Social theory Books
Peeters Publishers Building Towers: Perspectives on Globalisation
Book SynopsisThis volume contains the papers delivered at a colloquium on globalisation at the UFSIA in 2002. The book takes a multidisciplinary approach in the context of which several perspectives on globalisation are developed. The starting-point of the colloquium was a paper by Hendrik Opdebeeck with the title 'The globalisation discourse and the waning of ethical endeavour'. The issue at stake in this text is a personalistic approach towards a socially and economically most pressing phenomenon. This approach also occurs within a critical atmosphere which clearly points to distortions with respect to ethics. Within a personalistic perspective, founded in a Christian tradition of ethical discourse, it is not a sheer adaptation or legitimisation that is opted for, but a profound and critical reading of the signs of the times.Table of ContentsPrologue: Introduction: Globalisation and the Tragedy of Ethics: Christianity and Globalisation: Community Building and Economic Globalisation: Towards a Sustainable Global Welfare Society: On the Urgency of Broadening the Ethic Dimension in Globalisation: Does Globalisation Make Us Reconsider Marx: Globalism and the Idea of Europe: Culture versus Globalisation in Europe: Globalisation and the Human Genome Project: Globalisation and Securitisation of Risk Bearing: Technology and Globalisation: Epilogue.
£42.20
NUS Press Heroes and Revolution in Vietnam, 1948-1964
Book SynopsisOn the eve of the war against the South Vietnamese regime in 1964, the communist party strove to carve out a new productivist and political elite from the towns and villages of the country. According to a categorization of patriotic exemplarity devised by Ho Chi Minh, ""avant-garde workers,"" ""exemplary soldiers"" and ""new heroes"" would fill the ranks of a ""new model society,"" one in which political virtue would serve as the principle to mobilize the masses. This study presents and analyzes the process by which ""new heroes"" were invented. It first develops a picture of what constituted heroes in Vietnamese tradition and history, and then shows how the new model, effectively a Sino-Soviet import, was imposed, only to be slowly distorted by its own cultural rationale and by specific objectives. Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than half a century to the reconstruction of the national imagination and the development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam.
£31.05