Full Description
With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of 'the social' developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into the question by critiques from science studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new framework are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as 'the social'. This book makes a fascinating contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity.
Contents
1. Patrick Joyce, Introduction Part 1: The Old Social: Histories of the Social 2. Catherine Pickstock The Mediaeval Origins of Civil Society 3. Mary Poovey, The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in 18th Century British Moral Philosophy 4. Robert Wokler repatriating Modernity's Alleged Debt to the Enlightenment: French Revolutionary Social Science and the Genesis of the Nation State 5. Gyan Prakash The Colonial Genealogy of Society: Community and Political Modernity in Indonesia 6. Patrick Joyce Maps, Blood and the City: The Governance of the Social in 19th Century Britain Part 2: The New Social: Theory, Practice and Disciplines 7. Bruno Latour Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social 8. Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan The Place of Space in the Study of the Social 9.Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift the Spaces of Clock Times 10. Thomas Osborne History, Theory, Disciplinarity 11. John R. Hall Cultures of Inquiry, and the Rethinking of Disciplines
