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Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

: This page is about the sociological concept. Bureaucracy is also the name of a computer game. Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science. It refers to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules is socially organized. This office organization is characterized by regularized procedure, formal division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships. Examples of everyday bureaucracies include governments, armed forces, corporations, hospitals, courts, ministries, or schools.

Origin of the concept

Bureaucracy is derived from the word bureau, used from the early 18th century in Western Europe not just to refer to a writing desk, but to an office, i.e. a workplace where officials worked. The original French meaning of the word "bureau" was the baize used to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before the French Revolution of 1789, and from there rapidly spread to other countries. The Greek suffix -kratia or kratos - means "power" or rule. Bureaucracy thus basically means office power or office rule, the rule of the officialdom. In a letter of July 1, 1764, the French Baron de Grimm declared: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself. The late Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay sometimes used to say: 'We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania.' Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy". In another letter of July 15, 1765 Baron Grimm wrote also: "The real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and intendants are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist" (Baron de Grimm and Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 1753-69, 1813 edition, Vol. 4, p. 146 & 508 - cited by Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, p. 16). This quote refers to a traditional controversy about bureaucracy, namely the perversion of means and ends so that means become ends in themselves, and the greater good is lost sight of; as a corollary, the substitution of sectional interests for the general interest. The suggestion here is that, left uncontrolled, the bureauracy will become increasingly self-serving and corrupt, rather than serving society. However, bureaucracy existed long before words and theories were devised to describe it in detail. The Chinese Song dynasty (960 AD) for example constructed a centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. This system of rule led to a much greater concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than was achieved in previous dynasties.

Karl Marx and bureaucracy

In Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism, the historical origin of bureaucracy is to be found in four sources: religion, the formation of the state, commerce and technology. Thus, the earliest bureaucracies consisted of castes of religious clergy, officials and scribes operating various rituals, and armed functionaries specifically delegated to keep order. In the historical transition from primitive egalitarian communities to a civil society divided into social classes and estates, occurring about 10,000 years ago, authority is increasingly centralised in, and enforced by a state apparatus existing separately from society. This state formulates, imposes and enforces laws, and levies taxes, giving rise to an officialdom enacting these functions. Most importantly, the right of ordinary people to carry and use weapons of force becomes increasingly restricted; forcing other people to do things becomes increasingly the right of the state authorities only. But the growth of trade and commerce adds a new, distinctive dimension to bureaucracy, insofar as it requires the keeping of accounts and the processing/ recording of transactions, as well as the enforcement of legal rules governing trade. If resources are increasingly distributed by prices in markets, this requires extensive and complex systems of record-keeping, management and calculation, conforming to legal standards. Eventually, this means that the total amount of work involved in commercial administration outgrows the total amount of work involved in government administration. In modern capitalist society, private sector bureaucracy is larger than government bureaucracy, if measured by the number of administrative workers in the division of labour as a whole. Some corporations nowadays have a turnover larger than the national income of whole countries, with large administrations supervising operations. A fourth source of bureaucracy inheres in the technologies of mass production, which require many standardised routines and procedures to be performed. Even if mechanisation replaces people with machinery, people are still necessary to design, control, supervise and operate the machinery. The technologies chosen may not be the ones that are best for everybody, but which create incomes for a particular class of people or maintain their power. This type of bureaucracy is nowadays often called a technocracy, which owes its power to control over specialised technical knowledge. In Marx's theory, bureaucracy rarely creates new wealth by itself, but rather controls, co-ordinates and governs the production, distribution and consumption of wealth. The bureaucracy as a social stratum derives its income from the appropriation of part of the social surplus product of human labour. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc. Bureaucracy is therefore always a cost to society, but this cost may be accepted insofar as it makes social order possible, and maintains it. Nevertheless there are constant conflicts about this cost, because it has the big effect on the distribution of incomes; all producers will try to get the maximum return from what they produce, and minimise administrative costs. Typically, in epochs of strong economic growth, bureaucracies proliferate; when economic growth declines, a fight breaks out to cut back bureaucratic costs. Whether or not a bureaucracy as a social stratum can become a genuine ruling class depends greatly on the prevailing property relations and the mode of production of wealth. In capitalist society, the state typically lacks an independent economic base, finances many activities on credit, and is heavily dependent on levying taxes as a source of income. Therefore, its power is limited by the costs which private owners of the productive assets will tolerate. If, however, the state owns the means of production itself, the state bureaucracy can become much more powerful, and act as a ruling class or power elite. Because in that case, it directly controls the sources of new wealth, and manages or distributes the social product. This is the subject of Marxist theories of bureaucratic collectivism. Marx himself however never theorised this possibility in detail, and it has been the subject of much controversy among Marxists. The core organisational issue in these disputes concerns the degree to which the administrative allocation of resources by government authorities and the market allocation of resources can achieve the social goal of creating a more free, just and prosperous society. Which decisions should be made by whom, at what level, so that an optimal allocation of resources results? This is just as much a moral-political issue as an economic issue. Central to the Marxian concept of socialism is the idea of workers' self-management, which assumes the internalisation of a morality and self-discipline among people that would make bureaucratic supervision and control redundant, together with a drastic reorganisation of the division of labour in society. Bureaucracies emerge to mediate conflicts of interest on the basis of laws, but if those conflicts of interest disappear, bureaucracies would also be redundant. Marx's critics are however skeptical of the feasibility of this kind of socialism, given the continuing need for administration, and the propensity of people to put their own self-interest before the communal interest. That is, the argument is that self-interest and the communal interest might never coincide, or, at any rate, can always diverge significantly. In Adam Smith's theory of the "hidden hand" of the market, the general interest is usually best served if individuals pursue their own self-interest, and often free markets are seen as the best antidote to bureaucracy. This however is partly a fallacy, since the operation of markets also requires a large amount of administration, and does not remove conflict of commercial interest. Thus, the operation of markets is itself a source of bureaucracy.

