A serious retardant to development of a specifically public relations (PR) ethical philosophy is the tendency to retain a commitment uniquely journalistic? objectivity. Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays offered two ethical options or imperatives, based on objectivity or on advocacy. Public relations must accept a commitment to the ethics of persuasion in order to reduce a crippling inferiority complex and advance understanding of the profession by its practitioners as well as the public.

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a novel mnemonic, ACTIVE, inspired by Mason's 1985 PAPA mnemonic, which will help researchers and IT professionals develop an understanding of the major issues in information ethics.Design/methodology/approach– Theoretical foundations are developed for each element of the mnemonic by reference to philosophical definitions of the terms used and to virtue ethics, particularly MacIntyrean virtue ethics. The paper starts with a critique of the elements of the PAPA mnemonic and then proceeds to develop (...) an understanding of each of the elements of ACTIVE ethics, via a discussion of the underpinning virtue ethics.Findings– This paper identifies six issues, described by the mnemonic, ACTIVE. ACTIVE stands for: autonomy, the ability of the individual to manage their own information and make choice; community, the ethical effect of an information systems on the community which it supports; transparency, the extent to which the derivation of content and process in an information system is made clear; identity, the social and ethical effect of an information system on the definition and maintenance of the distinctive characteristics of a person; value, the value or moral worth placed on information associated with an individual and hence on the relationship with the individual; and empathy, the ability of the information systems professional to emotionally connect with the user and the extent to which the information system distances or connects.Originality/value– The paper applies virtue ethics to developing a tool to help information professionals reflect on their ethical practice in developing and supporting information systems. (shrink)

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace StevensTom McBrideThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Simon Critchley. 137 pp. New York: Routledge, 2005; $22.50.This book—a brief meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and an even shorter one on the cinema of Terrence Malick—might have been a disaster. The author, a philosopher, is sometimes in worried denial that Stevens is an "anti-realist" (...) or a "transcendental realist," and one occasionally senses that in the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry, herding the poets into the philosopher's pen is a bullying way to resolve the conflict. But the book isn't a catastrophe at all; it's a lucid, ruminative, and personable reading of Stevens (and Malick) that even offers a good general guide to the reading of poetry in what Critchley calls "the wake of romanticism" (motto: "God is dead; therefore I am").Critchley's major idea is twofold: that poetry is a therapeutic art form because it slows us down and encourages, about countless subjects, "the whole voluptuousness of looking"; and that Stevens's poetry is informed by a contest between a poetry of "supreme fictions" (in which phenomena come under the [End Page 503] dominion of a potent imagination) and a poetry of "antipodes" (in which phenomena resist the imagination—they "merely are"—and thus reduce the imagination to impotence). Here Critchley affirms a usual view of Stevens as a poet of the weather—another way of saying that he is a modernist with strong roots in the Romantic movement—and he notes that the supreme fiction poems often tend to be set in summer, when the imagination seems especially yeasty, while the antipodean poems tend to be set in winter, when the miserly realness of things seems to rule the earth. In his sensitive and astute reading, however, Critchley remarks upon something else: that in his late poems Stevens seems more overtly metaphysical (Critchely says Stevens is the most philosophically interesting poet of the twentieth century) and that his later poems are set more and more in the seasons of transition (late autumn/early spring). Late in Stevens's career the battle between supreme fictions and antipodes is therefore played out in the same, often overtly philosophical poems. Here Critchley's commentary is at its most astute. Occasional lovers of Wallace Stevens's poetry will remember why they adore his work, and have a better idea why.However, lest readers get the wrong idea, some careful qualifications about the dialectic between Stevens's summer and winter poems are in order. For one thing, the poems of supreme fictions always leave phenomena with their particularity, their ordinariness, their concreteness. To cite one such poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," although the poet imaginatively places "a jar in Tennessee" that makes "the lovely wilderness / Surround that hill," the wilderness' birds and bushes, even the jar itself, remain birds and bushes and jars ("gray and bare"). Here Critchley reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy dreams of what does not exist, while imagination transfigures what does. Stevens's poems of supreme fiction are always imaginative, never fanciful.A second qualification: Critchley argues that for Stevens (as well as for a number of philosophers) human ways of knowing are always informed, sooner or later, by the conceptual imagination. In that sense a rose is never just a rose, although we need not become overly fanciful about what a cigar might be. And this leads us to a third one: When readers get to the wintry, antipodean poems—the poems of "anti-poetry"—they will find Stevens suggesting that the only way to view objects without imagination is to imagine what that would be like. Even earlier in his career Stevens became interested in this paradox, as in "The Snow Man" where he muses:One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter [End Page 504] Of the January sun; and not... (shrink)

