This article revises received wisdom about the Durkheimian school of sociology and its relationship to Marxism by analyzing the work of Célestin Bouglé, one of the most influential and least examined sociologists of the Durkheimian tradition. Like other better-known Durkheimians of his generation such as Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs, Bouglé engaged Durkheimian sociology with Marxian and other German traditions of social thought. In the process he also paid an important debt to the French (...) socialists that Marx and so many French Marxists have denigrated as ‘utopian’, especially Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier. In fact, the concerns of Bouglé’s political sociology and Durkheimian sociology more generally are indissociable from the politics of Third Republic France. (shrink)

Émile Durkheim remains one of the most controversial, and deeply misunderstood, classics of social theory. His work differs from the dominant version of sociology that has essentially accepted the modernist self-description of contemporary societies; and it contradicts the individualism that has come to dominate the social sciences. For everybody who is interested in constructing theoretical alternatives to this individualism, Durkheim's sociology can be a useful inspiration - not only because of the solutions it suggests, but already because of (...) the questions it asks. Making use of the theoretical possibilities offered by the Durkheimian tradition, however, requires going beyond the familiar appropriations. The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim takes stock of the different recent debates on Durkheimian sociology, and makes them accessible to a wide audience spanning various disciplines; this includes crucial debates that, due to language barriers, are not easily accessible for an English-reading public. The handbook's chapters elucidate the controversial key concepts of Durkheimian sociology; situate them within the contemporary political and theoretical debates they were originally responding to; offer surveys of empirical research that uses Durkheimian concepts (on topics that were already central for Durkheim's own work as well as on topics that Durkheim hardly touched upon), thus demonstrating the possibilities of a Durkheimian sociology; bring out the divergent, and competing, ways in which Durkheim's ideas have been appropriated and reformulated within more recent theoretical developments in the social sciences. In doing so, this volume is an important resource for all scholars and students looking to understand Durkheimian sociology. (shrink)

An original sociology of art and artistic practice, based on the theories of Emile Durkheim and contemporary models of complex social systems. The book offers a critique of current history, philosophy and sociology of art and stands in a constructive and informative relation to much contemporary art historical theory.

The aim of this article is to question the nature of the socio-anthropological approach in Lefort’s thought. The author explores the complex relationship between Lefort and the Durkheimian French school of sociology in four stages: in the first, he shows Lefort as a sociologist ‘worthy of its name’ or, in other words, a sociologist interested in questioning the ‘institution of the social’. In the second, he focuses on the disturbing elements that Lefort introduces: the political and the (...) division into the French sociological approach. In the third stage, he focuses his attention on the sociological approach in Lefort’s way of thinking about democratic society. Finally, he concludes by referring to Lefort’s apparent opposition between philosophy and social sciences – and the errors that this may have engendered – in order to demonstrate the continuity of Lefort’s sociological approach. (shrink)

By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the "category project" which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa.

This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.

This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) gilt - neben Max Weber - als einer der beiden Gründerväter der modernen Soziologie. Er hat durch seine materialen Arbeiten nicht nur so zentrale soziologische Teildisziplinen wie die Religions-, Wissens-, Familien- und Rechtssoziologie begründet, sondern insbesondere durch sein theoretisches Werk der Soziologie als eigenständiger Wissenschaft den Weg geebnet. Hierzu trug er nicht zuletzt auch durch die Begründung einer soziologischen Zeitschrift und Formierung einer eigenen Denkschule bei. Trotz seines internationalen Renommees blieb sein Werk in der deutschen Theoriediskussion stets (...) eigentümlich vernachlässigt. Der erste Einführungsband über das Werk Durkheims in deutscher Sprache beschreibt die zeitgeschichtlichen und biografischen Hintergründe seines Lebens und erläutert die Ausgangsprobleme, die die Soziologie in den Augen ihres Begründers lösen sollte. Die Quintessenz seines soziologischen Werks wird in der Begründung einer rationalen Moral resümiert. Nach der Ausleuchtung der konkreten Gestalt, die Durkheim dem soziologischen Denken übertrug, widmet sich Daniel Šuber eingängig der wissenssoziologischen Relevanz des Durkheim'schen Werks. Gilt er gemeinhin nicht als deren Begründer, wird hier gezeigt, wie tief sein Denkansatz von der wissenssoziologischen Grundidee der ”Seinsbedingtheit allen Denkens“ (Mannheim) von Beginn an geprägt war. Die rekonstruierten Fallbeispiele werden dem religionssoziologischen Spätwerk, aber auch seinen früheren Arbeiten zur Familien-, Erziehungs- und Moralsoziologie entnommen. Abschließend wird die über ethnologische Autoren (E.E. Evans-Pritchard, C. Lévi-Strauss, M. Douglas) vermittelte Wirkungsgeschichte des Durkheim'schen Werks in der Nachkriegssoziologie skizziert. (shrink)

I pursue three aims in this article: (1) a contextualization of Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology within the broader trajectory of his intellectual development; (2) a sketch of the key ideas of his approach to cultural analysis against the backdrop of contemporary debates regarding culture and social structure; and (3) an appreciation and critical assessment of Alexander’s program.