Max Weber on bureaucracy

Max Weber has probably been one of the most influential users of the word in its social science sense. He is well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him; a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is—if basically mistakenly—called "Weberian civil service". However, contrary to popular belief, "bureaucracy" was an English word before Weber; the Oxford English Dictionary cites usage in several different years between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864. Weber described the ideal type bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that preceded it, which he characterized as charismatic domination and traditional domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is part of legal domination. However, he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a decision must be adopted to an individual case. According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a leveling effect on social and economic differences and implementation of a system of authority that is practically indestructible. Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:
- the historical and administrative reasons for the process of bureaucratization (especially in the Western civilisation)
- the impact of the rule of law upon the functioning of bureaucratic organisations
- the typical personal orientation and occupational position of a bureaucratic officials as a status group
- the most important attributes and consequences of bureaucracy in the modern world A bureaucratic organisation is governed by the following seven principles: # official business is conducted on a continuous basis # official business is conducted with strict accordance to the following rules: ## the duty of each official to do certain types of work is delimited in terms of impersonal criteria ## the official is given the authority necessary to carry out his assigned functions ## the means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and conditions of their use strictly defined # every official's responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal # officials do not own the resources necessary for the performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for their use of these resources # official and private business and income are strictly separated # offices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited, sold, etc.). # official business is conducted on the basis of written documents A bureaucratic official:
- is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis of conduct
- exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with impersonal rules, and his loyalty is enlisted on behalf of the faithful execution of his official duties
- appointment and job placement are dependent upon his technical qualifications
- administrative work is a full-time occupation
- work is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of advancement in a lifetime career An official must exercise his judgment and his skills, but his duty is to place these at the service of a higher authority; ultimately he is responsible only for the impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his personal judgment if it runs counter to his official duties.

Criticism

As Max Weber himself noted, in reality no ideal type organisation can exist. Thus the real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal model. Each of Weber's seven principles can degenerate:
- Vertical hierarchy of authority can became chaotic, some offices can be omitted in the decision making process, there may be conflicts of competence;
- Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;
- Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recrutation and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
- Officials can try to avoid responsibility and seek anonymity by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents) Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems:
- Overspecialisation, making individual officials not aware of larger consequences of their actions
- Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;
- A phenomenon of group thinking - zealotry, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organisation which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organisation unable to change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;
- A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book) - as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity raises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory rules In the most extreme examples, bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process has been criticised by many philosophers and writers (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt).

Bureaucracy (computer game)

Bureaucracy is an interactive fiction computer game released by Infocom in 1987, scripted by popular comic science fiction author Douglas Adams. The player is challenged to confront a long and complicated series of bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a recent change of address. Mail isn't being delivered, bank accounts are inaccessible, and nothing is as it should be. The game includes a measure of simulated blood pressure which rises when "frustrating" events happen and lowers after a period of no annoying events. Once a certain blood pressure level is reached, the character's heart bursts and the game ends. While undertaking the seemingly simple task of retrieving misdirected mail, the player encounters a number of bizarre characters, including an antisocial hacker, a paranoid weapons enthusiast, and a tribe of Zalagasan cannibals. At the same time, he or she must deal with impersonal corporations, counterintuitive airport logic, and a hungry llama.

Feelies

Among the extra items, which Infocom called feelies, in the Bureaucracy game package are:
- A pamphlet entitled You're ready to move! from the fictional bank Fillmore Fiduciary Trust
- A flier advertising the fictional magazine Popular Paranoia
- A welcome letter from the player's new employer, Happitec Corporation
- A Fillmore "Better Beezer" credit card application form (each sheet of the triplicate carbon copy form had different instructions and questions)
- A very skinny pencil (similar to those provided at banks to fill out insanely complicated forms)

Notes

According to Adams, the premise of the game was inspired by a real-life experience. Before moving from one address to another in London, Adams filled out several change-of-address forms, including one he submitted in person at his bank. Shortly after settling into his new apartment, he found that his credit card no longer worked. The bank had invalidated his current card and sent a new one to his old address. Adams spent weeks trying to get the bank to correct its mistake, filling out several new forms and talking to several bank officials. The bank finally sent a letter apologizing for the inconvenience; naturally, it was sent to his old address. Although Bureaucracy showed the unmistakeable signs of Adams' humor, the game didn't sell nearly as well as his other collaboration with Infocom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This may be, at least in part, because Infocom was facing grave financial difficulties in 1987. The recent failure of its relational database product Cornerstone was one reason for these difficulties. Advertising budgets were being slashed and personnel from all departments of the company were facing layoffs. In a somewhat surprising move given the author's popularity, Adams' name appears only in small print near the bottom of the box's cover, where a blurb reads "by Douglas Adams and the Staff of Infocom." Infocom rated Bureaucracy as "Advanced" in its difficulty rating system. In a nicely realistic touch, the game begins with a short online "software registration form" displayed on the screen. After the form has been completed, the game uses the given information after appropriately mangling it. (For example, the game will persistently address the player as the wrong gender, and whatever the player enters as "least favorite colour" will appear in numerous descriptions.)

External links

- [http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,2/gameId,474/ MobyGames' entry on Bureaucracy]
- [http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/bureaucracy.html Bureaucracy overview and information]
- [http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/bureaucracy/bureaucracy.html Bureaucracy information from the Infocom Gallery] with photos of the entire contents of the game (manual, feelies, etc.)
- [http://www.infocom-if.org/games/bureaucracy/bureaucracy.html Bureaucracy information from Infocom-if.org] Category:1987 computer and video games Category: Amiga games Category: Apple II games Category: Atari ST games Category: Commodore 64 games Category: DOS games Category: Apple Macintosh games Category: TI-99/4A games Category:Interactive fiction Category:Infocom

Political science

Political science is a social science discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. It is academic, theoretical and research oriented. Fields and subfields of political science include political theory and philosophy, civics and comparative politics, national systems, cross-national political analysis, political development, international relations, foreign policy, international law and politics, public administration, administrative behavior, public law, judicial behavior, and politics and public policy. Approaches to the discipline include classical political philosophy, structuralism, and behavioralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase "political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.

