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DissertationDOI

Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication

23 Sep 2014-
About: The article was published on 2014-09-23 and is currently open access. It has received 2 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Political communication.
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TL;DR: The moralizing interpreters of Marx and Freud have been identified by as mentioned in this paper as a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, which they call the "school of suspicion" of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought.
Abstract: Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century thought - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - "the school of suspicion," by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one's desires ("I really want to be rich!"), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit ("an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!"). "Beneath" or "behind" the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don't really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on. Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud. Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought. The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy. Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality's authority. So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades, has declared that "Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact" and that, as a result, "Marxists . . . are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.) Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, "Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers" and goes on to claim that "Freud's theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of (Kant's) Categorical Imperative." On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality. Nietzsche, too, has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way. The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality - a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago - in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge: the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a "revaluation of values." I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice. As a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it. When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
John Reichert1
TL;DR: Louise M. Rosenblatt as mentioned in this paper argued that the reading transaction is a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances, and that the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities cannot explain the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context.
Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.\

24 citations

References
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Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: Hagel as mentioned in this paper discussed the effects of virtual communities on business models and marketing strategies. But he did not discuss the impact of virtual community on marketing strategies and did not address how virtual communities can help expand markets, increase visibility, and improve profitability.
Abstract: What are virtual communities? How do they operate? How can they help expand markets, increase visibility, and improve profitability? What effects have they had on business models and marketing strategies? John Hagel discussed these issues in his keynote speech at the Direct Marketing Association's 1998 net.marketing Conference held April 1998.

1,664 citations

Book
01 Jan 1932
TL;DR: The concept of the political, expanded edition of Schmitt's "The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticization" as mentioned in this paper is a classic in political theory and philosophy, with a foreword by Tracy B. Strong.
Abstract: In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing one-self for the state - a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab's introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt's intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt's work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt's 1929 lecture "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations," which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update of a modern classic, "The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition" belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy.

1,651 citations

Book
20 Oct 2010
TL;DR: In this paper, Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught and how to shape our lives to serve out highest goals.
Abstract: Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. In this eloquent, persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.

1,645 citations

Book
01 Jan 1901

1,630 citations