Pub Date : 2024-01-02DOI: 10.1177/13684310231221251
Barbara Adam
The social sciences have established a plethora of ways to approach the future. Sidestepping any direct engagement with the not-yet has emerged as the dominant way to deal with its assumed non-factual nature. Social theory has laid the foundations for this bracketing with the three overarching key foci on function, meaning and structure. This article considers some of the consequences of treating the not-yet as immaterial for knowledge practices and shows the tradition to be no longer appropriate for the contemporary world. It frames arising issues through the significantly expanded perspective of the Anthropocene to revisit past approaches, explore contemporary challenges and trouble habits of mind in order to open up ways to take futurity and futuring seriously.
{"title":"Tempering the not-yet: Towards a social theory for the Anthropocene","authors":"Barbara Adam","doi":"10.1177/13684310231221251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231221251","url":null,"abstract":"The social sciences have established a plethora of ways to approach the future. Sidestepping any direct engagement with the not-yet has emerged as the dominant way to deal with its assumed non-factual nature. Social theory has laid the foundations for this bracketing with the three overarching key foci on function, meaning and structure. This article considers some of the consequences of treating the not-yet as immaterial for knowledge practices and shows the tradition to be no longer appropriate for the contemporary world. It frames arising issues through the significantly expanded perspective of the Anthropocene to revisit past approaches, explore contemporary challenges and trouble habits of mind in order to open up ways to take futurity and futuring seriously.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"112 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139391338","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-14DOI: 10.1177/13684310231215892
Lucy Ford, Neal Harris
In this article, we argue that E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of ‘meta-economics’ and of ‘scale’ as a means for advancing ecological social critique. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher’s approach, we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our article acknowledging his partisan metaphysics and his insensitivity to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher’s approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within and beyond critical political ecology.
在本文中，我们认为 E. F. 舒马赫的《小即是美》为当代社会理论提供了重要启示。尤其是，我们重点讨论了他使用 "元经济学 "和 "规模 "作为推进生态社会批判的手段的优点。我们赞同舒马赫的方法，但也注意到他的理论想象力的局限性，并在文章开头承认他的党派形而上学和对全球政治动态的不敏感。为了解决这个问题，我们要证明舒马赫提供的核心批判性见解可以从这些问题中得到实质性的解脱。因此，我们在此的任务是对舒马赫的社会生态批判方法进行批判性的重建，我们认为这种方法有可能塑造批判政治生态学内外的当代社会理论。
{"title":"Meta-economics, scale and contemporary social theory: Re-reading E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful","authors":"Lucy Ford, Neal Harris","doi":"10.1177/13684310231215892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231215892","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we argue that E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of ‘meta-economics’ and of ‘scale’ as a means for advancing ecological social critique. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher’s approach, we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our article acknowledging his partisan metaphysics and his insensitivity to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher’s approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within and beyond critical political ecology.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138973239","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.1177/13684310231211484
Kerry Mitchell
{"title":"Book review: The Making of Meaning: From the Individual to Social Order, Selections from Niklas Luhmann’s Works on Semantics and Social Structure","authors":"Kerry Mitchell","doi":"10.1177/13684310231211484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231211484","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139225951","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.1177/13684310231212732
Sören Altstaedt
The futures of humanity and planet Earth are at stake. This is reflected not only in the increasingly dire future imaginations of billions of people around the world but also in an ever-increasing body of future-related literature in the social sciences and humanities. However, despite growing sociological engagement with the future, an astonishing desideratum remains: the dissemination of future imaginations. Although many works imply that future imaginations disseminate, they rarely spell out how the cultural mechanisms of dissemination work. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures to conceptualize how future imaginations disseminate throughout the social, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. I conceptualize the future-cultures framework in three steps: (1) how future-cultures generate future-cultural codes, which select and classify (il-)legitimate future imaginations, sites of futuring and futuring practices; (2) how future-cultural codes relate different (futuring) practices and discourses into broader practice-/discourse-complexes, which (3) organize transversally in fields of futuring and modes of futuring, thereby disseminating distinct future imaginations over space and time.