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and (...) medicine, truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

Anglo-Saxon schools of metascience.--Continental schools of metascience.--Toward a theory of research that is neither logical reconstruction nor psychology or sociology of science.--References (p. 420-438).

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

In this work, the author presents the work of Allama M.T. Jafari, an Iranian, contemporary social thinker who worked within the parameters of Primordial School of Social Theory. This work is an attempt to enrich the existing literature on comparative sociology and social philosophy.

Soka Gakkai is one of the world’s fastest-growing religious movements and Italy figures among the western nations where this religious group has been most successful. This article aims at explaining this success-story: why has Soka Gakkai, and particularly its Italian affiliation, grown so rapidly in recent years? This research question gives the opportunity to assess the applicability of the economic theory of religion to the growth of new religious movements. Hence, in order to explain the expansion of Soka Gakkai, this (...) work begins with an examination of the adaptive strategies developed by a Japanese organization in the Italian religious market. It is claimed, however, that a rational choice explanation cannot stand on its own and that we must take into account the dynamics of pre-contractual solidarity that promote trust, especially when the expected benefits promised by this organization to its adherents do not materialize. Moreover, these solidarity dynamics generate intense emotional gratification that works as a highly motivating incentive to sustain members’ commitment and to prevent them from dropping out. This pre-contractual solidarity is actively produced and continuously reproduced by means of ritual interaction along the lines suggested by Collins’s theory. (shrink)

The author criticizes ways in which academic disciplines can be viewed as skewed toward bureaucratized intellect and its requirements and rewards, rather than toward scholarly intellectual life and research. Drawing from the Chicago traditions of sociology and philosophical pragmatism, as well as his own experience of them, Halton goes on to appraise ways in which these traditions have tended to become contracted to limited textbook canons. Donald Levine’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition provides a case in which the broad (...) influences of European intellectual traditions, for example, Nietzsche, are included in his sociological history of European sociological traditions, whereas similar influences, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, Jane Addams, Lewis Mumford, or even C. Wright Mills, are excluded from his account of the American and Chicago traditions. Admitting that academic disciplines represent skewed forms of bureaucratized intellect rather than progressive traditions allows one to admit those who are not members of the club into the dialogue of social thought and the social sciences. (shrink)

I would like to use this seminar to have your views on the first draft of Part I of the monograph I am currently writing about the relation between boundaries and legal order. Part I falls into four chapters. Chapter 1 contextualizes the discussion by drawing on the findings of Saskia Sassen's empirically informed contribution to the sociology of globalisation to undermine the widely shared assumption that the uncoupling of law and state exposes the inside/outside distinction as a merely (...) contingent feature of legal order. Chapter 2 is the conceptual heart of Part I: it unveils a preliminary model of legal orders, national and post-national, that explains why they are necessarily bounded in space, time, subjectivity and content. It runs through three concrete scenarios that illustrate how behaviour can deploy at least three different relations to boundaries, namely legality, illegality and a-legality. The third of these relations captures the nature of the distinction between familiar and strange worlds; it is decisive for explaining why all imaginable legal orders are perforce bounded in each of the abovementioned dimensions. Chapter 3 tests and validates this model, scrutinising its explanatory power with respect to a wide range of possible counter-examples. It discusses, amongst others, the hypothetical example of a world state; the European Union and its relation to the law of its members states; the law of a nomadic people, the Roma; the law of an indige-nous people, the U’we in Colombia; lex mercatoria; multinationals; and the law of the internet. Chapter 4 draws, finally, on these empirical results to revisit and refine the model of bounded legal order sketched out in Chapter 2. The core of this chapter is the problem of the individuation and deindividuation of legal orders. This problem had been introduced at the end of Chapter 1 as a more promising way of illuminating the relation between boundaries and legal order than the traditional theoretical approach to the concept of law, which focuses on the criteria that distinguish law from.... (shrink)

