Showing papers in "European Journal of Social Theory in 2009"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement.
Abstract: In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of...
591 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a typology of different ways in which power can be exercised, explicitly including innovative power and transformative power, is presented, and applied to transition studies, redefining pivotal transition concepts in terms of power and formulating hypotheses on the role of power in transitions.
Abstract: This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about power relations, but still lacks an explicit conceptualization of power. Then the article discusses some prevailing points of contestation in debates on power. It is argued that for the context of transition studies, it is necessary to develop an interdisciplinary framework in which power is explicitly conceptualized in relation to change. Subsequently, such a framework is presented, with reference to existing literature on power. Starting with a philosophical and operational definition of power, a typology is developed of the different ways in which power can be exercised, explicitly including innovative power and transformative power. Finally, the presented power framework is applied to transition studies, redefining pivotal transition concepts in terms of power and formulating hypotheses on the role of power in transitions. By doing so, the article not only offers an interdisciplinary framework to study power in the context of transition studies, but also contributes to power debates more generally by including innovation and transformation as acts of power, and thereby proposes a re-conceptualization of the relation between power and structural change.
471 citations
TL;DR: A review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War II U.S. sociology, especially its transformations in the last three decades of the twentieth century, can be found in this article.
Abstract: This article offers a review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War II U.S. sociology, especially its transformations in the last three decades of the twentieth century. With this as context, sociological methodology is rethought in terms of what cultural critics refer to as infra-empiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect. Thinking infra-empiricism as a new empiricism at this time means rethinking methodology in relationship to the changing configuration of economy, governance disciplinarity and control in the early twenty-first century.
185 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity is proposed. But the concept of identity cannot be reduced to any psychological notion of self-identity.
Abstract: This article argues for a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity. In the first part, the debate on the concept of identity raised by sev...
140 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that the descriptive turn evident in contemporary capitalism challenges orthodox sociological emphases on the central importance of causality and the denigration of descriptive methods, and argues that their apparent differences need to be placed in a broader re-orientation of sociology away from its historical interface with the humanities and towards the natural sciences.
Abstract: This article argues that the descriptive turn evident in contemporary capitalism challenges orthodox sociological emphases on the central importance of causality and the denigration of descriptive methods. The article reviews the different evocations of descriptive sociology pronounced by three very different contemporary sociologists: Andrew Abbott, John Goldthorpe, and Bruno Latour, and lays out their different approaches to the role of the `sociological descriptive'. It is argued that their apparent differences need to be placed in a broader re-orientation of sociology away from its historical interface with the humanities and towards the natural sciences. How this reorientation involves a new role for visual methods which have traditionally been decried in orthodox sociology is examined, and the article concludes with suggestions for how sociology might best orient itself to the descriptive turn.
124 citations
TL;DR: The role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement is explored in this paper, where the authors argue that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement.
Abstract: This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of ‘being intimate in public’ to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement.
107 citations
86 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology, and they offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology, which they call hermeneutic explanations.
Abstract: In the age of the ‘return to the empirical’ in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, to crystallize a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truthclaims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators’ meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way.
50 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors highlight examples from the Estonian experience and question whether attempts to find one single European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism.
Abstract: Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference.
45 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue for an aposteriorist, empiricist sociology that investigates social processes in their very factuality, their open-endedness, complexity, and path dependency, which is more processual, more relational, less goal-oriented, more path-dependent than our Western notion of 'action'.
Abstract: This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology — Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx — moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society becomes quickly one of social control and social order in functionalism and Parsons. The article argues instead for an aposteriorist, de facto empiricist sociology that breaks with this ultimately normative question. This aposteriorist sociology would instead investigate social processes in their very factuality, their open-endedness, complexity, and path dependency. A priorism in sociology, I would argue, is dominant in both positivism and phenomenology. The article opposes to phenomenology's transcendentaI rationalism a 'transcendental empiricism' that is illustrated with Edmund Burke's English and aposteriori aesthetics of the sublime. Sociology today needs to be relevant to study of 'emerging' nations like China. The article argues for an aposteriorist, empiricist sociology here, and looks at debates on property law in today's China. Here we look at rationalist and a priori notions of clear, distinct and divisible property in Continental reception of Roman law. We counterpose to this English, empiricist (a posteriori) Common Law notions of property as a bundle of rights, in which property is not clear and distinct but vague like a boundary object. We look at how this is instantiated in China. With Francois Jullien, we contrast a Chinese, effectively empiricist, aposteriorist notion of the universal to Western rationalist and a priori universalism. We look at the implications for international geopolitics and a possible Chinese route to democracy. With Jullien, we counterpose an aposteriorist Chinese notion of 'activity' to the Western a priori notions of 'action' found in Weber and Parsons. The Chinese 'activity' is more processual, more relational, less goal-oriented, more path-dependent than our Western notion of 'action'. The article argues that in the twenty-first century when national social control is partly displaced by global uncertainty, and when the ascendancy of the West is coming increasingly under question, that such an empiricist, aposteriorist sociology is suitable.
