Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness

Extract

Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness. By Gal Gerson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 239p. $45.00.

This is a book whose title does not adequately convey its content. On the one hand, it is admirably broad in its scope relating issues in the philosophy of mind, psychology, sociology and of evolutionary biology to politics and ideology. On the other, the anticipation of relating the new liberalism in England (nothing is said of Scotland and Wales) to European liberalism is not fulfilled. Instead, the crisis of European consciousness relates to quite different considerations. The period between 1870 and 1930, it is claimed, saw an unprecedented questioning of the cohesion between reason and enlightenment, especially in three fields of knowledge that provide the focus for Margins of Disorder, social psychology, biology, and classical studies. The revolt against the enlightenment was manifest in the proliferation of fields of knowledge developing their own vocabularies and procedural rules, rendering them incommensurable with one another. Encyclopedic reason was undermined by self-interrogation and increasing specialization. In social studies, for example, there were doubts about the existence, or alternatively the apprehension, of a universal set of standards for social good. Max Weber saw rationality as relational and historical, and Emile Durkheim, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto formulated issue-specific terminologies allowing systems of social behavior to be analyzed without reference to their truth values or moral functions. Such arguments, Gal Gerson contends, justified the exercise of power by elites for its own sake (p. 17).