In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today. Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference. Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

Politics & Social Sciences

Seligman, Adam B.

Weller, Robert P.

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today.\nNote that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference.\nCreating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

History

World

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

Social order results from a complex interaction of individual actions, institutional structures, and cultural norms. But just how do they relate to one another, and is any one factor predominant? The answers that social science has provided reflect the competing paradigms of the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches.In this innovative book, two prominent social scientists coming from competing research traditions attempt to chart a course between them, drawing on their respective strengths to present a new model based on a classificatory scheme of market/community/contract/hierarchy. The discussion, which includes a closing dialogue between the authors, covers both methodological and empirical issues, with a review of classic theories of revolution and an analysis of the process of relegitimation following the French Revolution and the Dutch Revolt against the Hapsburgs.

Market and Community: The Bases of Social Order, Revolution, and Relegitimation

Business & Money

Lichbach, Mark I.

Economics

Penn State University Press

Social order results from a complex interaction of individual actions, institutional structures, and cultural norms. But just how do they relate to one another, and is any one factor predominant? The answers that social science has provided reflect the competing paradigms of the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches.
In this innovative book, two prominent social scientists coming from competing research traditions attempt to chart a course between them, drawing on their respective strengths to present a new model based on a classificatory scheme of market/community/contract/hierarchy. The discussion, which includes a closing dialogue between the authors, covers both methodological and empirical issues, with a review of classic theories of revolution and an analysis of the process of relegitimation following the French Revolution and the Dutch Revolt against the Hapsburgs.

Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 37)

Whether looking at divided cities or working with populations on the margins of society, a growing number of engaged academics have reached out to communities around the world to address the practical problems of living with difference. This book explores the challenges and necessities of accommodating difference, however difficult and uncomfortable such accommodation may be. Drawing on fourteen years of theoretical insights and unique pedagogy, CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion—has worked internationally with community leaders, activists, and other partners to take the insights of anthropology out of the classroom and into the world. Rather than addressing conflict by emphasizing what is shared, Living with Difference argues for the centrality of difference in creating community, seeking ways not to overcome or deny differences but to live with and within them in a self-reflective space and practice. This volume also includes a manual for organizers to implement CEDAR’s strategies in their own communities.

Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (Volume 37) (California Series in Public Anthropology)

Wasserfall, Rahel R.

Montgomery, David W.

Reference

University of California Press

As the countries of East-Central Europe struggle to create liberal democracy and the United States and other Western nations attempt to rediscover their own tarnished civil institutions, Adam Seligman identifies the neglect of the idea of "civil society" as a central concern common to both cultures today. Two centuries after its origins in the Enlightenment, the idea of civil society is being revived to provide an answer to the question of how individuals can pursue their own interests while preserving the greater good of society and, similarly, how society can advance the interests of the individuals who comprise it. However, as Seligman shows, the erosion of the very moral beliefs and philosophical assumptions upon which the idea of civil society was founded makes its revival much more difficult than is generally recognized.

The Idea of Civil Society

Social Sciences

Princeton University Press

The Problem of Trust

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role.Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Seligman, Adam B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Seligman, Adam B.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Seligman, Adam B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity

Market and Community: The Bases of Social Order, Revolution, and Relegitimation

Market and Community: The Bases of Social Order, Revolution, and Relegitimation

Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (Volume 37) (California Series in Public Anthropology)

Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 37)

The Idea of Civil Society

The Problem of Trust