Full Description
Through stories, conversations, and essays, this book pursues interwoven critical and philosophical inquiries into the nature of the contemporary in the North Atlantic, asking how are we to live as intellectuals, individually and in community?
Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party is the product of informal discussion and academic work done over the last two decades among an international group of social scientists. An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking, this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence. Reflecting that the US, indeed the North Atlantic countries, seem to have entered autumn, David A. Westbrook asks what spring might be. Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home?
Contents
Introduction, Beginning: An Invitation to a Dinner Party, Part I Crises of Meaning, 1. Ruins, 2. Our Times Are Strange, 3. Making the Contemporary Legible, 4. Hope(less), 5. Notes from Underground, Part II Curiosity, 6. Curiosity Outside and Inside the University, 7. The (In)tractable Future, 8. Power I: A Critique of Received Narratives, 9. Power II: Model Wars, 10. Data and Conversation, Part III Powerful Subjects, 11. Why Do You Want to Talk to Us?, 12. Reflection, 13. Translation, 14. Legitimation, 15. Education, Part IV New Buildings from Old Stones, 16. Old Stones, 17. Teaching, 18. Getting There, 19. To "Theory" and Back, 20. A Seat at the Table, Part V Hopes, 21. Caritas in the People's University, 22. Humanizing Bureaucracy, 23. Café Intellectuals, 24. Philosophy in the Marketplace, Ending: Books of Dreams
