Late Modernity in Crisis

Andreas Reckwitz is Professor of Social Theory and Cultural Sociology at Humboldt University, Berlin.Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, and Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt, Germany.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart IAndreas ReckwitzThe Theory of Society as a Tool1. Doing Theory2. Practice theory as Social Theory3. The Practice of Modernity4. The Theory of Society at Work: From Bourgeois and Industrial Modernity to Late Modernity5. Theory as Critical Analytics6. Coda: The Experimentalism of TheoryPart IIHartmut RosaBest Account: Outlining a Systematic Theory of Modern Society1. What Is a Theory of Society and What Can It Do?2. Dynamic Stabilization and the Expansion of Our Share of the World: An Analysis of the Modern Social Formation3. Desynchronization and Alienation: A Diagnosis and Critique of Modernity4. Adaptive Stabilization and Resonance: A Therapeutic and Transgressive Outline of an Alternative HorizonPart IIIModernity and Critique: A Conversation with Martin BauerNotes

"For those of us who think that the big picture matters and not just information, empirical data, and small narratives, this book is good news. Two prominent sociologists, each in their own way and both with rigor and erudition, take up the question on the minds of many: What sort of society are we really living in? In what direction are our societies headed? A major contribution to the revitalization of interest in a comprehensive theory of modernity."—Miroslav Volf, Yale University"... an admirable attempt to raise the kind of Big Ideas that the founding figures of sociology – Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel, and others – thought were important if we were to understand society as a whole. It might be just what we need at this fraught period in our journey together as a global society."—The Englewood Review of Books