Honor in the Modern World : Interdisciplinary Perspectives

After a century-long hiatus, honor is back. Academics, pundits, and everyday citizens alike are rediscovering the importance of this ancient and powerful human motive. This volume brings together some of the foremost researchers of honor to debate honor’s meaning and its compatibility with liberalism, democracy, and modernity. Contributors―representing philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, leadership studies, and military science―examine honor past to present, from masculine and feminine perspectives, and in North American, European, and African contexts. Topics include the role of honor in the modern military, the effects of honor on our notions of the dignity and “purity” of women, honor as a quality of good statesmen and citizens, honor’s role in international relations and community norms, and how honor’s egalitarian and elitist aspects intersect with democratic and liberal regimes.

Amitai Etzioni is the founder and director of the Communitarian Network and University Professor at The George Washington University. He has served as a senior advisor to the White House and President of the American Sociological Association. He has taught sociology at Columbia University, the Harvard Business School, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 22 books, including The New Golden Rule, Political Unification Revisited and My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message. A recent study listed him as one of the leading hundred public intellectuals.

Shannon E. French is the Inamori Professor in Ethics, director of the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, and a professor in philosophy and law at Case Western Reserve University, USA. Prior to CWRU, she taught for eleven years at the United States Naval Academy. She founded the first MA program in Military Ethics at CWRU, works globally with the US and allied military, service academies, and chaplain corps, and held the General Hugh Shelton Distinguished Visiting Chair in Ethics for seven years. Her core fields are military ethics and ethical issues in emerging technology.

Sharon R. Krause, Brown University, USA

Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and a fellow of the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is past president of the International Society of Political Psychology and currently an Alexander Onassis Fellow of Classical Studies. His The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (2003) won the Alexander L. George Award of the International Society of Political Psychology for the best book in the field. More recently, he has authored Conflict, Cooperation and Ethics (2006) and co-edited Unmaking the West: “What-If” Scenarios that Rewrite World History (2006) and The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006).