Research Catalog

Title

Power and parenting : a hermeneutic of the human condition / Kieran Bonner.

Author

Bonner, Kieran, 1951-

Publication

Houndmills, Basingstoke : Macmillan Press Ltd ; New York : St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 177 pages; 23 cm

Summary

The power to act is two-sided: it refers to the parent's ability to initiate (having children or responding to their actions) and to the need to come to terms with limits (irreversibility and unpredictability). The book argues that the best way of responding to the essential limits of human power (Arendt) is for the parent to develop the interrelation between wisdom, ethnicality and mastery, that is, practical wisdom. On the other hand, the dominant contemporary discourse treats parenting as a production which calls for enhancing mastery and control. The book demonstrates that this approach fails to capture the authentic experience of parenting because it fails to come to terms with the condition of action itself.

Subject

• Parenting
• Parenting > Moral and ethical aspects
• Power (Social sciences)
• Wisdom
• Gezinsopvoeding
• Ethiek
• Macht

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 168-172) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Understanding (Hermeneutics) and Power (Parenting) -- The Problem of Contemporary Parenting -- Parental Power As 'Nearly Total' -- The Social and Historical Background to Parental Power -- The Paradox of Parental Power -- The Motivation for Parenthood -- The Modern Age from the Radical Interpretive Perspective -- Reconceiving the Idea of a Problem -- Parental Power and the Human Condition -- The Problem of Power from the Perspective of Praxis -- Becoming a Parent: Using Power to Put Oneself in Power -- Infertility, Power as Intervention and the Power of Intervention -- Living with the Consequences of Our Actions -- The Great Fear: Becoming What One Hates -- Suffering the Story of Our Fate -- Action (Praxis) and Production (Poiesis) -- Power, Wisdom and Comedy -- Experience and Wisdom -- Aristotle's Concept of Phronesis -- Does an Uncertain Future Need to be Suffered? -- Producting the High Achiever: Hobbes and Power -- Hobbes and the Rise of Modernity -- Hobbes and Phronesis -- Parenting the Superkid and the Desire for Power -- The Wisdom and Practicality of the Endless Pursuit of Power -- Boundless Desire and the Need for Limitless Power -- The Parent's Need for Self-Understanding -- Methods and Parenting: Bourgeois Power -- Excursus: The Problem So Far -- The Rise of Science and the Idea of Childhood -- Parenting and the Debate Between Discipline and Freedom -- Parenting and Disciplinary Power -- The Unanticipated Consequences of Acting to Increase Power -- PET and the Ethics of Parenting.

ISBN

• 0312210027
• 9780312210021
• 0333616154
• 9780333616154

LCCN

97038324

OCLC

• ocm37663332
• 37663332
• SCSB-506092

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library