Dans cet article, nous développons une réflexion sur le conflit en démocratie en nous appuyant sur une étude du parcours et des travaux de Charles Wright Mills. Comme celle de Pierre Bourdieu qui lui fait écho sur de nombreux points et avec laquelle nous l’entrecroisons, la démarche de Mills fournit les bases d’une réflexion sur les conditions sociales d’une authentique conflictualité démocratique, orientée vers une déconstruction de certaines formes de domination. Tout d’abord, le travail de Mills intègre (...) un questionnement sur l’impact des formes de stratification sociale sur le développement des luttes sociales. Mills contribue ainsi à mettre en relief, dans le contexte américain, une interaction permanente des luttes de classe et des luttes statutaires et une certaine neutralisation des premières par les secondes. La mise en relief par Bourdieu de la prégnance, au sein des divers champs sociaux, des luttes de classement va dans le même sens. Ensuite, un retour sur la notion de « société de masse » chez Mills permet de mettre en relief la façon dont ce dernier voit dans le déclin de l’autonomie des ordres institutionnels un facteur d’étouffement de la conflictualité démocratique. Enfin, nous comparons la façon dont Mills et Bourdieu défendent, chacun à sa manière, une « politique de vérité ». L’analyse de la portée et des limites d’une telle politique nous amène à souligner en quoi l’autonomie des ordres institutionnels ou des champs sociaux est une condition et un enjeu à la fois structurant et foncièrement ambivalent de la conflictualité démocratique. (shrink)

This article examines Charles Wright Mills’ sociological works and political thought : it shows how they provide the basis of a reflection on the social conditions of democratic conflict. First Mills’ work questions the impact of social stratification on democratic conflict. Second Mills’ approach of the notion of « mass society » puts emphasis on the way the decline of the autonomy of social orders contributes to a weakening of democratic conflict. Finally, we compare the way (...) class='Hi'>Mills and Pierre Bourdieu defend a « politics of truth » : such an analysis emphazises that the autonomy of social orders or social fields is a condition and a stake at once pivotal and ambivalent of democratic struggles. (shrink)

In 1987, the World Commission on Economic Development popularized the term “sustainable development” in its well-cited report, Our Common Future. According to this report, sustainable development is defined as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The WCED asserted that sustainable development required simultaneous adoption of environmental, economical, and equity principles. Bansal, 197–218, 2005) has conducted a study of Canadian firms in the oil and gas, mining, (...) and forestry industries from 1986 to 1995. The study found that both resources based and institutional factors influence corporate sustainable development. This paper studied the corporate sustainable development of Mysore Paper Mills Ltd. from 1995 to 2011 using the same model. The study found that independent variables with significant impact on environmental integrity and overall sustainability were fines, penalties, court cases involved by the company, and log of total assets. On economic prosperity, the independent variable with significant impact is log of total assets. For social equity, the independent variable with significant impact is foreign sales as percentage of total sales, number of fines/penalties/court cases, number of fines/penalties/court cases, log, and return on equity. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time all the writings of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill on equality between the sexes, including John Stuart Mill's _The Subjection of Women_, a classic in the history of the women's rights movement since its publication one hundred years ago. Also contained in this volume is a major interpretative essay by Alice S. Rossi on Mill and Harriet Taylor which describes and analyzes their long personal and intellectual relationship.

