What is the relevance of Luc Boltanski’s ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ to central issues in contemporary social and political analysis? In seeking to respond to this question, this book contains critical commentaries from prominent social theorists attempting to map out the influence and broad scope of Boltanski’s oeuvre.

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on (...) the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the revival of `virtue ethics'. If we regard human rights as a crucial development in the establishment of global institutions of justice and equality, then we need to explore the obligations that correspond to such rights. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue a respect for other cultures and an ironic stance towards one's own culture spells out this obligation side of the human rights movement. Cosmopolitanism of course can assume very different forms. The article (...) traces various cosmopolitan ethics from the Greeks, Roman Stoics and Christian philosophers. Contemporary cosmopolitanism needs to be ironic to function usefully in hybrid global cultures, but it is open to the charge of being culturally `flat' and elitist. These criticisms are examined through the confrontation between Maurizio Viroli and Martha Nussbaum. While American patriotism is not a promising foundation for ironic cosmopolitanism, the republican tradition of virtue does offer a viable method of developing cosmopolitanism. Ironic cosmopolitan care for other cultures is founded on the commonalities of social existence, of which there are two central components: ontological vulnerability and political precariousness. (shrink)

A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy can be more easily disconnected from the institutionalized framework (...) of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

In contemporary sociology, there has been significant interest in the idea of mobility, the decline of the nation state, the rise of flexible citizenship, and the porous quality of political boundaries. There is much talk of medicine without borders and sociology without borders. These social developments are obviously linked to the processes of globalization, leading some to argue that we need a `sociology beyond society' in order to account for these flows and global networks. In this article, I propose an (...) alternative analysis. There are important developments involving the securitization of modern societies that create significant forms of immobility. One striking illustration is the increasing use of walls to quarantine or secure territories and communities against outsiders or to regulate the flow of migrants in Israel, in Europe and along the Mexican-US border. Modern societies are in particular characterized by a deep contradiction between the economic need for labour mobility and the state's political need to assert sovereignty. Gated societies, ghettoes, quarantine zones, prisons, camps and similar arrangements are in many respects pre-modern institutions of spatial regulation for political ends. Contemporary technical developments in biomedicine offer new opportunities for political control and spatial regulation in terms of forensic policing, bio-tattooing and bioprofiling. Globalization paradoxically produces significant forms of immobility for political regulation of persons alongside the mobility of goods and services. (shrink)

The sociological debate about globalization has often neglected the place of religion in a global age. This absence is problematic, given the creative role of the world religions in the shaping of the modernization and globalization processes. This article treats globalization as a particular phase of the general process of modernity, and considers religion in terms of four paradoxes. The first (the Nietzsche paradox) argues that, against the received wisdom, fundamentalism is a form of modernization. Although religious fundamentalism may be (...) a reaction to the hybridity brought about by globalization, it is not a traditional reaction. The second (the Parsonian paradox) argues that modernization and globalization constitute religion as a special and separate institutional sphere of society, and hence transform religion into a problem of modernity. Fundamentalism attempts to reverse this pattern and, in the marginal societies of the global system, fundamentalist religion challenges this western version of modernized religion. The third (the McLuhan paradox) is that religious values in a global village expose the incommensurability of cultural systems, but relativism is not easily sustained in practice and globalization paradoxically increases the need for human rights universalism. While nationalism as a framework for cultures conflicts with attempts to develop general systems of rights discourse, it is not evident that the creation of alternative rights systems (such as Confucian codes) appears to be immediately viable. The final (the Montaigne paradox) explores the contradiction between Orientalism as a necessary consequence of the discovery of Otherness and Otherness as a necessary experience of cosmopolitan humanism. The article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of cosmopolitan virtue in the context of these paradoxes of globalization and religion. (shrink)

It is a common complaint that sociology has little regard for history. One important exception to this standard criticism is the sociology of religion of Robert N. Bellah and his ‘revival’ of Karl Jasper’s notion of the axial age. In this article, Bellah’s evolutionary notions of religion are explored within a debate about historical disjunctures and continuities. A significant challenge to the idea of the continuity of axial-age religions comes from the notion of an Anthropocene. Our relationship to nature has (...) fundamentally changed and the possibilities for ‘improving’ the human body create a significant ontological challenge to the continuity/preservation of embodied practice as the underpinning of axial-age religions. The Anthropocene age presents a turning away from the religious legacies of the past, because biotechnical developments change not only our relationship to nature but they presage a radical change to the human body. Can the axial-age religions as our contemporaries survive the construction of hybrid post-bodies? In conclusion, insofar as there has been a ‘protestantization’ of religions with modernity involving an erosion of habitualized religion, an individualized and dis-embodied religiosity may be compatible with our anthropocenic future, but this possibility represents a discontinuity with the past and not a continuity. (shrink)

