Insecurity and the Eclipse of Enlightenment

Harry F. Dahms is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Social Theory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. He is also editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory, the director of the International Social Theory Consortium, and an associate editor of Basic Income Studies and Soundings. He has published numerous articles and edited many books in the area of social theory.Daniel Krier is Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University, USA, specialising in social theory and political economy. Dan writes in the traditions of critical and continental social theory with an emphasis upon Weber’s historical/comparative methodology.Ilaria Riccioni is an Associate Professor of General Sociology at the Faculty of Education at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her work deals with sociological theory, critical sociology and qualitative research; cultural sociology; avant-garde art as a social critique and indicator of change.

• Introduction: The Inverted Dialectics of (In)Security and the Eclipse of Enlightenment; Harry F. Dahms, Daniel Krier, and Ilaria Riccioni Chapter 1. Between Artifice and Enlightenment: Queer Critique, Insecurity, and the AI Large Language Model; Kevin S. Amidon Chapter 2. A Constellation for Political Ecology: Working-Through the Eclipse of Reason; Thomas F. Bechtold Chapter 3. Eclipse of Enlightenment and Uncertainty in Contemporary Society: In Search of New Civilization; Adele Bianco Chapter 4. Insecurity, Damaged Life, and Psychic Exploitation: The Stabilization of Neoliberalism; Roderick Condon Chapter 5. Lonely Crowd or Anxious Mass? (In)Security Between (Anti)Enlightenment, (Ir)Responsibility, (Im)Maturity, (Un)Reason, and the Crux of (Un)Mündigkeit; Harry F. Dahms Chapter 6. Epistemic Insecurity, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Belief in Rationality; Jean-Louis Fabiani Chapter 7. Rethinking The Civilizing Process Through The Dawn of Everything; Robert Garot Chapter 8. Insecurity, Uncertainty and Social Complexity: Systems Theoretical Remarks on Societal and Individual Level Incertitude; Dániel Havrancsik Chapter 9. Theory and Theology: The Axial Age, Realized Eschatology and the Eclipse of Reason in the Twenty-First Century; Reha Kadakal Chapter 10. Security, Reason, and Economic Theology: Late Capitalism as Cradle and Grave of Gods; Daniel Krier Chapter 11. Epistemic Insecurity: A Critique; Patrick O’Mahony Chapter 12. Insecurity, Experience and Imagination: Contemporary Visual-Technological Society and the Question of Freedom; Ilaria Riccioni Chapter 13. Climate Change, Reason, and American Higher Education: Inculcating the Self-Deception of Capitalist Society; Alexander M. Stoner Chapter 14. Liminality, States of Exception, and the Problem of Enlightenment; Arpad Szakolczai Chapter 15. Dichotomies Reconsidered: Towards More Reliable Conceptual Tools of Social Science in the Digital Age; Krešimir Žažar