History of political science

Main Article: History of political science

Antecedents of political science

While the study of politics is first found in the Western tradition in Ancient Greece, political science is a late arrival in terms of social sciences. However, the discipline has a clear set of antecedents such as moral philosophy, political philosophy, political economy, history, and other fields concerned with normative determinations of what ought to be and with deducing the characteristics and functions of the ideal state. In each historic period and in almost every geographic area, we can find someone studying politics and increasing political understanding. The antecedents of politics trace their roots back even earlier than Plato and Aristotle, particularly in the works of Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Euripides. Later, Plato analyzed political systems, abstracted their analysis from more literary- and history- oriented studies and applied an approach we would understand as closer to philosophy. Similarly, Aristotle built upon Plato's analysis to include historical empirical evidence in his analysis. During the rule of Rome, famous historians such as Polybius, Livy and Plutarch documented the rise of the Roman Republic, and the organization and histories of other nations, while statesmen like Julius Caesar, Cicero and others provided us with examples of the politics of the republic and Rome's empire and wars. The study of politics during this age was oriented toward understanding history, understanding methods of governing, and describing the operation of governments. With the fall of the Roman Empire, there arose a more diffuse arena for political studies. The rise of monotheism and, particularly for the Western tradition, Christianity, brought to light a new space for politics and political action. During the Middle Ages, the study of politics was widespread in the churches and courts. Works such as Augustine of Hippo's The City of God synthesized current philosophies and political traditions with those of Christianity, redefining the borders between what was religious and what was political. Most of the political questions surrounding the relationship between church and state were clarified and contested in this period. In the Middle East and later other Islamic areas, works such as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Epic of Kings by Ferdowsi provided evidence of political analysis, while the Islamic aristotelians such as Avicenna and later Maimonides and Averroes, continued Aristotle's tradition of analysis and empiricism, writing commentaries on Aristotle's works. During the Italian Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli established the emphasis of modern political science on direct empirical observation of political institutions and actors. Later, the expansion of the scientific paradigm during the Enlightenment further pushed the study of politics beyond normative determinations.

Political science

The advent of political science as a university discipline is evidenced by the naming of university departments and chairs with the title of political science arising in the 1860s. Integrating political studies of the past into a unified discipline is an ongoing project, and the history of political science has provided a rich field for the growth of both normative and positive political science, with each part of the discipline sharing some historical predecessors. In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic and rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior swept the discipline. At the same time that political science moved toward greater depth of analysis and more sophistication, it also moved toward a closer working relationship with other disciplines, especially sociology, economics, history, anthropology, psychology, and statistics. Increasingly, students of political behavior have used the scientific method to create an intellectual discipline based on the postulating of hypotheses followed by empirical verification and the inference of political trends, and of generalizations that explain individual and group political actions. Over the past generation, the discipline placed an increasing emphasis on relevance, or the use of new approaches and methodologies to solve political and social problems.

Contemporary political science

Political scientists study the allocation and transfer of power in decision-making, the roles and systems of governance including governments and international organizations, political behavior and public policies. They measure the success of governance and specific policies by examining many factors, including stability, justice, material wealth, and peace. Some political scientists seek to advance positive theses by analyzing politics. Others advance normative theses, by making specific policy recommendations. The study of politics is complicated by the frequent involvement of political scientists in the political process, since their teachings often provide the frameworks within which other commentators, such as journalists, special interest groups, politicians, and the electorate analyze issues and select options. Political scientists may serve as advisors to specific politicians, or even run for office as politicians themselves. Political scientists can be found working in governments, in political parties or as civil servants. They may be involved with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or political movements. In a variety of capacities, people educated and trained in Political science can add value and expertise to corporations. Private enterprises such as think tanks, research institutes, polling and public relations firms often employ political scientists. In the United States, political scientists known as "Americanists" look at a variety of data including elections, public opinion and public policy such as Social Security reform, foreign policy, U.S. congressional power, and the Supreme Court to name only a few issues. As a discipline, political science is primarily advanced by articles in scholarly journals and academic books. The major journals, which are published by academic presses and are associated with associations of political science, are the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics and British Journal of Political Science, referred to in the discipline as "APSR," "AJPS," "JoP," and "BJPS" respectively. Countless other journals focus on more specific areas of the discipline, for example Legislative Studies Quarterly and Political Research Quarterly.

Current fields of study

Civics and comparative politics involve the comparison of patterns of political development—including forms of government—and processes of political change in different settings or at different times. In the United States and Canada, it may also include regional studies; that is, work focusing on a particular state, province or region. Political theory involves the study of normative questions of government, ideology, regimes, movements, and the history of political philosophy. International relations focuses on the study of the dynamics of relations between states, and, more recently, on transnational issues such as the environment, human trafficking, trade, social movements, labor like co-operatives, or preventing terrorism. The complex interplay of economic and political choices is reflected in the field of political economy where political science tries to understand the normative implications of economic structures and theories. Public Administration studies the implementation, determination and outputs of public policies. It seeks to explain the role of political structure, bureaucratic politics and interest group activity on the public policy output and the policy performance of public sector entities. Political elites and political behavior, and the interplay between them, are studied in the field of political psychology.

External links

- [http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/psusp.html Political Science Resources]
- [http://www.progressiveu.org/ Progressive U] New media from political science students
- [http://www.admu.edu.ph/depts/polsci/courses.html Courses] Political Science Courses
- [http://essays.org.uk/political-science/ Essays on Political Science] Category:Politics
- Category:Humanities occupations ko:정치학 ja:政治学 th:รัฐศาสตร์

Social relation

Social relation can refer to a multitude of social interactions, regulated by social norms, between two or more people, with each having a social position and performing a social role. In sociological hierarchy, social relation is more advanced then behavior, action, social behavior, social action, social contact and social interaction. Social relations form the basis of concepts such as social organisation, social structure, social movement and social system.

Specific meaning

Although Harvard University has featured a "Department of Social Relations" (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term "social relations" is frequently used in social sciences, there is in fact no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social). "Social" connotes association, co-operation, mutual dependence and belonging. It could be argued that a social relation is, in the first instance, simply a relation between people, but more specifically
- a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group,
- a relation between groups of people, or
- a relation between an individual and a group of people. The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class or social stratum, a nation, a population, or a gender etc. This definition contrasts with the relationship between people and inanimate objects.

