In the past few years, an increasing number of scholars have begun working to develop an integrated field introduced as a new discipline. From now on, these ‘memory studies’ have their own scientific journals, academic departments and international conferences. Now the scholars involved in this institutionalization situate themselves in an intellectual genealogy headed by the French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. Going back to Halbwachs’s original writing, this article argues that this genealogy rests upon a misreading. For the author of Collective memory, ‘memory’ was not a specific topic of research, but rather should be studied within and with the help of the ordinary tools and methods of general sociology. This article pleads the cause of this alternate route and, in doing so, hopes to introduce the reader to Halbwachs’s original theory and to its promising developments for contemporary studies in collective memory.
This article explores Simmel’s engagement with Nietzsche to illuminate the dynamics of ethical agency in his late life-philosophy. The main argument is that Simmel’s reworking of the Nietzschean themes of the will to power, distinction, and self-overcoming lays the ground for his vitalist ethics in The View of Life. An integrative reading across Simmel’s intellectual biography points to the relevance of the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return for Simmel’s critique of abstract Kantian morality. The Nietzschean promise of life-affirmation is problematized in relation to the broader project of sociological metaphysics, which transgresses the boundaries between classical sociology and social philosophy. Opening up the grounds for a more sustained investigation into Simmel’s engagement with Nietzsche, this article resonates with contemporary discussions on the ethics of the relational self and sociological vitalism.
Eisenstadt’s most well-known contributions come primarily from his research on "multiple modernities." Less appreciated has been his evolutionary theory of cultural change. In this article, we revisit Eisenstadt’s evolutionary theory in order to make explicit his potential contributions to the neo-evolutionary tradition and demonstrate where his contribution can be further appreciated. In short, Eisenstadt’s theory supplements macro-level materialist and micro-level bio-psychological theories by (1) offering a group-level theory that takes agency and historicity seriously by calling attention to the role of institutional entrepreneurs and their projects for cultural change; (2) formulating a multi-linear, multi-directional theory of evolution that avoids determinist traps; (3) highlighting non-materialist crises such as the widespread breakdown in trust, the discontents of centralized and consolidated power, and the collapse of a shared sense of meaning; and (4) accounting for the possible conditions of success or failure. Historical examples are used to illustrate Eisenstadt’s model.
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse is a neglected figure in social theory, perceived as a social evolutionist with little else to offer to sociological analysis. His realist philosophy of science and his social theory are recovered in order to show him as a key figure in classical sociology as well as a writer of contemporary relevance. He set out a conceptualisation of social action and social structure, of the conditions for social coherence and stability and of the discursive flow of communication that is the basis of mind, self and society.
In Marx’s characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted by the formal subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist processes of production. In consequence, increases in production occur with constant returns to scale, competitive constraints are incompletely developed (per unit costs are not reduced), cooperation is simple, and this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well as with rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine capitalism (the "iron cage") are absent, and if capital accumulation occurs within this first stage of manufacture, it must be motivated subjectively. While Weber provides an explanation of the nature of this subjective motivation, an explanation of the capacity of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to motivate capital accumulation systematically presumes a characterization of the logic of economic production that is developed incompletely in Weber’s analysis. The Protestant ethic becomes the spirit of capitalism, and methodically motivates capital accumulation, only when it interpenetrates the first stage of manufacture. Thus, neither Marx nor Weber alone provides an adequate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism. Marx slights the necessity for the autonomous, subjective motivation of capital accumulation within the first stage of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the nature of manufacture, the structure of economic production that is rationalized subjectively by the spirit of capitalism. However, their arguments are complementary and, if integrated, provide the foundation for a satisfactory explanation of this developmental process. Through my characterization of their analyses of capital accumulation in the first stage of manufacture, I construct an argument about Marx and Weber’s understanding of the role of value-commitments in the analysis of economic/social structures and about the common logic of historical explanation found in their theories.
This review article provides a review of the book Review of Le tournant de la théorie critique, Collection Solidarité et société, Éditions Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 2015. This book is an important contribution to contemporary critical theory that reestablies critical theory in current debates about the future of neoliberalism. This book about the turn of critical towards proposing an alternative vision of the social order, justice, society and democracy gives us a very good description of how to analyse contemporary structures of domination. The book is positing that major political ideologies are not dead but instead have been reshaped by the hegemonic influence of neoliberalism and the present submissions of individuals to the structures of capitalism.
