Private Lives And Public Affairs

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.

00 From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution. From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.

While many of the essays in this book were written before 9/11, they point to a number of important issues such as the commercialization of public life, the stepped up militarization, racial profiling, and the threat to basic civil liberties that have been resurrected since the terrorist attacks. Public Spaces, Private Lives serves to legitimate the claim that there is much in America that has not changed since 9/11. Rather than a dramatic change, what we are witnessing is an intensification and acceleration of the contradictions that threatened American democracy before the tragic events of 9/11. Hence, Public Spaces, Private Lives offers a context for both understanding and critically engaging the combined threats posed by the increase in domestic militarization and a neoliberal ideology that substitutes market values for those democratic values that are crucial to rethinking what a vibrant democracy would look like in the aftermath of September 11th.

Mark S. Cladis pinpoints the origins of contemporary notions of the public and private and their relationship to religion in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His thesis cuts across many fields and issues-philosophy of religion, women's studies, democratic theory, modern European history, American culture, social justice, privacy laws, and notions of solitude and community-and wholly reconsiders the political, cultural, and legal nature of modernity in relation to religion. Turning to Rousseau's Garden, its inhabitants, the Solitaires, and the question of restoration and redemption that preoccupied much of Rousseau's thought, Cladis examines how Rousseau addressed the tension between the joys and moral obligations of social engagement and the desire for solitude. He was caught between two possibilities: active involvement in the creation of an enlightened and humane society or extrication from social entanglements in favor of cultivating a spiritual interior life. Yet Rousseau did not view this conflict as a desperate division. Rather, for him it was a moral struggle to be endured by those who had fallen from the Garden. For this edition Cladis has added a substantive introduction that discusses the role of religion in contemporary democratic societies, particularly in American public life. Cladis proposes four models of thinking about religion in public and champions what he calls spiritual democracy-a dynamic, culturally specific, and progressive democracy. Cladis argues that spiritual democracy refers not only to a society's legal codes and principles but also to its democratic culture and symbols and its daily practices and institutions. It encompasses the nation's character, diverse identities, and a distinctivel exchange between the nation's public vision and citizens' complex, private lives.