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The doctrine of universalism, which asserts that all will find salvation in the life to come, can be critiqued on the grounds that it appears to underplay the real and lasting significance of suffering and injustice in this life, potentially placing its adherents in an improper relation to suffering and sufferers. In this essay, I engage with this problem, first, through examining how Karen Kilby's critique of conceptual clarity might problematize the doctrine. I argue, however, in this essay's second part, that the conceptual clarity we might first see is not the full story of universalism. In seeking a fuller story, I approach universalism from the perspective of its practical implications, here borrowing from ideas explored by Simeon Zahl, taking up his call to attend to the concrete outworking of doctrine in human experience. Two possible 'affects' of universalism are suggested, which, in a third part, I argue might nurture in the believer a heightened sensitivity to the wrongness of death and the problem of sin. Universalism, examined from the perspective of its practical implications, problematizes in this life some of the suffering that it might appear to resolve in the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Since the 1980s, the International Baccalaureate (IB) has gained popularity as an alternative to traditional public curricula, which public discourse frames as ill-equipped to prepare students for today's global market economy. Within this set of discourses, the IB emerges as a pedagogical tool for producing a new kind of "international" student who transcends the limitations of the traditional public school student. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Using the IB's high school music curriculum, known as the Diploma Programme (DP), as an entry point, this article examines the kind of "international" student that the IB claims to produce. Research Design: Informed by Foucault's notion of discursive subjectification, this study examines how the diploma music curriculum fabricates a particular kind of person: the diploma music student. Although the IB takes this subject position for granted, this study rests on the premise that diploma music students only become "thinkable" as such within certain sociohistorical conditions. Data Collection and Analysis: I engage with a set of official IB documents designed to inform the practice of DP music teachers. I approach this literature as a power-laden dispositive of knowledge production. I examine statements that relate to the construct of the diploma music student based on both the possibilities they afford and the meanings they preclude. I pay special attention to how this curriculum fabricates divisions, distinctions, and comparisons. Findings/Results: I argue that the IB's conception of the diploma music student as an independent thinker, an internationally minded person, and an individual committed to creating a better world reflects three cultural theses that coalesced during the European Enlightenment: the notions of reason, the nation, and progress. Through their recurrent treatment as "truth claims," these tropes become naturalized. They enable the IB's notion of the diploma music student to emerge discursively as neutral and universal. Conclusions/Recommendations: By pointing out some of the onto-epistemic systems that undergird the IB's conception of the diploma music student, I do not suggest that the IB should completely abandon those constructs. However, this curriculum's portrayal of modern Euro-American ways of being and thinking as universal is incompatible with its stated claims of ontological and epistemic universality and inclusivity. Alternatively, I suggest engaging with various ways of being and reasoning substantially and respectfully. In addition, it would be pertinent to consider how each onto-cosmo-epistemological system relates to other systems and the students vis-à-vis ongoing power-knowledge dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines how recent scholarly interventions about notions of race, ethnicity and nation in the ancient Mediterranean world have impacted the study of early Christianity. Contrary to the long-held proposition that Christianity was supra-ethnic, a slate of recent publications has demonstrated how early Christian authors thought in explicitly ethnic terms and developed their own ethnic discourse even as they positioned Christianity as a universal religion. Universalizing ambitions and ethnic reasoning were part and parcel of a larger sacred history of Christian triumphalism. Christian thinkers were keen to make claims about kinship, descent, blood, customs and habits to enumerate what it meant to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community. The narrative that Christians developed about themselves was very much an ethnic history, one in which human difference and diversity was made to conform to the theological and ideological interests of early Christian thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of the writer, rapper and slam poet Abd Al Malik, who shook up the music world with his message of religious tolerance in the midst of the suburb riots in France in 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. It shows how he builds on his religious conversions and revelations to pose challenging questions about Islam, its interpretations, and its relationship with French society. In his essays and novel, he challenges the readiness of France to accept Muslim culture in its national and cultural identity. In his last novel, he tells the story of a converted Muslim frontrunner in a national presidential election and his reception by the French population. Malik campaigns in favour of a post-religious France through his music and through his literary works. He dismantles the idea that Islam is a religion of people of colour and insists on its multi-ethnicity. His ideal post-religious France would be based on acceptability and inclusivity, love and universalism. Malik insists that Islam is not radicalism. According to him the Islamist message that he denounces is based on a narrow and ‘ignorant’ interpretation of Islam, which negates both modernity and the Western world. Malik, as a Sufi Muslim, suggests that Islam actually enables religious