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Author: Yoshimi Takeuchi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9780231133272
DOWNLOAD EBOOKYoshimi questioned the very nature of thought, arguing that thinking is less a subjective act than an opening to alterity. His works were central in drawing Japanese attention to the problems inherent in Western colonialism & to the cultural importance of Asia.
Author: Arjun Appadurai
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781452900063
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780813919669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFew 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.
Author: A. Raghuramaraju
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-12-06
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 0199088365
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnlike 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.
Author: Bram Gieben
Publisher: Polity
Published: 1993-01-04
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780745609607
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFormations 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.
Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-04-25
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 0745666442
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity. We do not as yet, he argues, live in a post-modern world. Rather the distinctive characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing period of the twentieth century express the emergence of a period of 'high modernity,' in which prior trends are radicalised rather than undermined. A post-modern social universe may eventually come into being, but this as yet lies 'on the other side' of the forms of social and cultural organization which currently dominate world history. In developing an account of the nature of modernity, Giddens concentrates upon analyzing the intersections between trust and risk, and security and danger, in the modern world. Both the trust mechanisms associated with modernity and the distinctive 'risk profile' it produces, he argues, are distinctively different from those characteristic of pre-modern social orders. This book build upon the author's previous theoretical writings, and will be of fundamental interest to anyone concerned with Gidden's overall project. However, the work covers issues which the author has not previously analyzed and extends the scope of his work into areas of pressing practical concern. This book will be essential reading for second year undergraduates and above in sociology, politics, philosophy, and cultural studies.
Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-04-30
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0745666485
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.
Author: Peter Wagner
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2012-02-13
Total Pages: 207
ISBN-13: 0745652913
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Author: Anthony J. Cascardi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-03-19
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780521423786
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.
Author: Henri Lefebvre
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-01-16
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 1844677834
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOriginally published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. A classic analysis of the modern world using Marxist dialectic, it is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin’s death—an analysis in which the contours of our own “postmodernity” appear with startling clarity.
