Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity

by Fernando Flores, Huebert L. Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa

Book Overview

Argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture--that is, when they are making history.

Disclosing New Worlds calls for a recovery of a way of being that has always characterized human life at its best. The book argues that human beings are at their best not when they...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262692244
• ISBN13: 9780262692243
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

More needed now than ever

This book suffers from only one negative: it was published ten years too early, way ahead of its time. This book is far more relevant to the issues of today than it was in 1999, although the matters it addresses are really timeless. While the writing is fairly dense (which I personally like) and it's useful, maybe necessary, to have some familiarity with the sources behind the ideas presented, anyone with patience and commitment can derive enormous benefit from this book. Careful reading of this work yields exceptional and practicable gains for anyone interested in "history-making" in any domain. The authors offer direct sensitizing to the terrain of producing meaningful changes in human identities and the worlds in which those identities are embedded. With so many how-to style books on the market, this one fills in a much needed missing piece: the underlying architecture of generative innovation. This book is the real deal. Inspiring and powerful.

Philosophical Exploration of the Fundamental Principles

Disclosing New Worlds is a philosophical exploration of the fundamental principles that underlie entrepreneurial activity, democratic action and the cultivation of solidarity. Through a number of real-life examples, it shows how excellence in these three domains of social activity is brought about-not with a detached, rational deliberative stance, but with intense involvement in the practices of the culture and critical reflection on the anomalies of everyday life. "Disclosing New Worlds gets to the heart of corporate entrepreneurship. It combines rigorous philosophical thinking with rich descriptions of everyday corporate, democratic and social life. The result is a book that accurately portrays a set of important skills not yet taught in our schools."Thank you!

Un libro para leer muchas veces

La noción de disclosive spaces y estilo nos produce una mayor apertura a otros mundos. Nos permite desarrollar sensibilidad a la manera de ser de cada uno y de los otros. La observación sistemática de anomalías pone más a la mano la posibilidad de innovación, le quita la connotación "mágica" que acarrea para nosotros. El estilo como esencia del ser histórico, y como juega con los disclosive spaces es una noción muy potente para impulsar cambios. Vivir cada cosa como momento único, para lo cual hay que darse tiempo para andar más lento por la vida.

On becoming an agent in everyday life

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have read. It accomplishes a truly philosophical approach to the types of social action that are available in everyday life: in business, politics and culture. Its view of social action as disclosure may bring fundamental changes to the way we cope with our everyday problems. Plato--who may be a model for every philosopher--developed his most important philosophical ideas in the Republic--a book about social action, focused on the most important kind of social action of his time. Disclosing New Worlds does a similar job for the 20th century world (of course, it does not have the ambition to be as comprehensive as Plato's work). This is a book that attempts to develop the reader's level of awareness--to a historical awareness, which is essential to human life, as stressed by Ortega y Gasset. Indispensable reading for whoever has a necessity to think about business and society.

Skills for making history spring from the everyday world!

Refusing to employ the all-too-common approach of using abstract conceptions of the human being such as "performer," "rational animal," "creature of God," and so forth from which to derive an idea of the good life, the authors show how the skills of entrepreneurs, virtuous citizens, and cultivators of solidarity enable life to be lived at its best. More than this, the authors claim that these skills need not be admired from afar but can be cultivated in each of our lives. Developing these skills does not merely help the economy, political activity, and our communities. They make our lives worth living. Without understanding and cultivating them, our lives drift toward a meaninglessness in which we act without caring. We can see this drift today in the lack of abiding commitments by workers to businesses, by citizens to politics, and by us all generally to the social institutions that bind us together. When people develop these skills in their everyday lives, they are engaged in "making history." This means that our common understanding of history as a sequence of large-scale events and important people fails to grasp what it is that truly makes history. History is made when we change the way in which we understand and deal with ourselves and things. This book is the first of its kind in many ways. It brings together some of our greatest cultural concerns and shows the common background to them all in an unprecedented way. That is, it shows that those who create the business opportunities most of us take for granted, who as citizens change our political landscape, and who overcome our divisiveness by creating solidarity between us all share some basic skills. This book is the first to bring together these different worlds in this way. The book is also deeply philosophical but written so that its philosophical moorings do not obstruct understanding. Rather its philosophical roots attract the reader, because the basic philosophical question under consideration is: what does it mean to be human and to live life at its best? No other book has endeavored to find the answer to this question by examining the common practices underlying the innovative activity of entrepreneurs, good citizens, and those who generate and cultivate solidarity. The authors provide studies ranging from Henry Ford to Mothers Against Drunk Driving to Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate their points. The cases they examine draw the reader into a world in which he or she learns that we need not live life at meaningless extremes, but that there is room in our lives for creative and fruitful activity that can change our world for the good. Steering clear of the "Cartesian" extreme of viewing all circumstances governed by rules that we can simply apply as well as the "neo-Nietzschean" extreme of viewing the world as nothing but meaningless change, the authors provide their readers with hope that they can artfully change their world. My praise for the book c