People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society.

The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today.

This book is about how individuals make political decisions and form impressions of politicians and policies, with a strong emphasis on the role of the mass media in those processes.

In this volume. Heide Gerstenberger investigates the development of bourgeois state power by on the one hand proposing a critique of different variants of the structural-functionalist theory of the state and on the other hand analysing the examples of England and France. The central thesis of the work is that the bourgeois form of capitalist state power arose only where capitalist societies developed out of state structures that were already rationalised.

The purpose of this volume is to ask and propose a positive answer to the question: "Can we attend to the personhood of individuals within systems and cultures which are mass oriented?" One of the most interesting changes in contemporary thinking has been the emphasis on the unique person. While the distinction between a person (a unique rational being) and individual (one of several similar things) has long existed, it is in the twentieth century that we seem to have become fully conscious of this distinction. There is good reason for such as emphasis today. Repeatedly in this century the case of the person was deemed less important than some policy. Innocent persons slaughtered in the name of some "ism," political bombings and kidnappings, and mass unemployment to name but a few. The cause of our dehumanization seems to be the reduction of the individual person to a part of the political, economic or religious system.

American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the “posthuman.” Additionally, some essays respond to the current “aesthetic turn” in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In the 1970s, he used Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to explain the popularity of cinema. In this final book, Metz uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs, offering critical direction for theorists who struggle with the phenomena of new media. If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Consulting a range of genres and national trends, Metz builds a novel theory around the placement and subjectivity of screens within screens, which pulls in—and forces him to reassess—his work on authorship, film language, and the position of the spectator. Metz again takes up the linguistic and theoretical work of Benveniste, Genette, Casetti, and Bordwell, drawing surprising conclusions that presage current writings on digital media. Metz's analysis enriches work on cybernetic emergence, self-assembly, self-reference, hypertext, and texts that self-produce in such a way that the human element disappears. A critical introduction by Cormac Deane bolsters the connection between Metz's findings and nascent digital-media theory, emphasizing Metz's keen awareness of the methodological and philosophical concerns we wrestle with today.

"Exact but not exacting, this is a fine work of overview and analysis; it makes an excellent contribution to the literature on power and freedom." Philip Pettit, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University "In this work, the author assumes the task of a ‘logical clean-up’ – an extremely valuable contribution to the promotion of scientific rigour and clarity in political scholarship." [This book] "gives the reader orientation in a conceptual jungle." [It is] "an excellent analysis of the relationships between normative and social power." Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Prof. em.

Whenever we interact with other people, we influence them--and they influence us. Within this sphere, neutrality is an impossibility. Instead, we must learn to think in terms of good and bad ways of influencing, and here the keyword is respect. The need for respectful influence is no less critical when dealing with religious influence, especially in the relationship between children and adults. In this book, longtime director of the Christian Institute of Education in Denmark, Carsten Hjorth Pedersen, provides valuable guidance for parents, educators, teachers, club leaders, and preachers who influence others in work or leisure. In a language accessible to all readers, the author shows the way to a healthy balance--a balance that relies on the will to confront, but without letting down the other person, neither through intimacy nor desertion.