Thinking the Unthinkable

In the eloquent style for which he has become famous, Charles Lemert writes of social theory as no one else. Thinking the Unthinkable is offered as text for instruction, yet it defies the prevailing assumption that social theory is a method for clarifying the facts of social life. Lemert shows how social theory began late in the 19th century as a struggle to come to terms with the failure of modern reason to solve the social problems created by the capitalist world-system. Since then, social theory has developed through twists and turns to think and rethink this Unthinkable. Hence the surprising innovations of recent years-postmodern, queer, postcolonial, third-wave feminist, risk theories, among others arising in the wake of globalization. Once again, Lemert has made the difficult clear in a book that students and other readers will treasure and keep. Part I What Is Social Theory?; Chapter 1 The Impossible Reasons of Modern Civilizations; Chapter 2 Social Theory and Modernity’s Unthinkable; Chapter 3 Social Violence as the Bead Lust of the Unthinkable; Chapter 4 Five Ways to Skin a Cat; Part II Unthinkable Social Things; Chapter 5 Revolutionary Reasons; Chapter 6 Rationality’s Double-Bind; Chapter 7 The Reasonable Hope of a Social Bond; Chapter 8 Perverse Reasons; Chapter 9 Unreasonable Differences; Part III The Exiled Others Think the Unthinkable; Chapter 10 Beyond the Double-Bind; Chapter 11 A Revolutionary Social Bond; Chapter 12 The Strange Social Benefits of Conflict; Chapter 13 The Social Structure of Meanings; Chapter 14 The Unfolding of Social Theory in the Unraveling of the Twentieth Century into the Twenty-First;