12天死亡式GRE作文突击方案(最新完整版）
[color=Blue]Sample Text写在前面的话 8月9日Sample Text13天死亡式GRE作文突击方案
首先我要清楚的告知各位G友，我绝对不是牛牛，而是一个极为平凡的土校土人，去年考了T， 620＋4.5， 作文写偏题了，总的来说我没有很置疑这个分数，但我会再卷土重来。
之所以说到T很大一部分原因式因为我的T采取的就是拉长式分散式战术，浪费了很多时间，后来成绩出来，总结原因还是将近两个月的时间复习，强度不足，幅度有余，所以在确定G的考试时间后，我决定采取中长跑的复习手法，整个过程冲刺＋匀速＋再加冲刺。i当头的ssue和argu准备则是冲刺方案的头站。
先总的概括一下我13天做了的事情，1、新东方GRE课堂录音重复听了三遍，整理了所有课堂笔记， 并基本加深了理解。2、将所有argu和issue过了一遍，口头简述了每个题目的纲要。 3、做了一份共6页的argu句型大全，并做到倒背如流。4、做了三个issue模板重复摹写了将近20遍。 5、收集了所有issue涉及领域的定义以及主要概念，基本理解。6、收集了所有领域的素材并将其浓缩成了7页记熟。8、掐时练习了15篇issue和20篇argu。9、期间记了老俞词汇3000个。10、背了三篇典型范文，100个常用短语和30个常用句型。
每一天的安排我都有记录，而且亲身体验后是非常合理的，每天的学习时间不高于十个钟头。从开始的无法动笔倒后来恒定的字数（issue 600以上，argu500以上）基本上我觉得这种高强度的学习非常出成效，毕竟活了几十年逻辑这根筋已经硬化的差不多了，你不强力拉一拉他示不会丝毫动弹的，其实英语写作很多时候也一样。当然，以上这些事是不管长期还是短期准备都必须要做到的，可以根据个人情况进行时间上的调整。
具体的安排我会在下一贴加上，希望对G友们有所启示。
Sample Text写在后面的话
这个帖子在网上挂了三天后反响远远超过了我的想象,我的QQ已经爆了,我在QQ爆了的那一刻感到原来大家心情如此相近而且我们的G队伍是如此庞大.谢谢大家对LZ的信任,但我在此也不得不说到几点，有关于采用我 这个方法的前提。
1、新东方的课或者是其它入门的课或是前人的点睛辅导一定要上过。也就是说，你要有让你快速领悟issue和argu写作方法的捷径，时间那么短，如果不是悟性超凡这一途径很有必要！
2、与世隔绝的决心和毅力。LZ在十二天里电话全天关机，几乎大门不出，二门不迈，饭都是定好送，最后坐得脖子都彻底僵直了（唉，老了），所以选择采用此法的，最好是采取隐居生活，想一想就疯狂这一把了不是？
3、了解自己的形势。这一点也很重要，LZ毕竟是外语系，托福已考，所以这一次说12天就搞定，决不是在建造空中楼阁；再说到自己的强项和短项，我的强项是短时记忆，所以我不断地在十二天重复重复，到最后加强巩固，几乎就抓着一根救命稻草打拼。大家都不妨花半个钟头想想自己在学习能力上地最强项是什么，结合自己地实际来制造有个人特色地死亡方案。
In sum，大家急归急，但不要报太多希望于依赖捷径,列一张清单自己要做什么，然后有多少天能作，每天做多少，有哪些东西可以辅助，想想清楚，当然有什么问题可以问我，小女子我会尽量回复地。
提供一个小型百科搜索网站 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/，里面有非常多地素材。
祝大家G之战役，捷！
跟进
12天死亡式GRE作文突击方案(看了记录发现加起来是12天～，在此更正一下)
复习武器库：1、新东方issue、argu课堂录音各五节，每节三个钟头。
2、新东方发放的GRE写作讲义
3、GRE写作精讲（黄本，新东方发放）
4、GRE写作5.5突破（分两本issue、argu）
第一日：
本日目标：基本清楚argu和issue的写作手法和写作目的，明确两者写作基本原则
上午: 看十篇argu范文
听新东方老师argu课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
不限时写一篇argu
中午：老俞词汇400个
下午：听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
不计时写一篇issue
晚上：看GRE写作5.5突破的argu部分
本日小结：第一天很艰难，对argu和issue有了很泛的了解，感觉argu比较轻松一点，但几乎都无法下笔，写的时候痛苦了半天，两篇加起来写了两个多钟头。
第二日：
本日目标：进一步明确argu和issue的写作手法和写作目的，理解两者写作基本原则
上午: 看十篇argu范文
听新东方老师argu课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
不计时写一篇argue
中午：老俞词汇400个
下午：听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
看issue范文5篇
晚上：看GRE写作5.5突破的argu部分
本日小结：严重发现argu比issue容易很多，但写得很慢，词汇还很不规范，而且对逻辑错误有点混淆，比如说分不清哪个是hasty generalization、哪个是incomplete thought。Issue此课后完全蒙了，决定推后一点集中攻击。
第三日：
本日目标：结合讲义做argu逻辑各个攻破模板， 进一步学习issue写作方法
上午: 将argu课堂笔记结合讲义再过一遍
做全套模板, 针对各个逻辑谬误各做三到四个句子和段落模板
下午：限时写一篇argu
修改全套模板, 补充不足。
听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
晚上：老俞词汇400个
看GRE写作5.5突破的argu部分
本日小结：做了模板后发现argu的道路豁然开朗，但是在写的时候发现还是会不知道哪个用哪个，而且也还不能默下来，下午进行了补充和修改；issue还是比较茫然。
第四日：
本日目标：背诵argu逻辑各个攻破模板，过issue题库（四分之一）； 进一步学习issue写作方法
上午: 背argu击破模板和范文
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
下午：限时写一篇argu
老俞词汇400个
做argu开头模板三个，结尾三个
晚上：听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
本日小结：今天写argu就明显比较有感觉，对逻辑谬误的发掘能力和分辨能力已经比较强，但还是不熟练，限时字数为300多。Issue今天上的课是段落分析，彻底折服于李虹桥强悍的逻辑分析能力，乍感issue有了无线光明。
第五日：
本日目标：加固背诵argu逻辑各个攻破模板，过issue题库（4分之1）； 做两个issue body的模板。
上午: 背argu击破模板和范文
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
下午：限时写一篇argu
老俞词汇400个
做issue的body模板两个
晚上：听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记
咀嚼笔记
过完argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
本日小结：今天写argu就明显感觉对逻辑谬误的发掘能力和分辨能力已经比较强，但还是不熟练，限时字数为400多一点点。Issue今天上的课是段落写法，包括超级模板法、比较法、演绎法、直驳法，后三种看上去很简单，但在尝试运用时很受打击。
第六日：
本日目标：巩固背诵argu逻辑各个攻破模板，过issue题库（四分之一）； 进一步学习issue写作方法，修改模板
上午: 背argu击破模板和范文
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
下午：老俞词汇400个
限时写一篇argu，一篇issue
晚上：听新东方老师issue课堂录音并做详细课堂笔记(最后一节)
咀嚼笔记，修改模板
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
本日小结：argu还是在巩固阶段，Issue今天上的课是句型和修辞，感觉issue还在意识阶段，很难表达，限时写的都fail掉了，没有写完。
第七日：
本日目标：巩固背诵argu逻辑各个攻破模板，过issue题库（最后四分之一）； issue的课堂讲义和重点重过一遍
上午: 背argu击破模板和范文
过argu题库中文版，用英文以极快的速度标记每篇的逻辑谬误
限时写一篇argu
下午：老俞词汇400个
重过issue笔记和课堂讲义
晚上：重听新东方老师issue课堂录音并继续细化课堂笔记
着手整理素材
本日小结：argu的状态比较恒定，但还是稳步上升；issue课上完加以整理和重听后有一点郁闷，因为突然感觉自己时间不够，需要技术上的调整。
第八日：
本日目标：过issue题库，搜集全方位素材，包括各领域定义及名言、一个又盛而衰的公司案例、一个历尽磨难最后善终的总统案例，两则scandal的案例，正反面两则政治事件、三项伟大的科技发明，以及若干名胜地名和人名。
Argu开始进入疯狂强化期，加强练兵，将模板彻底内化为己有。
上午: 背argu击破模板和范文
限时写三篇argu
下午：老俞词汇400个
做issue开头模板三个，结尾三个，做素材一览表，根据列表搜集好句子，好词，定义，例子，词汇，继续完善模板
晚上：将issue题库中文版过了一遍
限时写一篇issue
本日小结：今天的argu连写了三篇，过程有点痛苦，但有了质的飞跃，第三篇字数达到470，并已经可以熟练运用各个模板；issue改变了战略，决定采用超级模板法搞定所有的文章并最终运用于考试，轻松了些许，另外，深刻感觉李虹桥的方法很好，就是先写开头和结尾，再写文章ts和段落ts，最后加以填充。第一次掐时写了530多。
第九日：
本日目标：argu继续疯狂强化期，加强练兵，将模板彻底内化为己有，issue素材分类整理记忆。
上午: 背argu击破模板和issue模板，好句子，好词，例子等。
限时写三篇argu
下午：老俞词汇400个
分领域看issue观点，素材，加以自己的分析
晚上： 限时写一篇issue
上寄托砸砖
本日小结：今天写argu已经写得很麻木了，字数屡创新高，也脱离了我的模板资料开始完全默写；issue今天收获也很大，对各个领域的中心观点加以理解后感觉段落ts明显轻松了很多。
第十日：
本日目标：全面进入膏肓疯狂强化期，加强练兵，将模板彻底内化为己有。
上午: 背所有的模板素材
限时两篇argu＋issue
下午：老俞词汇400个
限时两篇argu＋issue
晚上：总结，比较，修正
限时两篇argu＋issue
补充素材，略微修改模板
本日小结：今天是一场思维的战役，而且基于以前的基础，前五篇在字数上和质量上屡创新高，但最后一篇深感思维不负重荷，今天是死亡战役之巨大转折点。
第十一日：
本日目标：继续膏肓疯狂强化期，加强练兵，将模板彻底内化为己有。
上午: 背所有的模板素材
限时两篇argu＋issue
下午：老俞词汇400个
限时两篇argu＋issue
晚上：总结，比较，修正
将之前收集的素材强化，特别是经典案例和定义加强记忆，特别是人名、地名等。
本日小结：今天的写作已经写的比较麻木，在字数上平均在了issue 630和argu 550， 质量也比较稳定，单词还有些谬误。
第十二日：
本日目标：终极膏肓疯狂强化期，加强练兵，将模板彻底内化为己有。
上午: 背所有的模板素材
限时两篇argu＋issue
比较，修正，定稿
下午：老俞词汇400个
考场侦察
晚上：强化素材记忆，以及常用单词。
回顾之前的文章不足。
本日小结：今天已经是尘埃落定，最后一篇（issue 670，argu 595）为我的战役画上了完满的句号。
昨天考了G, 感觉此次G发挥很稳定，考虑字数和质量等因素自己估计约为5分以上。不可置疑12天的时间给了我一个质的飞跃，当然，这和基础、强度，耐力和韧性有不可分割的关系。我们可以从西方经济学的边际效应来解析这种飞跃，在这样极短的时间每一步行动的边际效应都维持在较大正值以内的，相应的每一个举动都是能大幅度促升整体效应，相反，长久战拉开了人会非常容易疲乏，很难排除做无效功甚至负功的可能性，所以我个人比较赞成偏短的作文准备方式。但我要强调一点，短时间作战有一大忌讳就是“泛”，资料越集中越好，开头结尾固定下来，模板越少越好并且用得越多越好，词也就用那么几个就够了，总之，我们要把横向的限制拉伸为纵向的极限。最后，希望我所提供的计划能给大家一些参考性的价值，并附上个领域的定义和攻击模板供gf们选择采用。我的qq为10243624，具体问题各位g友 可以随时联系我：）
材料
材料
跟进
1．TechnologyApplication of knowledge to the practical aims of human life or to changing and manipulating the human environment. Technology includes the use of materials, tools, techniques, and sources of power to make life easier or more pleasant and work more productive. Whereas science is concerned with how and why things happen, technology focuses on making things happen. Technology began to influence human endeavor as soon as people began using tools. It accelerated with the Industrial Revolution and the substitution of machines for animal and human labor. Accelerated technological development has also had costs, in terms of air and water pollution and other undesirable environmental effects.
Quotes:
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives. - Freeman Dyson
We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers. - Edward Dahlberg
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances. - Thomas Carlyle
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road. - Stewart Brand
Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. - Niels Bohr
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. - J. G. Ballard
2．Politics is a process by which decisions are made within groups. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in all human (and many non-human) group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.
A person who seeks reason and truth by thinking and meditation
Definitions
• Power according to political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is "the human ability not just to act but to act in concert."
• Authority is the ability to enforce laws, to exact obedience, to command, to determine, or to judge.
• A government is the body that has the authority to make and enforce rules or laws.
• Legitimacy is an attribute of government gained through the acquisition and application of power in accordance with recognized or accepted standards or principles.
• Sovereignty is the ability of a government to exert control over its territory free from outside influence.
It is the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.
3．Science
For many the term science refers to the organized body of knowledge concerning the physical world, both animate and inanimate, but a proper definition would also have to include the attitudes and methods through which this body of knowledge is formed; thus, a science is both a particular kind of activity and also the results of that activity.
The Scientific Method
The scientific method has evolved over many centuries and has now come to be described in terms of a well-recognized and well-defined series of steps. First, information, or data, is gathered by careful observation of the phenomenon being studied. On the basis of that information a preliminary generalization, or hypothesis, is formed, usually by inductive reasoning, and this in turn leads by deductive logic to a number of implications that may be tested by further observations and experiments (see induction; deduction). If the conclusions drawn from the original hypothesis successfully meet all these tests, the hypothesis becomes accepted as a scientific theory or law; if additional facts are in disagreement with the hypothesis, it may be modified or discarded in favor of a new hypothesis, which is then subjected to further tests. Even an accepted theory may eventually be overthrown if enough contradictory evidence is found, as in the case of Newtonian mechanics, which was shown after more than two centuries of acceptance to be an approximation valid only for speeds much less than that of light.
Role of Measurement and Experiment
All of the activities of the scientific method are characterized by a scientific attitude, which stresses rational impartiality. Measurement plays an important role, and when possible the scientist attempts to test his theories by carefully designed and controlled experiments that will yield quantitative rather than qualitative results. Theory and experiment work together in science, with experiments leading to new theories that in turn suggest further experiments. Although these methods and attitudes are generally shared by scientists, they do not provide a guaranteed means of scientific discovery; other factors, such as intuition, experience, good judgment, and sometimes luck, also contribute to new developments in science.
The Beginnings of Science
Science as it is known today is of relatively modern origin, but the traditions out of which it has emerged reach back beyond recorded history. The roots of science lie in the technology of early toolmaking and other crafts, while scientific theory was once a part of philosophy and religion. This relationship, with technology encouraging science rather than the other way around, remained the norm until recent times. Thus, the history of science is essentially intertwined with that of technology.
Promise and Problems of Modern Science
Modern science holds out a number of promises, as well as a number of problems. In the foreseeable future researchers may solve the riddle of life and create life itself in a test tube. Most diseases may be brought under control. Science is also working toward control over the environment, e.g., dispersing hurricanes before they can endanger life or property. New sources of energy are being developed, and these together with the capacity to manipulate alien environments may make life possible on the moon or other planets.
Among the challenges faced by modern science are practical ones such as the production and distribution of enough energy to meet increased demands and the elimination or reduction of pollutants in the environment. Some of these problems are political and sociological as well as scientific, as are such problems as control over nuclear and other forms of weapons (biological, chemical) and regulation of the use of computers and other electronic devices that may seriously infringe on individual privacy and freedom. Some have profound ethical implications, e.g., those associated with gene manipulation, organ transplantation, and the capacity to sustain life beyond the point at which it once would have ended. There are also philosophical problems raised by science, as in the uncertainty principle of the quantum theory, which places an absolute limit on the accuracy of certain physical measurements and thus on the predictions that may be made on the basis of such measurements; in the quantum theory itself, with its suggestion that at the atomic level much depends on chance; and in certain paradoxical discoveries in mathematics and mathematical logic. Even a detailed account of the history of science cannot be complete, for scientific activity is not isolated but takes place within a larger matrix that also includes, for example, political and social events, developments in the arts, philosophy, and religion, and forces within the life of the individual scientist. In other words, science is a human activity and is affected by all that affects human beings in any way.
Early Greek Contributions to Science
The early Greek, or Hellenic, culture marked a different approach to science. The Ionian natural philosophers removed the gods from the personal roles they had played in the cosmologies of Babylonia and Egypt and sought to order the world according to philosophical principles. Thales of Miletus (6th cent. B.C.) was one of the earliest of these and contributed to astronomy, geometry, and cosmology. He was followed by Anaximander, who extended Thales' ideas and proposed that the universe is composed of four basic elements, i.e., earth, air, fire, and water; this theory was also taught by Empedocles (5th cent. B.C.) in Sicily. The philosophers Leucippus and Democritus (both 5th cent. B.C.) held that everything is composed of tiny, indivisible atoms. In the school founded at Croton, S Italy, by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (6th cent. B.C.) the principal concept was that of number. The Pythagoreans tried to explain the workings of the universe in terms of whole numbers and their ratios; in addition to contributions to mathematics and philosophy, they also made notable studies in the area of biology and anatomy, e.g., by Alcmaeon of Croton (fl. c.500 B.C.). The most important developments in medicine were made by Hippocrates of Cos (4th cent. B.C.), known as the Father of Medicine, who formulated the science of diagnosis based on accurate descriptions of the symptoms of various diseases. The greatest figures of the earlier Greek period were the philosophers Plato (427–347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), each of whom exerted an influence that has extended down to modern times.
Advances in Astronomy
Astronomy progressed on the theoretical level through the contributions to celestial mechanics of P. S. Laplace and others, and on the observational level through the work of many scientists. They included William Herschel, who built telescopes and discovered Uranus (1781), the first planet found in modern times, and his son John Herschel, who extended his father's observations to the Southern Hemisphere skies and pioneered in astrophotography, which in modern astronomy is the chief method of observation. Another tool that found important application in astronomy was the spectroscope. Increasingly astronomers made use of the instruments, techniques, and theories of other fields, particularly physics.
4．Human behavior is the collection of activities performed by human beings and influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, and/or coercion.
The behavior of people (and other organisms or even mechanisms) falls within a range with some behavior being common, some unusual, some acceptable, and some outside acceptable limits. In sociology, behavior is considered as having no meaning, being not directed at other people and thus is the most basic human action. Behavior should not be mistaken with social behavior, which is more advanced action, as social behavior is behavior specifically directed at other people. The acceptability of behavior is evaluated relative to social norms and regulated by various means of social control.
The behavior of people is studied by the academic disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
Factors affecting Human Behavior
• Attitude – It is the degree to which the person has a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of the behavior in question.
• Social Norms – This is the influence of social pressure that is perceived by the individual (normative beliefs) to perform or not perform a certain behavior.
• Perceived Behavioral Control – This construct is defined as the individual’s belief concerning how easy or difficult performing the behavior will be
5. group
noun
1. A number of individuals making up or considered a unit: array, band2, batch, bevy, body, bunch, bundle, clump, cluster, clutch2, collection, knot, lot, party, set2. See group.
2. A number of persons who have come or been gathered together: assemblage, assembly, body, company, conclave, conference, congregation, congress, convention, convocation, crowd, gathering, meeting, muster, troop. Informal get-together. See collect/distribute.
3. A group of people sharing an interest, activity, or achievement: circle, crowd, set2. See group. 6. Jurisdiction
The geographic area over which authority extends; legal authority; the authority to hear and determine causes of action.
Jurisdiction generally describes any authority over a certain area or certain persons. In the law, jurisdiction sometimes refers to a particular geographic area containing a defined legal authority. For example, the federal government is a jurisdiction unto itself. Its power spans the entire United States. Each state is also a jurisdiction unto itself with power to pass its own laws. Smaller geographic areas, such as counties and cities, are separate jurisdictions to the extent that they have powers independent of the federal and state governments.
Jurisdiction also may refer to the origin of a court's authority. A court may be designated either as a court of general jurisdiction or as a court of special jurisdiction. A court of general jurisdiction is a trial court that is empowered to hear all cases that are not specifically reserved for courts of special jurisdiction. A court of special jurisdiction is empowered to hear only certain kinds of cases.
Courts of general jurisdiction are often called district courts or superior courts. In New York, however, the court of general jurisdiction is called the Supreme Court of New York. In most jurisdictions other trial courts of special jurisdiction exist apart from the courts of general jurisdiction; examples are probate, tax, traffic, juvenile, and, in some cities, drug courts. On the federal level, the district courts are courts of general jurisdiction. Federal courts of special jurisdiction include the Tax Court and the bankruptcy courts.
Jurisdiction can also be used to define the proper court in which to bring a particular case. In this context a court has either original or appellate jurisdiction over a case. When the court has original jurisdiction, it is empowered to conduct a trial in the case. When the court has appellate jurisdiction, it may only review the trial court proceedings for error.
Generally, courts of general and special jurisdiction have original jurisdiction over most cases, and appeals courts and the jurisdiction's high court have appellate jurisdiction. But this is not always the case. For example, under Article III, Section 2, Clause 2, of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court is a court of appellate jurisdiction. However, under the same clause, the Court has original jurisdiction in cases between states. Such cases usually concern disputes over boundaries and waterways.
Finally, jurisdiction refers to the inherent authority of a court to hear a case and declare a judgment. When a plaintiff seeks to initiate suit, he or she must determine where to file the complaint. The plaintiff must file suit in a court that has jurisdiction over the case. If the court does not have jurisdiction, the defendant may challenge the suit on that ground, and the suit may be dismissed or its result may be overturned in a subsequent action by one of the parties in the case.
A plaintiff may file suit in federal court; however, state courts generally have concurrent jurisdiction. Concurrent jurisdiction means that both the state and federal court have jurisdiction over the matter.
If a claim can be filed in either state or federal court, and the plaintiff files the claim in state court, the defendant may remove the case to federal court (28 U.S.C.A. § 1441 et seq.). This is a tactical decision. Federal court proceedings are widely considered to be less susceptible to bias because the jury pool is drawn from the entire state, not just from the local community.
State courts have concurrent jurisdiction in most cases. Federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction in a limited number of cases, such as federal criminal, antitrust, bankruptcy, patent and copyright, and some admiralty cases, and suits against the U.S. government.
Under federal and state laws and court rules, a court may exercise its inherent authority only if it has two types of jurisdiction: personal and subject matter. Personal jurisdiction is the authority a court has over the parties in the case. Subject matter jurisdiction is a court's authority over the particular claim or controversy.
7. Constitution
The fundamental law, written or unwritten, that establishes the character of a government by defining the basic principles to which society must conform; by describing the organization of the government and regulation, distribution, and limitations on the functions of different government departments; and by prescribing the extent and manner of the exercise of its sovereign powers.
A legislative charter by which a government or group derives its authority to act.
The concept of a constitution dates to the city-states of ancient Greece. The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.), in his work Politics, analyzed over 150 Greek constitutions. In that work, he described a constitution as creating the frame upon which the government and laws of a society are built:
In modern Europe, written constitutions came into greater use during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Constitutions such as that of the United States, created in 1787, were influenced by the ancient Greek models. During the twentieth century, an increasing number of countries around the world have concluded that constitutions are a necessary part of democratic or republican government and have adopted their own constitutions.
Many different forms and levels of government may have constitutions. All fifty states of the United States have constitutions, as do many countries including Japan, India, Canada, and Germany. It is also common for nongovernmental organizations and civic groups to have constitutions.
In its ideal form, a constitution emanates from the consent and will of the people that it governs. Besides establishing the institutions of government and the manner in which they function toward each other and toward the people, a constitution may also set forth the rights of the individual and government's responsibility to honor those rights.
Constitutions, whether written or unwritten, typically function as an evolving body of legal custom and opinion. Their evolution generally involves changes in judicial interpretation or in themselves, the latter usually through a process called amendment. Amendment of a constitution is usually designed to be a difficult process in order to give the constitution greater stability. On the other hand, if a constitution is extremely difficult to amend, it may be too inflexible to survive over time.
The ongoing evolutionary nature of constitutions explains why Great Britain may be described as having a constitution even though it does not have a single written document designated as such. England's constitution instead inheres in a body of legal custom and tradition that regulates the relationship between the monarchy, the legislature (Parliament), the judicial system, and common law. Though Great Britain's constitution is in a sense unwritten because it does not originate in a single document, many written laws have been instrumental in its creation, and England in fact has one of the oldest traditions of constitutionalism.
In a truly constitutional form of government, government officials are subject to constitutional rules and provisions and may not violate them without punishment. Such constitutional governments are also called limited governments because the constitution restricts the scope of their power over the people. However, many governments with constitutions do not practice true constitutionalism. The former Soviet Union, for example, created the Stalin constitution in 1936, but that document did not establish a truly constitutional form of government. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953, could not be formally penalized or called to account for his actions, no matter how heinous, before any other government official, any court, or the people themselves. The Soviet Constitution also claimed to guarantee freedom of speech, press, and assembly, but in practice the Soviet government continually repressed those who sought to express those freedoms. Constitutions such as that of the former Soviet Union are called nominal constitutions, whereas those that function more truly as prescriptive documents, such as the Constitution of the United States, are called normative constitutions.
In the United States, individual state constitutions must conform to the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, they may not violate rights or standards established by the federal, or national, Constitution. However, states are free to grant rights not defined in the U.S. Constitution, so long as doing so does not interfere with other rights drawn from the federal Constitution. For this reason, groups or individuals seeking to file constitutional claims in court are increasingly examining state constitutions for settlement of their grievances. In the issue of school desegregation, for example, groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began in the 1990s to shift their focus to the state level with the hope of finding greater protection of rights under state constitutions. 8. Literature
Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the folktale.
I. American Literature to 1860
According to one version of American cultural history, there was no American literature until the second third of the nineteenth century, when, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, "men grew reflective," and at long last "mind had become aware of itself." Explanations for the literary barrenness of early America were offered then and have been reiterated since, but all such arguments finally arise from the unexamined premise that what writing there was does not deserve the dignity of being called literature.
Colonial America was in fact very much a culture of the book, but for more than a century after the founding, especially in New England, the books were overwhelmingly religious, and the values the postromantic age would associate with literary production--originality, individual voice, the adversarial imagination--were incomprehensible at best or versions of heresy at worst. Early American literary expression arose partly from an oral tradition whose passing Emerson himself came to lament. This sense of loss marks one of his differences from his Concord contemporary Henry David Thoreau, who believed that "there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language" and that writing is "maturity" while speech is "transitory" and "almost brutish." It is a revealing irony that Emerson (who began as a preacher, and whose later essays were developed through the process of oral public delivery) devoted so much of his effort to recapturing the rhythms of inspired speech. Nearly a century after the Revolution, when the elderly Emerson thought that the "American mind ... beginning to show a quiet power ... proper to a continent and an educated people," its literature was also losing some of its spontaneity and its sense of groundedness in a community that knew the sound of its own collective voice. The arrival of a truly national literature--celebrated in the early decades of the nineteenth century with proclamations of its tardiness by William Cullen Bryant (Lectures on Poetry, delivered 1826, published 1884), William Ellery Channing (The Importance and Means of a National Literature, 1830), and Emerson himself (The American Scholar address, 1837)--was accompanied by a sense of the urgent need to record the passing of an earlier America.
In the New England of Emerson's forebears, literature had been spoken. "Faith cometh by hearing" was the Apostle Paul's most frequently quoted injunction, and the ministry poured forth immense numbers of sermons--Sabbath sermons, lecture-day sermons, election-day sermons--many of them transcribed by a devoted lay member of the congregation and prepared for the press as a means of preserving the original experience of hearing the gospel word. From the New England presses there also came inventories of biblical types, chronicles of New England history as part of God's work of redemption, memoirs recording conversions, almanacs containing seasonal poetry and practical advice. Poetry was regarded as suspiciously ornamental, though one of the best-sellers of the seventeenth century, Michael Wigglesworth's chiliastic "The Day of Doom," was cast in an insistent, rhyming tetrameter. Anne Bradstreet's lyrics, composed and published in The Tenth Muse (1650), and the "preparatory meditations" written late in the century by Edward Taylor, minister of Westfield, as a means to prepare himself for administering the Lord's Supper, were the most enduring poetic achievements of Puritan civilization in America.
If we take the view that literature is the record of experience formulated within the terms made available by the culture, then all these writings--however occasional or restricted by the generic conventions of their mainly religious function--constitute literature. But if, in the words of the critic Richard Poirier, literature should furnish "an occasion for ... amazement," whereby we are awakened to the world-creating power of words, the body of early American writing that can be called literature grows smaller. It does not, however, disappear. The greatest colonial preachers and historians--William Bradford, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Cotton Mather--recognized their challenge to employ an Old World language to express New World experience. The biblical accents of Bradford's great Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (written 1630-1650), or the exquisite mapping of the soul that "soul-physicians" like Cotton conducted in early New England, transformed the English language into a New England idiom that was saturated with biblical symbols and irresistibly drawn into the patterns of biblical narrative.
In the southern colonies, which had been settled by men with different aspirations who were often uncertain about the likely duration of their stay, the earliest public writings were largely promotional tracts intended to attract unpropertied young Englishmen into a New World apprenticeship or to allay the doubts of prospective investors. In the early eighteenth century, some significant historical works, notably Robert Beverley's History of the Present State of Virginia (1705), emerged. Perhaps the most remarkable document from the colonial South was William Byrd of Westover's candid diary (1709-1741), containing in raw form themes that would obsess southern writers for centuries to come: the contradictions of a genteel life built on the labor of slaves, the temptations to indolence inherent in the natural fertility, the perilously thin boundary between civilization and savagery.
Distinctions between the northern and southern imagination began to blur in the eighteenth century, as the spread of the Enlightenment modified the religious inheritance of New England and created a southern intellectual class that would eventually produce a group of political writers--Thomas Jefferson (the Declaration of Independence, 1776; Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787), James Madison (chief author of the Federalist Papers, 1787), John Taylor of Caroline (Arator, 1813), and much later John C. Calhoun (A Disquisition on Government, 1851)--whose articulation of the rationale for independence, and then for nationhood, reached a high level of eloquence, complexity, and prescience. The most powerful expressions of the New England mind remained religious, notably in the works of Jonathan Edwards, a latter-day Calvinist who fused the innovations of Lockean psychology with his Puritan inheritance and created an entirely new description of moral and religious experience (especially in his Treatise on Religious Affections, 1746, and in the posthumously published dissertations on The Nature of True Virtue, 1765, and The End for Which God Created the World, 1765). But the project of nation-building became the focus of literary energy in New England as well. In the 1740s, long before political independence was a thinkable idea, a vision of a new unity among the colonies began to be felt in the controversial writings of the Great Awakening and burst out with full force in the pamphlets of the 1760s and 1770s, of which the culminating example was Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776).
After the Revolution, American writing--North and South--inevitably became more self-conscious. The common literary project was to furnish the new nation with a living mythology through which it might achieve a sense of positive identity as it rejected its function as a subsidiary part of the British Empire and sought to suppress its regional distinctions. One feature of this search for a common American history was the growing awareness (which had been sporadically expressed by certain dissident Puritans) of the brutalization and virtually inevitable extinction of the Native Americans--whose voices were represented in Jefferson's Notes; whose ancestors were evoked in Bryant's poem "The Prairies" (1832); who held the stage as the doomed opponents of imperial Britain in numerous "Indian plays," including the perennially popular Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John August Stone; and who appeared, as both sinister heathen and noble savage, in the Leatherstocking saga of James Fenimore Cooper beginning with The Pioneers (1823) and closing with The Deerslayer (1841).
A more usable mythic history was at work in the immensely popular Life of Washington (1800) by Parson Mason Weems, which appeared in many editions under the imprint of the entrepreneurial Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey and became one of the first American works to rival British literary productions in sales. It marked the onset of what has been called "the legend of the Founding Fathers." An American public with a taste for American themes had already begun to support indigenous comedy and melodrama in the theater (in such plays as Royall Tyler's The Contrast, 1787, and William Dunlap's André, 1798), and now, with the rise of a middle-class, female readership, the novel began to gain an audience too. Although more obliquely than in the didactic poetry of the Connecticut Wits or of the Jeffersonian poet Philip Freneau, the theme of the destiny of the young nation occupied the novel as well. Devoted to the epistolary form and to imitations of Samuel Richardson (as the drama was to Richard Brinsley Sheridan), the early American novel put forth its public theme of the tested virtue of the citizenry with a kind of sexual allegory, exploiting the titillating possibilities of the seduction plot. Books like William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) have a threatened woman at the center, who, faced with a tempter's charms, undergoes an internal struggle between passion and restraint that strikingly resembles the national debate over radical Republicanism versus Federalist conservatism.
Before the turn of the century, a number of regional literary styles had begun to emerge--centered in Philadelphia around the Port-Folio of Joseph Dennie, in Boston around the Monthly Anthology, and in New York, somewhat later, around the Knickerbocker group that included James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Irving's Sketch-Book (1820) was the most elegant expression of American nostalgia for the class hierarchy of preindustrial England and the elusive pastoral tranquillity that it seemed to represent.
Such literary societies, especially those of the Boston Unitarians, began to make possible a genuine critical discussion of what kind of literature would be appropriate for a democracy. This was the debate in which Emerson climaxed with his American Scholar address to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1837, and despite all the literary ferment that had preceded him, he was right to announce--in Nature (1836)--that a new age was at hand. The critical debate and the tentative, derivative forays into fiction, drama, and neoclassic epic poetry now gave way to an explosion of creative energy that F. O. Matthiessen has memorably called the "American Renaissance." The decades following Emerson's prophecies of the late 1830s witnessed the greatest outpouring of literary genius in American history, before or since--the romances of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; the prose inventions of Emerson and Thoreau. Lesser writers also began to produce a literature of real social and aesthetic consequence--the exploratory social and psychological analyses of Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson; the beginnings of an African-American narrative tradition with the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861); and the immensely influential fictional attack on slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
By the 1850s it was no longer possible to speak of American literature as provincial or submissive to English models. But as it matured it also modulated what Emerson called its optative mood; it became elegiac (as in Whitman's Democratic Vistas, 1871), and its greatest achievements remained uncomfortable within the traditional structures of literary expression. American literary genius, as in the case of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), broke utterly away from the conventional prescriptions of the novel. To catch the American voice at its grandest, in what Melville called its "Vesuvian" register, one still needs to range beyond the customary boundaries of the "literary," since perhaps the greatest master of English prose in mid-nineteenth-century America was neither a novelist nor a poet, but a politician, Abraham Lincoln.
With the coming of the Civil War, as Melville had intimated in his straitened stories of the 1850s, there occurred what Edmund Wilson has called "the chastening of American prose style." This was a kind of evacuation of the symbolic density that had characterized literary language in America since the prophetic writings of the colonial period. With the advent of the large social novels of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton, American literature may be said to have come of age. But with this triumph of the discursive language of realism, the great age of the American literary imagination may also be said to have passed. If its characteristic voice had once been extreme, self-obsessed, and extravagant, it now became measured, subdued, and controlled. In this change there was loss as well as gain. The extraordinary literary moment of what Melville called, near the end of his life, "the time before steamships," was over.
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (1986); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1940).
Quotes:
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it. - Roland Barthes
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. - Gaston Bachelard
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. - W. H. Auden
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation. - Aharon Appelfeld
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity. - Nelson Algren
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature. - George Age
9. law
Discipline and profession concerned with the customs, practices, and rules of conduct that are recognized as binding by the community. Enforcement of the body of rules is through a controlling authority, such as a group of elders, a regent, a court, or a judiciary. Comparative law is the study of the differences, similarities, and interrelationships of different systems of law. Important areas in the study and practice of law include administrative law, antitrust law, business law, constitutional law, criminal law, environmental law, family law, health law, immigration law, intellectual property law, international law, labour law, maritime law, procedural law, property law, public interest law, tax law, trusts and estates, and torts. See also Anglo-Saxon law; canon law; civil law; common law; equity; Germanic law; Indian law; Islamic law (Shari'ah); Israeli law; Japanese law; jurisprudence; military law; Roman law; Scottish law; Soviet law
Law, rules of conduct of any organized society, however simple or small, that are enforced by threat of punishment if they are violated. Modern law has a wide sweep and regulates many branches of conduct.
Development of Early Law
Law does not develop systematically until a state with a centralized police authority has appeared. For this development a written language is not required, but necessarily the earliest known legal codes are those of literate societies. Examples of early law systems are to be found in the code of Hammurabi (Babylonia), the Laws of Manu (India), and the Mosaic code (Palestine). These codes show what would seem to be the universal tendency of the religious and ethical system of a society to produce a legal order to enforce its ethical and social mandates. In classical antiquity the first codes of law are those attributed to Solon and to Lycurgus.
10. ethics
Branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Ethics is traditionally subdivided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics. Normative ethics seeks to establish norms or standards of conduct; a crucial question in this field is whether actions are to be judged right or wrong based on their consequences or based on their conformity to some moral rule, such as “Do not tell a lie.” Theories that adopt the former basis of judgment are called consequentialist (see consequentialism); those that adopt the latter are known as deontological (see deontological ethics). Metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgments and theories. Since the beginning of the 20th century, much work in metaethics has focused on the logical and semantic aspects of moral language. Some major metaethical theories are naturalism (see naturalistic fallacy), intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism. Applied ethics, as the name implies, consists of the application of normative ethical theories to practical moral problems (e.g., abortion). Among the major fields of applied ethics are bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and medical ethics.
ethics, in philosophy, the study and evaluation of human conduct in the light of moral principles. Moral principles may be viewed either as the standard of conduct that individuals have constructed for themselves or as the body of obligations and duties that a particular society requires of its members.
Approaches to Ethical Theory
Ethics has developed as people have reflected on the intentions and consequences of their acts. From this reflection on the nature of human behavior, theories of conscience have developed, giving direction to much ethical thinking. Intuitionists (Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke), moral-sense theorists (the 3d earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson), and sentimentalists (J. J. Rousseau, Pierre-Simon Ballanche) postulated an innate moral sense, which serves as the ground of ethical decision. Empiricists (John Locke, Claude Helvétius, John Stuart Mill) deny any such innate principle and consider conscience a power of discrimination acquired by experience. In the one case conscience is the originator of moral behavior, and in the other it is the result of moralizing. Between these extremes there have been many compromises.
The Nature of the Good
Another major difference in the approach to ethical problems revolves around the question of absolute good as opposed to relative good. Throughout the history of philosophy thinkers have sought an absolute criterion of ethics. Frequently moral codes have been based on religious absolutes. Immanuel Kant, in his categorical imperative, attempted to establish an ethical criterion independent of theological considerations. Rationalists (Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Josiah Royce) founded their ethics on a metaphysics.
All varying methods of building an ethical system pose the question of the degree to which morality is authoritative (i.e., imposed by a power outside the individual). If the criterion of morality is the welfare of the state (G. W. Hegel), the state is supreme arbiter. If the authority is a religion, then that religion is the ethical teacher. Hedonism, which equates the good with pleasure in its various forms, finds its ethical criterion either in the good of the individual or the good of the group. An egoistic hedonism (Aristippus, Epicurus, Julien de La Mettrie, Thomas Hobbes) views the good of the individual as the ultimate consideration. A universalistic hedonism, such as utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham, James Mill), finds the ethical criterion in the greatest good for the greatest number. 8. Literature
Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the folktale.
I. American Literature to 1860
According to one version of American cultural history, there was no American literature until the second third of the nineteenth century, when, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, "men grew reflective," and at long last "mind had become aware of itself." Explanations for the literary barrenness of early America were offered then and have been reiterated since, but all such arguments finally arise from the unexamined premise that what writing there was does not deserve the dignity of being called literature.
Colonial America was in fact very much a culture of the book, but for more than a century after the founding, especially in New England, the books were overwhelmingly religious, and the values the postromantic age would associate with literary production--originality, individual voice, the adversarial imagination--were incomprehensible at best or versions of heresy at worst. Early American literary expression arose partly from an oral tradition whose passing Emerson himself came to lament. This sense of loss marks one of his differences from his Concord contemporary Henry David Thoreau, who believed that "there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language" and that writing is "maturity" while speech is "transitory" and "almost brutish." It is a revealing irony that Emerson (who began as a preacher, and whose later essays were developed through the process of oral public delivery) devoted so much of his effort to recapturing the rhythms of inspired speech. Nearly a century after the Revolution, when the elderly Emerson thought that the "American mind ... beginning to show a quiet power ... proper to a continent and an educated people," its literature was also losing some of its spontaneity and its sense of groundedness in a community that knew the sound of its own collective voice. The arrival of a truly national literature--celebrated in the early decades of the nineteenth century with proclamations of its tardiness by William Cullen Bryant (Lectures on Poetry, delivered 1826, published 1884), William Ellery Channing (The Importance and Means of a National Literature, 1830), and Emerson himself (The American Scholar address, 1837)--was accompanied by a sense of the urgent need to record the passing of an earlier America.
