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On the decaying moral space. Is there a way out?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2002

PIOTR SZTOMPKA
Affiliation:
Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Grodzka 52, 31-044 Krakow, Poland. E-mail: ussztomp@cyf-kr.edu.pl

Abstract

The concept of moral space is presented here, in the arguments of classical authors who treated the decay of moral space as an inevitable cost of modernity. Three areas are identified where the decay of moral space is manifested in our period of ‘late modernity’. They are: violent crime, distrust and cynicism, and the vanishing of social capital. Paradoxically, however, opportunities to overcome the current moral void are discovered in the very traits of modernity: reflexiveness and globalization. They allow the process of moral healing through the reconstitution of primordial communities, ethnic, national, religious, in an open, tolerant and ecumenical manner, as well as the constitution of new communities of universalist and global reach.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2001

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