The Iraqi constitution of 2005 grants freedom of religious thought, belief and practice for all religions. This study was also based on the premise that the constitutional rights are not adhered to in Iraq, even by government officials, which could be due to the absence of suitable legislations subsequent to the framing of the constitutional provisions. An analytical and descriptive research design was adopted for this study. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources through documentation research and evaluation (...) of historical sources. The primary data comprised Articles of the Iraqi constitution, and a few national and international legal instruments related to religious freedom. Secondary data included empirical research studies, books, articles and other published sources. This study therefore took the form of an empirical legal research as it involved the issues of constitutional reforms in the field of religious freedom. A comparative approach was adopted in analyzing the documents about religion and politics related to both the Arab region and the West. The focus was on the measures that should be adopted to advance the dialogues of religious freedom and maintain religious neutrality in all government policies. The study found out that there were apparent contradictions between the constitutional provisions and the State Laws. Similarly, the Iraqi civil and penal codes remain silent regarding legal remedies for the violation of constitutional provisions. (shrink)

The _Epic of Gilgamesh_, a 3600-year 12-tablet collection, was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War, and fraudulently imported into the United States. In September, 2021, UNESCO facilitated its repatriation to Iraq, which is seen as an occasion to consolidate Iraq’s efforts to rebuild its legacy, since the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is of immense cultural, historical and religious value for Iraq The current study examines the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ in the light of the ancient Sumerian and (...) Akkadian traditions. This collection of tablets carries a great legacy of the contemporary Babylonian and Mesopotamian beliefs and socio-religious values, also evident in the use of cuneiform and clay tablets, being ancient forms of writings. The study made use of content analysis and historical and analytical approaches to retrieve data through a documentation research design. The study found that the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is not only a work of religious literature, but a treatise on civilization. On one hand it narrates the stories engrained in the Mesopotamian mythology, such as those of Ninsun, Shamash and Utnapishtim; on the other hand, owing to its content, literary style and tone, characterization and symbolism, this study would be a great contribution to relive the story of Gilgamesh from current literary, and socio-religious perspective and provide a comprehensive account of the legacy and inheritance that it brings in for the modern generation. (shrink)

According to Wai Chee Dimock, scholars of American literature should study it in a bigger historical context than the one beginning in 1776 or even 1620, freeing themselves in this way from the narrow-minded nationalism that has so often drawn a border around their research. To view American literature in light of the longer durée of ancient civilizations is to see Henry David Thoreau reading the Bhagavad Gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Persian poet Hāfez, and rediscover in these and other (...) extensive sympathies the kinship of American literature with world literature. Dramatically expanding the tracts of space-time across which literary scholars might draw valid links between author and author, text and text, and among author, text, and the wide world beyond, the perspective of deep time holds the additional promise, for Dimock, of reinvigorating “our very sense of the connectedness among human beings” and of dissuading us, thereby, from the wisdom of war.1 At the very least we might hope that American soldiers wouldn't look idly on, as they did on 14 April 2003, as the cultural treasures of the Iraqi National Library—which are the treasures of all humankind—were looted and burned. (shrink)

Twenty Years of Poland's Euro-Atlantic Foreign Policy During the years 1989-1991, after a deep transformation of the internal system and the international order in Europe, Poland pursued a sovereign foreign policy. The new policy had the following general goals: 1) to develop a new international security system which would guarantee Poland's national security; 2) to gain diplomatic support for the reforms conducted in Poland, including primarily the transformation of the economy and its adaption to free market mechanisms, which were designed (...) to result in economic growth; and 3) to maintain and increase the international prestige of Poland and the Poles, who had been the first to commence the struggle to create a democratic civil society in the Eastern bloc. Implementing this new concept of foreign policy, Poland entered the Council of Europe in November 1991. The following year, Warsaw started to strive for membership of NATO, which was achieved in March 1999. A few years later, Polish leaders pursued policies in which Poland played the role of a "Trojan horse" for the USA. This was manifested most clearly during the Iraqi crisis of 2003, and in the following years, particularly in 2005-2007. From spring 1990 Poland aspired to integration with the European Community; in December of the following year it signed an association agreement, which fully entered into force in February 1994. In the period 1998-2002 Poland negotiated successfully with the European Union and finally entered this Union in May 2004. In subsequent years Poland adopted an Eurosceptic and sometimes anti-EU position. The new Polish government, established after the parliamentary election of autumn 2007, moved away from an Eurosceptic policy and pursued a policy of engagement with European integration. (shrink)