This article reconsiders the work of Raymond Aron in order to explore the fracture lines that existed (and in many ways continue to exist) between conservative forms of political liberalism, as advocated by Aron, and neoliberal ideas of economic or market freedom associated with Hayek and his followers. These tensions between Aron and Hayek are analysed by assessing Aron’s involvement in the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Congress for Cultural Freedom through the 1950s, and then considering the arguments of his 1962 review of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty and his 1963 Jefferson Lectures. While Aron has been largely neglected in the existing literature on neoliberalism, it will be argued that he was the key sociological figure to engage critically with neoliberalism in its formative years and, beyond this, that the value of his work today lies in its defence of the social basis of democracy and freedom against the raw economism of neoliberal thought.
The social theory outlined by Patrick Geddes has been largely ignored in writings on the history of sociology and in contemporary discussions of social theory. This neglect reflects the fact that his contributions were scattered and incomplete and were never drawn together into a coherent statement. He and his followers failed to engage with other sociologists and their insights were lost. This article draws on Geddes’ published statements to present a systematic account and reconstruction of his theoretical ideas. It is argued that he built a strikingly modern system theory that is relevant to contemporary discussions in social theory and that his role in the development of sociology must be reconsidered.
Moving beyond Beck’s explicit opposition to Marx’s understanding of society, this article proposes to explore some of the deeper commonalities between Marxism and Beck’s theory of risk society. Rather than remaining at the level of propositional claims about society, at which Marx and Beck are opposed in several important ways, this article proposes to analyze these theories in terms of their key commonalities in the problem situations they address. In particular, this article identifies how both of these theories explore the implications of the development of productive forces and the resulting humanisation of nature in the context of widespread social estrangement. This article then identifies key commonalities in the structure of the theoretical solutions that each theory employs to address their commonly held problem situation. In this way, this article rethinks the relationship between Beck and Marx, as well as suggesting alternative ways of re-appropriating classical social theory.
Many scholars have questioned the thoroughness of Max Weber’s typology of authority. The key problem has been that some empirical cases, such as doctors and Soviet leaders, cannot be accounted for by combining Weber’s three pure types of authority. I propose a new solution to this problem by reconstructing Weber’s conceptualization of authority – stressing the doxic (Bourdieu) backup of authority – and modifying his typology – adding a "substantive-rational" type. Unlike previous attempts, this solution meets three important criteria: (1) thoroughly accounting for a variety of anomalous cases; (2) overcoming the limitations of the theory of action by acknowledging the developments of contemporary social theory; and (3) still serving Weber’s ambitious purposes, such as understanding broad rationalization processes and the stabilization of charisma. The usefulness of the typology is illustrated with various empirical cases that represent transformations of charisma in a substantive-rational direction or combinations of formal-rational and substantive-rational grounds for legitimacy.
The idea that has dominated French social thought since the 1950s, according to which symbolism is the origin of social life, is largely due to Lévi-Strauss’ reading of Durkheim. The problem according to Lévi-Strauss is that Durkheim tried to ground the sui generis character of social reality on collective representations expressed in symbols, while explaining the origin of symbolism by social reality, a fatal circularity in his view. This article presents a confrontation between Durkheim’s theory of symbolism and Lévi-Strauss’ simplistic interpretation of it. It considers Lévi-Strauss’ solution to the contradiction produced by his own interpretation and then criticizes that solution for failing to account for the moral character of social reality and the social constitution of social actors, which were both at the center of Durkheim’s sociology. Finally, the performative account of symbols, and especially of grammatical persons, developed by some French social thinkers – Benveniste, Ortigues, and Descombes – in reaction to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism is considered. The contemporary linguistic analysis shows that Durkheim’s theory of symbolism, far from falling into the naïve circularity that Lévi-Strauss attributed to it, links social practice and symbolism in a sophisticated internal dynamic.
The aim of this article is to clarify the difference between the anthropological category of the person, as analyzed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), and the modern ideal of a free autonomous person, which had been at the center of Durkheim’s sociological project since The Division of Social Labor (1893). After explaining the need to return to a sociological perspective, the article considers Durkheim’s examination of the transformations implied by the modern cult of the person in the practical and intellectual organization of social practices. The modern ideal constitutes morality as a social fact, requiring a new form of moral education, as a first step toward a wider political transformation, based on social aspirations to justice that it is the task of sociology to explain, understand, and help realize. This practical commitment opens the way to an understanding of sociology’s original place in the modern epistemological discussion and, consequently, to an appreciation of the novelty Durkheim achieved in founding the French School of Sociology.
