Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixotes Dinner Party [Paperback]

An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking,?Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixotes Dinner Party?interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence.

Introduction, Beginning: An Invitation to a Dinner Party, Part I Crises of Meaning, 1. Ruins, 2. Our Times Are Strange, 3. Making the Contemporary Legible, 4. Hope(less), 5. Notes from Underground, Part II Curiosity, 6. Curiosity Outside and Inside the University, 7. The (In)tractable Future, 8. Power I: A Critique of Received Narratives, 9. Power II: Model Wars, 10. Data and Conversation, Part III Powerful Subjects, 11. Why Do You Want to Talk to Us?, 12. Reflection, 13. Translation, 14. Legitimation, 15. Education, Part IV New Buildings from Old Stones, 16. Old Stones, 17. Teaching, 18. Getting There, 19. To Theory and Back, 20. A Seat at the Table, Part V Hopes, 21. Caritas in the Peoples University, Part V Hopes 22. Humanizing Bureaucracy, 23. Caf? Intellectuals, 24. Philosophy in the Marketplace, Ending: Books of Dreams

David A. Westbrook is Louis A. Del Cotto Professor, University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York. His books include Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern <lŸ