The Crisis Of Progress

America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

This book is about the concept of progress, its separate varieties, its current rejection, and how it may be reconsidered from a philosophical and scientific basis. John C. Caiazza's main emphasis is on how science is understood as it has a direct impact on social values as expressed by prominent philosophers. He argues that progress is at a standstill, which presents a crisis for Western civilization.Caiazza presents historical examples, both of scientific inquiry and social and cultural themes, to examine the subject of progress. Beginning with the Whig model and progressive political values exemplified by Bacon and Dewey, he also examines other variations, the Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, and totalitarianism. Technology, argues Caiazza, also has a stultifying effect on Western culture and to understand the idea of progress, we must take a philosophic rather than a scientific point of view. Modern cosmology has inevitable humanistic and theological implications, and major contemporary philosophers reject social science in favour of ancient concepts of virtue and ethics.In the end, Caiazza writes that time is an agent, not a neutral plain on which scientific and historical events occur. We can expect technology to keep us in stasis or become aware of the possibility of transcendence. This book will be of interest for students of scientific history and philosophy.

"The true story of how Rachel Johnson - born into one of Britain's most famous political families - tries and fails to get elected in the 2019 hard-fought effort to stop Brexit, running against her older brother, Boris, and what she learns in the process about politics, ambition, family, marriage, and winning and losing"--

Operation Just Cause, the United States' incursion into Panama, was the culmination of a gradually escalating confrontation between the United States and the Noriega dominated government of Panama that extended from June, 1987 until early January, 1990. Applying diverse methodological approaches, this volume examines the various ways representative examples of the global media covered the developing crisis and the eventual US incursion into Panama. The volume: - sets the stage for this analysis by delineating the chronological development of the escalating confrontation, as well as by examining the confrontation from the perspective of the US government - analyzes the crisis from the perspective of the US, Soviet, Canadian, French, Portuguese, Arab, and the People's Republic of China media - exposes the challenges for public affairs officers operating within the context of the global media response to international crises, and provides an assessment of the implications of the crisis for inter-American and international relations. This analysis and evaluation of a variety of global media perspectives on the escalating US-Panamanian confrontation will serve to better illuminate and further enrich our understanding of a major international event - indeed, one of the final events of the Cold War era.

This book examines the 2008 global economic crisis as a complex social phenomenon or "social hieroglyphic", arguing that the crisis is not fundamentally economic, despite presenting itself as such. Instead, it is considered to be a symptom of a long-standing, multifaceted, and endemic crisis of capitalism which has effectively become permanent, leading contemporary capitalist societies into a state of social regression, manifest in new forms of barbarism. The author offers a qualitative understanding of the economic crisis as the perversion, or inversion, of the capitalistically organized social relations. The genesis of the current crisis is traced back to the unresolved world crisis surrounding the Great Depression in order to map the course and different "inverted forms" of the continuous global crisis of capitalism, and to reveal their inner connections as derivative of the same social constitution. From a historical and interdisciplinary perspective, the book expounds critical social theory, elaborating on the intersection between the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School – mainly Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse – and the "social form" analysis of the Open Marxism school. Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic critically addresses the permanent character of the 1920s–1930s crisis and the "crisis theory" debates; the political crisis in Eastern Europe (1953–1968); the crisis of Keynesianism; the crisis of subversive reason; the crisis, negative anthropology and transformations of the bourgeois individual; the state of social regression and the destructive tendencies after the rise of neoliberalism; and finally, the 2008 financial crisis and its ongoing aftermath.

This volume advances a better, more historical and contextual, manner to consider not only the present, but also the future of ‘crisis’ and ‘renewal’ as key concepts of our political language as well as fundamental categories of interpretation.