In this article, it will be my aim to outline the key features of Emerson’s original conception of Bildung, with special reference to the links, first, between the American essayist and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and second, Emerson and John Dewey. After introductory notes on how to map out Emersonian Bildung in relation to the available philosophical commentaries, I delineate some of the chief meanings of Bildung, showing how Emersonian self-culture aligns with Humboldtian Bildung. Second, I draw out concrete implications for (...) educational practice from an Emersonian view of self-culture vis-à-vis comparisons with Dewey. In addition to Bildung qua self-culture, another basic sense of Emersonian Bildung is education, and Emerson often deals with educational themes in his treatments of self-culture. In the final section, I return to the specifics of Emerson’s sense of Bildung, saying a few words on the alleged elitism of the term, and in particular, its neglected religious overtones. This section serves t... (shrink)

In this article, it will be my aim to outline the key features of Emerson’s original conception of Bildung, with special reference to the links, first, between the American essayist and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and second, Emerson and John Dewey. After introductory notes on how to map out Emersonian Bildung in relation to the available philosophical commentaries, I delineate some of the chief meanings of Bildung, showing how Emersonian self-culture aligns with Humboldtian Bildung. Second, I draw out concrete implications for (...) educational practice from an Emersonian view of self-culture vis-à-vis comparisons with Dewey. In addition to Bildung qua self-culture, another basic sense of Emersonian Bildung is education, and Emerson often deals with educational themes in his treatments of self-culture. In the final section, I return to the specifics of Emerson’s sense of Bildung, saying a few words on the alleged elitism of the term, and in particular, its neglected religious overtones. This section serves the purpose of distinguishing Emerson’s view not only from related accounts of Bildung, but also from the secondary commentaries available. (shrink)

Building on recent texts, I give a characterization of Richard Shusterman’s specific variant of pragmatism, understood as a melioristic or perfectionist pragmatism, where ethical and political dimensions are deeply intertwined with the epistemological one. To do so, I focus on what seems to be Shusterman’s latest contribution to his inter- rupted dialogue with Richard Rorty in Thinking through the Body.

To contribute to the organizational turn in research on participatory democracy, this paper examines the effects of organizational hierarchy on individual thinking. Power corrupts, but neither political scientists nor psychologists can really tell us how. To identify mechanisms by which it does so, the paper introduces recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology, here to suspicious political theorists. The study of cognition shows that we actively make meaning, and that we do so with a discernable neurological apparatus. The paper (...) presents hierarchy as a social construct that 'fits' this apparatus in such a way as to assist the capture of meaning by the interests of power. This process of capture takes place beneath individual awareness. For this reason, the concern here amounts to ideology critique: specifically, using cognitive psychology to reveal the ideological propagation of hierarchy. The fact that hierarchy has hidden cognitive costs has important implications for the prospects of a more participatory democracy. Any democratization of organizational life is seen to turn on the capacity of participants to selectively use and manage hierarchy and to minimize its cognitive costs. This entails, among other things, a recovery of our own thinking from the knowledge processing requirements of power saturated hierarchic organizations. In its examination of the personal effects of power, the paper seeks to reveal psychological mechanisms by which power corrupts, and by which, inadvertently, we come to serve the interests of power in the very way we think. (shrink)