It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.īook Description Paperback. ![]() Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain-an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. ![]() Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades. A must-read." -Samuel Moyn, Henry R.Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance-society's own past. Without denying group-based injustice in American life, Jacoby bracingly affirms the importance of the individual distinction that our classic thinkers identified as the ultimate aspiration for an age of accelerating conformity in how we raise our children, what we wear, and how we talk. "Russell Jacoby’s new book offers an implacable and unprecedented dose of resistance to an unreflective mantra. Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University and award-winning author most recently of No Property in Man Immensely learned yet unfailingly lucid, Jacoby will make you think harder than you ever have about things you thought you knew.” In On Diversity, he tackles some of the core pieties of our time, and drives home a central paradox, that the shibboleth of diversity cloaks a world of increasingly soulless uniformity. “Russell Jacoby is the best kind of intellectual provocateur, a philosopher skeptic who knows that the pursuit of justice does not in itself yield truth and often enough yields falsehood. How is it, he wonders, that the explosion of officially sanctioned “diversity” has been accompanied by a decline of individuality? His answer takes us on a scintillating journey through the history of ideas, including Constant, Herder, Tocqueville, Mill, Herzen, Burckhardt, Durkheim, Randolph Bourne, Walter Benjamin, and many others. On Diversity is first-rate intellectual history and penetrating cultural criticism.” -George Scialabba, author of Low Dishonest Decades and What Are Intellectuals Good For? "In this book, as he has throughout his career, Russell Jacoby asks the necessary questions, the ones few other contemporary writers care to pose. ![]() ![]() Does a concern with diversity of cultures strengthen diversity of thought? Has the global scaling-up of American mass society left us with more groups and fewer individuals? A highly personal inquiry into the jargon of authenticity, this book is also a fascinating history of a central modern idea." -David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University, and author of American Breakdown "Russell Jacoby has written a cogent and provocative essay on the paradoxes of identity, and he asks questions that yield no comforting answers. "This is an insightful, thought-provoking book which raises intriguing questions, and I enjoyed reading it." “ On Diversity is philosophically generous, occasionally witty, tightly reasoned and engagingly written." -Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal
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