Towards a Buddhist Critical Social Theory

This book takes a personal voyage - an awakening struggle - as a starting point and reveals its general implications by using this reflective practical experience to generate wide-ranging, careful scholarship and theoretical virtuosity."Awakening-Struggle" demonstrates conceptual creativity through grappling with the foremost and advanced problems of contemporary critical theory. This work is a prodigious, scholarly account of critical theory that goes beyond the usual immanent reading and leads us to the 'affinity' between critical theory and Buddhist as a way of working towards a self-society dialectic that is a key to the critical theory tradition. Against critical theory's tendency towards social scientific objectivism that reinforces privilege in society, Hattam proposes Buddhist 'technologies of self' as resources for social activism and social revitalization.Hattam illustrates not only how Buddhism can enhance critical theory, and critical theory Buddhist, but finally how theory, the individual, and collective life might look like if created beyond the pale of our reified, alienated dualistic existence.Professor Philip Wexler, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.