Abstract

Drawing heavily upon Habermas, Welmer, Arendt, Foucault, Castoriadis, the Budapest school, and Alain Touraine, John Rundell has undertaken a multilayered analysis of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Not only does Rundell seek to reconstruct the major contribution to social theory by each of the three thinkers and to provide “a thematization of their latent and lingering insights concerning the self-constitution of modernity,” he also attempts an analysis of the formal theoretical constraints which led each of them to circumvent and suppress valuable insights for a social theory of modernity. Rundell wishes to conduct his analysis “not only from within the structure of their own theorizing, but also from the vantage point of the cultural self-understanding of the modern epoch”. He too must attempt a theory of modernity and the onus is on him to survey the assumptions that guide his own theorizing. The book, then, is partly a critical contribution to the history of social theory and partly an attempt at a more comprehensive social theory. It is in its fulfillment of the former ambition that the book is more satisfying.