The Fifth Modality

by Roberts, Carl W.

• ISBN13: 9789004162358
• ISBN10: 9004162356
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

"This is a book written about how people understand each other. Like Simmel's writings and works written by Foucault and Goffman towards the ends of their careers, this book depicts interactions as behavioral forms. Its novelty is that it grounds these forms in discourse within all mass societies. Its concluding argument is that all persons, situations, and cultures have mutual significance in accordance with four fundamental modal forms: ability (most common in the United States), necessity (most common in the socialist countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia), obligation (most common in ancient Chinese and Indic societies), and permission (most common in the Islamic world)."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Carl W. Roberts is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Iowa State University.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Glossary	p. xiii
On Persuasion	p. 1
Reading Personhood	p. 21
Gedankenexperiment	p. 40
Individualism	p. 69
Mutualism	p. 88
Essentialism	p. 110
Doctrinism	p. 133
Another Modality	p. 157
A Formalization	p. 171
Bibliography	p. 179
Index	p. 187
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