Examples

In this sense, a social relation is therefore not necessarily identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation of some type, although all these kinds of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to a condition which groups of people have in common or share. For example, the simple statement "Jack and Jill love each other" might refer to a unique interaction between two people, the meaning of which might be difficult to define for an outsider. Yet, Jack and Jill may also be socially related in many different ways, insofar as they both are, as a matter of fact, members of the same or different social groups, and thus their identity is shaped in good part by the fact that they belong to those groups. If we wanted to understand and explain their behaviour, we would need to refer to those social relations. We might establish the milieu they grew up in, their ancestors, the jobs they do, where they lived, who their friends are, and so on, all of which helps explain why they necessarily interact in the way that they do, and not in some other way. At a higher level of abstraction, we might consider two groups which are socially related, for example, although they live in different places, they depend on each other in trading goods and services. At an even higher level of abstraction, we might consider the relationship between an individual and the whole of the world population, or the relationship of the world population to itself. Some might indeed argue that a social relation exists between mortals and God (or the Gods), though others would regard this more as an imaginary relation. In flights of fancy, we could extend the analysis to the relation of all sentient organisms in the universe.

Theorists

However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge of social relations. At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering.

Understanding social relations

There are at least three problems in understanding social relations.
- many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred with the aid of abstractions. This raises the question of how we know they exist, and how they exist.
- reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied (this occurs also in natural sciences; not just in the sense that a biologist is also a biological being, but also even in theoretical physics - cf. the reflections of David Bohm).
- animal and insect populations for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology), and social relations might exist between humans and animals (though some dispute this; they argue that associative relations are confused here with true social relations; a human being could associate with all sorts of things or organisms, without a social relation being involved).

Types of social relations

In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness:
- sub-conscious awareness (studied by e.g. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Milton Erickson).
- conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards) (studied e.g. in phenomenology and general psychology).
- intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association) (studied e.g. in social psychology and sociology).
- objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently, as is developed e.g. in science to a high level).
- reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness - occurring in work, play, love, activism, politics etc.
- transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience - some would include intuition and spirituality under this heading; it is the subject of much writing in religion and New Age thought). Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. the different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind:
- subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children,
- social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions (a person might act as though a social relation exists),
- intersubjective social relations involving shared meanings conveyed through communication,
- objective social relations which exist whether someone is aware of them or not (they might nevertheless be communicated insofar as we communicate with everything we are and do);
- social relations in the process of being transformed from one kind into another, or being interrelated with each other;
- spiritual or intuitive social relations of some kind. As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group.
- A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it;
- s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case;
- a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members;
- a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it;
- a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once, and it might be changing its boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps overlapping with other groups;
- a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification (Cf. the notion of a noosphere). However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist at some level - with the obvious consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification. Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".

References

- Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
- Karl Marx, The German Ideology
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
- Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?
- Piotr Sztompka, Socjologia Category:Sociology

Armed Force

The armed forces of a state are its government sponsored defense and fighting forces and organizations. They exist to further the foreign and domestic policies of their governing body. In some countries paramilitary forces are included in a nations armed forces. Armed force is the use of armed forces to achieve political objectives. The study of the use of Armed Forces is called military science. Broadly speaking, this involves considering offense and defense at three "levels": strategy, operational art, and tactics. All of these areas study the application of the use of force in order to achieve a desired objective.

Organization

Armed forces may be organized as standing forces (e.g. regular army), which describes a professional army that is engaged in no other profession than preparing for and engaging in warfare. In contrast, there is the citizen army. A citizen army (also known as a militia or reserve army) is only mobilised as needed. Its advantage lies in the fact that it is dramatically less expensive (in terms of wealth, manpower, and opportunity cost) for the organizing society to support. The disadvantage is that such a "citizen's army" is less well trained and organized. Historically, professional armies often triumph over much larger citizen armies when engaged in combat. A compromise between the two has a small cadre of professional NCOs (non-commissioned officers) and officers who act as a skeleton for a much larger force. When war comes, this skeleton is filled out with conscripts or reservists (former full-time soldiers who volunteer for a small stipend to occasionally train with the cadre to keep their military skills intact), who form the wartime unit. This balances the pros and cons of each basic organization, and allows the formation of huge armies (in terms of millions of combatants), necessary in modern large scale warfare. The armed forces in many larger countries are divided into an army, an air force, and usually a navy (unless geography dictates otherwise). These divisions may be solely for the purposes of training and support, or may be completely independent branches responsible for conducting operations independently of other services. Most smaller countries have a single organization that encompasses all armed forces employed by the country in question. In larger armed forces the culture between the different branches of a countries armed forces can be quite different. It has been said that "a navy and an air force man equipment" whereas "an army equips men". The state of readiness of a military organisation may be indicated by its DEFCON state (US) or BIKINI state (UK).

Benefits and costs

BIKINI state The obvious benefit to a country in maintaining armed forces is in providing protection from foreign threats, and from internal conflict. In recent decades armed forces personnel have also been used as emergency civil support roles in post-disaster situations. On the other hand they may also harm a society by engaging in counter-productive (or merely unsuccessful) warfare. Expenditure on science and technology to develop weapons and systems sometimes produces side benefits, although some claim that greater benefits could come from targeting the money directly. Excessive expenditure on armed forces can drain a society of needed manpower and material, significantly reducing civilian living standards. If continued over a significant period of time, this results in reduced civilian research and development, degrading the society's ability to improve its infrastructure. This lack of development in turn can affect armed forces in a vicious cycle. See North Korea for a typical modern example of this problem. Transarmament is a recent movement to replace armed forces with nonviolence training and infrastructure.

Armed forces of the world

See :Category:Militaries.

External links

- [http://www.defencetalk.com/ DefenceTalk]
- [http://www.janes.com/defence/ Janes Defence]
- [http://www.HavenWorks.com/military Military News]
- [http://www.militaryindexes.com/ Directory of Online Military Indexes & Records - USA]
- [http://www.DefenseLINK.mil US Military News DefenseLINK.mil]
- [http://www.bdcol.ee/ Baltic Defence College] ja:軍隊 simple:Military zh-cn:武装力量

Hospital

from 1682.]] A hospital today is an institution for professional health care provided in part by physicians and nurses.

