51 found
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  1.  12
    A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline.Peter Wagner - 2002 - Routledge.
    First Published in 2004. Confusion reigns in sociological accounts of the curent condition of modernity. The story-lines from the 'end of the subject' to 'a new individualism', from the 'dissolution of society' to the re-emergence of 'civil society', from the 'end of modernity' to an 'other modernoity' to 'neo-modernization'. This book offers a sociology of modernity in terms of a historical account of social transformations over the past two centuries, focusing on Western Europe but also looking at the USA and (...)
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  2.  12
    Theorising modernity: inescapability and attainability in social theory.Peter Wagner - 2001 - London: SAGE.
    This book argues that sociology has lost its ability to provide critical diagnoses of the present human condition because sociology has stopped considering the philosophical requirements of social enquiry. The book attempts to restore that ability by retrieving some of the key questions that sociologists tend to gloss over, inescapability and attainability. The book identifies five key questions in which issues of inescapability and attainability emerge. These are the questions of the certainty of our knowledge, the viability of our politics, (...)
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  3.  72
    A history and theory of the social sciences: not all that is solid melts into air.Peter Wagner - 2001 - Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.
    Divided into two parts this book examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the `organization of modernity', in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the `rationalistic revolution' of the `golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. Part two examines key concepts in the social sciences. It begins with some of the broadest concepts used by social scientists: choice, decision, action and institution and moves on to examine the `collectivist alternative': (...)
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  4.  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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  5.  14
    After Justification: Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity.Peter Wagner - 1999 - European Journal of Social Theory 2 (3):341-357.
    This article presents the moral and political sociology developed by the research group around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot from its gradual dissociation from the tradition of critical sociology during the 1980s to the present. Taking the major presentation of this approach, De la justification, as the point of departure, the key items of criticism to which this book was exposed are discussed, both in terms of their intellectual merit and in light of the ongoing debates in French social and (...)
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  6.  13
    Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines.Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock & Richard P. Whitley - 1990 - Springer Verlag.
    This book, which represents probably the most comprehensive discussion of the emergence of modem social science yet produced, is of far more than merely historical interest. The contributors set out to rewrite the history of the social sciences and to show the limitations of conventional conceptions of their development. These tasks they accomplish with great success and much distinction. Yet in so doing they contribute in a direct way to our understanding of the relation between social analysis and the nature (...)
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  7.  58
    Towards a theory of synagonism.Nathalie Karagiannis & Peter Wagner - 2005 - Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (3):235–262.
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  8.  43
    Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme.Peter Wagner - 2015 - Social Imaginaries 1 (1):105-129.
    Sociologists have increasingly adopted the insight that ‘modern societies’ undergo major historical transformations; they are not stable or undergoingonly smooth social change once their basic institutional structure has been established. There is even some broad agreement that the late twentieth century witnessed the most recent one of those major transformations leading into the present time – variously characterized by adding adjectives such as ‘reflexive’, ‘global’ or simply ‘new’ to modernity. However, neither the dynamics of the recent social transformation nor the (...)
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  9.  51
    Modernity, Capitalism and Critique.Peter Wagner - 2001 - Thesis Eleven 66 (1):1-31.
    The twin theories of late 20th-century societal constellations, functionalist modernization theory and neo-Marxist theories of late capitalism, fell into crisis and disrepute during the 1970s and 1980s. Social theory responded to such double crisis of the theorizing of `capitalism' and of `modernization' by embracing the term `modernity', a term that, almost unknown in social thought before the end of the 1970s, appeared to provide a new common ground in terms of representing the present societal constellation. At the same time, however, (...)
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  10.  11
    From interpretation to civilization — and back: Analyzing the trajectories of non-European modernities.Peter Wagner - 2011 - European Journal of Social Theory 14 (1):89-106.
    This article identifies civilizational analysis as one response to a recent crisis in the sociology of large-scale social configurations and explores how far the concept of civilization can go in analyzing the contemporary global social constellation. The reasoning proceeds in four steps. First, a brief review of the recent conceptual debate in social theory and historical sociology leads to the conclusion that concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ still work with too strong presuppositions about continuity and commonality of patterns of (...)
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  11.  67
    The nascent political philosophy of the european polity.Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 2002 - Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (3):342–364.
  12.  15
    Knowing How to Act Well in Time.Peter Wagner - 2020 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (4):507-513.
    Numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have speedily analysed and interpreted the COVID-19-induced social and political crisis. While the commitment to address an urgent topic is to be appreciated, this article suggests that the combination of confidence in the applicability of one’s tools and belief in the certainty of the available knowledge can be counter-productive in the face of a phenomenon that in significant respects is unprecedented. Starting out from the plurality of forms of knowledge that are mobilized (...)
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  13.  32
    The Resistance that Modernity Constantly Provokes: Europe, America and Social Theory.Peter Wagner - 1999 - Thesis Eleven 58 (1):35-58.
    During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms available to social theory for thinking the social world (...)
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  14. Multiple Trajectories of Modernity: Why Social Theory Needs Historical Sociology.Peter Wagner - 2010 - Thesis Eleven 100 (1):53-60.
  15.  48
    (1 other version)Varieties of agonism: Conflict, the common good, and the need for synagonism.Nathalie Karagiannis & Peter Wagner - 2008 - Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (3):323-339.
  16.  47
    Imagination and Tragic Democracy.Nathalie Karagiannis & Peter Wagner - 2012 - Critical Horizons 13 (1):12 - 28.
    Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political philosophers – modern and ancient – for whom a concept of imagination is truly central. In his work, however, the role of imagination is so overarching that it becomes difficult to grasp its workings and consequences in detail, in particular in its relation to democracy as the political form in which autonomy is the core imaginary signification. This article will proceed by first suggesting some clarifications about Castoriadis’s employment of (...)
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  17.  16
    The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity[Link].Peter Wagner & Heidrun Friese - 2003 - Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (3):342-364.
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  18.  12
    Modernity and capitalism: Conceptual retrieval and comparative-historical analyses.Peter Wagner & David Casassas - 2016 - European Journal of Social Theory 19 (2):159-171.
    The terms modernity and capitalism remain in widespread use to characterize contemporary societies, but the distinction between them is much less antagonistic in current social theory than it used to be when a theory of ‘modern society’ was opposed to the theory of ‘late capitalism’. Rather than seeing societies either on an evolutionary trajectory realizing the functionally efficient institutionalization of freedom or as determined by increasing contradictions due to the logics of capital and to class struggle, a key task of (...)
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  19.  18
    The lasting significance of viruses: COVID-19, historical moments and social transformations.Peter Wagner - 2023 - Thesis Eleven 177 (1):122-132.
    Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article reviews the question of the lasting socio-political significance of the appearance of the virus, much and controversially debated at the beginning. We can see now – maybe rather unsurprisingly – that the expectations of rapid pandemic-related social change, whether positive or negative, were widely exaggerated. Rather, the pandemic has now entered into an interpretation of the global socio-political constellation as marked by a sequence of crises, including the financial crisis (...)
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  20.  40
    (1 other version)When `the Light of the Great Cultural Problems Moves on': On the Possibility of a Cultural Theory of Modernity.Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 2000 - Thesis Eleven 61 (1):25-40.
    Comparative analysis of civilizations has recently revived and has led into a debate about varieties of modernity. This connection between an empirically defined area of study, `civilizations', and a theme that is predominantly seen as conceptual, `modernity', is a peculiar one and raises crucial questions for any social theory. Can `modernity' be located spatio-temporally among the civilizations? Is it itself a civilization (or the successor to all civilizations), or does it not rather refer to a human condition? This article takes (...)
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  21.  53
    The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, or, What's Wrong with Post-1968 Individualism?Peter Wagner - 2002 - Thesis Eleven 68 (1):31-45.
    The thesis that `1968' resulted in the rise of the individual, on the one hand, and the end of politics, on the other, is critically discussed by interpreting the events of 1968 as a project of emancipation and by distinguishing between the individual and the collective aspects of emancipation.
