ABSTRACT
This chapter compares and contrasts Emile Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen on the role of Christian morals in the modernity project in order to highlight Durkheim's contribution to the moral import of postmodern discourse. Carl Justav Jung's proposed solution to modern barbarism is to make contact again with the repressed, unconscious Great Mother archetype. In rebelling against all grounds and referents for social reality, postmodernism has thrown out the feminine, Christian referents that Durkheim and Veblen felt should offset modernity. Durkheimian reading of the postmodern rebellion at oppressive Enlightenment narratives leads to the hopeful conclusion that humankind is at the brink of realizing the epistemological revolution necessary for genuine, constructive social change. In establishing sociology as a science of morals a century ago, Durkheim was seeking a new world order that would preserve right-handed progress and capitalist efficiency, but that would be balanced with left-handed, mystic sympathy and sense of international social solidarity.
