This paper argues that the phenomenon of globalisation can be best understood as the secularisation and widespread extension of a particular type of life?conduct that originated in Western monasticism. This concerns not substantive content but modality and form, like the self?sustaining methodical regularisation of the everyday conduct of life in closed and partitioned space aiming at rationalisation and perfection. This type of inner?worldly asceticism was a successful response to the challenge of chaotic ?liminal periods of transition, following a wholesale dissolution (...) of order. However, the solution represents a generalisation of liminality into a permanent condition, explaining both the innovativeness and creativity of modern societies, but also their characteristic tempo of hectic change that disrupts stable human relationships and the coexistence with animals and plants, losing balance and measure. (shrink)

Much of the extant popular culture literature points to the nihilistic and present-centred philosophies of material/image consumption common among North American youth enclaves. Few researchers, however, inspect how ascetic youth subcultures on the continent reject mainstream pressures to consume, and perform moral reformist work through the body. In this article, participant observation-based data collected on eastern Canadian practitioners of an ascetic lifestyle called ‘Straightedge’ are utilized to illustrate how social discipline and moral commentary is interactively displayed via ‘restrained’ body ritual. (...) Practitioners of Straightedge express a quasi-religious conviction or sense of ‘calling’ to their rather Puritanical way of life, and view commitment to Straightedge as an ongoing marker of self-control and efficacy. Straightedge narratives suggest how the desire to pursue asceticism springs from a learned cultural habitus, and how the practice may be ‘read’ by others as a form of social protest. Practitioners stress how the calling to asceticism serves as a means of personal salvation, and how performing Straightedge encourages ‘civilized’ corporeal practice. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the (...) will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)

Elias’s view of democracy and German Sonderweg is discussed by looking at his analysis of intellectuals. How should the figuration of culture and politics be conceived at a time when the civilizing process could trigger both democracy and autarchy? It is argued that Elias’s answer was that democracy is always accompanied by discontinuity in existence, and that the Weimar Republic therefore needed intellectual spokespersons promoting tolerance of political uncertainty. Such democratic culture demanded a fair balance between involvement and detachment. Elias (...) claimed that intellectuals ought to act as defenders of chance and a fragmented society, and moreover as critics of political romanticism and utopian myths. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists covers the life, work, ideas and impact of some of the most important thinkers in this discipline. Concentrating on figures writing predominantly in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Claude Le;vi-Strauss, each entry includes: · full cross-referencing · a further reading section · biographical data · key works and ideas · critical assessment. Clearly presented in an easy-to-navigate A-Z format, this accessible reference (...) guide is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, cultural studies and general studies, as well as other readers interested in this fascinating field. (shrink)

Since its appearance in 1962, Habermas' concept of Öffentlichkeit has gained and lost significant valencies. Originally a response to concerns about the state of German political culture shared by political radicals and conservatives alike, it was later incorporated into Habermas' broader concerns with the character of human communication more generally. In recent years Habermas has returned to problems that motivated the earlier work, but has sought to make sense of them using his ‘mature’ concept of Öffentlichkeit. The results of this (...) have been mixed, both analytically and politically; this is illustrated by his recent statements about religion and the public sphere. (shrink)

Dance is addressed as making significance for what Elias terms the civilizing process of early modernity through its contribution to the ennoblement of warriors and the pacification of merchants. The grounds for this are drawn from McNeill's contention that expenditure of muscular energy rhythmically in dance, as in military drill, but with different sociocultural consequences, is a fundamental human device for consolidating community feeling by facilitating cooperation by arousing a warm sense of togetherness. The significance of dance as a sociocultural (...) practice in early modernity is discussed critically through contemporary writings from the 16th and 17th centuries, with particular consideration given to the description of dance as an allegory for moral order in Elyot's manual on the education of the ruler. (shrink)

ArgumentThe history of ballooning has received considerable attention from historians examining the technological innovations behind it as well as from scholars interested in aeronautical anecdotes concerning launches and disasters. The cultural importance of this new machine, however, remains less fully analyzed. This essay explores one facet of that history through a discussion of the commodification of launches in France and Great Britain. These two countries, which have larger middling classes as well as a higher degree of commercialization in general, provided (...) a fertile environment for aeronauts seeking to instruct and entertain an audience willing to fund ballooning. Balloonists had to invent ways to market this scientific discovery and determine how best to attract paying customers. The audience was entertained while simultaneously empowered to act as witnesses to what balloonists presented as a scientific experiment. (shrink)