{"title":"Future-cultures: How future imaginations disseminate throughout the social","authors":"Sören Altstaedt","doi":"10.1177/13684310231212732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231212732","url":null,"abstract":"The futures of humanity and planet Earth are at stake. This is reflected not only in the increasingly dire future imaginations of billions of people around the world but also in an ever-increasing body of future-related literature in the social sciences and humanities. However, despite growing sociological engagement with the future, an astonishing desideratum remains: the dissemination of future imaginations. Although many works imply that future imaginations disseminate, they rarely spell out how the cultural mechanisms of dissemination work. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures to conceptualize how future imaginations disseminate throughout the social, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. I conceptualize the future-cultures framework in three steps: (1) how future-cultures generate future-cultural codes, which select and classify (il-)legitimate future imaginations, sites of futuring and futuring practices; (2) how future-cultural codes relate different (futuring) practices and discourses into broader practice-/discourse-complexes, which (3) organize transversally in fields of futuring and modes of futuring, thereby disseminating distinct future imaginations over space and time.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139217385","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1177/13684310231205258
Simone Varriale
{"title":"Book Review: Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations: Visions of Italy and the Italians in England and Britain from the Renaissance to the Present Day","authors":"Simone Varriale","doi":"10.1177/13684310231205258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231205258","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139235786","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-03DOI: 10.1177/13684310231204540
Nick J. Fox
This article considers how the relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology of the new materialisms can inform a theory of the contemporary capitalist state, and how this perspective offers a distinctive resolution of some of the negative consequences of a capitalist mode of production. It summarises Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism as an international/ecumenical social formation, founded upon a ‘capitalist axiomatic’: namely, the free flows of capital and labour required for the everyday workings of the capitalist market. The state is a material realisation of this capitalist axiomatic. The article then undertakes a more-than-human analysis of capitalist production and markets, supply and demand, in terms of affects and assemblages. The article invokes the metaphor of a ‘black hole’ to suggest that capitalism is not merely exploitative of workers, but a formation from which neither worker nor entrepreneur can escape once a participant. Furthermore, it is these more-than-human affects that produce undesirable consequences including uncertainty, waste and social inequalities. This second analysis further refines a monist understanding of the capitalist state and suggests immediate measures to counter the unintended consequences of a market economy.
{"title":"Capitalism and the state: A new materialist perspective","authors":"Nick J. Fox","doi":"10.1177/13684310231204540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231204540","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how the relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology of the new materialisms can inform a theory of the contemporary capitalist state, and how this perspective offers a distinctive resolution of some of the negative consequences of a capitalist mode of production. It summarises Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism as an international/ecumenical social formation, founded upon a ‘capitalist axiomatic’: namely, the free flows of capital and labour required for the everyday workings of the capitalist market. The state is a material realisation of this capitalist axiomatic. The article then undertakes a more-than-human analysis of capitalist production and markets, supply and demand, in terms of affects and assemblages. The article invokes the metaphor of a ‘black hole’ to suggest that capitalism is not merely exploitative of workers, but a formation from which neither worker nor entrepreneur can escape once a participant. Furthermore, it is these more-than-human affects that produce undesirable consequences including uncertainty, waste and social inequalities. This second analysis further refines a monist understanding of the capitalist state and suggests immediate measures to counter the unintended consequences of a market economy.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135868772","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}
Pub Date : 2023-10-27DOI: 10.1177/13684310231206677
Noel Castree
Etienne Benson’s book Surroundings (2020) details the emergence and history of the now ubiquitous signifier ‘the environment’. Today, the environment performs all manner of work cognitively and normatively, as Benson shows. His book ends with a plea that diversity be fostered in the immediate environments people inhabit. However, this unremarkable aspiration is foiled by two absences in his otherwise fine book. One is a proper treatment of social power and how, discursively and materially, powerful people and organisations routinely diminish existing environmental variety. The other is the ‘gigantism’ associated with twenty-first century capitalism and technoscience. Benson’s analysis, in the end, misses key drivers affecting the content and affects of the environment as a signifier.