In the New England of Emerson's forebears, literature had been spoken. "Faith cometh by hearing" was the Apostle Paul's most frequently quoted injunction, and the ministry poured forth immense numbers of sermons--Sabbath sermons, lecture-day sermons, election-day sermons--many of them transcribed by a devoted lay member of the congregation and prepared for the press as a means of preserving the original experience of hearing the gospel word. From the New England presses there also came inventories of biblical types, chronicles of New England history as part of God's work of redemption, memoirs recording conversions, almanacs containing seasonal poetry and practical advice. Poetry was regarded as suspiciously ornamental, though one of the best-sellers of the seventeenth century, Michael Wigglesworth's chiliastic "The Day of Doom," was cast in an insistent, rhyming tetrameter. Anne Bradstreet's lyrics, composed and published in The Tenth Muse (1650), and the "preparatory meditations" written late in the century by Edward Taylor, minister of Westfield, as a means to prepare himself for administering the Lord's Supper, were the most enduring poetic achievements of Puritan civilization in America.
If we take the view that literature is the record of experience formulated within the terms made available by the culture, then all these writings--however occasional or restricted by the generic conventions of their mainly religious function--constitute literature. But if, in the words of the critic Richard Poirier, literature should furnish "an occasion for ... amazement," whereby we are awakened to the world-creating power of words, the body of early American writing that can be called literature grows smaller. It does not, however, disappear. The greatest colonial preachers and historians--William Bradford, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Cotton Mather--recognized their challenge to employ an Old World language to express New World experience. The biblical accents of Bradford's great Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (written 1630-1650), or the exquisite mapping of the soul that "soul-physicians" like Cotton conducted in early New England, transformed the English language into a New England idiom that was saturated with biblical symbols and irresistibly drawn into the patterns of biblical narrative.
In the southern colonies, which had been settled by men with different aspirations who were often uncertain about the likely duration of their stay, the earliest public writings were largely promotional tracts intended to attract unpropertied young Englishmen into a New World apprenticeship or to allay the doubts of prospective investors. In the early eighteenth century, some significant historical works, notably Robert Beverley's History of the Present State of Virginia (1705), emerged. Perhaps the most remarkable document from the colonial South was William Byrd of Westover's candid diary (1709-1741), containing in raw form themes that would obsess southern writers for centuries to come: the contradictions of a genteel life built on the labor of slaves, the temptations to indolence inherent in the natural fertility, the perilously thin boundary between civilization and savagery.
Distinctions between the northern and southern imagination began to blur in the eighteenth century, as the spread of the Enlightenment modified the religious inheritance of New England and created a southern intellectual class that would eventually produce a group of political writers--Thomas Jefferson (the Declaration of Independence, 1776; Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787), James Madison (chief author of the Federalist Papers, 1787), John Taylor of Caroline (Arator, 1813), and much later John C. Calhoun (A Disquisition on Government, 1851)--whose articulation of the rationale for independence, and then for nationhood, reached a high level of eloquence, complexity, and prescience. The most powerful expressions of the New England mind remained religious, notably in the works of Jonathan Edwards, a latter-day Calvinist who fused the innovations of Lockean psychology with his Puritan inheritance and created an entirely new description of moral and religious experience (especially in his Treatise on Religious Affections, 1746, and in the posthumously published dissertations on The Nature of True Virtue, 1765, and The End for Which God Created the World, 1765). But the project of nation-building became the focus of literary energy in New England as well. In the 1740s, long before political independence was a thinkable idea, a vision of a new unity among the colonies began to be felt in the controversial writings of the Great Awakening and burst out with full force in the pamphlets of the 1760s and 1770s, of which the culminating example was Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776).
After the Revolution, American writing--North and South--inevitably became more self-conscious. The common literary project was to furnish the new nation with a living mythology through which it might achieve a sense of positive identity as it rejected its function as a subsidiary part of the British Empire and sought to suppress its regional distinctions. One feature of this search for a common American history was the growing awareness (which had been sporadically expressed by certain dissident Puritans) of the brutalization and virtually inevitable extinction of the Native Americans--whose voices were represented in Jefferson's Notes; whose ancestors were evoked in Bryant's poem "The Prairies" (1832); who held the stage as the doomed opponents of imperial Britain in numerous "Indian plays," including the perennially popular Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John August Stone; and who appeared, as both sinister heathen and noble savage, in the Leatherstocking saga of James Fenimore Cooper beginning with The Pioneers (1823) and closing with The Deerslayer (1841).
A more usable mythic history was at work in the immensely popular Life of Washington (1800) by Parson Mason Weems, which appeared in many editions under the imprint of the entrepreneurial Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey and became one of the first American works to rival British literary productions in sales. It marked the onset of what has been called "the legend of the Founding Fathers." An American public with a taste for American themes had already begun to support indigenous comedy and melodrama in the theater (in such plays as Royall Tyler's The Contrast, 1787, and William Dunlap's André, 1798), and now, with the rise of a middle-class, female readership, the novel began to gain an audience too. Although more obliquely than in the didactic poetry of the Connecticut Wits or of the Jeffersonian poet Philip Freneau, the theme of the destiny of the young nation occupied the novel as well. Devoted to the epistolary form and to imitations of Samuel Richardson (as the drama was to Richard Brinsley Sheridan), the early American novel put forth its public theme of the tested virtue of the citizenry with a kind of sexual allegory, exploiting the titillating possibilities of the seduction plot. Books like William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) have a threatened woman at the center, who, faced with a tempter's charms, undergoes an internal struggle between passion and restraint that strikingly resembles the national debate over radical Republicanism versus Federalist conservatism.
Before the turn of the century, a number of regional literary styles had begun to emerge--centered in Philadelphia around the Port-Folio of Joseph Dennie, in Boston around the Monthly Anthology, and in New York, somewhat later, around the Knickerbocker group that included James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Irving's Sketch-Book (1820) was the most elegant expression of American nostalgia for the class hierarchy of preindustrial England and the elusive pastoral tranquillity that it seemed to represent.
Such literary societies, especially those of the Boston Unitarians, began to make possible a genuine critical discussion of what kind of literature would be appropriate for a democracy. This was the debate in which Emerson climaxed with his American Scholar address to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1837, and despite all the literary ferment that had preceded him, he was right to announce--in Nature (1836)--that a new age was at hand. The critical debate and the tentative, derivative forays into fiction, drama, and neoclassic epic poetry now gave way to an explosion of creative energy that F. O. Matthiessen has memorably called the "American Renaissance." The decades following Emerson's prophecies of the late 1830s witnessed the greatest outpouring of literary genius in American history, before or since--the romances of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; the prose inventions of Emerson and Thoreau. Lesser writers also began to produce a literature of real social and aesthetic consequence--the exploratory social and psychological analyses of Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson; the beginnings of an African-American narrative tradition with the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861); and the immensely influential fictional attack on slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
By the 1850s it was no longer possible to speak of American literature as provincial or submissive to English models. But as it matured it also modulated what Emerson called its optative mood; it became elegiac (as in Whitman's Democratic Vistas, 1871), and its greatest achievements remained uncomfortable within the traditional structures of literary expression. American literary genius, as in the case of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), broke utterly away from the conventional prescriptions of the novel. To catch the American voice at its grandest, in what Melville called its "Vesuvian" register, one still needs to range beyond the customary boundaries of the "literary," since perhaps the greatest master of English prose in mid-nineteenth-century America was neither a novelist nor a poet, but a politician, Abraham Lincoln.
With the coming of the Civil War, as Melville had intimated in his straitened stories of the 1850s, there occurred what Edmund Wilson has called "the chastening of American prose style." This was a kind of evacuation of the symbolic density that had characterized literary language in America since the prophetic writings of the colonial period. With the advent of the large social novels of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton, American literature may be said to have come of age. But with this triumph of the discursive language of realism, the great age of the American literary imagination may also be said to have passed. If its characteristic voice had once been extreme, self-obsessed, and extravagant, it now became measured, subdued, and controlled. In this change there was loss as well as gain. The extraordinary literary moment of what Melville called, near the end of his life, "the time before steamships," was over.
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (1986); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1940).
Quotes:
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it. - Roland Barthes
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. - Gaston Bachelard
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. - W. H. Auden
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation. - Aharon Appelfeld
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity. - Nelson Algren
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature. - George Age
9. law
Discipline and profession concerned with the customs, practices, and rules of conduct that are recognized as binding by the community. Enforcement of the body of rules is through a controlling authority, such as a group of elders, a regent, a court, or a judiciary. Comparative law is the study of the differences, similarities, and interrelationships of different systems of law. Important areas in the study and practice of law include administrative law, antitrust law, business law, constitutional law, criminal law, environmental law, family law, health law, immigration law, intellectual property law, international law, labour law, maritime law, procedural law, property law, public interest law, tax law, trusts and estates, and torts. See also Anglo-Saxon law; canon law; civil law; common law; equity; Germanic law; Indian law; Islamic law (Shari'ah); Israeli law; Japanese law; jurisprudence; military law; Roman law; Scottish law; Soviet law
Law, rules of conduct of any organized society, however simple or small, that are enforced by threat of punishment if they are violated. Modern law has a wide sweep and regulates many branches of conduct.
