Overview

The Hegemony of Common Sense: Wisdom and Mystification in Everyday Life is a path-breaking synthesis, a unique contribution to the study of class and consciousness. Dean Wolfe Manders revisits a question posed by Sombart a century ago: ?Why is there no socialism in the United States of America To probe this question, he initiates a multi-method study of capital and class as cultural realities. Class, he contends, is insinuated in the fabric of ?everyday-historical? experience, which people process via often contradictory ?common sense? categories. Artfully adapting themes from Gramsci, Marx, James, and Mead, Manders explores these categories from several angles. Particularly trenchant is his incisive inquiry into paroemiology, the study of popular sayings.

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9780820479279

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Reviews

« The agenda of this book is easily stated -- that the reigning 'common sense' of the American public is amenable to systematic critique by means of sociological inquiry into common sayings, proverbs, and other forms of everyday discourse. What Manders offers, in particular, is a 'Gramscian' critique of common sense in which social class is a central category. His brilliant, challenging argument is that, in this deeply class-divided society, the seemingly neutral and universal wisdom of common sense sayings often masks a deeper reality -- a reality of unresolved ambivalence and contradiction, of class-inflected views and values, of doubt and uncertainty. In this context, 'common sense' is often self-defeating, infused with fatalism and passivity, in ways that prove detrimental to working people. Ý... With a Ý... palette of theoretical resources and a Ý... sharply defined critical agenda, Manders explores the interior of mass consciousness -- the assumptions and tacit meanings that saturate the popular sayings of the day, where they hide, in effect, in plain sight. Ý... This pioneering work remains unique. No other study has mined the field of proverbial expression for insight into the structure of common sense with similar breadth of vision. What Manders offers -- a provisional synthesis of critical theory and proverb scholarship fired by the sociological imagination -- is unavailable from any other source. -- David Norman Smith

Author Information

The Author: Dean Wolfe Manders received his B.A. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University. He has previously published works both in the United States and Europe. Having taught extensively in the Boston and San Francisco Bay areas, he presently teaches primarily at San Francisco State University, and secondarily at the College of San Mateo.

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