guises worldwide. The work combines topical essays on significant developments in the confluence of religion and law throughout the world with short descriptions of each countries' current treatment of religion. Readers can investigate specific nations, compare situations across nations, and explore key issues in the pervasive, often controversial relationship between religion and government.

The Politics of Collective Violence

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Release : 2003-03-17
Genre : Political Science
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Book Rating : 80X/5 ( reviews)

The Politics of Collective Violence - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Politics of Collective Violence write by Charles Tilly. This book was released on 2003-03-17. The Politics of Collective Violence available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, incidents of road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book, first published in 2003, seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Professor Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet that it also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and its variations, and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property.

God, Greed, and Genocide

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Release : 2005
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 201/5 ( reviews)

God, Greed, and Genocide - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook God, Greed, and Genocide write by Arthur Grenke. This book was released on 2005. God, Greed, and Genocide available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. What are the similarities between the mass extermination of idolaters in the Old Testament, the burning of witches in the Middle Ages, the extermination of native Americans, the mass killing of the Armenians at the hand of the Turks, the Holo- caust of the European Jews, and the communist eradication of the enemies of the people both in the Soviet Union and Cambodia? Are these to be seen as unique cases, or as the result of a recognizable pattern. The author provides insight into these questions, basing his argument on the latest sources. He maintains that the study of the dynamics that lead to mass destruction may provide a better understanding of the holocaust as a recurrent phenomenon.

Crisis and Critique

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Release : 2016-07-15
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 510/5 ( reviews)

Crisis and Critique - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Crisis and Critique write by Rodrigo Cordero. This book was released on 2016-07-15. Crisis and Critique available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Fragility is a condition that inhabits the foundations of social life. It remains mostly unnoticed until something breaks and dislocates the sense of completion. In such moments of rupture, the social world reveals the stuff of which it is made and how it actually works; it opens itself to question. Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity. Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.