Terminology

During the Middle Ages the hospital could serve other functions, such as almshouse for the poor, or hostel for pilgrims. The name comes from Latin hospes (host), which is also the root for the words hotel and hospitality. Some patients just come just for diagnosis and/or therapy and then leave (outpatients); while others are "admitted" and stay overnight or for several weeks or months (inpatients). Hospitals are usually distinguished from other types of medical facilities by their ability to admit and care for inpatients. Grammar of the word differs slightly, with American English preferring that someone is "in the hospital", while Commonwealth English (including some Canadian English) prefers that someone is "in hospital". Commonwealth English also maintains that "an hospital" is the correct usage in situations where the noun in question must be prefixed with an article, (though in practice, it would be highly unusual to hear any speaker of British English say "an hospital" rather than "a hospital"), while in American English, "a hospital" is preferred, as the actual pronunciation of the phrase is easier due to the aspirated 'h' with which the word starts.

Types

The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which is set up to deal with many kinds of disease and injury, and typically has an emergency ward/A&E department to deal with immediate threats to health and the capacity to dispatch emergency medical services. A general hospital is typically the major health care facility in its region, with large numbers of beds for intensive care and long-term care; and specialized facilities for surgery, plastic surgery, childbirth, bioassay laboratories, and so forth. Larger cities may have many different hospitals of varying sizes and facilities. Very large hospitals are often called Medical Centers and usually conduct operations in virtually every field of modern medicine. Types of specialized hospitals include trauma centers, children's hospitals, seniors' hospitals, and hospitals for dealing with specific medical needs such as psychiatric problems (see psychiatric hospital), pulmonary diseases, and so forth. A hospital may be a single building or a campus. Some hospitals are affiliated with universities for medical research and the training of medical personnel. Within the United States, many hospitals are for-profit, while elsewhere in the world most are non-profit. Many hospitals have hospital volunteer programs where people (usually students and senior citizens) can volunteer and provide various ancillary services. A medical facility smaller than a hospital is called a clinic, and is often run by a government agency for health services or a private partnership of physicians (in nations where private practice is allowed). Clinics generally provide only outpatient services.

History

In ancient cultures religion and medicine were linked. The earliest known institutions aiming to provide cure were Egyptian temples. Greek temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius might admit the sick, who would wait for guidance from the god in a dream. The Romans adopted his worship. Under his Roman name Æsculapius, he was provided with a temple (291 BC) on a island in the Tiber in Rome, where similar rites were performed. The first institutions created specifically to care for the sick appeared in India. Brahmantic hospitals were established in Sri Lanka by 431 BC, and King Ashoka founded 18 hospitals in Hindustan c. 230 BC The latter were provided with physicians and nurses, and supported from royal funds. The first teaching hospital, however, where students were authorized to methodically practice on patients under the supervision of physicians as part of their education, was the Academy of Gundishapur in the Persian Empire. Moreover, "to a very large extent, the credit for the whole hospital system must be given to Persia".(A medical history of Persia, C. Elgood, Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 173.) The Romans created valetudinaria for the care of sick slaves, gladiators and soldiers around 100 BC. The adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the empire drove an expansion of the provision of care, but not just for the sick. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. urged the Church to provide for the poor, sick, widows and strangers. It ordered the construction of a hospital in every cathedral town. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil, bishop of Caesarea. The latter was attached to a monastery and provided lodgings for poor and travelers, as well as treating the sick and infirm. There was a separate section for lepers. Medieval hospitals in Europe followed a similar pattern. They were religious communities, with care provided by monks and nuns. (An old French term for hospital is hôtel-Dieu, "hostel of God.") Some were attached to monasteries. Others were independent and had their own endowments, usually of property, which provided income for their support. Some were multi-function. Others were founded specifically as leper hospitals, or as refuges for the poor or for pilgrims. Not all cared for the sick. Meanwhile Muslim hospitals developed a high standard of care between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. Hospitals built in Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries employed up to twenty-five staff physicians and had separate wards for different conditions. State-supported hospitals also appeared in China during the first millennium A.D. In Europe the medieval concept of Christian care evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a secular one, but it was in the eighteenth century that the modern hospital began to appear, serving only medical needs and staffed with physicians and surgeons. Britain led the field. Guy's Hospital was founded in London in 1724 from a bequest by wealthy merchant Thomas Guy. Other hospitals sprang up in London and other British cities over the century, many paid for by private subscriptions. In the British American colonies the Pennsylvania General Hospital was chartered in Philadelphia in 1751, after £2,000 from private subscription was matched by funds from the Assembly. In Continental Europe the new hospitals were generally built and run from public funds. The Charité was founded in 1710. Whatever the financing, by the mid-nineteenth century most of Europe and the United States had established a variety of public and private hospital systems. In the United States the traditional hospital is a non-profit hospital, usually sponsored by a religious denomination. One of the earliest of these "almshouses" in what would become the United States was started by William Penn in Philadelphia in 1713. These hospitals are tax-exempt due to their charitable purpose, but provide only a minimum of charitable medical care. They are supplemented by large public hospitals in major cities and research hospitals often affiliated with a medical school. In the late twentieth century chains of for-profit hospitals have arisen.

External links

- [http://www.ricwoods.com/ Murals in the John Hunter Children's Hospital Newcastle by Australian artist ric woods create a healing envoirnment]
- [http://www.building-history.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Articles/Heritage.htm Jean Manco, The Heritage of Mercy] covers medieval hospitals in Britain.
- [http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/keys/webtours/VQ_P2_10_EN.html Last Resort: Hospital Care in Canada] — Illustrated Historical Essay Category:Healthcare Category:Buildings and structures ja:病院

Ministry (government department)

A ministry is a department of a government, led by a minister. Ministries are usually subordinate to the cabinet, and prime minister, president or chancellor. A government will usually have numerous ministries, each with a specialised field of service. National ministries vary greatly between countries, but some common ones include Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Health. Some countries such as Switzerland, the Philippines and the United States do not use the term "ministry" for their government departments, and instead simply call them departments. In Hong Kong the term "bureau" is used. In Canada, while members of the federal Canadian Cabinet are ministers, they do not head ministries but departments such as the Department of National Defence. Certain Canadian provinces, however, do have ministries such as Ontario which has a Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Natural Resources, etc. See also: cabinet, The Ministry, ministerial responsibility Category:Government

