Badiou's Being and event

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Chilton Williamson

"When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his seminal work Democracy in America (1835), he regarded democracy as the future of the West. Subsequent events, from the collapse of communism to the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, seem to confirm his prescience. But a closer look at the history of democracy from the 1830s down to the present reveals a far more complicated picture. In fact, author Chilton Williamson Jr. concludes, the future appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world. After Tocqueville traces that history and examines that future. Williamson shows that in Europe democracy has tended toward socialism, in America toward nationalism. Indeed, the definitions and concepts of "democracy" have become so varied that the very term democracy is in effect meaningless--something upon which people have never been able to agree, and never will"--

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James Boyd White

"How do you imagine the world, and yourself and others within it? How do you confront the constraints of language, the evils of your particular culture, the limits of your own mind? How do you use what you imagine to give meaning to your past experience and shape your expectations for the future? Such are the questions that drive The Edge of Meaning by the distinguished humanist and lawyer James Boyd White.". "Addressing the most fundamental imaginative and intellectual activity of human life, this book presents an inspiring conception of an art of mind and language that enables us to confront the uncertainty and fluidity that are themselves the essence of human experience."--BOOK JACKET.

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Andrew Rippin

This text provides a survey of Islamic history and thought, from its formative period to the present day. The book examines the elements which come together to form Islam and explores how its disciplines of theology and law have evolved. This edition also comments on 21st century developments affecting Muslims.

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Stjepan G. Meštrović

"As the present century and millennium approach their close, many dramatic endgames have been conceptualized by celebrated intellectuals; for example: the "end of history" (Fukuyama); the "end of culture" (Baudrillard); the "end of communism" (Brzezinski) - the last just in time for the events of 1989. The "end of sociology" might even be proposed by those who deem the field of no practical relevance to contemporary social problems. Mestrovic here cuts against the grain of this nihilistic discourse, by arguing that postmodernism itself is an aspect of culture."--BOOK JACKET. "In setting out to find cultural roots for the many phenomena taken up by postmodernists, he connects the present turmoil with strikingly similar debates at the end of the last century, debates concerning the future of capitalism, communism, feminism, and sociology, among other matters. With ambitious sweep, he relates the work of Emile Durkheim and other earlier figures (such as Henry Adams, Veblen, Jung, Adorno) to contemporary postmodernist discourse. His new book points to an opportunity for sociology to revivify itself by taking the cultural approach of its founders seriously."--BOOK JACKET.