To Flourish or Destruct

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the Notre Dame Center for Social Research.  He is the author or coauthor of several books, including What Is a Person? and Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Critical Realist Personalism—Some BasicsChapter 2: Rethinking Motivations for ActionChapter 3: Against Social SituationismChapter 4: Human Nature and Motivations in Classical TheoryChapter 5: On Basic Human Goods, Interests, and MotivationsChapter 6: Toward a Theory of FlourishingChapter 7: Understanding Failure, Destruction, and EvilConclusionNotesIndex

“Smith extends his careful work on the individual, as presented in What Is a Person?, to demonstrate the insufficiency of human motivation and agency in the work of social scientists, in particular sociologists. . . . Smith’s careful readings of Marx and sociologists Goffman and Durkheim reveal how their reductionist readings of human motivation cannot account for why humans act or fail to flourish. Smith then sets out a careful theory about the sorts of needs humans must satisfy in order to flourish and the ways that these needs structure human action. This major work in sociological theory should be read by social scientists in all disciplines. Highly recommended.”