School

:For other uses of the term school, see school (disambiguation). school (disambiguation) A school is most commonly a place designated for learning. The range of institutions covered by the term varies from country to country. In the United Kingdom, the term school refers primarily to pre-university institutions, and these can, for the most part, be divided into primary schools (sometimes further divided into infant school and junior school), and secondary schools. School performance is monitored by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education In North America, the term school can refer to any institute of education, at any level, and covers all of the following: preschool (for toddlers), kindergarten, elementary school, middle school (also called intermediate school or junior high school, depending on specific age groups and geographic region), high school, college, university, and graduate school. In the US, school performance through high school is monitored by each state's Department of Education. Many of the earlier public schools in the United States were one-room schools where a single teacher taught seven grades of boys and girls in the same classroom. Beginning in the 1920s, one-room schools were consolidated into multiple classroom facilities with transportation increasingly provided by kid hacks and school buses. In both, a school may also be a partially autonomous or indeed entirely separate institution, not necessarily a part of a system of compulsory public education at all, dedicated to learning within one particular field, such as a school of economics (e.g. the London School of Economics), a school of dance, or a school of journalism. London School of Economics]] In much of continental Europe, the term school usually applies to primary education, with primary schools that last between six and nine years, depending on the country. It also applies to secondary education, with secondary schools often divided between Gymnasiums and vocational schools, which again depending on country and type of school take between three and six years. The term school is rarely used for tertiary education, except for some upper or high schools (German: Hochschule) which are more accurately translated as colleges.
Records
The King's School, in Canterbury in the south east of England, may be the oldest existing school in the world. It was founded in 597 AD.
Criticism
During the twentieth century traditional schools have been the target of widespread criticism. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste showed how schools help to reproduce class structure. Schools were accused of inhibiting rather than promoting the learning of children, basically by creating fear. People like A.S. Neill tried to create more libertarian schools (Summerhill) while others like John Holt saw home schooling as an alternative.
Bullying
Bullying can be a common problem within many schools. Programs to target bullying have often been introduced, but these are often unsuccessful.
External links

Pro-school

- [http://www.greatschools.net greatschools.net]
- [http://www.eschoolsearch.com/ eschoolsearch.com]
Against school

- [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm John Taylor Gatto, former New York State & New York City Teacher of the Year]
- [http://www.school-survival.net School Survival - Support site for kids who hate school]
Others

- [http://www.whocanteach.com Tutors Network] Category: Education ko:학교 ms:Sekolah ja:学校 simple:School

Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm

Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (December 26, 1723 – December 19, 1807), author, the son of a German pastor, was born at Ratisbon. He studied at the University of Leipzig, where he came under the influence of Gottsched and of JA Ernesti, to whom he was largely indebted for his critical appreciation of classical literature. When nineteen he produced a tragedy, Banise, which met with some success. After two years of study he returned to Ratisbon, where he was attached to the household of Count Schonberg. In 1748 he accompanied August Heinrich, Count Friesen, to Paris as secretary, and he is said by Rousseau to have acted for some time as reader to Frederick, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha. His acquaintance with Rousseau, through a mutual sympathy in regard to musical matters, soon ripened into intimate friendship, and led to a close association with the encyclopaedists. He rapidly obtained a thorough knowledge of the French language, and acquired so perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed effaced. A witty pamphlet entitled Le Petit Prophète de Boeh-mischbroda (1753), written by him in defence of Italian as against French opera, established his literary reputation. It is possible that the origin of the pamphlet is partly to be accounted for by his vehement passion for Mlle Fel, the prima donna of the Italian company. In 1753 Grimm, following the example of the abbé Raynal, began a literary correspondence with various German sovereigns. Raynal's letters, Nouvelles littéraires, ceased early in 1755. With the aid of friends, especially of Diderot and Mme d'Epinay, during his temporary absences from France, Grimm himself carried on the correspondence, which consisted of two letters a month, until 1773, and eventually counted among his subscribers Catherine II of Russia, Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, and many princes of the smaller German States. It was probably in 1754 that Grimm was introduced by Rousseau to Madame d'Epinay, with whom he soon formed a liaison which led to an irreconcilable rupture between him and Rousseau. Rousseau was induced by his resentment to give in his Confessions a wholly mendacious portrait of Grimm's character. In 1755, after the death of Count Friesen, who was a nephew of Marshal Saxe and an officer in the French army, Grimm became secretaire des commandements to the duke of Orleans, and in this capacity he accompanied Marshal d'Estrées on the campaign of Westphalia in 1756-57. He was named envoy of the town of Frankfort at the court of France in 1759, but was deprived of his office for criticizing the comte de Broglie in a despatch intercepted by Louis XV. He was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1775. His introduction to Catherine II of Russia took place at St Petersburg in 1773, when he was in the suite of Wilhelmine of Hesse-Darmstadt on the occasion of her marriage to the czarevitch Paul. He became minister of Saxe-Gotha at the court of France in 1776, but in 1777 he again left Paris on a visit to St Petersburg, where he remained for nearly a year in daily intercourse with Catherine. He acted as Paris agent for the empress in the purchase of works of art, and executed many confidential commissions for her. In 1783 and the following years he lost his two most intimate friends, Mme d'Epinay and Diderot. In 1792 he emigrated, and in the next year settled in Gotha, where his poverty was relieved by Catherine, who in 1796 appointed him minister of Russia at Hamburg. On the death of the empress Catherine he took refuge with Mme d'Epinay's granddaughter, Emilie de Belsunce, comtesse de Bueil. Grimm had always interested himself in her, and had procured her dowry from the empress Catherine. She now received him with the utmost kindness. He died at Gotha on the 19th of December 1807. The correspondence of Grimm was strictly confidential, and was not divulged during his lifetime. It embraces nearly the whole period from 1750 to 1790, but the later volumes, 1773 to 1790, were chiefly the work of his secretary, Jakob Heinrich Meister. At first he contented himself with enumerating the chief current views in literature and art and indicating very slightly the contents of the principal new books, but gradually his criticisms became more extended and trenchant, and he touched on nearly every subject--political, literary, artistic, social and religious--which interested the Parisian society of the time. His notices of contemporaries are somewhat severe, and he exhibits the foibles and selfishness of the society in which he moved; but he was unbiassed in his literary judgments, and time has only served to confirm his criticisms. In style and manner of expression he is thoroughly French. He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle; and it was the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire. His religious and philosophical opinions were entirely negative.