In _Democracy and Education_, John Dewey devotes a chapter to geography and history. McBride reveals that, until recently, he had not thought much about this chapter; geography and history were compulsory topics to be taught to children. In recent years, having read Katherine McKittrick’s _Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle_, McBride has been compelled to think more about geographies of dominance; the ways place, terrain, and geography are imbued with racialized and gendered and hierarchal values, (...) which conspire to create boundaries and exclusions. According to Dewey, learning about the geographies of place and histories of groups of people can enrich our connections to this place and its ecology, make the goals of our people more meaningful, and it can boost our inefficaciousness in our immediate surroundings. Failing this, the knowledge we gain from our elders becomes increasingly detached and meaningless. McBride suggests that Dewey suffered from a form of this estrangement (regarding the tacit racially-white Eurodescended coloniality of North America). McBride suggests that the vast majority of our society can conceive of no future world that is not dominated by Eurodescended peoples and thoroughly infused with their techno-industrial norms and values. If our accounts of the social milieu skirt past the dispossession of the first peoples or the enslavement of Afrodescended peoples or the debilitating effects of heteropatriarchy, then it would appear that we are not terribly critical about our past or our connection to place. It would suggest that we are resigned to (or comfortable within) the Eurodescended norms of this place, unable to see any viable alternatives. In the end, McBride suggests that we accept the Deweyan insight but supplement it with the critical study of geographies of domination and cartographies of struggle. (shrink)

La recherche à l’origine de ce texte vise la description et la compréhension de l’engagement d’enseignantes et d’enseignants dans l’écriture d’un journal de bord quotidien. À partir d’entretiens biographiques et de leurs analyses, ce texte décrit cette activité et son évolution, identifie les facteurs d’engagement. Cette activité d’écriture impliquée et réflexive se dévoile plurielle et évolutive. L’engagement s’explique par un jeu d’influences réciproques entre facteurs personnels, facteurs exogènes et facteurs énactifs. Cet article présente des recommandations pour accompagner et reconnaître l’écriture (...) diaire dans le champ de la formation comme dans l’espace du travail. (shrink)

Based on archival and ethnographic data, this article analyzes the iconic-making, iconoclastic unmaking, and iconographic remaking of national identifications. The window into these processes is the career of Saint John the Baptist, patron saint of French Canadians and national icon from the mid-nineteenth century until 1969, when his statue was destroyed by protesters during the annual parade in his honor in Montréal. Relying on literatures on visuality and materiality, I analyze how the saint and his attending symbols were deployed in (...) processions, parades, and protests. From this analysis, I develop the sociological concept of aesthetic revolt, a process whereby social actors rework iconic symbols, redefining national identity in the process. The article offers a theoretical articulation and an empirical demonstration of how the context, content, and the form of specific cultural objects and symbols—national icons—are intertwined in public performance to produce eventful change, and shows why and how the internal material logic and the social life of these icons shape the articulation of new national identities. (shrink)

Schumpeter took a dim view of the deliberative capacities of the average voter who, he believed, could not be relied upon to make responsible judgements about distant and rather abstract matters of...

Being in Time examines philosophical treatments of time and self-consciousness in relation to concepts of narrative, focusing on the literary aspects of philosophical writing. Lloyd shows how philosophy bears on the human and emotional aspects of the experience of time which are often neglected by the history of philosophy. Starting with Augustine's treatment of the ways in which time makes him a 'problem to himself', the book traces the themes of unity and the experience of fragmentation and loss as expressed (...) by Descartes, Hume and Kant. The idea of the past as 'lost' is explored through Bergson's philosophy of time and Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return. The book concludes with a discussion of philosophical aspects of themes of self-consciousness, memory and writing in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the novels of Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Michèle Le Dœuff, this paper uses the idea of “philosophical imagination” to make visible the historical intersection between philosophical ideas, social practice, and institutional structures. It explores the role of ideas of “terra nullius” and of the “doomed race” in the formation of some crucial ways in which non-indigenous Australians have imagined their relations with indigenous peoples. The author shows how feminist reading strategies that attend to the imaginary open up ways of rethinking processes of (...) inclusion and exclusion. (shrink)

In “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” Robert Gooding-Williams offers an insight. He writes: “Our sense of ourselves and of the possibilities existing for us is, to a significant degree, a function of the descriptions we have available to us to conceptualize our intended actions and prospective lives. . . . ‘Hence if new modes of description come into being, new possibilities of action come into being in consequence.’” In this article, I discuss the philosopher’s role in the articulation of new descriptions (...) and thus new possibilities. I argue that potential modes of bold and assertive comportment are conjured when new insurrectionist descriptions are articulated within oppressed populations. To bring this to a higher resolution, I discuss the pervasiveness of dialectical conflict, the need to creatively reorient the descriptions of oppressed groups toward liberation, and the need for more than one prescriptive mode of social amelioration. (shrink)

Spinoza is a key figure in modern philosophy. _Ethics_ is his most studied and well known work. Being both up-to-date and clear, this Guidebook is designed to lead the reader through this complex seminal text. _Spinoza's Ethics_ introduces and assess: * Spinoza'a life, and its connection with his thought * The text of the _Ethics_ * Spinoza's continuing relevence to contemporary philosophy.

Collating, for the first time, the key writings of Leonard Harris, this volume introduces readers to a leading figure in African-American and liberatory thought. -/- Harris' writings on honor, insurrectionist ethics, tradition, and his work on Alain Locke have established him as a leading figure in critical philosophy. His timely and urgent responses to structural racism and structural violence mark him out as a bold cultural commentator and a deft theoretician. -/- The wealth and depth of Harris' writings are brought (...) to the fore in this collection and the incisive introduction by Lee McBride serves to orient, contextualize, and frame an oeuvre that spans four decades. In his prolegomenon, Harris eschews the classical meaning of “philosophy,” supplanting it with an idiosyncratic conception of philosophy--philosophia nata ex conatu--that features an avowedly value-laden dimension. As well as serving as an introduction to Harris' philosophy, A Philosophy of Struggle provides new insights into how we ought conceptualize philosophy, race, tradition, and insurrection in the 21st century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, a tool (...) that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, (...) and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research. (shrink)

The burden of difference: pluralist justice and the public sphere -- Moral conversations and democratic hermeneutics -- Particularism versus universalism: a false debate? -- Secularism, culture, and critique -- Laïcité and the memory of public culture -- The ties that bind: public culture and the debt to the past -- Normative solidarity and public hermeneutics -- From intersubjectivity to encounter -- Exit of religion, debt of meaning.

This article examines a neglected dimension of Bazin's work, namely his writings for the daily newspaper Le Parisien libéré. Four key points emerge from this corpus. First, Bazin goes beyond the film-reviewing norms of the day to analyse the intentions and achievements of the film-makers. Second, Bazin foregrounds the capacity of cinema to address the concerns of contemporary society. Third, as a result, he ascribes a particular value to films that actively engage with the new social realities of post-war France. (...) Four, Bazin remains blind to the misogynistic dimension of post-war French cinema, with its tendency to culpabilize women for the national disgrace of the Occupation. Ultimately, Bazin's newspaper reviewing represents a more socially aware vision of cinema than that promoted by more specialized cinema journals, yet his criticism remains caught within the gender ideology of his time. (shrink)

Parler d’« exception culturelle » française est parfois pleinement justifié. Ainsi, dès lors que sont étudiés de près les rapports pour le moins conflictuels entre genre et cinéma en France, certaines tendances spécifiques se dessinent. Il n’est pas nouveau de dire que l’équivalent français du terme anglais gender a quelques difficultés à s’intégrer dans le monde universitaire hexagonal et les réticences à envisager la société au sens large en fonction des sexes biologiques et des rapports en...

