Critique of Modernity - Softcover

Touraine, Alain

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557865310 ISBN 13: 9781557865311

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995

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For over two hundred years, the notion of modernity has dominated Western social thought. Yet as we approach the end of the millenium, we find the concept under seige: constantly being challenged, rejected or refined. In Critique of Modernity , Alain Touraine, one of our leading social thinkers, offers an outstanding analysis and reinterpretation of the modern for the twenty-first century.

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From the Back Cover:

In Critique of Modernity, Alain Touraine, one of our leading social thinkers, offers an outstanding analysis and reinterpretation of the modern for the twenty-first century.

Touraine begins by recalling the triumph of rationalist theories of modernity and then traces the destruction, in both thought and social practices, of that idea, through the critiques of consciousness and reason elaborated by Nietzche and Freud, and in the rise of consumer society and mass communications. From modernity triumphant to modernity in crisis, the author charts a course through a complex history, setting the scene for this re-formulation of the modern in the final section of the book.

Redefining modernity as a tense relationship between Reason and Subject, rationalization and subjectivation, the spirit of the Renaissance and the spirit of Reformation, and science and freedom, the author establishes a position as far removed from today's declining modernism, as it is from the ubiquitous phantom of "postmodernity".

Critique of Modernity is a major contribution to debates around modernity, postmodernity and the future of democracy.

About the Author:

Alain Touraine is Director of the Centre d'Analyse et d'Intervention Sociologiques in Paris, France. He is the author of many books, including The Post-Industrial Society, The Self-Production of Society and The Return of the Actor.

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