The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory

About this book

The essays turn about a single theme the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theoryDurkheim Freud Simmel and Weber and Park Parsons and Merton.