Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194135
Christopher Adair-Toteff
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a work that discusses what nihilism is and offers a possible means for overcoming it. Wendy Brown uses Nietzsche as the expert on nihilism and Max Weber as the thinker who offers a possible way to fight it. Brown references many of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings, but she focuses mainly on Weber’s two ‘Vocation’ lectures: ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ and ‘Politik als Beruf’; actually, she uses the translations ‘Science as Vocation’ and ‘Politics as Vocation’. This book is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures that she gave during November 2019. It is highly successful when read as a political work, but if read as a piece of scholarship, it is less successful. The book has four sections: ‘Introduction’, ‘Politics’, ‘Knowledge’, and ‘Afterword’. In the ‘Introduction’, Brown explains that the focus of the Tanner Lectures is to discuss values, and it has a goal to bring together values and knowledge which the Enlightenment had separated. Brown emphasizes that merging them now is critical, given the plethora of problems confronting humanity. She notes that it may seem counterintuitive to invoke Max Weber because he not only embraced the distinction between facts and values; he also seemed complicit with ‘some of the most sinister forces contouring our present’. Furthermore, Brown insists ‘Weber was a dark thinker’ (p. 7) and certainly he had a reputation as being volcanic. But he was realistic and that provides Brown with the first of three reasons to ‘think’ with Weber. The second was his willingness to confront the crises of liberalism. The third one which animates these essays was ‘his deep confrontation with the intellectual and political predicaments of our nihilistic epoch’ (pp. 7–10). Brown does not mean that all values have vanished nor does she suggest Weber thought the world lacked all meaning. However, she does insist that the world lost much of the basis for values when science replaced religion. She also insists that 1194135 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194135International SociologyReviews: Sociology and Sociologists review-article2023
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194158
Jack Palmer
Since its publication, Creolizing the Modern has won both the René Wellek Prize for outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature and the Barrington Moore Book Award for the best book in comparative historical sociology. Few, if any, books can lay claim to receiving such esteemed accolades across the disciplines of sociology and literary studies and this alone should give the reader a sense of the significance that this intervention represents. A product of collaboration between a literary scholar (Anca Parvulescu) and a sociologist (Manuela Boatcă), the book is based around a close textual reading of Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel, Ion, which centres on struggle of its eponymous character for land ownership in the Transylvanian village of Pripas (now named after Liviu Rebreanu) in the early twentieth century. In Creolizing the Modern, Ion is situated within what the late French literary critic, Pascale Casanova, called the ‘world republic of letters’, a stratified and unequal global network of genre conventions, stylistic orders and linguistic systems. This notion of ‘world literature’ is itself melded with what Immanuel Wallerstein theorized as the capitalist ‘world system’, denoting the historical development of a transnational economy and an accompanying division of labour which divides the world into ‘core’, ‘peripheral’ and ‘semi-peripheral’ regions. Ion takes on a double significance in this meeting of world literature and world system. On the one hand, Ion is a modernist novel set in a rural part of a semi-peripheral region, written in the peripheralized language of Romanian and published within a marginal system of national literary institutions. This, resultantly, means that the novel has remained ‘virtually non-existent for global audiences’ (p. 12), a fact reflected in the difficulty of obtaining an English translation today (two versions exist, both produced in the 1960s and mostly held in university libraries having been acquired during the area studies heyday of the Cold War). On the other hand, Ion itself thematizes the formation of the capitalist world system and its attendant regimes of class, gender, ethnic and religious hierarchy. Over the course of Creolizing the Modern, various characters and passages from Ion are evoked to refract and connect themes such as the 1194158 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194158International SociologyReview: Historical Sociology review-article2023
自出版以来，《Creolizing the Modern》获得了勒内·韦勒克比较文学学科杰出图书奖和巴林顿·摩尔比较历史社会学最佳图书奖。很少有书能在社会学和文学研究领域获得如此受人尊敬的赞誉，仅此一点就应该让读者感受到这种干预所代表的意义。这本书是文学学者（Anca Parvulescu）和社会学家（Manuela Boatcă。在《Creolizing the Modern》中，Ion位于已故法国文学评论家Pascale Casanova所称的“世界字母共和国”中，这是一个由流派惯例、风格秩序和语言系统组成的分层和不平等的全球网络。这种“世界文学”的概念本身与伊曼纽尔·沃勒斯坦（Immanuel Wallerstein）所理论的资本主义“世界体系”相融合，后者表示跨国经济的历史发展以及随之而来的将世界划分为“核心”、“外围”和“半外围”区域的劳动分工。《离子》在这场世界文学与世界体系的交汇中具有双重意义。一方面，《离子》是一部以半周边地区农村为背景的现代主义小说，用罗马尼亚语的周边语言写成，并在国家文学机构的边缘体系中出版。因此，这意味着这部小说“对全球观众来说几乎不存在”（第12页），这一事实反映在今天很难获得英文译本上（有两个版本，都是在20世纪60年代制作的，大多保存在大学图书馆，是在冷战时期地区研究的鼎盛时期获得的）。另一方面，Ion本身将资本主义世界体系的形成及其随之而来的阶级、性别、种族和宗教等级制度主题化。在Creolizing the Modern的过程中，Ion的各种人物和段落被唤起，以折射和连接主题，如1194158 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194158国际社会学评论：历史社会学评论-文章2023
