Description
Book SynopsisIn this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self.
Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "cybernetic society," a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization—such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego—in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community.
Trade Review"Thompson ranges confidently over philosophy, psychoanalysis, and economics in this thoughtful and original study of the individual in a mass society."—Russell Jacoby, University of California, Los Angeles
"Thompson is a preeminent scholar who has produced a controversial, interdisciplinary work that speaks to the future of the critical tradition. This is an innovative and important work that deserves to be read."—Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University
"In the tradition of the great diagnostic philosophers—from Marx and Nietzsche, Lukács and Foucault, to Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, and Rahel Jaeggi—Michael J. Thompson's
Twilight of the Self probes the central problems of contemporary social and political life. Like a 'doctor' for 'sick cultures,' this ambitious book seeks to identify the source of our ailment, theorize its origins, and prescribe a treatment."—Jeremy Kingston Cynamon,
The Review of PoliticsTable of ContentsIntroduction
1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual
2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self
3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis
4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy
5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition
6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms
7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego
8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self
