By Paul Hollander
Paul Hollander's most recent publication is an understated, wry, and infrequently hilarious choice of reflections at the profound hyperlink among anti-Americanism and the delusions and wishes stirred up via modernity. Hollander's publication is wealthy in truth and bright, direct statement; a sociologist by way of career, he practices anything with reference to the nineteenth-century Tocquevillean number of the self-discipline and eschews the abstruse conception, do-gooding mawkishness, and quantitative pedantry that plague his box and academe at huge. the one Superpower includes many delights of this cringe-inducing type; Hollander is a grasp at unveiling lame self-importance, the psychologically soiled and suspect. . . . Hollander's booklet is a vital reminder in a time while not only the highbrow however the usual American turns out to cleave ever extra dangerously to a presumptuous wish for switch and development, which (so it truly is was hoping) will vague the elemental barriers and shortcomings of lifestyles itself.
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Additional info for The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism
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On the one hand, grievous human rights violations led him to support the 1991 UN-sanctioned Persian Gulf War, which was provoked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, as well as the 1999 NATO-led intervention against Yugoslavia over its violent military escapade in Kosovo. On the other hand, he objected— again on human rights grounds—to the conduct of these interventions, which caused heavy civilian casualties. S. invasion of Iraq for bypassing UN approval and violating international conventions governing warfare (DW 26–36, 85–112, 179–82).
23. , 246. 16 Habermas uncover the various powers in society that threaten to undermine and distort these norms. 24 Habermas thus denies that the standards of social critique are immanent in the historical dynamics of particular societies. A more scientifically responsible reconstruction of social evolution, he hopes, might establish (if successfully carried out) very abstract norms that transcend their concrete embodiment by any factual society. This presumes, Habermas believes, that they can be grounded in the very process that underlies social evolution, namely, in the process of reasoning that propels learning within institutions that are responsible for cultural and social rationalization.
For now, it suffices to note that Weber closely linked rationalization to secularization, or the gradual substitution of rational attitudes oriented toward calculated success in the material world for spiritual attitudes oriented toward salvation in the beyond. Rationalization entails the “disenchantment of the world” and paves the way for capitalism and its individualist ethic of work and responsibility. Although Weber had argued that the roots of rationalization extended back to Protestant Christianity, which developed certain ethical possibilities peculiar to Judeo-Christian culture, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that its origins were archaic.