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Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust (both Princeton).
Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's...
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Leszek Kolakowski delves into some of the most intellectually vigorous questions of our time in this remarkable collection of essays garnished with his characteristic wit. Ten of the essays have never appeared before in English.
"Exemplary. . . . It should be celebrated." -Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review
"This book . . . express[es] Kolakowski's thought on God, man, reason, history, moral truth and original sin, prompted by observation...
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Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.
Translated from the Spanish De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities functions...
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Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the changing sense...
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Elisa Joy White investigates the contemporary African Diaspora communities in Dublin, New Orleans, and Paris and their role in the interrogation of modernity and social progress. Beginning with an examination of Dublin's emergent African immigrant community, White shows how the community's negotiation of racism, immigration status, and xenophobia exemplifies the ways in which idealist representations of global societies are contradicted by the prevalence...
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Today, "corruption" generally refers to pursuing personal interests at the expense of one's responsibilities, the law, or the common good. It calls to mind some official violating their public duty for private gain, suggesting seamy bureaucracies taking payoffs, kickbacks, and bribes. Yet at other times, notions of corruption were rooted in a more expansive view of the causes of people's behavior and the appropriate ways to regulate conduct. In this...
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Modernity and the Rise of the Pocket God explores the relationship between modern religion and ancient values. Journey through the bucolic fields of the ancient villager, en route to the concrete jungles and splendid skylines of the modern city-goer. See what wedded the ancient believer to his God and his fellow believers. Then glimpse the growing chasm between the modern believer, her society, and her Father. And, in the end, see what us modern folks...
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“Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama” shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strove to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.
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This book explores the inherent connections between the social and legal changes in Islamic law. Dramatic social changes are taking place in the digital world around us. All these social changes demand legal changes in Islamic law as well. Many Muslim academics and legal experts have demanded that legal changes must be made in Islamic law in line with the general philosophy of Islamic law. This book examines the contributions of the classical and...
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In Cte d'Ivoire, appearing modern is so important for success that many young men deplete their already meager resources to project an illusion of wealth in a fantastic display of Western imitation, spending far more than they can afford on brand name clothing, accessories, technology, and a robust nightlife. Such imitation, however, is not primarily meant to deceive-rather, as Sasha Newell argues in The Modernity Bluff, it is an explicit performance...
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Between the 1890's and 1920's, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant...
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While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a socio-historical and a cultural concept. Of course, he is considered to be a modernist writer (some call him even a postmodernist), but what the broader concept of modernity intellectually, historically, socially, and culturally means for him and how this is expressed in his...
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Despite the ease with which scholars have used the term "memory" in recent decades, its definition remains enigmatic. Does cultural memory rely on the memories of individuals, or does it take shape beyond the borders of the individual mind? Cultural memory has garnered particular attention within Irish studies. With its trauma-filled history and sizable global diaspora, Ireland presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. What do stereotypes of...
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This book offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine. These provide very, different forms of encounter, but are, bound by the shadow, of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This immense spectacle helped forge our understanding...
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When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra-someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper-and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan's musical history, however, no such role existed-composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. In Composing...
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The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions...
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Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern...
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What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make...
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Negative theology is the attempt to describe God by speaking in terms of what God is not. Historical affinities between Jewish modernity and negative theology indicate new directions for thematizing the modern Jewish experience. Questions such as, What are the limits of Jewish modernity in terms of negativity? Has this creative tradition exhausted itself? and How might Jewish thought go forward? anchor these original essays. Taken together they explore...
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Has Jewish modernity exhausted itself? Flourishing between the age of Enlightenment and the Second World War, the intellectual, literary, scientific and artistic legacy of Jewish modernity continues to dazzle us, however, in this provocative new book, esteemed historian Enzo Traverso argues powerfully that this cultural epoch has come to an end.
Previously a beacon for critical thinking in the Western world, the mainstream of Jewish thought...