This 6 page paper argues that various perspectives began to have names applied to them in the late 19th century. The writer says that American society incorporates so-called liberalist perspectives as its traditionalist beliefs. The writer further explores how the U.S. expresses traditionalism and what changes have occured in this perspective over the decades of the 20th century. There are 6 sources listed in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: MM12_PGtradnl.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
West looked to the religious writings in the East for these truths and it was from this search that traditionalist perspectives began to be developed (Sedgwick, 2001). It was,
in fact, Ren? Gu?non, a French writer who rejected modernity as a "Dark Age" and who attempted to reconstruct a "perennial philosophy - the central religious truths behind all
the major world religions - largely on the basis of his reading of Hindu religious texts" (Sedgwick, 2001). In his writings, Gu?non emphasized that the spiritual and intellectual elite in
the West needed to "find both personal and collective salvation in the surviving vestiges of ancient religious tradition" (Sedgwick, 2001). In response to Gu?non plea to change directions and to
look to the religious and spiritual writings of the East, a number of intellectuals tried to do as he had said, i.e., put Eastern theory into practice in the West
(Sedgwick, 2001). The movement began first in Europe and then moved to America and finally to the Islamic world (Sedgwick, 2001). Traditionalists founded institutes, Masonic lodges and Sufi brotherhoods (Sedgwick,
2001). They also wrote and published books that were very often extremely successful (Sedgwick, 2001). Traditionalism gave the ideological foundations for many of the anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia and
by the end of the 20th century, traditionalism had entered the debate in the Islamic world regarding what the most desirable relationship would be between Islam and modernity (Sedgwick, 2001).
Rourke argues that everything that happens in the world affects our lives and that people should play a role in determining the course of those world events (2002). Economics, for
instance, is one of the ways in which every person is affected (Rourke, 2002). Trade and international investment practices, for example, can have an impact on ones standard of living