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194154c
Amany Abdelrazek-Alsiefy
Forchtner B (2019) The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication. New York: Routledge. İnal O (2022) Authoritarianism, populism, and the environment in Turkey. Environmental History 27(4): 634–641. Kaczynski TJ (1995) Industrial society and its future. The Washington Post. Available at: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm Lubarda B (2020) Beyond ecofascism? Far-right ecologism (FRE) as a framework for future inquiries. Environmental Values 29(6): 713–732. Ofstehage A, Wolford W and Borras SM Jr (2022) Contemporary Populism and the Environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 47: 671–696. Sedrez L (2022) Scorched land: The erosion of environmental governance during the Bolsonaro Administration. Environmental History 27(4): 657–664. Silke A and Morrison J (2022) Gathering storm: An introduction to the special issue on climate change and terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence 34(5): 883–893. Staudenmaier P (2013) Organic farming in Nazi Germany: The politics of biodynamic agriculture, 1933–1945. Environmental History 18(2): 383–411. Staudenmaier P (2022) Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics between Left and Right. Porsgrunn: New Compass Press. Taylor B (2019) Alt-right ecology: Ecofascism and far-right environmentalism in the United States. In: Forchtner B (ed.) The Far Right and the Environment. New York: Routledge, pp. 275–292.
{"title":"Moncef Marzouki, الدوحة .مجدد سياسي لفكر أسس أي : والبدائل المراجعات: [Reviews and Alternatives: Which Foundations for a Renewed Political Thought?] منصف ،المرزوقي","authors":"Amany Abdelrazek-Alsiefy","doi":"10.1177/02685809231194154c","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809231194154c","url":null,"abstract":"Forchtner B (2019) The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication. New York: Routledge. İnal O (2022) Authoritarianism, populism, and the environment in Turkey. Environmental History 27(4): 634–641. Kaczynski TJ (1995) Industrial society and its future. The Washington Post. Available at: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm Lubarda B (2020) Beyond ecofascism? Far-right ecologism (FRE) as a framework for future inquiries. Environmental Values 29(6): 713–732. Ofstehage A, Wolford W and Borras SM Jr (2022) Contemporary Populism and the Environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 47: 671–696. Sedrez L (2022) Scorched land: The erosion of environmental governance during the Bolsonaro Administration. Environmental History 27(4): 657–664. Silke A and Morrison J (2022) Gathering storm: An introduction to the special issue on climate change and terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence 34(5): 883–893. Staudenmaier P (2013) Organic farming in Nazi Germany: The politics of biodynamic agriculture, 1933–1945. Environmental History 18(2): 383–411. Staudenmaier P (2022) Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics between Left and Right. Porsgrunn: New Compass Press. Taylor B (2019) Alt-right ecology: Ecofascism and far-right environmentalism in the United States. In: Forchtner B (ed.) The Far Right and the Environment. New York: Routledge, pp. 275–292.","PeriodicalId":47662,"journal":{"name":"International Sociology","volume":"38 1","pages":"581 - 584"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42933441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194134
Housamedden Darwish
This critical review delves into Kevin Mazur’s latest publication, Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression (2021), which scrutinizes the transformation of a peaceful civil movement into a civil war characterized by ethnic divisions. The review offers a comprehensive assessment of Mazur’s approach to answering the pivotal question: How did the Syrian conflict evolve along ethnic lines? Spanning 306 pages, the book’s central premise revolves around the notion that the Syrian uprising’s evolution into an ethnicized conflict can be attributed to a confluence of factors, with the predominant catalyst being the ethnically exclusive nature of the incumbent political regime. Of particular interest in this review is the emphasis on the sectarian or ethnic perspective – a prominent lens used to analyse the political and societal landscapes of the Islamicate Arab world. Mazur’s ethno-sectarian perspective, commendably, avoids succumbing to primordial essentialism. However, this review contends that a critical appraisal is warranted regarding Mazur’s conceptualization of Syrians’ identities solely through religious, ethnic, or sectarian affiliations. Similarly, the presumption that these affiliations inherently explain attitudes towards both the ruling regime and the uprising against it raises valid concerns. One notable critique lies in the characterization of Syrians within Mazur’s narrative. Strikingly, absent are depictions of Syrians as a unified populace, individual actors or civic entities. This stems from