Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Founding Fathers of the United States – Juvenile literature”

One of the paradoxical reasons for the 2008 financial crash was that the competition between the Western and Eastern blocs was played out and won not militarily but rather on the grounds of economic efficiency. Because the primacy of the West had been established by economics and not armaments, not only did the West forgo the construction of a new global governance, but it also failed to reinforce the existing one, which might have avoided the risks of unbridled capitalism. The 20-year period between 1989 and 2008 highlighted a radicalization of the capitalist model on which developed Western societies were based, together with a distorted conception of the corporation. The relationship between democracy and free market is asymmetrical: democracy cannot survive without a free market, while the free market functions even in the absence of democracy. In fact, one of the reasons why several Italian banks such as Intesa Sanpaolo were less affected by the 2008 crisis than other institutions around the world was precisely that they relied less on financial risk than on credit. However, the West seems to have now lost the capacity of vision that the United States and the founding fathers of the European Union demonstrated at the end of the Second World War. Must the West, therefore, resign itself to a marginal role in world affairs, or does it still have a chance to regain an influential role in a fairer and more solidarity-orientated global order?

Este artigo aborda algumas questões fundamentais da relação pesquisador/pesquisado, a fim de auxiliar jovens pesquisadores que se debruçam sobre os estudos das religiões. Primeiro, chamamos atenção para as não consensuais concepções empregadas pelos estudiosos e também para a diferença entre os modos de vivência da fé e as classificações acadêmicas. O segundo ponto abordado diz respeito à tarefa elementar do cientista social da religião, a saber, a de sintetizar a complexidade do trânsito dos fiéis, que circulam em múltiplas alternativas religiosas. Como um terceiro ponto, ressaltamos a interferência da visão pessoal do pesquisador para a construção do saber. O presente trabalho retoma algumas proposições metodológicas já cunhadas pela literatura e evoca parte da trajetória de pesquisa de um dos pais fundadores da sociologia – Max Weber –, a fim de levantar algumas notas metodológicas sobre sua experiência de viagem aos Estados Unidos e sobre a elaboração de As seitas protestantes e o espírito do capitalismo.Abstract: In order to help some researchers who are beginning on sociological and anthropological approach, this article discusses some typical issues about the relationship between the researchers and “the researched”. First of all, we call attention to the non-consensual conceptions employed by the researchers, and to the differences between the ways which believers live their faith and the classifications which have been made by scholars. The second debate we pointed out is elementary and it is common to all religious researches. We emphasize the task of connect all the complexity of multiple sets of affiliations. As a third point we state about the interference of the researcher’s personal vision to the construction of knowledge. This paper revisits some methodological proposals that have been suggested by the specialized literature, and evokes part of the trajectory of one of founding fathers of sociology – Max Weber –, in order to develop some notes on his methodological experience of traveling to United States and writing The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism.Keywords: Religion. Methodology. Max Weber.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings’s views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.