Parler d’« exception culturelle » française est parfois pleinement justifié. Ainsi, dès lors que sont étudiés de près les rapports pour le moins conflictuels entre genre et cinéma en France, certaines tendances spécifiques se dessinent. Il n’est pas nouveau de dire que l’équivalent français du terme anglais gender a quelques difficultés à s’intégrer dans le monde universitaire hexagonal et les réticences à envisager la société au sens large en fonction des sexes biologiques et des rapports en...

This essay focuses on the danger of complicity. American philosophers, given their country’s hegemonic position, exert global influence; what form should it take? Comparison is made with the situation of France when it still controlled Algeria. French philosophers, until near the time of Algerian independence, generally accepted and sometimes profited from this extremely unjust situation. An important exception was Sartre, particularly in his Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It is argued that elements of complicity with American global (...) dominance, some of the more unjust aspects of which are listed, are to be found in such widely read philosophers as Rawls and Rorty. It is suggested that a rethinking of the problem of evil, in its political and not just its religious aspects, is in order. Finally, a broader view of what ‘American philosophy’ means, including, for instance, the voices of African American and Native American philosophers, is urged. (shrink)

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibilographical essay assessing the ..

Hoerl & McCormack claim that the temporal updating system only represents the world as present. This generates puzzles regarding the phenomenology of temporal experience. We argue that recent models of reinforcement learning suggest that temporal updating must have a minimal temporal structure; and we suggest that this helps to clarify what it means to experience the world as temporally structured.

No matter one’s wealth or social position, all are subject to the threats of natural hazards. Be it fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or drought, the reality of hazard risk is universal. In response, governments, non-profits, and the private sector all support research to study hazards. Each has a common end in mind: to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities. While this end goal is shared across hazards, the conception of how to get there can diverge considerably. The earthquake and (...) hurricane research endeavors in the US provide an illustrative contrast. The earthquake community sets out to increase resilience through a research process that simultaneously promotes both high quality and usable – preparedness-focused - science. In order to do so, the logic suggests that research must be collaborative, responsive, and transparent. Hurricane research, by contrast, largely promotes high quality science – predictions - alone, and presumes that usability should flow from there. This process is not collaborative, responsive, or transparent. Experience suggests, however, that the latter model – hurricane research - does not prepare communities or decision makers to use the high quality science it has produced when a storm does hit. The predictions are good, but they are not used effectively. Earthquake research, on the other hand, is developed through a collaborative process that equips decision makers to know and use hazards research knowledge as soon as an earthquake hits. The contrast between the two fields suggests that earthquake research is more likely to meet the end goal of resilience than is hurricane research, and thus that communities might be more resilient to hurricanes were the model by which research is funded and conducted to change. The earthquake research experience can provide lessons for this shift. This paper employs the Public Value Mapping (PVM) framework to explore these two divergent public value logics, their end results, and opportunities for improvement. (shrink)

An increasing number of studies about teacher’s induction issues mention that it is essential to take into account the types of support needs of beginning teachers to offer them adequate support. Few researchers have accurately portrayed the types of support needs felt by novice teachers and focused on the degree of agreement between the type of support needs felt and the perceived support received. This research used data drawn from a French-language survey (n = 156) and semi-directed interviews (n = (...) 10) conducted in Quebec with novice teachers. Quantitative analyzes using association measures on types of support needs and perception of support received indicate that the support perceived by teachers is largely inconsistent with the types of support needs felt. The interviews provide a better understanding of the quantitative results and suggest some possible solutions. (shrink)

