Silence and Society

Charles Lemert is University Professor and John C. Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University, USA. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization, and culture. He is author of Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World (Routledge, 2015), Why Niebuhr Matters (Yale University Press, 2011), Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things (Routledge, 2008), Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories (Routledge, 2007), Postmodernism is Not What You Think: Why Globalization Threatens Modernity (Routledge, 2005), and Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture of Irony (Polity Press, 2003). He is also co-author of Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory (Second Edition, Routledge, 2022) and Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2021), editor of Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings (Seventh Edition, Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010).

“This beautifully written and richly textured sociology of silence, absence, lack, death and social memory will undoubtedly appeal to readers interested in social theory and psychoanalytically informed understandings of subjectivity. Charles Lemert teases out the contradictory interconnections of individualism and socialization with extraordinary delicacy. Silence and Society is intriguing, dazzling, stimulating.”Anthony Elliott, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of South Australia, Australia"Years since the loss of his son from suicide, Charles Lemert continues to direct his critical analysis on death, in particular, on the silence and actions associated with that enigmatic inevitability. By weaving together biography, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, Lemert expands upon the discussion of death to include the living—our response or lack of response to death, the silence of death—and offers readers thoughtful examples of the role of silence in daily life and society. In doing so, he brings to light what silence says about us. Silence is a window through which clarity may be obtained, or it can be an opportunity lost, or a way of causing pain. With this insightful book, Lemert invites us to contemplate and reevaluate what the ghosts in our lives and in society are communicating. The refusal to listen haunts us and makes our approach to death anything but peaceful."Nathan Rousseau, Professor of Sociology, Indiana University, USA"In Silence and Society, Charles Lemert offers a mesmerizing, meandering, erudite, and thought-provoking engagement with a multiplicity of his and our living ‘dead.’ With a set of sixteen essays, Lemert takes us on a journey through his own biography, the history of social thought from ancient philosophy to our more recently dead but still living thinkers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and world and national histories mediated largely through the ghostly presence of those theorists who have interpreted our pasts and presents. The essays are a pleasure to read; I will cherish them and undoubtedly return to read them again and again."Ann Branaman, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Florida Atlantic University, USA

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart One: Social Facts of Silence1. Silence and Society: Below the Bottom Turtle2. The Dead, the Living, and the Yet to Be Born—Never-ending Social Things3. 1950—Conformity and the Crisis of the Idealized Individual4. Westward Journeys: Searching for Silence5. Clamorous Global Development — Democracy, Health, and Suicide in Silent India, with Vani Kulkarni6. Slouching Toward Inequality—Entropic Inequality and the Death of SocietiesPart Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions7. Bad Noise Disturbs the Collective Mind8. History’s Failed Search for Identities—The Silent Self9. Fuckin’ Old Man—Noise and Silence in Analytic Talk10. The Silent Third: Augustine of Hippo, Charles Sanders Pierce, Erving Goffman11. Icons and Social Fictions—Object Lessons/Many KindsPart Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time12. Shit and other Fecal Matters at the Tail End of the Modern Era13. Zygmunt Bauman on Liquid Waste, Being Human, and Bodily Death, with Makenna Goodman14. What Would the Dead Have Said—Durkheim’s Ghost, A Century Later15. Father is Gone: The Dead Who Never Stop Talking16. And That’s Not All: Last Words from the Ashes, by Noah Lemert