Disclosing New Worlds (book)

Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity^[1] is a philosophical proposal intended to restore or energize democracy by Social constructionism via an argument style of World disclosure but which philosophy is distinct from:

• Relativism - a concept in which points of view have no absolute truth or validity.
• Formalism - an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy
• Essentialism - the view that, for any specific entity (such as an animal, a group of people, a physical object, a concept), there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function.

Nevertheless, the authors build on these ideas and seek to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress when persistent technological advance obscures an uncertain future for humanity threatened by multiple issues such as peak oil, global warming and Environmental degradation. The book is co-authored by Fernando Flores, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa (a consultant philosopher specializing in commercial innovation). They concentrate on three practical activities:

• social entrepreneurship,
• Active citizenship and
• social solidarity

The authors reason that human beings are at their best when engaged in imaginative and practical innovation rather than in in abstract reflection, and thus challenging accepted wisdom and conventional practices within their particular environment, or as the authors claim, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to political power changes, wars or violent revolution, but to changes in the way people understand their personal qualities and deal with their particular situations.

Structure of the work

World disclosure (German: Erschlossenheit, literally development or comprehension) is a phenomenon first described by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his landmark book Being and Time. As well as the authors of this work, the idea of disclosing has also been discussed by philosophers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, Nikolas Kompridis and Charles Taylor. It refers to how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to ordinary people.

Chapters and sections

• 1. The ontological structure of everyday history making
  • 1.1. How everyday practices ground history making (pp. 17 – 22)
  • 1.2. The phenomenon of historical disclosing (disharmonies, articulation, reconfiguration, cross-appropriation) (pp:22 - 29)
  • 1.3. Why our role as disclosers is forgotten (pp29 –30)
  • 1.4. Methodological considerations (pp:31 - 33)
• 2. Entrepreneurship: The skill of cultural innovation
  • 2.1. Current accounts of entrepreneurship (pp:34 - 45)
  • 2.2. A composite case for entrepreneurship (pp: 4554)
  • 2.3 Involved versus detached business:Economic theory and what is lost in the rationalization of business skills (pp: 45 - 66)
  • 2.4. Entrepreneurial skill:human activity at its best (pp:66 - 68)
• 3. Democracy: the politics of interpretive speaking
  • 3.1. Liberal democracy versus civic humanist tradition (pp:69 -84)
  • 3.2. Democracy as civil society: the merits and dangers of the "public space" (pp:85 - 88)
  • 3.3. Free associations: how citizens can change their society's practices (pp:88 94)
    • Constructing organization that produces clarity
    • Uncovering a disharmony
    • Discovering the disharmony in multiple disclosive spaces
    • Cross appropriating
  • 3.4. Differences between citizen virtue and entrepreneurship (pp:94 - 96)
  • 3.5 The reward of civic action (pp:96 - 98)
  • 3.6 Interpretive Speaking (pp:99 -101)
  • 3.7. In defence of free association (pp:101 104)
  • 3.8. Customary and detached political activity (pp:104 - 109)
  • 3.9. The politics of cross-appropriation on an international scale (pp: 109 - 115)
• 4. Solidarity the ground of meaningful community
  • 4.1 The modern concept of solidarity (pp:117 - 118)
  • 4.2. Values goods and concerns:from inculcation of shared concerns to recognition of concerns as shared (pp:118 - 122)
  • 4.3. In defense of dying for one's national identity (pp:122 - 126)
  • 4.4. Saving Herder's intuition:the search for the highest good or value (pp:126 -131)
  • 4.5. Solidarity in a pluralistic society: a shared collection (not a shared ordering) of concerns (pp:131 - 134)
  • 4.6. How feeling promotes solidarity (pp:134 - .136)
  • 4.7. How a "We" is constituted (pp:137 - 140)
  • 4.8.The cultivation of solidarity by a "culture figure" (pp:140 - 114)
  • 4.9. Values, wars or adaptive coping (pp:114 - 148)
  • 4.10. How solidarity is preserved in institutions (pp:148 161)
    • The courts of law
    • Colleges and universities

Conclusion

The authors reiterate the importance of history making and identify thee types of actors:

• The entrepreneur
• The virtuous citizen
• The culture figure

Each has to overcome resistance to change, but do so in different ways. Solving puzzles request of each a clear strategic objective, but use different tactics to overcome obstructions. By understanding and disclosing our objectives, and discovering the sort of role we may have to play according to particular situations to reach those goals, all of us can be "history makers" and make changes to our society by changing the shared narrative that binds our particular culture. The authors quote already changed collective attitudes which have recently become much less tolerant of road accidents, various forms of discrimination and repressive public education of young people.

They promote a change to the overarching consumerism as the western world's social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts, in favor of sustainable development within individual communities as a precursor to disclosing a new world order that supports human equality

Later editions

• 1999 a new English language edition was published in USA ^[2]
• 2000 Version Español was published in Spain ^[3]

References

1. Flores, Fernando; Drefus Flores, Spinosa, Charles (1997). Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. MIT Press USA. ISBN 0-262-19381-7. Cite uses deprecated parameter |coauthor= (help)
2. Disclosing new worlds (New edition). MIT Press, USA. 31 March 1999.
3. Abrir Nuevos Mundos,. Torus, Spain. 27 March 2000. ISBN 9788430603848.