The ambiguity of the sacred combines two opposite modes, the pure and the impure, as its fundamental feature. Present in the work of Durkheim and most scholars of the sacred, as well as in actual social practice, the impure sacred is not the profane, the sphere that opposes the sacred. However, in most interpretations of Durkheim, and even in aspects of his own argument, the ambiguity of the sacred is neglected and, in several important cases, treated as if it were profane: this has negative consequences for cultural sociology and the study of culture in contemporary society. In certain cases, the impure sacred and the profane can be hard to tell apart. Yet, if the boundaries between the sacred (pure and impure) and the profane are not clearly distinguished, the overall approach to culture in terms of distinctions and boundaries loses its logical and theoretical coherence. This article elucidates the ambiguity of the sacred and reintegrates that ambiguity into cultural sociology. The model proposed here treats the impure as a transient result of violation of the sacred/profane border with no independent status of its own.
Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, which posits the distinction between sacred and profane as the keystone of human understanding, grounds not only his approach to religion and epistemology but also his theory of modernity. This distinction between traditional and modern social forms is essential to Durkheim’s position. In traditional society, social facts are produced through consensus. Durkheim’s theory of modernity, however, focuses on the role of constitutive practices in the creation of modern social facts in situations lacking consensus. A tendency to consider the sacred only in traditional consensus-oriented (religious and symbolic) terms leads to the impression that modern society has entered a crisis period in which the sacred and the social facts the sacred/profane distinction make possible are in short supply. While Durkheim acknowledged a crisis in the transition to modernity, he maintained that new forms of constitutive practice would develop to replace the religious and cultural commonalities of the past, making it possible for modern society to produce strong collective solidarity, mutual intelligibility, and a new moral grounding in freedom and justice. The sacred essentially relocates, shedding its "institutional" character and becoming situated, "ordinary," and self-organizing. In this article, we take three modern social facts and the constitutive practices they depend on, examining the moral and contractual relationships they enact, the reciprocities they require, and the distribution of participation they facilitate.
Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals is widely cited but rarely closely studied. This article makes a case for a rereading of this theory. This is both desirable and necessary because, as the article shows, it is a more nuanced and yet also encompassing theory than recognized in current scholarship on the sociology of intellectuals, and it actually has much to contribute to a comprehensive modern sociology of intellectuals. This is chiefly by the way it took class into account while transcending it. Far from being limited to a description of intellectuals as class-bound, Gramsci’s theory in fact also saw intellectuals as class-less and a class-in-themselves. It also took into account intrinsic qualities of intellectual production and can contribute to questions in subaltern studies and the study of counter-hegemony.
Although Durkheim founded his sociology on his unique epistemology and his corresponding sociology of knowledge, it is the positivist and structuralist interpretations of his work which have mainly influenced sociology, while the foundational sociology of knowledge has languished. This article explores Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge and the theoretical grounding it offers to contemporary fields of inquiry that are focused on an empirical analysis of practical knowledge and its uses in action, particularly those initiated by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that approaching social science as a ‘patterned activity’ draws attention both to the distinctive nature of social science and to its central subject matter – meaningful (symbolically oriented) behavior and theoretical entities based on it – enabling therefore a constructive perspective on the major debate regarding social science’s organizing principles. A patterned activity is defined as a cluster of behavior oriented to a basic (that is, characteristic or defining) goal or aim accorded value; the goal or aim, by which the norms of the patterned activity are bounded, is the satisfaction of a certain appetite, desire, or need. The concept of a patterned activity is rooted in and developed from elements of Max Weber’s methodological writings. This concept is evaluated against Clifford Geertz’s ‘cultural systems’ approach and Robert K. Merton’s view of the norms of science, and the article then addresses the legacy of Talcott Parsons more generally. Lastly, Émile Durkheim’s and Weber’s respective approaches to social science are assessed so as to illuminate their views regarding its central subject matter and to demonstrate a convergence of their views.
Weber said that his work would soon be superseded. While his 1911 drafts about race, ethnic community, and nation have recently attracted attention, his concern for the growth of objective knowledge has not been followed through. Weber maintained that a shared belief in common descent does not of itself constitute a group, but he failed (i) to develop his distinction between the concepts of the historian and the sociologist; (ii) to analyse the ways in which physical and cultural differences were used to mobilize for collective action; and (iii), while writing about social closure, to examine the opening of previously closed relationships. Contemporary social scientists working in this field may cite Weber as an authority, yet they have not built systematically upon the advances he pioneered. The possible future development of his line of analysis is sketched.
