Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self, and TranscendenceAdam 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 wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into being its own nemesis" in the forms of ethnic, racial, and identity politics. Seligman counters that the modern human must recover a notion of authority that is essentially transcendent, but which extends tolerance to those of other--or no--faiths. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 3 |
THE SELF IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES | 15 |
AUTHORITY AND THE SELF | 34 |
HETERONOMY AND RESPONSIBILITY | 60 |
THE SELF INTERNALIZED | 87 |
TOLERANCE AND TRADITION | 124 |
NOTES | 143 |
159 | |
173 | |
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Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence Adam B. Seligman No preview available - 2000 |