Social Research articles from June 1997

Social Research archives from June 1997

The new capitalism.
June 22, 1997... The word new is a suspect word, the favored adjective of advertisers. Yet in the last twenty years profound changes in material life have occurred, changes that a score of years ago it was hard to foresee. Then, the great corporate bureaucracies...

The invisible hand and the cunning of reason.
June 22, 1997... Here is a distilled list of the theses I shall discuss: * that the idea of the invisible hand has had an impact not only on the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries but on the twentieth century as well; * that this idea had a curious...

Varieties of altruism - and the common ground between them.
June 22, 1997... Altruistic behavior, where it occurs in nature, is commonly assumed to belong to one or the other of two generically different types. Either it is an example of kin selected altruism, such as occurs between blood relatives -- a worker bee risking...

Social evil.
June 22, 1997... The real aim of the devil, wrote Goethe, is not the destruction of holiness but of life. Mephistopheles, a.k.a. Lucifer, laments that despite his best endeavors he will not succeed in destroying life's capacity to reproduce itself endlessly. In...

Why is there no feminism after communism?
June 22, 1997... If the existence of feminism depended only on the existence of gender injustice, and the need to address it, feminism would be a thriving enterprise in Central Europe. Women are bearing a heavy burden in the so-called transition to democracy....

Feminism and the roots of apathy in the Czech Republic.
June 22, 1997... As a child I repeatedly participated in one nasty game. We put a stick into an anthill and watched how hundreds of thousands of ants tried to fix all those damaged paths and restore their order. They managed well; they had been building those...

The situation of philosophy, the culture of philosophers: philosophy in the new Germany.
June 22, 1997... Introductory Note The following article was first written for the philosophy division of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) run by the French philosopher and writer Roger-Pol Droit. In 1994,...

The genesis of Islamic economics; a chapter in the politics of Muslim identity.
June 22, 1997... The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an economic doctrine that calls itself "Islamic economics." Of all economists of the Muslim faith, only a small minority, known as "Islamic economists," identify with some variant of this new...

Green ghettos and the white underclass.
June 22, 1997... Urban cores in the United States are transforming rapidly; they are home to novel social forms and complicated spatial transformations. From a distance, the "inner city" appears as a generic, nightmarish image in media representations, but up...