Works

Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique ..., depuis 1753 jusqu'en 1769, was edited, with many excisions, by JBA Suard and published at Paris in 1812, in 6 vols. 8vo; deuxième partie, de 1771 a 1782, in 1812 in 5 vols. 8vo; and troisième partie, pendant une partie des années 1775 et 1776, et pendant les années 1782 a 1790 inclusivement, in 1813 in 5 vols. 8vo. A supplementary volume appeared in 1814; the whole correspondence was collected and published by M. Jules Taschereau, with the assistance of A Chaudé, in a Nouvelle Édition, revue et mise dans un meilleur ordre, avec des notes et des éclaircissements, et oil se trouvent rétablies pour la première fois les phrases supprimées par la censure impériale (Paris, 1829, 15 vols. 8vo); and the Correspondance inédite, et recueil de lettres, poésies, morceaux, et fragments retranchés par la censure impériale en 1812 et 1813 was published in 1829. The standard edition is that of M Tourneux (16 vols., 1877-1882). Grimm's Mémoire Historique sur l'origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l'impératrice Catherine II jusqu'au décès de sa majesté impériale, and Catherine's correspondence with Grimm (1774-1796) were published by J Grot in 1880, in the Collection of the Russian Imperial Historical Society. She treats him very familiarly, and calls him Heraclite, Georges Dandin, etc. At the time of the Revolution she begged him to destroy her letters, but he refused, and after his death they were returned to St Petersburg. Grimm's side of the correspondence, however, is only partially preserved. He signs himself "Pleureur." Some of Grimm's letters, besides the official correspondence, are included in the edition of M Tourneux; others are contained in the Erinnerungen einer Urgrossmutter of K von Bechtolsheim, edited (Berlin, 1902) by Count C Oberndorff.

References

- Mme d'Epinay's Mémoires
- Rousseau's Confessions
- E Scherer, Melchior Grimm (1887)
- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. vii
- KA Georges, Friedrich Meichior Grimm (Hanover and Leipzig, 1904) Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, baron von

Diderot

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer. Born in Langres, Champagne, France in 1713, he was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and was the editor-in-chief of the famous Encyclopédie. Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with his work Jacques le fataliste, which challenged conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas relating to free will. He is also known as the author of the essay Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown, upon which many an article and sermon about consumer desire have been based. He was educated by the Jesuits, and became a bookseller in Paris. In 1743 he married Anne Toinette Champion, a devout Roman Catholic. He had affairs with the writer Madame Puisieux and with Sophie Volland, to whom he was constant for the rest of her life. His letters to her are among the most graphic of all the pictures that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle in Paris.

Early works

Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Stanyan's History of Greece (1743); with two colleagues, François-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of James's Dictionary of Medicine [http://www.harpers.org/AMajesticLiteraryFossil.html] (1746–1748) and about the same date he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), with some original notes of his own. He composed a volume of bawdy stories, the Les bijoux indiscrets (1748); in later years he repented of this work. In 1746 he wrote the Pensées philosophiques (1746), and he presently added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. In 1747 he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first to the extravagances of Catholicism; second, to the vanity of the pleasures of that world which is the rival of the church; and third, to the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world. Diderot's next piece was what first introduced him to the world as an original thinker, his famous Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). The immediate object of this short work was to show the dependence of men's ideas on their five senses. It considers the case of the intellect deprived of the aid of one of the senses; and in a second piece, published afterwards, Diderot considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute. The Lettre sur les sourds et muets, however, is substantially a digressive examination of some points in aesthetics. The philosophic significance of the two essays is in the advance they make towards the principle of Relativism. But what interested the militant philosophers of that day was an episodic application of the principle of relativism to the concept of God. What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles interesting is its presentation, in a distinct though undigested form, of the theory of variation and natural selection. It is worth noticing, too, as an illustration of the comprehensive freedom with which Diderot felt his way round any subject that he approached, that in this theoretic essay he suggests the possibility of teaching the blind to read through the sense of touch. His speculation in the Lettre sur les aveugles was too hardy for the authorities, and he was thrown into the prison of Vincennes. Here he remained for three months; then he was released, to enter upon the gigantic undertaking of his life.

Encyclopédie

Vincennes Main article: Encyclopédie The bookseller and printer André Le Breton had applied to Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, undertaken in the first instance by the Englishman John Mills, and the German, Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became transformed. Instead of a mere reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion. His enthusiasm infected the publishers; they collected a sufficient capital for a vaster enterprise than they had at first planned; Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the government; in 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project to a delighted public; and in 1751 the first volume was given to the world. The last of the letterpress was issued in 1765, but it was 1772 before the subscribers received the final volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. These twenty years were to Diderot years not merely of incessant drudgery, but of harassing persecution, and of injury from the desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the Encyclopédie, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure the sight no longer. The subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, and this was a right measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. The Encyclopédie was threatening to the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it takes for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought and the value of science and industry. It asserts the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the main concern of the nation's government. There was a contemporary belief that the Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were now made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759 the Encyclopédie was formally suppressed. The decree, however, did not arrest the continuance of the work, which went on, but with its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine. D'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, among them, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired an evil fame. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as he best could. He wrote several hundred articles, some of them very slight, but many of them most laborious, comprehensive and ample. He wore out his eyesight in correcting proofs, and in bringing the manuscript of less competent contributors into decent shape. He spent his days in the workshops, mastering the processes of manufacturing, and his nights in reproducing on paper what he had learnt during the day. And he was incessantly harassed all the time by alarms of a descent from the police. At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an end, he encountered one last and crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the displeasure of the government, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he chose to think too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labour of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced.