The conflict in Iraq has been portrayed as “ethnic” civil war, a radically different conflict from “ideological” wars such as Vietnam. We argue that such an assessment is misleading, as is its theoretical foundation, which we call the “ethnic war model.” Neither Iraq nor Vietnam conforms to the ethnic war model's predictions. The sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni militias is not simply the outcome of sectarian cleavages in Iraqi society, but to an important extent, a legacy of U.S. (...) occupation. On the other hand, although Vietnam was a society riven by ethnic cleavages, the Vietnam War also fails to conform to the ethnic war model. We show that there is no necessary overlap between ethnic conflict and ethnic war. Some ethnic conflicts evolve into ethnic wars, and others develop dynamics virtually indistinguishable from those of ideological civil wars. We suggest that the state's role is essential in transforming conflicts into either ethnic or irregular wars. We conclude with an analysis of the current situation and future prospects in Iraq. (shrink)

This essay presents some preliminary thoughts about the linkages between current human rights universalism and the practice of violence in the form of wars and interventions. I draw three parallels that may help us think about the current wars on terror and in Iraq. The first parallel concerns the progress of liberal universalist thought from the Enlightenment period in which a concern for rights coexisted with the justifications for imperialism. In the current era the succeeding line of universalist thought is (...) that of human rights which similarly coexists with the overt and tacit support for violence that deprives some humans of their lives.The second parallel concerns the use of national identity. In the imperial era, the justification for rights either given or withheld was closely linked to constructions of national identity. Similarly, today there is a resurgence of nationalist discourse in which the construction of U.S. national identity is used to justify the violence that is done against Iraqi citizens. This discourse which constructs the U.S. as ontologically civilized and the Iraqis as barbarians is used to justify the violence that is done to them.Finally, the last parallel concerns violence in general. During imperialism, the scrutiny for acts of violence was borne largely by the native. Because he was constructed as a barbarian, his violence was made far more obvious as further evidence of his lesser development. In the present circumstances, a similar scrutiny is borne by the Iraqi insurgent while the violence of the coalition forces remains veiled beneath euphemisms like collateral damage. The torture scandal at Abu-Ghraib presented an opportunity to reverse the gaze but because of its interpretation as an aberration that falls squarely outside the ``normal" and the failure to widen the debate to other violence, this opportunity was largely lost.These three parallels taken together suggest that the old liberal hegemonic order of imperialism with its conflicting narratives of rights and oppression has been carried forward and sublimated into a human rights regime. And human rights is now deployed to justify violence against ``human rights abusers." Because of this continuity, there is a need to create a new universalism born organically from the struggles of subordinated peoples that eliminates old-order imperialist justifications for the oppression of Others while claiming to support human rights. (shrink)

