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The article presents views of several sociologists regarding the future direction of social theory and its task in the 1st century. The growing strength of social theory has now placed it at a crossroads: it will have to decide whether it is going to become an overspecialized undisciplined within sociology or a central dimension to sociology, and to social science more broadly. One of the article authors is of the view that sociology is both a theoretical and an empirical discipline and it is important that these dimensions do not lose sight of each other. A second set of questions relates to the relationship between social theory and its public unction. Today sociologists are witnessing transformation in the production and legitimation of knowledge. Social theory needs to face up to the challenge of the democratic legitimation of knowledge. It will not be enough to resist specialization within sociology and social science. Another author is of the view that all the papers published in the journal should be interested in bridging the gap between the classical tradition of sociological theorizing and the sociologists' need to understand and solve contemporary social problems.

"The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans" is a book that explores the concept of imposters and their role in society. The book brings together papers from scholars in various disciplines who examine different aspects of identity deception. The editors define an imposter as someone who pretends to be someone else to deceive others, and argue that imposters can be found in various realms of society, including media, science, politics, and everyday life. The book argues that the concept of imposters can be used as an analytical tool to understand social relations and cultural forms. While the book provides a wide range of interesting studies, it misses an opportunity to explore the micro-sociological perspective on identity deception and does not pay enough attention to the subjective experience of being an imposter. Overall, the book offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the topic of imposters. [Extracted from the article]

One of three distinct approaches to his famous 'Trust' argument, this paper written by Garfinkel in 1960, and never before published, proposed a rethinking of rules, games and linguistic classifications in interactional terms consistent with Wittgenstein's language games. Garfinkel had been working in collaboration with Parsons since 1958 to craft an approach to culture that would replace conceptual classification with the constitutive expectancies of interaction and systems of interaction. The argument challenged the work of cultural anthropologists influenced by zoology and biology, who called themselves 'ethnoscientists' and studied culture in terms of linguistic classification systems. Garfinkel had proposed an alternative sociological 'ethnoscience' of culture and language that would focus on how culture was made, on how linguistic events are achieved, and on the rules of their making. This 'Language Games' approach followed Wittgenstein in seeking what Garfinkel called a literal description of cultural/linguistic events: meaning by 'literal', a step-by-step account of the constitutive and preferred rules participants use to create a recognizable event-in-a-language. Made famous three years later in version associated with Schutz, Garfinkel's Trust argument also appears in a 1962 text (Parsons' Primer, published in 2019) in a version built on Parsons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Talcott Parsons (1902–79) discussed religion and secularization in a number of papers and essays. This work was left unfinished; in the last book that he saw into print, Parsons depicted these papers and essays as work-in-progress. This article focuses on Parsons’ approach to secularization in this late work. Building upon his AGIL-scheme, Parsons analyzed the relation between processes of inclusion and increasing differentiation, on the one hand, and secularization at the value-oriented level, on the other. This article presents a reconstruction and an immanent critique of Parsons’ approach, which highlights both its possibilities and its limitations in order to contribute to the development of a contemporary social theory of secularization and religious change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents several views on researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos's research paper on representation in science by way of the lessons of painting, cartography, photography, and other modes. As in previous work, Santos follows a painter's point of view, combining crafts and art. His treatment suffers from problems of scale and perspective. Regulation and emancipation are presented as the "thin pillars of modernity." This paper was a sequel to Santos's book "Toward a New Common Sense." Peter Wagner, a professor of social and political theory, comments on the opening passage by writer Thorstein Veblen on Santos's paper, and feels that it was breathtakingly brilliant. The force lies in the sudden move against Veblen whose important insights did not prevent him from advocating a "delirious racial anthropology" as an alternative. In his strong programme, Veblen continues the tradition of critique in pointing to something that is not, but could be, and elevates this to a higher position, seen as immediately reachable, if not actually reached, as soon as the obstacles are removed. According to João Caraça, Director of the Science Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, suggests that while setting the stage for detailing the list of the implausibilities of modern social sciences, especially of mainstream economics, Santo's paper moves into delineating the outline of a more "natural" and sustainable system of creating and verifying truth.

