Fin De Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason

By Jeffrey C. Alexander

In four closely interwoven studies, Jeffrey Alexander identifies the central dilemma that provokes contemporary social theory and proposes a new way to resolve it. The dream of reason that marked the previous fin de si cle foundered in the face of the cataclysms of the twentieth century, when war, revolution, and totalitarianism came to be seen as themselves products of reason. In response there emerged the profound skepticism about rationality that has so starkly defined the present fin de si cle. From Wittgenstein through Rorty and postmodernism, relativism rejects the very possibility of universal standards, while for both positivism and neo-Marxists like Bourdieu, reductionism claims that ideas simply reflect their social base.

In a readable and spirited argument, Alexander develops the alternative of a "neo-modernist" position that defends reason from within a culturally centered perspective while remaining committed to the goal of explaining, not merely interpreting, contemporary social life. On the basis of a sweeping reinterpretation of postwar society and its intellectuals, he suggests that both antimodernist radicalism and postmodernist resignation are now in decline; a more democratic, less ethnocentric and more historically contingent universalizing social theory may thus emerge.

Developing in his first two studies a historical approach to the problem of "absent reason," Alexander moves via a critique of Richard Rorty to construct his case for "present reason." Finally, focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, he provokes the most sustained critical reflection yet on this influential thinker.

Fin de Siecle Social Theory is a tonic intervention in contemporary debates, showing how social and cultural theory can properly take the measure of the extraordinary times in which we live.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859840914
• ISBN13: 9781859840917
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

So where are all the neo-modernists?

With this work, Jeffrey Alexander makes the long-overdue case for a "neo-modernist" position - for the belief that the project of modernisation has not finished. If you're wondering how to think in a post-modernist world, Alexander's stance gives you the answer: post-modernism has its uses, but modernism will survive.Indeed, in a practical sense, Alexander points out, modernism is thriving. The people who knocked down the Berlin Wall clearly did not believe that their reality was a linguistic construction. If they knew anything about Foucault's thinking, they knew better than to take it seriously. They wanted improvement, and they knew how to get it. So did the countless individual modernisers of East Asia who transformed the lives of both themselves and hundreds of millions of their fellow human beings through the 1970s and 1980s. So, although Alexander doesn't say it, did the people who brought technology to the forefront of Western thinking in the 1990s. These people all thought, in their different ways, that it was possible to make things better. The theorists who best explain such events are not Foucault, or Feyerband, or even Anthony Giddens; they're Talcott Parsons and Karl Popper and Joseph Schumpeter. The "alternative world" of most pre-1980s social theory is simply breaking down in the face of reality.Most of this thinking is contained in the brilliant opening essay (one of four in the book), an essay titled "Modern, Anti, Post and Neo". Alexander ends this piece by suggesting "a renewed sense of involvement in the project of universalism" is abroad in the world. The wonder is that the intellectual left has pursued it with so little vigour in the past five years. "Neo-modernism" precisely defines the spirit of the age, but where are all the neo-modernists?