Summary
Contents
Subject index
This accessible and comprehensive overview of the main issues on the modernity-postmodernity controversy is the first clear-sighted book on the subject. It surveys modern social theory, from Kant to Weber with economy and masterly precision. And evaluates the work of the Frankfurt School, Arendy, Strauss, Luhmann, Habermas, Heller, Castoriadis and Touraine, before moving on to consider the approaches of the leading writers on postmodenrity: Lyotard, Vattimo, Derrida, Foucault and Jameson. The result is a new way of conceptualizing the modernity-postmodernity debate, and an exciting new approach to the roots of contemporary social theory.
The Impossibility of Modernity: Cultural Crystallization and the Problem of Contingency
The Impossibility of Modernity: Cultural Crystallization and the Problem of Contingency
In this chapter I look at a number of positions which share a concern with the implications of the post-Enlightenment age for modernity. I concentrate on the consequences of the critique of the Enlightenment for liberal thought. In many ways modernity is an expression of liberal thought, a reflection of the possibilities of subjective freedom in dealing with the problem of contingency. Modernity is a world in which choice becomes a problem. In the absence of the certainties of natural law or notions of divine right, modernity substitutes human history for natural history. In this shift, evolution becomes more a matter of culturally shaped ...
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