From Humility to Hubris among Scholars and Politicians

Exploring Expressions of Self-Esteem and Achievement

Robert A. Stebbins

Emerald

This book can be opened with

Paperback / softback

9781787147584

16 May 2017

£48.99

eBook (PDF)

9781787147577

16 May 2017

£35.99

eBook (ePub)

9781787430150

16 May 2017

£35.99

Note on our eBooks and Audiobooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) and listen to audiobooks on the free Emerald Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. Or read and listen on Emerald's online reader (ePUB eBooks and audiobooks only). To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.

Description
Contents
Reviews
About

A main theme running through this book is that we cannot understand the virtues of humility and modesty without an equally good understanding of the vices of hubris and conceit. All four attitudes express self-esteem, which flourishes in the soil of achievement. Achievement is valued in any challenging field, be it art, science, sport, entertainment, business, politics, religion, or administration. And it is for this reason alone that achievers are inclined to discuss their excellence or may be forced to discuss it when others inquire about it or remark on it. By these routes achievement and self-esteem surface frequently in the diverse academic and political exchanges that spawn humility/modesty or hubris/conceit.

Achievement in a respectable activity can be a wonderful personal milestone bathed in positive emotions, where in the modern world individualism and individuation are widely valued. It may also be wonderful for other people in the achiever’s family, social network, community, or society when they are favorably affected. But in this book, when refracted through three additional analytic lenses – individualism and individuality, big- vs small-picture thinking, and tolerance and compromise – the expression of achievement-based self-esteem takes on some startling new dimensions.

One of them is that, at the hubris/conceit end of the continuum of the expression of self-esteem, discussion risks becoming uncivil, owing to the disagreeable ways that achievement is sometimes conveyed (e.g., boasting, name calling, depreciating others’ related achievements). Moreover, such can turn out to be enormously unproductive. Or as Leo Tolstoy once put it: “Conceit is incompatible with understanding.”

Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Self-Esteem and Achievement Chapter 3. Individualism and Individuality Chapter 4. Big-Picture vis-à-vis Small-Picture Thinking Chapter 5. Tolerance and Compromise Chapter 6. Conclusions

This exploration in symbolic interactionist social psychology investigates four aspects of self-esteem related to scholarly and political achievement: hubris and conceit on the one hand, and humility and modesty on the other hand. The study looks at these four aspects through three perspectives: individualism and individuality, big-picture versus small-picture thinking, and tolerance and compromise—which correspond to micro, meso, and macro levels of sociology and history. The author argues that conceit and hubris have come to dominate conversation in scholarship and politics.
- Annotation ©2017

Robert A. Stebbins is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. He has written over 250 articles and chapters and written or edited more than 50 books, including Serious Leisure, Between Work and Leisure, Leisure Activities in Context: A Micro-Macro/Agency-Structure Interpretation of Leisure, and The Idea of Leisure. He received his PhD in Sociology and Psychology in 1964 from the University of Minnesota.