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  22.  14
    Inescapability and Attainability in the Sociology of Modernity: A Note on the Variety of Modes of Social Theorizing.Peter Wagner & Heidrun Friese - 1999 - European Journal of Social Theory 2 (1):27-44.
    It is a background assumption of much of social science - here called modernist social science - that, in principle, there are neither questions that it cannot decline nor answers that cannot be found. Modernist social science does not accept the issues of inescapability and of attainability; they are names for adversaries that need to be fought against. In contrast to modernism in social theory, this article argues that social theory not only cannot succeed in suppressing the questions of the (...)
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  23. Violence against the Democratic State, Abuse of Children: Revising the Collective Memory of `1968'?Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 2002 - Thesis Eleven 68 (1):106-109.
    The thesis that `1968' resulted in the rise of the individual, on the one hand, and the end of politics, on the other, is critically discussed by interpreting the events of 1968 as a project of emancipation and by distinguishing between the individual and the collective aspects of emancipation.
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  24.  22
    From Domination to Autonomy: Two Eras of Progress in World-sociological Perspective.Peter Wagner - 2022 - Антиномии 22 (3):72-95.
    In recent decades, the belief in progress that was widespread across the two centuries following the French Revolution has withered away. This article suggests, though, that the diagnosis of the end of progress can be used as an occasion to rethink what progress meant and what it might mean today. The proposal for rethinking proceeds in two big steps. First, the meaning of progress that was inherited from the Enlightenment is reconstructed and contrasted with the way progress actually occurred in (...)
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  25.  10
    Space creator.Peter Wagner - 2023 - Thesis Eleven 179 (1):142-144.
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  26.  10
    What is to be thought? What is to be done?: The polyscopic thought of Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis.Peter Wagner & Nathalie Karagiannis - 2012 - European Journal of Social Theory 15 (3):403-417.
    Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis are among the most inspiring thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. They each combine comprehensive philosophy with social and political theory, and a broad view on human history with a critical diagnosis of the present, with nuanced observations on our current condition—characteristics, rare during this period, that this article describes as polyscopic thought. Castoriadis is widely known as the philosopher of ‘autonomy’, of the human capacity to give oneself one’s own law; his (...)
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  27.  20
    L'Europe comme enjeu politique.Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 2000 - Multitudes 3 (3):51-63.
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  28.  30
    L'Europe en guerre.Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 2003 - Multitudes 4 (4):81-85.
    Europe as a political entity is born with the general public disagreement against the Iraqi war, while governments were divided on that point. Those linked with European opinion are going to build politics together while the others will remain in a corm on market. This new political stage is supported by the global movement.
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  29.  28
    More beginnings than ends. The other space of the university.Heidrun Friese & Peter Wagner - 1998 - Social Epistemology 12 (1):27 – 31.
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  30.  18
    1968-2001: Measuring the Distance.Paul Ginsborg, Luisa Passerini, Bo Stråth & Peter Wagner - 2002 - Thesis Eleven 68 (1):5-10.
    In its first part the article examines visions of the family during 1968 and the succeeding years. It concentrates in particular on alternative visions of the family, both at a theoretical level (as with David Cooper's Death of the Family), and at the level of social history, with the rise and fall of the commune movement. It does so with reference to a methodology which concentrates on relationships, principally those between the individual and the family, between family and between the (...)
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  31.  12
    The stranger in synagonistic politics.Nathalie Karagiannis & Peter Wagner - 2008 - In Andrew Schaap (ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics. Ashgate Pub. Company. pp. 147--62.
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  32.  22
    Civil society and the problématique of political modernity.Jean Terrier & Peter Wagner - 2006 - In Terrier Jean & Wagner Peter (eds.).
  33.  21
    Declining Deliberation: Civil Society, Community, Organized Modernity.Jean Terrier & Peter Wagner - 2006 - In Terrier Jean & Wagner Peter (eds.).
  34.  26
    The Critique of Organized Modernity.Jean Terrier & Peter Wagner - 2006 - In Terrier Jean & Wagner Peter (eds.).
  35.  18
    The Return of Civil Society and the Re-Opening of the Political Problématique.Jean Terrier & Peter Wagner - 2006 - In Terrier Jean & Wagner Peter (eds.).