33 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the conflictive role of religion in post-1989 Europe and analyzes three major reasons for this: first, the restoration of structural and cultural pluralism of European civilization since the breakdown of communism entails the reconstitution of the full diversity of European religion.
Abstract: This article analyzes the conflictive role of religion in post-1989 Europe. Three major reasons for this are addressed: first, the restoration of structural and cultural pluralism of European civilization since the breakdown of communism entails the reconstitution of the full diversity of European religion. Second, international migration as a crucial part of globalization has intensified, contributing to the transformation of Europe into a complex of multi-cultural and pluri-religious societies. Third, the wave of contemporary globalization has been accompanied by an intensification of inter-civilizational and inter-religious encounters and conflicts — particularly between Christianity and Islam. As a result, European integration and enlargement as a secular and humanist mode of cultural integration and religious governance are basically challenged by this three-fold revitalization of religion. The growing tendency is to respond to this challenge by enhancing the Christian foundations of Europe rather th...
TL;DR: The role of concepts in the so-called 'new' empiricism that is currently emerging from the writings of Gilles Deleuze is examined in this article, where it is shown that many of the key arguments about concepts, in particular, that they are pedagogical, multiple, networked and problem-oriented in basis, are anticipated by Weber's sociological methodology of concept formation.
Abstract: This article examines the role of concepts in the so-called 'new' empiricism that is currently emerging from the writings of Gilles Deleuze. It asks what concepts are, and how they might be put to work to present the 'pure difference' of the empirical world. In addressing these questions, a number of parallels and contrasts are drawn between the writings of Deleuze and Max Weber. It is shown that many of Deleuze's key arguments about concepts- in particular, that they are pedagogical, multiple, networked and problem-oriented in basis - are anticipated by Weber's sociological methodology of concept formation. This leads, finally, to a consideration of whether the creation of concepts as a practice belongs primarily within the domain of philosophy (as argued by Deleuze), or if it is a key part of social scientific work more generally.
TL;DR: The authors investigates the form of ethico-political involvement consistent with Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity, and proposes a new interpretation of the tense relation between the biography and writings, consistent with the reading of socio-analysis and reflexivity.
Abstract: Starting from the controversies surrounding Bourdieu's political involvement, this article investigates the form of ethico-political involvement consistent with Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity. The argument begins by drawing the ethico-political dimensions of Bourdieu's methodology, especially his notions of socio-analysis and reflexivity. These latter emerge as the counterparts of Bourdieu's politics of the field, grounding the `conversion of the gaze' required for political action and presenting possibilities for social agents to comprehend, accept and even re-create their selves. Applying a `dispositional reading' to some of Bourdieu's texts, the article proposes a new interpretation of the tense relation between Bourdieu's biography and writings, consistent with the ethico-political reading of socio-analysis and reflexivity. Bourdieu's texts can be read as an example of a socio-analysis, a rhetorical strategy devised to enlist individuals into the painful exercise of rewriting their social biographies.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that it is appropriate to think of the social as consisting of aspects of homogeneity or shared frames of reference and aspects of heterogeneity at the same time.
Abstract: For the most part, current reflections on the social seem to overemphasize either homogeneity (society/nation-state, modernization/globalization) or heterogeneity (sociality, cosmopolitanism). Against this, here the argument is put forward that it is appropriate to think of the social as consisting of aspects of homogeneity or shared frames of reference and aspects of heterogeneity at the same time. This thought is developed particularly in contrast to normative concepts such as Bauman's sociality—republicanism nexus or Beck and Grande's ideas on European cosmopolitanism. With the help of concepts such as sociation, glocalization and conflict, a basis will be developed for the elaboration of particular socials (e.g. Europe) as a general social theory. This avoids falling into normative traps, which are usually risky when starting out from a historical particularity to explain current and future structures and features of notions such as European society.
TL;DR: In this article, a relational conceptual vocabulary is proposed to describe the debates on Europe following 1989, which can be expressed in terms of different temporal locations (allochronism) which, when merged with a normative stance, can lead to a situation of heterochrony.