practices that embrace deep French values and promote the aspiration to ‘vivre ensemble’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way one addresses the question of the possibility of universal salvation and the reality of damnation is determined by one's understanding of the relationship between human freedom and divine grace. The universalist solution presupposes a predestinarian approach, which undermines the natural integrity of created freedom. Highlighting the determinative role of theological anthropology in eschatology, I propose that the subjunctive universalism advocated by some Catholic theologians, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, ought to be replaced with a more nuanced theodramatic eschatology based upon the emerging consensus in the twentieth-century Catholic theology of grace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a backdrop of surging interest in the topic of universal salvation (or universalism, apokatastasis), Ilaria Ramelli’s major tome places Origenian and Origenist universalism at the center of Christian theologizing during the first nine centuries. She claims that Origen was misunderstood rather than rejected, that textual interpolations have distorted the ancient record, and that the young Augustine was a universalist. Historiographic problems abound in this book, which does not clearly distinguish Origen from Gregory of Nyssa and others, nor account for the countervailing views of early nonuniversalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jacques Maritain are both confronted by the apparent contradiction between the reality of damnation and the universal salvific will of God. While Balthasar’s understanding of grace lends itself to universalism, Maritain’s more harmonious perspective is able to avoid the pitfalls of which Balthasar is frequently criticized. Digging beneath the aporia that so plagued Balthasar, Maritain offers an innovative theory that seems to reconcile the divine will to be “all in all” and the enduring choice of some creatures to refuse God’s grace. Thus, going beyond any problems with Balthasar’s universalist hope, Maritain’s proposal seems to represent a higher synthesis of diverse eschatological truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, the emergence of the issue of ‘diversity’ since the 2000s has deeply renewed public debates around racial and ethnic discriminations. Tracing the debates that appeared in this context around ‘diversity statistics’ and the possibility of integrating racial and/or ethnic data in the national census, this essay aims at delineating the conflicting universalisms that shape different positions around a ‘race issue’ that France alternatively engages with and blissfully ignores. By tracking the trends and changes in public lexicons, in the mediated public sphere as well as in institutional language, through an approach inspired by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe’s Discourse Theory and S. Hall’s theory of articulation, it describes competing notions of citizenship in the French context and presents a critical analysis of the current public redefinitions of antidiscrimination policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anthropology is uniquely positioned to open a new dimension of critical human rights discourse based on engaging indigenous rights. Moving toward a critical anthropology of human rights begins from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The charge that this document reifies ‘indigenous’ and ‘rights’ is examined in light of reifications such as ‘primitive’ and ‘tribe’, referencing Eric Wolf’s assertion that cultures, societies and nations should not be treated as if they were bounded ‘billiard balls’. In reframing rights, Marx’s (1844) and others’ insights on human collectivity are useful. This reframing perforce questions the ipso facto legitimacy of nation-statism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent revolutions in literary and cultural theory have come full circle – or perhaps spiralled back around – to a quest for universal values and perspectives and beliefs. After several decades of accentuated splintering into national, regional, sexual, racial, and religious particularisms, the cry has gone up for attempting to recover some sense of a common bond of universal democratic enfranchisement. Of course, the notion of the universal ‘returns’ metamorphosed. It is no longer the universality of a closed system or of a delimited concept, but rather an open universal that is in question. The crucial breakthrough in the rethinking of universality can best be understood as construing it not as conceptual but rather as what defies conceptualization. This is a non-predicative universality and must be thought of as that which resists or exceeds the closure of identity. It opens a radically alternative vision to that of the Enlightenment philosophies that have typically paraded under the banner of universality, although it also undermines the traditional opposition between rational enlightenment and religious or mystical obscurantism. The universal in this new sense opens up a mysterious region of incommensurability as, paradoxically, our only common measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is ‘nature’ the only basis we have for explaining universal patterns in culture, such as religious practices? Cognitive and interpretive approaches seem to agree so in surprisingly Cartesian fashion. This paper proposes cosmologies as a second, ‘cultural’ type of universality. For an ethnographer affected by the field, culture is not something out there to either ‘explain’ (Sperber, Lévi-Strauss) or ‘interpret’ (Geertz, Weber). Culture is to be comprehended by ‘getting into’ a variety of shared cosmological states. These cosmological states are (1) reflexive, (2) exhaustive and (3) mutually exclusive categories, which can account for (4) the semantic shifts characterizing practices such as rituals. These four conditions are lacking in the binary mechanisms of cognitive modules of the Standard Model of religion (e.g. Boyer and Liénard’s hazard-precaution) and the epidemiological model (Sperber and Bloch). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 Westcentrist 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we ask ourselves the question 'Who am I?', we usually utilize various self descriptions through which we defined ourselves in the past. Those self-definitions may depend on group memberships, roles and social categories such as culture or religion. We were interested in the question of whether people with dual national identities associate distinct national value systems with each of those identities. In particular, we had focused on first and second generation Asian-Canadians and tested the hypothesis that distinct value systems are linked to each of one's two national identities. Participants of South-East and East Asian origin or descent completed Schwartz's (1992) value survey, once as Asians and once as Canadians. The participants revealed discrepancies in how they ranked the value types when instructed to do so as Canadians and as Asians. Specifically, the value types of universalism, self-direction, hedonism and stimulation were rated as significantly more important when participants were responding as Canadians, and the value types of conformity and tradition were rated significantly higher when the same participants were responding as Asians. These results are consistent with the results of other research that compares separate samples in Asia and in the West. But, the present research is fairly unusual in its examination and demonstration of separate value systems within individuals who have two national identities. The implications of having separate value systems associated with each of one's national identities for the interplay between self-identification and culture and for value theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incorporating patients' spiritual beliefs into health care decision making is essential for ethically good care. Gadow's three-level ethical framework of ethical immediacy, ethical universalism, and relational narrative is presented as a tool for enhancing nurses' ability to explore and deepen understandings of patients' spiritual beliefs, given that these and their experiences are often expressed in a language that seems foreign to nurses. The demographic and cultural shifts that lead to the necessity to understand patients who use principles and metaphors that, while commonly understood within their spiritual tradition, may seem incomprehensible to outsiders, are here set in the Canadian context. A case study on palliative sedation is used to illustrate how the ethical framework can help to reveal the spiritual certainties, principles and narratives patients bring to their health care experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the evolution in large firms' strategy and structure in a new spatial and temporal context (Spain 1993-2003). The central question of this work is to determine whether transformations undergone in this country have led Spanish companies' strategies and structures to converge with those of other European countries, following the predictions of 'universalistic' theories of strategy and organization; or whether cultural/institutional effects have remained strong, following a path-dependence/cultural-lag type logic. The Spanish experience is particularly significant for theory in general because its late development and very distinctive institutional origins allow us to test theories applied before in a new country and more recent time period. Our findings show that a changing context (e.g. liberalization) has led Spanish firms to converge with those of other European economies in the pattern of strategy and structure (increasing levels of diversification and divisionalization). Thus, the findings of this study in a new context are consistent with universalistic predictions that strategies and structures will evolve towards a common model of corporate development, as Chandler postulated initially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postdevelopment school has criticized development projects for their inherent power relations and their authoritarian implications. However, since the 1980s a transformation in development discourse can be observed that includes an emphasis on participation and civil society organizations. Through the analysis of several development projects, the article pursues the question of whether this transformation can also be observed on the level of projects—and on the level of inherent power relations. From a poststructuralist perspective, it argues that "development" functions as an empty signifier that can be filled with almost any content but constrains its form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish modernization relied on the western social sciences and humanities not only as an abstract and distant model, but also in the form of close encounters and interactions with western refugee scholars. This article examines the activities of western intellectuals and experts who visited Turkey in the early republican era (1923-50), especially focusing on a group of émigré scholars who were employed in Turkey after the university reform of 1933. While European and North American social scientists were drawn to meticulous comparisons of 'East' and 'West' in this period, elites in the former component of this comparative dichotomy were seeking creative ways to turn this taxonomy to their advantage. In the Turkish case, the project of adopting modernity contained universalistic aspects intended to function for particular local needs. A body of racial, historical and linguistic theories attempted to create and sustain a nationally homogeneous society while, at the same time, emphasizing the contributions of Turkishness to western and modern history. Republican scholars tried to establish the Turkish origins of western civilization with the help of western social sciences in general and of western émigré scholars in particular. In the process of facilitating the local efforts to import western modernity into the specificity of Turkishness, refugee scholars encountered contradictory demands and employed different strategies to respond to these demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the use of ideology by a group of care managers in the United Kingdom (n = 44) in their work environments. It draws upon ethnomethodological research which investigated the motivations of qualified employees for entering and remaining within state social work. As well