Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life - Couverture rigide

Elshtain, Jean Bethke

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0801855993 ISBN 13 : 9780801855993

Editeur : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

Synopsis

At the centre of this work is a concern with the relationship between rhetoric and political action. For the author, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should therefore approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, the author finds in the writings of Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and Elshtain critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual goals. She reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past decades, this book advocates a "via media" politics that avoids unacceptable political discourse. The author champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The most recent of her many books are 'Democracy on Trial', a 'New York Times' Notable Book of the Year in 1995, and 'Augustine and the Limits of Politics'.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Date d'édition: 1997
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0801855993
• ISBN 13: 9780801855993
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 376
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible