Postmodern Politics for a Planet in Crisis

Policy, Process, and Presidential Vision

Edited by David Ray Griffin & Richard A. Falk

Subjects: Social Change, Environmental Studies, Presidency, The, Postmodernism, Political Science
Series: SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought
Paperback : 9780791414866, 232 pages, July 1993
Hardcover : 9780791414859, 232 pages, July 1993

Alternative formats available from:

Table of contents

Preface

Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought
David Ray Griffin

Introduction: From Modernity to Postmodern Politics
Richard Falk and David Ray Griffin

PART I: POLITICAL VISION AND POLICY FOR A POSTMODERN AMERICA

1. A Presidential Address on the Economy
John B. Cobb Jr.

2. The Full Measure of Our Days: Time and Public Policy in a Postmodern World
Joanna Macy

3. 2020 Hindsight: A Retired Kansas Farmer Looks Back on the Revolution in Agriculture between 1990 amd 2020
Wes Jackson

4. The "Vision Thing," the Presidency, and the Ecological Crisis, or the Greenhouse Effect and the "White House Effect"
David Ray Griffin

5. Without a Vision the People Perish: Washington D. C. as Parable
Jim Wallis

6. A Postmodern Vision of Education for a Living Planet
Douglas Sloan

PART II: THE POLITICAL PROCESS AND THE PRESIDENCY

7. Political Culture and the Presidency: Memory and the Shift from Mostmodern to Postmodern
Roger Wilkins

8. Politics for a Troubled Planet: Toward a Postmodern Democratic Culture
Frances Moore Lappe

9. A Postmodern Presidency for a Postmodern World
Richard Falk

10. Searching for a President with a Global Vision
Frank K. Kelly

Notes on Contributors and Centers

Index

Argues that the planetary crisis, which has been produced by modernity, demands a postmodern politics.

Description

This book argues that the planetary crisis, which has been produced by modernity, demands a postmodern politics, especially in the United States, the chief embodiment and exporter of modernity. What is needed is an America that promotes a new world order that is genuinely new—one based on a concern for the human race as a whole, and on a sustainable relationship between the human species and the rest of the biosphere. John B. Cobb, Jr. , Richard Falk, David Ray Griffin, Wes Jackson, Frank Kelly, Frances Moore Lappé, Joanna Macy, Douglas Sloan, Jim Wallis, and Roger Wilkins write about various dimensions of this postmodern politics, including its educational aims, morality, time-consciousness, and ecological sensibility, its agricultural and other environmental policies, its truly democratic process, and a postmodern presidency. This book provides the most complete prescription yet for the kind of presidential leadership we need and the kind of transformation in the body politic necessary to evoke and complement such leadership.

David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School, Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies, and President of the Center for a Postmodern World. He is the author of God and Religion in the Postmodern World and Evil Revisited and editor of The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals; Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions; and Sacred Interconnections: Postmodern Spirituality, Political Economy, and Art. Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and rapporteur of the Global Civilization Project, an undertaking of the World Order Models Project. He is the author of Explorations at the Edge of Time: Prospects for the World Order; Revolutionaries and Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terrorism; A Study of Future Worlds; and (with Robert Jay Lifton) Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism.

Reviews

"There are more ideas per linear inch in this book than in a dozen others. This is a genuinely visionary compilation. The book brings a powerful moral/ecological vision to a subject corrupted by a deepening national cynicism. " — David W. Orr, Director, Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College