Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Third Edition

Resumen del libro

When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality. Even more so than when Lakoff wrote, liberals and conservatives simply have very different, deeply held beliefs about what is right and wrong. Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are unconscious part of our "hard-wired" brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don't fit our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. For this new edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword, extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent financial crisis, and the effects of global warming. One might have hoped such massive changes would bring people together, but the reverse has actually happened; the divide between liberals and conservatives has become stronger and more virulent. To have any hope of bringing mutual respect to the current social and political divide, we need to clearly understand the problem and make it part of our contemporary public discourse.

Biografía del autor

George Lakoff (Bayonne, Nueva Jersey, 1941) es lingüista y científico cognitivo. Ha sido profesor en la Universidad de California y también en las universidades de Harvard y Michigan. En la actualidad es director del Center for the Neural Mind x{0026} 38; Society de la Universidad de California. Lakoff es el fundador de la lingüística generativa, que traslada el foco de atención de la gramática de la sintaxis al significado, pero sobre todo esconocido por su teoría de la metáfora conceptual, que sostiene que las metáforas nos permiten estructurar unos conceptos a partir de otros, y por sus análisis políticos relacionados con la materia.