Abstract: Addressing attempts to define a common European memory on the theme of the Holocaust, and transformations of the Cold War discourses on totalitarianism and democracy. The article conceptualizes the persistent forms and new constellations of alterity that reproduce an East—West divide. The article shows that cognitive debates about Europe hint at constantly shifting relations between various parts of Europe and between Europe and its neighbors. A relational conceptual vocabulary is proposed to describe the debates on Europe following 1989. Cleavages and social distancing can be expressed in terms of different temporal locations (allochronism) which, when merged with a normative stance, can lead to a situation of heterochrony.
TL;DR: In this paper, the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory are discussed and the continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nationalist parties in Hungary.
Abstract: This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, second, that these hopes continue to influence contemporary social and political developments. The continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nationalist parties in Hungary. This analysis is placed in the context of the already apparent impact of the global economic crisis in post-communist countries. It concludes that the unevenness and diversity of the post-1989 world elude overly generalized attempts at theorization and demand more nuanced analyses.
TL;DR: The authors provided a systems-theoretical analysis of the cartoon crisis and the way the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, responded to the expectations of Muslim groups in particular and the business community.
Abstract: The article provides a systems-theoretical analysis of the Cartoon Crisis and the way the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, responded to the expectations of Muslim groups in particular and the business community. The analysis shows that the Prime Minister followed a single strategy throughout the crisis, namely, insisting on a secular understanding of the separation of politics and religion. Religion, in this view, should not interfere in politics, and politics should not interfere in religion. The main outline of the analysis shows that Prime Minister Rasmussen, paradoxically, found himself using a theological distinction in order to make a political argument. In doing so, Rasmussen shows, in contrast to his former argumentations, that modern, so-called `secular' politics is actually based on a religious Protestant understanding of the separation of the two realms, though the use Rasmussen made of this separation remains political.
TL;DR: In this paper, the normative assumptions that underpin the US as an exemplar or polity model for the EU, as seen from a European perspective, are discussed. But the authors do not consider whether the features that Europeans hold up as attractive about the US also exist in Europe.
Abstract: Recent years (pre-Obama) of transatlantic rifts should not deceive us into ignoring the great attraction that the United States has exerted, and continues to exert, on Europeans. This article, first, seeks to uncover the normative assumptions that underpin the US as an exemplar or polity model for the EU, as seen from a European perspective. Second, it briefly considers whether the traits that Europeans find attractive about the US as a polity model have much real bearing on the EU, not in terms of how Europeans would want the EU to be but in terms of how the EU presently is. The point is to get a sense of the empirical distance that Europeans would have to travel if they were to transpose what they find attractive about the US to the EU. Are the features Europeans hold up as attractive about the US also available in Europe? These two undertakings set the stage for the third and most original, endeavour, which is to consider whether there are entities that are more compatible with what we currently find in Europe. The case singled out here is another American state, namely Canada. A clarification and critical assessment of what is referred to here as ‘Europe’s American Dream’ are intended to serve as a kind of mirror for Europeans to consider whether the European project is: (a) one of emulating the US; (b) a unique experiment; or (c) an EU that is closer to Canada than the US. If the reality of Canada is more proximate to the reality of the EU, should then Canada instead serve as Europe’s American Dream?
TL;DR: The authors argue that the proper or "second" end of history consists not in the fulfilment of its dialectical process but rather in the radical interruption of the dialectic that terminates the teleological dimension of social praxis.
Abstract: The article presents a conception of the end of history, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s critical engagement with Alexandre Kojeve’s reading of Hegel. Departing from Agamben’s concept of inoperosity as an originary feature of the human condition, we argue that the proper or ‘second’ end of history consists not in the fulfilment of its dialectical process but rather in the radical interruption of the dialectic that terminates the teleological dimension of social praxis. Introducing the figure of the ‘workless slave’ into the scenario of the Master—Slave dialectic, the article demonstrates how the dialectic of history may be ended in a non-dialectical fashion through inoperative praxis that subtracts itself from the struggle for recognition. In the conclusion, the implication of this reading of the end of history for the understanding of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ is addressed.
TL;DR: The authors make a distinction between essentialist universalism and constructivist universalism, and see what is universally shared by all relevant parties as something to be constructed through the process of Verkehr.
Abstract: Universalism can be religious or secular; within the category of secular universalism, a distinction can be made (especially in China) between universalism focused on 'universality' or the universal validity of certain ideas and universalism focused on 'generality' or the general extension of certain ideas. Within the category of universality-based universalism, 'value universalism' holds one or some values to be universally valid and 'culture universalism' holds a certain culture or a certain way of ranking various values to be universally valid. Within the category of 'value universalism', a distinction can be made between 'dialogue-oriented universalism', which argues for the priority of the right to communication over other rights and 'monologue-oriented universalism', according to which one subject can unilaterally decide what is of universal validity for all. Not only 'monologue-oriented universalism', but also 'dialogue-oriented universalism' can be understood in a Euro-centrist way; there is thus a distinction between West-centrist and non-West-centrist varieties of universalism. The key to avoiding West-centrist universalism while upholding universalism is to make a distinction between essentialist universalism and constructivist universalism, and to see what is universally shared by all relevant parties as something to be constructed through the process of 'Verkehr' in Marx's sense that is informed by the process of 'Kommunikation' in Habermas's sense.
TL;DR: The concept of self-interest is core to modern understandings of individual desire and need and is also central in the concept of homo economicus and, in a variety of forms, underpins economic science as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The concept of self-interest is core to modern understandings of individual desire and need. It is also central in the concept of homo economicus and, in a variety of forms, underpins economic science. The critical discussion of the notion of self-interest in William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action ([1805] 1969), remains unknown in sociology and economics even though it resolves a number of key problems associated with the concept and makes an original, indeed, unique contribution to action theory. In particular, Hazlitt shows that the basis on which an individual pursues their own interest is identical with their sympathy with the interests of others. Hazlitt shows that a clear distinction between self and other cannot be sustained, and that an individual is as remote from their future self as they are from any other person. Even the `sexual appetite' Hazlitt shows cannot be understood in terms of simple self-interest as it is stimulated and consummated through mental and reciprocal c...
TL;DR: In this paper, a culturo-historical approach is proposed to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an "entangled history" that was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding.
Abstract: In social scientific studies of Europe’s new democracies, there has emerged an analytical approach which transcends the teleology of ‘transitology’ and, focusing on the impact of culture and history, is sensitive to the contingencies and ‘eventfulness’ of social transformations. The main thrust of this article is that such a culturo-historical approach may prove useful not only in assessing the different results to which the processes of democratization lead at the national level, but also to assess the general direction of political change after 1989 towards democracy. Building on Eisenstadt’s notion of modernity as a cultural and political program, this article therefore attempts to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an ‘entangled history’, that is, as a common, transnational phenomenon which was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding.
TL;DR: Paul Willis as mentioned in this paper has been a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies, best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture, from Learning to Labour to Profane Culture to Common Culture, and his insights have informed much contemporary work on topics such as socialization, consumer culture, music and popular culture.
Abstract: As a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies, Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture – from Learning to Labour to Profane Culture to Common Culture. A prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Willis is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. Translated into many languages, his work is widely read in sociology, anthropology and education. His insights have informed much contemporary work on topics such as socialization, consumer culture, music and popular culture. Theoretical reflection is in many ways central to Willis’s work, thriving on field experiences and the intimate portrayal of people’s everyday creativity. His studies are instructive examples of what has recently been called ‘peopled ethnography’ (Fine, 2003), a type of fieldwork-based research that not only provides thick descriptions sensitive to the peculiarities of individual subjectivities, but also offers theoretical insights on broader socio-cultural dynamics. They have been drawn upon by a number of social theorists, including Giddens (1984), to capture human agency as both productive and bounded, as embodied and discursive consciousness which produces and reproduces given social structures. This interview takes the reader on Willis’s intellectual journey to insist on the main theoretical thrust of his work. Since Profane Culture (Willis, 1978), Willis has shown that mass commodities may become occasions for popular resistance and catalysts of cultural innovation. With the backdrop of a Gramscian perspective, he has emphasized the symbolic work performed on commodities in ordinary life, which may help marginal groups explore alternative ways of imagining themselves as against dominant classifications. Even though consumerism has often been a whipping boy, youth cultures since the 1960s have been cultures of consumption – the motorbikers and the hippies studied by Willis appropriated mass commodities as elements for the constitution of the group. Willis notoriously characterized hippy culture as ‘an immanent critique of the Protestant ethic’: the hippies celebrated the natural through mass commodities in a hedonistic but cerebral search for pleasure that transfigures dominant values and creates new values: European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 265–289
TL;DR: In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globaliz... became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the saliency of this dominant theory of globalization as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Since the 1960s, the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘transnational’ have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the ‘global’ contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist ‘New World Order’, a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the ‘globalizing of modernity’ as a description of the post-1989 reality, ‘globalization’ became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of ‘globalization’. In scholarly discussion, ‘globalization’ became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globaliz...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the question of the empirical in the context of its related notion of experience, inasmuch as the latter explicitly brings into play issues about subjectivity.
