The Politics Of Meaning

Drawing on ideas presented in the Bible, Jewish teachings, and his experience as a psychotherapist, Lerner examines the roots of the vague discontent felt by so many Americans about our political system and explains how values can be put back into these broken politics.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed a nation deeply divided and in flux. This volume provides urgently needed insights into American politics and culture during this period of uncertainty. The contributions answer the election’s key mysteries, such as how contemporary Christian evangelicals identified in the unrepentant candidate Trump a hero to their cause, and how working class and economically struggling Americans saw in the rich and ostentatious candidate a champion of their plight. The chapters explain how irrationality is creeping into political participation, and demonstrate how media developments enabled a phenomenon like “fake news” to influence the election. At this polarized and contentious moment, this volume satisfies the urgent need for works that carefully analyze the forces and tensions tearing at the American social fabric. Simultaneously intellectual and accessible, this volume is designed to illuminate the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath for academics and students of politics alike.

This work discusses whether the dominant perceptions of disability in industrial society, as an individual and as a medical problem, is universal. The author links the roots of individualization and medicalization to the rise of capitalism.

When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

The intention of this book is to explore the relationship between an ideological idiom and the changing social movement in which it operates. The basic question is that of what roles an Islamic symbol complex played in different phases of the Palestinian nationalist movement, and what were the socio-economic factors which help to explain, and are themselves partially explained by, the appearance of these roles. Islam was ideologically ‘appropriate’ at different stages in the development of the movement, and this study examines in what way, and why. First published in 1982.

This sophisticated book by internationally renowned theorist Zaki Laidi, tackles the problem of individual identity in a rapidly changing global political environment. He argues that it is increasingly hard to find meaning in our ever-expanding world, especially after the collapse of political ideologies such as communism. With the breakup of countries such as the former Yugoslavia, it is clear that people are now looking to old models like nationalism and ethnicity to help them forge an identity. But how effective are these old certainties in a globalized world in a permanent state of flux?