the book’s classification framework, which hinges on two primary criteria: an ethnic-sectarian criterion and a local or regional one. This duality, while serving analytical purposes, potentially undermines the complexity and diversity inherent within Syrian society. In conclusion, this review acknowledges the significant contributions of Mazur’s book, recognizing its role in shedding light on the ethnicized trajectory of the Syrian conflict. Nonetheless, it urges cautious contemplation of the assumptions underpinning the ethnic-sectarian perspective. The book’s dual classification approach warrants critical consideration for its potential to oversimplify the multifaceted nature of Syrian identities. Thus, while appreciating the book’s value, this review underscores the need to acknowledge its limitations in fostering a comprehensive understanding of the Syrian conflict’s intricate dynamics.
{"title":"From Peaceful Civil Movement to Civil War and Sectarian Polarization: A Critical Review of Kevin Mazur’s Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression","authors":"Housamedden Darwish","doi":"10.1177/02685809231194134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809231194134","url":null,"abstract":"This critical review delves into Kevin Mazur’s latest publication, Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression (2021), which scrutinizes the transformation of a peaceful civil movement into a civil war characterized by ethnic divisions. The review offers a comprehensive assessment of Mazur’s approach to answering the pivotal question: How did the Syrian conflict evolve along ethnic lines? Spanning 306 pages, the book’s central premise revolves around the notion that the Syrian uprising’s evolution into an ethnicized conflict can be attributed to a confluence of factors, with the predominant catalyst being the ethnically exclusive nature of the incumbent political regime. Of particular interest in this review is the emphasis on the sectarian or ethnic perspective – a prominent lens used to analyse the political and societal landscapes of the Islamicate Arab world. Mazur’s ethno-sectarian perspective, commendably, avoids succumbing to primordial essentialism. However, this review contends that a critical appraisal is warranted regarding Mazur’s conceptualization of Syrians’ identities solely through religious, ethnic, or sectarian affiliations. Similarly, the presumption that these affiliations inherently explain attitudes towards both the ruling regime and the uprising against it raises valid concerns. One notable critique lies in the characterization of Syrians within Mazur’s narrative. Strikingly, absent are depictions of Syrians as a unified populace, individual actors or civic entities. This stems from the book’s classification framework, which hinges on two primary criteria: an ethnic-sectarian criterion and a local or regional one. This duality, while serving analytical purposes, potentially undermines the complexity and diversity inherent within Syrian society. In conclusion, this review acknowledges the significant contributions of Mazur’s book, recognizing its role in shedding light on the ethnicized trajectory of the Syrian conflict. Nonetheless, it urges cautious contemplation of the assumptions underpinning the ethnic-sectarian perspective. The book’s dual classification approach warrants critical consideration for its potential to oversimplify the multifaceted nature of Syrian identities. Thus, while appreciating the book’s value, this review underscores the need to acknowledge its limitations in fostering a comprehensive understanding of the Syrian conflict’s intricate dynamics.","PeriodicalId":47662,"journal":{"name":"International Sociology","volume":"38 1","pages":"552 - 561"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49170914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194135b
Adfer Rashid Shah
Third, even if we agree with the principle of public sociology, does it really need to be encouraged or promoted within the academy? Given, as acknowledged by Burawoy, that there is already public sociology conducted elsewhere, why would we need to embark upon this exercise within a university and professional research setting? How would, for instance, academic recruitment be affected by Burawoy’s stance? If we were to follow his stance, should we recruit junior academics whose political commitments (and political associations) align with ours? Should we evaluate students’ work (including PhDs) on a similar basis? One can see that this easily leads to a problematic and at worst sectarian academic culture. Fourth, there is a broader methodological issue, one that is intimately connected to Burawoy’s insistence that public sociologists are supposed to learn as much from the publics that they serve, as these publics do from them. If this is indeed his position and that of his fellow public sociologists, then various questions arise. Most importantly, how reliable is this ‘local’ knowledge generated by the public(s) and how do public sociologists evaluate this knowledge? Would it not be vital, especially in some circumstances, for public sociologists to take critical distance from his knowledge provided by their public(s)? Similarly, what distinguishes expertise in the social sciences from the knowledge generated by the publics?
