In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

‘Plastinates’ (i.e. corpses conserved through plastics) are lab created artifacts which since the nineties have been the subject of a cultural field experiment via an anatomical exhibition. Similarly to brain-dead or digitalized bodies, they constitute an ambiguous form of post-mortem existence. The article inquires after the ways in which the ontological status of these entities is constituted through the practices of body donors, anatomists and visitors. Plastinates owe their ambiguity to an oscillation between two different frames of perception. Their meaning (...) is determined by the extent to which an anatomy exhibition can impose a ‘medical gaze’ over a non-professional way of perception, which would stubbornly associate bodies with persons. This association depends on two qualities of plastinates, which refer back to the donor: on the one hand, they draw the observer into a communicational relationship, since the body is the archetypal medium of the self-representation of persons. On the other hand, the plastinated body, considered as ‘bequest’, acquires a biographical dimension: though the exhibition tries to appropriate the individual body anatomically, as an exemplar of a timeless, abstract idea of the human, the visitor’s mundane perspective reintegrates the exhibit into history. Plastinates are the embodied expression of the last will of those people whom the public meets in the exhibition. (shrink)

This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Sociological Imagination by recalling, renewing and updating C. Wright Mills’ pledge to expand a politically aware, self-reflective and publicly accessible intellectual culture between aestheticism and scientism. We begin by sketching how Mills’ ‘bifocal’ vision of the translation between the close-up perspective on personal milieus and the longer view of social structures contrasts with recent calls for a public sociology which would sustain its professional legitimacy while reviving its critical conscience. To illustrate this (...) point, we argue that his project can be reframed in a way that ‘provincializes’ the universalizing claims and scientific aspirations of much of North American sociology by exposing its imperial unconscious in pre- and post-war movements toward the professionalization and scientization of knowledge. Here our focus turns to the prospects for a ‘sociology of empire’ to trace imperial forms which are symptomatically manifested both in the discipline’s assumptions about historical progress and in Mills’ critique of these assumptions. Finally, with an example from the history of British colonialism in Egypt, we show how, despite its blindspots, Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination implicitly projects an alternative ‘sociological map’ with distinct vantage points that can account for the changing cultural tasks of our time, especially concerning how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power. We conclude by revisiting Mills’ distinctive approach to ‘the craft of sociology’, considered more as a prayer than a profession, and undertaken more as a personal and political calling than as career. (shrink)

The Introduction to Simmel's early article on the family locates it in the context of his sociological concerns in the 1890s. The article is also placed in the context of his probable anthropological sources. Brief mention is made of some of his other contributions to the study of love and eroticism.

Max Weber’s reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture on technology and culture, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society held in Frankfurt in 1910, is discussed in terms of its conventional and improvised character as a distinctive mode of ‘sociological’ speech. Emphasis is placed on the specific rhetorical circumstances that gave rise to these remarks, especially with regard to Weber’s status as an authorized speaker at the meeting, and their formulation as a response to Marxist theories accepted or (...) criticized by members of the audience. In characterizing the relationship between technology and culture specifically as a topic of sociological discourse, Weber’s comments therefore constitute a speech-act in their own right. They both conform to the protocols of ‘value-free’ academic debate upheld by the Society and experiment with this new genre and forum of intellectual discussion. Weber’s innovative aspirations are ultimately in tension with his efforts to routinize or even rationalize the scholarly vocation ( Beruf) of sociology as both an inward calling and an institutionalized profession that can speak critically to the most pressing and relevant issues of the day. (shrink)

Classical realism and Morgenthau in particular have recently experienced a revived interest in International Relations (IR). The evolving debate has helped to contextualise and reconstruct Morgenthau's thought which until now had been misrepresented in structural realist and early poststructuralist interpretations. However, despite all of its achievements, we have yet to draw more attention to Morgenthau's contribution to contemporary IR theory. To contribute to the closing of this research gap this article considers a set of questions which Morgenthau himself asked at (...) the beginning of his career as its conceptual framework. It is argued that Morgenthau was particularly concerned with the dehumanisation of socio-political life in modern democracies evoked through processes of ideologisation, technologisation, and scientification, which he countered by focusing on a re-introduction of the human factor to politics. This demonstrates that Morgenthau's work is a rich source for IR theory because his intellectual agenda was driven by concerns similar to what we find in poststructuralism. (shrink)

