The Democratic Imagination - 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 Democratic Imagination write by James Irvine Cairns. This book was released on 2012-01-01. The Democratic Imagination available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Democratic Imagination examines different conceptions of democracy, exploring tensions that emerge in key moments and debates in the history of democracy, from Ancient Greece to the French Revolution to contemporary Egypt.
Citizen Speak
Citizen Speak - 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 Citizen Speak write by Andrew J. Perrin. This book was released on 2009-10-15. Citizen Speak available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But in Citizen Speak, Andrew J. Perrin argues that these activities are only a small part of democratic citizenship—a standard of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting. For Citizen Speak, Perrin met with labor, church, business, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution laws, or your nearby airport is slated for expansion? The conversations these challenges inspire, Perrin shows, require imagination. And what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what’s possible, what’s important, what’s right, and what’s feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, Citizen Speak shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.
The Democratic Imagination in America
The Democratic Imagination in America - 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 Democratic Imagination in America write by Russell L. Hanson. This book was released on 1985. The Democratic Imagination in America available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 'This is an interesting and absorbing study, The author seeks to delineate 'democracy' as an operative concept in American life over time; its meanings have shifted, and these shifts both symbolize changes in our politics and help to constitute these changes. Hanson's critical use of American history is persuasive and distinctive, and he will find a large audience.' --William E. Connolly, University of Massachusetts.
Imagination in Politics
Imagination in Politics - 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 Imagination in Politics write by Mihaela Czobor-Lupp. This book was released on 2014-10-15. Imagination in Politics available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Imagination is a complex and ambiguous culture-making power, which, while central to politics, is a rather marginal concept in contemporary political theory. By drawing on works of modern and contemporary Continental political philosophers, this book addresses how imagination can be both a source of freedom and domination in liberal-democratic politics, and argues for a benign public employment of images and narratives in a global world of diverse cultures. The challenge is not to keep contemporary politics clear of images, but to better distinguish between benign and malign uses of creativity in the public realm. This distinction is important because the language employed by the participants in the complex cultural dialogue that characterizes modern plural societies is constituted by metaphors and myths, which form their perceptions and sensibilities. The embedment of communicative practices in a society’s imaginary brings an ambivalent psychological and emotional potential into democratic politics. Modern liberal-democracies can shift the public employment of imagination either in a direction that increases the autonomous capacity of individuals to engage culture and language in a creative and interactive manner in the construction of their identities, or in a direction that increases fascination with images and myths and, consequently, the escapist desire to pull these out of the living dialogue with others. Turning the public work of creativity in the first direction requires a conscious change in the modern social imaginary. This can be achieved through the aesthetic cultivation of an ethical productive imagination: both analogical and explorative, both empathic and reflective. While capable of creatively giving utopian impetus to politics, this imagination would also stir the individuals’ responsiveness to the particularity of others and to their capacity to be equal and free partners in the making of a common world. An important avenue in achieving this objective in modern liberal-democracies will be provided by the capacity of literary works to open up public spaces of dialogue. There the renewal of the metaphors and myths that frame individual and collective identities in a society can have transformative effects that increase the individuals’ ability for cross cultural understanding.
Collective Dreams
Collective Dreams - 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 Collective Dreams write by Keally D. McBride. This book was released on 2015-08-26. Collective Dreams available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?
