Front cover image for The Subject of Modernity

The Subject of Modernity

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Our own self-styled postmodern age has seen no end to this debate, which now receives a major and wide-ranging intervention from the theorist and critic Anthony J. Cascardi. Offering an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject or self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth, he carries his argument across the fields of epistemology, literature, political science, religion and psychology. The modern subject proves to be positioned within conflicting discourses, in a culture characterised by its 'detotalised totality'. Max Weber's concept of 'world disenchantment' enables Cascardi to make a searching critique of modernity's sense of its absoluteness, divorced from an archaic, 'enchanted' world. He advocates in its place a more fruitful relationship between historical analysis and theoretical speculation, offering constructive new alternatives to current orthodoxy regarding subjectivity and modernity
eBook, English, 1992
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992
1 online resource (328 pages)
9780511597428, 9780521412872, 9780521423786, 0511597428, 0521412870, 0521423783
776966728
Print version:
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The disenchantment of the world; 2. The theory of the novel and the autonomy of art; 3. Secularization and modernization; 4. The subject and the state; 5. Subjective desire; 6. Possibilities of post-modernism; Notes.
Title from publishers bibliographic system (viewed on 22 Dec 2011)
doi.org Connect to e-book
www.survey.bris.ac.uk We have trial access to this e-book until 31/7/2012 through our Cambridge Books Online trial of over 12,000 titles. Please tell us if you would like to recommend continued access to it