The sociology of education is concerned not just with the abstract theory but with the day-to-day experiences of pupils and teachers. In this up-to-date account of the main developments in the subject, Karen Chapman shows how education offers a rich and varied field for sociologists, one easily accessible for study. She begins by setting the subject in its historical post-War context. She then goes on to outline comprehensively the subject's theoretical base and anlayses the factors that influence educational change. (...) Specific chapters deal with the topical subjects of educational under-achievement, gender, race and the trend towards a vocational element in curriculum. (shrink)

Sociologists of education often emphasize goods that result from a practice (external goods) rather than goods intrinsic to a practice (internal goods). The authors draw from John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe how the same practice can be understood as producing “skills” that center external goods or as producing habits (Dewey) or virtues (MacIntyre), both of which center internal goods. The authors situate these concepts within sociology of education’s stratification paradigm and a renewed interest in the concept of (...) alienation, contrasting the concepts of skills, habits, and virtues to capital, credentials, and habitus. They close by connecting the argument to broader critiques of procedural liberalism and the ideology of meritocracy, then giving suggestions for an expanded sociology of education beyond the stratification paradigm. (shrink)

In its early years the sociology of education was not clearly distinguished from general social philosophy. Spurred by the publication of John Dewey’s_ School and Society_ in 1899, widespread interest in the role of the school as a social institution helped to lay the foundation for the development of educational sociology as a separate field of study. This facsimile set of eight books, selected by the editor, presents early contributions to the development of the sociology (...) of education from the 1920s through to the 1950s - the period in which it emerged as an organized and specialized sub-field of sociology, mainly in the USA. Comprehensive and fascinating, the extensive new introduction to this set places these works firmly in the context of current scholarship, while the nature of the facsimile provides a real sense of immediacy and authenticity for both students and scholars alike. (shrink)

Cet article entend participer à l’étude de l’inscription du Régime de Vichy dans l’histoire de la mise en forme et de l’institutionnalisation des sciences sociales autour d’une « Science de l’Homme ». Le modèle d’une science sociale unifiée est en particulier porté par la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (dite Fondation Carrel) et son secrétaire général, l’économiste François Perroux. Cette institution, créée et financée de manière substantielle par le régime de Vichy, s’inscrit non seulement dans l’histoire longue de (...) l’émergence des sciences sociales en France, mais constitue également un point de rupture important dans ce processus. Cette rupture profite particulièrement à l’alliance de circonstance entre « traditionalistes » et certains pans des sciences les plus « modernistes » de l’époque, ceci en opposition avec une sociologie durkheimienne qui, dès les années 1930, perd de son influence. En s’appuyant notamment sur les archives du Fonds François Perroux, l’article documente l’effort de ce dernier pour discréditer la tradition durkheimienne, tant dans ses écrits que dans sa manière d’organiser et de penser la mission de la Fondation Carrel. (shrink)

Alexander has made a major contribution to the development of a neo-Durkheimian cultural sociology. Two central elements have been: the semiotic analysis of sacred symbols and rituals that evoke the solidarity attached to the idealized nation; analysis of structures and processes that constitute a civil society. Some questions can be raised. The first concerns the tensions between ethnic-nationalisms and the kind of culture of civil society that is said to be congruent with the liberal-democratic state. Secondly, not all (...) groups share the binary constructions of the civil code of liberal democracy. Thirdly, more attention needs to be given to the relationship between the rational public sphere and the spheres of entertainment and popular culture. Cultural studies of popular genre, such as television talk shows, reveal that, rather than exhibiting universal characteristics of liberal-democratic society, these public cultural performances reproduce the particularities of national differences. (shrink)

This article presents a relatively straightforward theoretical framework about distributive justice with applications. It draws on a few key concepts of Sociological Game Theory. SGT is presented briefly in section 2. Section 3 provides a spectrum of distributive cases concerning principles of equality, differentiation among recipients according to performance or contribution, status or authority, or need. Two general types of social organization of distributive judgment are distinguished and judgment procedures or algorithms are modeled in each type of social organization. Section (...) 4 discusses briefly the larger moral landscapes of human judgment – how distribution may typically be combined with other value into consideration. The article suggests that Rawls, Elster, and Machado point in this direction. Finally, it is suggested that the SGT framework presented provides a useful point of departure to systematically link it and compare the Warsaw School of Fair Division, Rawls, and Elster, among others. (shrink)

We provide an economic assessment of the operation of schooling quasi-markets, re-interpreting the findings of the mainly sociologically-based empirical research. We find that economic analysis is complementary to that of sociology, providing further explanations for the failure of greater competition to increase the diversity of provision and challenge traditional school hierarchies.