Max Lerner - Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era
Here you can read online Max Lerner - Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 1941, publisher: Routledge, genre: Science / Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era
- Author:
- Publisher:Routledge
- Genre:
- Year:1941
- City:London
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Ideas for the Ice Age is a companion volume to Max Lerners classic work Ideas Are Weapons. Both were written mostly in the 1930s, as products of a period when the democratic idea was under heavy siege from totalitarian ideologies of the right and left., In its focus, Ideas for the Ice Age is a study of the task of democracy in a revolutionary era, an enterprise that has taken on new urgency in the post-Communist world. For Lerner this task comprises four aspects around which the book is organized: the task of winning the future for American democracy, and planning its organization; the problem of selecting out those elements of a usable past which, when strengthened and extended, can assure a livable future; the problem of acting decisively in moments of international crisis; and the problem of strengthening democracy at home and completing its unfinished business., Within this framework, Lerner selects ideas and personalities that have decisively shaped the modern mind. The selections have lost none of their original timeliness. Among the wide range of figures considered here are Machiavelli, Franz Kafka, Randolph Bourne, Harold Laski, John Strachey. and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lerner reflects as well on the offices, institutions, and constitutional questions of American democracy in moments of historical crisis. For a new generation of readers, this gallery of thinkers will be essential reading, a must for students of American studies, the history of ideas, and political theory.
Max Lerner: author's other books
Who wrote Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Max Lerner
Infinite Ideas
Max Lerner
Sonia Alonso
Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Ideas for the Ice Age
Originally published in 1941 by The Viking Press
Published 1993 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2019 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
New material this edition copyright 1993 by Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 92-1307
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lerner, Max, 1902-
Ideas for the Ice Age: studies in a revolutionary era/Max Lerner; with a
new introduction by the author.
p. cm.
Originally published in 1941 by The Viking PressT.p. verso.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-56000-595-5
1. Democracy. 2. Totalitarianism. 3. DemocracyUnited States. 4.
United StatesPolitics and government I. Title.
LC475 1992
320.5dc20
92-1307
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-595-7 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-52563-4 (hbk)
FOR
Bruce Bliven
journalist and friend in any age
Contents
The Case of the Spanish Embargo (1938)
The Supreme Court Revolution
The Personnel of the Supreme Court
Keynes Meets Marx
Roosevelt as Symbol
Guide
What Triggers History?
I T IS a daunting thing for a writer to republish a volume of his collected essays a half-century after its original publication (in 1941). He runs the risk inherent in such a venturethat some of the essays, written under the urgency of events at the time, will have been overtaken by the storms of the intervening years. Yet what counts in any theory of the deep structures of historical change is not the transitory events, whose acceleration is one of the signs of the twentieth century, but the inner reality at the heart of the ideas that give the events their meaning.
It is with these ideas that the present volume concerns itselfwith their mutations under stress but also their underlying viability, with the way they survive the efforts to twist and distort them, andmost of allwith their animating force. For it is this force which gives the idea the power to conscript the energies and stir the actions and passions of widely diverse people and cultures.
It is critical for the reader to understand that the essays presented here were meant as part of the same larger intellectual venture as those which comprised my earlier (1939) volume, Ideas are Weapons. They were both intended, as I put it in 1939, as adventures in the history and uses of ideas.
Both emerged out of a basic methods of approach to the task of the historian of ideas. Yet the two volumes are different. The differences are conditioned by the changing force-field within which ideas work out their history.
Summarily put, the acceleration of dark events during the two years that separated the books darkened my own mood as well. In 1939 America was just beginning to awaken from its isolationist slumber. The intervening years saw the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the division of Poland between the two totalitarian powers, the invasion of the Low Countries, the conquest of Norway, the collapse of France, the air Blitz over England, the invasion of Russia.
Every day brought its fresh headlines of looming disaster. We watched as nations collapsed like dominos before Hitlers triumphant armies. The prospect that he would be able to lay the foundation for his vaunted thousand-year Reich seemed less improbable than it had been. No one in the West who experienced those years can forget their poignancy and pain.
Little wonder that my mood was a bleak one. It was reflected in my choice of the Ice Age as the master metaphor for the volume. I knew of course that because of its association with the geological ice age it suggested the terminal visions of mans span on earth that had obsessed a number of modem writers. My own use of it was instrumental. It was meant to suggest the darkness of a society stripped of its freedoms, its cultural heritage, its human meanings, one that would envelop us unless we acted in concert, decisively, to rescue ourselves and assure a future for our children.
The time was short. When I sent the book to my editor at Viking, in the summer of 1941, America had not yet entered the war. Hitlers armies in Russia had not yet encountered their nemesis, General Winter, and Pearl Harbor was still undreamt of. Yet even as we sent aid to the British and Russians and hung on the news from both fronts, it became clear that only Americas massive economic and human war potential could redress Hitlers advantage and wrest a hard-won victory from his grasp.
This was the psychological climate within which I was writing. It gave a certain skin-of-our-teeth edge to a number of the essays. It was a time of disintegration of fighting faiths, one of doubt about first principles. We were witnessing the breaking of established nations and the shaping of barbarous new ideologies. Worst of all, there was the self-flaggelation of the intellectual elites, and their despair about democratic survival. Thus I found myself fighting not only the traditional isolationism of the Right but also the more dangerous isolationism of the Left, based on conscience and scruple over the costs of survival to democracy itself.
There was much to be done, and there was a certain delight of battle in urging it. We had to establish the principle of collective security, which I had staked out in my first book, It is Later Than You Think. We had to do it swiftly, with whatever allies offered themselves, to buy time for completing the unfinished business of democracy. In our harsh age we had to claim the future, even if it meant the very real risk of being thrust into war, with incalculable results. Meanwhile we would also have to organize a war-readiness economy and society that would severely strain our peacetime habits and institutions.
My opening essay, The War as Revolution, struck a theme that was to echo through a number of the others as wellthat the war was itself a revolution, that it came out of the failure to organize a viable peace after World War I which made a Hitler possible, that it showed up the inadequacies of a world of nation-states acting in isolation rather than in concord; that we had failed to recognize the impact of the new technologies of warfare, of mass communication, of propaganda and persuasion; that the revolution demanded a strong central authority within nations, and a dynamic both of leadership and administration; that it pointed to a postwar world in which the viable economic units would be not individual nations but national blocs; that it had underlined the incompleteness of a political and moral discourse that failed to reckon with the irrationals of mens thinking andalong with the life of reasonthe reality of evil.
If there was a militant instrumentalism behind my use of the idea of revolution, it was true of the other ideas that engaged me in both my Ideas volumes. I knew the liberal doctrine that ideas would triumph out of their validity or fall out of their falsehood, and I thought it was poppycock. Unless we fought valorously for our ideas we could scarcely complain if they failed to fight for us.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era»
Look at similar books to Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Infinite Ideas
Max Lerner
Sonia Alonso
Reviews about «Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era»
Discussion, reviews of the book Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.