Introduction 1 Contentious politics and social movements: Part I The Birth of the Modern Social Movement: 2 Modular collective action 3 Print and association 4 Statebuilding and social movements Part II From Contention to Social Movements: 5 Political opportunities and constraints 6 The repertoire of contention 7 Framing contention 8 Mobilising structures and contentious politics Part III The Dynamics of Movement: 9 Cycles of contention 10 Struggling to reform 11 Transnational contention/conclusion: the future of social movements

Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics

Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.

Publics and Counterpublics

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 The Modern Moral Order 3 2 What Is a "Social Imaginary"? 23 3 the Specter of idealism 31 4 The Great Disembedding 49 5 The Economy as Objectified Reality 69 6 The Public Sphere 83 7 Public and Private 101 8 The Sovereign People 109 9 An All-Pervasive Order 143 10 The Direct-Access Society 155 11 Agency and Objectification 163 12 Modes of Narration 175 13 The Meaning of Secularity 185 14 Provincializing Europe 195 Notes 197

Modern Social Imaginaries

The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.

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Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City , Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus.

As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy.

Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

The queen of America goes to Washington city : essays on sex and citizenship

The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiryinto a category of bourgeois society

The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society

Critique of Stammler

Max Webers Wissenschaftsprogramm.

Dieses Buch ist aus meiner skeptischen Einschatzung der Entwicklung der Soziologie in den letzten Jahrzehnten heraus entstanden. Zum einen hat sich die Theorie gegenOber der "uns umgebenden Wirklichkeit des Lebens" (Weber) verselbstandigt, so daB es haufig unklar ist, worOber sie Aussagen macht. Zum anderen werden in der Theorie wie auch in der Empirie haufig Begriffe verwendet, deren Bezug zu den "sozialen Tatsa chen" ungeklart ist. Das Ziel dieses Buches besteht daher darin, zu einer Theorie der soziologischen Begriffsbildung und damit zur Bestimmung des Objektbereichs der Soziologie beizutragen. Ich versuche nachzuwei sen, daB die Verbindung von Begriffen der Soziologie mit jenen, die im Alltagsleben zur Bezeichnung sozialer Sachverhalte verwendet werden, eine notwendige ist. Wie ich diese Verbindung argumentiere, grOndet in meiner Beschafti gung mit der analytischen Philosophie. Es ist meine Uberzeugung, daB in der Verwendungsweise der Begriffe, mit deren Hilfe in der Soziologie so ziale Phanomene identifiziert werden, die Struktur von "Gesellschaft" auf gezeigt werden kann. "Gesellschaft" ist jedoch keine Erfindung der So ziologie, sondern wesentlicher Aspekt unserer "alltaglichen" Handlungen und Einstellungen, die daher in all jenen Begriffen exp/izit gemacht werden kann, die wir als Gesellschaftsangehbrige zur Identifikation dieser Zu stande verwenden. Die strukturelle Identitat dieser zwei Ebenen der Be griffsbildung - der alltaglichen und der soziologischen - soli dement sprechend durch "Aufweis der Verwendungsregel der entsprechenden Wbrter" in der Soziologie wie in der Alltagssprache aufgezeigt werden. Die Arbeit ist daher einem "methodischen Begriff von sprachanalytischer Phi losophie" (Tugendhat 1979) verpflichtet.

Thomas Burger

Papers

The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiryinto a category of bourgeois society

The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society

Critique of Stammler

Max Webers Wissenschaftsprogramm.

Rekonstruktion von Handlungen : Alltagsintuitionen und soziologische Begriffsbildung