Consciousness and Society |  | Author: H. Stuart Hughes
Creator: Stanley Hoffman
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 672340
Media: Paperback
Pages: 449
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0765809184
Dewey Decimal Number: 301.09
EAN: 9780765809186
ASIN: 0765809184
Publication Date: June 11, 2002
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Product Description
Hughes' ideas, and the way they are expressed in Consciousness and Society, have become paradigms of twentieth-century scholarship. In dealing with the changing social thought after 1890 in Europe, Hughes was able to cover a wide array of thinkers and issues in a scholarly, yet graceful manner. It is a study of the "cluster of genius" of Europe at that time: Croce, Durkheim, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche, as well as other great European minds. The book explores questions that are still of relevance in today's society: Is the separation of facts and values tenable, or even desirable? Can rationality accommodate the ideas of a Bergson or a Freud? Is there, or should there be, a
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| Customer Reviews:
A Classic of Intellectual History May 22, 2004
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Although it is now almost fifty years since the first edition appeared, a recent rereading reminded me why this has long been considered the essential English-language oveview of the social thought of turn-of-the-century continental Europe (Germany, France, Italy, and Austria). Hughes focuses on the central issues in social theory--positivism, pragmatism, idealism, irrationalism, materialism, liberalism--as they were addressed by the most innovative and influential thinkers of the period (notably Freud, Durkheim, Croce, Bergson, Sorel, and Pareto, and--Hughes' hero--Weber). Hughes assess ideas at a high level of abstraction, so this is probably not the book for a reader with no previous acquaintance with modern social theory. And although he sketches in the social and political background and offers penetrating biographical sketches, Hughes does not undertake the kind of close reading exemplified by Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, which demonstrates the intimate links between intellectuals' life experience and their ideas. But not many works of history age this well. One sign of Hughes' success: closing this book, I wanted to pick up Freud and Durkheim and Weber again.
Positivistic Influences July 14, 2003
John C. Landon (New York City)
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is an important book that is deservedly back in print and well worth reading at a time when we seem to be reliving the mistakes of the positivistic surge at the end of the nineteenth century, deja vu all over again. The crash of the Hegelian movement and the reversal of thought in the post-Hegelian generation saw many influenced by the (quite metaphysical) Comtean positivism, among them none other than Charles Darwin. The effect is practically cast in granite in the works of Marx who unwittinlgy signatures the trend. The tide of positivism carrying its distinct set of hidden metaphysical premises and limits was fairly well exposed at the time, but in the age of dominant Darwinism it has made a comeback in disguise. Hughes goes through the whole development tracing the stream of influences and gives us an significant portrait of intellectual history we seemed doomed to relive none the wiser. (Reviewed from memory, I think I got it right)
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