Showing papers by "Craig Calhoun published in 2001"

Civil Society/Public Sphere: History of the Concept

Abstract: The concept of the public sphere refers to the capacity of the members of civil society to coordinate their common affairs through collective discourse which transcends the private interests of each. The concept is associated especially with the theories of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. Current work focuses especially on the relationship between rational-critical communication and other dimensions of culture-formation and expressive communication; on issues of diversity in participation, topics, and communicative styles; and on the relationship of the public sphere to state-centered politics and/or the transcendence of the state in an international public sphere.

Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History

Abstract: The development of institutions and practices of open communication concerning affairs of common interest is basic to democracy This is analyzed as involving transformations of public space from the Athenian agora to the metaphorical space of electronic communications These spaces provide for communication among strangers as well as those joined by bonds of community; they are arenas for the expression of individual and collective identities as well as for the making of collective decisions Analytic attention focuses largely on questions of access to publics, which is often restricted on bases such as gender, ethnicity, or citizenship It focuses also on institutional supports for public communication, on the relationship between rational-critical communication and other forms of action in public, and on the differentiation of public communication into multiple partial publics

The Critical Dimension in Sociological Theory

Abstract: Human beings "make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circum­ stances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted" (Marx & Engels, 1848/1974, p. 103). The implications of this are profound. Human action can change the world. This means that generalization from existing reality does not exhaust social possibility, and thus is a biased basis for science. But human action is shaped by externally imposed or inherited conditions. This means that the range of possible historical developments is not limitless. Nor is human action inexplicably spontaneous. History and action are understandable on the basis of systematic research. Such understanding may never be complete, but it can be improved. Moreover, the making of this understanding is part of the human making of history not external to it. This is crucial background to critical theory. It is also a challenge to positivism, which would reduce the complexity of social life and history to explanation by a few invariant laws. Equally, it is a challenge to those "postmodernists" who would reduce the struggle for under­ standing to a struggle for power. Reductionism of either sort does violence to the achievements of social science and to the everyday sociocultural competence of human beings. Invariant laws (or something asymptotically close to them) may be formulated. The pursuit of power (and other interests) certainly does shape knowledge. But neither laws nor interests accounts for the whole of knowledge. Neither positivism nor relativism will do. Sociology needs systematic empirical research and a struggle to win social facts from the misunderstandings of everyday life, ideology, and previous partial knowledge (Bourdieu, Chambordeon, & Passeron, 1991). Sociology also needs critical awareness of the conditions and limits of knowledge and of social action. Yet, almost since its inception, sociological theory has been divided by a series of partially homologous but consistently problematic oppositions: positivist-critical, empirical-theoretical, objective-subjective, structure-action. The result is that the development of sociological theory is impeded by muddled arguments, unnecessary divisions between research and theory.

Symposium on Ethnicity: Tradition, But Not Mere Inheritance

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges facing students of ethnicity in the early 21st century is to resist those who would describe it as mere inheritance and maintain an approach to it as a mode of active, creative participation in social life. Too easily, ethnicity is rendered the ‘other’ to globalization. It is treated as static, or at best grudgingly resistant to modernization and cosmopolitan virtues. It is described as a matter of ‘tradition’ in a usage that resembles Bagehot’s notion of ‘the hard cake of culture’. Better, I think, that we should understand ethnicity in the sense of living culture, produced anew as it is reproduced, passed on from one to another (traditio, traditare) in every interaction, not just in the sage pronouncements of autocratic and unchallenged elders. Ethnicity does indeed depend on tradition; it gains some of its distinctive character from this mode of passing on creations, sharing ideas and values, reproducing meanings, learning culture. It is traditional because this work of culture is done through innumerable directly interpersonal acts of communication. Like all forms of traditional culture, it is changed dramatically by the introduction of mass literacy, reliance on fixed texts and authorized interpreters. In such efforts to fix and stabilize tradition, the contents of ethnicity are sometimes hardened – though it is almost always the case that if ethnic cultures remain alive this hardening is challenged by new generations and new creativity. This does not mean that ethnicity is traditional rather than, or as opposed to ‘modern’, especially not if modern is understood to refer to an epoch. On the contrary, ethnicity as we know it has been produced in large part by the modern processes of state-building, market integration and migration. These brought people together in cities and states within which they experienced both their difference from others and their similarities on a larger S Y M P O S I U M