Following introductory remarks on Mills’s academic persona and current reputation, I pursue two lines of investigation. First, I analyze the deep structure of his thought, constituted by a pragmatist epistemology and a radical sociology, or ‘politics of truth.’ Then I argue that this structure is undermined by inconsistencies between its two components.
This text follows closely a paper given in May 2007 to the third seminar, held at University College London, of an ESRC seminar series co-organized by the author, Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths College, University of London) and Azzedine Haddour (University College London) entitled ‘Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting’. The paper offers a preliminary discussion of Bourdieu’s analysis of Islam in his first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958). It suggests that, as a young philosopher aspiring to undertake social anthropological or sociological research, he sought to reconcile the legacies of Durkheim and Weber. The methodology and conceptual apparatus deployed in this early text did not enable Bourdieu to appreciate the function for social agents of their religious practices and affiliations in a way which might have been possible for him in his later, ‘post-structuralist’ phase. As a ‘Research Note’, the text is reproduced so as to encourage further detailed study of Bourdieu’s work within the Algerian context and to suggest lines of inquiry in relation to his early intellectual formation.
The paper fills a gap in the discussion of The Religion of China by focusing on Weber’s treatment of Daoism. First, it presents an examination of Weber’s use of sources in his construction of Daoism and his location of mysticism and religion in the early Daoist text Daodejing. Second, his treatment of Daoism – and Confucianism – within the orthodox/heterodox framework is examined and shown to be a European projection inadequate for understanding Chinese state practices. Finally, it is shown that Weber’s approach prevents appreciation of the contribution of Daoist thought to a Chinese entrepreneurial spirit. By reformulating Weber’s argument concerning culture and economy, this important and neglected aspect of Daoism is highlighted.
This article examines what Spencer meant by his expression ‘survival of the fittest’ and its status in the explanation of change. It shows how in his Principles of Biology the expression was introduced in connection with his discussion of Darwin’s mechanism of species change, ‘natural selection’, which he wished to incorporate into his all-embracing theory of evolution. The analysis demonstrates through textual examination that the relationship between the expressions ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ was not, as is often assumed, one of equivalence, but that it embodied intellectually significant modifications of Darwin’s position not acknowledged within references, themselves accurate enough, to Spencer’s well-known preference for the inheritance of acquired characteristics over ‘chance variations’. The article then discusses how Spencer applied what he understood by ‘survival of the fittest’ to the explanation of social change, as presented in his foundational contribution to sociology, The Principles of Sociology.
There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes’s work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enough to give them a limited capacity for sociability – enough, that is, to achieve a rudimentary level of self-preservation – but not nearly enough to produce society. He builds this argument directly against the scholastic argument that nature in fact supplies to humans so much reason that, were they to apply it in the manner in which nature intends, they would achieve a perfect society. In forging his particular direction against the scholastics, Hobbes draws mostly on his Epicurean political philosophy, whereby the rule of a strong authority, the sovereign, disciplines the wills of subjects in order to properly balance their passions, to the extent that a distinct domain of peace and security is created and maintained, a domain he mostly calls simply ‘society’. His account of society is normative in only one respect, a very important respect – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security.
Scholars have not infrequently called attention to the master metaphors in Durkheim’s writing, those figures, typically drawn from biology, physics and chemistry, which structure his sociological thought. Less attention has been given to the work that metaphors do in Durkheim’s texts, or to Durkheim’s fundamental ambivalence about metaphor. This paper argues that Durkheim depends on metaphor to construct the building blocks, and not just the overall architecture, of his argument in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). His conception of the ‘gods’ of totemism makes the theory relevant to modern European religion, and his construction of the concept of the sacred depends on electrical and epidemiological metaphors. I argue that Durkheim’s theory of social representation (the central argument of the book) is a theory of metaphorical relations between social organization and the organization of the cosmos.
Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyond American society and to the wider world.
The concept of field forged by Pierre Bourdieu is often regarded as if it could be applied universally (as the concept of ‘habitus’, for example, can be). This article shows that such an extensive use comes from a misunderstanding of the real nature of this concept. From Bourdieu’s own viewpoint, clearly developed in The Rules of Art, fields have emerged in a highly specific type of society: that is, the so-called ‘differentiated’ or ‘capitalist’ societies. Therefore, they must be considered one and only one of the many possible modes of organizing productive activities, a mode that at the scale of human history is remarkable for its rarity. From this perspective, taking seriously the concept of field requires to renounce applying it at all costs to any concrete action system or socio-historical configuration characterized by interdependences. Nor can one postulate that fields are in any way the human species’ ultimate, perfect way of organizing its productive activities, though this normative tendency can be felt in Bourdieu’s own writing when he discusses science or art. Provided we are careful to use it restrictively, the field concept will hold up quite well against the many objections it has elicited. Moreover, one can only maximize the concept’s heuristic returns if one keeps in mind that it refers to a determined socio-historical reality: that is, if one is willing to envisage the possible disappearance of the reality it accounts for.