In recent years Singapore has come to be seen as a successful project of economic transformation and capitalist development. What is more remarkable - but less discussed - is Singapore's success in building a multiethnic society and the unique concomitant civilizing processes that have accompanied this. Singapore represents today a project of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural polity and a postmodern global city that combines civility, nostalgia and economic functionality. Here it is argued that - despite some well-known and decisive dark (...) spots on the political landscape - this success has to do with two concomitant processes. One is the functionally administered extension of the state into the meaning-sphere of the individual, totalizing it from within his own nostalgia in an exoticized urban space. The other is the soteriological transcendence of individual and intra-individual relations within and beyond the culturally recognized `communities'. Westerners will not be able to learn from the Singapore process of multi-cultural civilization should they continue to merely understand it in terms of `Asian authoritarianism'. (shrink)

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as (...) the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectivelysynchronizedacross fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements. (shrink)

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the (...) mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reassess the standard sociological canon and sketch the outlines of a new approach by bringing together a series of thinkers whose works so far have remained disconnected. Introducing a distinction between classics and background figures who were crucial sources of inspiration, it shifts emphasis to the late, reflexive works of Durkheim and Weber. These are sources for two types of reflexive sociology: historical and anthropological. The main background figures of reflexive historical sociology are Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (...) and Freud, while its protagonists include Foucault, Elias, Voegelin, Borkenau, Mumford, Ariès and Koselleck. A short introduction will be given to the four main fields of interest within the approach: the reconstructive histories of subjectivity, of forms of thought, of forms of knowledge, and of closed space and regulated time. (shrink)

This paper reviews the contemporary discussion on the epistemological and ontological effects of Big Data within social science, observing an increased focus on relationality and complexity, and a tendency to naturalize social phenomena. The epistemic limits of this emerging computational paradigm are outlined through a comparison with the discussions in the early days of digitalization, when digital technology was primarily seen through the lens of dematerialization, and as part of the larger processes of “postmodernity”. Since then, the online landscape has (...) become increasingly centralized, and the “liquidity” of dematerialized technology has come to empower online platforms in shaping the conditions for human behavior. This contrast between the contemporary epistemological currents and the previous philosophical discussions brings to the fore contradictions within the study of digital social life: While qualitative change has become increasingly dominant, the focus has gone towards quantitative methods; while the platforms have become empowered to shape social behavior, the focus has gone from social context to naturalizing social patterns; while meaning is increasingly contested and fragmented, the role of hermeneutics has diminished; while platforms have become power hubs pursuing their interests through sophisticated data manipulation, the data they provide is increasingly trusted to hold the keys to understanding social life. These contradictions, we argue, are partially the result of a lack of philosophical discussion on the nature of social reality in the digital era; only from a firm metatheoretical perspective can we avoid forgetting the reality of the system under study as we are affected by the powerful social life of Big Data. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper argues that the New Science, which was seen as essentially a public enterprise, was moreover a major constituent of the public sphere in early modern era. In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western Europe the sphere of public experimentation, testing, and discussion related to the new science, manifested, itself as a highly diversified, contested, and complex social field.Two general problems arose in constructing this cultural public sphere: the selection of participants in the debate and the inclusion of a heterogenous public (...) in the experimental scene. National authorities employed diverse policies but none denied the necessity of public debate for testing the validity of experimentations. The public sphere had to create its own conditions of existence by imposing manifold regulations in order to make these public meetings possible and enjoyable. These regulations emphasized common interest and the moral code as the most basic condition for rhe sustenance of the public sphere, thus enhancing self-restraint, tolerance, and politeness on the part of both discussants and participants. The more inclusive and heterogenous the public sphere, the more these norms were required. Thus the sphere of public debate constituted by early modern science implied a civilizing process, quite different from and more encompassing than the one analyzed by Norbert Elias. (shrink)

