Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party

Through stories, conversations, and essays, this book pursues interwoven critical and philosophical inquiries into the nature of the contemporary in the North Atlantic, asking how are we to live as intellectuals, individually and in community?

Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party is the product of informal discussion and academic work done over the last two decades among an international group of social scientists. An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking, this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence. Reflecting that the United States, indeed the North Atlantic countries, seem to have entered autumn, David A. Westbrook asks what spring might be. Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home?

David A. Westbrook is Louis A. Del Cotto Professor, University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York. His books include Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (with Mark Maguire), and City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent.