Description: Argues that rebuilding ethical communities will require a cultural reorientation from visually dominated to oral/aural experience and develops a speech-based conception of moral place that can set limits on the actions of individuals and communities.
Brief description: Murray Jardine is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Auburn University.
Review Quotes:
"Written with verve and clarity, Jardine's book deals with and untangles an important, indeed pressing, set of tangled issues. It is a lucid and able attempt, against the postmodern grain, to re-foundationalize moral and political practice. Using the concept of 'place' (in less a spatial than a linguistic sense) he outlines the elements of a political theory for the postmodern age that undercuts the assumptions and claims of contemporary postmodernist theorizing. Along the way he illuminates the darker recesses of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment political thought." --Terence Ball, University of Minnesota
"Jardine's presentation of the current moral and political problem of modernity and his attempt at the beginnings of a solution by establishing a new vocabulary for discussing morally and politically legitimate structures hit the crucial center of the current moral and political crisis." -- Richard A. Talaska, Xavier University