Bücher von Adam B. Seligman

Analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of social relationships. This book asks whether trust - which critics identify as essential in creating a cohesive society - can continue to serve this role. It shows that trust is losing its unifying power because the individual, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules.

This book argues for the continuing tension across historical contexts between movements emphasizing ritual and movements emphasizing sincerity. Our contemporary age has, at great risk, downplayed the importance of ritual. Drawing on examples from Chinese, Greek, Jewish, and contemporary culture, the book presents an innovative interdisciplinary account of how ritual works.

Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "e;the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into being its own nemesis"e; in the forms of ethnic, racial, and identity politics. Seligman counters that the modern human must recover a notion of authority that is essentially transcendent, but which extends tolerance to those of other--or no--faiths. Through its denial of an authority rooted in an experience of transcendence, modernity fails to account for individual and collective moral action. First, deprived of a sacred source of the self, depictions of moral action are reduced to motives of self interest. Second, dismissing the sacred leaves the resurgence of religious movements unexplained. In this rigorous and imaginative study, Seligman seeks to discover a durable source of moral authority in a liberalized world. His study of shame, pride, collective guilt, and collective responsibility demonstrates the mutual relationship between individual responsibility and communal authority. Furthermore, Seligman restores the indispensable role of religious traditions--as well as the features of those traditions that enhance, rather than denigrate, tolerance. Sociologists, political theorists, moral philosophers, and intellectual historians will find Seligman's thesis enlightening, as will anyone concerned with the ethical and religious foundations of a tolerant society.

As the countries of East-Central Europe struggle to create liberal democracy and the United States and other Western nations attempt to rediscover their own tarnished civil institutions, this title identifies the neglect of the idea of 'civil society' as a central concern common to both cultures today.