Traditions Tyranny And Utopias

A collection of six essays on the nature of Western civilization and its impact in cultural and economic terms on the impoverished under-developed East, by a very distinguished political psychologist and social theorist.

These essays present an outsider's view of Western norms of progress, rationality, and maturity, and offer an alternate perspective on oppression in modern times. Nandy stresses the importance of considering the world views held by "non-modern" cultures in formulating a more humane and less technologically preoccupied vision of progress.

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

"This is a collection of three significant works of Ashis Nandy - The Tao of Cricket, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, and Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias. In The Tao of Cricket, Nandy shows how a game once identified with the British Empire - and a preserve of the British gentry - is now more South Asian than English. He examines the sneaking entry of the modern urban-industrial ethic and mass culture into a game that used to thrive on its ability to be a living critique of modern life. Through the story of Indian cricket, he attempts a systematic analysis of world-views, ideologies, cultural exchanges, and political choices. An Ambiguous Journey to the City - concerned with the apparently territorial journey between the village and the city - captures some of the core fantasies and anxieties of Indian civilization over the past century. Nandy argues that the decline of the village from the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically, and that the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism cannot be realized without renegotiating the myth of the village. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias is a collection of essays on the modern West and its cultural and psychological impact on the East. Nandy analyses, brilliantly and insightfully, aspects of East-West relationship - from Western visions, which have displaced all other ideals of a good society, to western histories that have displaced all other pasts of the East. Yet, the apparently defeated have, through the likes Gandhi and Senghor, tried to subvert the West's construction of the rest and to ensure cultural survival and on open-ended future. This volume is essential reading for social scientists, policymakers, activists and anyone interested in the way Indian politics and culture are now enmeshed with a global struggle to protect human dignity and democratic values. This is the third omnibus edition of Ashis Nandy's writings, the first two being Exiled at Home and Return from Exile"--Jacket.

In his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, Mark R. Levin explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects—the Founding Fathers, and its modern-day disciples—and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it. Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government. As Levin meticulously pursues his subject, the reader joins him in an enlightening and compelling journey. And in the end, Levin’s message is clear: the American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty. President Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Levin agrees, and with Ameritopia, delivers another modern political classic, an indispensable guide for America in our time and in the future.

The volume complements two highly successful previously published volumes of Richard Rorty's philosophical papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and Essays on Heidegger and Others. The essays in the volume engage with the work of many of today's most innovative thinkers including Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, Juergen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. The collection also touches on problems in contemporary feminism raised by Annette Baier, Marilyn Frye, and Catherine MacKinnon, and considers issues connected with human rights and cultural differences.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

This volume is an adda of great minds, spanning generations and multiple nationalities. While one discusses creativity and aesthetics through Indian classical music, another recounts the pleasure of a simple walk. Another questions how it would be if Rabindranath Tagore lived in the twenty-first century; yet another, how ‘cool’ Indians are or might be in the future. Subjects as far apart as war and solitude find space in these musings. Through these lively engagements emerge key insights into the ideas, writings, and life of one of the foremost intellectuals of our time in Indian and global scholarship, thought, and dissent—Ashis Nandy.