Politics and the Human Body: Assault on Dignity / Edition 1

by Jean Bethke Elshtain, J. Timothy Cloyd

Overview

Who or what determines the right to die? Do advancing reproductive technologies change reproductive rights? What forces influence cultural standards of beauty? How do discipline, punishment, and torture reflect our attitudes about the human body?

In this challenging new book, Jean Bethke Elshtain, a nationally recognized scholar in political science and philosophy, and J. Timothy Cloyd, a strong new voice in social and political science, have assembled a collection of thought-provoking essays on these issues written by some of the finest minds of our day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826512604
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	10/15/1995
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

J. Timothy Cloyd earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in 1991. He served as Coordinator for the Program in Social and Political Thought at Vanderbilt University from 1991 to 1994.

Jean Bethke Elshtain has written extensively on political philosophy, feminism, reproductive technology, the family, and the ethics of political and social thought and action. Her ten books include Women, Militarism, and War, The Family in Political Thought, and Just War Theory. She currently serves as Laura Spellman Rockefeller Chair of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Contents
Section One: Bodies Perfect, Bodies Everlasting, Bodies Bought and Sold
Terra Es Animata: On Having A Life
Gilbert Meilaender
The New Eugenics and Feminist Quandaries
Jean Bethke Elshtain
The Dream of the Human Genome
Richard C. Lewontin
The Matter of Baby M
Judge C. J. Wilentz
"Surrogate Mothering" and Women's Freedom: A Critique of Contracts for Human Reproduction
Mary Lyndon Shanley
Section Two: Suffering and Pain: The Body Beleaguered and Besieged
Pain, Suffering, and Death in the ICU
Arthur P. Wheeler, M.D.
Suffering in Chronic Illness
Eric J. Cassell
A Reflection on Pain and Embodiment
Richard M. Zaner
Section Three: Organs for Sale or Rent: Progress or Pathology
Organs For Sale? Propriety, Property and the Price of Progress
Leon Kass, M.D.
The Case for Commerce in Organ Transplantation
James F. Blumstein
Section Four: Misguided Compassion, Disciplined Subjects, Torture as Politics, and Slavery as Social Death
Killing Compassion
Stanley Hauerwas
Selling Bodies
David Steiner
Democratic Space: A Study of Political Excess in Foucault's Thought
Charles E. Scott
Torture, Human Rights, and the Body
J. Timothy Cloyd
The Slave Body: Authority, Alienation, and Social Death
Orlando Patterson
Notes
About the Authors