Abstract: This paper explores the question of the empirical in the context of its related notion of experience, inasmuch as the latter explicitly brings into play issues about subjectivity The paper focuses directly on the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concerning infancy and experience, voice and speech, and bare life and politics In doing so, an argument is made that questions Agamben’s recourse to a particular form of linguistic model and makes evident the limitations that such a model poses for an understanding of significant transformations in modern forms of sovereignty regarding the socio-political articulation of highly domesticated voices The paper intends to provide some sociological and social theoretical ground for a consideration of the voice of infancy in contemporary forms of biopolitical sovereignty In doing so, the paper suggests that infancy is more than a figuration of experimentation, inasmuch as its voice (hovering between babble and the comprehensible) may resonate across an empirical domain, which is reconfigured through such a voice (or voices) heard, taken seriously and touching others
TL;DR: In this new [postmodern] system, the European Union is a superpower that relies upon soft power to express itself and achieve its objectives, and that finds itself at a moral advantage in an international environment where violence as a means of achieving influence is increasingly detested and rejected, and at a strategic advantage because its methods and priorities fit more closely with the needs and consequences of globalization as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In this new [postmodern] system, the European Union is a superpower that relies upon soft power to express itself and achieve its objectives, and that finds itself at a moral advantage in an international environment where violence as a means of achieving influence is increasingly detested and rejected, and at a strategic advantage because its methods and priorities fit more closely with the needs and consequences of globalization. (McCormick, 2006: 6)
TL;DR: Castoriadis's socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Every theory of modernity must at least presuppose an implicit ontology of the social-historical. Castoriadis is one of the few who makes these presuppositions explicit. Castoriadis’s socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse — leaving us with a fragmented field of tensions. Castoriadis’s exposition of the ontological plurality of the social-historical is one of his most important contributions to social theory — but when he turns his attention to modernity, he immediately polarizes the field. The aim here is to offer some correctives to Castoriadis’s polarized depiction, primarily by teasing out tensions in his work.
TL;DR: For example, the authors argued that the failure of the communist system in 1989 has had a relatively modest influence on the social sciences and argued that, assessing its impact twenty-five years after the events, 1989 has not had the attention it deserves.
Abstract: 1989, taken here as a shorthand for a complex set of events and longer-term historical processes, has had, surprisingly so, a relatively modest influence on the social sciences. In the specific sense of potential stimuli for rethinking social and political theory in the light of the clearly far-reaching changes involved in the collapse of the communist world, it seems fair to argue that, assessing its impact twenty years after the events, 1989 has not had the attention it deserves. The most immediate and evident reaction to the implosion of the alternative modernity of the Soviet world – and the concomitant blow to a Marxist understanding of the world – was that we were witnessing a ‘return to normality’. In other words, there has been a prevalent tendency to interpret the end of ‘really existing socialism’ as an affirmation and further diffusion of the achievements of Western modernity, also because of the apparent eagerness in the East to adopt Western models despite an earlier critical posture towards those very same models (Cirtautas, 1997). There is some justification for the equation of the collapse of the most immediate rival of Western modernity with a triumph of the latter. It seems not unreasonable to argue that it was the direct competition with and, in a parallel way, the mythical imaginary of an apparently more successful Western model that contributed to the collapse of the communist system. In terms of a mythical Other, it was in particular the promise of freedom embodied in the democratic system based on the rule of law and fundamental rights (Priban, 2002; Priban and Sadurski, 2006), as well as the apparently ‘proven’ rationality of the capitalist market economy that provided important fuel for the continuous critique of the arbitrary, corrupt, and dysfunctional nature of the communist systems. The rather widely adopted triumphalist or self-congratulatory stance towards 1989 seems, however, to have been insufficiently critical in that it has shied away from more comprehensive reflections on the ‘great revolution[s] without revolution’ (Michnik, 2009: 12), and therefore does not acknowledge related potential learning effects. In other words, triumphalism left a number of stories related to 1989 untold. As argued by Outhwaite and Ray in 2005, the events of 1989 ‘have serious consequences for the project of social theorizing – many of which are even now widely unacknowledged’ (2005: 1). Johann Arnason has argued for the consideration of the major implications of the ‘abrupt disappearance of a once European Journal of Social Theory 12(3): 307–320
TL;DR: The boundaries, openness and character of the future European society will crucially depend on the degree and scope of identity politics as discussed by the authors, which remain strong reference points for the future of European society.
Abstract: The boundaries, openness and character of the future European society will crucially depend on the degree and scope of identity politics. Religion, culture and nationality remain strong reference f...
TL;DR: Bauman, Z., 2008. The Art of Life as mentioned in this paper, p. 142 pp., ISBN 9780745643250.1] and p. 6.1.
Abstract: Review of:
Bauman, Z., 2008. The Art of Life. Cambridge: Polity, 142 pp., ISBN 9780745643250.