Journal of Classical Sociology最新文献

{"title":"Breaking news: Upheavals in the formation of public opinion","authors":"P. Wagner","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231165649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231165649","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45926126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embryonic intersectionality: W.E.B. Du Bois and the inauguration of intersectional sociology","authors":"Reiland Rabaka","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231160169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231160169","url":null,"abstract":"As a brief exercise in the critical sociology of sociology, this article demonstrates W.E.B. Du Bois’s undeniable contributions to the history, discourse, and development of American sociology in particular, and the wider world of sociology in general. This dialectical approach to Du Bois’s sociological discourse will enable objective interpreters of his work to see that when compared and contrasted with the monumental work of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, what was and what remains really and truly distinctive about Du Bois’s sociology is precisely his unpretentious preoccupation with uniquely and unequivocally American social, political, and cultural issues, such as, for example: race and anti-Black racism in the context of slavery, lynching, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the United States; racial capitalism and the racial colonization of social classes in the United States; and the racial colonization of gender and sexuality in the United States.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46947667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marxist sociology in East Berlin (1949–1989): A field-spatial analysis","authors":"B. Grüning","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231159618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231159618","url":null,"abstract":"The main objective of the paper is to identify the logic of the sociological field in the GDR, looking at how it was spatialized in the city of East Berlin. In this regard, I am less interested in providing an overview of the different research streams of the main sociologists operating in the scientific and academic institutes located in Berlin than in reconstructing some crucial dynamics at work there and highlighting their effects at the social and symbolic levels. The underlying idea is that, especially in East Berlin, the sociological knowledge produced was less homogeneous than it has been represented in the existing literature. Without negating the existence of shared aspects characterizing Marxist-Leninist sociology, also superimposed on the political elite, a field analysis enables us to see how the different positions and trajectories of GDR-sociologists had an impact on their approaches to theoretical, epistemological, and methodological questions, and on their understanding and uses of concepts deriving from both Marxist-Leninist and “bourgeois” sociology. In the analysis, I will first compare the social trajectories of two of my interview-partners as paradigmatic of two different sociological habitus depending on their different academic/political socialization, networks, and positions in the field. As a second step, I will present a sketch of the sociological field drawn from 63 curricula of sociologists active in East Berlin in an attempt to pinpoint, on a larger scale, the homologies between the social and symbolic spaces of the field. Thus, the underlying idea is to examine the intersection of the “quasi-structural properties” of the field with its “phenomenological aspects” concerning the “feel for the game.” While the two understandings of field are interdependent, it is in the second one that the physical space as a localized social space played a crucial role in defining the material, social, and cultural constraints and opportunities actors faced which, in turn, influenced their practices and choices.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47456370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A disenchanted world: Max Weber on magic and modernity","authors":"Mario Marotta","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231160716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231160716","url":null,"abstract":"Despite its great popularity in both the scientific and non-scientific fields, Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” remains mostly obscure and in recent years it has become the center of an interdisciplinary debate on modernity involving both Weberian specialists and non-specialists. The aim of the article is to return to Weber’s text and analyze Weber’s use of the term and the meaning of what he calls the “disenchantment of the world.” To do so I follow Taylor’s and Schluchter’s insight and investigate how Weber would picture an initial condition of enchantment. However, while these interpreters did not explore the Weberian perspective on magic, I instead show that not only Weber had a precise and original conception of magic as the primitive attitude toward the world, but also that this conception may clarify the meaning and dynamics of the process of disenchantment in both the spheres of religion and of science.