In Defense Of Dialogue

In Defense of Dialogue: Reading Habermas and Postwar American Literature offers a timely investigation of the value of dialogue in contemporary American culture. Using Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to read the work of Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and Andy Warhol, In Defense of Dialogue assembles postwar writers who have never been studied alongside one another, showing how they overcame the pervading skepticism of their contemporaries to imagine sincere and rational speakers who seek to cultivate intersubjective discourse.

In The Absent Dialogue, Anit Mukherjee examines the relations between politicians, bureaucrats, and the military in India and argues that the pattern of civil-military relations in India hampers the effectiveness of the Indian military. Informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews with high ranking officials, as well as archival material, this book sheds new light on both India's political and military history, as well as democratic civilian control and military effectiveness more generally.

Although friction often frustrates civil-military relations, it is an inevitable and important part of the policymaking process. The system breaks down when there is too much friction or too little: when civilian and military leaders descend into open conflict or when one side acquiesces to the other and embraces groupthink. The system works best when both sides in the civil-military dialogue are able to speak candidly in an environment that fosters empathy and empowerment.

Over more than twenty years as a mediator, Aaron T. Wolf has learned that successful conflict resolution is shaped by complicated dynamics--from how comfortable the meeting room is to the participants' deepest senses of self. Bridging seemingly intractable issues means addressing multiple layers of needs. Wolf's approach may be surprising to Westerners who are accustomed to separating rationality from spirituality and science from religion. The Spirit of Dialogue draws lessons from a diversity of faith traditions to transform conflict, from identifying the root cause of anger to aligning with an energy beyond oneself--what Christians call grace--to the true listening practiced by Buddhist monks. Whether atheist or fundamentalist, Muslim or Jewish, Quaker or Hindu, any reader involved in difficult dialogue will find concrete steps towards a meeting of souls.

In Dramatic Dialogue, Atlas and Aron develop the metaphors of drama and theatre to introduce a new way of thinking about therapeutic action and therapeutic traction. This model invites the patient’s many self-states and the numerous versions of the therapist’s self onto the analytic stage to dream a mutual dream and live together the past and the future, as they appear in the present moment. The book brings together the relational emphasis on multiple self-states and enactment with the Bionian conceptions of reverie and dreaming-up the patient. The term Dramatic Dialogue originated in Ferenczi’s clinical innovations and refers to the patient and therapist dramatizing and dreaming-up the full range of their multiple selves. Along with Atlas and Aron, readers will become immersed in a Dramatic Dialogue, which the authors elaborate and enact, using the contemporary language of multiple self-states, waking dreaming, dissociation, generative enactment, and the prospective function. The book provides a rich description of contemporary clinical practice, illustrated with numerous clinical tales and detailed examination of clinical moments. Inspired by Bion’s concept of "becoming-at-one" and "at-one-ment," the authors call for a return of the soul or spirit to psychoanalysis and the generative use of the analyst’s subjectivity, including a passionate use of mind, body and soul in the pursuit of psychoanalytic truth. Dramatic Dialogue will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Review: "Seventeen distinguished experts tackle profound issues related to titled subject. Farer's lively introduction furnishes clear, insightful framework; subsequent chapters provide strong theoretical and empirical bases with high-quality scholarship. States receiving case study attention, however, are limited; key ones such as Brazil and Argentina are not included"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas/

What role should religion play in shaping and implementing U.S. foreign policy? The dominant attitude over the last half century on the subject of religion and international relations was expressed well by Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state: "Moral Talk was fine preaching for the Final Day of Judgment, but it was not a view I would entertain as a public servant." Was Acheson right? How a nation "commits itself to freedom" has long been at the heart of debates about foreign aid, economic sanctions, and military intervention. Moral and faith traditions have much to say about what is required to achieve this end. And after September 11, no one can doubt the importance of religious beliefs in influencing relations among peoples and nations. The contributors to this volume come at the issue from very different perspectives and offer exceptional and unexpected insights on a question now at the forefront of American foreign policy.

Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and ubiquitous torture ... nuclear threat, the ecological laying waste of our planet, the leap of endemic, possibly pandemic, illness out of the very matrix of libertarian progress" is exactly what Joseph de Maistre foretold. In the Dialogues Maistre addressed a number of topics that are discussed briefly or not at all in his other works already available in English. These include an apologetic for traditional Christian beliefs about providence, reflections on the social role of the public executioner and the "divinity" of war, a critique of John Locke's sensationalist psychology, meditations on prayer and sacrifice, and a mini-course on "illuminism." The literary form is that of the "philosophical conversation" – one that allowed Maistre to be deliberately provocative and to indulge his taste for paradox, a "methodical extravagance" that he judged particularly appropriate for the eighteenth-century salon. Translator and editor Richard Lebrun provides a full scholarly edition of this classic work, complete with an introduction, chronology, critical bibliography, and generous explanatory notes. The Dialogues will be of interest to scholars of literary history as well as the history of ideas.

This book reconstructs the tradition of dialectic from Aristotle's Topics, its founding text, up to its "renaissance" in 16th century Italy, and focuses on the role of dialectic in the production of knowledge. Aristotle defines dialectic as a structured exchange of questions and answers and thus links it to dialogue and disputation, while Cicero develops a mildly skeptical version of dialectic, identifies it with reasoning in utramque partem and connects it closely to rhetoric. These two interpretations constitute the backbone of the living tradition of dialectic and are variously developed in the Renaissance against the Medieval background. The book scrutinizes three separate contexts in which these developments occur: Rudolph Agricola's attempt to develop a new dialectic in close connection with rhetoric, Agostino Nifo's thoroughly Aristotelian approach and its use of the newly translated commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes, and Carlo Sigonio's literary theory of the dialogue form, which is centered around Aristotle's Topics. Today, Aristotelian dialectic enjoys a new life within argumentation theory: the final chapter of the book briefly revisits these contemporary developments and draws some general epistemological conclusions linking the tradition of dialectic to a fallibilist view of knowledge.

“An excellent, vividly written” (The Washington Post) account of leadership in wartime that explores how four great democratic statesmen—Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion—worked with the military leaders who served them during warfare. The relationship between military leaders and political leaders has always been a complicated one, especially in times of war. When the chips are down, who should run the show—the politicians or the generals? In Supreme Command, Eliot A. Cohen expertly argues that great statesmen do not turn their wars over to their generals, and then stay out of their way. Great statesmen make better generals of their generals. They question and drive their military men, and at key times they overrule their advice. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion led four very different kinds of democracy, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They came from four very different backgrounds—backwoods lawyer, dueling French doctor, rogue aristocrat, and impoverished Jewish socialist. Yet they faced similar challenges. Each exhibited mastery of detail and fascination with technology. All four were great learners, who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways mastered it as well as did their generals. All found themselves locked in conflict with military men. All four triumphed. The powerful lessons of this “brilliant” (National Review) book will touch and inspire anyone who faces intense adversity and is the perfect gift for history buffs of all backgrounds.