Gerard Delanty 
Modernity and Postmodernity 
Knowledge, Power and the Self

This accessible and comprehensive overview of the main issues on the modernity-postmodernity controversy is the first clear-sighted book on the subject. It surveys modern social theory, from Kant to Weber with economy and masterly precision. And evaluates the work of the Frankfurt School, Arendy, Strauss, Luhmann, Habermas, Heller, Castoriadis and Touraine, before moving on to consider the approaches of the leading writers on postmodenrity: Lyotard, Vattimo, Derrida, Foucault and Jameson.

The result is a new way of conceptualizing the modernity-postmodernity debate, and an exciting new approach to the roots of contemporary social theory.

Table des matières

Introduction

Knowledge, Power and the Self

The Discourses of Modernity

Enlightenment, Modernism and
Fin-de-si[e]cle Sociology

Modernity and Secularization

Religion and the Postmodern Challenge

The Pathogenesis of Modernity

The Limits of Enlightenment

The Impossibility of Modernity

Cultural Crystallization and the Problem of Contingency

Rescuing Modernity

The Recovery of the Social

Postmodernism and the Possibility of Community

From Modernity to Postmodernity

Postdialectics and the Aesthetization of the Social

Further Reflections

Constructivism beyond Postmodernism

A propos de l’auteur

Gerard Delanty is Reader in Sociology at the University of Liverpool