{"title":"Who gets to speak for the environment, how and to what ends?","authors":"Noel Castree","doi":"10.1177/13684310231206677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231206677","url":null,"abstract":"Etienne Benson’s book Surroundings (2020) details the emergence and history of the now ubiquitous signifier ‘the environment’. Today, the environment performs all manner of work cognitively and normatively, as Benson shows. His book ends with a plea that diversity be fostered in the immediate environments people inhabit. However, this unremarkable aspiration is foiled by two absences in his otherwise fine book. One is a proper treatment of social power and how, discursively and materially, powerful people and organisations routinely diminish existing environmental variety. The other is the ‘gigantism’ associated with twenty-first century capitalism and technoscience. Benson’s analysis, in the end, misses key drivers affecting the content and affects of the environment as a signifier.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"BC-21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136261925","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}
Pub Date : 2023-10-27DOI: 10.1177/13684310231206327
Leonidas Tsilipakos
This article demonstrates the underappreciated import and potential of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, a classic work published 65 years ago. Its aim is not simply to correct misunderstandings of Winch but to rehabilitate the text as indispensable for understanding past and present woes and cementing the future of sociological endeavour. I reconstruct and defend the claims put forth by Winch and then explicitly draw out their implications, which demonstrate the incoherence of the predominant disciplinary self-image that sees sociology as having a method and/or critical thinking prerogative. This problematic self-conception is jeopardizing the coherence and wider relevance of sociology and is responsible for its perennial difficulties in articulating a mode of discourse that can be seen as cogent by the public. A defensible alternative sees sociology as a second-order study of practices that is premised on a conceptually accurate relation to those practices and on answerability to the criteria and abilities of understanding, description, explanation and criticism they afford. This conception can support the reconfiguration of existing forms of sociological inquiry as well as the development of new ones.
{"title":"Winch’s <i>Idea</i> at sixty-five: Its point and implications for the prospects of sociology","authors":"Leonidas Tsilipakos","doi":"10.1177/13684310231206327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231206327","url":null,"abstract":"This article demonstrates the underappreciated import and potential of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, a classic work published 65 years ago. Its aim is not simply to correct misunderstandings of Winch but to rehabilitate the text as indispensable for understanding past and present woes and cementing the future of sociological endeavour. I reconstruct and defend the claims put forth by Winch and then explicitly draw out their implications, which demonstrate the incoherence of the predominant disciplinary self-image that sees sociology as having a method and/or critical thinking prerogative. This problematic self-conception is jeopardizing the coherence and wider relevance of sociology and is responsible for its perennial difficulties in articulating a mode of discourse that can be seen as cogent by the public. A defensible alternative sees sociology as a second-order study of practices that is premised on a conceptually accurate relation to those practices and on answerability to the criteria and abilities of understanding, description, explanation and criticism they afford. This conception can support the reconfiguration of existing forms of sociological inquiry as well as the development of new ones.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136261761","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}
Pub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1177/13684310231199709
Christopher Thorpe
{"title":"Book review: Jeffrey Alexander and Cultural Sociology","authors":"Christopher Thorpe","doi":"10.1177/13684310231199709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231199709","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135696807","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}
Pub Date : 2023-08-28DOI: 10.1177/13684310231188888
Felix Kämper
In this article, I apply the colonization thesis from Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action to capitalist societies’ relationships with their natural environment. Resolving the fixation of his critique of capitalism on the so-called lifeworld ( Lebenswelt) to include questions of the environment ( Umwelt) opens up new vistas in the ongoing ecological reorientation of Critical Theory. If we think about the exploitation of the natural environment in Habermasian terms, the paradoxical irrationality of the expansion of instrumental rationality from the market mechanism becomes evident, providing us with normative leverage against the systemic devastation of external nature. The conversed colonization thesis calls for promoting the ecological preconditions for self-determined societal development through the collective containment of capitalist dynamics: since it undermines the enabling capacities of the ecosystems based on which the ‘project of modernity’ thrives, economic instrumentalization of nature can no longer proliferate.
{"title":"On the colonization of the environment","authors":"Felix Kämper","doi":"10.1177/13684310231188888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231188888","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I apply the colonization thesis from Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action to capitalist societies’ relationships with their natural environment. Resolving the fixation of his critique of capitalism on the so-called lifeworld ( Lebenswelt) to include questions of the environment ( Umwelt) opens up new vistas in the ongoing ecological reorientation of Critical Theory. If we think about the exploitation of the natural environment in Habermasian terms, the paradoxical irrationality of the expansion of instrumental rationality from the market mechanism becomes evident, providing us with normative leverage against the systemic devastation of external nature. The conversed colonization thesis calls for promoting the ecological preconditions for self-determined societal development through the collective containment of capitalist dynamics: since it undermines the enabling capacities of the ecosystems based on which the ‘project of modernity’ thrives, economic instrumentalization of nature can no longer proliferate.","PeriodicalId":47808,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Social Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43286935","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：