1st Edition
Anatomies of Modern Discontent Visions from the Human Sciences
This book provides an overview and analysis of the thought of figures across the human and social sciences on the character, causes, and consequences of discontent in modern societies. Exploring the important social and cultural conditions associated with modernity, it focuses on the contributions of 38 prominent scholars from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – philosophers, historians, and social scientists – on the subject of discontent and social malaise, and individual and collective well-being. Thematically organized, this volume offers brief portraits of the lives and key ideas of these thinkers, leading toward a presentation of modernity as a “differentiated complaint.” Reclaiming an important tradition in the human and social sciences that sees life on a grand scale, that integrates personal affairs with social and cultural matters, and that dares people to recommit themselves to this broader vision of human involvement, Anatomies of Modern Discontent will appeal to readers across the social sciences and humanities, particularly those with interests in social theory, sociology, and philosophy.
Introduction: Modernity’s Challenges to Self
Part I: New Patterns of Social Experience
1. Karl Marx: Alienation under Capitalism
2. Emile Durkheim: The Search for Social Connection
3. Max Weber: Rationalization’s Iron Grip
4. Georg Simmel: Marginality as the Modern Condition
5. Erich Kahler: Split from Without – and Within
6. Robert Nisbet: The Eclipse of Community
7. Robert Bellah: Communitarianism and Religion in a Post-Traditional World
8. Daniel Bell: Capitalism’s Contradictions
9. Hannah Arendt: Politics as Possibility
Part II: Culture Transformed
10. Johan Huizinga: The Decline of the Play Spirit
11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: The Perils of Enlightenment
12. David Riesman: Seeking Autonomy in the Other-Directed Society
13. Daniel Boorstin: Extravagant Expectations
14. Lewis Mumford: In the Shadows of the Machine
15. Jane Jacobs: Cities Where People Matter
16. Marshall Berman: Swimming in the Maelstrom
17. Christopher Lasch: Cultural Narcissism
18. Juliet Schor: The Work and Spend Cycle
Part III: Forms of Inequality
18. C. Wright Mills: Social Structure, Elites, and Masses
19. Michel Foucault: Knowledge as Control
20. Simone De Beauvoir: Woman as Other
21. W.E.B. Du Bois: Divided Consciousness
22. Franz Fanon: The Long Reach of Colonialism
23. Margaret Mead: The Enculturation of Gender
24. Lillian Rubin: Worlds of Pain
25. Betty Friedan: Responding to Traps of Gender and Age
26. William Julius Wilson: Dilemmas of the Truly Disadvantaged
Part IV: Modern Selves
27. Sigmund Freud: Repression and Other Conflicts
28. Erich Fromm: Society Against Self
29. Herbert Marcuse: Resistance in the Affluent Society
30. Norman O. Brown: Embracing Life – and Death
31. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea – and Reorientation
32. Erving Goffman: Managing Modern Identities
33. Arlie Hochschild: Commercialized Feeling
34. Anthony Giddens: Challenges to Self in a Runaway World
35. Kenneth Gergen: Saturated Selves
36. Martin Buber: Personhood as Dialogue
Conclusion: An Anatomy of Modern Discontent
Biography
Thomas S. Henricks is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Elon University, United States. He is the author of Selves, Societies, and Emotions: Understanding the Pathways of Experience; Play and the Human Condition; Play: A Basic Pathway to the Self; and Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression and the co-editor of Handbook for the Study of Play.