In traditional societies, knowledge is organized in hierarchical chains through which authority is legitimated by custom. Because the majority of the population is illiterate, sacred knowledge is conveyed orally and ritualistically, but the ultimate source of religious authority is typically invested in the Book. The hadith are a good example of traditional practice. These chains of Islamic knowledge were also characteristically local, consensual and lay, unlike in Christianity, with its emergent ecclesiastical bureaucracies, episcopal structures and ordained priests. In one sense, (...) Islam has no church. While there are important institutional differences between the world religions, network society opens up significant challenges to traditional authority, rapidly increasing the flow of religious knowledge and commodities. With global flows of knowledge on the Internet, power is no longer embodied and the person is simply a switchpoint in the information flow. The logic of networking is that control cannot be concentrated for long at any single point in the system; knowledge, which is by definition only temporary, is democratically produced at an infinite number of sites. In this Andy Warhol world, every human can, in principle, have their own site. While the Chinese Communist Party and several Middle Eastern states attempt to control this flow, their efforts are only partially successful. The result is that traditional forms of religious authority are constantly disrupted and challenged, but at the same time the Internet creates new opportunities for evangelism, religious instruction and piety. The outcome of these processes is, however, unknown and unknowable. There is a need, therefore, to invent a new theory of authority that is post-Weberian in reconstructing the conventional format of charisma, tradition and legal rationalism. (shrink)

The human body has been a potent and persistent metaphor for social and political relations throughout human history. For example, different parts of the body have traditionally represented different social functions. We refer to the ‘head of state’ without really recognizing the metaphor, and the heart has been a rich source of ideas about life, imagination and emotions. The heart is the house of the soul and the book of life, and the ‘tables of the heart’ provided an insight into (...) the whole of Nature. The hand also plays an important role in conventional imagination regarding things that are beautiful (handsome) or damaged and incomplete (handicap). We can generalize from these diverse examples to argue that the fluids flowing from the inside of the body to the outside are regarded as socially dangerous and contaminating, because these fluids on the outside of the body directly challenge our sense of order and orderliness. This inside/outside division of the body combines with a wet/dry dichotomy to delineate these risky borders. Although leaking bodies have been a source of ancient metaphors of disorder, the modern world, that sociologists increasingly characterize by its liquidity, is peculiarly fascinated by flow as an image of global flexibility. The more our world is economically and militarily interconnected, the more we fear social fluidity. In political terms, asylum seekers and terrorists are thought not to respect our bodies or our borders; we are especially sensitive to their capacity to disrupt the solidity of sovereignty. In short, metaphors of the human body, even in an age of high technology, continue to shape the social and political imagination, but they are challenged by emerging metaphors of liquidity, that is by liquid modernity. (shrink)

The sociology of language has been concerned primarily with the use of language in everyday interactions, resulting in important theoretical contributions, particularly to conversation analysis. In responding to Simon Susen’s “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, which emphasizes the inherent “sociality” of symbolic forms, this article directs attention to an important location of language, namely to its role in public rituals or liturgies. Looking at the history of the Book of Common Prayer within the framework (...) of symbolic violence, this article examines the power struggles over public rituals that over time came to shape the very notion of “Englishness” through shared, if contested, liturgical worship. (shrink)

The book guides the student and scholar through the vast array of approaches and frameworks that shape contemporary analysis of social reality.

The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture the actual complexity of Europe’s borders. There are four religious and thus four cultural-symbolic (...) borders, which are increasingly defining the continent: north-western Europe is Protestant, southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox and increasingly nationalist, and the South and Near East are Muslim. The cultural purity and the values that Europe craves in search of identity and order are simply not available in a world of global interconnectedness and social diversity. (shrink)

The concept of generation has had little refinement and application in recent sociology. After reviewing the literature, this article modifies Mannheim's original conceptualization through Bourdieu's notion of habitus, with the aim of providing a framework for the comparative study of generations. To this end, generation is defined as a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate (...) the cohort over a finite period of time. (shrink)

The Huntington thesis of the clash of cultures and American foreign policy analysis are both aspects of the legacy of Carl Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe. This article explores Schmitt's political theology as the theoretical basis of modern politics in terms of the concepts of state sovereignty and the idea of a permanent emergency. Within this Schmittian framework, the analysis of Islam as presented by writers such as Huntington, Fukuyama and Barber is critically analysed. Their analysis of fundamentalism and (...) political Islam fails to grasp the complexity and diversity of modern Islam. The article concludes by examining a number of social and economic processes that make the political division between friend and foe untenable. (shrink)

Since 9/11, the possibilities for pluralism and tolerance have been severely tested by a discourse of terrorism and security. The development of an intelligent and cosmopolitan understanding between religious communities in Europe and America has been compromised by a range of legal and political responses to terrorism. While the debate about the berqa has clearly indicated the problems relating to Muslim cultural differences, we argue that legal pluralism and in particular the question of Shari’a tribunals may prove to be a (...) more decisive test of Western multiculturalism. This article examines the many criticisms raised against religious arbitration in domestic affairs and considers the presence of the Shari’a at various levels of society, claiming that the evolution of Sharia-mindedness is compatible both with a faith-based life and with liberal ideals. However, the problem with religious courts lies elsewhere, namely with the fragmentation of social life and the erosion of citizenship. The article concludes by examining the prospects and problems of Turkish entry into the European Union with special reference to the domestic policies of the Justice and Development Party. (shrink)

This is an indispensible book for students, teachers and professional researchers in sociology, cultural studies, politics, feminism and philosophy.

