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This paper argues that social theory can cast light on some of the main themes in current debates about trans issues. It considers four such themes: social classification and social control; tensions between individual and group rights; access to public spaces; and the relationship between personal pronouns and social identity. In so doing, it seeks to reframe local disagreement and polemic through more general questions about our modes of living together, and concludes that these debates are at bottom about the future of civility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "environment" is ambiguous in social theory. Sometimes it is wielded like a "tyrant" which moulds subjects as if they were a simple reflection of its environment; other times it is treated as if the environment is a "slave" of subjects whose agency can transform it. This paper reflects on the complex interaction between people and their environments. Social theory cannot establish a univocal, abstract, final explanation of the influence of the environment on people's behaviour and identity. Each environment will have a situational configuration that will have different consequences depending on other biological and cultural traits of the subject. Each specific situation must be analysed empirically to understand this complex interaction. The subject-environment mismatch creates "social folds" — that is wrinkles which open new social spaces and enable freedom. The modulation between environment and subject creates risks to freedom, but also liberating opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud was a major cultural and intellectual influence in the twentieth century, whose significance waned. Kaye's exposition argues that part of the reason is that his presentation of himself as a medical scientist obscured his true interest in society and thus the social theory that informed his commentary on culture. In support of this argument he reconstructs the social theory. The reconstruction exhibits some familiar problems: the question of how deep motivations relating to the parricide hypothesis are transmitted over millennia, the plausibility of the family drama itself, the question of the cultural origins of Freud's own perspective, and the plausibility and historical specificity of his cultural diagnosis. The paper comments on some of the prehistory of these problems to contextualize Freud, and to discuss the problem of resonance: the dependence of acceptance of his arguments on seeing the mechanisms in oneself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous conceptions of violence today, such as physical, psychological, emotional, structural, and epistemic. The question of which social phenomena are to be described as violence is itself a matter of furious dispute. In social theory, there is a widespread tendency to distinguish between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ conceptions of violence. In this scheme, modern violence is primarily physical, while postmodern violence takes places across a broad spectrum of forms. The paper questions this binary. The co-occurrence and conflict between these forms of violence leads to a third form, which I call refigured violence. The refiguration of violence can be observed in three developments, which are mediatisation, polycontexturalisation, and translocalisation. I provide one illustration of these considerations with the example of so-called shock sites on the internet. In so doing, I emphasise that the sociology of knowledge can provide a valuable perspective for making sense of contemporary discourses about violence in all their complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates studies on the small world problem. Concept and operation of the small world theory; Factors that contributed to the rise of the small world phenomenon; Implications of the small world theory on social sciences.

