THE VALUES THAT RONALD REAGAN TOOK INTO THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY CAME FROM MANY SOURCES, AS DO VALUES THAT ALL PEOPLE USE TO ORDER THEIR LIVES, BUT IT DOES SEEM CLEAR THEY DERIVED IN IMPORTANT WAYS FROM TWO INDIVIDUALS. ONE WAS BEN HILL CLEAVER, THE MINISTER OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN DIXON, ILLINOIS, DURING THE 1920S. THE OTHER WAS THE FUTURE PRESIDENT'S MOTHER, NELLE, WHOSE INFLUENCE UPON HIM WAS STRONGLY PURPOSIVE. AT MANY POINTS THE POSITIONS TAKEN BY THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF REAGAN'S YOUTH COINCIDED WITH THE WORDS, IF NOT THE BELIEFS OF THE LATTER-DAY REAGAN. THESE POSITIONS INCLUDED FAITH IN PROVIDENCE, ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA'S MISSION WITH GOD'S WILL, BELIEF IN PROGRESS, TRUST IN THE WORK ETHIC AND ADMIRATION OF THOSE WHO ACHIEVED WEALTH, AN UNCOMFORTABLENESS WITH LITERATURE AND ART THAT QUESTIONED THE FAMILY OR CHALLENGED NOTIONS OF PROPER SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, PRESUMPTION THAT POVERTY IS AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM BEST LEFT TO CHARITY RATHER THAN THE STATE, SENSITIVITY TO PROBLEMS INVOLVING ALCOHOL AND DRUGS, AND RETICENCE TO USE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT CIVIL RIGHTS FOR MINORITIES. FOR HER PART, NELLE WAS A PILLAR OF THE CHURCH AND THE ONE WHO PROVIDED STABILITY TO THE SHAKY REAGAN FAMILY. SHE HELPED SPARK HER SON'S INTEREST IN ACTING AND BELIEVED THE STATE COULD BE A FORCE FOR NOBLE PURPOSES. IT WAS FITTING MANY YEAR'S LATER IN 1981, THAT AS HER SON TOOK THE OATH OF HIS NATION'S HIGHEST OFFICE, HIS HAND RESTED ON NELLE'S TATTERED BIBLE.
An examination of five models of political association that have been influential in the Western tradition. They are basic, historical-political constructions of reality, rooted in fundamental conceptual orientations termed primordial (construing reality as ordered by some other outside humanity), & civil (construing reality as human construction ordered by will & reason). (1) The earliest political model -- the organic order -- is rooted in the primordial orientation & based on kinship ties. The political is treated as a given order, to which individuals must conform by nature. (2) The covenant community derives from the Bible & is based on a mix of kinship & consent. Covenant creates a political community of kinship based on consent, in which political order is treated as a human creation bounded by processes & goals promulgated by some other. (3) The mixed polis derives from Greek political thought, & holds that the best political order is structured by nature & discovered by reason, while actual political orders are transitory products of chance, circumstance, & prudence. (4) The contractual society is modern & rooted wholly in the civil orientation. The political order is voluntary association of egoistic individuals bound by ties of self-interest exchange. (5) The collectivist universal posits the historical necessity of a global, organic community of humanity. The political disappears within an ordered set of other-regarding relations. Adequacies & inadequacies of each model are discussed & the covenant community is concluded to be the most viable. 1 Figure. AA.
Toynbee is less than a historian in that he is primarily a symptom of the worship of size, of the eclipse of scruple, of the contemporary hunger for vast spectacles & for men of learning who champion at least some kind of religion. Above all, Toynbee's success is a symptom of the widespread need for some assurance that history has a meaning. Troubled by the futility of so much human suffering, by deeply ambivalent feelings about the mechanization of modern life & by profound confusion in the face of more & more specialized experts, people long desperately for the royal road to meaning. Toynbee's frequent references to God & Jesus, & the thousands of footnote references to the New Testament that record his every use of Biblical turn of speech assure the Christian reader that the Bible is still right. His famed erudition manifests itself not in a disciplined awareness of important studies of his subject matter by other writers - let alone rival hypo's or facts which do not seem to fit his own account - but in a flair for quaint allusions. His method is what Stephen Potter calls 'One-Upmanship'. Toynbee's work is insidious. It is entertaining & seems instructive, but it really is not instructive because it is utterly unreliable. It is ingratiating & seems religious, but it is full of parochial prejudice, deeply intolerant, & betrays a shocking lack of scruple. J. A. Fishman.
