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Looking back upon the first quarter of the twenty-first century, two themes have risen to the top of the social theory agenda and are likely to continue to become more pronounced: the proliferating sense and reality of insecurity, and the accelerating eclipse of enlightenment.
Thus far, this century has been characterized by changes in the structure and functioning of global capitalism, which has transmuted from neoliberalism into varieties of neoauthoritarianism. This new and exciting volume of Current Perspectives in Social Theory explores whether these shifts represent fundamental and transformational changes or merely adaptive, superficial ones—particularly in relation to social structure and social processes. Insecurity and the Eclipse of Enlightenment considers how these developments are likely to point toward profoundly different and increasingly disorienting futures, while also revealing the persistent, contradictory principles that have been shaping modern societies for at least two centuries.
Harry F. Dahms is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Social Theory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. He is also editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory, the director of the International Social Theory Consortium, and an associate editor of Basic Income Studies and Soundings. He has published numerous articles and edited many books in the area of social theory.
Daniel Krier is Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University, USA, specialising in social theory and political economy. Dan writes in the traditions of critical and continental social theory with an emphasis upon Weber’s historical/comparative methodology.
Ilaria Riccioni is an Associate Professor of General Sociology at the Faculty of Education at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her work deals with sociological theory, critical sociology and qualitative research; cultural sociology; avant-garde art as a social critique and indicator of change.
Introduction: The Inverted Dialectics of (In)Security and the Eclipse of Enlightenment; Harry F. Dahms, Daniel Krier, and Ilaria Riccioni
Chapter 1. Between Artifice and Enlightenment: Queer Critique, Insecurity, and the AI Large Language Model; Kevin S. Amidon
Chapter 2. A Constellation for Political Ecology: Working-Through the Eclipse of Reason; Thomas F. Bechtold
Chapter 3. Eclipse of Enlightenment and Uncertainty in Contemporary Society: In Search of New Civilization; Adele Bianco
Chapter 4. Insecurity, Damaged Life, and Psychic Exploitation: The Stabilization of Neoliberalism; Roderick Condon
Chapter 5. Lonely Crowd or Anxious Mass? (In)Security Between (Anti)Enlightenment, (Ir)Responsibility, (Im)Maturity, (Un)Reason, and the Crux of (Un)Mündigkeit; Harry F. Dahms
Chapter 6. Epistemic Insecurity, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Belief in Rationality; Jean-Louis Fabiani
Chapter 7. Rethinking The Civilizing Process Through The Dawn of Everything; Robert Garot
Chapter 8. Insecurity, Uncertainty and Social Complexity: Systems Theoretical Remarks on Societal and Individual Level Incertitude; Dániel Havrancsik
Chapter 9. Theory and Theology: The Axial Age, Realized Eschatology and the Eclipse of Reason in the Twenty-First Century; Reha Kadakal
Chapter 10. Security, Reason, and Economic Theology: Late Capitalism as Cradle and Grave of Gods; Daniel Krier
Chapter 11. Epistemic Insecurity: A Critique; Patrick O’Mahony
Chapter 12. Insecurity, Experience and Imagination: Contemporary Visual-Technological Society and the Question of Freedom; Ilaria Riccioni
Chapter 13. Climate Change, Reason, and American Higher Education: Inculcating the Self-Deception of Capitalist Society; Alexander M. Stoner
Chapter 14. Liminality, States of Exception, and the Problem of Enlightenment; Arpad Szakolczai
Chapter 15. Dichotomies Reconsidered: Towards More Reliable Conceptual Tools of Social Science in the Digital Age; Krešimir Žažar