This article frames diversity and recommends that it be reconciled with contrasting values. Diversity cannot stand by itself. At its most abstract level, diversity can be seen to be on a continuum with unity or with sameness and for diversity to become meaningful, these dilemmas must be reconciled, so that, for example, we are diverse in our expressions but the same in our rights to express that diversity.

This article frames diversity and recommends that it be reconciled with contrasting values. Diversity cannot stand by itself. At its most abstract level, diversity can be seen to be on a continuum with unity or with sameness and for diversity to become meaningful, these dilemmas must be reconciled, so that, for example, we are diverse in our expressions but the same in our rights to express that diversity.

Since its appearance in 1962, Habermas' concept of Öffentlichkeit has gained and lost significant valencies. Originally a response to concerns about the state of German political culture shared by political radicals and conservatives alike, it was later incorporated into Habermas' broader concerns with the character of human communication more generally. In recent years Habermas has returned to problems that motivated the earlier work, but has sought to make sense of them using his ‘mature’ concept of Öffentlichkeit. The results of this (...) have been mixed, both analytically and politically; this is illustrated by his recent statements about religion and the public sphere. (shrink)

Classic and canon -- Description -- Categories -- Metaphors -- Diagrams -- Cynicism and scepticism : two intellectual styles -- Sociological theory and the art of living.

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they (...) may not be best equipped. (shrink)

Habermas’s recent writings on the future of Europe advocate a European constitution as a means of consolidating the achievements of post-war social democracy and providing European level institutions with a normative foundation without the need to appeal to the idea of Europe as a ‘community of fate’. This article argues that, while these aims are laudable, the terms in which Habermas formulates them owe much both to a domestic German agenda and to his theory of communicative rationality and the public (...) sphere, which restricts the horizon within which the legitimacy of a European polity might be discussed and entails premature assumptions about what the core of a European identity consists in. It ends by suggesting an alternative sense of the European achievement and European identity. (shrink)

Habermas’s recent writings on the future of Europe advocate a European constitution as a means of consolidating the achievements of post-war social democracy and providing European level institutions with a normative foundation without the need to appeal to the idea of Europe as a ‘community of fate’. This article argues that, while these aims are laudable, the terms in which Habermas formulates them owe much both to a domestic German agenda and to his theory of communicative rationality and the public (...) sphere, which restricts the horizon within which the legitimacy of a European polity might be discussed and entails premature assumptions about what the core of a European identity consists in. It ends by suggesting an alternative sense of the European achievement and European identity. (shrink)

This article argues that Mannheim's work contains three distinct accounts of utopia. Two of these - utopia in its classical meaning as opposition to the given and utopia in its association with democratic planning - are well known. The third is found in Mannheim's reflections on the problem of ecstasy. In suggesting a utopia of individualist self-defnition and `pure relationship' it anticipates the recent writings of Beck, Bauman and Giddens.

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too.... Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a talk; (...) it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. (Edmund Burke). (shrink)

Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology. There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambivalences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of society (...) in terms of social groups and an acknowledgement of modern individualism; sociology’s location somewhere between literature and science; and sociology’s awkward response to the claim – made by both Catholic conservatives and Marxists – that modern industrial and post-industrial society cannot be a society of estates. These ambivalences may help to explain why the attempts to use social types for the purpose of cultural diagnosis – from the interesting portrait of arbitrarily selected positions in the division of labour to more ambitious guesswork about modern culture’s dominant ‘characters’ – have been unconvincing. (shrink)

Written by leading theorists and empirical researchers, this book presents new ways of addressing the old question: Why did religion first emerge and then continue to evolve in all human societies? The authors of the book--each with a different background across the social sciences and humanities -- assimilate conceptual leads and empirical findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neurology, primate behavioral studies, explanations of human interaction and group dynamics, and a wide range of religious scholarship to construct a deeper (...) and more powerful explanation of the origins and subsequent evolutionary development of religions than can be currently found in what is now vast literature. While explaining religion has been a central question in many disciplines for a long time, this book draws upon a much wider array of literatures to develop a robust and cross-disciplinary analysis of religion. The book remains true to its subtitle by emphasizing an array of both biological and sociocultural forms of selection dynamics that are fundamental to explaining religion as a universal institution in human societies. In addition to Darwinian selection, which can explain the biology and neurology of religion, the book outlines a set of four additional types of sociocultural natural selection that can explain fill out the explanation of why religion first emerged as an institutional system in human societies, and why it has continued to evolve over the last 200,000 years of societal evolution. These sociocultural forms of natural selection are labeled by the names of the early sociologists who first emphasized them; and these can be seen as a necessary supplement to the type of natural selection theorized by Charles Darwin. Explanations of religion that remain in the shadow cast by Darwin's great insights will, it is argued, remain narrow and incomplete when explaining a robust sociocultural phenomena like religion. (shrink)

These essays showcase the value of the narrative arts in investigating complex conflicts of value in moral and political life, and explore the philosophical problem of moral dilemmas as expressed in ancient drama, classic and contemporary novels, television, film, and popular fiction. From Aeschylus to Deadwood, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harry Potter, the authors show how the narrative arts provide some of our most valuable instruments for complex and sensitive moral inquiry.

We know from the research literature that psychotherapy is effective, but we also know that hundreds of diverse therapies are being practiced that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny; thus, in some circumstances iatrogenic effects do occur. Therefore, it is crucial that we recognize and implement therapeutic interventions that are evidence based rather than succumb to ethical dilemma, frustration, and complacency. Recommendations for family therapists are discussed, including the need to (a) keep abreast of research findings, (b) translate research (...) findings and developments as they apply to clinical practice, (c) prioritize techniques and intervention models, and (d) reexamine funding priorities and research foci. (shrink)

Last year I published a short article urging bioethicists to carefully examine the question of what ought to constitute the canonical issues topics and questions driving research and teaching in bioethics. Why some subjects dominate the field whereas other topics are regarded as matters for scholars in other disciplines is a question that has intrigued me for nearly a decade. How are the boundaries of bioethics established? What factors influence research agendas and the creation of bioethics curricula? How do funding (...) agencies, editors, and leading scholars shape the field of bioethics? These questions are increasingly receiving scrutiny from Charles Bosk, Raymond De Vries, and other researchers as they explore the sociology of bioethics and the “construction” of the “ethical enterprise.". (shrink)

Particularly during the 1940s, Robert Merton developed a loosely knit methodological program including such key concepts as "structure and functional analysis" and "middle range theories" which provided guidance for sociological work over several decades and which retains some considerable relevance today. However, there are inconsistencies and incompletions in this program which have become more problematic over time. The paper questions the depth of these difficulties and also points out that in the historical circumstances of a limited stimulus provided by the (...) paucity of critique written at the time and Robert Merton's operational style, it is not surprising that difficulties were not attended to. Key Words: Merton • methodological program • classics in sociology • functional analysis • middle-range theory. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, (...) some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer. (shrink)

Intending the recovery of human agency with the aid of theories of human socio-cultural life, Turner and Harre do so however in terms of conflicting conceptions of the embodying of persons. Consequently, their theories share the problem of determinism and embodied human agency. This is the problem of the proper location of agency with regard to the person, the body, and society. These theories then are in fundamental conflict on exactly this issue of the proper location of agency. (...) class='Hi'>Turner's thesis of location: in the beginning is the body, and therefore the person. Thus Turner's recovery of agency: the effectiveness of persons resides in the discourse-independent agency of the bodies of persons. Harre's thesis of location: in the beginning is the person, and therefore the body. Thus Harre's recovery of agency: the effectiveness of persons resides in the discursive agency of persons embodied. For both Turner and Harre the intent to recover agency through embodiment is also a scientific intent. Thus, the problem of the proper location of agency requires that agency must be formulated in terms of ubiquitous determinism and not regularity determinism: only the former provides a conception of causal powers. To answer the question of location Turner is led to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and its conception of the lived body. Instead, Harre enlists a realist philosophy of science with its special conception of causual powers. A systematic conception of agentive causation is shown to constitute the recovery of human agency and to enable us to make principled determinations in the assignment of agency. It is argued that, since phenomenology presumes the ontology of regularity determinism, it cannot provide us with what it in fact denies, a conception of causal powers. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty moved from his idea of the actual body as lived to the actual body as flesh, and in that reformulation it is best understood as causal powers. It is argued that without a conception of causal powers Turner's use of the lived body to establish the agency of effective persons must fail, revealing instead that the effectiveness of persons is the discursive agency of persons embodied. Persons discursively embodied enact the practices of speech acts and action signs systems. (shrink)

Victor Turner's comparative symbology provides a description of liminality, marginality, and liminoid genres that can be usefully applied to positioning theology in a theory of practice, determining its social location, and assessing its future meaning. This paper argues not only that theological marginality is a result of the secularization of culture but also that the breach with theology's pubiics reflects a more significant internal breach that is essential to theology as a liminoid form of public reflexivity. The paper draws (...) from deconstructionist philosophy and defines the interpretive task of theology as a deconstructionist hermeneutic. (shrink)

