The Wild West
eBook - PDF

The Wild West

The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory

  1. 206 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Wild West

The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory

About this book

?An extremely accessible, well structured and imaginative reading of market and social theory in terms of the myth of the Wild West frontier?

New Formations

This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff).

Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time. It is a unique discussion of market and social theory using cultural myth. Will Wright fully explores how issues of individualism, freedom and inequality in the myth of the Wild West connect up with questions of white, male superiority and environmental degradation.

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Yes, you can access The Wild West by Will Wright in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. Introduction
  5. Part 1: Individualism
  6. Chapter 1 - The Social Contract
  7. Chapter 2 - 'Natural' Individuals
  8. Chapter 3 - The Invisible Hand
  9. Part 2: Industrial Problems
  10. Chapter 4 - Karl Marx: The Revolutionary and the Cowboy
  11. Chapter 5 - Max Weber: Bureaucracy and the Cowboy
  12. Chapter 6 - Emile Durkheim: Endless 'Frontiers'
  13. Part 3: Mythhical Insights
  14. Chapter 7 - Separating the Women
  15. Chapter 8 - Removing the Indians
  16. Chapter 9 - Sustaining the Wilderness
  17. Conclusion
  18. References
  19. Index
  20. File and Television Index