  36. Autonomy in history : teleology in nineteenth-century European social and political thought.Peter Wagner - 2015 - In Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty & Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Historical teleologies in the modern world. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
     
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  37.  24
    Beyond serving state and bureaucracy: Problem-oriented social science in (West) Germany.Peter Wagner & Hellmut Wollmann - 1991 - Knowledge, Technology & Policy 4 (1):56-88.
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  38.  12
    Epistemology and Critique.Peter Wagner - 2001 - European Journal of Social Theory 4 (3):284-287.
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  39.  9
    Editor's Introduction.Peter Wagner - 1998 - European Journal of Social Theory 1 (2):163-164.
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  40.  9
    Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?Peter Wagner - 2023 - Thesis Eleven 174 (1):3-20.
    Johann Arnason’s work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political philosophy, drawing creatively on the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Invariably, his works introduce more nuance and sophistication into the analysis of even very well studied socio-historical phenomena. At the same time, he addresses such major phenomena in terms of modernity, democracy and capitalism, agreeing that there often – maybe always – is a combination of empirical, conceptual (...)
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  41.  13
    On wars and revolutions.Peter Wagner - 2007 - In Boaventura Sousa Santodes (ed.), Cognitive justice in a global world: prudent knowledges for a decent life. Lanham: Lexington Books. pp. 87.
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  42.  19
    Social and Political Philosophy, Historical-Comparative Sociology and the Critical Diagnosis of the Present: a Reply.Peter Wagner - 2018 - Social Imaginaries 4 (2):109-134.
    In reply to the contributions to Social Imaginaries vol. 4, no. 1, this article reviews the development of the research programme that the author has been pursuing over more than three decades. It places the emphasis on the conceptual and methodological requirements for a historical sociology of social change. It insists, on the one hand, on the need to avoid overly strong conceptual presuppositions to analyze social phenomena of large scale and long duration, while, on the other hand, sustaining the (...)
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  43. Social theory and political philosophy.Peter Wagner - 2006 - In Gerard Delanty (ed.), The handbook of contemporary European social theory. New York: Routledge. pp. 25.
     
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  44.  17
    Towards a world sociology of modernity.Peter Wagner - 2010 - In Hans Joas (ed.), The benefit of broad horizons: intellectual and institutional preconditions for a global social science: festschrift for Bjorn Wittrock on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Leiden [etc.]: Brill. pp. 24--227.
  45. The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity'.Peter Wagner - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
  46.  39
    The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form.Peter Wagner - 2005 - Thesis Eleven 80 (1):47-73.
    European integration needs to be analyzed in terms that address the normative self-understanding of the emerging polity or, in other words, the self-understanding of European modernity. While it is often argued that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presuppositions, which are untenable against the background of European cultural diversity and risk to revive non-liberal European political (...)
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  47.  6
    The Question of Freedom: Social and Political Progress Under Conditions of Modernity.Peter Wagner - 2017 - Revue Internationale de Philosophie 281 (3):281-297.
    The idea of modernity is closely associated with the expectation of progress. In Europe, the combination of Enlightenment thought, French Revolution and Industrial Revolution is often seen to spell the onset of modernity; and the new society that was emerging would leave all limitations of the past behind and open up towards the wide horizon of a future of steady improvement in the human condition. This enthusiasm about the future was generated by the possibilities that would emerge with freedom: freedom (...)
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  48.  9
    War and Social Theory: Reflections after Kosovo: Introduction.Peter Wagner, Heidrun Friese & Gerard Delanty - 2001 - European Journal of Social Theory 4 (1):5-10.
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  49. Ways out of the modern labyrinth : normative expectations and subsequent social change.Peter Wagner - 2023 - In Ľubomír Dunaj, Jeremy Smith & Kurt Cihan Murat Mertel (eds.), Civilization, modernity, and critique: engaging Jóhann P. Árnason's macro-social theory. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
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  50.  39
    Liberty and discipline: Making sense of postmodernity, or, once again, toward a sociohistorical understanding of modernity. [REVIEW]Peter Wagner - 1992 - Theory and Society 21 (4):467-492.
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