The article analises from the perspective of the concept of ‘processuality’ proposed by Andrew Smirnov, as well as in comparison with Kant’s categorical imperative, the concept of ‘reflection’ and its role in the ethical teaching of the outstanding Iraqi Sufi al-Haris al-Muhasibi (VIII-IX centuries). Reflection is an integral component of the mystic’s continuous observation of his thoughts and intentions. The latter is the main tool for cleansing the soul and heart on a person’s path to God. The ‘additional’ tools (...) used in the study are Smirnov’s logical-semantic theory and Kant’s ethical teaching goal is to show the fundamental difference between the ideological paradigm of al–Muhasibi as a representative of Afro-Asian civilization from the paradigm of Kant as a representative of Western European civilization. The contrast of two ethics – ‘procedural’ (al-Muhasibi) and ‘substantial’ (Kant) – leads us to the theory of four types of civilization-specific mentality developed by Andrew Paribok. This article can and should be considered as a demonstration of how the method of Pskhu’ ‘situational hermeneutics’ works, according to which the researcher has the right to use those intellectual theories (sometimes irrelevant to each other) that help him in a concise form to clearly and unambiguously convey to the reader the meaning of the phenomenon under study (concept / text). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical DilemmaHandreen Mohammed SaeedFollowing the abrupt fall of almost a third of its territory in 2014 to armed militias, Iraq fell into civil war turmoil. As a direct result of the armed conflicts, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were displaced or subjected to atrocious human rights violations with physical, sexual, and psychosocial abuse. While the scenes on the TV provided only a (...) glimpse of what was happening on the ground, the true stories circulating about people’s suffering left me personally in absolute shock. Among those who suffered the most from the offences were marginalized religious and ethnic minority groups, who were viewed and treated as infidels by the aggressor militants. Those marginalized communities not only endured displacement due to the armed conflicts but they were also mass-exterminated, sexually abused, and underwent massive destruction of their towns and villages.In 2016, I was working for Ministry of Health as a primary care physician in a small town in Iraqi Kurdistan, which hosted tens of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) from one of those marginalized minority communities. I had the opportunity to hear their tragic stories firsthand as they fled for their lives in 2014. Working in those communities as a primary care physician allowed me to truly understand their feelings and emotions and reflect on their experiences while providing healthcare services. This experience sparked an interest in humanitarian work, in which I could be close to areas of need and involved in providing physical health first-aid and also psychological and social first-aid; all crucial in addressing the future health consequences experienced by people going through humanitarian crises. In the same year, 2016, I joined an international medical organization and started working in remote and low-resource settings in northern Iraq as a humanitarian physician. Our projects included a variety of primary care, psychosocial, and urgent care services targeting refugees, IDPs, and vulnerable host communities in areas near conflict zones. The projects were designed and implemented with the hope that the most vulnerable populations have access to our services.In October 2016, the Iraqi authorities launched a massive military operation known as the “Battle of Mosul” to regain control of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. As an emergency medical humanitarian organization, we had to be near the battlefield and respond to the unfolding humanitarian crisis on a daily basis. As the official security forces backed by the international alliance started to advance, tens of thousands of people, including some militants and their families, fled Mosul and headed towards areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s forces in the north, where our organization was operational. Some of them sought refuge in one of our medical facilities in northern Iraq, which was operated by local staff, [End Page 172] including members from some of the minority communities that had suffered the most from the militants’ aggression in 2014. The patients entering our facilities were mainly older adults, women, and children, but we were also visited by a small group of potential militants who were either injured, malnourished, or just seeking help and refuge. As a neutral, impartial, independent, humanitarian organization compliant with medical ethics, we were committed to providing healthcare services to anybody in need without discrimination or judgment.As we responded to the humanitarian crisis unfolding before our eyes, some of our staff members came forward and raised valid questions about the ethics of treating patients potentially involved in serious human rights violations. With tears in her eyes, one nurse approached me and stated, “Seeing these people reminds me of all the girls and women who went missing from my village and are now being sold as sex slaves in Syria”. The staff expressed serious concerns about their ability to provide care to patients who may have been involved in mass killing, torture, and the destruction of their own towns, as well as sexual abuse against their family members, friends, and people in their communities. Due to the psychological and physical trauma caused by the militants’ conquest, the staff was reluctant to provide medical care to these patients, as seeing and hearing them brought back... (shrink)

