Books by "David G. Woodcock"
7 books found
Man & Work provides a comprehensive overview of European literature focusing on the changing role of work and its impact on industrial society. The problem of work and its role in society is of fundamental importance to our civilization. Work is economic necessity; yet the relationship of man to work cannot be limited to physical survival alone, since it is inextricably linked with our humanity. In tracing the various related and contrasting views David Meakin covers such vital topics as the nostalgia for roots and permanence, the exaltation of technology, the emergence of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, and the concept of creativity, which leads on to the relationship between art and work, and the idea of non-fragmented, organic living. The dangers of the ethic of work, in particular its exploitation by fascist ideologies, are also considered. Fully integrating both the literary and sociological evidence, the argument ranges widely from the thought of Marx, Freud, Marcuse, Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris, Huizinga, Péguy, and Simone Weil to the writings of Lawrence, Hardy, Tolstoy, Jünger, Kaiser, Zola, Camus, and Wesker. The author concludes by surveying various solutions proposed and argues the urgency of such speculation for the future of democracy in its deepest sense. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy and sociology.
This intellectual portrait of Romain Rolland (1866-1944)--French novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in 1915--focuses on his experiments with political commitment against the backdrop of European history between the two world wars. Best known as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel, Jean-Christophe, Rolland was one of those nonconforming writers who perceived a crisis of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great War, and who consciously worked to discredit and reshape that society in the interwar period. Analyzing Rolland's itinerary of engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies aspects of European cultural history and helps decipher the ambiguities at the heart of all forms of intellectual engagement.Moving from text to context, Fisher organizes the book around a series of debates--Rolland's public and private collisions over specific committed stands--introducing the reader to the polemical style of French intellectual discourse and offering insight into what it means to be a responsible intellectual. Fisher presents Rolland's private ruminations, extensive research, and reexamination of the function and style of the French man of letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with five styles of commitment: oceanic mysticism linked to progressive, democratic politics; free thinking linked to antiwar dissent; pacifism and, ultimately, Gandhism; antifacism linked to anti-imperialism, antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, most controversially, fellow traveling as a form of socialist humanism and the positive side of antifascism. Fisher views Rolland's engagement historically and critically, showing that engaged intellectuals of that time were neither naive propagandists nor dupes of political parties.David James Fisher makes a case for the committed writer and hopes to re-ignite the debate about commitment. For him, Romain Rolland sums up engagement in a striking, dialectical formula:
Examines an alternative to the old patterns of living and working in the prevailing social system—the communal work place where work, recreation, and living space are brought together in a unified setting. The authors deal with a number of questions the communal work group faces, including the selection of projects, the choice of technologies and legal structure, and the means for determining economic viability. Past American and European communitarian movements are traced, as well as the nature and limitations of the new community experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.
From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. This book succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. Goodway argues that a recovered anarchist tradition could—and should—be a touchstone for contemporary political radicals. Moving seamlessly from Aldous Huxley and Colin Ward to the war in Iraq, this challenging volume will energize leftist movements throughout the world.