The authors of this volume explore the tensions and dilemmas that impact pluralism and homogeneity in modern societies. This is the first work in this field in which the frame of discussion is a comparative civilizational analysis. It focuses on issues that are at the heart of the contemporary human experience and culture. The contributors to this book, renowned scholars from all over the world, tackle these issues by referring to different temporal and spatial settings. This book is in homage to Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt. We honor his ground-breaking work in the comparative study of modernities and civilizations.

Contributors are: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Erik Allardt , Saïd Arjomand, Johann P. Arnason, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Raymond Boudon, Michael Confino, Ralf Dahrendorf, Gerard Delanty, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Han Entzinger, Bernhard Giesen, Rolland Goetschell, Ulf Hannerz, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Jürgen Kocka, Donald N. Levine, Menachem Magidor, Alberto Martinelli, T.K. Oommen, Shalini Randeria, Luis Roniger, W.G. Runciman, Dominique Schnapper, Hayim Tadmor, Stanley J. Tambiah, Wolfgang Schluchter, David Shulman, Sammy Smooha, Piotr Stzompka, Edward A. Tiryakan, Alain Touraine, Zvi Werblowsky, and Björn Wittrock.

For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.

This book is the analysis of the civilizational and historical context of the development of the Great Modern Revolutions; their relations to modernity, to the civilization of modernity, and to the development of multiple modernities; and the fate of revolutionary symbolism and dynamics in modern regimes, in the continually changing civilization of modernity, its dynamics and tribulations.

This is a book about modern liberal society and its adversaries. The book rediscovers and rehabilitates much maligned, especially in America, liberalism as the ideal system of liberty in relation to anti-liberalism as one of un-freedom. It rediscovers liberal modernity as a free, equal and just social system and time, thus most compatible with and enhancing of human civilization ushering in the 21st century. It exposes anti-liberal adversaries, especially conservatism, as ideologies and systems most inappropriate with and destructive of civilization. The book rediscovers liberal modernity as the master process and destination of Western civilization, and its anti-liberal adversaries, notably conservatism, as the ghosts of a dead past. The anti-liberal rumors of the ‘death’ of liberalism are ‘greatly exaggerated’.

The Horizon of Modernity provides an extensive account of New Confucian philosophy that cuts through the boundaries between history and thought. This study explores Mou Zongsan's and Tang Junyi's critical confrontation with Marxism and Communism in relation to their engagement with Western thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. The author analyzes central conceptual aporias in the works of Mou, Tang, as well as Xiong Shili in the context of the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the emergence of the discipline of philosophy in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history. This book casts new light on the nexus between the categories of subjectivity and social structure and the relation between philosophy, modern temporality, and the structural conditions of the modern world.