My starting point in this paper is the artistic structures of the Renaissance. Resorting to what I call an epistemology of blindness, I set out to identify the limits of representation in modern science. This epistemology applies to different sciences in different degrees. I argue that the degree is particularly high in the case of mainstream economics. At the end of the paper I indicate some possible ways of advancing from an epistemology of blindness toward an epistemology of seeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws a parallel between two contemporary French conceptions of sociology. Each is first considered in terms of the principles and strategies of its sociological method. Through an analogy with Marx's philosophy of social science, critical sociology is shown to make an heuristic use for the analysis of cultures and social structures of the resistance to sociology that the sociologist encounters in the social objects, whereas pragmatic sociology adopts a pluralistic and descriptive strategy towards actions, actors and things. The paper then tries to show how common interests or trading zones could allow both critical and pragmatic sociology to profit from their competitive relation by taking each other as objects of sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodernist thinkers have often claimed that there is something like a 'modernist' model of theory and metatheory in the social sciences which is objectivistic, dogmatic and generally over-ambitious, aiming to dominate the theoretical landscape like a modernist skyscraper. This paper suggests that there is little to support such a view, and that most sociologists and social anthropologists, and many other social scientists, have been much more cautious and tentative in their claims than postmodernists have claimed. The alleged distinctiveness of postmodern social science is therefore itself open to question. The paper includes a discussion of reflection and reflexivity in realist philosophy of science and in the social theory of Habermas and Bourdieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault introduced the concept “governmentality” to refer to the conduct of conduct, and the technologies that govern individuals. While he adopted the concept after his shift from archaeological to genealogical studies, commentators argue his work on governmentality and that of his followers appears to remain entangled with structuralist themes more redolent of his archaeologies. This paper thus offers a type of conceptual clarification. The paper provides a resolutely genealogical approach to govermentality that: echoes Foucault on genealogy, power/knowledge, and technologies of power; suggests ways of resolving problems in Foucault’s work; introduces concepts that are clearly historicist, not structuralist; and opens new areas of empirical research.

Suicide is complex; yet suicide research is dominated by 'psy' disciplines which can falter when seeking to explain social patterning of suicide rates, and how this relates to individual actions. This article discusses a multidisciplinary report which aimed to advance understandings of socioeconomic inequalities in suicide rates in the UK. Contrasts are drawn between health psychology and sociology. Important intersections are highlighted, including a lack of attention to socioeconomic inequalities, and an emphasis on adverse life experiences and emotions to understand inequalities and suicide. There are also curious disconnects, both within and between relevant psychological and sociological perspectives. The article argues that there are significant gaps in existing theorization regarding suicide, which can only be addressed through meaningful inter-disciplinary collaborations between sociologists, psychologists and others. Current theorization in mainstream suicide research is limited by its failure to engage with enduring, yet vitally important sociological debates regarding structure and agency, nature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spreading phenomenon of Euroscepticism is manifested in critical practices in discourse that oppose European integration. This paper explores Euroscepticism as an element of discourse, which cannot only be measured as party positions or individual attitudes. Based on this understanding, our argument is twofold. Firstly, Euroscepticism relates to the unsettled and principally contested character of the European Union (EU) as a political entity: its basic purpose and rationale, its institutional design and its future trajectory. It correlates with pro-European discourse and the attempts to promote the (democratic) legitimacy of the EU. Secondly, we argue that Euroscepticism unfolds primarily through mass media. As such, it is given public expression through general news values, drama and narratives that are targeted to draw the attention of the wider audience. Understanding this responsive and public nature of Euroscepticism leads us, in the end, to a comprehensive typology of six forms of polity evaluation of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber is noted for his analysis of the 'specific and peculiar rationalism' of western culture. However, his diagnosis of a life disenchanted by reason draws attention to his lesser known formulations of the problem of theodicy — the problem of reconciling pain and misfortune with moral expectations of the world. Weber suggests that cultural responses to this problem change with the increasingly secular rationalization of life. The present paper traces this development from the cultural representation of pain as the embodiment of moral strife in the early modern novel to contemporary images of pain and suffering in medicine, the mass media and film. The comparison suggests that late modernity is confronted by an 'inverse' problem of