Social order results from a complex interaction of individual actions, institutional structures, and cultural norms. But just how do they relate to one another, and is any one factor predominant? The answers that social science has provided reflect the competing paradigms of the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches.

In this innovative book, two prominent social scientists coming from competing research traditions attempt to chart a course between them, drawing on their respective strengths to present a new model based on a classificatory scheme of...

As the countries of East-Central Europe struggle to create liberal democracy and the United States and other Western nations attempt to rediscover their own tarnished civil institutions, Adam Seligman identifies the neglect of the idea of "civil society" as a central concern common to both cultures today. Two centuries after its origins in the Enlightenment, the idea of civil society is being revived to provide an answer to the question of how individuals can pursue their own interests while preserving the greater good of society and, similarly, how society can advance the interests of the...

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in...

Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into...

Innerworldly Individualism looks to colonial history, in particular, seventeenth-century New England, to understand the sources of modern nation building. Seligman analyzes how cultural assumptions of collective identity and social authority emerged out of the religious beliefs of the first generation of settlers in New England. He goes on to examine how these assumptions crystallized three generations later into patterns of normative order, forming the foundation of an American consciousness. Seligman uses sociological research grounded in early American history as his...