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Using two classic accounts of Elizabeth II’s Coronation, this article explores the potential meanings of the monarchy in the 21st century.

The paper examines the origins of the idea of “the social question” in the nineteenth century, the rise of the welfare state, the challenge of neoliberalism, and the new transnationalized social qu...

This article offers a critical but appreciative reading of Chad Alan Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought. It frames that reading around the section of the book titled “Why the Jews Are Good to Think,” a phrase that is a take on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim that totemic emblems are chosen, “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’.” The article contends that the book is predicated on a view that, at least for the scholars Goldberg scrutinizes, Jews were considered to occupy a unique social space in western Europe and North America, one in which they constituted an Other unlike any other Other. As such, they offered unique insights into specifying the meaning and significance of the premodern and modern.

The cultural turn in late twentieth-century sociology took several forms, none more influential than the “strong programme in cultural theory” advanced by Jeffrey C. Alexander and associates (Alexa...

Not so long ago, the United States was described as a “nation of immigrants,” reflecting the reality that most Americans are either immigrants themselves or are the offspring of immigrants. Not mea...

The authoritarian tendencies evident in the Trump campaign and administration are framed by the idea of a “politics of cruelty,“ drawing on Judith Shlkar’s idea of the ”liberalism of fear,”...

Ambivalence as an interpretive tool in sociology refers to the social experience of any complex, cognitively confusing, or emotionally charged phenomenon that calls simultaneously for opposite reactions. Migrants’ life conditions, as this Special Issue illustrates, are particularly subject to ambivalence. This introduction reviews the predominant understandings of ambivalence as a sociological category, its specific relevance in migration studies, and its implications for empirical research. It then reviews the articles in this Special Issue that are collectively intended to advance our understanding of the relevance of ambivalence for migration studies.

Conservatism refers to one of the constituent political positions found in all contemporary democracies. It can be construed as a philosophy, an ideology, a political party, a movement, a disposition, a mode of discourse, performance style, and an emotional relationship to the political. Since the birth of modern democracies in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it has become commonplace to describe the range of political options available to the citizenry as occupying a spectrum from left to right, with a range of alternatives between the extreme poles, including a centrist position in the middle that straddles the divide. The left was associated with promoting challenges to established authorities and existing hierarchies, along with calls for increased economic equality and expanded social and political rights to all citizens, including the heretofore marginalized. This contrasts with the right, which was defined as defending inequalities and differential entitlements, concentrating matters involving rights around preserving property rights, shoring up public and social order, and promoting traditional values and conventional social relations. In this context, liberalism became a mark of political identity associated with the left, as did socialism, while conservatism, broadly construed, represented the right. This framing of politics also includes the possibility of underminings by extremism on both the left and right. For the former, the main threat since the Russian Revolution has been posed by revolutionary communism, while right-wing extremism has manifested itself in reactionary movements, including fascism and illiberal populism. Since liberalism and conservatism must be understood in relational terms, the spatial and temporal settings for the politics of opposition will vary considerably. It is impossible to do justice to the vast literature on conservatism in a bibliography such as this. What follows is a more delimited, and thus manageable examination of work on conservatism. First, it focuses on conservatism in the United States, and not elsewhere. Second, it is chiefly concerned with conservatism since the end of World War II. Third, it concentrates on the study of conservatism by sociologists and those working in cognate disciplines; while not all the authors are card-carrying sociologists, their works reflect a sociological character, although the exception to this third point is the overview section, which presents key readings by advocates of conservatism, and thus offers insider depictions of the meaning of conservatism. Fourth, this article does not concentrate solely on extremist right-wing movements; rather, in surveying the relevant literature on American conservatism broadly construed, it points to a growing consensus that the radical right wing has pushed mainstream conservatism increasingly further to the right.

The major claim we advance in this chapter is that civil sphere theory (CST) constitutes the first truly sociological theory of civil society. To sustain such a bold claim, we first locate CST contextually, both historically and in relation to concurrent contemporary work on civil society. We then analyze the conceptual development of classical theories of civil society, identifying their weaknesses based on their sociological shortcomings. With this as background context, we argue that CST has to be seen as a way to rescue the significance of civil society “questions,” providing however a radically different strategy in looking for “answers.”Finally, we provide a vision of CST as an ongoing, collaborative theoretical project.

Among the roles that the camera has played since the invention of photography is that of documenting social phenomena. In the history of the United States, the tradition of documentary photography ...

A 1944 issue of the American Journal of Sociology was devoted to contemplating the next stage in world history after the impending defeat of fascism near the end of World War II. Prominent scholars...

In the hegemonic narrative of the history of religious pluralism in the United States—which received its canonical formulation in Will Herberg’s book of 1955, Protestant–Catholic–Jew: An Essay in A...

Boundaries play an important role in Richard Alba’s articulation of new assimilation theory, as is evident in the major works he has produced during the past two decades. This article traces his interest in boundaries to “The Twilight of Ethnicity among Americans of European Ancestry: The Case of Italians”, an article he published in ERS in 1985. It is in this article and a related book published the same year that one can begin to trace the evolution of his thinking on both ethnic boundaries and the cultural content contained within those boundaries.

Scholars of religion have long been preoccupied with defining their subject matter, the social fact that we have come to call religion. Some of the early foundational figures in the development of ...