Description

Argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture—that is, when they are making history.

Disclosing New Worlds calls for a recovery of a way of being that has always characterized human life at its best. The book argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture—that is, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to wars and transfers of political power, but to changes in the way we understand and deal with ourselves. The authors identify entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the creation of solidarity as the three major arenas in which people make history, and they focus on three prime methods of history-making—reconfiguration, cross-appropriation, and articulation.

Praise

A brave attempt to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress in an age when the triumphalism of technological advance masks an unconfident vision of the future.

~Peter Aspden, Financial Times

Disclosing New Worlds represents an extraordinarily fruitful response to the radically changed social and intellectual conditions of the late twentieth century. It breaks with the theoretical bias of modern scholarship and, attending to practice, provides for a deeper understanding and appreciation of economics, politics, and culture. Disclosing New Worlds constitutes an important advance in social theory, one that is particularly impressive and encouraging to philosophers who have deplored the academic seclusion of their discipline. Here philosophy has given the decisive impetus to a rich and illuminating interdisciplinary effort and helped to produce a thick theory of practice.

~Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy, The University of Montana, author of Crossing the Postmodern Divide

Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus explore disclosure, a function of language that cannot be understood as the communication of information. They offer rich, practical new interpretations of entrepreneurship in business, solidarity in communities, and citizen action in democracy—reaching the surprising conclusion that these are all the same skill. Information is not the way to understand the Information Age! This is truly a seminal work.

~Peter J. Denning, Director, Center for the New Engineer, George Mason University

Disclosing New Worlds gets to the heart of corporate entrepreneurship. To do this, it combines rigorous philosophical thinking with rich descriptions of everyday corporate, democratic, and social life. The result is a book that accurately portrays a set of important skills, not yet taught in our schools. These skills produce entrepreneurs, politically engaged citizens, and those culture figures who dedicate cultures to their deepest concerns.

~Lorenzo H. Zambrano, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Cemex, S.A.

Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus have written a rich, ambitious book on the free enterprise system and the sort of democratic community it presupposes. Disclosing New Worlds also represents a new way of doing philosophy, a new way of looking at business and a new way of looking at democracy. The underlying style and spirit of the book is unabashedly Heideggerian, although it is written much more clearly and down to earth than that might suggest. Their discussion of search divers practical topics as the rise of feminism, the founding of the personal computer business and the success of Mother Against Drunk Driving is both insightful and profound, 'practical' philosophy at its very best.

~Robert C. Solomon, Qunicy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business, University of Texas

Excerpts:

We would now like to summarize as simply as possible our view of entrepreneurship, virtuous citizenship, and the cultivation of solidarity. In a customary situation, a businessperson thinks that her job is to stay ahead of the competition. She therefore tries to maximize output while minimizing input and to outdo competitors in predicting the future. As social and technological change accelerates, this sort of activity becomes increasingly frustrating. As her previously successful coping skills become increasingly disturbed, the businessperson is forced to reflect on what she is doing and to seek a better way of proceeding. She might focus on specific indicators of success and plan strategies for improving those indicators. One strategy might be to devise new ways to game the system, such as creating hedges and trusts. If she finds that this gaming increases her stress but fails to help her outdistance the competition, she may move further toward detachment and rationality. The final stage in this withdrawal from the involved deployment of concrete skills is the attempt to discover and use a generalized theory of business or competition. For a time business schools supplied such game-theoretical models and produced, it is now generally acknowledged, only a further decline in competitiveness.

According to our view, the true entrepreneur is not primarily engaged in competition (although it is, of course, free market competition that makes entrepreneurial activity possible). The true entrepreneur is involved in holding on to an anomaly and producing something that reduces a disharmony by changing the style of a disclosive space. As long as she remains innovative in this way, she will have no competitors. She will instead be engaged in the rewarding and meaningful activity of developing a new enterprise. Her main competition will be not other businesses but the old style of life she is changing.