The Eclipse of Morality: Science, State, and Market (Sociological Imagination & Structural Change) Book

We are heirs to three approaches to the problem of order developed in the seventeenth century: science, the state, and the market. Busch uses the works of Bacon, Hobbes, and Adam Smith as Weberian ideal types. Each attempted to describe, to predict, and to prescribe a solution. Different as they were, each proposed a solution that relieved people of most moral responsibility and assigned it to an extrahuman force: God's hand as revealed through the method of science, the visible hand of the state, or the invisible hand of the market. Using historical examples drawn from the last two centuries, Busch shows how the ideas initially proposed by these thinkers became reified as scientism, statism, and marketism -- systems of belief that single mode of ordering could solve the riddle of society. No single, unique ordering is possible or necessary, the author argues, since individuals and society are both the outcomes of social processes. Democracy must be expanded by building networks that extend it beyond the political realm to all institutions. Busch ends by providing concrete examples of successful attempts to extend democracy, to create multiple orderings, thereby putting moral responsibility neither on the shoulders of individuals, where it becomes crushingly heavy, nor on society, where it becomes unbearably light. CONTENTS Acknowledgments · Introduction: The Politics of Science and the Science of Politics · 1. Development and the Problem of Order · 2. The Technology of Power and the Power of Technology · 3. The State of the State · 4. Selling the Market · 5. Beyond the Leviathans · 6. Networks of Democracy · References · IndexRead More