Individualism and Public Life: A Modern Dilemma

by Ralph Ketcham

Overview

In the spirit of recent works such as Habits of the Heart and The Closing of the American Mind, Ralph Ketcham's Individualism and Public Life asks whether the individualism which has made possible so many of the material advances we enjoy may also be the cause of the shortcomings troubling our society today.

By tracing the development of individualism from its origins in classical and Judeo-Christian traditions, and enlisting the insights of East Asian cultures, Ketcham re-evaluates the individualism which characterizes contemporary American society. He then poses a new politics of the public interest, including revised ideas of citizenship, leadership, and decision-making in a grand attempt to reconcile the individualism of American liberalism with a healthy conception of public life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631157731
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	01/08/1991
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.31(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

Ralph Ketcham is Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

Paradoxes, 1945-85

Of Allied victory and the American century

Of suburbia and the American way of life

Of education

Of affluence

Of pluralistic politics

Of world power

Of therapy and humanistic psychology

Of America as a civilization

Individualism in Western culture

Greek social individualism

Judeo-Christian autonomous individualism

A tension in citizenship

The Renaissance, the Reformation, and puritanism

The commercial spirit

Science and empiricism

Romanticism and Darwin

John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century liberalism

Ambiguous legacy for twentieth-century America

East Asian counterpoint: the shadow of Confucius

The divergence of West and East

A morality of relationship

Eastern and Western ideas of self

Eastern and Western ideas of the state

The Japanese encounter with the West

Society and psyche in modern Japan

The public, the private, and democracy in East and West

Public responsibility, order, and law in East Asia

A different democracy in Japan

Individualism and the public interest in the 1980s

Individualism re-reconsidered

Education for citizenship?

Public-spirited and laissez-faire utopianism

A jeffersonian model of citizenship

Individualism, pluralism, and the leader as broker

Leadership and ideal right

Conflict of interest politics

Decision-making and human nature

The whole: more than the sum of the parts?

Deciding on a law of the sea

A politics of the public interest