SOCI 380 Chapter Mills: Mills Culture and Politics
19 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Mills contends that we have entered a new and dangerous age characterized by large unresolved questions in the economic and political realms and by the threat of future large-scale violence at a time of continual war preparedness. The modern age is being succeeded by a post-modern period. The ending of one epoch and the beginning of another is, to be sure, a matter of definition. But definitions, like everything social, are historically specific. And now our basic definitions of society and of self are being overtaken by new realities. Too many of our explanations are derived from the great historical transition from the medieval to the modern age; and that when they are generalized for use today, they become unwieldy, irrelevant, not convincing. And i mean also that our major orientations- liberalism and socialism- have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves. These two ideologies came out of the enlightenment.
