The civilizational turn in sociological theory is best understood as an attempt to do full justice to the autonomy of culture (against all versions of structural-functional theory) without conceding the issue to cultural determinism. Civilizational formations are based on combinations of cultural visions of the world with regulative frameworks of social life, but the relationship between the two levels is open to conflicting interpretations and strategic uses of them. Axial age civilizations open up new structural and historical dimensions of interaction (...) between cultural and social patterns, and are therefore central to the agenda of civilizational analysis. Among the later breakthroughs which draw on Axial sources, the emergence of modernity stands out as particularly important; the cultural and political program of modernity may be seen as a new and distinctive civilization, but it remains open to more or less formative influences from older civilizational legacies. (shrink)

This book will appeal to second- and third-year undergraduates, and graduates and academics in sociology and social theory, politics, cultural studies and other ...

Since its appearance in English translation in 1996, Jurgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms has become the focus of a productive dialogue between German and Anglo-American legal and political theorists. The present volume contains ten essays that provide an overview of Habermas's political thought since the original appearance of Between Facts and Norms in 1992 and extend his model of deliberative democracy in novel ways to issues untreated in the earlier work. Habermas's theory of democracy has at least three features (...) that set it apart from competing positions. First, it combines a concern with questions of normative justification with an empirical analysis of the social conditions necessary for the realization of democratic institutions. Second, at the heart of his model is the assertion of an internal relationship between liberalism and democracy. Finally, Habermas defends a conception of universal human rights that is not only sensitive to cultural differences but also calls for legal and political institutions that facilitate the cultivation of cultural and religious identities within pluralistic societies. These essays demonstrate the extraordinary power of Habermas's theory of democracy through a further engagement with Rawls's political liberalism and through original contributions to current debates over nationalism, multiculturalism, and the viability of supranational political institutions. (shrink)

The significance of colonialism and decolonization for the dawning of European integration and their subsequent bearing on notions of European identity still constitute a largely unexplored field within research. In seeking to problematize and amend this state of things, this article embarks on charting a set of historical developments which provide a case for arguing that theoretical and empirical studies on the nexus of European integration and European identity need to pay much closer attention to questions pertaining to colonialism and (...) decolonization. As such, the article seeks to offer a glimpse of what it takes to be a critical background against which scholarly debates on contemporary notions of European identity need to be considered. Such an approach, it is suggested, should be of particular value for research trying to come to terms with Brussels' current endeavour to foster a collective sense of European identity in the Union. In expanding on this exact point, the article also broaches the question concerning all those `non-European' territories in Africa, South America and elsewhere that are incorporated into the present-day European Union, but which, nevertheless, hardly ever surface as such in studies on the EU and its politics of European identity. (shrink)

Does a global economy render the traditional nation-state obsolete? Does globalization threaten democratic life, or offer it new forms of expression? The German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas addresses these and other questions in this work.

The attempts to interpret Russian and Southeast European history in light of a Byzantine background tend to focus on traditions of political culture, and to claim that patterns characteristic of the late Roman Empire have had a formative impact on later developments. But the effects attributed to political culture presuppose a civilizational framework, and arguments on that level must come to grips with evidence of historical discontinuity, during the Byzantine millennium as well as in later centuries and on the periphery (...) of the Byzantium cultural world. The path to a historically grounded civilizational analysis is, however, obstructed by persisting images of Byzantium as a stagnant culture, immobilized by a complete fusion of secular and sacred authority. The article discusses and criticizes some of the most influential versions of this view. (shrink)

Like a navigator, Derrida sets out from a Europe that has always defined itself as the capital of culture, the headland of thought, in whose name and for whose benefit exploration of other lands, other peoples, and other ways of thinking ...

The Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime in Turkey centres around the deconstruction of the Republic's civilizing mission. Here the modernization of the rump of the Ottoman Empire undertaken in the name of the universality of western civilization (with the consequent attributing of backwardness to Islam) is problematized: Islamist discourse converges with other postmodern critiques in proclaiming the exhaustion of modernity as a project of emancipation. Islamist politics celebrate the return of the Muslim actor and identity. And yet the making (...) of an Islamist movement is threatened by the mobilization of other political identities similarly suppressed by the Turkish state's modernizing project. This includes in particular Kurdish subjectivity, long a target of assimilation in the name of the universality of the greater Turkish nation. This paper examines the fragmenting of the Islamist movement in Turkey, as well as Islamist attempts to head off Kurdish nationalism. The Islamist suppression of difference within its own ranks in the name of an Islamic universalism betrays it too as a descendant of Enlightenment discourses and a modernizing movement in its own right. (shrink)

This paper is based on four assumptions concerning the analysis of the construction of collective identities. First, such construction, like power and economic relations, is an analytically autonomous basic component of the construction of social life. Second, such constructions have been going on in all human societies throughout history. Third, all such patterns of collective identity have been continually constructed from some basic yet continually changing building blocks, codes or themes - especially those of primordiality, civility and `sacredness'. The paper (...) focuses on the different patterns of modern nation states in the framework of the more general approach to the construction of collective identities. This analysis of different modern nation states indicates that despite common characteristics, there developed great differences in their construction; in the analysis of such differences it is very important to take into account the historical and civilizational backgrounds of the respective societies. (shrink)

"A brilliant analysis. Using an extraordinary amount of rich and unusual primary sources and a remarkable array of theoretical insights, the author analyzes the role of the individual and individualism throughout the whole Communist period. It is one of the best works of sociology that I have read in recent years, and may be the most brilliant and provocative work that I have ever read on the Soviet Union."--Tim McDaniel, author of "Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia".