ABSTRACT Through a close analysis of Spinoza's views on prophecy and the Hebrew Republic, this article contributes insights into how certain modes of governing succeed in aligning and entangling affects with reason. I argue, first, that the prophet must be seen as a political figure immersed in the imaginative-affective domain. Through the imagination, signs, and a moral compass, the prophet utilizes

ABSTRACT Jürgen Habermas famously argues that reason cannot be rejected or criticized by employing its tools. In other words, every critique of reason has to put forward certain universal generalizations about reality. Based on this, he suspects a performative contradiction in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction – a claim which is largely dismissed by Derrida and his followers. Derrida aims at articulating

ABSTRACT The study of nationalism is usually split into its macro-sociological dimension and the political and coercive aspects on the one hand, and into micro-sociological, psychological and symbolic aspects on the other. Pierre Bourdieu’s methodological structuralist approach and his concepts of habitus and doxa give us a better understanding of nationalism in its dominant form – State Nationalism

ABSTRACT The rise of authoritarian populism has forced many democracies to consider how best to defend democracy against its inner enemies. In the literature on democratic self-defense, one often distinguishes between three models: a legal (militant), political (procedural) and social (integrational). If much scholarly attention is on the merits and limits of the first two models, the social model

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the broad reception of Karen Barad's framework of agential realism, it comes as a surprise that there has been little discussion so far of her core concept of diffraction in the social studies of science. This article aims to evaluate the methodological potentials of a diffractive approach for science studies. In order to achieve this, I will examine Barad's take on

ABSTRACT This article argues that faith is a crucial concept for understanding the relationship between reason and affect. By allowing people to learn from religious faith for secular ends, it can help generate political action for emancipatory change. Antonio Gramsci's underexplored secular-political and materialist conception of faith provides an important contribution to such a project. By speaking

ABSTRACT This article addresses the role of thinking in politics by engaging with two radically different literatures: theorizing on affect and sociological research into reflexivity through internal conversation. Brian Massumi and his fellow affect theorists have made an important contribution to dismantling overly rationalist conceptions of thought, by conceptualizing the embeddedness of humans in

ABSTRACT This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the ‘end of history’ to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as ‘capitalist realism’, divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call ‘static time’,

ABSTRACT This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from

ABSTRACT It is common to understand mass demonstrations, like those belonging to the new cycle of contentious politics, as disruptive political events. However, there is no consensus on how to define what political events are, let alone how to investigate them. Most frequently, events are romanticized and understood as great ruptures, which makes the concept problematic as a means to investigate these

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen a surge of interest in prefigurative politics, which refers to the political strategies that model a future society on a micro level and aim to instantiate radical social change in and through practice. While most previous studies have focused on defining the concept and categorizing various types of prefiguration, this paper contributes by investigating under what circumstances

ABSTRACT This article has two major goals: to present the different ways in which sociologists use the term ‘method’; and to suggest a tentative explanation why these been invested with their current meaning. The following uses are discussed: method as a mean to a goal; methods as methodology; the scientific method; method as a craft; and the heuristic method. It is also pointed out that sociologists

ABSTRACT This article evaluates Andreas Wimmer’s theory of ethnic boundary making by applying it to the maintenance of Jewish ethnic identification in Sweden, as expressed in interviews with Swedish Jews. Wimmer proposes that ethnic conflict routinizes and entrenches perceptions of ethnic difference; we argue that the antisemitic persecutions of the twentieth century have entrenched the perception

ABSTRACT Frontier-making has always been fundamental for the circulation and accumulation of capital. The perennity of frontier-making is not only due to the demand for minerals, land or other resources, or because frontiers represent fresh market opportunities, but crucially because it operates as compensation for the saturation of the existing capitalist relations in core areas. At the frontier,

ABSTRACT This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political

ABSTRACT Research on Islamist radicalization has been characterized by different analyses of why some people become radical Islamists. Structures such as social, economic and political marginalization are often understood as root causes of radicalization. In critical theorizations of radicalization, religion is often mentioned as a component; however, its role is often downplayed. This article focuses

ABSTRACT Dumpster diving for food implies using discarded edibles found in waste containers behind supermarkets, for example. People who voluntarily engage in this activity suggest that it is a form of hands-on social critique. In this article, we use interview materials to describe and conceptualize this practice. The main question we pose is: in what way is voluntary dumpster diving a ‘critical practice’

