Postmodern Pluralism and Concepts of Totality : The Twenty-fourth Wisconsin Workshop

The present volume contains contributions to the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin Workshop on Postmodern Pluralism and Concepts of Totality. For more than fifty years these two terms have been in the center of a world-wide controversy, be it in political speeches, mass media declarations, newspaper articles, or works of literature. Instead of conforming to conventional patterns of an unquestioned democratic pluralism, the speakers at this conference tried to rescue certain concepts of totality from meaningless notions of an open society which has given up all hopes for a political, social and cultural communality, based on concepts of the common good. And they did this not only in regard to political and socio-economic theories, but also in view of discourses such as feminism, ecology, utopian thinking, philosophy, German studies, and materialist theories of literature.