This book argues that contemporary society in Western democracies is generally misunderstood to be a pyramidal hierarchy dominated either by government or the economy. Neither view is correct. We live in a fundamentally pluralistic society divided into numerous 'modular' social systems each performing different functions; these include politics, public administration, the armed forces, law, economics, religion, education, health and the mass media. Because each is specialized, none of these systems are dominant and there is no overall hierarchy of power. Modernizing societies are therefore structured more like a mosaic than a pyramid. Modernization is the tendency for growth in the adaptive complexity and efficiency of the social systems. Growth in complexity is shaped by selection processes which maintain the functionality of social systems. The best examples are the market economy, science and democratic politics. The process of modernization is both inevitable and, on the whole, desirable: this constitutes the modernization imperative. Therefore, the proper question should not be whether society should modernize, but how.

Modernisation Imperative (Societas)

Politics & Social Sciences

Charlton, Bruce

Andras, Peter

Sociology

Societas

<p>Thought Prison explores the ramifications of political correctness on language, and thus thought; its casual denial of logic and insidious reach into the realms of science and learning; its total saturation of its twin supports, the mass media and ruling elites. Once the collectively self-imposed blinkers, of good causes and good intentions, are stripped away we can see the nanny state and moral universe beyond for what it is – a catastrophic delusion that is destroying the world we know. Most of us think of political correctness in terms of its scope for irony. It provides opportunity to protect us from a vaguely troubling acceptance of an enforced orthodoxy. We are familiar with the no-go areas defined by PC taboos – race, sex (or to be PC, gender), ethnicity, sexual preference, disability, class – and indeed of it being an engineered term to suit political and scientific argument. What we may be less able to accept is that PC is something in which we are all complicit. Thought Prison examines the way we are now, and how the Western world has come to be that way. It reveals an Orwellian dystopia that instead of being characterized by a crude authoritarian elite, is supported and driven by an irrational yet equally totalitarian and all-pervasive status quo of our own making, dominating politics, economics, public administration, law, education, the military, health services – our very selves.</p>

Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness

Anthropology

University of Buckingham Press

This work is a reappraisal of the nature of psychiatric illness and therapeutic approaches to it. It looks at how current classifications and treatment derive from a century-old framework which is now incoherent.

Psychiatry And the Human Condition

Medical Books

Medicine

Radcliffe Pub

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Books by Charlton, Bruce