This study examines the significance of gender-inclusive corporate boards for improving business performance in Pakistan and addresses the social paradox of gender quotas for reducing gender disparities in boardrooms. The conceptual review of all-inclusive literature focuses on assembling descriptive outlines of the evidence explored; analyzing and evaluating it; sieving out inapt studies; and furnishing an aperçu of the authentic evidence. Pakistan’s case for boardroom’s gender diversity merits consideration in the context of kinship, competence, business ethics, and meritocracy. With the legal (...) and regulatory push in the form of the Companies Act, 2017 and SECP’s regulation, companies in Pakistan are liable to induct at least one woman director on corporate boards. The literature portrays the legislative measures as controversial and presented polarized opinions on gender quotas, either in favor or in against the legislations. The research evinces that the overall women representation in the listed companies at KSE-100 index was 7.55% in August 2019 which rose to 11% till March 2020. The paper contributes towards exposing the social paradox of gender-inclusive boardrooms in Pakistan. The findings indicate an urgent need for the implementation of gender parity social reforms to empower competent women with their legal rights to enjoy the stature they deserve. (shrink)

This is an era of globalization, and to maximize the competitive advantage, the banking industry is acknowledging and recognizing Human Resource practices and contributing their best to employ the organizational resources in best productive manner so that they can excel and enjoy competitive edge. Number of factors are affecting on performance of the employee. This research paper is mainly intended to explore the influence of employee diversity on the performance of employee in Private Banking business of Pakistan. Specifically in this (...) paper, the performance of the employee in a banking sector has been predicted by the influence of employee diversity with respect to their education, age, gender, and ethnicity. The data was collected from 203 private banking representatives by a convenience sampling method. In order to identify the relationship, the data has been tested by SPSS Regression and correlation analysis methods. Research findings suggested that the organizations with specific reference to banking sector should plan, design and execute the policies,, practices and strategies that have a wide range canvas inclusive every individual employee and workforce diversities. (shrink)

Writing in 1978, on the eve of Thatcherism’s political triumph, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (Hall et al., 2013, p. 193) claimed Britain was experiencing a ‘crisis of hegemony’; a political, e...

La 4e de couverture indique : "Dans cet ouvrage de référence consacré à une analyse approfondie du thème du consentement aux soins dans la pratique médicale, M.-F. Civil porte son regard de médecin et de philosophe sur les comportements de bon nombre de praticiens à l'heure actuelle plus ou moins soumis à la « mathématisation » de la médecine. Loin de se contenter d'un état des lieux complet de la question, il nous conduit pas à pas sur les chemins d'une (...) « éthique existentielle » tout à fait singulière, renvoyant à des situations pratiques de soins où délibérer avant d'agir et réfléchir à l'action déjà prise permet aux patients d'exprimer le sens donné à leur vécu dans le cadre de leur projet de vie immédiate ou future. Son approche très phénoménologique, aux côtés notamment de Heidegger et Husserl, ouvre la porte à un vaste chantier de réflexion pour tous ceux qui envisagent de se pencher sur la manière concrète d'être-au-monde en médecine comme souci pour soi et pour les autres. Ainsi ce livre interpelle les étudiants, les chercheurs, les professionnels de santé, mais également tous ceux qui ont été, ou seront, tôt ou tard, confrontés au problème du consentement.". (shrink)

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

This paper discusses the paradigms of European history and of European civilisation defined in the main histories of Europe written from the Enlightenment to Guizot.Voltaire, Robertson, Gibbon, and Guizot consolidated a model of the history of Europe which has its origins in the fall of the western Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. The other main steps of this history were the Christianisation, the creation of a vital economic centre in western and northern Europe, the development of the (...) cities, the rediscovery of Roman law, the creation of a complex system of states, the colonial expansion and again the birth of a society of “good manners”.A common civilisation which did not ignore the differences which existed between one country and another – the “national characters”, discussed by David Hume in 1748. Instead the different national characters – the variety of Europe as Guizot wrote – represented an important element of the European civilisation. (shrink)

