Performance Measurement, Reporting, Obstacles and Accountability

Recent Trends and Future Directions

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5773541
AutoresPaul Thomas G (autor correspondente), Paul G Thomas
Ano2006
Páginas115
Data de publicação2006-01-01
Open AccessSim
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoPerformance Measurement, Reporting, Obstacles and Accountability (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraANU Press (PUBLISHER • AU)
DOI10.26530/oapen_459439
OpenAlexW4248647189
Open LibraryOL28360083M
ISBN9781920942793
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas1

lifeblood of every real intellectual'. 2I encouraged speakers to de-familiarise a received image of a contemporary thinker's stock ideas, all of which Hage had done so admirably that memorable evening.In the two and a half years since the series began, speakers have responded dynamically to its premise.The series began fittingly with Geremie Barmé and Gloria Davies addressing the exemplary status and posthumous legacies of Mao Zedong and Lu Xun in China-a topical theme after the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd's ascension to the prime ministership in late 2007.Indicating that much more than admiration was at stake in the evocation of a key thinker, in a lecture of October 2008 Ian Higgins analysed the 'political extremism' of Jonathan Swift's 'insurgent Irish polemic and satire', and contested, via an analysis of Swift's emphasis on religious confession, the conventionally secular account of Swift as a political thinker and writer.Debjani Ganguly restored to us a sense of Gandhi as a sometimes self-ironic activist intellectual, a self-styled 'inconsistent' thinker who endorsed Emerson's observation that 'foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'.Her lecture evoked the many personae of the Mahatma, analysing the globally minded, cosmopolitan Gandhi and the indigenous intellectual who imaginatively deployed an Indian ethical vernacular (Ahimsa, Satyagraha).She evoked Gandhi as a moral icon simultaneously relevant and irrelevant to late-modern India, important to India's intellectual life and popular culture, but regrettably peripheral to the domain of national politics.In bringing together the papers for this issue of Humanities Research, I was mindful-like Debjani and the other speakers mentioned-of the contradictory and unresolved legacy of important figures of emancipative and humanist thought.I was also interested in the unstable combination of ethical universalism and Euro-centric parochialism that continues to generate fascination and disquiet with the 'Enlightenment project' and its aftermath.In particular, Cook's and Curthoys' essays contribute to a continuing historiographical discussion that pluralises our sense of the rhetorical inventiveness and suasive agility of Enlightenment discourse while acknowledging the imaginative limitations of particular thinkers.Like Debjani, the contributors to this issue are interested in the discursive innovations and mode of address of their chosen thinkers.In the lead essay, 'Volney and the science of morality in revolutionary France', Alexander Cook brings to life a now obscure figure, the French polymath Constantin François Volney (1757-1820).While not an important thinker in the accepted sense of the term, Volney, Cook argues, was a key thinker of the French Revolution, one of its most widely read intellectual exports, who can provide us with a 'key for unlocking, or understanding, issues in the intellectual and cultural history of his era'.Cook argues suggestively for Volney's significance in 2

History · Philosophy