Defending Ideals

In Defending Ideals Cornell looks at the crisis on the left and asks how we can turn back toward more left wing ideals.

In this book, Drucilla Cornell examines the crisis on the left and asks how we can turn back toward more left-wing ideals. She looks at the meaning of freedom through various lenses as well as the dissolution of feminism. She discusses and critiques such major thinkers as: Amartya Sen, Adorno, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, Richard Falk, and Paul Berman among others.

One of the principal moral and psychological problems of our time is whether humane ideals can be defended. Loss of faith in the objectivity of ethics has encouraged a sense of hopelessness. The notion that no ideal is better than any other, that a humane commitment has no rational advantage over Nietzsche's contempt for ordinary people, has been accused of leaving our civilization without self-confidence or a purpose. James R. Flynn rejects attempts to salvage ethical objectivity as futile and counterproductive. Instead, he uses philosophical analysis to demonstrate the relevance of logic and evidence to moral debate. He then uses modern social science to refute racists, Social Darwinists, Nietzsche, and the meritocracy thesis of The Bell Curve. Flynn concludes that the great post-Enlightenment project?justice for all races and classes, the reduction of inequality, and the abolition of privilege?retains its moral dignity and relevance.

In 1908, after decades of struggling with a public administration undermined by systemic patronage, the Canadian parliament decided that public servants would be selected on the basis of merit, through a system administered by an independent agency: the Public Service Commission of Canada. This history, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Commission, recounts its unique contribution to the development of an independent public service, which has become a pillar of Canadian parliamentary democracy.

In 1908, after decades of struggling with a public administration undermined by systemic patronage, the Canadian parliament decided that public servants would be selected on the basis of merit, through a system administered by an independent agency: the Public Service Commission of Canada. This history, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Commission, recounts its unique contribution to the development of an independent public service, which has become a pillar of Canadian parliamentary democracy.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the inflectional middle category in Modern Greek. Against the theoretical backdrop of cognitive linguistics, it is argued that a wide range of seemingly disparate middle structures in Modern Greek comprise a complex semantic network, and that this network is organized around two prototypical middle event types, which are noninitiative emotional response and spontaneous change of state. In those cases where middle structures have active counterparts, middle and active variants of the same verb stem are compared in order to demonstrate more clearly the semantic distinctions and pragmatic functions encoded by inflectional middle voice in Modern Greek. Major semantic groupings of middle structures treated include emotional response in particular and psycho-emotive experience in general, spontaneous change of state and/or the resulting state, agent-induced events in which an agent subject is (emotionally) involved with or affected by some aspect of the designated situation, passive-like events in which a patient subject is affected by a nonfocal agent, implicit or specified, and reflexive-like events in which a patient subject and an unspecified agent may overlap to varying degrees.

An ARTery Best Book of the Year An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul. “An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard...Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor...[A] powerful, heartfelt book.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like...[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.” —Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education “Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.” —Kirkus Reviews