The purpose of this theoretical article is to contribute to the analysis of knowledge and valuation in markets. In every market actors must know how to value its products. The analytical point of departure is the distinction between two ideal types of markets that are mutually exclusive, status and standard. In a status market, valuation is a function of the status rank orders or identities of the actors on both sides of the market, which is more entrenched than the value (...) of what is traded in the market. In a market characterized by a standard, the situation is reversed; the scale of value is more entrenched than the rankings of actors in the market. In a status market actors need to know about the other actors involved as there is no scale of value for evaluating the items traded in the market independently of its buyers and sellers. In a standard market it is more important to know how to meet the standard in relation to which all items traded are valued. The article includes empirical examples and four testable hypotheses. (shrink)

While avoiding the pretence of producing an exhaustive reading of such a complex object as Lars Von Trier's Dogville, this article selectively uses the film to explore the process of the emergence of a new legality and a new set of legal relationships within a community. Two superimposed layers of meaning, the biblical and the mythic, are considered and their interaction with two different reasons, the symbolic and the economic, is suggested and explored. The categories of ‘critical being’, by Fitzpatrick (...) and Tuitt, and homo sacer, by Agamben, are taken as useful tools to understand such interaction and the connected dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout the article, it is argued that the perspective of the sacrifice, as framed especially by Girard, is useful to highlight an anthropological mechanism that can be retrieved in Dogville. (shrink)

This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic "relationship culture" comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social (...) relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this "meaning structure of social networks.". (shrink)

This paper considers the charge that—contrary to the current widespread assumption accompanying the near-universal neglect of his work—Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) cannot count as one of the founders of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. In order to elucidate the matter, Jerusalem’s “sociology of cognition” is here reconstructed in the context of his own work in psychology and philosophy as well as in the context of the work of some predecessors and contemporaries. It is argued that while it shows clear discontinuities with (...) the present-day understanding of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, Jerusalem’s sociology of cognition was not only distinctive in its own day but also anticipated in nuce a much-discussed theme in current history of science. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the role of strangers in the social division of labor that is otherwise a key concept in sociological theory. Partly drawing upon Simmel, this article develops a general framework for analyzing the "uses" of "the stranger" throughout history. Four major domains in which strangers have often been employed are identified: (1) circulation (of goods, money, and information); (2) arbitration; (3) management of secret/sacred domains; and (4) "dirty jobs." The article also explores how these activities (...) relate to the characteristics of stranger-relations. It is suggested that such an inquiry, in addition to helping us to understand how the presence of strangers in a society affects the processes of social differentiation, might equip us with a conceptual framework often lacking from purely political and ethical considerations of stranger-relations. (shrink)

To question power means also to ask what makes us governable and enables us to govern. This paper addresses this issue by rephrasing the question ‘what is power?’ into the question: ‘to what problem can power be seen as a response?’. This transformation allows us to keep the ‘power of power’ in sight. It then elucidates the ‘how’ of power through some conceptual explorations and theoretical clarifications as well as through an explicitly anthropological problematisation of power, as the way in (...) which power is understood depends always also on the way in which people understand themselves. Reassessing Foucault's rejection of anthropological reflections, the paper sketches a structural matrix of human self‐conceptions through which power and also critique can be reconstructed systematically. (shrink)

The state of recent as well as older research on social ontology suggests a paradigmatic approach, according to which it is our consciousness that must provide the framework for conceptualising the social. I, however, argue that Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following opens up a new horizon for the ontology of the social. The fact that the rules of our language are social in nature and that we need not be aware of them in order to follow them shifts the problem to (...) what lies behind consciousness. The ontological conceptualisation of the social must focus on our implicit knowledge instead, which is always an enabling condition for our consciousness: for we share some of this implicit knowledge with others, as can be seen from Wittgenstein and the case of language. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der einleitende Beitrag der Schwerpunktausgabe behandelt die Konjunkturen des Themas Religion und Architektur innerhalb der religionswissenschaftlichen Forschung der vergangenen Jahrzehnte. Ausgangspunkt ist die Beobachtung, dass Architektur in der religionswissenschaftlichen Fachgeschichte zwar immer wieder Gegenstand theoretischer Ansätze und methodischer Überlegungen war, aber bisher keine umfassende religionswissenschaftliche Methodologie zu diesem Gegenstand entwickelt worden ist und Architektur als solche nach wie vor als religionswissenschaftliche Quelle ein Desiderat darstellt. Vielmehr fungierte religiöse Architektur in den jüngsten Debatten zu raum- oder migrationsbezogenen Themen als Blaupause. (...) Religiöser Architektur wird zwar oftmals Bedeutung zugesprochen, z. B. als Kontaktzone oder in ihrer raumbildenden und strukturierenden Funktion, wie sie jedoch Bedeutung erzeugt, stellt nach wie vor eine zentrale Frage dar, die noch nicht hinreichend und religionswissenschaftlich vergleichend untersucht worden ist. An der Schnittstelle zwischen Material Turn und Spatial Turn gerät religiöse Architektur nun wieder zunehmend in den Fokus aktueller religionswissenschaftlicher, soziologischer, kunsthistorischer und architekturtheoretischer Forschungsvorhaben. Die Einleitung führt exemplarisch in ausgewählte Disziplinen ein, die zur Beschäftigung mit religiöser Architektur Anregungen bieten, und versteht sich als Anstoß, die religionswissenschaftliche Debatte zu diesem Gegenstand voran zu treiben. Die Schwerpunktausgabe führt entsprechend religionshistorische wie systematische Beiträge zusammen, die sich auf unterschiedliche Weise diesem breiten Gegenstand nähern. (shrink)

