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Journal Article•DOI•

The Human Condition.

Andrew J. McLean
29 Jun 2017-Academic Psychiatry (Springer International Publishing)-Vol. 41, Iss: 6, pp 771-771
TL;DR: In some religious traditions, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness.
Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

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Citations
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Journal Article•DOI•
Paternalism and the Public Household. On the Domestic Origins of Public Economics

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Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay1, Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay2•
University of Lausanne1, Goldsmiths, University of London2
01 Jan 2017-Social Science Research Network
TL;DR: In this paper, a thread that runs through the history of economic thought connecting the oikos to modern public economics is emphasized and three points of the analogy in Musgrave's public household which echo recurring patterns of thought about the state are highlighted.
Abstract: The ancient Greek conception of oikonomia is often dismissed as irrelevant for making sense of the contemporary economic world. In this paper, I emphasize a thread that runs through the history of economic thought connecting the oikos to modern public economics. By conceptualizing the public economy as a public household, Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) set foot in a long tradition of analogy between the practically oriented household and the state. Despite continuous references to the domestic model by major economists throughout the centuries, the analogy has clashed with liberal values associated with the public sphere since the eighteenth century. Musgrave’s conceptualization of public expenditures represents one episode of this continuing tension. His defense of merit goods, in particular, was rejected by many American economists in the 1960s because it was perceived as a paternalistic intervention by the state. I suggest that the accusation of paternalism should not come as a surprise once the ‘domestic’ elements in Musgrave’s conceptualization of the public sector are highlighted. I develop three points of the analogy in Musgrave’s public household which echo recurring patterns of thought about the state.

18 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
Invisible streams Process-thinking in Arendt

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Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen1•
University of Jyväskylä1
22 Feb 2016-European Journal of Social Theory
TL;DR: For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s w...

17 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
Negative and Positive Freedom: Lessons from, and to, Sociology

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Finn Bowring1•
Cardiff University1
01 Feb 2015-Sociology
TL;DR: The authors argued that positive freedom as it was theorised by the classical sociologists must be distinguished from the more fashionable idea of individual self-realisation and self-identity, a notion equally susceptible to idealist constructions, and one increasingly targeted by Foucaultinspired critics.
Abstract: Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ was a milestone in the development of modern political theory, with his advocacy of negative freedom supporting the neoliberal demand for ‘freedom from’ the state. This article defends the conception of positive freedom by calling on the neglected insights of the sociological tradition. I demonstrate how Marx, Durkheim and Simmel all understood freedom to be a socially conditioned phenomenon, with ‘freedom from’ being an idealist fiction (Marx), and a recipe for anomie (Durkheim) and loss of meaning (Simmel). I argue, however, that positive freedom as it was theorised by the classical sociologists must be distinguished from the more fashionable idea of individual self-realisation and self-identity, a notion equally susceptible to idealist constructions, and one increasingly targeted by Foucault-inspired critics. Instead I draw on Hannah Arendt and Andre Gorz to show how positive freedom should be theorised as a worldly, conflictual, and pre-eminently political affair.

17 citations

Cites background from "The Human Condition."

  • ...…as the motivational origin of capitalism, and to reinsert the adjective ‘public’, which had been a standard qualifier until the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence, into the ‘happiness’ that American citizens had claimed the private right to pursue (Arendt, 1958: 254, 1990: 127–9)....

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  • ...the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence, into the ‘happiness’ that American citizens had claimed the private right to pursue (Arendt, 1958: 254, 1990: 127–9). As Sennett, a former student of Arendt, defended the 18th-century understanding of the difference between public life on the one hand, and personal needs and self-identities on the other: ‘“Public” behaviour is a matter, first, of action at a distance from the self, from its immediate history, circumstances, and needs; second, this action involves the experiencing of diversity.’ The public sphere is ‘the forum in which it becomes meaningful to join with other persons without the compulsion to know them as persons’ (2002[1977]: 87, 340). The French social theorist André Gorz was also a long-running critic of productivism and a famous advocate of a ‘post-work’ society in which culture and politics are civilised and reinvigorated by an abundance of time. Less well known than his political writings is his intellectual self-portrait, The Traitor, which was first published in the same year as Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). What makes The Traitor particularly relevant to this discussion is that it traces, in a uniquely personal way, the process by which the individual’s search for positive freedom, if it is to be at all successful, leads away from the self towards the world of others....

