Classes And Masses

This volume brings together articles based on experimental and theoretical research from teachers working in diverse teaching backgrounds with varying experience, from research scholars to school teachers, from college and university teachers in India to a British native teaching in China. The contributions here provide a mix of global and local teaching scenarios, addressing the need for diagnostic tests, developing need-based material, using the mother tongue to ensure active participation of the masses, and re-examining the language policies in Asian countries. The papers collected here also explore the implementation of Task-based Language Teaching, the integration of technology in developing language skills, and the use of games and activities to engage the interest of low level learners while teaching both literature and language, further linking them with their culture and society. The book offers a reflection of the changes that have taken place in the teaching environment in the last two decades, with the introduction of Communicative Language Teaching, and, as such, will be of immense help for policy framers and educators in South-Asian countries and in countries where English is a second or foreign language. Furthermore, the volume offers valuable information for researchers working in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT), which can be used for reviewing literature and exploring the directions in which the new teaching methods and approaches are leading, and establishing the validity of research.

In Masses, Classes, Ideas, well-known French philosopher Etienne Balibar explores the relationship between abstract philosophy and concrete politics. The book gathers together for the first time in English nine of Balibar's most influential essays written over the last decade, which have been carefully revised and reordered in logical succession with an original preface. Balibar discusses the influence of political philosophy on collective movements, touching on issues of religious and class struggle, nationalism and racism, the rights of man and the citizen, and property as a social relation. He seeks to explain the novelty of Marxist philosophy and political theory with respect to the classical doctrines of "state" and "revolution." Masses, Classes, Ideas also examines the limitations and aporias which have become manifest in Marxist philosophy and critically assesses its legacy, offering a provocative contribution to the project of renewing democratic theory.

This volume poses fundamental questions about the function and relevance of the public sphere, both politically and practically.

The Masses are the Ruling Classes proposes the radical, yet seemingly innocuous view that social policy in the United States is determined by mass consent. Contemporary explanations of decision making in the US typically attribute power over policy making to a variety of hidden forces and illegitimate elites holding the masses innocent of their own problems. Yet the enormous openness of the society and near-universal suffrage sustain democratic consent as more plausible than the alternatives -- conspiracy, propaganda, usurpation, autonomous government, and imperfect pluralism. Contrary to prevailing explanations, government is not either autonomous or out of control, business and wealthy individuals have not usurped control of the nation, large segments of the population are not dispossessed of the vote or of a voice in public affairs, and the media has not formed a conspiracy with Hollywood and liberals to deny Americans their God-given freedoms. Despite the multitude of problems that the nation faces, its citizens are not oppressed. In this pithy yet provocative book, Epstein argues that Democracy in the United States is not progressive but is instead populist, and that the core of the populist ideology is romantic rather than pragmatic.

Is the consciousness of Americans in the midst of dramatic transformation? Or do people think and feel much the same as they have always thought and felt? Do most people enjoy their work, or hate it? Is the American family being replaced by new institutional forms, or is it much the same as it was in the 1950's? Have material values been replaced by a "postmaterial consciousness" in a postindustrial society? Are Americans becoming more conservative, less conservative, or staying about the same? State of the Masses asks the important questions.Originally published in 1986, this prescient study evaluate the views of social critics, neo-conservatives, neo-Marxists, post-industrialists, and the theorists of the little man, who puport to describe the nature, social conditions, outlooks, and motivations of the American populace. The claims of one group are often diametrically opposed to those of another. The authors make the case for which claims can be considered true and which false. Hamilton and Wright analyze the contradictory claims and compares their implications with the best social science research and data available at that time. They also explore the implications for theories in light of the conflicting portrait the evidence provides. The authors conclude with a new perspective for understanding continuities and changes in the United States. This is a prescient view of American society during turmoil, and a model for how social science research can be used predictively.

In this book, a new general model of delayed transitions to democracy is proposed and used to analyze Mexico's transition to democracy. This model attempts to explain the slow, gradual dynamics of change characteristic of delayed transitions to democracy and is developed in a way that makes it generalizable to other regional contexts. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data based on an original data set of forty thousand individual interviews, Schatz analyzes how the historical authoritarian corporate shaping of interests and forms of political consciousness has fractured the social base of the democratic opposition and inhibited democratizing social action. Using comparative cases of delayed transitions to democracy, the author's conclusions challenge and improve upon current theories of democratization. In elaborating a model for the delayed transition to democracy, the author argues that the emphasis on transformative industrialism in both political modernization and class-analytic theories of social bases of democratization is modeled too closely on the western European process of democratization to allow a full explanation of the case of Mexico's transition to democracy. In addition, she argues that a delayed transitions model provides a more adequate explanation of gradual transitions to democracy because such a model builds on a the insights of structural theories regarding the social bases of anti-authoritarian mobilization. To support the delayed transitions model, Schatz compares Mexico with Taiwan and Tanzania, countries also characterized by delayed transitions to democracy in the late twentieth century. This important book fills a considerable gap in the literature on democratization at the end of the century.