This paper discusses the roots of knowledge society theory – an emerging paradigm within theoretical sociology – in classical sociology of knowledge, and draws some conclusions about the former’s validity, relevance and shortcomings. The paper first presents a framework for understanding the development of classical sociology of knowledge, and positions knowledge society theory within this tradition by connecting it to the earlier theory of post-industrial society. It is argued that, while knowledge society theory has much to recommend it in terms of its effectiveness in challenging existing orthodoxies about the relationship between society and knowledge, it has not sufficiently differentiated itself from the theory of post-industrial society and falls prey to some of the problems that it has itself raised against this theory. This problem can, however, be mitigated by connecting knowledge society theory with some of the positive theoretical developments that are beginning to emerge from the agency–structure debate.
This paper uses the work and employs the tools of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to attempt to improve sociology. Heidegger’s thinking is employed primarily to undo a paradox of sociology. Sociology focuses on the social, but starts with the assumption of essentially non-social egos that somehow generate a social world. This ‘egologism’ has caused sociology to occupy itself with a number of pseudo-problems. We argue that Heidegger develops what we call a ‘socio-ontological’ approach, which means that human beings are always already social and dwell originarily in a social world. To present this ‘social foundation for sociology’ is the contribution of this paper.
The rapid expansion of the social sciences in post-war America produced a new approach to research on the theory and practice of democracy. Some of the main themes of this approach were borrowed from early sociological critiques of democracy developed by a group of European social scientists who were later called ‘elite theorists’ or ‘Machiavellians’. This article outlines the set of theoretical motifs found in the works of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels that became a foundation for the study of democracy in American post-war social science. Writing in response to the perceived problems of social democracy at the time, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels each identified the goals and ideals of mass popular sovereignty as ill conceived and dangerous based on ‘social facts’ derived from empirical observation. These ‘facts’ appeared in later studies of democracy as naturalized or self-evident foundational propositions. Joseph A. Schumpeter’s famous critique of democracy’s classical ideals is one of the most important examples of a theory built on the ‘facts’ produced by the early critics. This article therefore presents an analysis of the role these conclusions played in Schumpeter’s theory, which characterized democracy as a series of mechanisms designed to mediate and control, rather than give full expression to, popular sovereignty.
While recent calls have been made for a ‘dialogical’ approach in the study of classical sociology, little empirical work has taken up this charge. This paper seeks to examine an under-appreciated author, Wilhelm Jerusalem, as a case study in the importance of social dialogue to foundational ideas in sociology. Jerusalem developed the first explicit ‘sociology of knowledge’ in 1909 in response to his encounter with William James’ pragmatism, the burgeoning Viennese sociological movement, and his previous psychological studies. In outlining his theory and its development, the paper traces how Jerusalem’s dialogue at different times with Husserl, Mach, James, Durkheim, Scheler, and others was essential to the direction taken by his work. A focus on these dialogic encounters gives us a new understanding of the relations between strands of thought in the early twentieth century, and the changing structure of these connections also helps to explain the relative neglect of Jerusalem’s unique work. The paper utilizes this examination of Jerusalem’s sociology of knowledge in order to put forward propositions for a dialogical approach to the empirical study of the relations among theoretical traditions in the social sciences.
In sociological or political-theoretical discussions of monarchy, the voice of Émile Durkheim is mostly absent. Although Durkheim himself had little to say on the topic, his theory of religion, and elements of his political sociology, provide resources for an engagement with monarchy both as a social institution and as a political possibility. The twentieth-century crisis of religion which Durkheim addressed in a particularly trenchant fashion has an analogue in the twentieth-century crisis of monarchical sovereignty: its supposed collapse into irrelevance, its survival, and its return in other forms. In the work of Schmitt and Agamben, this is represented as a theologico-political dilemma. This article explores what Durkheimian sociology might still contribute to a discussion of sacral and juridical aspects of sovereignty. By this is meant not only examination of its sociopolitical location and functions, but also a study of the ‘fictions’ and paradoxes of monarchical sovereignty as exemplary instances of the paradoxicality of the social. What are the features and consequences of a king-shaped hole or an empty throne in modern political imaginaries?