The paper critically reconstructs the crowd psychological heritage in phenomenological and social science emotion research. It shows how the founding figures of phenomenology and sociology uncritically adopted Le Bon’s crowd psychological imagery as well as what I suggest calling the disease model of emotion transfer. Against this background, it can be examined how Le Bon’s understanding of emotional contagion as an automatic, involuntary, and uncontrollable mechanism has remained a dominant force in emotion research until today. However, a closer look at (...) phenomenological descriptions and empirical investigations of how emotion’s spread shows that there is little evidence supporting Le Bon’s crowd psychological framework. Thus, I suggest that the disease model should be dismissed in favor of more plausible approaches to interpersonal emotion dynamics. (shrink)

In modern societies collective identity is both an empty signifier and a sacred center: even as its existence is taken for granted, what is or should be is subject to a host of different and often conflicting interpretations. However, the narratives and representations of collective identity are in no way undermined by these public debates; these signifiers are seen rather as a problem that is in principle amenable to solution, as something that ought to be (re)solved. In fact, the empty (...) signifiers of collective identity are constructed as solvable secrets precisely and primarily in public speech, open debate and perpetual critique. This article identifies the public and private modes of dealing with empty signifiers – through collective traumatic repressions, private resentments, public discourses adhering to argumentation ethics, and individual fabulations. (shrink)

German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of (...) them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author. (shrink)

This article critically engages a recent essay Jeffrey Alexander has published on ‘societalization’, whose conceptualization it finds problematic; first, because in contrast to the impression conveyed by the essay, the term itself is anything but new (as shown in a summary of six theories of societalization which precede Alexander’s by decades, in two cases, by more than a century), and, second, because the way Alexander employs the term is highly aporetic, while also being emblematic of much deeper problems that afflict (...) the whole discipline. Following a reconstruction of the term’s morphology and the transmutations it underwent during its gradual incorporation into the English language, the article identifies an undertheorized concept of society as the root cause behind the difficulties into which Alexander maneuvers himself. It concludes with a brief sketch of an alternative that can contribute to overcoming these difficulties. (shrink)

People live in distinct groups, notably territory-holding societies, whose boundaries aren't neatly defined by the traits that Pietraszewski describes for his socially aligned groups, as I propose calling them, which occur both within and between our societies. Although studying SAGs could prove enlightening, societies are essential human groups that likely existed long before the complex SAGs of today.

This article presents a novel conception of groups and social processes within and among groups from a communication-ecological perspective that integrates approaches as different as Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Heideggerian praxeology, and Luhmann’s systems theory into an innovative social-theoretical framework. A group is understood as a social entity capable of collective action that is an object to itself and insofar possesses an identity. The elementary operations of groups consist in social processes with communicative, pre-communicative, and non-communicative episodes. Groups operate in a number (...) of environments that are conceived of as both correlates of their own processes and providing groups with the raw materials for the fabrication of their constituents. These environments include but are not limited to spatial, discursive, emotional, institutional, semiotic-medial, psychic-personal, technical, and groupal environments. The article paves the way to combine studies on intergroup and intragroup communication in one comprehensive theoretical framework situated on such an abstract level that it can be concretized in view of utterly different cultural contexts and the emic perspectives of actors therein. Accordingly, the framework provides researchers with the conceptual devices to balance the comparability of different lifeworlds with the faithfulness to actors’ inside views. The methodological implications laid out in this article prioritize qualitative, especially ethnographic methods as a starting point for research on group communication. (shrink)

