In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological ...

Translator's Introduction Political Theory in the Welfare State [Politische Theorie im Wohl- fahrtsstaat] was originally published (Olzog, Munich) in. ...

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of History (...) at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

This book explains the emergence and functioning of three forms of governance structures within the context of the European integration and constitutionalisation process: comitology, (regulatory) agencies and the Open Method of Co-ordination. The point of departure is the insight that the intergovernmental/supranational distinction, which most theories of European integration and constitutionalisation rely on, has lost its strength. A new paradigm of EU research is therefore needed. Against this background it is suggested that the distinction between governing and governance provides a (...) more appropriate basis for analysing the phenomenon of integration and constitutionalisation in Europe. The distinction between governing and governance allows for an understanding of the EU as a hybrid consisting of a governing dimension, characterised by legal and organisational hierarchy, and a governance dimension which operates within a network form characterised by legal and organisational heterarchy. The function of governance structures is to ensure the embeddedness of the governing dimension in the wider society. Instead of representing contradictory developments, the two dimensions are therefore mutually constitutive in the sense that more governing implies more governance and vice versa. These theoretical insights are illustrated through two detailed case studies which respectively reconstruct the operational mode of the Open Method of Coordination within EU Research & Development Policy and the regulatory system for the EU chemicals market (REACH). The book is inter-disciplinary in nature and incorporates insights from law, political science and sociology. Reviews and review essays: - Thomas Conzelmann, European Law Journal, volume 19, Issue 1, 143 – 45, 2013. - Agustin José Menéndez, European Public Law, Vol. 18, Issue 3, pp. 556–563, 2012. - Sarah Kahn-Nisser and Gianluigi Palombella: ‘Integration and Function: Taming Governance in the EU?, Transnational Legal Theory, Vol. 1, 4, 587 – 595, Dec. 2010. - Chris Thornhil, Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 37, 4, 687-90, Dec. 2010. - Edoardo Chiti, The Common Market Law Review, Vol. 48, 1, 265-66, 2011. - Maartje de Visser, European Law Review, Vol. 36, 3, June, 440 – 442, 2011. -Mark Fenwick, The European Union Institute in Japan Review, Feb., 1 – 5, Feb. 2012. (shrink)

In the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, ways of thinking in the Western world transformed in fundamental ways; even words that remained the same took on new meanings. In the field of the history of ideas, the period 1700–1850 is also called the ‘saddle-period’. Philosophers of history have argued that the new basic concepts that emerged at this time indicate how social reality has come to be comprehended in the modern era. Various segments of the population relied on them (...) to act, understand, interpret and reform reality. These concepts are crucial to the discursive constitution of the world—in the economy, politics, science, art, education and so on. They play their part in the dissolution of the ‘old’ world and the emergence of a ‘new’ one. They can thus also be studied with regard to their functioning as both factors in and indicators of evolutionary processes. This article deals with a small aspect of the historical co-evolution of concepts and structures in education. It examines the non-random character of the variations in the discourses on the social function of education, especially in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

In the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, ways of thinking in the Western world transformed in fundamental ways; even words that remained the same took on new meanings. In the field of the history of ideas, the period 1700–1850 is also called the ‘saddle-period’. Philosophers of history have argued that the new basic concepts that emerged at this time indicate how social reality has come to be comprehended in the modern era. Various segments of the population relied on them (...) to act, understand, interpret and reform reality. These concepts are crucial to the discursive constitution of the world—in the economy, politics, science, art, education and so on. They play their part in the dissolution of the ‘old’ world and the emergence of a ‘new’ one. They can thus also be studied with regard to their functioning as both factors in and indicators of evolutionary processes. This article deals with a small aspect of the historical co-evolution of concepts and structures in education. It examines the non-random character of the variations in the discourses on the social function of education, especially in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyse the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while (...) it undermines the procedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality. (shrink)

The essays in this volume formulate what is considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The volume starts with an examination of the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition notably the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

This collection of five essays by Germany’s most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann’s social theory to the question “What is modern about modernity?” and shows the origins and context of his theory. In the introductory essay, “Modernity in Contemporary Society,” Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls “social differentiation,” thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number (...) of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. “European Rationality” defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox. In the third essay, “Contingency as Modern Society’s Defining Attribute,” Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a “preadaptive advance” through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In “Describing the Future,” Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with “The Ecology of Ignorance,” in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas “for sponsors who have yet to be identified.”. (shrink)