theodicy, in which representations of pain and suffering are disassociated from ethical and political contexts and the quest for meaning within a human frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether to a 'liberal' or a 'people's' democracy, the evolution of modern political systems has been consistently theorized as a 'transition'. Elaborated within Marxism as the 'transition to communism' and later recycled by modernization theory and comparative politics, this concept has been tightly connected to the development of macro-societal analysis. This paper argues that any attempt at writing its history should be sensitive to the deep-seated ambivalence of this concept, which has alternatively lent itself to either teleological or non-teleological interpretations. But far from matching the ready-made division between Marxist and non-Marxist political sociology, this ambivalence has always been internal to these different social scientific traditions. As a result, the same conceptual issues and tensions can be identified within the Marxist and, later, Soviet doctrine on the one hand, and Western social sciences on the other hand, from the sociology of development of the 1950s to comparative democratization in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces various articles and research papers of the 2001 issue of the "European Journal of Social Theory."

The inner affinity of money and religion has been a central issue of the 'classical' theories of money, in particular of Georg Simmel and Karl Marx. The paper argues that the conceptualizations of money in current economic sociology and mainstream economic theory are deficient, and that a more promising approach can be developed by referring to those classical authors, whose thinking was not yet dominated by the institutionalized academic division of labour between sociology and economics of today. It is shown, how the concept of money as 'Vermögen' (Simmel) or as 'capital' (Marx) can be combined with current constructivist theories of economic 'myths' and 'visions', thus opening a new perspective for sociological analysis of entrepreneurship, innovation, economic growth and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control. The inspirations for this account are Ian Hacking's view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber's idea about cultural communication as a form of social epidemiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reconstructing and commenting upon the Kosovo conflict, the cognitive interest of practical philosophy does not evade a political judgment but is primarily led by the interest in answering the question of what normative yardsticks are available (to politicians and to the public) for coping with a situation where the international order of law fails to provide a legal solution to the problem of preserving peace and, at the same time, protecting human rights that are severely violated by a sovereign state. The paper proposes an answer from the point of view of an ethics of history-related responsibility, which takes into account three normative levels based on ethical, legal and political considerations. In this light the action of NATO must be judged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the novelty of NSMs--or better, of any social and political movement in contemporary Western societies--in the light of their capacity to develop systems of relationships which cut across established social and political cleavages. It illustrates first the relational bases of Rokkan's concept of cleavage, and its contribution to the understanding of social movements; it then shows how Simmel's concept of the intersection of social circles and his distinction between concentric and crosscutting circles may be fruitfully applied to the analysis of political cleavages and their changing forms. In the conclusions, the elements of an approach to the study of the newness of social movements, based on the integration of Rokkan's and Simmel's principles, are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action argue that he has failed to recognize the extent to which moral argumentation is grounded in particular historical contexts, cultural traditions, collective identities, or social lifeworlds. Although he has engaged in a series of strategies aimed at acknowledging the role of particularistic considerations without abandoning his primary commitment to ethical universalism, Habermas has not succeeded in meeting all of the objections of his critics. This paper treats the contradiction between formal and substantive rationality, which lies at the heart of the debate, as an empirical phenomenon within the social world. It argues that the antinomy of formal and substantive rationality plays a central role in historical processes of social change. Through critical argumentation, social actors deliberate on contradictions among strategic, moral, and ethical standards of validity, and they struggle to resolve these contradictions through collective action and the reform of laws, policies, and institutions. Examples are drawn from US political history to substantiate the argument, and some questions are raised for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key critical idea of Judith Butler's recent work is 'differential precarity': how the same network of social dependency that sustains our existence creates a divide between those for whom it proves protective and enabling and those for whom it implies precarious social existence. Yet the examples Butler analyses present problems not only with how precarization is unequally manifested but how it is rooted in the structures of dependency. Against her intent, Butler reduces systemic problems of dependency to distributive inequalities of precarity. We propose to adapt and enrich Butler's insight by integrating it into a Marxist framework. The result is a problematization of how capitalist societies are predicated on a productive feedback loop between dependization and precarization. We argue the critical grammar of dependency–precarity helps articulate the latent normative content of Marxism, while the latter advances this grammar beyond the limited envelope of distributivism, offering a critique focused on the nature of dependency and not only its ensuing precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of political and legal citizenship requires attention to social solidarity, Current approaches to citizenship, however, tend to proceed on abstract bases, neglecting this sociological dimension, This is partly because a tacit understanding of what constitutes a 'society' has been developed through implicit reliance on the idea of 'nation', Issues of social belonging are addressed more directly in communitarian and multiculturalist discourses, Too often, however, different modes of solidarity and participation are confused, Scale is often neglected, The model of 'nation' again prefigures the ways in which membership and difference are constructed, The present paper suggests the value of maintaining a distinction among relational networks, cultural or legal categories, and discursive publics, The first constitute community in a sense quite different from either of the second and third, Categories, however, are increasingly prominent in largescale social life, But the idea of the public is crucial to conceptualizing democratic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between Foucault's general concerns and his neglected work on non-Western societies. It does so by examining two related questions. Firstly, what role does exoticism play in his theoretical imaginary? Secondly, how does his work on Japan, Iran and the nonWestern world contribute to a different understanding of his thinking? As such, four general themes will be followed in order to underline the interplay of cultural difference with Foucault's broader projects: the limits of Western reason, genealogical schemes of history, power and resistance, and, finally, subjectification. Throughout, an attempt will be made to highlight the interdependence and mutual constitution of Foucault's thought and matters of cultural alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from the debate opened by Beck, Giddens and Lash, this article seeks to clear the way for a more consistent and coherent concept of reflexivity in relation to the cultural-symbolic foundations of society. Seeing that Lash in his contribution to the debate inadvertently raises a key problem, i.e. the broad cognitive problem, the paper develops a critique of his hermeneutic culturalism. ft focuses on the disparity between the position explicitly put forward in the debate with Beck and Giddens and the cognitive position which implicitly comes into play throughout his relevant essays. The disparity first appears in his treatment of the problem of mediation, but it comes to a head in his appropriation of Bourdieu. The argument is supported by elements of a socio-cognitive theory which has been gaining visibility in social theory and in the philosophy of social science. While the article is critical of Lash, its overall aim is to strengthen his contribution to the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of 'society' encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory's conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use of a three-tiered heuristic model distinguishing synthesis (what is society?), dynamis (what are the driving forces of social change?) and praxis ((how) can social change be motivated or influenced by social actors?). In this way, they are able to reconstruct not only the divergences and controversies between the different versions and approaches in Critical Theory across the four generations of authors writing in this tradition, but also four core points of convergence which can serve to differentiate between Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and other critical theories. These four points, we suggest, should be seen to form the backbone of any valid conception of society in contemporary Critical Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory's theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. The acknowledgement of the critical theory lineage's naturalist, realist and especially idealist features leads this reconstruction to ascribe a central role to certain pivotal concepts that deserve special attention – including nature, the construction of society, evolution, immanent–transcendence and the conceptual conditions or cognitive order of society. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the argument of certain weaknesses often visible in the contemporary articulation of the theory of society in both critical theory and general social theory. Conceptual solutions to those deficiencies are simultaneously presented in a form appropriate to critical theory's modal-based negative explanatory and positive disclosing critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the contribution of a long tradition of critical inquiry to understanding how 'felt contact' with the world, in this instance a heating planet and its detrimental impacts, provokes 'thinking beyond' its limits to take account of the cosmopolitan potentials created by new planetary conditions. In particular, it examines the contributions of Hegel, Marx, Adorno and more recently Rosa to a critical theory of subjective resonance and reflective learning from encounters with damaged life. It notes the significance of these experiences to new initiatives aimed at forcing constructs of justice to turn more imaginatively towards the implications of embodied contact with climate adversity, and