Daniel Wickberg

Broschiertes Buch

A History of American Thought 1860-2000

Thinking the Modern

Beschreibung

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 andgender, 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.

Autor

Daniel Wickberg has taught intellectual history at the University of Texas at Dallas for over 25 years. His primary areas of research are the history of American social thought and historiography. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (1998).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Routledge / Taylor & Francis
• Seitenzahl: 328
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. September 2023
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 520g
• ISBN-13: 9780367633110
• ISBN-10: 0367633116
• Artikelnr.: 68100740

Rezensionen

It will not surprise anyone acquainted with Dan Wickberg that he has written a magisterial history of the rise of modern ways of thinking in the United States. The book tracks Americans' quest, since the mid-nineteenth century, for frameworks to make sense of a newly unsettled and fluid world. But at its core are the deep contradictions marking modernity: the fresh possibilities inherent in indeterminacy on the one hand, and the conceiving of new modes of coercion and unfreedom on the other. Deftly noting intellectual conflicts and cross-currents yet still able to identify the "lenses, categories, and sensibilities" that have remade modern thought, the book sparkles. From his very first chapter specifying what was novel and generative (and what was not) about Darwin's Origin of Species, to his last-on the dissolving border between the realms of culture and politics in the late twentieth century, unleashing the "culture wars" and much else-Wickberg offers a lucid, compelling, and even gripping retelling of modern American intellectual history.

Sarah E. Igo, Vanderbilt University, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America