Suchergebnisse

"This book provides a post-Covid recovery strategy that is based on all aspects of health, but also addresses the ever-greater threat from global warming. Health and sustainability are interlocked. More than other European nations, we favour libertarian values over social equity, privatized public services and lower taxes that reduce those services. From fair-minded pragmatism, we have descended into dogma, incompetence and intolerance. Using the government's 5 guiding principles for a sustainable future, the book suggests how to improve distinct aspects of health: personal health through more preventive medicine; environmental health with lower transport and household emissions; economic health through local (rather than global) production of goods and services; social health by reducing gross health and wealth inequalities; and political health through strategic commitment, fair taxes (a bedroom tax just on the poor?) and more devolution. We need to think local, act local and act now."

"The modern world was not created by the civilization of Renaissance Italy, the advent of the printing press, or the marriage restrictions imposed by the medieval church. Rather, it was widespread reading that brought about most of the cognitive, psychological, and social changes that we recognize as peculiarly modern. David Williams combines book and communications history with readings of major works by Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe and Milton to argue that expanding literacy in the Renaissance was the impetus for modern civilization, turning a culture of arid logic and religious ceremonialism into a world of individual readers who discovered a new form of communion in the act of reading. It was not the theologians Luther and Calvin who first taught readers to become what they read, but the biblical philologist Erasmus, who encountered the divine presence on every page of the gospels. From this sacramental form of reading came other modes of humanist reading, particularly in law, history, and classics, leading to the birth of the nation-state. As literacy rates rose, readers of all backgrounds gained and embodied the distinctly modern values of liberty, free speech, toleration, individualism, self-determination, and democratic institutions. Communion and community were linked, performed in novel ways through revolutionary forms of reading. In this conclusion to a quartet of books on media change, Williams makes a compelling case for readers and acts of reading as the true drivers of social, political, and cultural modernity--and for digital media as its looming nemesis."--

A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? -- Bread, Blood, and Paper: The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis -- Humanist Reading: "The Booke of the Crucyfixe" and Erasmian Philology -- Sacramental Reading: Foxe's Book of Actes and Milton's Fifth Gospel -- Juridical Reading: John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law -- Historiographical Reading: The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow -- Classical Reading: Milton's Euripidean Tragedy -- The Communion of the Book: A Dialectic of Presence and Absence.

It was neither the civilization of Renaissance Italy nor the printing press that created the modern world. Instead, it was reading. Through historical analysis and readings of Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe and Milton, The Communion of the Book explores how literacy produced modern values, and how digital media threaten those values.

The planet we will pass on is different than the one we inherited. Living with our angry Eden will involve a period of sustained difficulty and disruption. David Williams, author of When the English Fall, spells out how we will be morally tested, outlines nine virtues key to human thriving in the decades to come, and beckons readers toward a faith and a hope resilient enough to face the effects of the climate crisis

Adam Smith on Politics, Progress, and Judgement -- Immanuel Kant on Universal Right, Universal History, and the European State -- Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism, and Empire -- L.T. Hobhouse, 'New Liberalism', and the 'New Imperialism' -- Liberalism and Colonialism Past and Present.

"The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of 'The standpoint of world history and Japan' may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the pages of Chuo Koron, the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by controversy and shrouded in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language. "--

"African Americans' Struggle for Freedom in the Civil War Era For a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation has been the dominant narrative of African American freedom in the Civil War era. However, David Williams suggests that this portrayal marginalizes the role that African American slaves played in freeing themselves. At the Civil War's outset, Lincoln made clear his intent was to save the Union rather than free slaves - despite his personal distaste for slavery, he claimed no authority to interfere with the institution. By the second year of the war, though, when the Union army was in desperate need of black support, former slaves who escaped to Union lines struck a bargain: they would fight for the Union only if they were granted their freedom. Williams importantly demonstrates that freedom was not simply the absence of slavery but rather a dynamic process enacted by self-emancipated African American refugees, which compelled Lincoln to modify his war aims and place black freedom at the center of his wartime policies"--

"The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of 'The standpoint of world history and Japan' may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the p. of Chuo Koron, the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by controversy and shrouded in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language. "--

"In the 1990s the World Bank changed its policy and took the position that the problems of poverty and governance are inextricably linked. Improving the governance of its borrower countries became progressively accepted as a legitimate part of the World Bank's development activities. This book examines why the World Bank came to see good governance as important, and evaluates what the World Bank is doing to improve the governance of its borrower countries." "David Williams examines changing World Bank policy since the late 1970s to show how a concern with good governance grew out of the problems it experienced over structural adjustment lending, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Whilst providing an account of the early years of the World Bank through to the 1990s, the book also systematically relates the policies of good governance to liberalism. A detailed case study of World Bank lending to Ghana demonstrates what the attempt to improve 'governance' looks like in practice."--Jacket