Order Description
Essay Questions
1. Both Foucault and Weber provide forceful account of the role of power in modern economic and political organization. Compare these accounts. Does either offer anything to a contemporary consideration of these questions?
2. Consider Adorno and Touraine on the question of modern subjectivity. Who offers us the most interesting account from a contemporary perspective?
3. Weber speaks of the institutions of science giving priority to mediocrity. To what extent is this view an endorsement of Horkheimer’s claim that in modernity individualism has become “ideological”? Are these views convincing?
4. Foucault speaks of the “universal reign of the normative” as characteristic of modernity while Heller argues it is characterized by a “growing awareness of contingency”. What do these authors means by these characterizations and is it possible to reconcile these two evaluations?
5. Weber’s lecture on science is an essay about disenchantment. In what sense is this true and is this different from the “dissatisfaction” that Heller views as the spirit of modernity? Which concept do you think the most useful in thinking about modernity? (This question should not be attempted by those who also did essay question 4)
6. In Discipline and Punish Foucault maintains ‘in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating’. Later he argues that’ Let’s take the pedagogical institution…I don’t see where evil is in the practice of somebody who, in each game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him.’ What is the tension if any in these two positions and how does Foucault reconcile these trains of thought in the interview ‘The Ethic of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’? Is he convincing?