ABSTRACT In this piece, we introduce the notion of ‘atmoculture’ as a conceptual tool to analyse the new forms of mobility supported and enacted by digital algorithms. In historical perspective, we analyse how modernity has created a movement-space where the problem of finding one's way through an increasingly ‘displaced’ urban space first emerged, with noticeable psycho-social consequences. Reconstructing

ABSTRACT Managerial coaching is an important and arguably emblematic example of the transformation of managerial techniques that has occurred in the last decades, where more equal work relations and empowerment of employees is increasingly promoted. In the literature on managerial coaching, the role of the manager-coach is to open up a space for the employee to formulate her desires and attempt to

ABSTRACT In this paper I will sketch a theory of how normative demands for freedom emerging from the lifeworld both serve to provide new bases of legitimation for capitalism by drawing on underlying normative orders in the lifeworld while simultaneously giving rise to precarity on the part of new classes of workers. I argue that such a theory can provide a means of theorizing recent protests against

That obligations arise from both social exchanges and social roles is well established in sociology. Less appreciated is the fundamental and dichotomous nature of exchange obligation and role obligation. In the absence of an understanding of the distinction between them exchange and role obligations may be confused, as when Mauss believes the obligations he discusses come from social exchange when

ABSTRACT Mindfulness, as the cultivation of ways to become attentive to the present moment, has grown exponentially in some areas of the global north over the past decade or so. As such, it has generated much important debate about its efficacy and the politics it produces, especially in terms of whether and how mindfulness is a response to, or effect of, neoliberalism. Drawing on Berlant's argument

ABSTRACT The main aim of this paper is to illustrate the distinctive features of the Finnish school of critical theory, focusing especially on its reception of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and his ideas regarding the concept of social pathology. In this respect, the article will provide a concise description of the philosophical work of some of its members: Onni Hirvonen, Heikki Ikäheimo, Arto

ABSTRACT This article affords particular attention to the relationship between memory, the narrativization of news and its linear construction, conceived as journalism’s ‘memory-work’. In elaborating upon this ‘work’, it is proposed that the Hegelian notion of retroactive causation (as used by Slavoj Žižek) can examine how analyses of news journalists ‘retroactively’ employ the past in the temporal

ABSTRACT This article investigates the meaning and role of social critique in the social sciences. This form of theorizing has always been a significant part of the social sciences. Due to the scientific ideal of value neutrality, however, the manner in which social criticism is conducted is seldom discussed. I claim that the value-neutrality ideal rests on a conception of normative subjectivism that

ABSTRACT The failure of states to take the necessary actions to prevent global temperatures from soaring may be interpreted as more than an act of environmental negligence. In terms of a knowing imposition of harm, it also represents an act of domination. That is, a deliberate denial of rights to a safe, democratic, and sustainable future. This paper notes the role played by institutional power in

ABSTRACT The article explores one of the most under-researched aspects surrounding populism, namely the political logics followed by governing populisms, and more specifically, the transitions of populisms from ‘protest to power’. It does so from a theoretical perspective rooted in the work of Ernesto Laclau. This implies conceiving the relationships between populism and state institutions as governed

ABSTRACT What can the idea of eternal return tell us about contemporary financial society? In this essay I follow Nietzsche by deploying it as an existential provocation, linking the prospect of endless recurrence to the daily routines of the asset economy. This entails a departure from simple notions of cyclical time, typically associated with political economy and the study of economic history, in

ABSTRACT During the last two decades, there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the writings of the radical twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, and one of the central issues in this wave of scholarship has been the Mills’ relationship to feminism and the place of sex and gender in his social theory. Contemporary scholars assert that Mills was largely ignorant about feminism

ABSTRACT This article challenges ‘agonistic’ readings of Arendt by demonstrating that Arendt’s work can be interpreted as ‘agonistic realism’. It argues that many agonistic readings of Arendt – I will discuss the readings of Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe in particular – miss the central orientation of Arendt’s thought. By ignoring works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem

ABSTRACT The study of youth is central to efforts to understanding continuity and change and the reproduction of inequality. There are longstanding debates about how to account for class in shaping young people’s lives in the context of social change, including recent calls for a greater focus on political economy in the sociological study of youth. This article considers these debates in the context

ABSTRACT My research explores Erich Fromm’s social theories of narcissism, alienation and authoritarianism for the purpose of linking those theories together, thereby analysing current populist phenomena as an extension of a fascist development in terms of Enzo Traverso’s conception of post-fascism. In my view, Fromm’s critical social theory of narcissism, which pertains to his two other theories,

ABSTRACT The proximate roots of performance measurement lie in a 1980s shift in management accountancy away from lagging and financial indicators towards leading ones that indicate potential for future value creation, especially regarding intangible assets and functions. This paper proposes that such innovations in accountancy are not merely technical but are driven by contextual economic imperatives

ABSTRACT Vilfredo Pareto’s legacy is uncertain; while his reputation in economics is secure, references to Pareto in contemporary sociology are few and fleeting. Sociologists and members of the public who are aware of Pareto’s non-economic work likely associate the Italian polymath with a single zoological image: the lions and the foxes. This phrase has found some currency in political sociology but

ABSTRACT Digital labour platforms act as intermediary agents between users and are imbued with the power to determine the rules of interaction within their own digital ecosystem. As the labour market has become increasingly integrated into the platform economy, digital enterprises have been able to use their concentration of power to experiment with new structures of labour regulation and management

Humanism went out of style in the second half of twenty century. Moreover, it became a special target of theoretical criticism. For many theorists, it may be not honourable to defend human dignity, to be guided by universal values, and to foretell an emancipated humanity. After totalitarianisms, post-colonial and ecological movements, post-structuralism, and decolonial criticism, it is no longer possible

humanism inherent to modern natural law’s universalism, insofar as it is realized in the institutional architecture of a legal liberal ‘State’, in which the public administrative apparatus controlled a dissociated mass of private individuals, destined to interact, through contract relations and for economic interests, in a radically depoliticized ‘civil society’. With a social realm thus conceived

The idea that criticism is the best form of flattery has never made much sense to me. Yet this is the first time that my work has been subject to such detailed dissection as the one that transpires in the 7 interventions that are included in this dossier. Given the depth and breadth of these reflections, it is certainly impossible for me to reply in detail to most, let alone all, the challenges that

ABSTRACT This article builds on current debates on the concept of alienation as a vehicle for the immanent critique of social pathologies in the world of work. Despite the renewals of the concept of alienation, the problem of how a theoretical diagnosis of alienation can be linked back to empirical material remains unsolved. Therefore, this paper develops a heuristic approach that makes it possible

ABSTRACT In light of the current crisis of democracy, political theory faces the crucial question if the democracy in crisis can bring about a severe transformation of democracy and pave the way to replacing democracy with authoritarian government. Political theory is not only called upon to analyze the multiple processes of de-democratization but also to conceptualize the relationship between democracy

ABSTRACT Émile Durkheim known among other things for his pioneering sociology of criminal law was also a corporatist theorist and can be interpreted as a predecessor for an institutionalist approach that has recently gained popularity in comparative criminal justice. Durkheim suggested an inverse relationship between the intensities of ‘repressive’ regulation and ‘restitutive’ welfare state regulation

Daniel Chernilo’s (2014, 340) invitation to the project of philosophical sociology is eloquent and elegant: ‘the questions that matter to sociologists are always, in the last instance, also philoso...

Daniel Chernilo’s Debating Humanity (Chernilo, 2017) is a defiantly old-fashioned defence of humanism, universalism, and the need for philosophical sociology. It is densely argued, rigorously coher...