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194130
Lauri von Pfaler
This review essay considers Vivek Chibber’s social theory of capitalism critically and develops some of the themes that a historicist social theory of capitalist stability should integrate theoretically. I start by outlining Chibber’s notable book and present its key claim about the materiality and primacy of class structure in terms of economic decision-making. I then point out the limits and antinomies of structural theory as a historical explanation, sketch the contours of a historicist methodology and provide examples of three political phenomena that are irreducible to the class structure but that have been central for the reproduction of capitalism. The final section considers the political consequences of my historicist criticism of Chibber.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194166
Daniel Little
Her ethnographic research leads her to a key conclusion: the fundamental factor providing resilience to the air traffic control system is the embodied socio-cognitive capacities and problem-solving abilities of the air traffic controllers themselves. Vaughan’s method is that of sociological ethnography. She examines the nature of the workplace, the inter-actor practices and relationships that exist in a control tower, and the rules and values that govern the culture of the controllers’ work lives. This approach requires immersion in the working lives and workspaces of the specialist controllers who are the object of her study. Her fieldwork was remarkably intensive and extended, involving lengthy periods of ‘participant-observer’ research at four Boston-area traffic control facilities. Her results derive from several different research activities: structured and unstructured interviews of participants, surveys of a larger number of individuals working within the air traffic control system, and her own annotated observations of activities, events, and practices within the control rooms themselves. Vaughan establishes that the controllers operate on the basis of constantly updated mental models of the airspace they are controlling, projecting forward the locations of the aircraft in their space. She refers to this cognitive capacity as ‘ethno-cognition’ and a specialized kind of ‘interpretive work’. Much of her research time was devoted to observing this situated social cognition in action in several air traffic control centers, and in seeking to understand the processes through which ordinary men and women gain the specialized embodied cognitive skills to be effective air traffic controllers. 1194166 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194166International SociologyReviews: Organizations and Labour review-article2023
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/02685809231194165
Hanze Xu
Recently, the value of rural Chinese areas has become increasingly prominent with the abolition of agricultural taxes, reform of rural land policy, and emphasis on rural agriculture in national policymaking. This has attracted more industrial and commercial enterprises to invest in and develop these areas, a trend known as ‘capital going to the countryside’. This has become a new phenomenon in rural China and is the empirical phenomenon on which the book focuses. Varied Attitudes Toward Insiders and Outsiders: The Social Context of Capital Going to the Countryside explores the social logic of capital going to the countryside based on an investigation of a corporate farm’s living conditions after moving to the northern Chinese countryside. Why is the industrial and commercial capital that funds agricultural operations in the countryside prone to slow progress? What difficulties and problems are prominent in these entrepreneurial farms ? What are the specific mechanisms and reasoning behind this phenomenon? These are the core issues that the book addresses. Unlike prior literature, which has attributed the failure of capital going to the countryside to issues related to supervision, incentives, and funds, Xu regards it as the bumpy interaction between external capital and rural society and summarizes it as an action logic of ‘varied attitudes toward insiders and outsiders’. In the literature review in chapter 2, Xu first examines the phenomenon of capital going to the countryside based on the macroscopic structural background of China’s urbanization model and government behavior transformation. After the tax-sharing reform, Chinese local governments’ transformation from operating businesses to operating land and the return of a significant number of resources and projects to the countryside have provided opportunities for capital to go to the countryside. Xu suggests that the outsider plight resulting from this phenomenon cannot be understood simply as a business management problem. Instead, we should probe into corporate behavior’s cultural, value, and ethical aspects and uncover the ingrained concepts behind interactions between farmers and business operators (p. 41). 1194165 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194165International SociologyReview: Economic Sociology review-article2023
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