Western Civilization 2 Exam 2

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Utilitarianism (Hedonistic and Classical)

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Who- Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill

What- Moral rules exist to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. On this view, there is no common or higher good beyond individual self-interest. What we call the common good is simply individual self-interest, aggregated and maximized. Utilitarians tend to be externalists and can follow moral rules to aide with the common good. Because individuals are understood to be motivated by self-interest, they need an additional motivation in order to care not just about their own happiness but also about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. A utilitarian can be in favor of individual rights. But the utilitarian will analyze those rights in terms of the effect they will have on utility

When- 19th century

Where- Europe

Significance- Bentham believed in Hedonism: the only human motivations, and the only standards of value, are the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; since punishment is the administering of pain, it is wrong in itself; the only justification for punishment is that it prevents further pain, by deterring others or by reforming criminals themselves. John Stuart Mill wrote on Utilitarianism. Basically: Utilitarianism can only attain its goal of greater happiness by cultivating the nobleness of individuals so that all can benefit from the honor of others. Utilitarianism is actually a "standard of morality" which uses happiness of the greater number of people as its ultimate goal. Mill mainly writes as if addressing opponents of utilitarianism, but here he is also trying to criticize and refine the understanding of the Greatest Happiness Principle offered by earlier utilitarians (Bentham).

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The Problem of Rights

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Nerds spying on sorority girls

Nerds are gaining pleasure, therefore, there is no harm

However, Sorority girls are losing their right to privacy, therefore utilitarianism is a bad thing.

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Lord Ashley's Mines Commission

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Who- Lord Ashley, an advocate of labor reform and all the children and women that testified.

What- It was a committee of people that banded together to prevent overworking of children in mines. The testimonies taken from this commission give details about the conditions in which they worked. Women and children were preferred to men because they were paid lower wages. Testimonies include that of Thomas Dunn, the manager of the mine, Payne, the coal master, Ann Eggley, Patience Kershaw, and Isabel Wilson. Ann Eggley had never heard of Jesus, Patience Kershaw worked with naked men, and Isabel Wilson states the hardships that she has dealt with in trying to bear children under the conditions of the mines.

When- 1842

Where- Great Britain

Significance- resulted in the Mines Act of 1842 that prohibited the employment in the mines of all women and of boys under thirteen. This act led to the ability for children to become more educated and move forward civilization. It was not strictly enforced.

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Steam Engine

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Who- James Watt

What- the first type of steam engine to make use of steam at a pressure just above atmospheric to drive the piston helped by a partial vacuum. It was the fully developed version that actually went into production.

When- 1775

Where- Scotland

Significance- It offered a dramatic increase in fuel efficiency, the new design replaced Newcomen engines in areas where coal was expensive, and then went on to be used in the place of most natural power sources such as wind and water. James Watt's design became synonymous with steam engines. This aided in the industrial revolution the same way that the spinning jenny did, by allowing fewer workers and therefore lowering prices. It also allowed the products to be made more quickly with less fuel, also lowering the prices.

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Working Class

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The proletariat (from Latin proletarius, a citizen of the lowest class) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons. The term was initially used in a derogatory sense[citation needed], Karl Marx strengthened this negative connotation using it as a sociological term to refer to the working class which he chose to describe them as a population to manipulate for the consolidation of power in the hands of a centralized statist government.

A 1911 Industrial Worker publication advocating industrial unionism based on a critique of capitalism.

In Marxist theory, the proletariat is the class of a capitalist society that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power[1] for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat. For Marx, however, wage labour may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since workers automatically wish their wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.

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Bourgeoisie

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Traditionally, the bourgeoisie composed those who were not peasants, nobles or clergy

One needed capital, independent business or be a member of the free professions

The capital accumulation and social mobility that came with trade and industrialization blurred old class distinctions

The upper middle class and the old nobility began intermarrying

The case of the Churchill family

In order to distinguish themselves from the other classes, the 19th-century middle class promoted a utilitarian, comfortable and private lifestyle

a) Education as a ticket to middle-class status

- student numbers tripled between 1870-1913

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Spinning Jenny

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Who- invented by James Hargreaves

What- a multi-spool spinning wheel

When- invented in 1764

Where- invented in England

Significance- The device dramatically reduced the amount of work needed to produce yarn, with a single worker able to work eight or more spools at once. Aided in the Industrial Revolution. Allowed to use fewer workers and therefore lowered the price of yarn and other fabrics.

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Social Novel

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Social novels, also known as social problem novels or realist fiction, originated in the eighteenth century but gained a popular following in the nineteenth century with the rise of the Victorian Era and in many ways was a reaction to industrialization, social, political and economic issues and movements. In the 1830s the social novel saw resurgence as emphasis on widespread reforms of government and society emerged, and acted as a literary means of protest and awareness of abuses of government, industry and other repercussions suffered by those who did not profit from England's economic prosperity.[1] The sensationalized accounts and stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class audiences to help incite sympathy and action towards pushing for legal and moral changes, as with the Reform Act of 1832, and crystallized different issues in periodicals and novels for a growing literate population.