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49516966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women of courage and the seedbed of autonomy in modernity: On the transnational influence of cultures on social structure in the work of Rose Laub Coser","authors":"Barbara Hoenig","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231159590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231159590","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the contribution of Rose Laub Coser to sociological theory in the structural tradition. Laub Coser was one of the most successful women sociologists of her generation. She was born in Berlin in 1916 but left with her family in 1924 for Antwerp in Belgium, and went into exile in 1939 in New York. Thus, Laub Coser was familiar with many cultural worlds and languages. Although she primarily lived in the United States, the transnational influence of the metropolis of Berlin is manifest in her sociological work in several ways. Conceptually, this is relevant for Laub Coser’s reception of Georg Simmel’s Soziologie. In particular, her theory of the complexity of social roles as a seedbed of individual autonomy is founded on Simmel’s theory of the importance of conflict and ambivalence for individualization. Her multiple experiences of emigration and exile influenced Laub Coser’s work, including Women of Courage, an analysis of the social lives of Eastern European and Italian migrants in the metropolis of New York, and her internationally comparative studies on the family and women’s rise in the labor market. Laub Coser investigated the social consequences of having multiple group affiliations and the conditions for such individuals in the cultural and social structure of modernity. In her transnationally comparative work of migrant cultures, she demonstrated the scope of her theory of role complexity. Contrary to images of migration bare of gender and culture, Laub Coser interprets the individuals she studied in Women of Courage as active agents of migration and provides insights on the influence that cultural definitions of situations have had toward creating the social structure of modern society. Starting from Robert K. Merton’s role-set theory and integrating Simmel’s analysis of forms of social differentiation, Laub Coser analyzed the conditions and consequences of multiple group affiliations, their observability, and the ambivalences in “cross-cutting social circles” (Simmel), which create conditions for developing individuality and individualism. The cultural mandate for women to be socialized toward the “greedy institution” of the family offers only restricted role-sets and opportunities for articulating social roles, constraining their social competencies as autonomous individuals. Despite the alienating and anomic consequences of role complexity, Laub Coser valued its liberating potential. Possibly this theoretical orientation was also influenced by her own experience as an immigrant, sociologist, and political activist in the socialist women’s movement. The posthumously published study Women of Courage is based on a research project that began in the 1980s, comprising hundreds of qualitative interviews with women who had migrated to New York in the early 1920s, and who were at least 13 years old when they immigrated. The histories of these women demonstrate their role in enabling the social mobility of their families in th","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43774445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ‘Heron’: Nine steps for a past life","authors":"Graeme Gilloch","doi":"10.1177/1468795X231158113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231158113","url":null,"abstract":"In Farewell to the Working Class,1 (1982), a book dedicated to his wife Dorine, André Gorz (1923–2007) offers the reader ‘Nine Theses for a Future Left’. Here, I borrow and play with this nomenclature for a series of reflections on the two volumes which constitute Gorz’s most personal writings and which book-end, so to speak, his oeuvre: The Traitor and Letter to D. A Love Story. More precisely, this is a viewing of the former text through the lens of the latter. The ‘steps’ presented here are not those of a linear path and progression but rather, like steps in a dance, move backwards and forwards, turn and circle, trace and retrace ephemeral patterns. In following in such steps, I contrast Gorz’s account of the self with another set of explicitly non-autobiographical autobiographical writings, those of the German Critical Theorist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Central to both writers is an understanding of particular traumatic experiences and past catastrophes, and an abiding concern with overcoming contemporary alienation through play and dance, love and eros.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43728084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gorz and Stiegler: Politics, ecology and the Neganthropocene","authors":"Ross Abbinnett","doi":"10.1177/1468795X231154238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231154238","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores the relationship between André Gorz’s account of the possibility of a deproletarianised regime of labour and Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the Neganthropocene. Gorz’s formulation of the impact of computer and robotic systems on the turnover of capital was, I will argue, a turning point in the way critical theory conceived the social implications of technology. His account of the supervenience of work and culture over the sphere of production forms the basis of the fundamental questions about life, creativity, and freedom that have emerged in the digital age. The paper will show that it is this notion of a fragile and disputed supervenience that is re-formulated and extended in Stiegler’s account of the Neganthropocene, particularly in his account of the fate of reflexive culture under the regime of global-digital capitalisation.