Enduring Modernity (The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization)

This book brings together the work of the late Anders Petersen, presenting his exciting and innovative transdisciplinary paradigm that offers insights into anxiety, depression and grief, and the connection between these conditions and the failings of contemporary civilization that give rise to them. With attention to the ways in which neoliberal hegemony and its imperatives of ‘performance’, ‘evaluation’, ‘self-realisation’, ‘resilience’ and ‘flexibility’ lead to self-criticism on the part of those who do not measure up to the prevailing criteria, resulting in ailments of mental health, it challenges the paradigmatic diagnosis of such conditions in terms of individual diseases or neurological malfunctions, to be treated by medication and training in order to return the individual to work and life ‘as normal’. An examination of the wrong-headed approach to what Petersen analysed as contemporary social pathologies, Enduring Modernity: Depression, Anxiety and Grief in the Age of Voicelessness will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, seeking new understandings aimed at emancipation from social suffering.

Anders Petersen was Associate Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and former President of the Danish Sociological Association.

Bert van den Bergh teaches cultural philosophy in the Department of European Studies at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.

Sabine Flick is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Education, Freiburg, Germany.

Kieran Keohane is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and the School of Society, Politics and Ethics at University College Cork, Ireland.

Domonkos Sik is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary.