By Charles Lemert, Anthony Elliott
During this complete, trendy and available advent to modern social thought, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert study the foremost theoretical traditions from the Frankfurt college to globalization and past. whilst first released, the book’s wide variety set new criteria for introductory textbooks – social theorists mentioned comprise Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Manuel Castells, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben and Manuel De Landa.
Extensively constructed take into consideration major fresh advancements in American social concept, the booklet bargains chapters on American pragmatism, structural functionalism, ethnomethodology, black feminist concept and world-systems idea. American traditions of social idea are introduced powerfully to lifestyles in remedies of intellectuals starting from William James to Robert ok. Merton, David Riesman to Randall Collins, and Patricia Hill Collins to Saskia Sassen.
Introduction to modern Social idea combines full of life exposition and readability with reflective social critique and unique insights, and is a wonderful textbook with which to navigate the twists and turns of up to date social concept as taught within the disciplines of sociology, politics, heritage, cultural reports and plenty of extra.
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Extra info for Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory
Example text
The premodern world, the ordered world of rolehierarchy and local tradition, has dissolved, leaving uncertainty and ambiguity. Seen from this angle, modernity is about the celebration of dynamism, an ever-expanding acceleration of personal and cultural life. This acceleration is expressed as a multiplication of the possibilities of the self on the one hand, and of self-dislocation by global social processes on the other. Construction and deconstruction, assembly and disassembly: these processes interweave in contemporary societies in a manner which has become self-propelling.
As a result, Freud is able at one stroke to rewrite the problem of self and society as a contest between love and hate, or between life and death. Love involves the flowering of civilized co-belonging. Hatred, aggression and the death drive are forces that threaten to tear culture apart. The Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930: 59) unfolds love and hate, Eros and Thanatos (Greek words for ‘love’ and ‘death,’ respectively), in the following way: [C]ivilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity .
The first project is personal well-being, individual self-expression and autonomy. The second project concerns the bonds of morality – that is, the forms of social trust, reciprocity and networks that facilitate civic actions and ethical engagement. This, one might think, represents dualistic thinking, but this is not necessarily the case. Individualism on the one hand, and moral bonds on the other, are not necessarily at loggerheads. Indeed, it is often argued that strong the contemporary relevance of the classics 27 individualism cannot be genuinely achieved without moral bonds.