Freud as a Social and Culural Theorist: On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process represents my attempt to rescue Freud from oblivion by reading him as the social theorist he always aspired to be, rather than as the medical scientist he so often claimed to be. By identifying Freud's enduring social, political, and cultural concerns, and by tracing the development of his reflections on them over the course of his long career, I attempt to locate Freud's thought in the tradition of Western social philosophy, particularly from the time of Hobbes on. Such an effort is essential for a proper assessment of Freud's contemporary relevance, as the responses of Prager, Turner, Apprey, Davis, and Reed published here amply demonstrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culturally informed metapsychology of Freud's is horizonal (sic) with psychoanalytically informed accounts of social concerns but not interchangeable. There are limits, to be sure, but evocative and informed chiasmatic crossings between them are generative and serve both fields of psychoanalysis and social thought. Psychoanalysis gives us access to the tragic inner life of humans and their capacity to love and betray, create and kill, among other acts of humans. The psychologically-charged world of social concerns is but an external field of reference that resonates with internal world representations. Inside and outside fold into each other to create a spiral circularity of events and psychological configurations that can be resubjectivized in accounts of human nature and the civilizing process in both psychoanalytic work and practices of social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud is about something important. While features of our contemporary situation make Freud's view of human nature and culture seem obsolete, they also illuminate what is at stake. Our institutional order is losing its solidity and durability, throwing us back on ourselves and our choices. It is becoming more "liquid," to use Zygmunt Bauman's apt metaphor, and fostering a light, depthless way of being and a mutable, non-constraining view of the social world. It is fostering a manner of self-making that involves a detached perspective on our very self and a techne by which we change ourselves through somatic intervention. Freud stood against the tendency to abandon a complex, hermeneutic view of selfhood and the facilitating structures of a cultural order. This was what he was about and what we must recover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates the ascent of what we call the empathy as care model in contemporary medicine. We make the following arguments: First, does empathy mean care? We examine this question in the context of medicine. We argue that empathy may not mean care throughout all medical practice, as findings from the medical education field show. However, empathy as care is rising in one specialty, palliative and hospice medicine. This specialty best represents the ideal-typical traits of the empathy as care model. This work contributes to the sociology of health and illness literature and to interpretivist sociological theorizing by examining empathy within the context of heath care meant to relieve pain and discomfort, often at the end of life, rather than curative medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay introduces a number of sociological theories that can be used to explore how individuals combine religious and secular discourses in their consciousness and behavior in pluralistic societies. Two concepts coined by Alfred Schutz seem to be most fruitful for this enterprise: the notion of 'multiple realities' (that make up an individual's life-world) and the notion of 'relevance structures' (as co-existing and potentially conflicting perspectives within the reality of everyday life). While the capacity to switch between realities and to juggle relevancies is probably an anthropological constant, the number of available relevancies increases radically in the course of modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The career of Lewis S. Feuer spanned several disciplines-Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, and History (especially the History of Ideas); his books and articles covered several centuries, and were devoted primarily to exposing the emotional undercurrents that animated the thought of intellectuals. Feuer tended to be highly suspicious of intellectuals, because they were susceptible to the allure of ideologies, which masked a dangerous will to power. His greatest achievement was to connect the contours of political and social thought to the drives of persons and to the context of institutions; his greatest limitation was to miss, at least in the United States, the deeper problem of popular hostility to science and to knowledge itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Berger has attempted to develop an account of the relationship between social structure and human agency that navigates a middle way between voluntarism and determinism. Berger’s approach has been criticised by social theorists for reproducing, rather than transcending, the very errors of voluntarism and determinism that he strives to avoid. However, the critics have focused on Berger’s explicit, meta-theoretical pronouncements about the nature or ontology of the social world, whilst ignoring the more sophisticated account of the structure agency relationship that is implicit in, and presupposed by, his substantive sociological research. The notions of ‘emergence’ and ‘emergent properties’ are used to develop an account of the structure-agency relationship that is consistent with Berger’s concrete sociological work, whilst avoiding the shortcomings of his explicit reflections about the nature of the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nation’s recent experience with war and economic crisis would hardlyshock Thorstein Veblen. America’s most original radical voice, Veblen has much to teach us about the common predatory origins of war and finance and the tragic consequences of their pursuit. This brief survey of the contemporary relevance of Veblen’s observations about war and economic collapse emphasizes the political foundation of his critical theory. Though widely regarded as an economic thinker, Veblen’s critique of modern business enterprise and its alliance with government rests on an essentially political dissection of what he termed barbaric exploit, the ancient root of war, power politics, the state, and latter day financial conquest. For Veblen, barbarism did not end with the coming of liberal democracy, rule of law or capitalism; its habits of exploit, waste and destruction go marching on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the social arrangements that foster claims of victimization. The announcement of new forms of victimization has become common place as of 1997. Some of these claims gained wide acceptance, whereas others met with considerable skepticism. Debating the merits of claims ignores underlying patterns in the way contemporary Americans interpret victimization. During the 1960s, Americans became sensitized to victims and victimization; by the 1970s, there was a widespread ideology of victimization. As this ideology gained acceptance in key institutions, it created a victim industry, a set of social arrangements that now supports the identification of large numbers of victims. Whether human actions and experiences are best understood as products of individuals' choices or as shaped by social arrangements is a central issue in social theory.

This article discusses facts about sociology. Sociology has tools with which it can address issues in social policy: empirical data and social theory. The first, empirical data, has been the more frequently used tool. Social theory, by contrast, has been seldom used in relation to social policy. This is not a healthy state of affairs. One of the criteria for judging work in social theory is its potential usefulness for informing social policy. For example, there is theoretical work on the conditions under which a stable and effective norm, with a particular content, will be brought into existence. Knowledge of these conditions would be extremely valuable in the design of organizations. For example, norms regarding expenditure of effort toward schoolwork develop among the students in most high schools. Often, these are norms opposed to working hard, norms which act to suppress effort.

The article lists a sampling of the best new books on social science received for review, which includes "Consumers In Trouble: A Study of Debtors In Default," by David Caplovitz, "The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965," by H. Stuart Hughes.