The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society [Hardcover]

Dennis Wrong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 1994

Many Americans despair that the glue that once held American society together has since come undone. Yet, as Dennis Wrong shows, our generation is not alone in fearing a breakdown of social ties and a descent into violent conflict. Analyzing such thinkers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Freud, Mead, Parsons, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, Wrong shows how their ideas about co-operation and conflict afford an illuminating perspective on our own efforts to create a well-functioning system that allows for productive and meaningful lives. In a world where diverse ethnic, religious, class, and national groups are both interdependent yet conflicted, this book reveals the individual and social processes that offer potential for reconciliation in the future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wrong, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses , offers a scholarly and highly abstract discussion of major theorists of social order. Maintaining that any emphasis on a single solution denies the complexity of human nature, he analyzes political theorists likes Hobbes and Locke, sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Peter Berger and the all-encompassing worldviews of Marx and Freud. After discussing the tensions between individuals and groups, Wrong addresses the relationship between group conflict and social order. Only at the book's end does he apply theory to contemporary fears of growing ethnic and religious disorder or a totalitarian excess of order. Looking at the contemporary loss of faith and the "end of ideology" occasioned by the fall of the Soviet Union, Wrong notes that no matter what happens to nation states, the basic units of social order--the family, the Gemeinschaft , the network joined by the common goal--will survive.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

For theorists like Wrong, the most fruitful--and insistent--question in sociology remains the oldest one: Why don't we act in our self-interest even more than we do? Wrong reads closely formulations of the question by seminal thinkers in Western civilization: Hobbes, of course, who first made problematic the question's subject, social order; Rousseau; Locke; and in this century, Freud and the American system builder, Talcott Parsons, who is currently enjoying a revival. Wrong's analysis is abstract; for some readers, it may be too philosophical, involving too many conceptual distinctions and not enough narrative and recitation of facts and hysteria over contemporary disorders. Others may relish Wrong's rigorous and sustained readings of canonical theory and his belief in human nature--the opposite of what he famously called the oversocialized conception of man long before such a formulation became at all fashionable among his peers. With Wrong as their medium, Hobbes and others help us think at length about the war of all against all, though hardly resolve it. But then, sustained thought is itself a kind of resolution. Roland Wulbert

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 354 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; F edition (January 31, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 002935515X
• ISBN-13: 978-0029355152
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,422,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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