The ennobling of democracy : the challenge of the postmodern age
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The ennobling of democracy : the challenge of the postmodern age
（The Johns Hopkins series in constitutional thought）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, c1992
- : pbk
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"Johns Hopkins paperbacks edition 1993"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliography (p. [219]-223) and index
LC cataloging-in-publication data title: The ennobling of democrary : the challenge of the postmodern age
Description and Table of Contents
Description
With the end of the Cold War, says Thomas L. Pangle, liberal democracy was deprived of its traditional enemy, and forced to re-examine its internal structure and fundamental aims. One result has been the moral-relativist "postmodernism" of mainstream Western intellectuals. Focusing on Lyotard, Vattimo, and Rorty, The Ennobling of Democracy offers a searching critique of postmodernism and its implications for political life and thought. Pangle carefully examines the political dimensions of postmodernist teachings, including the rejection of the natural-rights doctrines of the Enlightenment, the discounting of public purposefulness, and the disenchantment with claims of civic virtue and reason. He argues that a serious challenge has been posed to postmodernism by the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, which have directly experienced heroic political leadership, maintained a prominent place for religion, and preserved a belief in the virtues and duties of citizenship. They consequently make demands on Western thought that postmodernism has been unable to meet. Drawing on the classical republican ideal, Pangle opens the door to a bold new synthesis in political philosophy.
He argues that by reappropriating classical civic rationalism-and especially classical philosophy of education-a framework may be established to integrate the most significant findings of modern rationalism into a conception of humanity that encompasses, in an unprecedented way, the entire scope of the human condition.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Postmodern Predicament
Part I: The Inadequacy of the Postmodernist Response
Chapter 1. Postmodernism and the Avant-Garde
Chapter 2. The Heideggerian Roots of Postmodernism
Chapter 3. "Weak Thinking"
Chapter 4. American Postmodernism
Part II: The Spiritual Challenges of the Post-Cold War Era
Chapter 5. The Challenge For And From Europe
Chapter 6. The Need to Rethink Our Rights and Our Republicanism
Part III: Revitalizing the Intellectual Roots of Civid Culture
Chapter 7. Reinvigorating the Legacy of Classical Republicanism
Chapter 8. Rethinking the Foundations of Liberalism
Part IV: Education: Civic and Liberal
Chapter 9. Retrieving Civic Educations as the Heart of American Public Schooling
Chapter 10. Against Cannons and Canonicity: Dialectic as the Heart of Higher Education
Select List of Works Cited
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"