Description
Book SynopsisIn this provocative and timely new book, Alain Touraine explores the question of how we might live together in a truly globalized world society. Rejecting the seductive metaphor of a global melting pot, Touraine mounts a powerful attack on the idea that we now live together as equals, sharing the same social and cultural values. If anything, he argues, our differences are being heightened, as communities increasingly define their identities against the encroaching forces of globalization.
Touraine argues that the twin processes of globalization and particularization are pushing us further and further apart. On the one hand, traditional values and forms of cultural expression are being eroded by homogenized mass culture. On the other, communities are becoming more introverted as they fight to defend themselves from outside influences. Even the cities where our global networks originate and are controlled are made up of communities which are foreign to one another, as they defe
Trade Review
'Touraine re-poses the issue of social solidarity which was so central to social thought at the end of the nineteenth century, setting it against the background of late twentieth-century globalization, the transformation of human societies and subjects and the displacement of many of the structures which previously gave them some stability. The book should be an important reference point for social and political theory in the new century.' William Outhwaite, School of European Studies, University of Sussex
Table of Contents
Translator's Note.
Acknowledgements.
Introduction.
Part I: The Production of the Self: .
1. Demodernization.
2. The Subject.
3. Social Movements.
4. Early, Mid- and Late Modernities.
Part II: Living Together:.
5. Multi-Cultural Society.
6. The Nation.
7. Democracy in Decline?.
8. A School for the Subject.
Conclusion: Ethics and Politics.
References.
Index.
