Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory - Hardcover

Smith, Barbara H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674167856 ISBN 13: 9780674167858

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1988

Synopsis

Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through university corridors. While revisionists are perplexed by questions of value, critical theory--haunted by the heresy of relativism--remains captive to classical formulas. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book confronts the conceptual problems and sociopolitical conflicts at the heart of these issues and raises their discussion to a new level of sophistication.

Polemical without being rancorous, Contingencies of Value mounts a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of value, taste, judgment, and justification. Through incisive discussions of works by, among others, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Northrop Frye, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas, Smith develops an illuminating alternative framework for the explanation of these topics.

All value, she argues, is radically contingent. Neither an objective property of things nor merely a subjective response to them, it is the variable effect of numerous interacting economies that is, systems of apportionment and circulation of "goods." Aesthetic value, moral value, and the truth-value of judgments are no exceptions, though traditional critical theory, ethics, and philosophy of language have always tried to prove otherwise.

Smith deals in an original way with a wide variety of contemporary issues--from the relation between popular and high culture to the conflicting conception of human motives and actions in economic theory and classical humanism. In an important final chapter, she addresses directly the crucial problem of relativism and explains why a denial of the objectivity of value does not--as commonly feared and charged--produce either a fatuous egalitarianism or moral and political paralysis.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, where she is also Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory.

Reviews

Smith is here concerned with the basis for aesthetic value and evaluation. Surveying both traditional and contemporary treatments, she concludes that aesthetic values are radically contingent; all attempts to establish an objective ground for evaluative hierarchies beg the question. (In reaching this conclusion, she fails to place the aesthetic works of figures such as Hume and Kant into their larger ethical contexts.) In place of objective values, Smith posits an "economic" model of verbal and aesthetic transactions, grounding evaluations in the contingent needs and interests of the recipient. In this, she is closer to Aristotelian axiology than she realizes. Nevertheless, her book is one of the few to address the problem of value and evaluation directly. T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674167856
• ISBN 13: 9780674167858
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240