Andrew Abbott's Department and Discipline calls to mind an exchange I once had with an economist—prompted by my characterization of a recent work of urban sociology as part of the “Chicago‐school tradition”—who reminded me that in his profession “Chicago school” was associated with Milton Friedman, free market ideology, and a world made up of rational, self‐interest‐maximizing actors. What I had in mind could hardly be further from that: the highly contextual, neighborhood‐based mode of analysis that became a hallmark of the (...) University of Chicago Department of Sociology from the late 1910s through the 1930s and that explained such phenomena as juvenile delinquency, race relations, poverty, and urban ennui as the products of complex, historically rooted social processes, ecologies, and group interactions.The essays that make up Department and Discipline ask that we rethink “conventional” notions of “Chicago‐school” sociology as a body of work produced by a particular group of faculty and students in a bygone era. Instead, in an engaging, unapologetically polemical, and ultimately prescriptive blend of historical analysis and disciplinary critique, Abbott conceptualizes the Chicago school as a tradition that was invented and reinvented over time, and within the ever‐changing relationship between the department and the broader discipline over the first half of the twentieth century. With this as his central theme, Abbott contemplates the—highly contested—meaning of the Chicago school in historiography and departmental history; the historical transformation of the Chicago‐based American Journal of Sociology from early, shaping influence to a mere organ of an increasingly narrow, professionalized discipline; and the capacity of the discipline to transcend what Abbott believes to be its contemporary state of professional and intellectual exhaustion.Even within sociology, “Chicago school” has had varying connotations over the years. Some associate it with Robert Park and his cyclical, assimilationist vision of race relations; others with the organic, ecological view of urban growth and mobility patterns captured in such still‐ubiquitous concepts as ethnic “succession”; still others with symbolic interactionism, the social psychological study of how people engage with, give meaning to, and ultimately act within the object world around them. More recently there has been talk of a “second Chicago school,” a post–World War II generation of qualitative and interactionist scholars who kept those traditions alive even as the discipline was headed in more quantitative, grand theoretical directions. Complicating matters still further, members of the initial, now‐legendary founding generation did not think of themselves as engaged in a single intellectual project or “school” of thought. Indeed, Abbott tells us that it was not until the 1970s, decades after Chicago lost its dominance in the discipline, that “the loose tangle of maxims and practices that had sustained the department in its glory years” was actually presented as “the Chicago school” .So does it make sense to talk about a or the Chicago school of sociology? Abbott argues that it does, albeit not as something that exists in the ideas, the body of research, or the considerable institutional apparatus that characterized the department during its interwar “glory years.” Rather, it existed in the interactions among a methodologically diverse, often deeply conflicted department faculty, out of which emerged an eclectic tradition of inquiry dedicated to understanding social processes in the context of time and place. Ironically, it took a moment of crisis—a year‐long self‐study in 1951–1952 prompted by administrative pressure and foundation efforts to define sociology as a bona fide science—to bring this vision of the Chicago‐school tradition into full view. By then, the tradition was on the way out: its practitioners retiring or moving elsewhere; its sensibilities displaced by a type of analysis C. Wright Mills would scornfully refer to as abstracted empiricism, dedicated to the construction and manipulation of variables outside of time and place.Though not a book for the uninitiated—Abbott's detailed rendering of behind‐the‐scenes personalities and squabbles requires some knowledge of the department and its landmark works—Department and Discipline makes an important contribution to social science history as well as to the literature on the Chicago school. Informed by extensive archival research, the book is animated by a powerful argument that is likely to resonate with historians, if not with the AJS editors who declined to publish the essay they had commissioned from Abbott for the journal's centenary: that sociology must reconnect with and reinvigorate the tradition of contextual analysis. While intriguing, Abbott's argument that the Chicago “school” exists in departmental processes and faculty relationships is less fully realized—occasional references to the Chicago‐school tradition in its 1920–1930s “heyday” sound awfully like the conventional view. It also makes for a book that gives short shrift to the actual ideas and body of research associated with Chicago sociology—and to their extraordinarily enduring influence among social practitioners and analysts alike. Still, when Abbott does turn to the work, the discussion is, like the rest of the book, original, thought provoking, and rewarding to read. (shrink)

Les partisans de la démocratie radicale ont développé une critique de la démocratie représentative, mettant en avant une priorité du politique sur le social ainsi que la centralité du conflit. Ils n'ont cependant pas produit une réflexion suffisante sur les conditions de la participation politique. C'est ce à quoi s'attelle ce livre, en s'inspirant du pragmatisme de Dewey et de sa définition de la politique démocratique en termes d'expérimentation. Après avoir dégagé l'ossature de la pensée de Dewey, ce livre en (...) interroge certains des points aveugles en puisant à la source des travaux de Charles Wright Mills. Puis il en examine une des actualisations récentes. Tout en montrant les richesses du pragmatisme deweyen qui déconstruit certains clivages stériles en philosophie politique et permet de penser la dynamique de formation des liens civils, ce livre met en relief certaines limites de l'expérimentalisme démocratique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations and superiority of the white race in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his anti-emancipationist perspective in “The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” followed by John Stuart Mill’s divergent response to him in 1850 titled, “The Negro Question.” In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman’s perspective, (...) “The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question” by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. Although Mill’s essay was a direct attack on Carlyle’s explosive article and is overtly against Carlyle and Bodington’s ideas, this paper argues that an imperialist agenda underlies Mill’s views and in fact poses the same theories of Carlyle and Bodington. The paper first proceeds to interrogate Mill’s hegemonic subtext through a comparison of these three essays by situating them within the scientific discourse of the era, arguing that science, especially phrenology and evolution theories, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but was used to perpetrate the normative racial ideologies of the period. The paper also uses Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering the Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism to show that while Mill seemingly diverges from Carlyle’s stance, this ‘othering’ is in fact present in all three writers’ works. (shrink)

