ABSTRACT

Charles Lemert regards his book as a successor to C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination and Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. His title implies that Gouldner’s crisis has come and gone. He argues that Western culture is in permanent crisis, which contradicts both the medical and the broader metaphorical uses of the term. Lemert’s uncertainty results from the dual nature of the alleged crisis: it is a crisis within sociology reflecting, or rather failing adequately to reflect, crisis in the larger society. What Lemert thinks has died in the last twenty-five years is “modernity,” which in postmodernist fashion he defines as a theory, not a condition. Modernity is equated with belief in progress, with “the story of one world progressing toward a better day when all men will be free and good.”.