The Rise of Social Theory

Enlightenment concepts, says Hegel, "sh are the essential of the society they explain. They lose their continuous tense character, their promising tone, their critical impact, and get hold of the form of defeat and frustration" (185). The reason is chiefly that notions of the progressive character of human experience are belied by the domain that individual exit and interests simply do not irradiation with the context in which they might be exercised, Because "individual will is not of itself part and component part of the 'general will,' such Enlightenment notions as the social contract have no philosophical territory (Marcuse 185).

Marx, who owes much to Hegelian philosophy (particularly the dialectical method), nevertheless views Hegel as a German idealist who is as it were part and parcel of the Enlightenment, which is itself not unrelated to the Christian legacy to Western thought, whether Platonic or Aristotelian in character. Marx specifically and programmatically breaks with older mental traditions, amplifying the Hegelian refresh by grounding it in the textile historical and current conditions of existence. To be sure, Marx refers to the continuity of The Communist pronunciamento with previous Western thought both(prenominal) directly and indirectly, just now always with a view toward demonstrating its difference in both degree and kind from previous theoretical traditions.

When the ancient instauration was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian

With the exception of Kierkegaard, all of the philosophers cited crop a project of leaving God out of the comparison of human experience and/or of criticizing the Judeo-Christian ethos that has historically henpecked Western thought. The imperfections of the found universe are far withal evident to overlook, and it is difficult not to credit their tendency to understate a leap into the authority of faith when the rewards of faith are so elusive--possibly in the next life but decidedly in this one. The problem of evil, indeed, seems unanswerable for people of faith, for two reasons. First, at that place is a dearth of evidence that faith of itself does anything to alleviate evil.

Second, and by chance more telling, there is an abundance of evidence that faith has been the trigger of a good bit of evil, from the Sicilian Vespers to the St. Bartholomew debacle to the Holocaust to 9/11. As MacLeish puts it in his play base on the book of Job: "If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God."

---. imperious Theology: Volume One: Reason and Revelation, Being and God. 3 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951.

Christological relevance to redbrick experience

The detailed social critique meant to yield utopia associated with Marx and the cultural critique of sham objectivity by way of determined subjectivity associated with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are the 19th-century roots of the philosophical orientation of our own time. These theorists are the exponents of modernism and its progeny. In the 20th century, two additional lines of pregnant analysis and critique were developed, one by Freud and the other (though perhaps less original than derivative) by existentialists, who, along with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, are also, to varying degrees, implicated in postmodernism.

---. Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie. 1849. A Kierkegaard Anthology. Ed. Robert Bretall. New York: The modern-day Library, 1946.

Nietzsche's critique of culture and the West

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