The Domestication of Competition: Social Evolution and Liberal Society - Couverture rigide

Hearn, Jonathan

 
9781009199155: The Domestication of Competition: Social Evolution and Liberal Society

Synopsis

Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was 'domesticated', harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.

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À propos de l'auteur

Jonathan Hearn is Professor of Political and Historical Sociology at the University of Edinburgh and President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. His published writings explore themes of social power, nationalism and identity, Scotland and its Enlightenment, liberal and civil society, and competition.

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