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

It is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Aimed at students approaching Foucault's texts for the first time, this volume offers: * an examination of Foucault's contexts * a guide to his key ideas * an overview of responses to his work * practical hints (...) on 'using Foucault' * an annotated guide to his most influential works * suggestions for further reading. Challenging not just what we think but how we think, Foucault's work remains the subject of heated debate. Sara Mills' Michel Foucault offers an introduction to both the ideas and the debate, fully equipping student readers for an encounter with this most influential of thinkers. (shrink)

This paper explores contemporary debates about the meaning and value of realism in political theory. I seek to move beyond the widespread observation that realism encompasses a diverse set of critiques and commitments, by urging that we recognize two key strands in recent realist thought. Detachment realists claim that political theory is excessively abstract and infeasible and thereby fails adequately to inform actual political decision-making. Displacement critics, on the other hand, suggest that political theory threatens or disrespects real politics. Not (...) only are these visions of realism very different, there are also important tensions between them. I focus, in particular, on clarifying and evaluating the more complex charge that political theory displaces politics. (shrink)

Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition. While challenging conventional interpretations of key Marxist concepts and claims, the author contends that Marxism has been 'white' insofar as it has failed to recognize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world.

Despite the fact that ethics consultations are an accepted practice in most healthcare organizations, many clinical ethicists continue to feel marginalized by their institutions. They are often not paid for their time, their programs often have no budget, and institutional leaders are frequently unaware of their activities. One consequence has been their search for concrete ways to evaluate their work in order to prove the importance of their activities to their institutions through demonstrating their efficiency and effectiveness.

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty (...) and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound. (shrink)

‘Racial justice’ is a term widely used in everyday discourse, but little explored in philosophy. In this essay, I look at racial justice as a concept, trying to bring out its complexities, and urging a greater engagement by mainstream political philosophers with the issues that it raises. After comparing it to other varieties of group justice and injustice, I periodize racial injustice, relate it to European expansionism and argue that a modified Rawlsianism relying on a different version of the thought (...) experiment could come up with suitable principles of corrective racial justice. (shrink)

This previously-unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially-structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien's novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the central racist myth of European thought.

Numerous apprenticeship contracts survive among the papyri of Graeco-Roman Egypt, but scholars have been left guessing whether this documentation offers a sound comparison to job training in Classical Greece. This paper points out that such apprenticeship contracts are firmly attested in a work of Xenophon, revealing that, by the mid fourth century b.c., Athens was already home to the practice of formal apprenticeship.

In this novel re-examination of the archetype construct, philosopher Jon Mills and psychiatrist Erik Goodwyn engage in spirited dialogue on the origins, nature, and scope of what archetypes actually constitute, their relation to the greater questions of psyche and worldhood, and their relevance for Jungian studies and analytical psychology today. Arguably the most definitive feature of Jung's metapsychology is his theory of archetypes. It is the fulcrum on which his analytical depth psychology rests. With recent trends in post-Jungian and (...) neo-Jungian perspectives that have embraced developmental, relational, social justice, and postmodern paradigms, classical archetype theory has largely become a drowning genre. Despite the archetypal school of James Hillman and his contemporaries and the archetype debates that captured our attention over two decades ago, contemporary Jungians are preoccupied with the lived reality of the existential subject and the personal unconscious over the collective transpersonal forces derived from archaic ontology. Archetypal Ontology will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, transpersonal psychologists, cultural theorists, anthropologists, religious scholars, and many disciplines in the arts and humanities, analytical psychology, and post-Jungian studies. (shrink)

In this article, I consider recent debates on the notion of procreative liberty, to argue that reproductive freedom can be understood as a form of positive freedom—that is, the freedom to make oneself according to various ethical and aesthetic principles or values. To make this argument, I draw on Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics. Both adopting and adapting Foucault’s notion of ethics as a practice of the self and of liberty, I argue that reproductive autonomy requires enactment to gain (...) meaning within the life contexts of prospective parents. Thus, I propose a shift away from the standard negative model of freedom that sees it solely as a matter of noninterference or nonimpedance, a view advocated by major commentators such as John Harris and John Robertson. Instead, reproduction should be understood as a deeply personal project of self-making that integrates both negative and positive freedom. (shrink)

Buddhist Character Analysis. Robert Mann and Rose Youd. Aukana, Bradford-on-Avon 1992. 130 pp. £6.95.

The theory which holds that in the Tractatus a thought is a psycholo-gical entity is foundational to important interpretations of Wittgens-tein's philosophical psychology. The view that the theory receives poweful support from Wittgenstein's 1919 letter to Russell has been challenged by Peter Carruthers. This paper argues that Carruthers's challenge fails.

In this paper, I argue that focusing on resilience education fails to appropriately reflect the socio-political nature of character. I define protective epistemic character traits (PECTs) as epistemic character traits which aid students in avoiding, limiting or mitigating harm in the classroom. I argue that the relationship between epistemic character and protection in hostile classrooms is importantly influenced by context in two main ways: (1) the exercise and development of some PECTs may carry significant cost for some students and (2) (...) social and developmental factors may promote or obstruct the development of virtuous PECTs for individual students. I employ two principles from Ian James Kidd’s Critical Character Epistemology – aetiological sensitivity and normative contextualism – and propose a revised approach to resilience education. I argue that this revision requires an increased focus on changing underlying structures of oppression and cautions against teaching a standardised list of epistemic virtues. (shrink)

This article tries to provide a genealogy for, and a characterization of, “critical philosophy of race,” which has only recently begun to gain formal recognition as a subject within the discipline. After discussing the contested periodization of race and racism, the author turns to the related question of whether they have affected the history of Western philosophy from the classical epoch to modernity. Then he reviews contemporary scholarship in critical philosophy of race, looking at standard divisions of the field: metaphysics (...) ; epistemology ; aesthetics ; ethics ; social and political philosophy ; and existentialism, phenomenology, and pragmatism. (shrink)

In their paper Chris Gyngell, Hilary Bowman-Smart and Julian Savulescu offer a careful analysis of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, Genome Editing and Human Reproduction: social and ethical issues but they challenge us to go further still.i I want to suggest that, although their analysis is clear and accurate, its rather ‘molecular’ approach neglects the overall arc and orientation of the report. Furthermore, their conclusions about prospective parents’ reproductive obligations lack sensitivity to the proper evaluative context and offer littlein (...) the way of policy prescriptions. A neglected aspect of the report is the dialectical relation of the three sets of considerations through which it advances: those relating to the individuals directly involved, the wider society in which they live, and the future of human being in general. In particular, Gyngell et al.’s analysis does not attend to how the second principle advanced in the report interacts with the first. It also ignores an important implication of the refusal of a final synthesis, namely, to inaugurate a continual process of reflection between the first two sets of considerations. And it therefore inevitably glosses over practical questions of the mode and venue for this reflection. Something that has not been well understood in the reception …. (shrink)

Suggestions made by Luce Irigaray in her book, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, may offer a solution to a problem in environmental ethics which has much in common with the gender problem: the tendency of the masculine to exploit the Other as “a-place-to-be-in.” If humans are to achieve the ethicality of mutually beneficial, sustainable relating with all beings, we need to initiate an economy of desire which has regard to a reciprocity of receptivity-activity, as a way of safeguarding a clear (...) space open to the kind of relating that makes possible a “permanent becoming” together of all beings. We need to live in a psychic No-Place, to experience our environment as the potentially infinite “Open” of “our-between.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the various types of small, portable heliostat which maintain a beam of sunlight in a constant direction. Used mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century, these instruments were intended for optical demonstrations and the illumination of microscopes and similar apparatus, rather than for astronomical applications. Three basic patterns are distinguished: polar heliostats , biaxial single-mirror heliostats, and coelostats. The theory and geometry of each type is explained, followed by a consideration in chronological order of the (...) corresponding working instruments. Heliostats by Fahrenheit, Meyerstein, 's Gravesande, Gambey, Silbermann, Foucault, Stoney and others are illustrated, and extensive references given. (shrink)