Eugene Halton

Eugene Halton is a sociologist and philosopher and is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on materiality, consumption and materialism, and the problematic nature of modern civilization and the civilizational mindset more generally. His recent works concern a new philosophy of history regarding the limitations of the civilizational mindset, and guideposts toward re-attuning contemporary civilization to what he has termed “sustainable wisdom.”

Halton’s first book, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981, coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), based on his dissertation, is now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies and has been translated into four languages. He is also co-editor of Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing (2019). His earlier books, all with The University of Chicago Press, include The Great Brain Suck (2008), which explores, among other things, the problematic role of techno-consumer culture in America, and Bereft of Reason (1995) and Meaning and Modernity (1986). Both works were influential in re-introducing philosophical pragmatism to sociology. More recently he authored, From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution (2014), which rewrites the history of the axial age, the revolutionary period around 600 BCE, bringing the unknown originator of the theory, John Stuart-Glennie, to light, as well as another previously unknown and unexpected contributor, D. H. Lawrence.