as exploring the impact and uses of ideology, the article also questions the disparagement of universalism in the postmodern inspired critique of welfare. This is sustained by highlighting the broad and universal impact of neoliberalism in relation to the care management labour process. • Findings: Care managers utilize ideology throughout their practice, although this is predominantly inspired by external factors, notably legislation and policy. Despite this, there is evidence of some application of professional, and/or critical ideologies, which can offer respite from, and act as a form of resistance against neoliberal ideology within the care management labour process. Nevertheless, in practice, such resistance tends to be dispersed, sporadic and often individualistic. • Applications: It is proposed that the greater use of 'emancipatory' ideology in the education and practice of care managers may help in resisting further deskilling and disenfranchisement. Also, the work of Gramsci and Foucault offers a potential framework to contextualize forms of anti-market resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article refers to studies indicating that universal old age pension programmes alone or in combination with earnings-related schemes are conducive to poverty alleviation and less income inequality. Universalism matters, but few countries in the world have introduced universal old age pension programmes. The article does not research this apparent paradox, but asks the empirical question of whether poverty was a prime concern and reflected in arguments used in favour of universal old age pension when such programmes were introduced historically. What were the pro-arguments? The article looks at the arguments for establishing universal old age pension in three selected countries, all belonging to the group of pioneer countries in this respect: Canada, Mauritius and Norway, which all introduced universal pensions in the 1950s. Historical arguments for universal pension systems in these countries are presented and compared. The ambition to reduce poverty was an important motivation in two of the countries, but the main consideration cutting across all three countries was the moral aversion to means-testing and the desire to achieve fairness and respect to human dignity. Another argument found in all three countries was the pragmatic one that a universal scheme would lead to a reduction of the administrative cost of old age provision compared with a system based on means testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies (by the author of this article) on coverage of the EU in 1993 and 1996 by four leading Nordic newspapers generated three theoretical categories for a 'European political journalism'. The categories were named participation, legitimacy and mondialization/universalism. The present study revisited the same Nordic newspapers over 10 years later in 2005, shortly before and after the referenda on the proposed new EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands, to test the validity of these categories. Generally speaking, the same conceptual landscape still applies to Nordic journalism on the EU, but some of the empirical material seemed to demand the new category of 'identity'. This category seemed to be linked both to threats to national identity and to the loss of an emerging 'core European identity'. The article suggests that the core category of journalism's sense-making about the EU is the question of 'participation'. This core category is grounded on the classical Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft distinctions. The three other important categories - legitimacy, mondialization and identity - can be seen as supporting categories in the analysis of media coverage of the European Union. Within this general and normative conceptual frame, there are remarkable differences in the way the Nordic newspapers contribute to such European political journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nine articles in the dialogue divide into two groups: an abstract universalism constituted from above (Burawoy, Martinelli, Wievorka, Smith) vs concrete practices knitted together from below (Shen Yuan, Zdravomyslova, Habib, Baviskar and Braga et al.). In fact, a global sociology has to be constructed from below and the question is whether this is possible. This raises three questions. First, is there a common project that might broadly unite sociologists? Second, is there a community of discourse that would allow us to communicate our different practices? Third, if we do have a common language how can we handle the inequalities within and across nations, regions and the globe? In fact, there is a convergence on the challenges posed by third-wave marketization, otherwise known as neoliberalism. Furthermore, sociologists all recognize different types of engagement: professional, critical, policy and public. We must forge a subaltern universality from the connections among particular sociologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nurse leaders, including clinical nurse educators, who exercise stewardship at the point of service, may facilitate practising nurses' articulation of their shared value priorities, including respect for persons' dignity and self-determination, as well as equity and fairness. A steward preserves and promotes what is intrinsically valuable in an experience. Theories of virtue ethics and discourse ethics supply contexts for clinical nurse educators to clarify how they may facilitate nurses' articulation of their shared value priorities through particularism and universalism, as well as how they may safeguard nurses' self-interpretation and discursive reasoning. Together, clinical nurse educators and nurses may contribute to management decisions that affect the point of service, and thus the health care organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent two-part article in this journal, John Horton offers reasons to reject ‘philosophical anarchism’, and claims that rejecting that view should lead us to an ‘associative’ account of political obligations. This article argues for a different conclusion. The claim that local obligations are irreducible or independent is vulnerable to critique, and does not provide a compelling account of moral conflict. Rejecting philosophical anarchism should lead us to a version of moral universalism that can find a place for local attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the peculiar condition of being 'after' theory. Any attempt to better understand why theory now haunts contemporary intellectual practice more than it challenges it must make use of the archive of feminist theory's critical distance with poststructuralism. In fact, feminist theory's traditional concern with the possibilities of/for agency gives us the most useful framework for assessing both the in/adequacy of theory and the in/adequacy of any 'after theory' return (whether to aesthetics, intentionality, universalism, liberalism, the literary, etc.). If the question of agency puts pressure on theory's shortcomings, and the continued failure to locate agency within a constructivist framework gives legitimacy to regressive returns, then a more sustained discussion of agency is urgent. In turn, locating agency requires, philosophically and critically, a recuperation of 'experience' as a way of knowing. If it can be argued that the constructive process is what occasions experience, and experience, finally, is the site of agency, then we can theorize the 'how' of agency without relying on externalized positionalities (which are phenomenologically untenable). Finally, if, politically speaking, the failure to locate agency leaves us oscillating between the avowal and disavowal of reform, then a sustained discussion of agency promises to take us 'beyond reform' altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses important issues related to the cultural, social and political debate about universalism and cultural specificity with reference to the aim of the "de-Westernization" of media studies from an ethnographic research on Japanese engagement with media and information and communication technologies.

Trust in science means in effect trust in scholars and their actions. Both the strategic trust based on concrete estimates of trustworthiness and the culture of trust understood as a general imperative to be trustful based on the general presumption of trustworthiness are engendered by the axiological and normative framework typical for the domain of science and known as scientific ethos. The classical codification of the ethos of science was proposed by Robert K. Merton by means of four principles: universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism. Each of them is shown to facilitate or even evoke the truthful, competent, sincere and honest - in brief: trustworthy - conduct of scholars. The ethos of science and its implication - the trustworthiness of scholars - explain relatively low levels of fraud and plagiarism as compared with other domains. Unfortunately this description is adequate only with respect to the traditional model of 'academic science'. In our time we have witnessed the emergence of a different model of science characterized by dependence on huge financial resources, privatization and secrecy of research, commodification of research results, bureaucratization of scientific institutions and instrumentalization of science by subjecting it to extra-scientific interests. In this period of 'post-academic science' Mertonian norms lose some of their binding moral power, and the decay of trust in science is the predictable result. Consequently, the opportunities for, and actual cases of, fraud and plagiarism seem on the increase. To oppose this tendency it is necessary to rejuvenate the ethos of science by returning to Mertonian principles, but at the same time reformulating them in ways more adequate to the current institutional structures of post-academic science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about narratives of regional identity. In it I look at how they are formed and at the complex (and at times contradictory) cultural and political uses to which they are put. I examine the poetry of Basil Bunting, in particular his sonata Briggflatts as an example of a narrative of regional identity. Bunting's life and poetry are used to cast light on many of the important themes that can be identified in the literature on regionalism including the uses of history in identity formation, issues of landscape and language, and issues of universalism versus particularism in social — political practice. I draw on Bunting's subtle, complex, and pluralistic sense of his Northumbrian home-world to challenge those advocates of the ‘relational region’ who see places as simply the local articulation of global flows and who present any concern with local culture and identity as atavistic and archaic. I suggest that, by focusing on the enduring importance of dwelling, Bunting's poetry demonstrates the progressive potential of regional narratives while avoiding recourse to a crude metaphysics of scale. I show how poetry is a means of developing narratives of local and regional identity in ways which transcend the dichotomies with which social scientists in general — and geographers in particular — perennially struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmopolitanism has been used as a concept to open the horizons for being in the world. This article re-thinks the philosophical and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism by relating them to the new collaborative practices by artists. The concepts of agency and community will be grounded in a critical examination of the networking strategies and the practice of hospitality that have been cultivated by artistic collectives such as Stalker. The aim of this article is to ‘rescue’ the account of artistic practice from the extreme version of quasi-mystical universalism and dogmatic political activism, It also seeks to argue that the abstract principles of cosmopolitanism are in a dialogue with the multicultural practices of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-assesses classical social theory's relationship with cosmopolitanism. It begins by briefly reconstructing the universalistic thrust that is core to cosmopolitanism and then argues that the rise of classical social theory is marked by the tension of how to retain, but in a renovated form, cosmopolitanism's original universalism. On the one hand, as the heir of the tradition of the Enlightenment, classical social theory remains fully committed to cosmopolitanism's universalism. On the other, however, it needed to rejuvenate that commitment to universalism so that it could work without the normative burden that its traditional natural law elements now represented in the modern context. The article then argues that, in the cases of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, they all started to differentiate the claim to universalism into three different realms: (1) the normative idea of a single modern society that encompasses the whole of humanity; (2) the conceptual definition of what the social element in modern social relations is; and (3) the methodological justification of how to generate adequate empirical knowledge. The conclusion is that, despite differences and shortcomings, it is precisely this claim to universalism that makes classical social theory classical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, I address Professor Rhonheimer's charge that I deny the rational character of the natural law in my recent book. On the contrary, my theory of natural law is developed through an extended analysis of the ways in which reason draws on and informs the intelligibilities inherent in nature, understood in diverse ways. In this response, I focus on two issues to which Professor Rhonheimer gives extended attention, the first interpretative, the second constructive—namely, first, Aquinas's conception of reason, its scope and limits, and secondly, the prospects for moral universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'return to beauty' raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate 'value' fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an 'aesthetics of uncertainty' can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the 'return to beauty' and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study the relationship of religiosity and value priorities is differentiated, based on a multidimensional measurement of different contents of religiosity. The structure of values is conceptualized using Schwartz' (1992) two orthogonal dimensions of Self-transcendence vs. Self-enhancement and Openness to change vs. Conservation. The relations between these two dimensions and eight religious contents, ranging from open-minded to more close-minded forms of religiosity, were tested in a sample of church attenders (N = 685), gathered in Germany. The results show, that depending on the content of religiosity, different values are preferred (self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition and security values). The results indicate the importance of the content of religiosity for predicting value-loaded behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the politics of multiculturalism as encountered on the internet. Theoretically, it examines the different normative positions vis-à-vis multiculturalism in the works of Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Jeremy Waldron and Nancy Fraser. Three main dilemmas emerge: essentialism or fluidity of identities; universalism or particularism; and recognition or redistribution. These are empirically examined subsequently through online portals developed by four minority communities in the UK. Eight portals, developed by black British, Indian/South Asian, Chinese and Muslim communities were analysed with a view to understanding how such dilemmas are understood in online environments, taken to represent a version of everyday political conduct. The analysis focused on addressees/interlocutors, communicative forms and users, indicating that all multicultural dilemmas are enacted online. Following an agonistic model of politics, the article suggests that multicultural politics should be understood as an open arena for the struggle between these dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists often play crucial roles in designing and implementing policies in the private and public sectors; thus ft is important to better understand the values that underlie their decisions. We explore the value hierarchies that characterize economists in five studies. Findings indicate that students of economics attribute more importance to self-enhancement values and less importance to universalism values than students in other fields. This profile is already apparent at the beginning of the first year of study and persists throughout the degree. The values distinctive to economists are related to work-related perceptions and attitudes and hence may influence the policy decisions and recommendations of economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article draws upon a number of recent reports from several international organizations to argue the case that, at least at the level of discourse, the tide has turned from the period in the 1990s when a targeted and means tested safety net future for welfare policy especially in the context of development was being constructed. Now even within the World Bank there is some evidence that the case for a universal approach to social welfare provision is again being recognized. This shift suggests that one locus of the struggle for the future of national and international social policy continues to be the international epistemic community of social policy analysts working for and advising international agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the changing role of social sciences. An Action-Theoretical perspective of social sciences is discussed. A report was published by the Gulbenkian Commission for the restructuring of the social sciences. The report combined a retrospective on the history of the social sciences with the preliminary formulation of a vision for their future. The report identifies four main problem areas for contemporary social science. These are: a non-cartesian understanding of human nature; a dissolution of the latent identification of the social with the processes within the nation states; the integration of universalism and particularism; and a new understanding of scientific objectivity. The author presents his proposals for the future of the social sciences on the institutional level and substantive level. According to the author, the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic approaches characterizes a crucial distinction between disciplines or between theoretical agendas in the social sciences.

Provides a response to the feminist dilemma between moral universalism and moral pluralism Focus on the works of Seyla Benhabib, Iris Marion Young and Gayatri Spivak; Argument that Spivak's critique of the civil-society argument in the work of thinkers such as Benhabib and Young offers the best guide to conceiving what it means to make moral claims as a feminist in cross-cultural and transnational contexts.

This article examines the ways in which Islamic civilization has faced the challenges of the modern age and of globalization. The expansion of Islam in world history is itself a global or proto-global process with its own distinctive internal dynamics. The main challenge to modem Islam, coming from the global political culture in the form of Constitutionalism and democratization and human rights, has set in motion a civilizational encounter that has significantly altered the politico-religious dynamics of the proto-global pre-modem Islamic pattern. The intermingling of these inter- and intra-civilizational processes is traced with respect to the subversion of constitutionalism by ideology during the 1945-1989 period, and the slow recovery of the rule of law Since 1989. The same framework of civilization analysis is used for understanding Islamic fundamentalism and counter-global defensive development in contemporary Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces contributions to a special issue exploring alternative accounts of organizational change management (OCM). It begins with identifying why such alternatives are needed by pointing to core assumptions within OCM, including a practical and ontological prochange bias, managerialism and universalism. The alternatives to OCM are then framed in terms of the constructionism associated with various forms of discourse analysis. It is argued that the contributions show, both theoretically and empirically, the limitations of OCM as conventionally understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seyla Benhabib reformulates discourse ethics into a radically democratized strong conversational model to address communitarian, feminist, and postmodernist critiques of Habermasian formulations. This model of interactive universalism extends concepts of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity, enlarged thinking, and generalized and concrete Others. The procedural constraints of interactive universalism provide researchers a normative framework for investigating dialogical or conversational virtues that enable the model to thrive when deliberators engage in practical moral reasoning. Benhabib's own engagement of critics of discourse ethics suggests one dialogical virtue that has moral weight: a modest, if fragile, hope that this conversational model can change deliberators and democratic discourse for the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of manuscripts related to sociology, published in various journals. Some of the articles are: "Universalism and Indigenization in Sociological Theory," by Akinsola Akiwowo, published in the 1988 issue of the journal "International Sociology"; "The Call for Indigenization," by Yogesh Atal, published in 1981 issue of the "International Social Sciences Journal"; "The Economic Ethic of Russian Orthodox Christianity," by Andreas Buss, published in the 1989 issue of the journal "International Sociology"; "Synthesis and Indigenization in Indian Sociology: Beyond Tradition," by Dan A. Chekki, published in the 1990 issue of the journal "Sociology in India: Perspectives and Trends"; "Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi," edited by Rainer Deppe; "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective," by Alexander Gerschenkrov, "Social Theory and the Environment," by David Goldblatt, "Another Type of Third World Dependency--The Social Sciences," by Frederick H. Gareau.

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 amount of attention devoted to women and women's issues has increased dramatically in the last five decades throughout the world. In this article we examine the cultural construction of women that guided such action by analyzing texts that were produced and activities that were undertaken in relation to women by international organizations from 1945 through 1995. We show that the modernist principles of universalism, liberal individualism, and rationality provided the cultural framework for this global project. We compare the ways in which two issues important to women, education and genital mutilation, were constructed by global actors and the implications of this meaning making for action over time. Our analysis reveals an important link between the extent to which an issue is constructed to be consistent with the modernist principles and the extent to which it receives global attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that the dominant discourse of the 20th century is economic universalism, which has translated from modernity to postmodernity. Analysis of economic discourse; Importance of economic thinking; Factors which should be considered when analyzing market economists.

Analyzes strategies and means by which universalists claims about human nature become successful in science. Conditions under which such claims are taken to be inherently superior to those which are particularistic or context-specific; Birth of universalist claims in various fields; Philosophical and political critiques of theories about human nature.

Refutes the assumption of incompatibility and the inference of universalism's untenability. Affirmation that the truth of propositions is always relative to some culture; Distinction between two versions of cognitive or cultural relativism; Compatibility of moderate or mitigated relativism with universal propositions that correspond with the physical world.