Description
This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century.
The focus of this volume is on the destabilizing effects of modern challenges to notions of fixed order and absolute truths, and the contradictory consequences for philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic thought. The intellectual response to the unprecedented changes of this era produced visions of both liberation from the hierarchies of the past and new forms of control and constraint. One of the central contradictions in modern thought was between biological and cultural ideas of social, psychological, and moral order. This is the first work to provide an interpretive vision of the entire period under consideration. Topics covered include evolutionary thought, philosophical Pragmatism, ideas of race and gender, pluralism and cultural relativism, Cold War Liberalism, science and religion, feminist thought, evolutionary psychology, and the late twentieth-century Culture Wars. Thinkers from William James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Judith Butler and Cornel West are analyzed as historical figures.
This volume is an ideal resource for a general audience as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the field of American intellectual history.
Table of Contents
PART I: AMERICAN MODERNISMS: 1865-1919
1. DARWINISM AND THE EVOLUTIONARY SENSIBILITY
2. PRAGMATISM AND ANTIFOUNDATIONAL THOUGHT
3. THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, THE IDEA OF CULTURE, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
4. PROGRESSIVISMS
5. RETHINKING WOMAN AND MAN
PART II: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION: 1920-1962
6. CULTURAL RELATIVISMS AND MODERN HIERARCHIES
7. SCIENCE AS CULTURE: THE MORAL ORDER OF MODERNITY
8. FROM PROTESTANT HEGEMONY TO RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
9. PLURALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
10. SELF AND SOCIAL ORDER IN THE COLD WAR WORLD
PART III: RETHINKING MODERNISM: 1963-2000
11. CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS AND RUPTURES
12. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING
13. THE RETURN OF NATURE
14. GENDER AND SEXUALITY
15. CULTURE WARS
