By Adam B. Seligman
Adam Seligman, certainly one of our most vital social thinkers, keeps the incisive critique of modernity he all started in his formerly acclaimed The proposal of Civil Society and The challenge of Trust. during this provocative new paintings of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's bet, particularly, the gambit to disencumber the trendy person from exterior social and spiritual norms via supplanting them with the rational self as its personal ethical authority. but faraway from making sure the liberty of the person, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened cause has known as into being its personal nemesis" within the kinds of ethnic, racial, and identification politics. Seligman counters that the fashionable human needs to get better a proposal of authority that's basically transcendent, yet which extends tolerance to these of other--or no--faiths.
Through its denial of an expert rooted in an event of transcendence, modernity fails to account for person and collective ethical motion. First, disadvantaged of a sacred resource of the self, depictions of ethical motion are lowered to explanations of self curiosity. moment, pushing aside the sacred leaves the resurgence of spiritual pursuits unexplained.
In this rigorous and inventive examine, Seligman seeks to find a sturdy resource of ethical authority in a liberalized international. His learn of disgrace, delight, collective guilt, and collective accountability demonstrates the mutual dating among person accountability and communal authority. moreover, Seligman restores the essential position of non secular traditions--as good because the beneficial properties of these traditions that increase, instead of denigrate, tolerance. Sociologists, political theorists, ethical philosophers, and highbrow historians will locate Seligman's thesis enlightening, as will an individual eager about the moral and spiritual foundations of a tolerant society.
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