European Journal of Social Theory最新文献

{"title":"Politicization after the ‘end of nature’: The prospect of ecomodernism","authors":"Kristin Hällmark","doi":"10.1177/13684310221103759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221103759","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of literature has argued that environmental discourses in general, and climate change in particular, have a tendency to become depoliticized. In this article, I discuss how the mechanisms of depoliticization can be traced back to the commonly deployed nature–society dualism. By analysing ecomodernism, one of the most prominent articulations of politics in the Anthropocene, I assess the recent suggestion that the ‘end of nature’-thesis could provide a way out of this dualism and the related problem of depoliticization. I argue that while early ecomodernism showed great prospect in overcoming the depoliticization of environmental discourses by effectively challenging the externalization of nature from society, and critically questioning technocratic solutions, later ecomodernism displays a more depoliticized vision of environmental politics, one which once again separates nature from society, and places it in the realm of necessity, rather than contingency.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"26 1","pages":"48 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43504322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Castells versus Bell: A comparison of two grand theorists of the information age","authors":"A. Duff","doi":"10.1177/13684310221099695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221099695","url":null,"abstract":"Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Manuel Castells (1942–) are the grand theorists of the information age. The article provides a detailed, up-to-date, comparative analysis of their writings. It begins with their methodologies, identifying numerous commonalities in their post-Marxian frameworks. The substance of their theories is then examined, where it is shown that both plausibly explain contemporary social reality in terms of the interplay of three forces: the information technology revolution, the restructuring of capitalism and the innovational role of culture. There are found to be major similarities in their accounts (the Kantian interpretation, social stratification) but also significant divergences (role of science, the fourth world, the normative content of culture). Suitably combined, Bell’s and Castells’s thought goes a long way towards delivering a persuasive sociological theory of the global information society. However, the article concludes by suggesting that extensive further work is needed to clarify the precise relationships between the three factors and their relative weightings in the equations required to explain recent social change.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"26 1","pages":"90 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43989324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why (not) suicide: Habitus in hysteresis and the space of possibles","authors":"Sigita Doblytė","doi":"10.1177/13684310221101468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221101468","url":null,"abstract":"Sociological theory on the phenomenon of suicide continues to rely heavily upon the Durkheimian perspective. While such accounts are valuable additions to the field, engagement with alternative theoretical traditions may likewise be stimulating and provide distinct concepts to delve into the issue. This article contributes to expanding sociological understanding of suicide by drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, a relatively untapped resource in the study of suicide. I suggest that the concept of hysteresis – a mismatch between embodied and objectified structures – enables an understanding of under what circumstances agents may become vulnerable to suicide. I then theorise how socioeconomic, political, and cultural dynamics may deepen the hysteresis effect and increase the chances that individuals in specific social positions experience it. Finally, I argue that individuals’ responses to such distress depend on their space of possibles: the culturally laden idea of suicide and alternatives to it.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"614 - 631"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41771629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wolfgang Streeck on consumption, depoliticisation and neoliberal capitalism","authors":"Samuel Sadian","doi":"10.1177/13684310221097016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221097016","url":null,"abstract":"Tucked into Wolfgang Streeck’s influential crisis theory of contemporary capitalism are various attempts at causally linking processes of neoliberalisation to generalised depoliticisation, while depoliticisation is in its turn attributed to the emergence of a diffuse ‘consumerist’ ethos in the 1970s. Streeck argues that rising consumerism led to a generalised demotic embrace of marketised forms of need satisfaction and in so doing evacuated the political will to resist neoliberal reforms. If, however, we take neoliberalisation to entail both the depoliticisation of the demos and the marketisation of the polity, then Streeck’s attempt to connect these processes to consumption is weakened by significant historical oversights on both ends. Streeck’s attribution of depoliticisation to a new consumerist ethos is beset by a reductive economism. At the same time, Streeck overlooks just how pivotal legitimatory ideals of consumer-side social order developed by specific networked elites have been for the marketisation of the polity.