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First published one year after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and long out of print, this eyewitness account provides an insight into the political and social conflicts that no book written today can hope to achieve. Recognised by historians as a dress rehearsal for World War II, the Spanish Civil War drew romantics from all over the world to fight for the Republican cause. It has inspired and continues to inspire novelists, artists, historians, musicians, poets, movie makers, revolutionaries. Yet few were actually there to see for themselves. Franz Borkenau, a n idealistic young Austrian wrote (in English) this on the spot account of his visits to Spain in 1936 and 1937 - it became one of the most sought after classics and is now back in print for the first time in many years.
This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology". There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally, the book examines the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity.
A history of Western civilization looks at each preceding era's influence on the next, and predicts future developments in our culture
This book shows how the universal quantification of science resulted from the routinization of commercial practices that were familiar in scientist's daily lives. Following the work of Franz Borkenau and Jacob Klein in the 1930s, the book describes the rise of the mechanistic world-view as a reification of relations of exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Critical of more orthodox, positivist Marxist accounts of the rise of science, it argues that commercial reckoners, in keeping with the social relations in which their activity took place, delivered a new mathematical object, "general magnitude," to the new mechanics. The book is an historical extension of the sociology of scientific knowledge and develops and refines themes found in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Gideon Freudenthal.
This collection includes texts by Henryk Grossman that are primarily concerned with economic theory: monographs, articles, essays, letters and manuscript material. Many have never been published in English before, some in any language. The first in four volumes of Grossman’s works, it provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Grossman’s contributions to Marxist economic theory and critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn’s introduction explains the contexts in which the texts were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.
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Step into the heart of revolutionary Spain with George Orwell's powerful account, Homage to Catalonia. In this poignant narrative, Orwell recounts his firsthand experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War, offering a vivid and deeply personal perspective on the political and social upheaval of the time. Orwell’s writing brings to life the intense struggles, challenges, and betrayals he witnessed as he joined the militia in Catalonia. With sharp clarity, he paints a stark picture of the ideological divides that tore the country apart, and the complexities of war that blurred the lines between friend and foe.But here's the twist that will captivate you: What does Orwell’s experience reve...
Concepts of totalitarianism have undergone an academic revival in recent years, particularly since the breakdown of communist systems in Europe in 1989-91: the totalitarian paradigm, so it seems to many scholars today, had been discarded prematurely in the heat of the Cold War. The demise of communism as a social system is, however, not only an important cause of the recurring attractiveness of the totalitarian paradigm, but provides at the same time new evidence and, correspondingly, new problems of explanation for all approaches in communist studies and totalitarianism theory in particular. This book contains articles by philosophers, social scientists and historians who reassess the valid...
German Scholars in Exiledeals with intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and found refuge in either the United States or in American Services in Great Britain and post-WWII Germany. The volume focuses on scholars who were outside the commonly known Max Horkheimer-Hannah Arendt circles, who are less well-known but not less important. Their experiences ranged from an outstanding career at an Ivy-League university to a return to the German Democratic Republic and a position as an economic advisor to East Berlin's party leadership. None had actual political power, but many asserted some degree of influence. Their intellecutal legacies can still be seen in today's political culture.