Problem setting. Latin America and the Caribbean traditionally referred to as a large and ambiguous region in an out-side territorial scientific environment. A whole stratum of problems of identities, peculiarities of self-awareness, civilization affiliations of messianic ’appointments ’ in the history of the region and the world, the development of ways of cultural and historical development corresponding to them, the affirmation of the tendencies of state formation is in a scientific researcher focus. Among the many aspects that conceptualize the demandfor (...) research in the region and its implementation, we would like to highlight the following: 1) Latin America and the Caribbean are, to some extent, «a territory of historically significant validation of modern trends» in their speculative lengthening, the field ofdeveloping new ones political and economic novations, including regarding various projections of the correlation of socio-political practices, institutional design and legal technologies, derived from the understanding of nature and the purpose of law. 2) The region ’provides ’ a wide range of heterogeneous materials for analytical work, both concatenate-linear in nature, and combining poly-meaningful multidimensionality, multifaceted coexistence of values generated by contemporary media, the glare of meanings, signs, intentions of conscious transformations, random «breakthroughs» of network travel followers. In the discovery literature thatfollows only the analysis of statistical indicators, it is often noted that Latin America and the Caribbean is a region of polarization. 3) Considering the full amount of opportunities and perspectives available, Latin America in general, in some associative formulation, is clearly «boxing at levels below its weight and its impact on international canvases», that is, there are some reasons for internal and external character that significantly reduce the region’s role in the world, affecting accents of processes of political, legal and economic worsen the work «for the common good», underestimate «the bar of tasks and results» do not meet the expectations of the significance of the region. Recent research and publications analysis. The paper uses an interdisciplinary approach involving the research of representatives of various sciences. Concerning the approach to certain aspects of the constitutional process in the countries of Latin America and the Carribien was used the researches of Ukrainian authors Yu. M. Todyka, V. P. Kolisnyk, Yu. G. Barabash, M. P. Orzikh, T. M. Slinko, A. G. Kushnirenko, pertaining to in relation to consideration ofpeculiarities ofdevelopment andfunctioning of the model of the presidential state was launched analytical andfunctionality materials I. V. Protsiuk. On the conceptualization within the political science tradition in connection with the problems of the political regimes, their development in the conditions of conflict of the present, in the face of threats and challenges of a multifaceted nature are included the materials of methodological and theoretical importance M. P. Trebin, I. O. Polishchuk, D. Denisenko, G. M. Kutz, O. A. Fisun, M. A. Polovyi and, in the context of regional- geopolitical dimensions, V. Yu. Karasev. Among the foreign authors on the subject area of the study, we note the conceptual vision of the combination ofeconomic cycles and political and legal processes of the present Daniela Campello, the development of the author of the theory of «path dependence effect» by J. Mahoney and researchers of modifications of the development of neo-patrimonialism in Latin America and Karsten Bachle. Focused on the trends and innovations of the constitutional process in the countries of the region are the scientific orientations of Rogelio Nu'nez and P. I. Kostogryzov. A broad analytical and research base on the transformation of political regimes in Latina America and the Caribbean and the peculiarities ofpolitical processes in individual countries are provided by the works of B. Geddes, G. O’Donnell, L. Diamond, D. Ziblatta, S. Levitsky, Z. V. Ivanovsky, T. A. Vorotnikova, P. P. Yakovlev, D. V. Morozov, and others. Paper objective. The purpose of this work is to find out the broad contexts of the relationship between economic and political and legal processes in Latin America and the Carribien countries with attention to the peculiarities of the rule of law formation. The tasks are to analyze a set of approaches to finding the causes of the difficulties of socio-political and institutional-legal development in the region with the involvement of interdisciplinary scientific experience and to identify some essential features of meaning- forming and socio-constructing phenomena in the contextual contours. Paper main body. One of the options for designating the specificity of the current state of affairs is framed in the concept of the so-called «curse of volatility» - the dependence of local, mainly commodity and export-oriented with low internal economy savings from cycles, fluctuations of the world economy. This dependence is a definite structural factor and has been forming for a long time. Also, macroeconomic indicators within the framework of a certain political economy methodology in the projection for the sum ofpolitical and legal events allow us to see the spread of ideology, whether left or right, the rise of populism, the tendency for further democratization of the way of life or vice versa from democracy, the relative calm of the political process or the turbulence ofpolitical events are, after all, tied to basic economic indicators, and often more or less relevant to us and corresponding to figures about the level of safety of life. The trajectory of development was laid down by some decisions at a time of critical juncture when privatization created the basis of the local economy as a structural part of the world capitalist system with its dynamics of development that facilitated the formatting and reproduction of the reactive sequences caused by different types of liberal reforms. Conclusions of the research. The particular attention in Latin America and the Caribbean countries on the expectations and responsibilities of building the future is focused on the development of Constitutional law as a leading sphere in the system of national law. Hence the numerous constitutional changes in the countries of the region, the constitutional reforms of different grades, which are intensively continued today. The lifestyle liberalization, resolving key property issues, attempts at democratization in Latin America and the Carribien countries took place in different ways, but after the foundations ofpublic law that were borrowed in outline in the USA. Between enshrined key provisions in the Constitutions and the coexistence of essentially diverse mass consciousnesses and aspirations on different ’floors’ of the society, has raised multi-dimensional discord, that is emerging from the institutionalization of the liberal-democratic model of the state, generated in the context of understanding freedom as a key concept. Therefore the aspect ofan all-public agreement on coexistence rules does not appear to be fully realized, which gives rise to a search for a constitutional character. The focus remains on the relationship between multiple interests and ideas about the common good, by means of the formation of the general will in the structure and practice of constitutional-democratic regimes. It is inextricably linked to the transformation of the concepts of representation and citizenship. Democratic legitimation is correlated with ideas about the rule of the masses, the will of the majority in the living creation of the norms of life, and with the accompanying active and continuous participation in the political process of large groups, sectors of the population. The constitutional creativity of the countries of the region shows the element of an assertion of messianism, the designation of the special role of the country, its leader, ideology, the Constitution in the processes of historical implementation at the level of regional or the world. This moment of national pride for the country and its contribution to the cultural and civilizational space of history is realized in experimental projects of various expressions. (shrink)