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Nicholas Gane Continuum, London & New York, 2004, xii+210pp.ISBN: 0 8264 7066 1.
In the course of nine interviews, Nicholas Gane explores the present situation and future of social theory. The central theme is the changed significance of the social. The presuppositions of classical sociology -- the notion of the objectivity of society, or the idea that sociology is concerned with objects that are to be understood only in relation to the intentions of social actors, for instance -- have been undermined today as a result of developments especially in the nature of technology. Gane and his interviewees do not claim that this means the end of the social as such, although there are suggestions that we may be speaking of the end of society. The key thesis that Gane attempts to advance in his lucid and insightful interviews is that the social is changing its form rather than disappearing. This is explored in a different way with each of the theorists interviewed.
Zygmunt Bauman argues that the notion of postmodernity is no longer adequate to account for developments in the nature of modernity, the contemporary form of which he calls liquid modernity. This liquid modernity is characterized by social forms based on transience, uncertainty, anxieties and insecurity, and results in new freedoms that come at the price of individual responsibility and without the traditional support of social institutions. Judith Butler explores the language of theorizing about the social, noting that the social tends to fall away in the current...