Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo

How Social Theories Have Tried to Understand the "New World" of "Our Time

Bibliographic Data

ID5824907
AuthorsJeffrey C Alexander (0000-0003-3600-8023, Department of Sociology, U.C.L.A., 405 Hilgart Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90024, USA, corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume23
Issue3
Pages165-197
Publication date1994-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueZeitschrift für Soziologie (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0340-1804 • E-ISSN: 2366-0325
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/zfsoz-1994-0301
OpenAlexW200108960
LanguageEN
Citations received41
References cited12

This article links the cognitive contents of the different theoretical perspectives that have emerged since World War II to their meaning-making functions, and links both to their social origins broadly understood. It views social theorists as intellectuals who try to understand the crisis of their times. In doing so, they draw not only upon the cognitive resources of earlier social theories but upon the structured traditions of cultural codes and narratives. In order to explain the new and often unnerving experiences of their changing societies, intellectuals develop binary oppositions whose constructions of sacrality and profanity allow them to place the present in relation to a simplified past and future, thus creating "history." Social theory is also built upon changing narrative forms, genres of collective heroism, romantic individualism, tragedy, comedy, realism, and irony. The author suggests that in recent years the comic and ironic perspectives of postmodern theory have been challenged by a neo-modern perspective that is more heroic and romantic and more confident about solving the "problems of our time

Aesthetics · Binary opposition · Comics · Epistemology · Individualism · Irony · Literature · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Political science · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Social science · Sociology · Tragedy (event · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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