The Masses Are Revolting

The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional reaction came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers--including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Bront --whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period. Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections between these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

The Masses Are Revolting makes two overarching claims about the interrelation of disgust and aesthetics in Victorian culture and literature. First, I place the Victorian novel's focus on the newly repulsive conditions of British society in dialogue with the privileged position Enlightenment aesthetics afforded to the disgusting as the antithesis of the beautiful. An object which disgusts cannot be aesthetically pleasing, the story goes, since it is felt to be as repulsive in art as in nature. Traditional aesthetics thus prohibited the disgusting from artistic and literary composition, because it was thought to overflow the representational frame and preclude disinterested judgment. Through close readings of works by Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing, I argue that Victorian literary texts, to the contrary, took this boundary confusion between disgusting representations and disgusting realities as a point of departure, and so broke much more sharply with the 18th and early 19th century discourse of taste and beauty than has conventionally been acknowledged. Second, while emphasizing this disconnect between Victorian literary practice and aesthetic theory, I also examine the unprecedented importance that Victorians afforded to disgust as a public and political passion, focusing in individual chapters on the complex roles that disgust played in Victorian medicine, physiology, obscenity law, and sanitation. In a chapter surveying the documentation of the 1858 Great Stink of London, for example, I argue that the Victorian rhetoric of social revulsion produced in the wake of the sewage crisis derived from the Enlightenment discourse of aesthetic judgment. Thus, while Victorian literature industriously flouted the aesthetic prohibition of the disgusting, industrial society absorbed it.

This book is first and foremost a detailed and meticulous study of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930). No other up-to-date books explore this thinker and his great work. Most importantly, the author demonstrates the relevance and importance of Ortega y Gasset's thought and his The Revolt of the Masses for today's world, showing, for instance, how Ortega's categories like "mass man" and "decadence," have been vindicated by today's spiritual, moral and cultural decay. This aspect of the book will perhaps be of major interest to the reading public. What Ortega argues for in his brief history of philosophy is something that he has otherwise made explicit throughout his work, mainly his conviction that strictly speaking philosophy as an activity or manner of thinking that faces naked reality, holistically, ended long ago with the ancient Greeks. All subsequent philosophical endeavors have been merely a rehashing or an academic commentary on the pre-existing philosophical canon. This latter activity he saw as pertaining to the history of philosophy, but he did not regard it as philosophy. Philosophy, as a vital and life-forging way of life, he argued, had played out its originality, and thus had run its course, long ago. With a glossary of special terms as used by Ortega, and with references to Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Josef Pieper, and others, this work is a fundamental tool for any student of Ortega, of existentialism, and 20th-century European philosophy. Pedro Blas Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University in Miami. His areas of specialization include Continental philosophy, specifically Phenomenology, Existentialism, and philosophical aspects of literature. His works include Fragments: Essays In Subjectivity, Individuality And Autonomy (Algora, 2005), and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega's Philosophy of Subjectivity (Paragon House, 2005). Gonzalez holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from DePaul University.

Reconsiders of Arendt's philosophy of natality in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices

The Rise of Mass Advertising is the first cultural legal history of mass advertising in Britain c. 1840-1914 and its legal shaping; drawing together the history of capitalism, the history of fields of knowledge, and the history of modern disenchantment to present a new account of advertising's significance for modernity.

Provides an innovative theory of regime transitions and outcomes, and tests it using extensive evidence between 1800 and today.

An anthology of 70 essays and articles by prelates and pastors, theologians and canonists, philosophers and cultural figures-including: Cardinal Walter Brandmüller • Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke • Cardinal Gerhard Müller • Cardinal Robert Sarah • Cardinal Joseph Zen • Archbishop Thomas Gullickson • Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò • Bishop Rob Mutsaerts • Bishop Athanasius Schneider • Msgr. Charles Pope • Dom Alcuin Reid • Abbé Claude Barthe • Fr. John Hunwicke • Michael Brendan Dougherty • Ross Douthat • Edward Feser • Michael Fiedrowicz • Peter A. Kwasniewski • Phil Lawler • Martin Mosebach • George Neumayr • Joseph Shaw • and many others Already on July 16, 2021, the reactions to Pope Francis's severe restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass in Traditionis Custodes were like a river in full flood: articles, essays, interviews, podcasts-everywhere and from every point of view. An emotional, spiritual, intellectual dam had broken and the waters of discourse poured forth across the world. The sheer volume of writing occasioned by Traditionis Custodes is unlike anything seen in the history of papal documents-testimony to a neuralgic subject on which arguments proliferate and passions run high. The two-month period following the release of the motu proprio gave proof that the traditionalist movement was no fringe phenomenon, but something that had gained significant strength and sympathy during the relatively peaceful years from 2007 to 2021 (the "Pax Benedictina" to which the book's title refers). The purpose of this volume is to gather in one convenient place some of the finest and most appreciated essays and articles published in the period from mid-July through September of this fateful year, 2021-not only from America and England (although these predominate), but also from other nations: France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Poland, Kazakhstan, and China. This book is not, and makes no pretense of being, a presentation of "both sides of the argument." It offers a variety of critiques of this profoundly unwise and unpastoral decree, which suffers from incoherent doctrinal foundations, grave moral and juridical defects, and impossible ecclesiological implications.

This striking interpretation of Rancière's uncompromising view of emancipation draws on his Maoist commitments and invariably rational and Kantian-moralist basis. Tracing the logic of abstract and atemporal space in all of Rancière's work, it stands in contrast to the prevailing tendency to emphasise his sensitivity to evolving historical forms and changing regimes of sensibility. Overturning the meaning of Rancière's interest in the sensible makes the object of his thinking clear: a revolt against a reality structured according to ordered temporalities and forms of appearance. In making its case, For Revolt reconstructs Rancière's relations to some of the crucial, yet unexplored, politico-historical frameworks of his thought, such as the Cultural-Revolutionary Maoism and the French Revolution, offering a fresh perspective on these revolutionary paradigms. Going against dominant views, this book argues for a fundamentally positive influence of Louis Althusser's philosophy on Rancière's thought and analyses his relation to Marx and Kant based on previously undiscussed early student work. Through a critical discussion of Rancière, For Revolt sheds light on the present predicament of emancipatory politics – its emphasis on the actualities of here and now and its difficulties in envisaging programmatic realisations of radically alternative futures.