Suchergebnisse

Political theory as textual criticism -- How to teach kings to read history : humanist culture and the disenchantment of absolutist power -- Political power in the archives : from reason of state to critical history -- In the workshop of politics : Amelot de La Houssaye and the methods of unmasking Venice -- How to read a subversive : decoding reason of state of the self -- The Machiavellian reformation : critical technologies of reading and the culture of personal prudence -- An enlightened prince reads Machiavelli, and a philosophe publishes The prince

The urgency of our times has engendered demands for action, and action has followed: economic, political, diplomatic. We are concerned for the technical competence of those who are acting. But surely there are other and even more fundamental concerns. Action too easily distracts from the assumptions on which action is based. Many of those assumptions are born in that dark region of the popular imagination where nations define themselves in terms of basic myths of national mission and national identity. We are tempted by, and too easily succumb to, oversimple versions of those myths. Urgent as is our need for action, we need reflection more.The basic instrument of reflection on national identity and mission is literature, and ours is incredibly rich, Literature has helped both to shape and to reveal that obscure popular imagination and has criticized the ways it has shaped itself.

I am grateful to Professor Wand for devoting so much space to my "conceptual apparatus." I should have been more grateful if he had got it more nearly right. His criticism of my concepts, particularly of the central concept of powers, is so wide of the mark that one wonders about his concept of criticism. The puzzle is how he can pronounce with such assurance his "grave charges" that my thought is confused and misleading. The answer I shall suggest is partly (a) that he has not paid attention to my definitions, and partly (b) that he has tried to fit my argument into a conceptual framework – his own – which he assumes has some absolute validity. Perhaps (b) accounts for (a): he was perhaps unable to read what I wrote because it does not fit his conceptual scheme. Let me take in reverse order his criticisms of the three concepts he deals with.

Long-standing wisdom holds that criticism is antithetical to effective brainstorming because it incites intragroup conflict. However, a number of recent studies have challenged this assumption, suggesting that criticism might actually enhance creativity in brainstorming by fostering divergent thinking. Our paper reconciles these perspectives with new theory and a multimethod investigation to explain when and why criticism promotes creativity in brainstorming. We propose that a cooperative social context allows criticism to be construed positively, spurring creativity without inciting intragroup conflict, whereas a competitive social context makes criticism more divisive, leading to intragroup conflict and a corresponding reduction in creativity. We found support for this theory from a field experiment involving 100 group brainstorming sessions with actual stakeholders in a controversial urban planning project. In a cooperative context, instructions encouraging criticism yielded more ideas and more creative ideas, whereas in a competitive context, encouraging criticism yielded fewer ideas and less creative ideas. We replicated this finding in a laboratory study involving brainstorming in the context of a union-management negotiation scenario, which allowed us to hold constant the nature of the criticism. Taken together, our findings suggest that the optimal context for creativity in brainstorming is a cooperative one in which criticism occurs but is interpreted constructively because the brainstorming parties perceive their goals as aligned.