A century ago, shortly before his death, Simmel (1964) formulated an enigmatic idea of a philosophical sociology as a ‘study of the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of society’ (23) concerned with questions that transcend the boundaries of empirical inquiry. Drawing its inspirations from intellectual history, the project built on Nietzschean meditations on the fate of the modern individual

There are two different albeit overlapping senses in which one might do a ‘philosophical sociology’, and Daniel Chernilo’s (2017a) Debating Humanity bears the mark of both of them. On the one hand, the ‘philosophical sociologist’ might treat sociological practice as itself an expression of certain philosophical themes and orientations relating to the human condition. This was quite popular when I first

ABSTRACT Malaise – e.g. melancholy, ennui or boredom – compels subjects to deal with profound existential crises concerning the meaning of life. Discussions of malaise, however, tend to focus on points of departure that fragment its myriad forms. This is often done by downplaying points of overlap that are not given their proper due, and this means that it is difficult to appreciate the ways that malaise

ABSTRACT This article draws on insights from digital media theory and design methodology to contribute to sociological and anthropological understandings of money. It postulates the rise of a new money-form, or rather money-forms, referred to (in the plural) as experience money. The notion of experience money is developed through an analysis of Apple Pay, where I suggest that experience contains both

ABSTRACT This paper explores an ontological version of ‘abstraction’ as it manifests in the commonalities and differences across social scientific research events. Drawing on a range of writings that focus on the potentiality of the event, on Whitehead’s concept of the ‘eternal object’, and on the notion of attractor as discussed by DeLanda, the notion of abstractor’ is tentatively proposed. The aim

ion is a term that commonly carries negative connotations. So, for example, it is frequently opposed to lived experience – that is, abstraction is presented as a reduction of the richness and complexity of everyday life. In other negative uses, abstraction is held to involve an erasure of difference in a process of homogenization or generalization, as for example when the creation of classes or classifications

ABSTRACT In outlining their influential architectural theory of space syntax, Hillier and Hanson acknowledge its affinity to Durkheim’s sociological considerations on the spatial-morphological basis of social life. In doing so, space syntax theory promised to address the then woefully under-theorized relationship between society and space, specifically by emphasizing the agency of spatial-morphological

ABSTRACT The growing popularity that postmodern positions have achieved in the social sciences since the 1970s has brought with it a transformation in the way in which critique is understood and exercised. This has resulted in a ‘weak’ form of critique that, seeking to avoid authoritarian or arbitrary impositions, rejects the evaluative and normative aspirations that had traditionally characterized

ABSTRACT Populism of the twenty-first century, the paper argues, emerges from the aloofness of liberal democracy’s sober regimes of rationality. This results in political movements that are explicitly affective in their strategies, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum. However, while policy research claims that left- and right-wing populism ‘look alike’ (isomorphia), the paper shows

ABSTRACT The ambiguities of abstraction were at the heart of critical approaches to the problems of modernity. Abstraction, so fundamental to the modernist episteme, was seen to have alienated humanity from itself and from its entangled relations with its environment, constituting a fundamental rift between the subject and the world. This article analyses how the critique of the modernist episteme

ABSTRACT The following aphorism is used as the point of departure for the discussion in this article: ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I say?’ Its literal meaning is that it is through the very act of speaking that you get to know what you think; but the aphorism also has a suggestive quality to it. As a consequence, many artists and thinkers have referred to the aphorism and sometimes also

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of the constitution of behaviour and its effects on the observers and on those observed, in the case of a ‘direct load-control’ experiment in the electricity sector in France. Typical of the rise of the behavioural approach to understanding demand in the electricity sector, that experiment lasted seven years and involved several hundred households. It aimed

ABSTRACT This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic literature that tie it a relation to the material. This is developed from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Under the rubric of the liminal, the diachronic interchange between these poles will be examined to better understand how the Abstract saturates the material. This entails not only the purely Abstract

ABSTRACT Problems posed by the ‘Anthropocene’ have caused many feminists to rethink a feminist ethics in a post-anthropocentric vein. In this context, a reconceptualization of the notion of responsibility as response-ability or ability to respond has gained crucial relevance. This article reads ethics of response as feminist takes on problems posed by the Anthropocene, but also as attempts to conceptualize

ABSTRACT The invention of new forms of geo-social knowledge has become one of the imperatives to resist the so-called Anthropocene. Critical theorists have called for enhanced interdisciplinary collaborations between the earth sciences and the social sciences and humanities to disrupt conventional nature/culture divisions and imagine more sustainable futures. The condition for such geo-social encounters

ABSTRACT Precarity and precarious work are widely debated concepts, though a lack of clarity remains about its definition, dimensions and application. Recognition appears to be an illuminating concept for a deeper understanding of work and employment in times of precarity and its further effects, but has yet to be considered. The article aims to develop a multifaceted understanding of precarity for