to addressing deepening contradictions between ideals of justices and lived struggles to protect nature and thought's freedom from domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public sphere is the site where the collective will of the people is formed. The thesis is that to the extent that the people are constructed as entities that pre-exist their collective will, the public sphere contributes to fostering the evil among a people and between the people. This is discussed using the cases of nationalism, sovereigntism and populism. The narrative of Pandora's box provides the analytical leverage for retelling the theory of the public sphere. The story is that after the evils escaped Pandora's box, hope remained. This leads to two propositions: hope as preventing the closing off of the future of a people and hope as fostering collective learning processes that rectify the evils. These propositions provide the ground for a critical theory of the public sphere in which the force of the better argument is insufficient to explain the capability of a people to rectify the bad. It is a theory in which social relations matter that turn individuals into a people beyond national, statist or populist containers, making a people that is open to define and redefine itself in collective learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the West German New Left in part drew from the particular kind of critical theory that Adorno still represented but in search of radicalization it drew on Walter Benjamin, who for many was the real hero, and Italian Marxism as represented by Negri, but this was dangerous territory. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. I The Summer of Theory i is a fascinating reconstruction of the German New Left through a reading of one of its iconic publishers and the mission of its pivotal figures, Peter Gente and Heidi Paris. I Minima Moralia i had a transformative effect on German left-wing thought, making Adorno famous, but it also marked a disenchantment with Marxism, which was reflected in Merve's publications. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to present regret, an emotion to which sociologists so far have paid little attention, as having great sociological significance. First, it reviews recent research in social psychology and economics which cast anticipated regret as playing a major role in human decision-making. Second, it suggests a regret-based interpretation of the sunk-cost fallacy. Such an interpretation points to the need of a specifically sociological perspective on regret, calling attention to the cultural and institutional framings of regret-arousing events. The article further argues that secular changes in the types of regret imposed on individuals are paralleled by the spread of various forms of coping with it and that anticipated regret is responsible for both commitment to a chosen life-course and for sudden changes in it. The article ends with discussing the relationship between instrumental and moral regret, as well as the general implications of regret as a phenomenon for sociological understanding of rationality and human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Manuel Castells (1942–) are the grand theorists of the information age. The article provides a detailed, up-to-date, comparative analysis of their writings. It begins with their methodologies, identifying numerous commonalities in their post-Marxian frameworks. The substance of their theories is then examined, where it is shown that both plausibly explain contemporary social reality in terms of the interplay of three forces: the information technology revolution, the restructuring of capitalism and the innovational role of culture. There are found to be major similarities in their accounts (the Kantian interpretation, social stratification) but also significant divergences (role of science, the fourth world, the normative content of culture). Suitably combined, Bell's and Castells's thought goes a long way towards delivering a persuasive sociological theory of the global information society. However, the article concludes by suggesting that extensive further work is needed to clarify the precise relationships between the three factors and their relative weightings in the equations required to explain recent social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature has argued that environmental discourses in general, and climate change in particular, have a tendency to become depoliticized. In this article, I discuss how the mechanisms of depoliticization can be traced back to the commonly deployed nature–society dualism. By analysing ecomodernism, one of the most prominent articulations of politics in the Anthropocene, I assess the recent suggestion that the 'end of nature'-thesis could provide a way out of this dualism and the related problem of depoliticization. I argue that while early ecomodernism showed great prospect in overcoming the depoliticization of environmental discourses by effectively challenging the externalization of nature from society, and critically questioning technocratic solutions, later ecomodernism displays a more depoliticized vision of environmental politics, one which once again separates nature from society, and places it in the realm of necessity, rather than contingency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations since the middle of the 20th century, which have been referred to as the 'Great Acceleration' in the use of biophysical resources and in environmental degradation. It provides an analysis of the socio-political mechanisms that brought the resource-intensive path of social development about, showing how Western democratic societies tended to 'solve' difficult social problems by means of a triple displacement: onto other societies; onto nature and the planet; and