Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including: *The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau *Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics *Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin *Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.

Critiques of everyday life

This chapter begins by helping the reader to grasp the comprehensive nature of Nathaniel Berman's work, and the subtle perspective that he brings to the legal world when it is confronted by the passions to which nationalism and colonialism give rise. In his work, cultural Modernism interacts with the international law of Danzig; the fantasies surrounding Jerusalem with the concrete political and legal projects for that city; internationalist dreams with the institutional programs for Bosnia and Palestine; and the most industrious international bureaucracy with the most creative and audacious legal imagination. Berman makes use of all of the notions in the course of his work on "imperial ambivalences". His goal is to show that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation - rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it. Keywords:colonialism; cultural Modernism; imperial ambivalences; international law; Nathaniel Berman; nationalism

A Critical Introduction

This paper explores the implications of going beyond transaction cost theory's implicit focus on domestic investors to include multinational actors. As developed herein, the discriminating alignment between the level of hazards (contractual and/or political) and the mode of governance carries over. In the open-economy context, such an alignment reflects the hazards that arise from the nature of the transaction and those that arise from the nature of the political and regulatory environment.

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Comparative Economic Organization—Within and Between Countries

What is Fascism? How can we comprehend it? Fascism was a major political innovation of the 20th centiry and the source of much of its pain. This book shows that we cannot understand the phenomenon in the abstract, but only in terms of its actions.

The Anatomy of Fascism

This is a fascinating book, both for its qualities and its weaknesses, as Berman's analysis offers a comprehensive view of the development of the genre within a national literature/ culture. It does so, however, in a jargonesque teutonic prose that is as pretentious as the title suggests. The rise of a hypothesis, namely that the genre reflects, in its historical development, the German societal reactions to modernism according to Max Weber's categories, unfortunately, has a corresponding "fall" in that behind the critical jargon lurks an extremely traditional concept of the history of literature (e.g. of "Nationalliteratur" without proper differentiation of national "German" literatures outside the German Reich!); and judging even by very traditional criteria, there are important conceptual and factual omissions.

The rise of the modern German novel : crisis and charisma

Enlightenment or Empire is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the culture of European colonialism. The book opens with a bold reconsideration of the relationship between the Enlightenment and colonialism, at the heart of which is an examination of two parallel texts-Captain James Cook's and Georg Foster's accounts of Cook's voyage of 1773. Berman then examines geography, religion, gender, and fiction in the writings of nineteenth-century travelers in Africa. He concludes with a discussion of the alternative anti-colonial traditions of Germany and France. Berman's book is a provocative contribution to current debates about the Enlightenment and its political legacy. In opposition to contemporary critics who argue that the Enlightenment is fully implicated in structures of domination, including colonialism, Berman argues for a more subtle, complex understanding of the political and cultural consequences of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture

Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem

Since the 1930s the theoretical writings of the Frankfurt School have provided tools for analyses of political and cultural developments in Europe and the United States. Initially a response to Hitler's reign of terror, this influential wing of Western Marxism focused on analyzing the totalitarian potential inherent in any democratic society. Are the arguments of the Frankfurt School still relevant? "Modern Culture and Critical Theory" investigates this question in the context of important issues in contemporary cultural politics: neo-conservatism and new social movements, discontents with modernity and debates on postmodernism, the political hegemony of Ronald Reagan and the cultural hegemony of structuralism and poststructuralism. Throughout, Berman argues that the analysis of political processes must have an aesthetic component. The legacy of the Frankfurt School, he concludes, is one that can tell us much about our contemporary society. It offers us an alternative to the obvious conservatism in the political arena and the less obvious but significant conservatism of some contemporary critical theory.

Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School

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Russell A. Berman

Papers

The rise of the modern German novel : crisis and charisma

Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture

Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem

Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School

Öffentlichkeit-Geschihte eines kritischen Begriffs