Full Description
Kindness Wars rescues our understanding of kindness from the clutches of an intellectually and morally myopic popular psychology and returns it to the stage of big ideas, in keeping with the important Enlightenment-era debates about human nature and possibilities. Cazenave conceptualizes kindness not just as a benevolent feeling, a caring thought, or a generous action but as a worldview, a theory, or an ideology that explains who we are and justifies how we treat others. Here "kindness wars" refer to the millennia-old "kindness theory" and ideological conflicts over what kind of societies humans can and should have. The book's title denotes the two types of kindness wars it analyzes, conflict over (1) whether to be kind or not (i.e., the conflicts between kindness and other societal values and ideologies) and (2) what it means to be kind (i.e., the wars within kindness over different ideas as to what it means to be kind and to whom). Using a conflict theoretical perspective, Kindness Wars examines the history of the kindness concept; its many struggles with opposing notions of our true nature and possibilities; and what the lessons of that history and those battles offer us toward the development of a large, robust, and politically engaged conceptualization of kindness.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Kindness Wars: An Introduction
Chapter 2 The Evolution of Human Kindness from Before History
Chapter 3 The Political Construction of Kindness from Thucydides
to Hobbes
Chapter 4 Self-Interest Versus the Common Good: The Enlightenment
Debates
Chapter 5 Industrialization, Socialism, and Social Darwinism in the
Nineteenth-Century Social Thought
Chapter 6 Wars, Hyper-Capitalism, and Human Rights in the
Twentieth Century and Beyond
Chapter 7 Making Black Lives Matter: Kindness Battles in
Twenty-First Century America
Chapter 8 The Future Of Kindness: Toward the Construction of
Kinder Societies
Index
About the Author
