Word: ethnicity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expected, Democrats kept most of the mayors' jobs in big cities, but in many cases party dissidents or independents bucked the regular organization and won. In Pittsburgh, Interim Mayor Richard Caliguiri, a Democrat who ran as an independent with support from the ethnic wards, beat Democratic candidate Thomas Foerster, a more conventional liberal. It was the third successive mayoralty defeat for the once mighty Pittsburgh machine. In Cleveland, scrappy Dennis Kucinich, 31, a former three-term city councilman, edged out Edward Feighan, 30, the candidate of the regular Democratic organization, and promised a thorough housecleaning at city hall...
...Patterson is long on criticism of ethnicity in its many guiss, he comes up a bit short on substantive solutions to the problems for which it has traditionally served as an answer. Throughout the book he espouses the alternative of a new individualist universalism, envisioning a world in which people respect each other's differences, appreciate each other's individual talents, and come together no longer in "ethnic" but in existential solidarity...
...these philosophical abstractions were the only alternative to ethnic identification that Patterson offered, it could easily be argued that he commits the same error for which he attacks the ethnicity advocates--naively embracing an ideal while ignoring the structural social constraints that keep most of the world's people from realizing...
...does offer, however, some sketchy ideas about the direction in which modern societies should move. The point he stresses most strongly in response to new ethnicity sociologists like Michael Novac, who see a retreat into ethnic culture as a valid response to the dehumanizing aspects of modern industrial society--is that industrial society is here to stay, and that the answer is not to "escape into primordiality," but to accept modernity and think about ways of shaping it. In addition, he warns the peoples of the Third World developing countries that transcendental nationalism, while a necessary credo in the process...
Meanwhile, he has added to the current ethnicity debate a theoretically dazzling and particularly timely commentary in the psychological and cultural sources of romanticized ethnicity and modern nationalism. Intellectually, in its uncanny breadth of reference, Ethnic Chauvinism exemplifies precisely the broad humanistic spirit that Patterson champions, and its voyage both through history and into the depths of the human psyche in search of the key to man's need for ethnic identity puts many of today's more superficial and tendentious studies of ethnicity to shame. Patterson explains that one of the reasons he felt this critique necessary is that...