This article examines a post-war generation of academics in the United States and in Britain, who, coming from lower-class families without any previous experience of university education, became internationally famous but nevertheless continued to feel out of place in the academic world. Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, field and doxa is useful in studying the world of such outsiders and exiles who shaped post-war sociology. Without an established canon of sociology, these students typically developed critical and creative perspectives on society. (...) In Britain the post-war welfare state was the foundation of this new breed of academics. John O’Neill is the classic example. In America ‘The Disobedient Generation’ were influenced by race, the Vietnam War, and the draft. William Connolly and Stephen Turner provide two case studies of highly successful academics who were often subjectively outsiders. ‘Event’ and ‘hazard’ imply that successful careers are in fact merely accidental. Neoliberalism may have closed off such accidental careers. (shrink)

Logic is concerned with the design or structure of arguments. It describes the forms of valid argument and is concerned with the public presentation and reception of arguments. Hence it has a close connection with politics and the public sphere, and with rhetoric as the science of persuasion. Philosophers have analysed the objective conditions of validation, that is, the justifiability of assertions about the world. This quest for objective and scientific validity in argumentation about the nature of reality dominated much (...) of the development of logic in the 20th century. Logical arguments are held to be successful as a result of the ‘force of reason’ rather than because one's opponents have been bribed or coerced. Logic involves the study of the abstract, deductive moves in argumentation rather than an empirical study of how actual arguments are conducted. However, there is also a tension between rhetoric and philosophy; Plato drew a clear distinction between knowledge and persuasion. Logic is intended to give security to the former. The historical drift of logic is towards abstraction, especially the use of mathematical forms of representation. The study of logic is an important component of any project on encyclopaedic knowledge, that is, with knowledge that circulates in the public sphere, but the globalization of culture has raised an important problem about the universalistic claims of traditions of logic, namely, are there different forms of logical reasoning? (shrink)

This article argues that tattooing and body piercing in modern societies cannot be naively innocent acts; such activities cannot recapture primitiveness, because they take place within a social context, where social membership is not expressed through hot loyalties and thick commitments. Body marks in primitive society were obligatory signatures of social membership in solidaristic groups, wherein life-cycle changes were necessarily marked by tattooing and scarification. Modern societies are metaphorically like airport departure lounges where passengers are encouraged to be cool and (...) distant, orderly and regulated. The article is thus critical of recent attempts to discover and unearth Dionysian moments of creative tribalism in modern youth groups or working-class communities. Body marks are commercial objects in a leisure marketplace and have become optional aspects of a body aesthetic, which playfully and ironically indicate social membership. They cannot serve as charismatic entrance points to the primitive. (shrink)

Max Weber is a dominating presence in western sociology, but his legacy remains a matter of considerable controversy. His influence is felt in the philosophy of social science, in theories of class, status and power, and of course in the various substantive areas where he had a lasting impact. However this article argues that his comparative studies of religion form the core of both substantive and theoretical interests. Firstly the interpretation of his oeuvre is skewed towards by excessive attention to (...) the Protestant Ethic thesis, which was in fact only two essays that explored an issue that was already well known in German academic circles. Secondly Weber’s contribution to the study of Axial Age religions has only recently received adequate attention. The Axial Age religions emerging between 800 and 200 BCE created the foundations of the world religions through the idea of transcendence and developed a critical view of the everyday empirical world. Thus I argue that more attention should be given to his view of the interface between politics and religion. Weber pessimistically concluded that the world is dominated by ‘unbrotherliness’ and that the ethic of brotherly love in the major religions had come to nothing. (shrink)

Max Weber discussed Islam in various places in his sociology of religion, but there was no sustained or systematic commentary unlike his other work on the religions of China and India. What he did have to say about Islam was, even by the standards of his own analysis of value neutrality, judgmental. Subsequently his sociology of Islam has been criticized as Orientalist. While he provided positive interpretations of Protestant inner-worldly asceticism and Old Testament prophecy as radical and charismatic, his commentaries (...) on Islam were by contrast negative and critical. He regarded Islam as a warrior religion in which the salvation drive was turned away from the individual soul and the energy of the Muslim community was directed towards imperial conquest. His arguments did not for example provide a valid account of how Islam spread peacefully in South and South East Asia through Sufi traders. The article however notes an ironic justification for Weber’s analysis through the growth of urban ascetic piety in so-called post-Islam. Finally the article, turning away from Weber’s focus on economic ethics of the world religions, argues that Weber’s work is better understood as an ethical reflection on the perennial conflict between religion (the ethic of absolute ends) and politics (the ethics of responsibility). (shrink)

This edited collection of essays brings together the leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies to tackle many of the questions still being asked about Jean Francois Lyotard. Contributors include Barry Smart, John O'Neill and Victor J. Seidler with subjects ranging from Lyotard's writings on justice and politics of difference, on feminism, youth, judaism as well as a chapter devoted to his early writings.

Contemporary academic interest in the human body is a response to fundamental changes in the relationship between body, economy, technology and society. Scientific advances, particularly new reproductive technologies and therapeutic cloning techniques, have given the human body a problematic status. Ageing, disease and death no longer appear to be immutable facts about the human condition. The emergence of the body as a topic of research in the humanities and social sciences is also a response to the women's and gay liberation (...) movements, and environmentalism, animal rights, anti-globalism, religious fundamentalism and conservative politics. Further, the human body is now central to economic growth in various biotechnology industries, in which disease itself has become a productive factor in the global economy and the body a code or system of information from which profits can be extracted through patents. In modern social theory, the body has been studied in the contexts of advertising and consumerism, in ethical debates about cloning, in research on HIV/AIDS, in postmodern reflections on cybernetics, cyberbodies and cyberpunk, and in the analysis of the global trade in human organs. The body is a central feature of contemporary politics, because its ambiguities, vulnerability and plasticity have been amplified by new genetic technologies. (shrink)

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or (...) instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions. (shrink)

Logic is concerned with the design or structure of arguments. It describes the forms of valid argument and is concerned with the public presentation and reception of arguments. Hence it has a close connection with politics and the public sphere, and with rhetoric as the science of persuasion. Philosophers have analysed the objective conditions of validation, that is, the justifiability of assertions about the world. This quest for objective and scientific validity in argumentation about the nature of reality dominated much (...) of the development of logic in the 20th century. Logical arguments are held to be successful as a result of the ‘force of reason’ rather than because one's opponents have been bribed or coerced. Logic involves the study of the abstract, deductive moves in argumentation rather than an empirical study of how actual arguments are conducted. However, there is also a tension between rhetoric and philosophy; Plato drew a clear distinction between knowledge and persuasion. Logic is intended to give security to the former. The historical drift of logic is towards abstraction, especially the use of mathematical forms of representation. The study of logic is an important component of any project on encyclopaedic knowledge, that is, with knowledge that circulates in the public sphere, but the globalization of culture has raised an important problem about the universalistic claims of traditions of logic, namely, are there different forms of logical reasoning? (shrink)

The emergence of a science of religion and religions in which the sacred became a topic of disinterested, objective inquiry was itself an important statement about the general character of social change and can be taken as an index of secularization. It implies a level of critical self-reflexive scrutiny in society. In the West, the study of ‘religion’ as a topic of independent inquiry was initially undertaken by theologians who wanted to understand how Christianity could be differentiated from other religions. (...) The problem of religious diversity had arisen as an inevitable consequence of colonial contact with other religious traditions and with phenomena that shared a family resemblance with religion, such as fetishism, animism and magic. The science of religion implies a capacity for self-reflection and criticism, and it is often claimed that other religions do not possess such a science of religion. While different cultures give religion a different content, Christianity was defined as a world religion. In Hegel's dialectical scheme, the increasing self-awareness of the Spirit was a consequence of the historical development of Christianity. The contemporary scientific study of religion and religions is confronted by significant epistemological problems that are associated with globalization, and the traditional question about the nature of religion has acquired a new intensity. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard is often considered to be the father of postmodernism. Here leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies, including Barry Smart, John O' Neill and Victor J. Seidler, tackle many of the questions still being asked about this controversial figure.

Hospitals are traditional sites, not only of care, but of knowledge production. The word ‘hospital’ is derived from ‘hospitality’, and is also associated with ‘spital’, ‘hotel’ and ‘hospice’. In medieval society, the hospice was a place of rest, security and entertainment. The Knights Hospitallers were an order of military monks that took its historical origin from a hospital founded in Jerusalem in 1048. Before the rise of the modern research hospital, these spitals had a more general function as charitable institutions (...) for the care and maintenance of the aged, infirm and impoverished. Hospitals were important in the historical emergence of the university, but with the dominance of bio-medical sciences medical faculties have become increasingly separated geographically and administratively from other faculties. Medical research is dominated by private corporations and increasingly medical knowledge exists outside the conventional procedures and norms of scientific research. (shrink)