The paper confronts Georg Simmel’s distinction between the dyad and the triad with the phenomenological analysis of analogous structures undertaken by E. Lévinas, B. Waldenfels, and J.-L. Marion. Simmel insists on keeping the dyad and the triad apart while only the triad is considered worthy of sociological research. On the contrary, phenomenologists reveal deep interrelation between the relationship with the other and the third party where the latter is actually co-present in the dyad. The presupposed link between the two and (...) the three implies a different understanding of sociality that would respect its members in their uniqueness, unlike the world of interchangeable individualities common for social science. The third party can appear as the dimension of law and the ordinary, as the other of the other and the figure of humanity, or as the child in the case of erotic relationship. The last aspect of the third party provides a link to family studies. A brief outline of the situation illustrates oscillation between the triadic and dyadic interpretations of the family with the apparent prevalence of the dyad in recent decades. (shrink)

Setting out to understand “indexicality” and its significance in Ethnomethodology, it is first necessary to trace the history of the ideas of Harold Garfinkel. From his early commitment to find “order” in his Harvard dissertation, Garfinkel finds himself in California defending Parsons’ Structural Functionalism while confronting Goffman and Symbolic Interactionism, based in Simmelian, Schützian Sociology. From the audience of students shared with Goffman, Garfinkel puts aside the “situation” of Symbolic Interaction in favour of a process, “Indexicality”, abandoning theorising in favour (...) of ethnomethodology as the means to understand “order*”. This paper, then, demonstrates how indexicality works and proposes completing the tasks that Garfinkel set out in the Studies to disclose the taken-for-granted, the left out, bounded by caveats like No-Time-Out and For-all-practical purposes. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungObwohl Sportinteraktionen selten ohne einen Unparteiischen ablaufen, ist dieser Umstand soziologisch kaum erforscht. Die Spielleitung im Fußball, dem hier das Hauptinteresse gehört, ist in der Regel an einen neutralen Dritten delegiert, der das Spiel situativ beeinflusst, wie z.B. Elfmeterentscheidungen zuweilen drastisch vor Augen führen. Über einen Vergleich von Spielen ohne Schiedsrichter mit dem Kreisligafußball frage ich nach den strukturellen Unterschieden, die die Anwesenheit eines Schiedsrichters erzeugt. Dabei zeigt sich, dass ihre Präsenz die lautere und unlautere Konkurrenz im Spiel erhöht und (...) dass sich Spieler und Schiedsrichter in einer strategischen Interaktion befinden. Schließlich beschreibe ich die dramaturgischen Herausforderungen für Schiedsrichter, wie etwa ihre Darstellung von Neutralität und sicheren Entscheidungen. (shrink)

I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question (...) of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing ‘passive legitimacy’, which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation. (shrink)

Quelle est la nature de la liberté réelle (réelle) dans notre société? Je présenterai ici une nouvelle théorie du libéralisme que j’appelle « libéralisme orienté vers la croissance ». D’abord, j’examine le concept de liberté positive et négative d’Isaiah Berlin et je pose la question fondamentale en matière de liberté, à savoir que la liberté est un idéal paradoxal. J’identifierai deux paradoxes : l’un porte sur la liberté ordinaire et les valeurs sophistiquées, l’autre sur la question de la libération et (...) de l’apathie des individus ou des populations. Comment pouvons-nous surmonter ces paradoxes? Pour répondre à cette question, j’examinerai l’argument de Charles Taylor sur la liberté positive (liberté) et en élargirai les implications. Le paradoxe est d’autant plus lorsqu’il s’agit de communautés, comme la société japonaise. Au-delà du mode de pensée communautaire de Taylor, par exemple, je construis une nouvelle théorie de la liberté en proposant de suivre trois principes : le principe de la vertu (estime de soi), le principe du changement générateur et le principe de la différenciation. Je soutiens que la pierre de touche d’une société libre dépend de la façon dont nous concevons notre gouvernance sociale sur la base de ces principes. JEL Codes : Z10, B25. (shrink)

This article is based on the assumption that core concepts of National Socialism—different from Marxism—turn not on economic, but on moral concepts, or categories heavily related to such concepts as honour, loyalty, decency and comradeship. The article investigates National Socialism from the standpoint of moral judgments, and turns this investigation into part of a moral history. It further is concerned with the continuing impact of National Socialism beyond the military, political and ideological defeat of 1945; the moral historical approach can (...) show how this influence continues at a level hitherto relatively unexamined. The moral history of National Socialism involves more than a shift of perspective. It opens up a specific, barely explored, field of research. This draws upon a variety of sources, especially films (Hotel Sacher—1939 and Downfall—2004 are discussed). The examination is directed to the concept of loyalty within this framework; it is a concept of virtue, which is moreover suited to illuminate some aspects of the functioning of Nazi morality, and its subsequent influence. (shrink)