    [...]

  • ...the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence, into the ‘happiness’ that American citizens had claimed the private right to pursue (Arendt, 1958: 254, 1990: 127–9). As Sennett, a former student of Arendt, defended the 18th-century understanding of the difference between public life on the one hand, and personal needs and self-identities on the other: ‘“Public” behaviour is a matter, first, of action at a distance from the self, from its immediate history, circumstances, and needs; second, this action involves the experiencing of diversity.’ The public sphere is ‘the forum in which it becomes meaningful to join with other persons without the compulsion to know them as persons’ (2002[1977]: 87, 340)....

    [...]

  • ...Arendt, too, argued that in a conflictual world one cannot engage in political practice without taking sides, scorning those who believed abstract moral principles and appeals to human rights could answer, for example, the threat of Nazism. ‘If one is attacked as a Jew’, she said in an interview in 1964, ‘one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever. But: What can I specifically do as a Jew?’ (1994: 12). Both thinkers defended a notion of positive freedom that avoided moralising idealism – such as that which characterised the ‘new Liberalism’ that dominated late Victorian England under the influence of T.H. Green – as well as the false universalism that Berlin, and indeed Arendt (2002), believed had made Marx’s ideas susceptible to totalitarian use....

    [...]

Journal Article•DOI•
Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and the Politics of Love:

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Sean Kim Butorac1•
University of Washington1
21 Mar 2018-Political Research Quarterly
TL;DR: In this article, the question of love in the inherently conflictual realm of democratic politics, particularly in a racialized democracy, has been investigated in the context of love's politics.
Abstract: Does love have a place in the inherently conflictual realm of democratic politics, particularly in a racialized democracy? This article engages the question of love’s politics by way of Hannah Aren...

17 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
We Make Up the Rules as We Go Along: Improvisation as an Essential Aspect of Human Practices?

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Alessandro Bertinetto1, Georg W. Bertram2•
University of Turin1, Free University of Berlin2
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the conceptual groundwork for an understanding of the essentially improvisational dimension of human rationality, namely, the concepts of improvisation, normativity, habit, and freedom.
Abstract: Abstract The article presents the conceptual groundwork for an understanding of the essentially improvisational dimension of human rationality. It aims to clarify how we should think about important concepts pertinent to central aspects of human practices, namely, the concepts of improvisation, normativity, habit, and freedom. In order to understand the sense in which human practices are essentially improvisational, it is first necessary to criticize misconceptions about improvisation as lack of preparation and creatio ex nihilo. Second, it is necessary to solve the theoretical problems that derive from misunderstandings concerning the notions of normativity, habit, and freedom – misunderstandings that revolve around the idea that rationality is a form that is developed out of itself and thus works in a way similar to algorithms. One can only make sense of normativity, habit, and freedom if one understands that they all involve conflictual relationships with the world and with others, which in turn enables one to adequately take into account their constitutive connection to improvisation, properly understood. In outlining these conceptual connections, we want to prepare the foundations for an explanation of rational practices as improvisational practices. The article concludes by stating that human rational life is improvisatory because the conditions of human practice arise out of practice itself.

17 citations

References
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Book•
The Life of Lines

[...]

Tim Ingold
27 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human are presented, with a focus on the life of lines.
Abstract: To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human. In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there. In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere. In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social. This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.

410 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
From ‘gender equality and ‘women’s empowerment’ to global justice: reclaiming a transformative agenda for gender and development

[...]

Andrea Cornwall1, Althea-Maria Rivas2•
University of Sussex1, Centre for Development Studies2
24 Mar 2015-Third World Quarterly
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the fact that gender equality and women empowerment have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice.
Abstract: The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed, which can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.

271 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modeling fake news as complex contagion.

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Petter Törnberg1•
University of Amsterdam1
20 Sep 2018-PLOS ONE
TL;DR: A network simulation model used to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions.
Abstract: The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media

223 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
Do Humble CEOs Matter? An Examination of CEO Humility and Firm Outcomes

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Amy Y. Ou1, David A. Waldman2, Suzanne J. Peterson2•
National University of Singapore1, Arizona State University2
01 Mar 2018-Journal of Management
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance and found that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision.

215 citations

Journal Article•DOI•
Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

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Hannah Landecker1•
University of California1
01 Dec 2016-Body & Society
TL;DR: The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies.
Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrialscale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.

204 citations