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Activating the Common GoodBy: Peter Block A powerful, inspiring, and achievable vision of a society based on cooperation and community instead of competition and commodification. This book counters the dominant and destructive story that we are polarized, violent, selfish, and destined to consume everything in sight. That is not who we are. The challenge, Peter Block says, is that we are suffering under an economic theology that is based on scarcity, self interest,
By: Peter BlockA powerful, inspiring, and achievable vision of a society based on cooperation and community instead of competition and commodification.
This book counters the dominant and destructive story that we are polarized, violent, selfish, and destined to consume everything in sight. That is not who we are.
The challenge, Peter Block says, is that we are suffering under an economic theology that is based on scarcity, self-interest, competition, and infinite growth. We’re told we can purchase and outsource all that matters. Block calls this the “business perspective narrative.” It dominates not only the economy but also architecture, faith communities, journalism, arts, neighborhoods, and much more.
Block offers an antidote: the “common good narrative.” It embodies the belief that we are basically communal and cooperative. And that we have the capacity to communally produce what we care most about: raising a child, safety, livelihood, health, and a clean and sustainable environment.
This book describes how shifts to the common good perspective could transform many areas, fostering journalism that reports on what works, architecture that designs habitable spaces creating connection, faith collectives that build community, a market that is restrained and local, and leadership and activism that build social capital by creating trust among citizens. With these shifts, we would fundamentally change the world we live in for the better.
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4.6 ★★★★★
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Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
Five Stars
Format: Paperback
Why read Butler when we have Wittig?
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2017
★★★★★ 5
Five Stars
Format: Paperback
Great and thought-provoking!
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2017
★★★★★ 5
Five Stars
Format: Paperback
excellent sevice
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Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2015
★★★★★ 5
Gem from a brilliant thinker.
Format: Paperback
This book will forever redefine feminism for its readers.
There are two threads: one political, the other literary commentary. Fortunately, Witting pulls the former into the latter. The astute and radical political critique in Wittig's book is uniquely powerful.
Wittig addresses the question of how a movement is comprised of both group energy and individual experience. The theory, legacy, and limits of Marx and Engels are discussed.
Then, drawing on de Beauvoir and other iconoclasts, Wittig addresses our dominator culture in a way that goes directly to its core.
Wittig deals efficiently yet persuasively with the argument over whether nature or culture is responsible for inequality, declaring that "there is no sex." This statement becomes the book's alpha and omega, and the lens through which Wittig shows us history, literature, and the future of activism.
Like whiteness, maleness is a social category that can be renounced. Man (Homo) once meant everybody in the human community -- it was indeed generic, in the unifying sense. Unfortunately, the word has so frequently been used to describe a socially constructed group that expels half of itself in order to oppress it, "man" is now identified with those identified as male.
In the essay "The Category of Sex" Wittig writes:
"The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief, and, as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men. The ideology of sexual difference functions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the grounds of nature, the social opposition between man and women. Masculine/feminine, male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. ...The masters explain and justify the established divisions as a result of natural differences."
I understand that Wittig has recently passed away. If only I had discovered this book a little earlier, so that I could have met the author. That feeling, I suppose, is the sign of a truly good read. "A text by a minority author is only successful if it succeeds in making the minority point of view unviersal" writes Wittig --and to read this book from beginning to end is to find that the author has done just that.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2004
★★★★★ 3
Partly still thought-provoking, partly dated
Format: Paperback
Dr. Wittig had so much anger, and had such a fight to fight. She seems excessive at times, or as though she is painting with such a broad brush, but writing such as this did win some important battles. No, things are not as dark as her wrath would suggest, or at least not anymore.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2013