Existentialism and Sociology is the first work to systematically and critically analyze the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and to demonstrate their importance and connection to central sociological categories found in the theories of Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Mead, and others.

In chapter one I cover the basic concepts developed in Being and Nothingness, notable those of "temporality," "negation," "anguish" and "bad faith." In chapter two I move from the individual as the center of free action, to the individual in relation to the Other. In chapter three I attempt to unify the perspectives in the first two chapter and present a theory of action. In chapter four I introduce the reader to the Critique and establish its thematic links with Being (...) and Nothingness. In chapter five I analyze the ramifications of the concept of the practico-inert, which, for Sartre, is inseparable from human sociality. In chapter six I deal with the concept of organization, which refers to the contradictions within the social group as it moves into advanced stages of social integration. In chapter seven I cover the concepts of power and authority. Chapter eight deals with the idea of dialectical humanism and highlights essential concepts in the work by way of concluding it. --Introduction. (shrink)

This article examines the way advertising was rationalized in the early twentieth-century United States. Drawing on a targeted archival comparison with the United Kingdom, I show how the extensive mobilization undertaken to legitimate and rationalize advertising, rather than changes in the techniques employed in the content of ads themselves, were seen by actors in the mid-1920s to explain most of the extraordinary advances made by American advertising. Building on that comparison, I show how American advertising was transformed, particularly around World (...) War I, into a legitimate profession situated at the center of a network of expertise about consumers and their media. Under the banner of “truth in advertising” ads came to be regarded as a legitimate, rational, and sustained business investment, leading to an enormous increase in aggregate expenditures. I argue that future research should examine how this process fuelled mass media and contributed to the conditions for modern consumerism. (shrink)

If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? The field of Jewish political thought examines how Jewish individuals and communal organizations have behaved politically both within and beyond statehood. The study of Jewish political thought promises to expand received conceptions of what counts as "political.".

How did one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century grapple with the founding of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one of the most significant political conflicts of his time? Samuel Hayim Brody traces the development of Martin Buber's thinking and its implications for the Jewish religion, for the problems posed by Zionism, and for the Zionist-Arab conflict. Beginning in turbulent Weimar Germany, Brody shows how Buber's debates about Biblical meanings had concrete political consequences for anarchists, socialists, Zionists, Nazis, (...) British, and Palestinians alike. Brody further reveals how Buber's passionate commitment to the rule of God absent an intermediary came into conflict in the face of a Zionist movement in danger of repeating ancient mistakes. Brody argues that Buber's support for Israel stemmed from a radically rich and complex understanding of the nature of the Jewish mission on earth that arose from an anarchist reading of the Bible. (shrink)

Christian economic theology is distinguished from Christian social ethics by its methodological reflection on the emergence, formation, and proper boundaries of the economic sphere, as well as transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of economic science. In practice, this often amounts to anxiety about the authority of Christianity in the economic sphere, as well as about the extent to which Christianity can be held responsible for the system of impersonal economic domination known as capitalism. This review essay draws upon (...) three recent works on or about Christian economic theology, and argues that this genre's anxiety about Christian authority manifests in the ways that it draws temporal boundaries between ancient, medieval, and modern economies. Ultimately, its ambivalence about economy itself is traceable to Aristotle's understanding of money as containing two natures, one defined by quality (use value) and the other by quantity (exchange value). Christianity here becomes a cipher for quality. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 72 - 94 Politics has never been considered Martin Buber’s forte. This paper considers the range of Buber’s reception as a political thinker by considering it in the form of three “moments,” each from a different point in his career, and each through the eyes of a different figure who either read or worked with Buber politically: Theodor Herzl, Gustav Landauer, and Hans Kohn. The three moments are structured around a discussion of the (...) classic criticism that Buber’s politics are naïve or utopian; the paper seeks to respond, as Buber did, in a way that raises questions about the borders of politics itself. (shrink)

IN Plato’s eyes, unity was a prime requisite of civil society: “there is no greater good than whatsoever binds the State together into one”. Plato carried his conception of unity to an extreme; for his organic conception has the defect of postulating members who are means to the life of the rest, and do not share in that life. And yet Plato argues from his organic conception of the state to the conclusion, that as in an organism part must be (...) proportioned to suit part, and all to suit the whole—as no part must grow unduly, lest every part should suffer—so in a State class must be proportioned to class, and all classes be adjusted to the good of the whole. (shrink)

A-consciousness may be regarded as the visibility of information that is the output of a process within a community of other processes. The most prominent function of “public” dissemination of information is giving access to it to processes whose relevance is not clear at the moment of dissemination. The function of P-consciousness may be outside the realm of cognition.

Halford et al. are not redefining capacity in the sense of limit on resources but in the sense of limits on what resources can do. Furthermore, the necessity of using resource theory as a theoretical frame is questionable.

Human genetics has uncovered a vast trove of medically relevant changes in our genomes—variants and mutations that are both far more common and difficult to interpret than experts anticipated. What will this mean as we move into an era of genomic or “precision” medicine? For over a century the overriding goal of human genetics was to explain the inheritance of traits and conditions that hailed from disciplines like medicine, psychology, and criminology. Yet today, genomics research is calling prevailing categories of (...) human illness and difference into question. Genetic mutations are increasingly used to reclassify disease, disability, and developmental difference—a process I call genomic designation. In recent decades, this has led to the formation of support groups, foundations, specialist clinics, and dedicated literatures for genomically designated conditions like the XXX, NGLY1, Fragile X, and 1p36 Deletion Syndromes. Drawing heavily on the case of 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome, this paper explains how a genetic test result can radically alter the way a patient is understood and treated. Finding a 22q11.2 microdeletion can lead patients, parents, and caregivers to recast other diagnoses as mere symptoms of an underlying genetic disorder. A 22q11.2DS diagnosis can also redirect medical judgment and practice towards evaluations and even interventions that were not clinically indicated. Finally, a genomically designated diagnosis like 22q11.2DS can realign the very boundary between the normal and the pathological, leading experts and caregivers to reframe clinically nonsignificant findings like an IQ of eighty-seven as the symptom of a genetic disorder. In this way, the growing avalanche of positive genetic test results is disrupting classification and practice in a wide range of disciplines, bringing new populations under the gaze of medical genetics in the process. I conclude by discussing a few salient implications for bioethics and the social studies of science and medicine. (shrink)