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The Anthropocene debate is one of the most ambitious scientific programmes of the past 15 or 20 years. Its main argument is that, from a geological point of view, humans are considered a major force of nature, thus implying that our current geological epoch is dominated by human activity. The Anthropocene has slowly become a contemporary meta-narrative that seeks to make sense of the ‘earth-system’ as a whole, and one whose vision of the future is dystopian rather than progressive: as the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources reaches tipping point, the very prospects of the continuity of human life are being questioned. This article aims to explore the implicit notions of the human – indeed of the anthropos – that are being mobilized in the Anthropocene debate. It will proceed in two stages: first, the article will spell out the main arguments of the Anthropocene debate with a particular focus on trying to unpack its implicit ideas of the human. Second, it will use my approach to philosophical sociology to highlight some of the limitations and contradictions of the ideas of agency, reflexivity and responsibility that underpin the Anthropocene debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they may not be best equipped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I trace the fortunes of sociology in the United States, Britain and Australia over the course of some 60 years. I compare the impact of professionalization, migration and institutional location on the character and contents of sociology in these countries. While recognizing the many achievements of professional sociology, I argue that the modern auditing frameworks by which the careers of academic sociologists are measured have had the effect of standardizing teaching and research in sociology to the point of marginalizing the discipline in many institutions. Such marginalization has occasionally encouraged creativity, but it has nonetheless left many sociology offerings in a fragile position. As part of my historical overview I challenge the stereotypical contrast between American empiricism and European theoretical flair. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent collection Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory provides plenty of evidence in support of the proposition that there is not a strong mood within sociology today to conduct an ongoing productive debate about ‘society’ as the core object of the discipline, in the way that, for example, economics conducts such a debate about ‘the economy’. Instead, sociology is much more likely to have disparate debates, each organized around a different object or candidate-object. That is, most debates within the discipline about what is, are, or should be its object or objects are conducted by advocates of some theoretical trend or other which these advocates think more important than other trends, and certainly more important than the object society. This situation is far from conducive to increased public relevance, especially because, in most cases, the target audience of each debate is a cohort of insiders. If the discipline were to more strenuously organize and/or participate in public debates about society it would at very least find itself associated with a notion which has currency beyond the field itself, such that even if sociologists were to debate society using technical language they might still attract wide public attention, in the way that economics attracts such attention when it debates technical aspects of the economy, like monetary policy or ‘irrational exuberance’ or the technicalities of the derivatives behind the global financial crisis. Using Sociological Objects as a launching pad, this paper explores the decline within sociology of the object society and shows how easily the lessons offered by historical insights can be undermined by a particular attitude toward the use of theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented to this special issue which discusses the history of the scholarly field of sociology, focusing especially on its key philosophies as an academic discipline.

Herbert Blumer was a key figure in what came to be identified as the Chicago School of Sociology. He invented the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ as a label for a theoretical approach that derived primarily from the work of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. But his most influential work was methodological in character, and he is generally viewed today as a prominent critic of positivism, and of the growing dominance of quantitative method within US sociology. While this picture is broadly accurate, it neglects an important strand in his methodological thinking. He was committed to the goal of a science of social life, while at the same time he was uncertain whether such a science is possible. In his Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, he identified a serious dilemma facing this project: the problem of how a scientific approach can be made compatible with the distinctive nature of human social life. In the first chapter of his most influential book, Symbolic Interactionism, he advocates a naturalistic approach to case study, and seems to treat this as avoiding the dilemma. However, there is evidence to suggest that, even towards the end of his life, he regarded the problem as still unresolved. In this article, I examine both sides of Blumer’s dilemma, and whether his attitude towards it changed. However, my interest here is not only historiographical. I evaluate Blumer’s arguments and show that his intellectual struggle with this issue remains relevant today, despite the shifts that have taken place in social science methodology and the philosophy of science since his death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to confront the principal arguments of the concept of critique in sociology and to demonstrate the emergence in recent years of a re-dimensioned conception of critique, on the one hand, of a pragmatic, pluralistic and contingent nature, and, on the other, show how the need for a strong and transcendental concept of critique that does not renounce the possibility of individual and collective emancipation is still present. This article argues that the analytic and empirical space in which we can better observe the meeting between the contingent and normative aspects of critique is that of the social movements, that unsurprisingly have been important reference points for many of the different sociological traditions of critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author explores our value relation to religious pluralism, defined both as a characteristic of contemporary societies and as a phenomenon of particular historical significance in contemporary social science. She sketches pitfalls threatening researchers when their values intermingle with the object of their investigation. Starting with a fictional dialogue between sociologists on the identification of religious motives, the author briefly goes back to the study of motives within the sociology of Max Weber. Because the jurist is an important actor in contemporary debates on religious pluralism, the author continues with a short dialogue between sociologists and jurists. These two types of observers discuss the objectives, the affinities and the tensions related to their respective tasks and, thus, the limits of their respective disciplines. But Weber himself has something to add… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contains an analysis of Georg Simmel's aphorisms and an appendix with a number of these in translation. An account is given of the production, publication and reception of the around 300 aphorisms that Simmel produced. His close relationship to Gertrud Kantorowicz is discussed, since she was given the legal right to many of Simmel's aphorisms when he died and also assigned the task of publishing them by Simmel. The main themes in Simmel's aphorisms are presented: love, Man, philosophy, Lebensphilosophie and art. Two of Simmel's aphorisms are also given an extended analysis. It is suggested that the skill of writing a good aphorism, both when it comes to style and content, has much to do with what we call the art of compression. It is also suggested that what ultimately attracted Simmel to the form of aphorism was its capacity to hint at something that is richer than the reality we are currently experiencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of self-interest is core to modern understandings of individual desire and need. It is also central in the concept of homo economicus and, in a variety of forms, underpins economic science. The critical discussion of the notion of self-interest in William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action ([1805] 1969), remains unknown in sociology and economics even though it resolves a number of key problems associated with the concept and makes an original, indeed, unique contribution to action theory. In particular, Hazlitt shows that the basis on which an individual pursues their own interest is identical with their sympathy with the interests of others. Hazlitt shows that a clear distinction between self and other cannot be sustained, and that an individual is as remote from their future self as they are from any other person. Even the 'sexual appetite' Hazlitt shows cannot be understood in terms of simple self-interest as it is stimulated and consummated through mental and reciprocal capacities. These and related aspects of Hazlitt's Principles are set out below, and their relevance for an understanding of self-interested action and self-formation is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the necessity of materiality for social order, or the performative and integrative capacity of things to help make the society. This means that there is a need to investigate what happens in social settings which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as things. This discussion will draw on an on-line ethnography, extended over 18 months, of people exchanging sexually explicit material and communications over Internet Relay Chat. They set in motion a considerable range of mechanisms of materialization, and they did so in order to establish a sense of ongoing ethical sociality, a social order.

Rising to a classical challenge in theorizing the materiality of the social world, this article revisits the venerable conundrum of social thingness in order to argue for a radically performativist view of the ontological facticity of social relations, patterns, and institutions. Its aim is to make-believe that social orderings are maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what the author calls an everyday essentialism. The stickiness of the social, in other words, can in part be explained by a circular bootstrapping operation which is often misrecognized as such in order to produce an effect of autonomous facticity and ontological transcendence: the Münchhausen effect.

This article presents the author's comments on the article On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, published in a 1999 issues of Theory, Culture & Society. There is no better illustration of the importance of Bourdieu's dream of sociology as a pure practical aesthetic, than the evidence for its difficulty of achievement in his unintended public miscommunications. At its best, Bourdieu's scheme works beautifully well for the French, who buy his books in remarkable number. It works, one presumes, because only the French are able to imagine the multi-dimensional social spaces of Bourdieu's public sociology. Only they are susceptible of being terrorized by, let us say, his pictures of the French academy because only they can see themselves in one or another position of inclusion or exclusion. By contrast, when Bourdieu ventures to describe the utterly familiar in the practices of American imperialists, they fail utterly to imagine what he might be imagining. thus, in the only approximately specific section of the essay that has led to all this discourse, Bourdieu and Wacquant wave their arms over the sins committed by American imperialists in the name of race--again, as if they are unable to imagine their own stupidities.

This article discusses newly identified convergences among Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Talcott Parsons on the critique of utilitarian theories of action as of February 2000. A good deal of Talcott Parsons's intellectual energy went into bringing together ideas and insights from disparate quarters. The momentous synthesis attempted in The Structure of Social Action was followed by many other efforts to bring together work from diverse domains: from economics and political science, from linguistics and cybernetics, from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. Yet nothing quite compares to the scope of that foundational enterprise. In an earlier critique of The Structure of Social Action, contrary to what Parsons argued therein, the synthesis of instrumental and normative dimensions in a philosophy of action did not originate in the generation of Pareto, Durkheim and Weber, but took shape more than a century before, in a series of philosophical developments that rebutted the Hobbesian reduction to atomic self-interest. Hume and Smith in Scotland, Montesquieu and Comte in France, Kant, Herder and Hegel in Germany--all of them formulated conceptions of action of the sot that Parsons in The Structure of Social Action would designate as voluntaristic.

This article explores the implications of Gillian Rose's social and political theory of modernity. For Rose, modernity not only construes ‘the autonomous moral subject as free within the order of representations and unfree within its preconditions and outcomes’ (1996: 57), it is also ‘the working out of that combination’ (ibid.). The implications of this view are explored below, concentrating in particular on the way Rose tackled the aporias and contradictions of modern sociology and social theory. Its conclusion is twofold. First, that Rose retrieves the absolute as fundamental to the meaning of social and political critique, and second that, in the face of demands for radical political action, not least in Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, it is the religious dimension of our political experience that has been consistently overlooked. It is my argument that, in her concept of ‘the broken middle’, Rose does not overcome the gap between theory and practice, but she does comprehend it as a way of life, one characterized by human struggling and failing. This way of life calls us to ‘mind the gap’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present historical epoch seems to be characterized by a general trend towards pacification. Conflicts of all kinds — internal and external, personal and collective — are becoming less central to social life. This reflects a new type of individualism, rather than further progress of individualism in the classical sense. Contemporary individuals are losing the sense of commitment and continuity that was needed to sustain conflicts. This development has far-reaching effects on the very nature of the social bond and raises questions about its future; the radicalization of individualism may find expression in overtly anti-statist attitudes, but it inevitably entails a latent strengthening of the state as a necessary link between desocialized individuals. The logic of contemporary hyperindividualism is also reflected in the growth of new pathological symptoms, related to identity problems as well as to the condition of solitude in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]