Other works

police Although the Encyclopédie was Diderot's monumental work, he was the author of many pieces that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and fruitful ideas. He wrote sentimental plays, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), accompanying them with essays on dramatic poetry, including especially the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he announced the principles of a new drama, the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classic French stage. His art criticism was also highly influential. His Essai sur la peinture was described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who thought it worth translating, as "a magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch." Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm wrote newsletters to various high personages in Germany, reporting what was going on in the world of art and literature in Paris, then the intellectual capital of Europe. Diderot helped Grimm between 1759 and 1779, by writing for him an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings in the Paris Salon. These reports are highly readable pieces of art criticism. According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new sentiment, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot," Anne Louise Germaine de Staël wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius." Jean-Baptiste Greuze was Diderot's favourite among contemporary artists. Greuze's most characteristic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same sentiment of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life, which Diderot had attempted to represent upon the stage. For Diderot was above all things interested in the life of men, not the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Diderot's interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form; in two, however, of the most remarkable of all his pieces, it is not sympathetic, but ironical. Jacques le fataliste (written in. 1773, but not published until 1796) is in manner an imitation of Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey. Le Neveu de Rameau is a "farce-tragedy." Its intention has been matter of dispute; whether it was designed to be merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of irony to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original. Goethe's translation (1805) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Friedrich Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been dead forty years (1823). Diderot's miscellaneous pieces range from a graceful trifle like the Règrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre up to Le rêve de D'Alembert, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. Diderot was not a coherent and systematic thinker, but rather "a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). He did not develop a system of materialism, but he contributed many of the most declamatory pages of the Système de la nature of his friend Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach, styled by some "the very Bible of atheism". Varied and incessant as was Diderot's mental activity, it was not of a kind to bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain that bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Académie française. When the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no other alternative than to sell his library. When the Catherine II of Russia heard of his straits, she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library, and then requested the philosopher to retain the books in Paris until she required them, and to constitute himself her librarian, with a yearly salary. In 1773 and 1774 Diderot spent some months at the empress's court at St Petersburg. He died of emphysema and dropsy in Paris on July 31, 1784, and was buried in the city's Eglise Saint-Roch. His heirs sold his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the Russian National Library.

Bibliography

- Essai sur le mérite et la vertu, written by Shaftesbury French translation and annotation by Diderot (1745)
- Pensées philosophiques, essay (1746)
- La promenade du sceptique (1747)
- Les bijoux indiscrets, novel (1748)
- Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient (1749)
- LEncyclopédie, (1750-1765)
- Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751)
- Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, essai (1751)
- Le fils naturel (1757)
- Entretien sur le fils naturel (1757)
- Salons, critique d'art (1759-1781)
- La Religieuse, roman (1760)
- Le neveu de Rameau, autobiography (1761 ?)
- Lettre sur le commerce des livres (1763)
- Mystification ou l’histoire des portraits (1768)
- Entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
- Le rêve de D'Alembert, essay (1769)
- Suite de l'entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
- Paradoxe sur le comédien (1769 ?)
- Apologie de l'abbé Galiani (1770)
- Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, essai (1770)
- Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants (1771)
- Jacques le fataliste et son maître, novel (1771-1778)
- Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772)
- Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, in collaboration with Raynal (1772-1781)
- Voyage en Hollande (1773)
- Eléments de physiologie (1773-1774)
- Réfutation d'Helvétius (1774)
- Observations sur le Nakaz (1774)
- Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1778)
- Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal à Monsieur Grimm (1781)
- Aux insurgents d'Amérique (1782)
- Salons

References

External links

-
- [http://gallica.bnf.fr/scripts/catalog.php?Mod=i&Titre=&FondsTout=on&FondsTxt=on&FondsImp=on&FondsPer=on&FondsImg=on&FondsAud=on&FondsMan=on&Auteur=diderot&Sujet=&RPT= Diderot's listing at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (in French)]
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15098/15098-h/15098-h.htm The Project Gutenberg eBook of Diderot] by John Morley
- [http://dromo.info/diderotbio.htm Short biography] Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot, Denis ko:드니 디드로 ja:ドゥニ・ディドロ

Song Dynasty

:Alternative meanings: Song Dynasty (420-479). The Soong Dynasty is also the title of a book by Sterling Seagrave, see also Soong sisters. The Song Dynasty (Chinese: 宋朝) was a ruling dynasty in China from 960-1279. Its founding marked the reunification of China for the first time since the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907. The intervening years, known as the Period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, were a time of division between north and south and of rapidly changing administrations. The Song dynasty itself can be divided into two distinct periods: the Northern Song and Southern Song. The Northern Song (960-1127) signifies the time when the Song capital was in the northern city of Kaifeng and the dynasty controlled all China. The Southern Song (1127-1279) refers to the time after the Song lost control of northern China to the Jurchen Jin dynasty. The Song court retreated south of the Yangtze River and made their capital at Hangzhou. The northern Jin dynasty was overrun by the Mongols in 1234, who subsequently took control of northern China and maintained uneasy relations with the Southern Song court (A hasty peace treaty was settled, when Kublai Khan received the news of Möngee's death, the ruler of the Mongols. He went back in a bid to seize the throne from other competitors, leaving Song intact for a little longer). The Mongol Yuan dynasty, proclaimed in 1271, finally destroyed the Song dynasty in 1279 and once more unified China, this time as part of a vast Mongol empire.

Arts, culture and economy

The founders of the Song dynasty built an effective centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. Regional military governors and their supporters were replaced by centrally appointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to a greater concentration of power in the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than had been achieved in the previous dynasties. The Song dynasty is notable for the development of cities not only for administrative purposes but also as centers of trade, industry, and maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials, sometimes collectively referred to as the gentry, lived in the provincial centers alongside the shopkeepers, artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthy commoners - the mercantile class - arose as printing and education spread, private trade grew, and a market economy began to link the coastal provinces and the interior. Landholding and government employment were no longer the only means of gaining wealth and prestige. The development of paper money and a unified tax system meant the development of a true nationwide market system. Accompanying this was the beginnings of what one might term the Chinese industrial revolution. For example the historian Robert Hartwell has estimated that per capita iron output rose sixfold between 806 and 1078 (AD), such that, by 1078 China was producing 125,000 tons of iron per year. This iron was used to mass produce ploughs, hammers, needles, pins, cymbals (etc. etc.) for an indigenous mass market and for trade with the outside world, which also expanded greatly at this point. Concurrently the Chinese invented or developed gunpowder, the cannon, the flamethrower, printing technology, amongst many other things. As a result of these innovations (and the concurrent agricultural revolution) China boasted some of the largest cities of the world at this time. For example it has been estimated that Hangzhou had 500,000 inhabitants at this point: far larger than any European city. From a standard of living perspective, th