by Neil Postman (1999)
"In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century Neil Postman revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future - ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew."--BOOK JACKET. "He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness."--BOOK JACKET. "Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose - as opposed to an overreliance on technology and an increasing disregard for the lessons of history. And he argues passionately for specific new guidelines in the education of our children, with renewed emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a computer-driven world."--BOOK JACKET.
Jürgen Habermas
A series of twelve lectures on Modern and Post Modern thinkers ranging from Hegel who critiqued subjective reason and sought to replace it with Absolute Knowledge to Nietsche who proclaimed the death of philosophy and on to thinkers like Habermas who believed that art might possess the capability of uniting our fragmented reasoning ability and finally to post modern thinkers like Bataille, Focault and Derrida
Ann Douglas
This is one of those rare books that let us see with a fresh and startling clarity the underlying causes, meaning, and influence through time of profound a cultural phenomenon. In it, a brilliant young scholar traces the roots of our modern consumer culture to the sentimental society of Victorian America. With originality and sympathetic wit, Ann Douglas explores the alliance, beginning in 1820, of two disenfranchised groups: the women of the middle class and the liberal Protestant clergy, both increasingly relegated to the edges of society (to the parlor, to the Sunday School, to the libraries) by the prevailing entrepreneurial forces. Ann Douglas shows us the ladies and the ministers cultivating a realm of "influence," becoming the cultural custodians, taking control of the schools, preaching a reverence for the very qualities that society imposed upon them: timidity, piety, childish naivete, a disdain for the competitive forces in the larger world. She gives us the missing social history of the Protestant minister in the Northeast, and the subtle decline of his inherited theology. She takes us through the magazines the women and the ministers edited (Ladies' Magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, The Ladies' Repository), through the etiquette books, into the saccharine biographies of ministers and the books about women that the ministers wrote (among them, Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature) in which they tried to fix the correct "feminine" role or elaborate on woman's "beautiful errand." She gives us the contemporary novels and tracts—lachrymose, narcissistic, riotously quirky, forgotten now but then wildly popular (The Empty Crib, Stepping Heavenward, as well as such scandalous books as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated). We see the authors, through their works, colonizing, even domesticating, heaven (heaven has houses, streets, pianos, food, and clothing), projecting the dead as a kind of consecrated leisure class in a celestial retirement village, conveying the impression that death widened their appointed sphere: the church, faith, manners, morals. . . . We see the prayer manuals and the flood of almost necrophiliac pamphlets that the Victorians devoured. . . . We see the women and the ministers competing for spiritual leadership in the community as they became more and more self-immersed. We see vapidity masquerading as a sacred innocence, the moral life as a perpetual childhood, the church becoming progressively more anti-intellectual, the middle-class woman idealized not as doer but as n display case for the clothes and the pretty objects that man could lay at her feet, tragically contributing to her own exploitation, undermining all that was most authentic and creative in contemporary theology, romanticism, feminism. . . . With a masterful grasp of the tentures and the tensions of Victorian life, Ann Douglas gives us, in counterpoint, the important work of the Romantics who were forced to exist without popular support—among them, Margaret Fuller, rejecting the feminine ideal propounded in the ladies' magazines, striking out to cultivate a sense of history, and a placesquarely within it, and Herman Melville, writing his vigorously anti-sentimental dramas of the sea and the city; both of them exalting the ideal of the singular self and soul that their culture increasingly disregarded. This is a work of inspired scholarship and rich allusive power—an involving and fascinating portrait of Victorian America: its literature, its theology, its cultural legacy.—1977 jacket
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau wrote about the difficulty of being a good individual within an inherently corrupting collectivity: society. Emile deals specifically with education, and outlines a system which would allow for human goodness. He uses the fictional story of Emile and his tutor to outline his ideas. The book was banned and publicly burned on its publication, but became a European bestseller and provided a basis for new education systems.
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"--