San Antonio College Library

Mitchell uses examples drawn from history, politics, law, and culture to show how our singular concern with fairness has diminished our sense of vulnerability, so that our ideas of justice, equality, and efficiency are modeled on the capabilities of the strongest in society. Large scale examples-such as blue collar layoffs and corporate downsizing, natural disasters and catastrophic illnesses-illustrate the rickety bridge between comfort and disaster....

In their original versions, the ultimate fates of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan reflect the anti-individualism of their time: Faust and Don Juan are punished in hellfire, and Don Quixote is mocked. The three represent the positive drive of individualism, which brings down on itself repression by social disapproval. A century later, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe embodies a more favorable consideration of the individual, but only if one refuses to take...

"Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of Europe's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too...

This volume, an appraisal of the nature of feminism and its relationship to the culture at large, presents historical insight and critical analysis of the evolution of the women's movement. Fox-Genovese asserts that feminism has in many ways glorified the patriarchal individualism that spawned it, and that this individualism has ruthlessly excluded countless number of people, even as it offered them their highest aspirations. The book suggests that...

"In Law's Interior, Kevin M. Crotty draws on several important literary works to offer a new model of the relation between citizens and their laws, one that emphasizes the power of law to shape citizens and to foster - or discourage - their autonomy. Crotty maintains that citizens are "inside" the law - they are the law's interior. Literature, he finds, can be relevant to law by emphasizing the connections between law and the world around it - a stance...

C. B. Macpherson was one of the leading political theorists in North America and perhaps the most influential voice on the left for a view of liberal democracy that was simultaneously sympathetic to its aspirations and critical of its achievements. His work provides the contributors to this volume with a common starting point from which to reflect upon the possibilities for critical perspectives on liberal democracy in light of the demise of its Marxist...

"Consider this paradox: Ecologists estimate that it would take three planets Earth to provide an American standard of living to the entire world. Yet it is that standard of living to which the whole world aspires." "In Consuming Desires, Roger Rosenblatt brings together a collection of writers to shed light on that disturbing paradox. The book presents a rich and varied dialogue on the underlying roots of consumer culture and its pervasive impact...