Augustan culture

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Leonard Peikoff

Ayn Rand chose Leonard Peikoff to be her successor as the spokesman for Objectivism. And in this brilliantly reasoned, thought-provoking work we learn why, as he demonstrates how far America has been detoured from its original path and led down the same road that Germany followed to Nazism. Self-sacrifice, Oriental mysticism, racial ?truth,? the public good, doing one?s duty--these are among the seductive catch-phrases that Leonard Peikoff dissects, examining the kind of philosophy they symbolize, the type of thinking that lured Germany to its doom and that he says is now prevalent in the United States. Here is a frightening look at where America may be heading, a clarion call for all who are concerned about preserving our right to individual freedom.

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Yanique Hume and Aaron Kamugisha

Caribbean Cultural Thought presents a critical appraisal of the range of issues and themes that have been pivotal in the study of Caribbean societies. Written from the perspective of primarily Caribbean authors and renowned scholars of the region, it excavates classic texts in Caribbean Cultural Thought and places them in dialogue with contemporary interrogations and explorations of regional cultural politics and debates concerning identity and social change; colonialism, diaspora, aesthetics, religion and spirituality, gender and sexuality, and nationalism.

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Richard Waswo

"This book attempts to tell the history of a story, and to show how it is of central importance to western culture because it defines both what 'culture' is and who possesses it," Richard Waswo begins in this impassioned, humane, and compelling reinterpretation of western civilization. The story Waswo refers to is a legend commonly regarded as fact for two millenia: the descent of all European for peoples from emigrant Trojans. But this study, astonishing in its range and fascinating in its vision, does not merely trace the theme through history. Instead, Waswo examines the way the legend influenced western perception and behavior and became embodied in our literature, religion, law, philosophy, history, science, social theory, and film. Implicit in this legend of perpetual colonization, Waswo says, is a distinction between "culture," with its settled agricultural and urbanized communities, and the "savage," with its hunting, gathering, and nomadic pastoralism. Waswo examines the powerful influence of the legend from its first expression in the Aeneid itself to The Faerie Queene to the fiction of Conrad and Forster, and also considers such widely disparate manifestations as the films of John Ford, the defoliation of Vietnam, and the policies of the World Bank. Both polemical and thought-provoking, the book shows how "legendary images defining our civilization determine our conduct toward other cultures: the fictions are both enacted in history and at the same time used to justify such action morally."

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Robert Southard

The Prussian School of History first predicted and advocated, then celebrated and defended, the unification of Germany by Prussia. Experts in German historiography and the history of German liberalism have often complained about the lack of a book, in any language, that traces the origins and explains the ideas of this school of history. Here is that book. Robert Southard finds that, for the Prussian School, history had an agenda. These historians generally expected history to complete its main tasks in their own time and country. The outcome of their politics was, really, an "end of history" - not a cessation to historical occurrences, but a cessation of onward historical movement because the historical process had already achieved its long-term, beneficient purposes. Leading us through the intricacies of important but untranslated works of J. G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Rudolph Hayn, and Heinrich von Sybel, Southard demonstrates their belief that the historical sequence was a continual unfolding of God's plan. Indispensable for those interested in the history of German historical writing, this book also has major implications for understanding the history of political liberalism.