Understanding Modernity

Understanding Modernity PDF Author: Richard Munch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136875638
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676

Book Description
First Published in 1988, this volume works towards a new understanding and exploration of the rise and development of modern society, taking its lead from two classical theorists, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The key concept of this approach is the 'interpenetration' of different spheres of action. Richard Münch begins with an exploration of the points of convergence and divergence in the works of Durkheim and Weber. He then builds, from Durkheim, a new theory of social order as a complex set of ordering, dynamizing, identity-producing and goal-setting factors. Münch also constructs a new theory of personality development, based on Durkheim's view of the duality of human nature. He concludes by assessing weber's contribution to our understanding of how modern social order emerged, showing that the unique features of modern society emerged from the 'interpenetration' of cultural, political, communal and economic spheres in action.

The Formations of Modernity

The Formations of Modernity PDF Author: Bram Gieben
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745609607
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Formations of Modernity is a major introductory textbook offering an account of the important historical processes, institutions and ideas that have shaped the development of modern societies. This challenging and innovative book 'maps' the evolution of those distinctive forms of political, economic, social and cultural life which characterize modern societies, from their origins in early modern Europe to the nineteenth century. It examines the roots of modern knowledge and the birth of the social sciences in the Enlightenment, and analyses the impact on the emerging identity of 'the West' of its encounters through exploration, trade, conquest and colonization, with 'other civilizations'. Designed as an introduction to modern societies and modern sociological analyses, this book is of value to students on a wide variety of social science courses in universities and colleges and also to readers with no prior knowledge of sociology. Selected readings from a broad range of classical writers (Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) and contemporary thinkers (Michael Mann, E.P. Thompson, Edward Said) are integrated in each chapter, together with student questions and exercises.

The Crisis of Modernity

The Crisis of Modernity PDF Author: Augusto Del Noce
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773596747
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
In his native Italy Augusto Del Noce is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers of the period after the Second World War. The Crisis of Modernity makes available for the first time in English a selection of Del Noce's essays and lectures on the cultural history of the twentieth century. Del Noce maintained that twentieth-century history must be understood specifically as a philosophical history, because Western culture was profoundly affected by the major philosophies of the previous century such as idealism, Marxism, and positivism. Such philosophies became the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes after the French Revolution, and the next century put them to the practical test, bringing to light their ultimate and necessary consequences. One of the first thinkers to recognize the failure of Marxism, Del Noce posited that this failure set the stage for a new secular, technocratic society that had taken up Marx’s historical materialism and atheism while rejecting his revolutionary doctrine. Displaying Del Noce's rare ability to reconstruct intellectual genealogies and to expose the deep metaphysical premises of social and political movements, The Crisis of Modernity presents an original reading of secularization, scientism, the sexual revolution, and the history of modern Western culture.

Understanding Modernity

Understanding Modernity PDF Author: Richard Munch
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136875646
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
First Published in 1988, this volume works towards a new understanding and exploration of the rise and development of modern society, taking its lead from two classical theorists, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The key concept of this approach is the 'interpenetration' of different spheres of action. Richard Münch begins with an exploration of the points of convergence and divergence in the works of Durkheim and Weber. He then builds, from Durkheim, a new theory of social order as a complex set of ordering, dynamizing, identity-producing and goal-setting factors. Münch also constructs a new theory of personality development, based on Durkheim's view of the duality of human nature. He concludes by assessing weber's contribution to our understanding of how modern social order emerged, showing that the unique features of modern society emerged from the 'interpenetration' of cultural, political, communal and economic spheres in action.

Modernity

Modernity PDF Author: Peter Wagner
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745652913
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
This is a brief, authoritative and accessible introduction to the idea of modernity, written by a leading social theorist. Wagner shows that modernity was based on ideas of freedom, reason and progress, but he examines the extent to which these ideas have been, and can be, realized in the modern world.

Modernity in Indian Social Theory

Modernity in Indian Social Theory PDF Author: A. Raghuramaraju
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199088365
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Unlike the West, India presents a fascinating example of a society where the pre-modern continues to co-exist with the modern. Modernity in Indian Social Theory explores the social variance between India and the West to show how it impacted their respective trajectories of modernity. A. Raghuramaraju argues that modernity in the West involved disinheriting the pre-modern, and temporal ordering of the traditional and modern. It was ruthlessly implemented through programmes of industrialization, nationalism, and secularism. This book underscores that India did not merely the Western model of modernity or experience a temporal ordering of society. It situates this sociological complexity in the context of the debates on social theory. The author critically examines various discourses on modernity in India, including Partha Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism; Javeed Alam’s reading of Indian secularism; the use of the term pluralism by some Indian social scientists; and Gopal Guru’s emphasis on the lived Dalit experience. He also engages with the readings on key thinkers including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Ambedkar.

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: Mark Steven
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501351125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

Modernity and Subjectivity

Modernity and Subjectivity PDF Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.

Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: David Scott
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628927704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.

Understanding Modernity

Understanding Modernity PDF Author: Richard Münch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780710212177
Category : Sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description