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  1. Rationalizing the War in Ukraine through Religion: The Orthodox Church and Russia’s Imperialist Motif (Response to Hans-Herbert Kögler).Pavlo Smytsnyuk - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (4):542–547.
  2.  15
    Lessons from Castoriadis: Downsizing critical theory and defusing the concept of society.Johann P. Arnason - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):180-200.
    This article discusses successive positions of the Frankfurt School, contrasts them to the unfolding ideas of Castoriadis and argues for a critical theory centred on a concept of autonomy, but aware of the obstacles and complications inherent in social–historical reality and its modern configuration. To clarify this perspective, we need a concept of society that distances itself from the Parsonian paradigm, more so than recent theorists of the Frankfurt School have done. The critique of over-integrated images of society, developed by (...)
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  3.  21
    On the relationships between critical theory and secularisation: The challenges of democratic fallibility and planetary survival.Daniel Chernilo - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):282-300.
    This article looks at the contribution of secularisation debates to a critical theory of society. As the relations between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ aspects of modern life grow more vexing, it argues critical theory must eschew its previous secularisation-as-progress metanarrative. Instead, processes of secularisation are better understood as those relationships between public and private beliefs and practices that take place at the boundaries between modern society’s commitment to procedural institutions and substantive value commitments. The article then revisits four different understandings (...)
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  4.  15
    Book review: The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990. [REVIEW]Gerard Delanty - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):301-307.
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  5.  15
    Pandora’s box: The two sides of the public sphere.Klaus Eder - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):136-152.
    The public sphere is the site where the collective will of the people is formed. The thesis is that to the extent that the people are constructed as entities that pre-exist their collective will, the public sphere contributes to fostering the evil among a people and between the people. This is discussed using the cases of nationalism, sovereigntism and populism. The narrative of Pandora’s box provides the analytical leverage for retelling the theory of the public sphere. The story is that (...)
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  6.  17
    Social critique and transformation: Revising Habermas’s colonisation thesis.Regina Kreide - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):215-235.
    What is critical theory – and what is it not? This essay attempts a new answer to this old question and examines which normative convictions immanent to social reality can be used to describe, analyse and criticise contemporary, global forms of domination that form blockades of social and political participation. The analysis proceeds in a double step, referring both to the critique of society and to the critique of theory that describes society. The basis of this parallel swing is an (...)
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  7.  16
    Corrigendum to “Synthesis, Dynamis, Praxis : Critical Theory’s Ongoing Struggle with the Concept of Society”.Patrick O’Mahony - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):313-313.
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  8.  17
    Critical theory, Peirce and the theory of society.Patrick O’Mahony - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):258-281.
    The second-generation critical theory of Apel and Habermas was substantially built on the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Peirce. Along with critical theory generally, this variation requires a theory of society in which to embed its wide-ranging normative commitments. The article proposes re-orienting Habermas’s decades-old theory of communicative action, which contained essential pointers to a critical theory of society that has never been adequately taken up in either the critical social sciences or critical theory proper. Revising Habermas, Peirce is drawn upon (...)
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  9.  12
    Introduction to special issue: The critical theory of society.Patrick O’Mahony - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):121-135.
    The state of theorizing bearing on an explicit, contemporary, critical theory of society is first of all outlined. While contemporary conditions of scholarship are not promising in this respect, the potential of a distinctive critical theory of society nonetheless remains tantalizing. The mostly agreed, even if mostly only implicitly, core architectonic of critical theory is outlined as a foundation, though disagreements persist over the significance of the linguistic turn and context-transcendent versus context-immanent modes of theorizing. On the basis of the (...)
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  10.  13
    Book review: Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization.Andrés Saenz de Sicilia - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):308-312.
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  11.  31
    Synthesis, Dynamis, Praxis: Critical Theory’s ongoing search for a concept of society.Peter Schulz & Hartmut Rosa - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):201-214.
    From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of ‘society’ encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory’s conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use (...)
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  12.  18
    Thinking beyond the ecological present: Critical theory on the self-problematization of society and its transformation.Tracey Skillington - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):236-257.
    This article assesses the contribution of a long tradition of critical inquiry to understanding how ‘felt contact’ with the world, in this instance a heating planet and its detrimental impacts, provokes ‘thinking beyond’ its limits to take account of the cosmopolitan potentials created by new planetary conditions. In particular, it examines the contributions of Hegel, Marx, Adorno and more recently Rosa to a critical theory of subjective resonance and reflective learning from encounters with damaged life. It notes the significance of (...)
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  13.  18
    The critical theory of society: From its Young-Hegelian core to its key concept of possibility.Piet Strydom - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (2):153-179.
    Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory’s theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. The acknowledgement of the critical theory lineage’s naturalist, realist and especially idealist features leads this reconstruction to ascribe a central role to certain pivotal concepts that (...)
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  14.  18
    Castells versus Bell: A comparison of two grand theorists of the information age.Alistair S. Duff - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):90-108.
    Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Manuel Castells (1942–) are the grand theorists of the information age. The article provides a detailed, up-to-date, comparative analysis of their writings. It begins with their methodologies, identifying numerous commonalities in their post-Marxian frameworks. The substance of their theories is then examined, where it is shown that both plausibly explain contemporary social reality in terms of the interplay of three forces: the information technology revolution, the restructuring of capitalism and the innovational role of culture. There are (...)
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  15.  16
    Politicization after the ‘end of nature’: The prospect of ecomodernism.Kristin Hällmark - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):48-66.
    A growing body of literature has argued that environmental discourses in general, and climate change in particular, have a tendency to become depoliticized. In this article, I discuss how the mechanisms of depoliticization can be traced back to the commonly deployed nature–society dualism. By analysing ecomodernism, one of the most prominent articulations of politics in the Anthropocene, I assess the recent suggestion that the ‘end of nature’-thesis could provide a way out of this dualism and the related problem of depoliticization. (...)
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  16.  12
    Another unfinished project of modernity from a Latin American perspective. [REVIEW]Oliver Kozlarek - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):113-117.
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  17.  15
    Book Review: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse. [REVIEW]David McKeown - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):109-112.
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  18.  20
    A sociology of regret.Mikhail Sokolov - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):3-23.
    This article aims to present regret, an emotion to which sociologists so far have paid little attention, as having great sociological significance. First, it reviews recent research in social psychology and economics which cast anticipated regret as playing a major role in human decision-making. Second, it suggests a regret-based interpretation of the sunk-cost fallacy. Such an interpretation points to the need of a specifically sociological perspective on regret, calling attention to the cultural and institutional framings of regret-arousing events. The article (...)
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  19.  20
    Goodbye Foucault’s ‘missing human agent’? Self-formation, capability and the dispositifs.Kaspar Villadsen - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):67-89.
    A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. (...)
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  20.  28
    The triple problem displacement: Climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration.Peter Wagner - 2023 - European Journal of Social Theory 26 (1):24-47.
    Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations since the middle of the 20th century, which have been referred to as (...)
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