Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the (...) relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present. (shrink)

This book investigates the relation between Durkheim’s sociology, Critical Theory, and the philosophy of social sciences. The book is organized in four sections: confronting Durkheim and other critical traditions; inquiring his social and critical ontology; interrogating the relation between social practices and justice; and discussing his relevance in contemporary politics and political theory. An international group of philosophers, sociologists, and critical theorists contribute to show Durkheim’s reflection as an important complement—or an alternative—to the Hegelian-Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of social critique. (...) In this way, the book intends to inaugurate a new reflection on social critique at the intersection between philosophy and sociological theory. (shrink)

This essay is dedicated to Durkheimian conception of justice. The Hobbesian polarization between law and justice is considered paradigmatic for modern political thought. The Durkheim contribution is a significant reformulation of Hobbes’ alternative, able to highlight differently the constitutive tension between law and justice. Durkheim’s criticism against contract theories reframes the juridical order trough the concept of solidarity, considered by Durkheim as the unthought premise to modern obligation. The contract theory, has to been considered as the modern way to think (...) the relation between society, individual, property and work. Thus, contract theory becomes the claim allowing the emergence of a new conception of justice able to call into question - by the way of the notion of fair contract – the formal premises on which contract itself is grounded. So characterized, social justice join the notion of solidarity reframing the concept of obligation itself. (shrink)

L’article propose une relecture du texte Die Sitte publié par Ferdinand Tönnies en 1909. Ce texte nous donne une perspective stratégique pour améliorer notre compréhension de la longue réflexion que Tönnies consacre, pendant toute sa vie, au concept de communauté. Il nous montre que cette entreprise théorique contribue à réévaluer la notion d’obligation dont la pensée politique moderne a fait une notion clé depuis Hobbes. En ce sens, la sociologie de Tönnies participe d’une intention théorique qui est au cœur du (...) projet de la sociologie classique. Cette intention consiste à voir dans la sociologie une intervention épistémique dans la pensée politique des modernes capable de produire une critique de ses concepts fondamentaux. (shrink)