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"596 - 613"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42843662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990","authors":"Gerard Delanty","doi":"10.1177/13684310221099208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221099208","url":null,"abstract":"The Summer of Theory is an evocative and brilliant account of the 1968 generation of Marxist/post-Marxist intellectuals in West Germany. The book was published in German in 2015 to largely positive reviews. Tony Crawford’s translation is a compelling read of the rise and decline of a German genre, subversive ‘theory’. Philipp Felsch, Professor of Cultural History at the Humboldt University, Berlin, has vividly captured the milieu of a generation of German writers and their publishers, from c. 1960 to the end of the Cold War, a period that roughly can be characterized as the ‘summer of theory’. The 1960s, especially in the Federal Republic, saw the birth of a genre of what can be simply called radical ‘theory’ in the humanities. In many ways, this was a product of the meeting of German Marxism with French post-structuralist philosophy and other currents in radical thought, including Italian Marxism such as Operaism (or Workerism). But it was initially a reorientation of German Marxist thought, shorn of some of its historical baggage, and a product of a booming left-wing book market that came with the student movement. Felsch’s book seeks to show how theory was produced and how it was read by a generation of left-wing intellectuals who sought to understand the times in which they lived by new ideas that fundamentally challenged the conservative post-war orthodoxies and the cultural sterility of the 1950s. The self-understanding of the new turn to ‘theory’ was that of a ‘counter-discourse’, which was neither pure philosophy nor theory in the scientific sense of the term as hypotheses to be tested in social research. Theory was also an expression of a dissatisfaction with literature and artistic writing in the 1960s. It was inspired by the Frankfurt School’s conception of critical theory as self-reflection and ideology critique, but had a more radical and political edge to it. The Summer of Theory is a documentary-based historical reconstruction of the Berlin publishing house, Merve. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. The research that was the basis of the book was a treasure trove of Gente’s papers, which had been purchased by an archive in Karlsruhe, and several interviews with key figures of the 1968 milieu. Merve Verlag – named after Peter Gente’s first wife, Merve Lowien – was the radical alternative to the more mainstream Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. For more than two decades, since the first publication in 1970, Merve was a part of the intellectual scene in Berlin and more generally the student movement in West Germany. Gente’s European Journal of Social Theory 2023, Vol. 26(2) 301–307 a The Author(s) 2022","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"26 1","pages":"301 - 307"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47552152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is populism a social pathology? The myth of immediacy and its effects","authors":"Justo Serrano Zamora","doi":"10.1177/13684310221094762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221094762","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that populism, both in its left-wing and right-wing versions, is a social pathology in the sense contemporary critical theorists give to it. As such, it suffers from a disconnect between first order political practices and the reflexive grasp of the meaning of those practices. This disconnect is due to populists’ ideal of freedom, which they understand as authentic self-expression of ‘the People’, rejecting the need for mediating instances such as parties, parliaments or epistemic actors. When enacted in political practices and institutions, this ideal creates the conditions for undermining different forms of political freedom, including populist’s own ideal of collective self-expression, which they erode by fostering expressive domination. This all makes populism a self-defeating political ideology and bad candidate for advancing democracy in times of crisis. The article ends with a consideration of the advantages of this view compared to existing approaches to populism.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"578 - 595"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46096501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Methodological reflections on Foucauldian analyses: Adopting the pointers of curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity","authors":"M. Hansen, P. Triantafillou","doi":"10.1177/13684310221078926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221078926","url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"559 - 577"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43826302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans","authors":"Susie Scott","doi":"10.1177/13684310221084922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221084922","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48411771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms","authors":"Sonja Avlijaš","doi":"10.1177/13684310221076309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221076309","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"26 1","pages":"424 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49588533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When did biopolitics begin? Actuality and potentiality in historical events","authors":"S. Prozorov","doi":"10.1177/13684310221077198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310221077198","url":null,"abstract":"The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno’s own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"539 - 558"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41908303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}