The Flight from Ambiguity

Download or read book The Flight from Ambiguity written by Donald N. Levine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988-06-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.