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This paper addresses the question of the relations between emotions and personhood, with a view to advancing a critical realist account of the role of emotions in social life. It is argued that the constitution of persons has to be approached from an ontological perspective, and that this raises questions about how sociology has addressed the meaning and role of emotions. Margaret Archer's critical realist perspective on them as commentaries on human concerns is broadly endorsed, but some significant correctives are proposed, especially with respect to the important distinction between primary and secondary emotions. To this end, it is argued that the affect spectrum theory advanced by Warren TenHouten can be fruitfully appended to a critical realist theory of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper's task is to outline some foundations of a critical, Marxist‐humanist theory of communication in the age of digital capitalism. It theorises the role of communication in society, communication and alienation, communication in social struggles, social struggles for democratic communication, the contradictions of digital capitalism, and struggles for digital socialist humanism. Marxist humanism is a counter‐narrative, counter‐theory, and counter‐politics to neoliberalism, new authoritarianism, and postmodernism. A critical theory of communication can should draw on this intellectual tradition. Communication and work stand in a dialectical relationship. Communication mediates, organises and is the process of the production of sociality and therefore of the reproduction of society. Society and communication are in class and capitalist societies shaped by the antagonism between instrumental and co‐operative reason. Authoritarianism and humanism are two basic, antagonistic modes of organisation of society and communication. Instrumental reason creates and universalises alienation. Digital capitalism is a dimension of contemporary society where digital technologies such as the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, tablets, robots, and AI‐driven ("smart") technologies mediate the accumulation of capital, influence, and reputation. A Marxist‐humanist theory of communication aims to inform struggles for a good, commons‐based, public Internet in a good, commons‐based society that has a vivid, democratic public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Bourdieu and Habermas concur that a critical reconstruction of the lay practice must be able to help people emancipate themselves from the social forces that are beyond their recognition, they take a radically different tack to achieve that goal. In the first part of this paper, I will bring Bourdieu to a "virtual dialogue" with Habermas and show why Bourdieu's method of "participant objectivation" should be abandoned in favor of Habermas's theory of "virtual participation". In the second part, after examining how Habermas uses his theory of virtual participation to criticize Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, I will show why Habermas's theory of virtual participation fails to accomplish what it professes to do. In the third part, by recounting the history of child abuse, I shall argue that the critique of the traditional practice of child beating was made possible not through the exchanges of validity claims about child beating as Habermas would argue but through the performance of narratives that re‐describe the "meaning" of child beating in terms that made the traditional practice of child beating look inhuman, unbearable and horrible. Keywords critical theory, participant objectivation, virtual participation, validity claim, social performance, Narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that social and political thought have nothing to do with issues of concern to metaphysicians. I have referred to this assumption in the past as The Myth of Metaphysical Neutrality. I argue here that social and political theories have metaphysical positions built into them, such that to adopt a given social or political account commits one to that theory's implicit metaphysics ‐‐ and, conversely, that commitment to a given metaphysical position will preclude adopting social or political accounts that are at odds with it. I look first at the issue of emergence, showing that key concepts employed by Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx, respectively, require a belief that wholes do not reduce to their parts. I then turn to Marx's account of alienation, arguing that it presupposes a belief in agent‐causal free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not only a social‐structural reality but also shapes why particular facts are regarded as relevant in experience (topical relevance) as well as how relevant material is interpreted (interpretative relevance) and acted toward (motivational relevance). Applying this framework, we (1) argue that media popularizations of the IPCC's dire Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) are constituted by relevance systems conditioned by a capitalist social context and (2) strengthen Ollinaho's (2016) Schutzian explanation for climate change inaction by examining how productive relations and the culture industry perpetuate climate change irrelevance in everyday life. Schutz's framework helps conceptualize the intricacies of ideology and, when revised with Adorno's sociology, shines new light on an old question: the relations between social conditions and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]