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Overview
Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity.
He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the sans-culottes before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.
Synopsis
Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity.
He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the sans-culottes before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.
Booknews
A political scientist who admits lacking the specialized tools and knowledge of historians looks at the bonding of young bourgeois Ivy Leaguers turned radicals in and around the 1960s. He finds that their brotherhood, presumably based on opposition to the establishment, was in fact founded on self-hatred, which he describes as yet another typical element of bourgeois life and thought. Relying heavily on their own words and the views of philosophers, he contends that revolution--indeed battle of any kind--can lead only to a false fraternity that cannot be carried back into civil society. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.