Postmodern Society

Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. Second Edition. London: Blackwell, 2005. 289 pp.

Much has been written about postmodernity, but this book by Krishan Kumar, William R. Kennan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, is in a league of its own. First published in 1995, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society is wide-ranging, careful, balanced, and, above all, clear. He covers all the usual suspects – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard – but is more interested in the social and political dimensions of the contemporary world. Kumar focuses on the rapidly changing character of work and economic organization, the spread of information and communication through new technologies, as well as the theoretical challenge to modern assumptions from postmodern thinkers. He examines the global extent of these changes, but recognizes that Europe and the U. S. remain central in the dissemination of postmodern cultural and social forms. The book displays a fine historical sense; his treatment of “modernity,” for instance, begins with a brief history of the Latin modernus throughout the Middle Ages. This is the book for the reader with time to read only one book on postmodernism.