Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

Social Science and Contemporary Society The vanishing guarantees of rationality

Abstract: Social science has developed on the premises of social and scientific optimism and as the intellectual pendant of a liberal ideology which sought to manage change and claimed to be able to eliminate the sources of social unhappiness Modernity has been justified on the materialist and collectivist bases of the amelioration of the conditions of life and of social justice for all But these have proved to be unfulfillable promises which are no longer trusted Furthermore, capital accumulation is incompatible with this legitimation of modernity because it is based on the appropriation of surplus value by some from others How can social science and social scientists respond to the present era of pessimism in which the limits of the liberal and capitalist agendas have been recognized? Social science must recreate itself: the key element is the return of substantive rationality to the centre of our intellectual concerns Science is never disinterested and empiricism always presumes prior commitments The ambig

Big Data: A New Empiricism and its Epistemic and Socio-Political Consequences

Abstract: The paper investigates the rise of Big Data in contemporary society. It examines the most prominent epistemological claims made by Big Data proponents, calls attention to the potential socio-political consequences of blind data trust, and proposes a possible way forward. The paper’s main focus is on the interplay between an emerging new empiricism and an increasingly opaque algorithmic environment that challenges democratic demands for transparency and accountability. It concludes that a responsible culture of quantification requires epistemic vigilance as well as a greater awareness of the potential dangers and pitfalls of an ever more data-driven society.

Markets: Anthropological Aspects

Abstract: Anthropological perspectives on markets, both in historical and contemporary societies, focus on the varied institutional, political, social, and cultural forces that create and sustain market activity, and the ways in which economic life itself is inherently embedded in social and cultural relationships, that are often ignored in conventional economic analyses of market behavior. Anthropological interests in markets, often pursued through ethnographic research, examine commonalities in the principles and practices of exchange in subsistence and peasant societies as well as in centers of advanced capitalist finance. At the same time, questions about the nature of exchange and markets in societies at varied levels of complexity link ethnographic concerns with contemporary markets to historical interest in the development of markets and their impact on social and cultural development.

Encyclopaedism, modernism and the classification of geographical knowledge

Abstract: general principles, whether of morality, rationality or scientific law. The Encyclopidie sought to connect these separate knowledges and principles. Finally, because such thinking was, as I have tried to show, associated in the Encyclopidie, as elsewhere, with reform and change, it has a strong prescriptive and moralizing tone. Manifest in ideas of progress and varying notions of utility, enlightened thought was concerned with the ways in which a reforming 'ought' could be made to confront the recalcitrant 'is' of contemporary society. Associated with this moral purpose is a new vision, a new modernity which not only breaks up old and stable patterns of thought and authority but also serves as a goal for future action. This may have liberty and intellectual emancipation as a consequence but, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their Dialectic of enlightenment and as Foucault notes, it is no accident that 'reason' so often went hand-in-hand with restriction, restraint and with 'absolutism'. Reason and science, far from promoting liberty, can assume an absolute distinction between truth and falsity rather than accommodate tolerance of diversity. This contradiction, which I return to in the case of H G Wells' modernist World brain, should be understood within the context of enlightened claims to the virtue of pure reason.56 The enterprise is talked of both as a dictionary d'Alembert uses the term a 'Reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades' and as an encyclopaedia exhibiting the order and connection of all human knowledge. In the first term, we can see one reflection of contemporary interests in definition evident in geographical and other dictionaries advocating terminological and disciplinary precision, and the use of such knowledge by appropriate social groups. The forward-looking claims of the Encyclopidie did not come from prophetic vision of the yet-to-be French and industrial revolutions. They came rather from attempts to map the world of knowledge according to new boundaries determined by reason, to measure all human activity by rational standards and, thus, to provide a basis for rethinking the world. These texts were themselves disciplining knowledge. In the second term, we should consider this connectedness of world learning and the intent to order new knowledges encyclopaedism as 'the order and concatenation of human knowledge'57 to use Diderot and d'Alembert's terms as a profoundly modern geographical enterprise. I mean by this two things: first, the role of geographical metaphors by which the text was to be understood and used as the sum of human knowledge; and, secondly, the detailed definition and position of geography relativ to other dis iplines in that sum of knowledge. Metaph rs abound in describing or situating the Encyclopidie. In addition to the organic tree of knowledge with particular disciplin s forming the branches or even the fruit on the boughs,58 the authors saw their work as the universe of knowledge. D'A embert's ideals for the project have been considered those of the geometer, believing in a regular universe and operating with measurable axioms and p inciples. Elsewhere, e compared the formation of the text to the foundations of a great city and saw encyclopaedic order as a machine, whose parts all fit together but which can also be assembled in new ways. As a text, the crossreferenced Encyclopidie was to be an open-ended conversation amongst members of a cite scientifique.59 The Encyclopidie could, then, be interrogated, circumnavigated and mapped: 'mappe monde' is a metaphor crucial to the comprehension of their intentions given not only the parallels in contemporary enlightenment mapping projects, in France and throughout Europe, but also the idea of the text as summation of modern world knowledge. For Diderot and d'Alembert, the Encyclopidie

Literature and the social order in eighteenth-century England

Abstract: Recent scholarship had emphasised the importance of a number of non-literary, economic and social debates to the understanding of Augustan Literature. Debates over the place of land, money, credit and luxury in society, as well as strands of radical thinking, are prominent throughout the period. Originally published in 1984, this anthology of eighteenth century writings about contemporary society is divided into sections on the social order, economics, the poor and crime, with a general introduction identifying some of the dominant social discourses of the period. They reflect the emergence of an embryonic capitalist society, with its challenge to feudal ties, and of a nascent bourgeois class. This collection of writings is not intended to provide material for an empirical historical account of these changes, but to give some idea of the ideological terms in which they are perceived, endorsed or contested by contemporaries; and provide a set of discursive contexts in which the imaginative literature of the period can be read. The texts themselves repay close analysis as the bearers of complex ideological positions and it is interesting to observe how, for example, Pope accommodates Shaftesbury and Mandeville in the Moral Essays. A fascinating anthology, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, complete with editor’s introduction and notes on the passages, aims to suggest lines of inquiry without offering a ‘total’ reading.