This book adopts an explicitly postmodernist perspective of the digital revolution. While exploring issues relating to the re-creation of social life in the digital world, its main focus is on the political economy and in particular the extent to which the paradigms of capitalism and socialism can be mapped as postcapitalism onto this new world.

Solo: Postmodern Explorations provides a postmodern approach to technoscience and economics. Sassower pulls together postmodern motifs and attitudes with his own experience to provide a unique perspective on political history and economics. Solo raises the question of whether it is possible to be an objective observer and what that means for scholarship, especially when it concerns making assessments of other cultures in the developing world. Sassower questions the usefulness of applying e...

Contemporary society is rife with instability. Our active and invasive study of genetics has given life to one of the great specters of biological science: the clone. The scarcity of natural energy sources has led to an increased manipulation of atomic or nuclear energy and regressive environmental policies, resulting in a greater sense of danger for everyone. The promises of economic globalization have, in some cases, been delivered, but in many other ways globalization has created even g...

Raphael Sassower examines the concept of hypocrisy for its strategic potential as a means of personal protection and social cohesion. Given the contemporary context of post-truth, the examination of degrees or kinds of hypocrisy moves from the Greek etymology of masks worn on the theater stage to the Hebrew etymology of the color adjustment of chameleons to their environment. Canonical presuppositions about the uniformity of the mind and the relation between intention and behavior that war...

Envisioning a different mode of economic relations requires a rethinking of the classical frames of references we commonly take for granted. The implicit assumptions that we carry into critical debates are the stumbling blocks for finding useful solutions to age-old economic problems. And these impediments constrict our political imagination.This book asks what are these frames of references? How many of them are worthy of retaining, while others might be discarded? And what new fr...

What is at stake in compromising the Enlightenment ideals of a liberal education with new educational policies engendered by a neo-liberalized, global marketplace? Richly grounding his arguments in the social philosophy of European and American intellectuals, Raphael Sassower explores Western culture's long-standing ambivalence toward 'the life of the mind.' He shows how and why this historical legacy contributes to today's confusion over goals and values in contemporary education. He shed...

Debates over the role of government have intensified in the wake of America's deepest financial crisis since the Depression. This book suggests new ways of moving forward based on the policies and principles that have worked in the past. Sassower shows how American pragmatism has guided the more successful financial policies undertaken during the past century. This means that from the workplace to foreign aid, Americans benefit when they collaborate with each other rather than only pursue ...

Manorial Capitalism, Enslavement, and the Logic of Dividuation proffers three perspectives on the plantation slave economy of the Antebellum South. The first explores the paternal function as exemplified in the structural authority of the lord of the manor both symbolically and operationally. This figure of masculine authority persisted from the Medieval period to orchestrate what is called here Manorial Capitalism. The second examines the exploitation and alienation that epitomiz...

As a student and disciple of Karl Popper and longtime managing editor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Ian C. Jarvie extended the notion of Critical Rationalism to be useful in anthropology, aesthetics, film studies, and various social sciences. In this Festschrift, contributors from a range of interests and disciplines engage with the Popperian legacy and Jarvie’s scholarly and editorial work in Critical Rationalism to contextualize it in the broader, contemporary i...

To what extent is neoliberalism undermining democracy and distorting the values of science? Can and should science be treated as an exemplar for a more dialogic democracy? Are universities and public intellectuals able to develop a more dialogically engaged public? What role should there be for ‘experts’ in a more dialogic democracy? Does information and communications technology present a potential to enhance democracy or increase the control and manipulation of knowledge and the public b...

In order to better understand the conditions of the twenty-first century Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello revisit the twentieth century in Political Blind Spots: Reading the Ideology of Images. Sassower and Cicotello revisit some of the most significant periods in art and politics in the twentieth century paying close attention to the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

"Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine" jettisons the standard medical ethics models of "rights" language and shows how the bioethical problems that receive attention from the media and the public are related to and are explicable in terms of the epistemological foundations of science and medicine. These epistemological concerns include how medical knowledge is established (scientific validity), how medical protocols are administered (checks and balances), how medical certainty is evalu...