Durkheim Through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkeimian, Postmodernist, and Communitarian Responses to the Enlightenment.(Brief Article)

By Douglas F. Challenger. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994. 251 pp. $59.50 cloth; $22.95 paper.

In the tradition established by Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Sheldon Wolin more than a quarter century ago, Challenger's book addresses the resources that classical Greek moral and political philosophy offer to contemporary social thinkers in their efforts to rethink liberal, modernist, and now postmodernist social theory. Like these writers, as well as later theorists such as Bellah, MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer, Challenger is responding to two concerns. The first is the "crisis of relevance" produced by the positivistic separation of ethics from science, which has deprived social science of significant achievements while simultaneously denying modern society the benefits it might have anticipated from the science of society. The second related concern might be called the "crisis of liberalism"--the sense that the modern, liberal emphasis on individual rights, pluralism, autonomy and freedom has left society without any rational means for the achievement of consensus with regard to basic moral and political values. The "communitarian" response to these two concerns, Challenger observes, has led ...