Enlightened Individualism

Insights into a compassionate alternative to a ruthlessly self-interested capitalist culture Societally sanctioned competition for money, power, and fame promotes selfishness, personal alienation, and widespread inequality, especially in market-oriented economies. Yet many of those engaging in this competitive individualism—the competition for rewards and limited resources—yearn to act directly to promote a more civil, equitable, and sustainable society. Enlightened Self-Interest offers evidence-based insights into the societal and individual consequences of this cultural practice and an actionable alternative to it. This meticulously researched and empirically rooted reexamination of hypercompetition and zero-sum thinking presents inspiring examples of people who have reclaimed their own lives by contributing to a more civil, equitable, and sustainable society. They model the vision of enlightened self-interest, merging self-interest with other interests in pursuit of the common good, resulting in widely shared benefits. Enlighted Self Interest provides a compelling case for incremental change and a series of actionable recommendations to jump-start a personal transition and to become part of a collective radical evolution.

Reconciles seemingly conflicting views of Asian transcendence and American freedom to argue that post-WWII American writers envision a more enlightened individualism.

Gospel of the Open Road reclaims Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau as America’s spiritual birthright. It rescues them from literary history, and reveals them in their true light: as democracy’s prophets of the soul. Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau were religious seers who developed a new form of spirituality, and Gospel of the Open Road explains, in scholarly yet passionate fashion, the deep wisdom that is their enduring legacy. It presents them as a viable spiritual path for those who do not belong, and do not want to belong, to any organized religion.But this book does more. It draws fascinating parallels between the new spirituality taught by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and ancient spiritual wisdom as found in shamanism, Goddess worship, Tantra, Taoism, Confucianism, Vajrayana and Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. This book is an evocative synthesis of humanity’s most venerable spiritual wisdom and the most modern of philosophical, social, psychological, political, scientific, and Humanistic concepts. It traces the New Age spiritual revolution to its source in Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and explains how to apply their spiritual teachings to our everyday life here on Earth.

The Enlightenment Movement changed society forever, driving it forward through new and fresh ways of thinking about science, religion, history, politics, and culture. This dictionary offers a balanced overview and helps us to understand and appreciate the Enlightenment through its coverage of the basic assumptions and values that structured the movement; explanation of how these ideas were articulated; the paths of communication they followed; how its key ideas grew, developed and were refracted; and how new problems grew out of what were advanced as solutions to older problems. An engaging introductory essay along with hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries defines the significant persons, places, events, institutions, and literary works of the movement. A chronological table charts the progression of the movement by indicating the date, the main figures involved, the political or society events, and the science, arts, or letters that resulted. The comprehensive bibliography, with an introductory essay to the literature, categorized by subject complements this reference that will be valued by all seeking basic details about this important period.

Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume (including, among others, Pascal, Vico, Schmitt, Weber, Anscombe, Scruton, and Tolkien) do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place the person in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought.

The Virtues of Abandon explores how eighteenth-century debates over the self's relationship to property gave rise to a previously unexamined anti-individualist tradition of thought and action that informed the work of mystics, materialists, and radical political thinkers during the French Enlightenment and the Revolution.

For generations the traditional focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but here makes an overwhelming case for consideringBritain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world.