The True, the Good, and the Beautiful - by John Levi Martin (Hardcover)

About the Book

John Levi Martin explores the structures of social theory, the resulting tensions, and their broader significance for sociological thought.

Book Synopsis

We have many histories of social theory--what different authors attempted to do as they responded to previous theories. But we know precious little about how they did this in structural terms--what scaffolding they adopted and adapted to make their claims. Yet today's social thoughts largely employ structures passed down from previous generations, structures that were developed to solve problems that are no longer ours.

In The True, the Good, and the Beautiful, John Levi Martin explores these structures, the resulting tensions, and their broader significance for sociological thought. By examining how thinkers mapped interpersonal to intrapersonal structures, he traces the development of the underlying architectonics of theory, focusing on one that was inherited from eighteenth-century philosophy and brought into social science in the nineteenth century. He shows that the structural tensions inherent in these theories paralleled those being worked out in practical terms by constitutional theorists as thinkers attempted to return to their most fundamental understandings of the nature of the human, the social, and the political to recraft their societies. A magisterial new interpretation of the foundations of sociological thought, The True, the Good, and the Beautiful is as ambitious a work of social theory as we have seen in generations.

Review Quotes

This book is a major statement meant to stand the test of time. Connecting philosophy, social theory, and sociology, it explains in a new way what centuries of thinking about society and human action were actually about and what the underlying intellectual issues driving all this effort were. Radically novel, fun to read, and deep both in learning and insight--a rare combination.--Stephen Turner, author of Explaining the Normative

Unpacking the continuities and contradictions of a vast array of theoretical stances, John Levi Martin bravely fashions a genealogy of philosophies that treat the relationship between kinds of knowing and action from Plato and Aristotle all the way down to Parsons and Habermas. This book should be on every social theorist's desk as a primer when thinking where to go from here.--Roger Friedland, coauthor of Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy

John Levi Martin's impressive book is an astonishingly bold, grand project. A three-part story, it stretches across centuries from Plato to Kant and beyond, tracking the changes in ways that humans have understood the physical and social world and their freedom of action within it. Martin incorporates up-to-date, incisive, and lucid interpretations of the ideas of historically familiar theorists and many who are less so, questioning how they fit into the overall story to gain new insights into the human and social sciences.--Steven Lukes, author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work

About the Author

John Levi Martin is the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Social Structures (2011) and The Explanation of Social Action (second edition, 2021), as well as Thinking Through Theory (2014), Thinking Through Methods (2017), and Thinking Through Statistics (2018).