Postmodernism is not what you think - Charles Lemert

"Charles Lemert is one of the most thoughtful and interesting of sociology's postmodernists. He recurrently finds new angles of vision and is especially helpful for overcoming the pernicious opposition of micro and macro perspectives."
––Craig Calhoun, New York University

"Charles Lemert is the pre–eminent social theorist in America today. In Postmodernism Is Not What You Think Lemert charts a bold future for sociology; a future that follows the outline sketched by American sociology's last two great theorists, C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner. Writing from a space that only he can occupy, Lemert shows the sociological community how to embrace and learn from this thing called postmodernism. Of course postmodernism is just another name for the fact that the times have changed, and our social theories of the world must learn how to reflect this fact. This Lemert does, and in so doing he moves sociology well beyond Mills' Fourth Epoch, a sociological imagination for the next century."
––Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign

"Charles Lemert invites imaginative cultural inquiry into both the discipline of sociology and the transdisciplinary practice of social theory in an era where global changes in politics, knowledge production, and technology make trust in reality itself open to discussion."
––Stephen Pfohl, Boston College

Highly readable and elegantly composed, Postmodernism Is Not What You Think gently demolishes the most malicious misconceptions of the subject by explaining why the postmodern is so emotionally and politically disturbing. Lemert shows that the postmodern is less a theory than a condition of social life brought about by the trouble modernity has landed itself in.

Globalization, the media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the new sociologies are put in lucid perspective as signs of the new social formations dawning at the end of the modern age.