Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters in the first part of this book. The part of the book provides the political struggle to reunite social science and morality. In a postmodern social psychology, the task is more than the simple description and reporting of the processes by which a soul and a self emerge. The part proposes that a more aggressive methodology is essential to meet the information needs of an authentically democratic and transparent society. It outlines the theoretical and practical characteristics of an informationally rich and interactionally rich society—one at the opposite end of the sociology of fraud that provides the raw data for an alienated dramaturgical society. The part provides the tone and the mood for a wide-ranging critique and call for a radical, emancipatory, participatory social psychology in the postmodern mode. It shows that interaction in mass society has the same result as interaction in a praxis society.