SOCIOLOGY - Intellectuals and Revolutionary Politics Term Paper

SOCIOLOGY - Intellectuals and Revolutionary Politics - Term Paper Example Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations describes this phenomenon in the following way: â€Å"proclaimed the principle of the ‘invisible Hand’; every individual, in pursuing only his own selfish good, [is] led as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all...† (Buchholz, 1999). Thus Smith underlines that in the first place of the modern Western society is selfish interests of every individual. Everybody thinks that the more money he earns the less problems he would have. Of course, some contemporaries think that in case they had a lot of money they would share it with poor people. In reality, even if a person succeeds and gains lots of money there are only a few who share it with the poor. It also can be argued that the modern world is being developed at full speed and it is necessary to earn money to keep pace with this progress. Moreover, world’s economics is being developed following the main principle: to make the greatest profits. From this p erspective, a root of monetary obsession of the modern Westerners is involuntarily dictated by external conditions. Furthermore, from the perspective of economics it may be claimed that â€Å"Money ...provides the measuring rod of values† (Buchholz, 1999). ... In order to define values, intellectuals claimed that there was an â€Å"interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience† (Shils 1972, p. 3). In such a way, money as a value is argued by Shils for sure. This value is relevant to modern society, but ‘beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience’ it is not a value. The members of the Western society hardly realize that a deep-rooted system of values is good, but it’s not the system to be deeply rooted. For example, in the earlier society the one of the basic values and an honor was to die for one’s country. This value could hardly exist in the ‘monetized’ society nowadays. Therefore if to discuss the deep rooted system of values of the Western society it can be metaphorically explained what this really means: â€Å"Everyone has a god, but not everyone is aware of who or what that god is†Ã‚  (Buchholz, 1999). Q 2 Romantic German nationalism as a tr igger of Nazi politics The upheaval of national consciousness is triggered by intervention of aliens in the territory of a certain nation. Romanticism and ‘wars of liberation’ of different classes in Germany triggered Nazi politics. From one perspective it may seem that there is nothing in common between Romanticism and Nazism. There is a perfect explanation of German nationalism that occurred under influence of Romanticism: â€Å"When, later, the last hopes which the German patriots had rested on liberation from the foreign yoke had burst like over-blown bubbles, their spirits sought refuge in the moonlit magic night and the fairy world of dreamy longing conjured up for them by romanticism, in order to forget the gray reality of life and its shameful disappointments† (Romanticism and Nationalism). Partially, German