into the future. As an unintended consequence, this displacement politics led to the globalization of resource-intensive development and to a planetary situation in which, at least as it appears in much of current debate, no further displacement is possible. The article concludes with insights for a more adequate approach to social phenomena of large scale and long duration in social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tucked into Wolfgang Streeck's influential crisis theory of contemporary capitalism are various attempts at causally linking processes of neoliberalisation to generalised depoliticisation, while depoliticisation is in its turn attributed to the emergence of a diffuse 'consumerist' ethos in the 1970s. Streeck argues that rising consumerism led to a generalised demotic embrace of marketised forms of need satisfaction and in so doing evacuated the political will to resist neoliberal reforms. If, however, we take neoliberalisation to entail both the depoliticisation of the demos and the marketisation of the polity, then Streeck's attempt to connect these processes to consumption is weakened by significant historical oversights on both ends. Streeck's attribution of depoliticisation to a new consumerist ethos is beset by a reductive economism. At the same time, Streeck overlooks just how pivotal legitimatory ideals of consumer-side social order developed by specific networked elites have been for the marketisation of the polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what the rise in machine learning (ML) systems might mean for social theory. Focusing on financial markets, in which algorithmic securities trading founded on ML-based decision-making is gaining traction, I discuss the extent to which established sociological notions remain relevant or demand a reconsideration when applied to an ML context. I argue that ML systems have some capacity for agency and for engaging in forms of collective machine behaviour, in which ML systems interact with other machines. However, ML-based collective machine behaviour is irreducible to human decision-making and thereby challenges established sociological notions of financial markets (including that of embeddedness). I argue that such behaviour can nonetheless be analysed through an adaptation of sociological theories of interaction and collective behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A spate of social scientific literature gives the impression that societies in the twenty-first century are overrun with 'neoliberal subjects'. But what does it actually mean to be a neoliberal subject? And in what ways does this concept relate to 'neoliberalism', more generally? In this article, I distinguish between four common ways of thinking about 'neoliberalism': (1) as a set of economic policies, (2) as a hegemonic ideological project, (3) as a political rationality and form of governmentality and (4) as a specific type of embodied subjectivity. I argue that while neoliberalisms (1), (2) and (3) potentially hold clear conceptual connections to one another – notwithstanding the quite real tensions between them – their relationship to neoliberalism (4) is often (although not always) tenuous at best. That is, the evidence routinely offered to demonstrate the existence of neoliberalism (4) bears almost no necessary relationship to neoliberalisms (1), (2) or (3). I conclude that, for both academic and political reasons, scholars should be more careful when invoking the monolithic notion of a 'neoliberal subject'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relevance of death to the value of life. After a preliminary discussion of the human experience of mortality, I consider Heidegger's argument that death is a condition of authenticity, Sartre's claim that death is an externality that is irrelevant because it cannot be lived and Simmel's theory that death is a boundary that is transcended by life. While all theories have their merits, I suggest that Simmel's approach, which articulates well with Levinas's ethical critique of Heidegger, offers important insight into our responsibility for other people and for the survival of other forms of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a non-reductive approach to translation as a basic social process that shapes both the world that sociologists study and the sociological endeavour itself. It starts by referring to accounts from the sociology of translation and translation studies, which have problematized simplistic views of processes of cultural globalization. From this point of view, translation can offer an approach to contemporary interconnectedness that escapes from both methodological nationalism and what can be designated as the monolingual vision, providing substantive perspectives on the proliferation of contact zones or borderlands in a diversity of domains. The article centrally argues for a sociological perspective that examines not just the circulation of meaning but translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. Only if this more material aspect of translation is attended to can the nature of translation as an ordinary social process be fully grasped and its intervention in meaning-making activities explored. This has far-ranging implications for any reflexive account of the production of sociological works and interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network concepts are omnipresent in contemporary diagnoses (network society), management practices (network governance), social science methods (network analysis) and theories (network theory). Instigating a critical analysis of network concepts, this article explores the sources and relevance of networks in Foucault's social theory. I argue that via Foucault we can trace network concepts back to cybernetics, a research programme that initiated