Regardless of the popular wisdom to make predictions in negotiations as if they always reflect the right according to the Bible -- that "to every one who has will more be given" -- this article starts with observation that weaker parties can & do sometimes successfully negotiate with stronger parties. Naturally this provokes questions: "Why can weak parties successfully negotiate with the stronger parties in asymmetric negotiations? How to explain this structural paradox?". The article argues that these questions would be old & answered if not for the long lasting tendency in the international relations discipline to analyze international negotiations from the point of view of the traditional power understanding, as well as systemic international relations theories. On another hand, difficulties objectively arise due to the fact that analysis of the structural paradox is connected to the problem of power -- one of the most complex & difficult to define categories of the social science. And although much has been done recently in the social science to improve our understanding of the concept of power, it is still unclear what is the best way to conceptualize it. Detaching the notion of power from resources, in this article power is associated to the structure of negotiation, comprising of number of parties, interests, resisting points & possible zone of agreements, thus leaving the concept of power open to much more detail & accurate analysis. Having said that the structural analysis does not renounce the importance of resources all in all since every negotiation begins with a certain distribution of actor characteristics that are given. However, important are only the issue related characteristics. Moreover, as the structural model of analysis demonstrates, power is not a constant. The structural characteristics can be "photographed" at the beginning but may change during the process. In addition, the structure may be manipulated that in turn indicates that power is also a matter of perception. Perception mediates objective negotiating structure, although reality imposes certain limits on the implication of perceptions. The structural model of analysis permits to make the following propositions about power. The lower value that a party to a negotiation assigns to its resistance point, the less power it will have, because: The more it will perceive a negotiated agreement primary in terms of the gains it offers over the non-agreement alternative as well as other factors that shape the resistance point; The more risk averse it will be to achieve those gains; The more willing it will be to make concessions. Conversely, the higher value that a party to a negotiation assigns to its resistance point, the more power it will have, because: The more it will perceive a negotiated agreement primary in terms of the loss it entails as compared to the non-agreement alternative and other factors that shape the resistance point; The more risk seeking it will be to avoid those losses; The more it will be to withhold concessions. Adapted from the source document.
Thus it came as a surprise to me, after reading the small selection of essays in his 'street' book, that so little of Kracauer's early work seems to have reached the other side of the Atlantic. Neither of his two novels, Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934), has been translated into English; the original English rendition of his social biography of composer Jacques Offenbach, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937), written during Kracauer's Parisian exile, is long out of print, not to mention incomplete and flawed. And it is only in the past several years that English editions of his writing from the Weimar period have appeared, most notably his anthology of essays The Mass Ornament, put out by Harvard University Press in 1995, and the recent Verso translation of Die Angestellten, published as The Salaried Masses (1998). The English-speaking world is missing an important side of Kracauer. We know the Kracauer who fatuously unveiled the portents of National Socialism in such classic Weimar films as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and, to a lesser extent, the Kracauer who reflected on the aesthetics of cinema in his other major American publication, Theory of Film (1960). But we have little insight into Kracauer's writings from the Weimar period and from his first years of exile. AS A MEANS of bridging the gap between the pre-war German works and their postwar American counterparts, Gertrud Koch's brief critical overview of Kraucauer's entire oeuvre, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (first published in Germany in 1996 and translated here by Jeremy Gaines), offers a key addition to the still evolving secondary literature. Combining biographical sources and close textual analysis, Koch surveys the development of Kracauer's thought from his first sociological and journalistic writings in the 1910s and 1920s up to his final work, History: The Last Things Before the Last, published in 1969, three years after his death. At the outset of her study, Koch notes the profound difficulty critics have faced when trying to make sense of Kracauer's diverse, and sometimes competing, works and their reception. 'Kracauer exists,' she asserts, 'either as a film theorist or as a distant relative of the Frankfurt School, either as a journalist or as a philosopher, either as an essay-writer or as a novelist.' (Kracauer himself showed a certain awareness of this problem, suggesting late in life that he should not be viewed merely as 'a film man,' but as a 'philosopher of culture, or also a sociologist, and as a poet.') Yet, without attempting to attribute an artificial consistency to Kracauer's trajectory of thought, Koch examines, in seven crisp chapters, its development within a broad set of historical and theoretical contexts. BORN IN 1889 into an established Frankfurt-based Jewish family, Kracauer was raised amid a variety of cultural currents. His uncle Isidor Kracauer, who played a critical role in his upbringing, was an authority on the history of the city's Jewish community. After completing his studies in architecture, philosophy, and sociology, Kracauer himself participated to some degree in Frankfurt Jewish life, joining a small circle (which also included Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Leo Lowenthal) gathered around the charismatic Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel. (He would eventually break with Rosenzweig and Buber, publishing a vociferous critique of their Bible translation in 1926.) It was also around this time, however, that Kracauer's relationship to the far more secular Adorno, with whom he met regularly on Saturdays to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, began to blossom, as did his work on Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl. If anything, the first years of Kracauer's professional life reveal, as Koch suggests, deep commitment to a number of enterprises, from architecture to philosophy, from journalism to cultural criticism, without ever gaining a sense of permanence in any one single place. Indeed, in a 1923 letter addressed to Lowenthal and Adorno, Kracauer sardonically adopted a phrase from Georg Lukacs, giving his location as 'the headquarters of the transcendental homeless.'.
