Full Description
We have many histories of social theory—what different authors attempted to do as they responded to previous theories. But we know precious little about how they did this in structural terms—what scaffolding they adopted and adapted to make their claims. Yet today's social thoughts largely employ structures passed down from previous generations, structures that were developed to solve problems that are no longer ours.
In The True, the Good, and the Beautiful, John Levi Martin explores these structures, the resulting tensions, and their broader significance for sociological thought. By examining how thinkers mapped interpersonal to intrapersonal structures, he traces the development of the underlying architectonics of theory, focusing on one that was inherited from eighteenth-century philosophy and brought into social science in the nineteenth century. He shows that the structural tensions inherent in these theories paralleled those being worked out in practical terms by constitutional theorists as thinkers attempted to return to their most fundamental understandings of the nature of the human, the social, and the political to recraft their societies. A magisterial new interpretation of the foundations of sociological thought, The True, the Good, and the Beautiful is as ambitious a work of social theory as we have seen in generations.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Approach Taken
Part I. From Subordination to Combination: The Consolidation of an Architectonic
I-1. From a Trinity of Faculties to Two Platonic Wings
I-2. From Ideas to Transcendentals
I-3. The Birth of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful
I-4. The Stabilization of the Triad of Faculties
I-5. Imagination and Judgment in Immanuel Kant
I-C. The First Constitutional Moment
Conclusion to Part I. From Ideas to Faculties
Part II. From Combination to Dimensionalization: Adoption and Adaption
II-1. The Battle for the French Mind
II-2. Because I Said So
II-3. The Birth of Values
II-4. History, Individuals, and Concepts
II-5. The Revaluation of Devaluation
II-C. The Second Constitutional Moment
Conclusion to Part II. From Faculties to Values
Part III. From Serialization to Subordination: Rejection and Reformulation
III-1. The Creative Spirit
III-2. Of Laws and Lies
III-3. A Guess at the Riddle
III-4. The Quest for a Unified Science
III-5. Work Resumed on the Tower
III-C. The Third Constitutional Moment
Conclusion to Part III. From Values to Validity
Conclusion
References
Index
