Eugene Halton is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on consumption and materialism, pragmatism, and the problematic nature of modern civilization. His recent works concern a new philosophy of history regarding the limitations of the civilizational mindset, and needed guideposts toward re-attuning contemporary civilization to what he has termed “sustainable wisdom.”
His most recent book is From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which rewrites the history of the axial age, the revoluti…
Eugene Halton is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on consumption and materialism, pragmatism, and the problematic nature of modern civilization. His recent works concern a new philosophy of history regarding the limitations of the civilizational mindset, and needed guideposts toward re-attuning contemporary civilization to what he has termed “sustainable wisdom.”
His most recent book is From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which rewrites the history of the axial age, the revolutionary period around 600 BCE, bringing the unknown originator of the theory, John Stuart-Glennie, to light, as well as another previously unknown and unexpected contributor, D. H. Lawrence.
His previous book, The Great Brain Suck (University of Chicago Press, 2008), explores, among other things, the problematic role of techno-consumer culture in America. Earlier books include Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for its Renewal (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude (University of Chicago Press, 1986). He is coauthor, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1981) regarded now as a keystone in material culture studies and translated into four languages.
Halton is a coeditor of Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing (edited by Darcia Narvaez, Four Arrows, Eugene Halton, Brian Collier, and Georges Enderle. New York: Peter Lang, 2019).