Development of Early Law
Law does not develop systematically until a state with a centralized police authority has appeared. For this development a written language is not required, but necessarily the earliest known legal codes are those of literate societies. Examples of early law systems are to be found in the code of Hammurabi (Babylonia), the Laws of Manu (India), and the Mosaic code (Palestine). These codes show what would seem to be the universal tendency of the religious and ethical system of a society to produce a legal order to enforce its ethical and social mandates. In classical antiquity the first codes of law are those attributed to Solon and to Lycurgus.
10. ethics
Branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Ethics is traditionally subdivided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics. Normative ethics seeks to establish norms or standards of conduct; a crucial question in this field is whether actions are to be judged right or wrong based on their consequences or based on their conformity to some moral rule, such as “Do not tell a lie.” Theories that adopt the former basis of judgment are called consequentialist (see consequentialism); those that adopt the latter are known as deontological (see deontological ethics). Metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgments and theories. Since the beginning of the 20th century, much work in metaethics has focused on the logical and semantic aspects of moral language. Some major metaethical theories are naturalism (see naturalistic fallacy), intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism. Applied ethics, as the name implies, consists of the application of normative ethical theories to practical moral problems (e.g., abortion). Among the major fields of applied ethics are bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and medical ethics.
ethics, in philosophy, the study and evaluation of human conduct in the light of moral principles. Moral principles may be viewed either as the standard of conduct that individuals have constructed for themselves or as the body of obligations and duties that a particular society requires of its members.
Approaches to Ethical Theory
Ethics has developed as people have reflected on the intentions and consequences of their acts. From this reflection on the nature of human behavior, theories of conscience have developed, giving direction to much ethical thinking. Intuitionists (Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke), moral-sense theorists (the 3d earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson), and sentimentalists (J. J. Rousseau, Pierre-Simon Ballanche) postulated an innate moral sense, which serves as the ground of ethical decision. Empiricists (John Locke, Claude Helvétius, John Stuart Mill) deny any such innate principle and consider conscience a power of discrimination acquired by experience. In the one case conscience is the originator of moral behavior, and in the other it is the result of moralizing. Between these extremes there have been many compromises.
The Nature of the Good
Another major difference in the approach to ethical problems revolves around the question of absolute good as opposed to relative good. Throughout the history of philosophy thinkers have sought an absolute criterion of ethics. Frequently moral codes have been based on religious absolutes. Immanuel Kant, in his categorical imperative, attempted to establish an ethical criterion independent of theological considerations. Rationalists (Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Josiah Royce) founded their ethics on a metaphysics.
All varying methods of building an ethical system pose the question of the degree to which morality is authoritative (i.e., imposed by a power outside the individual). If the criterion of morality is the welfare of the state (G. W. Hegel), the state is supreme arbiter. If the authority is a religion, then that religion is the ethical teacher. Hedonism, which equates the good with pleasure in its various forms, finds its ethical criterion either in the good of the individual or the good of the group. An egoistic hedonism (Aristippus, Epicurus, Julien de La Mettrie, Thomas Hobbes) views the good of the individual as the ultimate consideration. A universalistic hedonism, such as utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham, James Mill), finds the ethical criterion in the greatest good for the greatest number. 11. philosophy
Critical examination of the rational grounds of our most fundamental beliefs and logical analysis of the basic concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs. Philosophy may also be defined as reflection on the varieties of human experience, or as the rational, methodical, and systematic consideration of the topics that are of greatest concern to humanity. Philosophical inquiry is a central element in the intellectual history of many civilizations. Difficulty in achieving a consensus about the definition of the discipline partly reflects the fact that philosophers have frequently come to it from different fields and have preferred to reflect on different areas of experience. All the world's great religions have produced significant allied philosophical schools. Western philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, George Berkeley, and Søren Kierkegaard regarded philosophy as a means of defending religion and dispelling the antireligious errors of materialism and rationalism. Pythagoras, René Descartes, and Bertrand Russell, among others, were primarily mathematicians whose views of reality and knowledge were influenced by mathematics. Figures such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill were mainly concerned with political philosophy, whereas Socrates and Plato were occupied chiefly by questions in ethics. The Pre-Socratics, Francis Bacon, and Alfred North Whitehead, among many others, started from an interest in the physical composition of the natural world. Other philosophical fields include aesthetics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophical anthropology. See also analytic philosophy; Continental philosophy; feminist philosophy; philosophy of science.
philosophy , study of the ultimate reality, causes, and principles underlying being and thinking. It has many aspects and different manifestations according to the problems involved and the method of approach and emphasis used by the individual philosopher. This article deals with the nature and development of Western philosophical thought. Eastern philosophy, while founded in religion, contains rigorously developed systems; for these, see Buddhism; Confucianism; Hinduism; Islam; Jainism; Shinto; Taoism; Vedanta; and related articles.
Distinguishing Characteristics
This search for truth began, in the Western world, when the Greeks first established (c.600 B.C.) inquiry independent of theological creeds. Philosophy is distinguished from theology in that philosophy rejects dogma and deals with speculation rather than faith. Philosophy differs from science in that both the natural and the social sciences base their theories wholly on established fact, whereas philosophy also covers areas of inquiry where no facts as such are available. Originally, science as such did not exist and philosophy covered the entire field, but as facts became available and tentative certainties emerged, the sciences broke away from metaphysical speculation to pursue their different aims. Thus physics was once in the realm of philosophy, and it was only in the early 20th cent. that psychology was established as a science apart from philosophy. However, many of the greatest philosophers were also scientists, and philosophy still considers the methods (as opposed to the materials) of science as its province.
Branches
Philosophy is traditionally divided into several branches. Metaphysics inquires into the nature and ultimate significance of the universe. Logic is concerned with the laws of valid reasoning. Epistemology investigates the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing. Ethics deals with problems of right conduct. Aesthetics attempts to determine the nature of beauty and the criteria of artistic judgment. Within metaphysics a division is made according to fundamental principles. The three major positions are idealism, which maintains that what is real is in the form of thought rather than matter; materialism, which considers matter and the motion of matter as the universal reality; and dualism, which gives thought and matter equal status. Naturalism and positivism are forms of materialism.
The History of Philosophy
Historically, philosophy falls into three large periods: classical (Greek and Roman) philosophy, which was concerned with the ultimate nature of reality and the problem of virtue in a political context; medieval philosophy, which in the West is virtually inseparable from early Christian thought; and, beginning with the Renaissance, modern philosophy, whose main direction has been epistemology.
Classical Philosophy
The first Greek philosophers, the Milesian school in the early 6th cent. B.C., consisting of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, were concerned with finding the one natural element underlying all nature and being. They were followed by Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Leucippus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus, who took divergent paths in exploring the same problem.
Socrates was the first to inquire also into social and political problems and was the first to use the dialectical method. His speculations were carried on by his pupil Plato, and by Plato's pupil Aristotle, at the Academy in Athens. Roman philosophy was based mainly on the later schools of Greek philosophy, such as the Sophists, the Cynics, Stoicism, and epicureanism. In late antiquity, Neoplatonism, chiefly represented by Plotinus, became the leading philosophical movement and profoundly affected the early development of Christian theology. Arab thinkers, notably Avicenna and Averroës, preserved Greek philosophy, especially Aristotelianism, during the period when these teachings were forgotten in Europe.
The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century
Scholasticism, the high achievement of medieval philosophy, was based on Aristotelian principles. St. Thomas Aquinas was the foremost of the schoolmen, just as St. Augustine was the earlier spokesman for the church of pure belief. The Renaissance, with its new physics, astronomy, and humanism, revolutionized philosophic thought. René Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy because of his attempt to give the new science a philosophic basis. The other great rationalist systems of the 17th cent., especially those of Baruch Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz, were developed in response to problems raised by Cartesian philosophy and the new science. In England empiricism prevailed in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, as well as that of George Berkeley, who was the outstanding idealist. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant achieved a synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist traditions and was in turn developed in the direction of idealism by J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. von Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel.
The romantic movement of the 18th cent. had its beginnings in the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau; its adherents of the 19th cent. included Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the American transcendentalists represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Opposed to the romanticists was the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin profoundly affected mid-19th-century thought. Ethical philosophy culminated in England in the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and in France in the positivism of Auguste Comte. Pragmatism, the first essentially American philosophical movement, was founded at the end of the 19th cent. by C. S. Peirce and was later elaborated by William James and John Dewey.
