Postmodern Pluralism and Concepts of Totality

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."