ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book takes the view that a new society is being created within and against the current: society. It shows how social dialectics, or irony, works to bring social mysticism out of technological and organizational innovations. The book reviews Emile Durkheim's analysis specifically because he was both advocate and analyst of social revitalization, and his sociology of religion offers a more general theory of societal revitalization. It describes and makes sense of the emergent elements of experience in a mystical society that social structural changes bring to the surface. The book looks at mystical traditions as the current repository of utopian hope. Mystical practice and theory contains suppressed alternative forms of life that are at once created and denied by the current organization of social life.