Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions
This book explores the many different strands in the language of civil society from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Through a series of case-studies it investigates the applicability of the term to a wide range of historical settings. These include 'state interference', voluntary associations, economic decision-making, social and economic planning, the 'bourgeois public sphere', civil society in wartime, the 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' of women, and relations between the state, the voluntary sector, and individual citizens. The contributors suggest that the sharp distinction between civil society and the state, common in much continental thought, was of only limited application in a British context. They show how past understandings of the term were often very different from (even in some respects the exact opposite of) those held today, arguing that it makes more sense to understand civil society as a phenomenon that varies between differenc cultures and periods, rather than a universally applicable set of principles and procedures.
In this important study Ernst Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language and myth there lies an unconscious "grammar" of experience, whose categories and canons are not those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical "logic" is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, and that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry and myth.
Religion and State - The Muslim Approach to Politics The author argues that Muslims had never previously faced a material and cultural challenge such as the West presented them during the last two centuries; and that this modern-times challenge has been more severe for Muslims than for any other peoples. “Islam and the West, it can be argued, is a special case.” From this base, he sketches the Muslim leaders’ generally accommodationist responses to the West and the concurrent decline in Islamic influence. The leaders imbued the public sphere with an activist spirit and educated much larger numbers of students. But these “secularizing, centralizing, nationalizing” states also created impossible expectations of themselves that they completely failed to deliver on. This failure provided an opening for the shunted-aside Islamists to have their say. And the rest, as they say, is history. – Daniel Pipes