Ex: Charles Dicken's Hard Times

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Household Words

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Household Words was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens which took its name from the line from Shakespeare "Familiar in his mouth as household words" — Henry V.

—-Charles Dickens

Theoretically, the paper championed the cause of the poor and working classes, but in fact addressed itself almost exclusively to the middle class. Only the name of Dickens, the journal's "conductor," appeared;. Articles were unsigned (although authors of serialized novels were identified) and, in spite of its regularly featuring an "advertiser," unillustrated.

In order to boost slumping sales Dickens' serialized his own novel, Hard Times, every week between April 1 and August 12, 1854. It had the desired effect more than doubling the journal's circulation and encouraging the author who remarked that he was, "Three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at Hard Times".

That Dickens owned half of the company and his agents, Forster and Wills, owned a further quarter of it was insurance that the author would have a free hand in the paper. In 1859, however, owing to a dispute between Dickens and the publishers, Bradbury and Evans, it was replaced by All the Year Round in which he had greater control.

The journal contained a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. A large amount of the non-fiction dealt with the social issues of the time.

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"Angel in the House"

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The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded up until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular during the later nineteenth century and its influence continued well into the twentieth. The poem was an idealized account of Patmore's courtship of his first wife, Emily, whom he believed to be the perfect woman.

The poem is in two main parts, but was originally published in four installments. The first was published with the main title in 1854. It was followed by "The Espousals" (1856), "Faithful for Ever" (1860), and "The Victories of Love" (1862). The latter two parts are effectively a separate poem, related to the main text.

The first two installments form a single coherent poem. It begins with a preface in which the poet, called Felix Vaughan in the book, tells his wife that he is going to write a long poem about her. The narrative then begins with an account of the poet's youth when he meets Honoria Churchill, the woman who is to become his wife. It proceeds in a series of short lyrics, representing Felix's reflections on his beloved, and on the nature of ideal femininity. There are also lyrics written from the point of view of Honoria. These reflective and lyrical sections are set into a narrative of the growing relationship between the couple, the emergence of a rival suitor, Honoria's cousin Frederick, who is rejected in favour of Felix, and the couple's eventual marriage.

The final instalments, known together by the title The Victories of Love, are written mostly from the point of view of Frederick, the rejected suitor, who marries another woman, Jane, after his rejection by Honoria. Unlike the first part, this section is in the form of an epistolary novel. Each poem is presented as a letter from one character to another. The initial letters, between Frederick and his mother, reveal that Frederick admits to feeling dissatisfied with his wife, especially whenever he meets his first love and her husband. The poem describes his struggle to overcome these feelings and to concentrate all his love on his wife, who also expresses her own doubts in letters to her mother. The other characters express their anxieties and hopes about the relationship between Frederick and Jane. Honoria helps Jane by her own example, and in the end Frederick overcomes his doubts and feels complete devotion to his wife.

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Leisure

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Wholesome leisure: sports

Boy Scouts
Soccer, rugby and football
Tennis (the heterosexual sport)
Golf

Life of comfort and leisure: residential segregation, servant-keeping, non-profit work and travel

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Mode of Production

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In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning 'the way of producing') is a specific combination of:

* productive forces: these include human labour power and the means of production (eg. tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land).
* social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.

Marx regarded productive ability and participation in social relations as two essential characteristics of human beings and that the particular modality of these relations in capitalist production are inherently in conflict with the increasing development of human productive capacities. [1]

According to Marx, the combination of forces and relations of production means that the way people relate to the physical world and the way people relate to each other socially are bound up together in specific and necessary ways. People must consume to survive, but to consume they must produce, and in producing they necessarily enter into relations which exist independently of their will.

For Marx, the whole 'secret' of why/how a social order exists and the causes of social change must be discovered in the specific mode of production that a society has. He further argued that the mode of production substantively shaped the nature of the mode of distribution, the mode of circulation and the mode of consumption, all of which together constitute the economic sphere. To understand the way wealth was distributed and consumed, it was necessary to understand the conditions under which it was produced.

A mode of production is historically distinctive for Marx, because it constitutes part of an 'organic totality' (or self-reproducing whole) which is capable of constantly re-creating its own initial conditions, and thus perpetuate itself in a more or less stable ways for centuries, or even millennia. By performing social surplus labour in a specific system of property relations, the labouring classes constantly reproduce the foundations of the social order. Normally a mode of production shapes the mode of distribution, circulation and consumption, and is regulated by the state.

When however new productive forces or new social relations develop that conflict with the existing mode of production, this mode of production will either evolve without losing its basic structure, or else begin to break down. This then gives rise to a transitional era of social instability and social conflict, until a new social order is finally consolidated, with a new mode of production.