Overview

Silence and Society addresses the reality that social sciences have ignored the importance of silence in human communication. Without communication, there is no community and thus no society. Yet, as classic communication theory explains, communication must always deal with noise. Increasingly, as cyber-technologies and media have gained the upper hand in social life, so have they become purveyors of empty noise—from mindless sitcom television to uninformed talk radio to cable news blather and more. The book is organized into three sections, each corresponding to a level of social order. Each bears a distinctive relation to the general problem of silence and noise in human community. “Part One: Social Facts of Silence” presents examples of the ways silence intrudes on vital aspects of human life: in personal self-understanding, in the irony that direction communication requires a third absent party (such as Goffman’s ego identity), in the fact that personal identity is the challenge of dealing with the trouble of deciding who we are in a given social setting. “Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions” considers a range of community issues from the strange noises of quiet neighborhoods to the way the necessity of social conformity silences individual autonomy, to the fact that the dead are ever present in daily language and behavior, especially in common religious practices. Finally, “Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time” suggests the principal ways the growing global environment aggravates human inequality—by forcing the poor into zones of exclusion, by increasing the mountain of human waste that in turn wastes human lives, by the extent to which global theories and programs for economic development are little more

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781032335490

ISBN 10:   1032335491
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   31 July 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

PrefaceAcknowledgments Part One: Social Facts of Silence 1. Silence and Society: Below the Bottom Turtle 2. The Dead, the Living, and the Yet to Be Born—Never-ending Social Things 3. 1950—Conformity and the Crisis of the Idealized Individual 4. Westward Journeys: Searching for Silence 5. Clamorous Global Development — Democracy, Health, and Suicide in Silent India, with Vani Kulkarni 6. Slouching Toward Inequality—Entropic Inequality and the Death of Societies Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions 7. Bad Noise Disturbs the Collective Mind 8. History’s Failed Search for Identities—The Silent Self 9. Fuckin’ Old Man—Noise and Silence in Analytic Talk 10. The Silent Third: Augustine of Hippo, Charles Sanders Pierce, Erving Goffman 11. Icons and Social Fictions—Object Lessons/Many Kinds Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time 12. Shit and other Fecal Matters at the Tail End of the Modern Era 13. Zygmunt Bauman on Liquid Waste, Being Human, and Bodily Death, with Makenna Goodman 14. What Would the Dead Have Said—Durkheim’s Ghost, A Century Later 15. Father is Gone: The Dead Who Never Stop Talking 16. And That’s Not All: Last Words from the Ashes, by Noah Lemert

Reviews

“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

Author Information

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).

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