The Twentieth Century
The transition to 20th-century philosophy essentially came with Henri Bergson. The century has often seen a great disparity in orientation between Continental and Anglo-American thinkers. In France and Germany, major philosophical movements have been the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the existentialism of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Positivism and science have come under the scrutiny of Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School; he has argued that they are driven by hidden interests. Structuralism, a powerful intellectual movement throughout the first half of the 20th cent., defined language and social systems in terms of the relationships among their elements.
Beginning in the 1960s arguments against all of Western metaphysics were marshaled by poststructuralists; among the most influential has been Jacques Derrida, a wide-ranging philosopher who has pursued deconstruction, a program that seeks to identify metaphysical assumptions in literature and psychology as well as philosophy. Both structuralism and poststructuralism originated mostly in France but soon came to influence thinkers throughout the West, especially in Germany and the United States.
Major concerns in American and British philosophy in the 20th cent. have included formal logic, the philosophy of science, and epistemology. Leading early figures included G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; Anglo-American philosophy was later exemplified by logical positivists like Rudolph Carnap. In their close attention to problems of language, the logical positivists, influenced by Wittgenstein, in turn influenced the work of W. V. O. Quine and others in the philosophy of language. Later Anglo-American philosophers turned increasingly toward ethics and political philosophy, as in John Rawls' work on the problem of justice.
12. morality
noun
1. The quality or state of being morally sound: good, goodness, probity, rectitude, righteousness, rightness, uprightness, virtue, virtuousness. See right/wrong.
2. The moral quality of a course of action: ethic (used in plural), ethicality, ethicalness, propriety, righteousness, rightfulness, rightness. See right/wrong.
3. A rule or habit of conduct with regard to right and wrong or a body of such rules and habits: ethic, ethicality, moral (used in plural). See right/wrong.
Quotes:
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. - Isaac Asimov
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit. - Aristotle
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. - Aristotle
The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it. - Jean Anouilh
Morality is a private and costly luxury. - Henry Brooks Adams
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. - Albert Einstein
13. culture
Integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that is both a result of and integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Culture thus consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols. It has played a crucial role in human evolution, allowing human beings to adapt the environment to their own purposes rather than depend solely on natural selection to achieve adaptive success. Every human society has its own particular culture, or sociocultural system. Variation among cultures is attributable to such factors as differing physical habitats and resources; the range of possibilities inherent in areas such as language, ritual, and social organization; and historical phenomena such as the development of links with other cultures. An individual's attitudes, values, ideals, and beliefs are greatly influenced by the culture (or cultures) in which he or she lives. Culture change takes place as a result of ecological, socioeconomic, political, religious, or other fundamental factors affecting a society. See also culture contact; sociocultural evolution.
culture, in anthropology, the integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs, and rules of conduct which delimit the range of accepted behaviors in any given society. Cultural differences distinguish societies from one another. Archaeology, a branch of the broader field of anthropology, studies material culture, the remains of extinct human cultures (e.g., pottery, weaponry) in order to decipher something of the way people lived. Such analysis is particularly useful where no written records exist. One of the first anthropological definitions of the term was given by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in the late 19th cent. By 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn had cataloged over 100 different definitions of the word.
The Nature of Culture
Culture is based on the uniquely human capacity to classify experiences, encode such classifications symbolically, and teach such abstractions to others. It is usually acquired through enculturation, the process through which an older generation induces and compels a younger generation to reproduce the established lifestyle; consequently, culture is embedded in a person's way of life. Culture is difficult to quantify, because it frequently exists at an unconscious level, or at least tends to be so pervasive that it escapes everyday thought. This is one reason that anthropologists tend to be skeptical of theorists who attempt to study their own culture.
Theories of Culture
Investigations have arisen from belief in many different theories of culture and have often given voice to new theoretical bases for approaching the elusive term. Many early anthropologists conceived of culture as a collection of traits and studied the diffusion, or spread, of these traits from one society to another. Critics of diffusionism, however, pointed out that the theory failed to explain why certain traits spread and others do not. Cultural evolution theory holds that traits have a certain meaning in the context of evolutionary stages, and they look for relationships between material culture and social institutions and beliefs. These theorists classify cultures according to their relative degree of social complexity and employ several economic distinctions (foraging, hunting, farming, and industrial societies) or political distinctions (autonomous villages, chiefdoms, and states). Critics of this theory argue that the use of evolution as an explanatory metaphor is flawed, because it tends to assume a certain direction of development, with an implicit apex at modern, industrial society. Ecological approaches explain the different ways that people live around the world not in terms of their degree of evolution but rather as distinct adaptations to the variety of environments in which they live. They also demonstrate how ecological factors may lead to cultural change, such as the development of technological means to harness the environment. Structural-functionalists posit society as an integration of institutions (such as family and government), defining culture as a system of normative beliefs that reinforces social institutions. Some criticize this view, which suggests that societies are naturally stable (see functionalism). Historical-particularists look upon each culture as a unique result of its own historical processes. Symbolic anthropology looks at how people's mental constructs guide their lives. Structuralists analyze the relationships among cultural constructs of different societies, deriving universal mental patterns and processes from the abstract models of these relationships. They theorize that such patterns exist independent of, and often at odds with, practical behavior. Many theories of culture have been criticized for assuming, intentionally or otherwise, that all people in any one society experience their culture in the same way. Today, many anthropologists view social order as a fragile accomplishment that various members of a society work at explaining, enforcing, exploiting, or resisting. They have turned away from the notion of elusive “laws” of culture that often characterizes cross-cultural analyses to the study of the concrete historical, political, and economic forces that structure the relations among cultures. Important theorists on culture have included Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, Ruth Benedict, and Clifford Geertz.
14. democracy
Form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. In a direct democracy, the public participates in government directly (as in some ancient Greek city-states, some New England town meetings, and some cantons in modern Switzerland). Most democracies today are representative. The concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages and the Enlightenment and in the American and French Revolutions. Democracy has come to imply universal suffrage, competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law. See also republic.
democracy , term originating in ancient Greece to designate a government where the people share in directing the activities of the state, as distinct from governments controlled by a single class, select group, or autocrat. The definition of democracy has been expanded, however, to describe a philosophy that insists on the right and the capacity of a people, acting either directly or through representatives, to control their institutions for their own purposes. Such a philosophy places a high value on the equality of individuals and would free people as far as possible from restraints not self-imposed. It insists that necessary restraints be imposed only by the consent of the majority and that they conform to the principle of equality.
Development
Democracy first flourished in the Greek city-state, reaching its fullest expression in ancient Athens. There the citizens, as members of the assembly, participated directly in the making of their laws. A democracy of this sort was possible only in a small state where the people were politically educated, and it was limited since the majority of inhabitants were slaves or noncitizens. Athenian democracy fell before imperial rule, as did other ancient democracies in the early Italian cities and the early church. In this period and in the Middle Ages, ideas such as representation crucial to modern Western democracy were developed.
Doctrines of natural law evolved into the idea of natural rights, i.e., that all people have certain rights, such as self-preservation, that cannot be taken from them. The idea of contract followed, that rulers and people were bound to each other by reciprocal obligations. If the sovereign failed in his duties or transgressed on natural rights, the people could take back their sovereignty. This idea, as postulated by John Locke, strongly influenced the development of British parliamentary democracy and, as defined in the social contract theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau, helped form the philosophical justification for the American and French Revolutions. The idea that equality of opportunity can be maintained through political democracy alone has long been challenged by socialists and others, who insist that economic democracy through economic equality and public ownership of the major means of production is the only foundation upon which a true political democracy can be erected.
English settlers in America faced frontier conditions that emphasized the importance of the individual and helped in breaking down class distinctions and prejudices. These led to a democratic political structure marked by a high degree of individualism, civil liberty, and a government limited by law. In the 19th cent. emphasis was placed on broadening the franchise and improving the machinery for enabling the will of the people to be more fully and directly expressed.
Since the mid-20th cent. most political systems have described themselves as democracies, but many of them have not encouraged competing political parties and have not stressed individual rights and other elements typical of classic Western democracy. With the collapse of one-party Communist rule in Eastern Europe, the fall of authoritarian dictatorships in Latin America, and the end of some one-party states in sub-Saharan Africa, however, the number of true multiparty democracies has increased. Despite the increase in the number of countries holding multiparty elections, however, the United Nations issued a study in 2002 that stated that in more than half the world's nations the rights and freedoms of citizens are limited.
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