The Ethics of Modernity: Formation and Transformation in Britain, France, Germany, and the USA

(Paperback)

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Based on intensive, long-term study, this comparative book traces the role of ethics in the formation of modernity in four Western nations (the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany).

Reviews

An important endeavor to provide a grand narrative of the trajectory of modernity, in the vein of the sociological master of us all, Weber. This book will be useful in courses looking for recent sociological ventures in comparative-historical analysis, especially if one is looking for an informed Weberian antidote to postmodern or even antimodern nihilism, or to a narrative that priviliges the economic or the political at the expense of the religio-cultural. * American Journal of Sociology *
Richard Mnch's comparative interpretation of the modern impulse in the prototypical Western nations is a remarkable intellectual product. It is an original and imaginative extension of the best of Max Weber's sociology. It is a beautiful appreciation of the simultaneity of the common impulse of the transformation to modernism and the different contexts into which this impulse was thrust. It is a work of high scholarship. But above all it is a book that is true. Mnch gets it right in his interpretation of the Western experience, and has it right in his prediction of the continuity of the modernizing impulse into the globalizing world. -- Neil J. Smelser, director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California

Author Bio

Richard MYnch is professor of sociology at the University of Bamberg, Germany.