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Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences First Edition
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Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries.
- ISBN-100691023476
- ISBN-13978-0691023472
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateNovember 5, 1991
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.1 x 0.55 x 9.2 inches
- Print length248 pages
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"This is the most lucid, concise, and comprehensive summary and analysis of the impact of post-modernism on the social sciences. . . . In sum, a brilliant yet genuinely helpful, humane, and readable work." ― Choice
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- Publisher : Princeton University Press; First Edition (November 5, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 248 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691023476
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691023472
- Lexile measure : 1310L
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.1 x 0.55 x 9.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,254,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,182 in Social Sciences Methodology
- #2,914 in Social Services & Welfare (Books)
- #6,528 in Political Philosophy (Books)
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If the affirmative's problem is trying to eclectically blend unblendables, the skeptics tend to refute themselves, the usual outcome of extreme abeyance. In an excellent concluding section, the author summarizes the endemic paradoxes of this position. For example, PoMo's use of theory to disavow theory; deconstruction's use of the very tools it deconstructs, viz. reason and logic; moreover, in raising the marginal at the expense of the center, a value judgement takes place even when such judgements are programmatically condemned.
Boiled down to basics, purist PoMo ends in its own version of solipsism: millions of unsynthesizable personal narratives. Small wonder that only the narrowest, most localized results are sanctioned in a prospective post-modern social science. In Rosenau's account, the possibility that such a science can emerge focuses on individuals instead of subjects or personalities. Since reason, structure, and other modes of synthesis are impossible, how such idiosyncratic accounts can even approach a threshold of science seems inexplicable to me even after reading the book.
But since PoMo is the fashion of the day, it's to the author's credit to have crystallized these topical questions in clearly understood terms.