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65976160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“For free and useless studies”: Critical reflections on the end of work and study","authors":"Nichole Marie Shippen","doi":"10.1177/1468795x231153824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x231153824","url":null,"abstract":"Revisiting Gorz’s Destroy the University (1970) offers an opportunity to analyze the community college as situated between the factory (vocational) and the prison (formal education’s “other”) in the United States. College administrators increasingly require economic rationality to justify the continued existence of liberal arts, humanities, and social science programs at community colleges or risk being eliminated as “useless.” Most community college students are first generation, full-time students, workers, and often parenting students. They face severe time constraints, which are under-theorized and under-politicized to their own detriment. The COVID-19 pandemic compelled most people, including students, to transform previously private spaces to public spaces to accommodate work, school, and care-giving responsibilities. As a result, spatial and temporal distinctions between these different modes of being collapsed, allowing economic rationality to inform the most intimate settings of home; a Gorzian nightmare. In this article, I bring Gorz’s “Destroy the University” into conversation with his Critique of Economic Reason to examine how economic rationality functions within the community college with special attention to the acceleration of study in relation to Complete College America’s “15 to Finish” program at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46725089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick","authors":"H. Joas","doi":"10.1177/1468795X231153831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231153831","url":null,"abstract":"Several of the towering figures of American sociology in the first decades after the Second World War have in the last years become the subject matter of intense biographical contextualization and serious scholarly debate. Robert Bellah, the great sociologist of religion, is a case in point, as is his long-time Berkeley colleague Philip Selznick, one of the crucial contributors to the sociology of law and organization. In the latter case it may seem difficult to go beyond the magisterial monograph on him published by the Australian legal theorist Martin Krygier in 2012 (see also my review: Joas, 2015). But the present collection makes quite a successful attempt to re-evaluate Selznick’s work in the light of changes—both in society and in the social sciences—that have occurred after the publication of Selznick’s major works or after Krygier’s study. The uninitiated should perhaps begin studying this volume with the two “bookends,” namely chapters 1 and 10. They will encounter a young New York leftist in the late 1930s and early 1940s with a Jewish (non-religious) background, struggling to develop a nonMarxist form of democratic socialism—in close connection with friends whose list reads like a “Who-is-who?” of postwar sociology (Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Alvin Gouldner, among them). As the author of chapter 1 and editor of the volume, the Dutch legal scholar Paul van Seters (p. 8), convincingly argues, however, “the most important source of inspiration and guidance for Selznick personally and for his work in sociology” was none other than the great pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual John Dewey. It was from Dewey that Selznick derived his life-long interest in the combination of a naturalistic understanding of the human mind with a fervent plea for democratic values and a sober understanding of the conditions for their emergence and stability. Krygier coined the term “Hobbesian idealism” for Selznick, to grasp a seemingly paradoxical combination of ambitious ideals with a realism of power; Selznick’s own self-characterization was “humanistic naturalism.” This combination was also constitutive for Selznick’s—and Bellah’s—understanding of the role of the social sciences in the public sphere, and in a particularly illuminating passage Van Seters (pp. 16–18) contrasts their project with Michael Burawoy’s contemporary “public sociology.” Bellah’s and Selznick’s ambition was certainly less restricted to the immediate present 1153831 JCS0010.1177/1468795X231153831Journal of Classical SociologyBook Review research-article2023","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43409512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a critical social theory of AI: Knowledge, information, and intelligence in the later works of André Gorz","authors":"Jaeho Kang","doi":"10.1177/1468795X231153825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231153825","url":null,"abstract":"In his last scholarly work, L’Immatériel, André Gorz grapples with the emergence of the new cognitive capitalism based on immaterial labor and capital and, crucially, he seeks to comprehend how advanced technologies—such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, ICTs, and specifically, AI—reshape the very nature of the human subject. Despite its vital contributions, his conventional form of humanism—one that draws clear lines between organic human culture and inorganic machinic systems—is questioned and challenged by the increasingly complex and pervasive interplay between the two domains. Focusing on his later writings, this essay critically examines Gorz’s social theory of cognitive capitalism with particular reference to knowledge, information and intelligence. In doing so, the essay draws out some theoretical implications of Gorz’s defense of the humanities against post-human civilization for the development of a critical social theory of AI.","PeriodicalId":44864,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Classical Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44776530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}