History and Freedom

History and Freedom
Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-11-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0745694500

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility. Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress. The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.

Freedom

Freedom
Author: Annelien De Dijn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0674988337

The invention of modern freedom—the equating of liberty with restraints on state power—was not the natural outcome of such secular Western trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the Atlantic Revolutions. We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy. The conception of freedom most prevalent today—that it depends on the limitation of state power—is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty. Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies—it was invented by their critics and opponents. Rather than following in the path of the American founders, today’s “big government” antagonists more closely resemble the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

Fairness and Freedom

Fairness and Freedom
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2012-02-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199832706

From one of America's preeminent historians comes a magisterial study of the development of open societies focusing on the United States and New Zealand

Liberty and Freedom

Liberty and Freedom
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 880
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195162530

The bestselling author of "Washington's Crossing" and "Albion's Seed" offers a strikingly original history of America's founding principles. Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. 400+ illustrations, 250 in full color.

Freedom

Freedom
Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 968
Release: 1985
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 9780521132138

Freedom

Freedom
Author: Joy Hakim
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195157116

Explores the history of freedom and the battle to uphold the freedom in America.

Images of History

Images of History
Author: Richard Eldridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190847360

Human subjects are both formed by historical inheritances and capable of active criticism. Insisting on this fact, Kant and Benjamin each develop powerful, systematic, but sharply opposed accounts of human powers and interests in freedom. A persistent constitutive tension between Kantian and Benjaminan ideals is woven through human life. By examining the two philosophers through this volume, Richard Eldridge attempts to make better sense of the commitment forming, commitment revising, anxious, reflective and acculturated human subjects we are.

The History of Freedom, and Other Essays

The History of Freedom, and Other Essays
Author: John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Baron Acton
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 707
Release: 2021-04-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

This book consists of articles reprinted from various journals of Acton, who was one of the great historians of the Victorian period and one of the greatest classical historians of all time. This work includes his other works include Lectures on Modern History and Historical Essays and Studies, which were brought to light after his death.