Employing Nietzsches Sociological Imagination: How to Understand Totalitarian Democracy

(Hardback)

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Harnessing the empowering ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to read the human condition of modern existence through a sociological lens, Employing Nietzsches Sociological Imagination: How to Understand Totalitarian Democracy confronts the realities of how modernity and its utopianisms affect ones ability to purpose existence with self-authored meaning. By critically assessing the ideals of modern institutions, the motives of their pundits, and their political ideologies as expressions born from the social decay of exhausted dreams and projects of modernity, Jack Fong assembles Nietzsches existential sociological imagination to empower actors to emancipate the self from such duress. Illuminating the merits of creating new meaning for life affirmation by overcoming struggle with ones will to power, Fong reveals Nietzsches horizons for actualized and empowered selves, selves to be liberated from convention, groupthink, and cultural scripts that exact deference from societys captive audiences.

Reviews

Drawing on C. Wright Mills's "sociological imagination," Fong develops a new understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche, in which the anti-sociological father of existential philosophy is rediscovered as the founder and most profound practitioner of critical sociology. Though Nietzsche's sociology is partly rooted in the praxis-related struggles of the bermensch, the "overcomer" serves also as an ideal type for a new mode of seeing, being, and existing. Thus, Nietzsche's critical sociology represents the first step in the formulation of an existential sociology, which is the larger ambition of the book. Fong's analysis of Nietzsche is scrupulously grounded in primary-source material and is contextualized through the author's impressive understanding of contemporary social theory. Fong's Nietzsche is a profound critic of the modern condition and is explicitly examined as a forerunner of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (and its critiques of conformity, the culture. Highly recommended.

Author Bio

Jack Fong is professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.