1st Edition

The Poverty of Postmodernism

By John O'Neill Copyright 1995
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Poverty of Postmodernism rejects the current celebration of knowledge and value relativism. This is on the grounds that it renders critical reason and commonsense incapable of resisting the superifical ideologies of minoritarianism that leave the hard core of global capitalism unanalyzed. In this book John O'Neill examines the postmodern turn in the social sciences. From a phenomenological standpoint (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Schutz, Winch), he challenges Lyotard's postrationalist reading of Wittgenstein and Habermas in order to defend commonsense reason and values that are constitutive of the everyday life-world. In addition he argues from the standpoint of Vico and Marx on the civil history of embodied mind that the post-rationalist celebration of the arts of superificiality undermines the recognition of the cultural debt each generation owes to past and post-generations. In a positive way O'Neill develops an account of the historical vocation of reason and of the charitable accountability of science to commonsense that is necessary to sustain the basic institutions of civic democracy.

    Introduction: the two politics of knowledge—alterity and mutuality Part I The politics of disciplinary knowledge 1 Postmodernism and (post) Marxism 2 The therapeutic disciplines: from Parsons to Foucault 3 The disciplinary society: from Weber to Foucault 4 The phenomenological concept of modern knowledge and the Utopian method of Marxist economics 5 Orphic Marxism Part II The politics of mutual knowledge 6 ‘Posting’ modernity: Bell and Jameson on the social bond—with an allegory of the body politic 7 On the regulative idea of a critical social science 8 Mutual knowledge 9 The mutuality of science and common sense: an essay on political trust Conclusion: the common-sense case against post-rationalism

    Biography

    John O’Neill is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, York University, Toronto.