Before one can speculate about a new world order and “a clash of civilizations”, or “the end of history”, it is necessary to develop an appropriate set of measures to compare human competition in world politics and economy. Components and the generic model of an autonomous civilization is defined for eight civilizations recognized at the beginning of the 21st century. Each component of contemporary civilizations is numerically estimated in order to construct the civilization index. A comparative analysis of (...) 8 civilizations’ indexes is provided in order to define strategies for the civilization development within 3 zones of encounters: clashes, modernization, and westernization. Two layers of world civilizations are defined and the dynamics of world civilization at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium is modeled. Based on that dynamics, the challenges for civilizations and peoples conclude the paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to define the sources of crisis affecting civilization, and to define a solution by the development of a Universal-Complementary Civilization. The study’s conclusion is that neither Western nor Global Civilization can improve the order of civilization. Even worse, these civilizations threaten sustainability by depleting strategic resources at a fast pace, driven by the market forces only. World Civilization at this time is driven by two conflicting civilizations, Christianity and Islam, (...) and is hurdling towards a huge disaster. Neither Christianity nor Islam has the right to impose its own values upon the other. To avoid wars and conflicts among civilizations one must break the human history of permanent negations and integrate eight autonomous civilizations and a global one by a set of Common-Complementary Universal Values, selected by each autonomous civilization and accepted by all the others as common values. Theimplementation strategy of this new civilization may take several centuries, but to start this civilization one must create a group of pioneers and “show cases” as soon as possible. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to define the sources of crisis affecting civilization, and to define a solution by the development of a Universal-Complementary Civilization. The study’s conclusion is that neither Western nor Global Civilization can improve the order of civilization. Even worse, these civilizations threaten sustainability by depleting strategic resources at a fast pace, driven by the market forces only. World Civilization at this time is driven by two conflicting civilizations, Christianity and Islam, (...) and is hurdling towards a huge disaster. Neither Christianity nor Islam has the right to impose its own values upon the other. To avoid wars and conflicts among civilizations one must break the human history of permanent negations and integrate eight autonomous civilizations and a global one by a set of Common-Complementary Universal Values, selected by each autonomous civilization and accepted by all the others as common values. Theimplementation strategy of this new civilization may take several centuries, but to start this civilization one must create a group of pioneers and “show cases” as soon as possible. (shrink)

The post-Kantians were inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment to forge a new synthesis of natural philosophy, art and history that would overcome the dualisms and gulfs within Kant’s philosophy. Focusing on biology and showing how Schelling reworked and transformed Kant’s insights, it is argued that Schelling was largely successful in laying the foundations for this synthesis, although he was not always consistent in building on these foundations. To appreciate this achievement, it is argued that Schelling should not be interpreted (...) as an idealist but as a process metaphysician; as he claimed, overcoming the oppositions between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism. It is also argued that as a process metaphysician, Schelling not merely defended an organic view of nature but developed a theory of emergence and a new conception of life relevant to current theoretical and philosophical biology. This interpretation provides a defense of process metaphysics as the logical successor to Kant’s critical philosophy and thereby as the most defensible tradition of philosophy up to the present. It provides the foundations for post-reductionist science, reconciling the sciences, the arts and the humanities, and provides the basis for a more satisfactory ethics and political philosophy. Most importantly, it overcomes the nihilism of European civilization, providing the foundations for a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did our ways of thinking, and our moral, political, and social values, come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger traces the story of how these values developed, and how they influenced society and culture from the 19th to the mid-20th century.

