Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought
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A01=Chad Alan Goldberg
american
Author_Chad Alan Goldberg
capitalism
Category=JHB
christian theology
christianity
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
france
french
Georg Simmel
german
germany
immigrants
jewish
Jews
judaism
Karl Marx
Max Weber
modern society
modernism
modernity
national traditions
occidentalism
orientalism
religion
religious study
Robert Park
social studies
sociology
tradition
united states of america
usa
Werner Sombart
western though
William Thomas
Product details
- ISBN 9780226460413
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 22 May 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change. In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the "Jewish Revolution," Emile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology.
In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews and now the Jewish state continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
Chad Alan Goldberg is professor of sociology and affiliated with the Center for German and European Studies, the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is the author of Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
