Search results for ""Author Béla Kapossy""

In the winter of 1807, while Berlin was occupied by French troops, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented fourteen public lectures that have long been studied as a major statement of modern nationalism. Yet Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation have also been interpreted by many as a vision of a cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism.This new edition of the Addresses is designed to make Fichte's arguments more accessible to English-speaking readers. The clear, readable, and reliable translation is accompanied by a chronology of the events surrounding Fichte's life, suggestions for further reading, and an index. The groundbreaking introductory essay situates Fichte's theory of the nation state in the history of modern political thought. It provides historians, political theorists, and other students of nationalism with a fresh perspective for considering the interface between cosmopolitanism and republicanism, patriotism and nationalism.

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Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives.In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it.Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

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In the winter of 1807, while Berlin was occupied by French troops, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented fourteen public lectures that have long been studied as a major statement of modern nationalism. Yet Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation have also been interpreted by many as a vision of a cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism.This new edition of the Addresses is designed to make Fichte's arguments more accessible to English-speaking readers. The clear, readable, and reliable translation is accompanied by a chronology of the events surrounding Fichte's life, suggestions for further reading, and an index. The groundbreaking introductory essay situates Fichte's theory of the nation state in the history of modern political thought. It provides historians, political theorists, and other students of nationalism with a fresh perspective for considering the interface between cosmopolitanism and republicanism, patriotism and nationalism.

Read more less