A Conflict of Visions PDF Download

Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465004660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541646266
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
DIVSowell presents a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Sowell sees what has happened during that time not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a tainted vision whose defects have led to crises in education, crime, and family dynamics, and to other social pathologies. In this book, he describes how elites—the anointed—have replaced facts and rational thinking with rhetorical assertions, thereby altering the course of our social policy./Div

Author: Francis M. Deng
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815723691
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
The civil war that has intermittently raged in the Sudan since independence in 1956 is, according to Francis Deng, a conflict of contrasting and seemingly incompatible identities in the Northern and Southern parts of the country. Identity is seen as a function of how people identify themselves and are identified in racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious terms. The identity question related to how such concepts determine or influence participation and distribution in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the country. War of Visions aims at shedding light on the anomalies of the identity conflict. The competing models in the Sudan are the Arab-Islamic mold of the North, representing two-thirds of the country in territory and population, and the remaining Southern third, which is indigenously African in race, ethnicity, culture, and religion, with an educated Christianized elite. But although the North is popularly defined as racially Arab, the people are a hybrid of Arab and African elements, with the African physical characteristics predominating in most tribal groups. This configuration is the result of a historical process that stratified races, cultures, and religions, and fostered a "passing" into the Arab-Islamic mold that discriminated against the African race and cultures. The outcome of this process is a polarization that is based more on myth than on the realities of the situation. The identity crisis has been further complicated by the fact that Northerners want to fashion the country on the basis of their Arab- Islamic identity, while the South is decidedly resistant. Francis Deng presents three alternative approaches to the identity crisis. First, he argues that by bringing to the surface the realities of the African elements of identity in the North-- thereby revealing characteristics shared by all Sudanese--a new basis for the creation of a common identity could be established that fosters equitable participation and distribution. Second, if the issues that divide prove insurmountable, Deng argues for a framework of diversified coexistence within a loose federal or confederate arrangement. Third, he concludes that partitioning the country along justified borders may be the only remaining option to end the devastating conflict.

Author: Hemant Shah
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452245495
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Newspaper Coverage of Interethnic Conflict: Competing Visions of America examines mainstream and ethnic minority news coverage of interethnic conflicts in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Authors Hemant Shah and Michael C. Thornton investigate the role of news in racial formation, the place of ethnic minority media in the public sphere, and how these competing visions of America are part of ongoing social and political struggles to construct, define, and challenge the meanings of race and nation. The authors suggest that mainstream newspapers reinforce dominant racial ideology while ethnic minority newspapers provide an important counter-hegemonic view of U.S. race relations. The general process of racial Newspaper Coverage of Interethnic Conflict is highly recommended for students and scholars in the fields of Journalism, Mass Communications, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology.

Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691003580
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This reconsideration of the macroeconomics, microeconomics, methodology, and social philosophy of the classical economists has been a small gem on the history of economic thought, written in a way accessible to students, while having much to teach scholars. The reissue of this book twenty years after its original publication is a tribute to the enduring relevance of the questions raised during the formative period of economics and to the skill with which the author analyzes them.

Author: M. Paul Holsinger
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879725563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
For Americans World War II was "a good war," a war that was worth fighting. Even as the conflict was underway, a myriad of both fictional and nonfictional books began to appear examining one or another of the raging battles. These essays examine some of the best literature and popular culture of World War II. Many of the studies focus on women, several are about children, and all concern themselves with the ways that the war changed lives. While many of the contributors concern themselves with the United States, there are essays about Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan.

Author: Morgan Y. Liu
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977923
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Winner of the 2014 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences. Under Solomon's Throne provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia's social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence. Morgan Liu illuminates many of the challenges facing Central Asia today by unpacking the predicament of Osh, a city whose experience captures key political and cultural issues of the region as a whole. Situated on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan--newly independent republics that have followed increasingly divergent paths to reform their states and economies--the city is subject to a Kyrgyz government, but the majority of its population are ethnic Uzbeks. Conflict between the two groups led to riots in 1990, and again in 2010, when thousands, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and nearly half a million more fled across the border into Uzbekistan. While these tragic outbreaks of violence highlight communal tensions amid long-term uncertainty, a close examination of community life in the two decades between reveals the way Osh Uzbeks have created a sense of stability and belonging for themselves while occupying a postcolonial no-man's-land, tied to two nation-states but not fully accepted by either one. The first ethnographic monograph based on extensive local-language fieldwork in a Central Asian city, this study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership. Living in the shadow of Solomon's Throne, the city's central mountain, they envision and attempt to build a just social order.

Author: Mark Tier
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 161824440X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Future of Freedom¾as Explored by Top Science Fiction Writers in a New Volume of All Original Stories. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "That government is best which governs least." And, as Will Rogers wryly quipped, "We're lucky we don't get all the government we pay for!" In Visions of Liberty, ten top science fiction writers, several of them Hugo or Nebula award-winners, create ten very different futures in which Government does not exist and explore the possibilities of a truly free society. Among the roster: Hugo winner and Grand Master Jack Williamson; Michael Resnick, winner of four Hugos and a Nebula, and author of the international bestseller, Santiago; Michael A. Stackpole, author of eight New York Times best sellers; best-selling novelist Jane Lindskold, New York Times best-selling author James P. Hogan, Robert J. Sawyer, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year; and more. As threats to liberty arise in our own time, so it will be in the future. In this volume, a stellar cast of SF luminaries consider how the future might be different¾and how freedom might truly triumph. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). Praise for the science fiction anthologies of Martin Harry Greenberg: Greenbergs choices are impeccable. -Booklist That rare achievement: a theme anthology that works. . . . Provocative and well-planned. -Kirkus Reviews Sheer enjoyability. . . . a fine mix of stories provokes everything from meditation to laughter. -Library Journal

Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465058728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence-- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.

Author: Ian Binnington
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813935016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.