By Richard Stivers
Arguing that the ideology of freedom and equality at the present time bears little resemblance to its eighteenth-century counterpart, Richard Stivers examines how those values were considerably remodeled in a technological civilization. as soon as considered a type of own estate and a side of the glory of the person, the context of freedom and equality this present day is technological ahead of it's political and monetary and is usually now mostly considered in collective phrases. targeting the paintings of Jacques Ellul and Max Weber, Stivers strains the improvement of freedom and equality in Enlightenment suggestion and American heritage after which proceeds to debate their present ideologies, realities, and illusions.
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Example text
There are a number of reasons for this convergence of understanding. The Western idea of human right was universal in theory if not in practice. Although it was never applied to all humans (slaves, women, minorities, workers, non-property holders), the concept of human rights should be applied to all humans. ”49 By this he means that in proclaiming something to be a human right we are insisting that the status of being human necessarily implies certain functions, among which are rights. For example, the right to free speech is a function of being and acting as a human.
Colin Campbell ties the ethic of consumption to the Romantic definition of the self as infinite possibility: the unending search for new and intense experience. 38 The fourth format, the lifestyle format, associates the product or service with a lifestyle one would like to assume. A Lincoln Continental features a well-dressed, attractive, upper-middle class couple getting out of their car to enter an expensive hotel. Or Keystone beer is being drunk by college students having a good time. The second, third, and fourth formats, all symbolic, are concerned respectively with power, identity and self-transformation, and lifestyle.
There is no attempt here to deny the politicization of all issues in the technological society, but rather to discover what drives politics at a deeper level. First, the domination of technology has made power abstract. The power of judgment and decision is not vested in individual managers, experts, and politicians but in the system as a whole. Weber understood this about bureaucracy: specialization is coordinated in a logical system of rules so that power resides in bureaucracy as a system. Ellul extended this idea to technology as a whole, the technological system.
