Pub Date : 2023-03-31DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231165649
P. Wagner
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Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231160169
Reiland Rabaka
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231159618
B. Grüning
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231160716
Mario Marotta
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-14DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231159590
Barbara Hoenig
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
本文从结构传统的角度考察了罗斯·劳布·科瑟对社会学理论的贡献。劳布·科瑟是她那一代最成功的女性社会学家之一。她1916年出生于柏林，1924年随家人前往比利时的安特卫普，并于1939年流亡纽约。因此，劳布·科瑟熟悉许多文化世界和语言。虽然她主要生活在美国，但大都市柏林的跨国影响在她的社会学作品中以多种方式表现出来。从概念上讲，这与劳布·科瑟接受乔治·齐美尔的《社会学》有关。特别是，她关于社会角色的复杂性作为个体自治的温床的理论是建立在西美尔关于冲突和矛盾心理对个体化的重要性的理论之上的。她的多次移民和流亡经历影响了劳布·科瑟的作品，包括《勇敢的女性》，一部对纽约大都市东欧和意大利移民社会生活的分析，以及她对家庭和女性在劳动力市场上崛起的国际比较研究。劳布·科瑟(Laub Coser)研究了拥有多个群体关系的社会后果，以及这些个体在现代性文化和社会结构中的条件。在她的跨国移民文化比较工作中，她展示了她的角色复杂性理论的范围。与没有性别和文化的移民形象相反，劳布·科瑟(Laub Coser)将她在《勇敢的女性》(Women of Courage)一书中研究的个体解读为移民的积极推动者，并提供了对情境的文化定义对创造现代社会社会结构的影响的见解。Laub Coser从Robert K. Merton的角色集理论出发，结合Simmel对社会分化形式的分析，分析了多重群体隶属关系的条件和后果、可观察性以及“交叉社交圈”(cross-cutting social circles, Simmel)中的矛盾心理，这些矛盾心理为个性和个人主义的发展创造了条件。将妇女社会化的文化命令只提供了有限的角色设定和阐明社会角色的机会，限制了她们作为自主个人的社会能力。尽管角色复杂性会带来疏远和失范的后果，但劳布·科瑟还是重视它的解放潜力。这种理论取向可能也受到她自己作为移民、社会学家和社会主义妇女运动政治活动家的经历的影响。在她死后发表的《女性的勇气》一书是基于一个始于20世纪80年代的研究项目，该项目包括对数百名在20世纪20年代初移民到纽约的女性进行定性访谈，这些女性移民时至少13岁。这些妇女的历史表明她们在使其家庭在接收社会中社会流动方面所起的作用。他们对文化如何变化以及女性移民如何理解她们在新世界的生活提供了见解。
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Pub Date : 2023-02-28DOI: 10.1177/1468795X231158113
Graeme Gilloch
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.
在1982年出版的《告别工人阶级》（Fareway to the Working Class）一书中，安德烈·戈尔兹（AndréGorz，1923–2007）向读者介绍了“未来左派的九篇论文”。在这里，我借用并使用这个术语，对两卷书进行了一系列思考，这两卷书构成了戈尔兹最私人的作品，也就是说，哪本书结束了他的全部作品：《叛徒》和《致D.的信》。更确切地说，这是通过后者的镜头来看待前者的文本。这里呈现的“步骤”不是线性路径和渐进的步骤，而是像舞蹈中的步骤一样，前后移动、转弯和绕圈、追踪和回溯短暂的模式。在接下来的这些步骤中，我将戈尔兹对自我的描述与另一组明确的非自传体自传体作品进行了对比，这些作品是德国批判理论家沃尔特·本雅明（1892-1940）的作品。两位作家的核心是对特定创伤经历和过去灾难的理解，以及对通过游戏和舞蹈、爱情和性爱克服当代异化的持久关注。
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Pub Date : 2023-02-14DOI: 10.1177/1468795X231154238
Ross Abbinnett
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-14DOI: 10.1177/1468795x231153824
Nichole Marie Shippen
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-13DOI: 10.1177/1468795X231153831
H. Joas
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
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Pub Date : 2023-02-10DOI: 10.1177/1468795X231153825
Jaeho Kang
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.
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