Right Order

This book confronts issues of meaning in a disenchanted, ‘godless’ world marked by the decline of organised religion. It proposes that right order is emerging as both the hidden structure of meaning that underpins the human condition and the force that shapes existence. The author argues that right order is both prior and to be made.

Men, women, and children depend on a sense of right order to feel at home in their world. They live by it. Order making is native, constitutive of who they are, imprinted in their genetic make-up and informed by the human drive to make things right. Right order is often obscured, faintly seen, or hardly felt. It can be elusive, fearsomely difficult to grasp. This book clarifies the nature of right order through examples, including Abraham Lincoln, Harry Potter, a football coach, and a heroic widow. It considers cases of disorder, from politics to female injustice to personal malaise, and turns for guidance to he who most profoundly mined his vast home terrain, stretching between God and atheism: William Shakespeare.

Rooted in sociological traditions derived from Max Weber’s work, yet offering an optimistic approach that illuminates the hidden structure eliciting grace, form, balance, and composure, this high-level work of outstanding originality represents the culmination of the author’s distinguished, 50-year-long intellectual career. It will appeal to both scholars and students of cultural sociology and social theory with interests in morality, popular culture, and metaphysical sociology.