Rule is commonly conceptualized with reference to the compliance it invokes. In this article, we propose a conception of rule via the practice of resistance instead. In contrast to liberal approaches, we stress the possibility of illegitimate rule, and, as opposed to critical approaches, the possibility of legitimate authority. In the international realm, forms of rule and the changes they undergo can thus be reconstructed in terms of the resistance they provoke. To this end, we distinguish between two types of (...) resistance—opposition and dissidence—in order to demonstrate how resistance and rule imply each other. We draw on two case studies of resistance in and to international institutions to illustrate the relationship between rule and resistance and close with a discussion of the normative implications of such a conceptualization. (shrink)

Current interpretations of Heidegger's notion of das Man are caught in a dilemma: either they cannot accommodate the ontological status Heidegger accords it or they cannot explain his negative evaluation of it, in which it is treated as ontic. This paper uses Simmel's agonistic account of human sociality to integrate the ontological and the ontic, indeed perjorative aspects of Heidegger's account. Section I introduces the general problem, breaks the exclusive link of Heidegger's account to Kierkegaard and delineates the general form (...) of a solution. Section II then sketches Simmel's conception of sociology and sociality. Section III determines what Heidegger is trying to do in Chapter Four of Division I in Being and Time in order to formulate a strictly ontological account of das Man. Section IV uses Simmel's account of sociality to build into this ontological account an inherent tendency to display the negative features Heidegger ascribes to das Man. In conclusion, section V points to how the proposed account of das Man intimates the character of fundamental ontology as nascently a form of critical theory. It also explains the extent to which Heidegger's perjorative characterisations of das Man and the Man-selbst are legitimate. (shrink)

How do markets come about? This article offers a first systematic analysis of three different ideal types of market fashioning: mutual adjustment, organization, and fields. Although aspects of these are identifiable in most empirical markets, these three ideal types provide analytic tools for students of real markets and marketplaces. After going through this comprehensive literature, it is argued that mutual adjustment, which refers to non-planned processes, is affinity with markets in which products are differentiated, for example, producer markets. Organization refers (...) to process driven by attempts to decide for others and shows affinity with markets for standardized and homogenous products, for example, stock exchanges. Organization also accounts for the making of marketplaces. The broader notion of fields does not refer to any specific process, but accounts for the context of market fashioning and its respective power struggles. (shrink)

Uncertainty is an intriguing aspect of social life. Uncertainty is epistemic, future-oriented, and implies that we can neither predict nor foresee what will happen when acting. In cases in which no institutionalized certainty about future states exists, or can be generated, judgment is needed. This article presents the forms by which uncertainty is reduced as a result of judgments made about different alternatives in a process involving several actors. This type of uncertainty may exist, for example, about which artist is (...) the best, which offer in the market is more valuable, which football team is better than all the rest, or which research proposal will get a grant. The result of different forms of uncertainty reduction is increased certainty concerning alternatives in relation to one another, such as good and bad, rank lists, scores, quality assessment, and “winner and losers.” Based on the result, uncertainty is reduced and action is facilitated. The forms are structural and comprise roles; may be legitimate in a smaller or larger domain; and may exist in all spheres of life, as exemplified in sports competitions, in labor markets, and in the ranking of universities. Three forms of uncertainty reduction based on judgment are identified in this article: (1) decision, made by an authority; (2) valuation, by means of which order arises as a result of actors ascribing values; and (3) contest, by which an order is the result of direct struggle. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der Sinnsuche und -differenzierung des Boxens als einem Element der normativen Ordnung des modernen Sports. Auf der Basis einer gesellschaftstheoretischen Analyse wird das moderne Boxen vom traditionellen Duellwesen unterschieden, um die spezifische Modernität des Boxens herauszuarbeiten. Die Modernität des modernen Boxens liegt in der politischen Vermitteltheit seiner sozialen Verhältnisse, die durch eine triadische Konstellation des Vergleichs gleicher Leistungen charakterisiert sind. Demgegenüber gilt das Duell als Ausdruck einer Gesellschaftsformation, die im Medium der Ehre an soziale (...) Ungleichheit gebunden ist. Die Selbstunterscheidung vom klassischen Duell wird in der Quasi-Verfassung des modernen Boxens, den Queensberry Rules, konstitutionalisiert. Die Queensberry Rules spannen den kategorialen Raum des modernen Boxens auf, innerhalb dessen die Genese des Boxens normativ vermittelt ist. (shrink)