description: Drawing upon both classical insights and more recent writings, Hearn provides a compelling account of social breakdown in the United States. The book examines the conditions most responsible for the deterioration of social institutions, notably of the family and of communitarian interdependencies, such as those that support neighborhoods. More specifically, Hearn analyzes the defining forces of liberal modernity-in particular, the market economy (favored by the political right) and the democratic welfare state (endorsed by the political left) - whose steady expansion has diminished the social contexts that nurture trust, mutuality, and a robust sense of both personal responsibility and social obligation. The originality of Hearn's book lies in the solutions he proposes, which differ from those rooted in what Hearn calls "the languages of modernity." Hearn advocates modes that would serve instead to renew solidarity and reclaim social virtue, a repertory of strategies that would answer Emile Durkheim's call for the creation of moral individualism. He assesses various approaches to revitalizing the social settings, the social institutions and communitarian structures, within which people become moral individuals capable of caring about and taking responsibility for the fates of others. Readers of this book are invited to rely in larger part on themselves as parents, neighbors, community members, and citizen-participants in a civil society in restoration.
language: English
title: Moral Order And Social Disorder: The American Search For Civil Society
titlecomplete: Moral Order And Social Disorder: The American Search For Civil Society (Sociological Imagination & Structural Change)
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Walter de Gruyter & Co