Word: social
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Walzer's argument that all social criticism should be akin to the textual interpretation of a book both the critic and criticized party have read is not totally convincing. If Walzer's analogy were complete, for example, we would have to write or co-author as well as read all those books we criticize. Hermeneutics, to give Walzer's interpretive model its formal title, is a fascinating philosophical strategy with a massive history in European thought. But its application to political criticism needs more analysis and justification than has yet been generated...
WALZER'S ARGUMENT that the social critic is less damaging and more constructive if he uses arguments internal to a particular society's experience is likewise provocative but inconclusive. In other writings, he has insisted that people should enjoy the right of self-determination--not because their particular histories embody such rights but because they are human beings...
...languages, that of American democracy on the one hand and that of the Jewish shtetl on the other? Such an argument would account for Walzer often slipping into a language of universal human rights. But it would explain equally well why Walzer finds in textual criticism his model for social criticism. Has not the community of which he is a part survived by finding a homeland in religious texts...
...make shoes again. To the old man's surprise and delight, his sons return home from the modern shoe plant they manage and join him at an activity both familiar and strange to them. The sons are engaged in a practice wrenched from its original circumstances, geography and social environment, yet it is one that allows them to be a family again; it is a practice that is somehow their own. They, like Walzer, have become communitarians who must find their home in memories, memories of a life that lies back across...
Winthrop police found the body of Professor of Education and Social Psychology Lawrence Kohlberg earlier this week, bringing to an end a three-month investigation into his disappearance...