a shift from 'being' to 'doing' and developed a new theory of regulation based on connectivity and codes, communication and circulation. This insight contributes to two debates: Firstly, it highlights a neglected influence on Foucault's theory that travelled from cybernetics via structuralism and Canguilhem into his concept of power. Secondly, it suggests that network society and governance are neither a product of neoliberalism nor of technological artefacts, such as the Internet. They rather resulted from a distinct tradition of cybernetically inspired theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the 'body pedagogics' of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific 'ways of life'. Focused on practical issues associated with 'knowing how' to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in 'vélo worlds', I develop Dewey's pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship's loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with an explanation of friendship's institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim's 'positive solidarity' juxtaposed with Honneth's recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution (partial) personal relationships make to (impartial) morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship's institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies and explores the realm of 'social nothingness': objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These 'negative symbolic social objects' include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts from phenomenology, I examine the process of 'negative noesis' (subject-object relations) in three aspects. 'Negative intentionality' describes people's motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. 'Negative embodiment' is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. 'Negative temporality' describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to articulate a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of autonomous beings humans over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the 'humanisation of nature' are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human–nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological–historical moment when at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on COVID-19 as a 'disease of the Anthropocene' and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are often thought to be closely linked to each other: conceptually, ideologically, historically. This article challenges that assumption by reinterpreting right-wing populism as an essentially anti-authoritarian movement. Right-wing populism diverges from the clearly authoritarian movements of the past, such as classic conservatism and fascism, in at least two important ways: first, it follows a distinctive epistemology with a different idea what constitutes the truth and who has access to it. Second, populism has a peculiar understanding of the ultimate source of political authority and the function of political leadership. My article shows how right-wing populists pursue a project of self-empowerment and appropriate notions of emancipation and autonomy for their own narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of emancipatory mobilization, there is no realistic prospect for any profound socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. Instead, social inequality and ecological destruction are on the rise and an autocratic-authoritarian turn is reshaping even the most established liberal democracies. In explaining these phenomena, the struggle for autonomy and emancipation is an important parameter that has not received sufficient attention so far. This article investigates these phenomena through the lens of the dialectic of emancipation – a concept that I have suggested elsewhere and that I here further elaborate, placing particular emphasis on the relationship between the rule-transgressing and the rule-setting capacities of the emancipatory project. The article specifies constitutive dimensions of the emancipatory project, explores their ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration and thus explains how the emancipatory logic itself has come to obstruct the socio-ecological transformation and to nurture new forms of authoritarian governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper focused on theoretical pluralism and sociology that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It talks about the distinction between the concept of sociology as a discipline and the status it shares with philosophy and history. Clausewitz's book "On War," which focuses on the capability of war to create a science devoted to its rational exploration, is discussed. The article also talks about the bonds between sociology and ideology.

The article presents a paper focused on the need for theoretical unification in social theory that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It focuses on the concept of sociology as anti-utilitarianism and the need to determine sociological ambition with respect to political economy and philosophy. The contemporary legacy of the sociological tradition, the relative unity of fragmented sociologies, and the relationship between sociological discipline and globalization are discussed.

The article presents a paper focused on the need for theoretical unification in social theory that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It offers the author's views on questions concerning the future of sociology and of society. These questions focus on concerns regarding the specificity of the social with respect to reality and on the relation between contemporary sociological theory and classical sociological theory. The concept of society and the notion of sociology as a critical discipline are discussed.