The 1981 book Genes, Mind and Culture by Edward O. Wilson and Charles J. Lumsden attempts to offer a comprehensive theory of the linkage between biological and cultural evolution. In the following 21 May 1982 radio broadcast, produced by Julian Brown under the auspices of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Wilson is joined by a philosopher, a geneticist, and a religion scholar in a discussion of “gene culture co‐evolution” and of other issues raised by sociobiology. The discussion is introduced and (...) chaired by the editor of Nature, John Maddox. (shrink)

Charles Perrow used the term normal accidents to characterize a type of catastrophic failure that resulted when complex, tightly coupled production systems encountered a certain kind of anomalous event. These were events in which systems failures interacted with one another in a way that could not be anticipated, and could not be easily understood and corrected. Systems of the production of expert knowledge are increasingly becoming tightly coupled. Unlike classical science, which operated with a long time horizon, many current (...) forms of expert knowledge are directed at immediate solutions to complex problems. These are prone to breakdowns like the kind discussed by Perrow. The example of the Homestake mine experiment shows that even in modern physics complex systems can produce knowledge failures that last for decades. The concept of knowledge risk is introduced, and used to characterize the risk of failure in such systems of knowledge production. (shrink)

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play in political violence are identified and (...) evaluated. In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states. (shrink)

Charles Ellwood is usually described as a junior member of the founding generation of American Sociology. Ellwood fulfils many of the standard stereotypes of the American sociology student of the era. He was born on a farm and, after winning a state scholarship, went to Cornell, as he himself noted, ‘because it was virtually the state university of New York’.1 He then went directly on to the University of Chicago, where he was converted only partially from his concerns with (...) social problems to a theorist. He was one of the first PhDs in sociology from the University, and the first Chicago Sociology PhD to hold a position in sociology at a major university other than Chicago itself: a large land grant university in the Midwest, Missouri. He stayed there for most of his career until leaving for Duke, an institution with a strong religious orientation that prized him for his religious writings. (shrink)

Cognition, and mental processes, played an important role in early social theory, especially in the thought of Comte and Spencer, but a gradually reduced role in the “classics,” and a minimal role in what became the “Standard Social Science Model.” This is now changing, so this history has become quite relevant. Comte is known for his interest in phrenology, but this interest took the form of a critique of phrenology as well as of the faculty psychology of the time. This (...) critique pointed toward a modern view of cognition. Herbert Spencer, whose reputation in cognitive science is deservedly high, provided a fully developed account of basic cognition that pointed to key issues of societal explanation that preserved individualism, supporting a view of society as a spontaneous order, and also qualified his view of the social organism. Despite his great influence, this development was largely cut off when social scientists absorbed and transformed neo-Kantianism and combined it with Völkerpsychologie into a model of culture that transferred cognitive issues to the collective level. The later social psychological use of “attitude” as a surrogate for cognitive processes also blocked a cognitively based account of society, as proposed by sociologists like Charles Ellwood. (shrink)

TOC -/- 0. Introduction (SN/CW) -/- I. Revisiting vitalist themes in 19th-century science -/- 1. Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability 2. in the History of Life and Death 3. Joan Steigerwald (York) – Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 4. Juan Rigoli (Geneva) –The “Novel of Medicine” 5. Sean Dyde (Cambridge) – Life and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Somaticism in the Wake of Phrenology. -/- II. Twentieth (...) century debates on vitalism in science and philosophy -/- 6. Brian Garrett (McMaster) – Vitalism versus Emergent Materialism 7. Christophe Malaterre (Paris) – Life as an Emergent Phenomenon: from an Alternative to Vitalism to an Alternative to Reductionism 8. Sebastian Normandin (Montreal) – Wilhelm Reich: Vitalism and Its Discontents 9. Chiara Elettra Ferrario (Wellington) and Luigi Corsi (Pisa) – Kurt Goldstein: Vitalism and the Organismic Approach 10. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris/Warwick) – The Origins of Canguilhem’s “Vitalism”. Against the Anthropology of Irritation -/- III. Vitalism and contemporary biological developments -/- 11. William Bechtel (UCSD) — Dynamic Mechanistic Explanation: Addressing the Vitalists’ Objections to Mechanistic Science 12. John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley (Exeter) – Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism 13. J. Scott Turner (Syracuse) – Homeostasis and the forgotten vitalist roots of adaptation -/- . (shrink)