Society and the Absurd: A Sociology of Conflictual Encounters

There is an unbridgeable controversy between the functionalist sociologist who anchors his theories on society and the group, and the existentialist who bathes his thoughts on the individual. Durkheim and Parsons, as well as many contemporary American sociologists, are adjustment-based in the sense that all those individuals who rock the boat, even if they are creative innovators, would be labeled deviant or mad. The existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Buber, regard the individual as the focus of life. They see philosophy and society as, at best, a curbing control-structure and, at worst, coercing, stigmatizing, and ostracizing. This volume treads in the giant footsteps of Albert Camus who saw the absurd as the conflictual encounter between the individual and society. Society and the Absurd attempts to overcome this deep sociological controversy by investigating absurdity through the prism of an interdisciplinary theory of personality.