This paper discusses the paradigms of European history and of European civilisation defined in the main histories of Europe written from the Enlightenment to Guizot. Voltaire, Robertson, Gibbon, and Guizot consolidated a model of the history of Europe which has its origins in the fall of the western Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. The other main steps of this history were the Christianisation, the creation of a vital economic centre in western and northern Europe, the development of (...) the cities, the rediscovery of Roman law, the creation of a complex system of states, the colonial expansion and again the birth of a society of “good manners”. A common civilisation which did not ignore the differences which existed between one country and another – the “national characters”, discussed by David Hume in 1748. Instead the different national characters – the variety of Europe as Guizot wrote – represented an important element of the European civilisation. (shrink)

This paper examines Hanafi’s concept of Occidentalism in the epistemological approach. It aims to investigate the character, study source, research method,validity, and objectives of Occidentalism. The paper findings demonstrate that Occidentalism is a science which aims to dismantle the myth of Western superiority and, in turn, to build an equal civilization. The study root of Occidentalism is the formation, structure, and fate of the European consciousness. The formation comprises the exposed and unexposed sources of the European consciousness. The structure (...) en compasses the ideologies of nationalism, Zionism, Nazism, Facism, and racialism. Fate relies on the model of the relationship between the East and the West. Afterward, Hanafi employs two research methods: historical-dialectical and phenomenology. Lastly, science can be recognized as Occidentalism if it has a five fold standard: there is the dialectic of the East and the West, positioning European consciousness as the study object, self-liberation as the spirit to liberate the East from Western hegemony, dismantling the myth of cosmopolite culture, and the accomplishment of an equal civilization. (shrink)

Ibn KhaldØun’s theory of history has been extensively discussed and interpreted in widely divergent ways by Western scholars. In the context of present debates, it seems most appropriate to read his work as an original and comprehensive version of civilizational analysis (the key concept of ‘umran is crucial to this line of interpretation), and to reconstruct his model in terms of relations between religious, political and economic dimensions of the human condition. A specific relationship between state formation and the broader (...) context of civilizational processes appears as the most central theme. This civilizational approach is then contrasted with the most influential recent Western interpretation, put forward by Ernest Gellner. Gellner translates Ibn KhaldØun’s analysis into functionalist terms and thus tones down its historical and civilizational specificity. The consequences are most obvious when it comes to discussing the unity and diversity of the Islamic world, especially with regard to the Ottoman Empire. (shrink)

This article identifies civilizational analysis as one response to a recent crisis in the sociology of large-scale social configurations and explores how far the concept of civilization can go in analyzing the contemporary global social constellation. The reasoning proceeds in four steps. First, a brief review of the recent conceptual debate in social theory and historical sociology leads to the conclusion that concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ still work with too strong presuppositions about continuity and commonality of (...) patterns of world interpretation. Second, a proposal is made to distinguish several basic problématiques that all human collectivities need to address and to suggest that such a distinction lends itself to research-oriented disentangling of various aspects of social phenomena. In an explorative manner, third, this approach will be applied to South Africa and Brazil, two social configurations that can fruitfully be studied as collectivities but lend themselves much less to civilizational analysis. By way of conclusion, finally, the trajectories of these non-European modernities will briefly be compared to the European one to illustrate the potential of this approach for a global sociology of plural trajectories of modernity. (shrink)

The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant (...) trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure. This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

Recent critics have declaimed against John Stuart Mill's liberalism, arguing that his conception of civilization is inexorably bound to a hierarchal conception of social progress justifying Europeans' moral right to 'civilize' barbarian peoples. Without exonerating him from his undoubtedly problematic views regarding non-European cultures, I would like to argue that Mill in fact has a much subtler view of historical development and of civilization than such critics attribute to him. Central to these critics' charges is an 'aggregative' view (...) of Mill's conceptualization of historical development--suggesting that Mill understood societies to move through discrete stages of social development, characterized by internally-correlated stages of economic, political, cultural and moral development--which fails to be borne out under close examination. I argue that Mill's view of historical development and his liberalism more generally are in fact significantly more capacious than is often recognized and are not inextricably bound to the project of imperialism. (shrink)

The titles in this mini-set were originally published between 1924 and 1931 and include works by J D Bernal, E E Fournier d’Albe, Andre Maurois and S Radhakrishnan. Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, and psychology they examine man’s place in the world of the future.