In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

In this collection, a leading sociologist brings his distinctive method of social criticism to bear on some of the most significant ideas, political and social events, and thinkers of the late twentieth century. Of the seventeen essays, two are published for the first time, and several of the previously published essays have been expanded and updated for this volume. In the first section, the author critiques several concepts that have figured prominently in political-ideological controversies—capitalism, rationality, totalitarianism, power, alienation, left and right, and cultural relativism/multiculturalism. He considers their origins, historical shifts in their meaning and the myths surrounding them, and their subtle resonance beyond their formal definitions. The second section highlights the author’s lifelong interest in the relation of intellectuals to social classes and institutions. The author critically assesses the notion of a “New Class” in which intellectuals have been alleged to play a prominent role, considers the implications for class structure of the increasing centering of intellectual life in the university, and assesses the relation of sociology to professional jargon. The final essays in this section discuss four influential thinkers: David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Allan Bloom. The book closes with an autobiographical statement centered on the author’s intellectual-political life.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

xv, 266 pp. xv, 266 pp. Using fiction as a lens to view our present circumstances and our growing concerns about terrorism and civil liberties, each of the essays discusses a work of literary fiction - some classical, some modern - that concerns, directly or indirectly, the historical development of the law. Each essay considers the legal lessons about the fictional event or events at its core, lessons that tell us something worth remembering as we continue to chart law's evolution. These lessons, like those that may be found in all great literature, necessarily extend beyond the historical confines of the characters and plot and background of each story to embrace the modern condition - which, as these great stories suggest, is and always has been the only condition.Published by Talbot Publishing, an imprint of the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Bruce Holsinger identifies and explains an affinity for medievalism and medieval studies among the leading figures of critical theory. His book contains original essays by Bataille and Bourdieu - translated into English - that testify to the strange persistence of medievalisms in French postwar writings.