The Inarticulate Society

Thomas Schachtman, author of Skyscraper Dreams, approaches the muddy, intolerant world of political conversation through the belief that Americans have lost the ability to respond and argue differing points of view without coming swiftly to blows. Considering the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it, Thomas Schachtman argues that political debates are in danger of moving from the Senate chamber to the streets, taking the social stability needed for a working democracy with it. Blaming this decline on the jargon used by specialists in the professions and academia in order to distinguish superiority over common citizens, Schachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media in combination with political and educational reform.

Johnson's centrality in the late eighteenth century makes his fretfulness about the social and aesthetic boundaries of writing especially fertile and influential. This book suggests that literary taxonomies, inventories, and canons simultaneously construct and reject a hierarchy of ethical as well as aesthetic values, and examines how figures of cultural authority conceive of their relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society.

Focusing on urban sociology as practised in Britain, the author argues that it is a key element in the response of the 'intellectual proletariat' to urbanization and the calls on it by the State to control the ensuing way of life. The themes of urban sociology have been the concerns of the Welfare State and, despite radical inputs, the discipline has remained tied up with the assumptions and methodological precepts of liberalism. The author's contention is that urbanization should be analysed in the framework of the political economy of regional development. This book was first published in 1977.

This book investigates how sustainability informs key principles and concepts of domestic and international law. It calls for the recognition of ecological sustainability as a fundamental principle to guide the entire legal system rather than just environmental legislation. To this end, the book makes a contribution to global environmental constitutionalism, a rapidly growing area within comparative and international environmental law and constitutional law. This 2nd edition has been fully revised and updated to take account of recent developments and new case law. The book will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy makers working in the areas of environmental law and governance.

Communication Centers: A Theory-Based Guide to Training and Management addresses what communication centers are and why they are valuable, examines their rich rhetorical roots, and offers advice to faculty who are asked to develop a communication center. Directors of established centers and peer tutors will also find valuable information.

Scottish creative writing in the twentieth century was notable for its willingness to explore and absorb the literatures of other times and other nations. From the engagement with Russian literature of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, through to the interplay with continental literary theory, Scottish writers have proved active participants in a diverse international literary practice. Scottish criticism has, arguably, often been slow in appreciating the full extent of this exchange. Preoccupied with marking out its territory, with identifying an independent and distinctive tradition, Scottish criticism has occasionally blinded itself to the diversity and range of its writers. In stressing the importance of cultural independence, it has tended to overlook the many virtues of interdependence. The essays in this book aim to offer a corrective view. They celebrate the achievement of Scottish writing in the twentieth century by offering a wider basis for appreciation than a narrow idea of 'Scottishness'. Each essay explores an aspect of Scottish writing in an individual foreign perspective; together they provide an enriching account of a national literary practice that has deep, and often surprisingly complex, roots in international culture.

This volume promotes a pragmatic, anti-essentialist and anti-hegemonic approach to the problem of the definition of religion. It argues that definitions of religion are context-bound strategies for pursuing a variety of purposes, extra-academic as well as academic. Religions being immensely varied, complex and multi-functional phenomena, they need to be studied by several academic disciplines from many different perspectives. It is, therefore, legitimate and useful that many definitions of religions are developed. The volume has contributions from scholars in Philosophy of Religion, the Comparative Study of Religions, Anthropology of Religion, Sociology of Religion and Psychology of Religion. It has chapters on the polemics of defining religion in modern contexts, the history of the concept of religion, and the methodology of its definition; it includes several definition proposals.