This article presents the foundation of research around which other contributions in this issue are structured. It follows from a larger study aimed at supporting the professional development of beginning teachers with respect to their personal epistemology. The study explores the link between beliefs and practices in continuing education.It is an avenue that is still little used in research, particularly in Quebec, where research has focused more often on pre-service teachers. Previous studies identified highlight inconsistencies between expressed beliefs (epistemological and (...) pedagogical) and actual teaching practices. These concepts that are central to our approach. They will be clarified and illustrated in this article with the help of portraits of two high school natural science (NS) teachers offering a particular look at the tensions present in the belief-practice articulations. These two portraits are elaborated mostly from qualitative data drawn from explanatory interviews, from which similarities and dissimilarities emerge with regard to the question studied. The article conclude with suggestions for accompanying beginning teachers in resolving these tensions. (shrink)

Situé dans une approche interactionniste du développement du langage, l’article propose une démarche méthodologique pour étudier l’étayage dans sa dynamique dialogique, pour laquelle le recours à un corpus s’avère indispensable. L’article comprend plusieurs parties : sont présentées d’une part les différentes facettes de l’étayage d’un point de vue théorique, d’autre part la construction d’un outil opérationnel sous la forme d’une grille d’analyse des conduites étayantes des adultes et des réactions des enfants. Enfin, quelques résultats issus d’une recherche sur les interactions (...) mère-enfant, à titre illustratif de la démarche, montrent la façon dont les activités effectuées par les participants façonnent leurs conduites. La discussion se focalise sur les apports d’une analyse de corpus (données de type naturel tout autant que contrôle de certains facteurs, comparaison de données qualitatives et quantitatives, etc.). (shrink)

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as "in relation" takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

La asociación entre educación y democracia es insepar a b le del pensamiento democrá tico. La escuela es una institución fundamental que resultan tener a su c a r go, en la m a y oría de los Estados mode r nos, los poderes pú b licos. Esta b lecida sobre el principio de iguald a d , la instrucción pú b lica pr e vé el aprendizaje y la profundización en la ciudadanía política y social. P er mite tanto (...) disf r utar de los derechos del hombre y ejercer las libe r tades fundamentales, como comprender los deberes y las restricciones inherentes a la prese r v ación de la "cosa pú b lica". Sin emba r go, en F rancia ha sufrido remodelaciones: la "inst r ucción cívica" se ha co n v er tido en la "educación para la ciudadanía". Se ha operado un deslizamiento desde la fo r mación en el espíritu crítico hacia la obediencia a la autoridad. El "c i vismo", con una función política esencial en la democracia, se ha ocultado bajo la "c i vilidad", que tiene una connotación inn e g a b lemente moral. Ahora bien, la c i vilidad e x clu y e la aprehensión de las solidaridades inherentes al n e xo social y no i n v estiga las vías de la socialización política de los (futuros) ciudadanos. (shrink)

La colonisation n’est faite que de commencements. Ces commencements font les passages de temps vers la décolonisation. Mais l’histoire de la colonisation et des décolonisations se raconte dans les balancements qui évoluent, selon les points de vue adoptés, pour les uns, les « colonisés », entre conquête et établissement, exploration et exploitation,..

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the very beginning of his explicitly political thinking until the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre was always cognizant of the fact that the typical electoral system, whether dominated by two or by several "parties," that is to be found in Western countries and that is vaunted as the pinnacle of real democracy amounted to a profound mystification. That is why, at the time of the centenary of his birth, he is owed a renewed respect for his ideas in (...) this area. I do not intend to examine here the evolution of Sartre?s political thought, or even his views with respect to the Eastern European countries, the "socialism" of which, as he eventually discovered, was scarcely more real than their "democracy." Rather, I shall confine myself to recalling certain elements, especially certain iconoclastic elements, of that thought. I shall do so with a view to taking a clear-headed look at a possible future in which those icons will have disappeared. (shrink)

This paper takes aim at contemporary conceptions of liberal democracy and the accompanying loss of faith with liberal democratic theory which may be observed. There exist problems with procedure, outcomes, and the decline of universality in the face of liberal nationalism which only serve to reinforce boundaries. The clearest cases of these problems have arisen in the United States over the past few years, and especially since the events of September 11, 2001.