The paper maps out an alternative to a behavioural (economic) approach to business ethics. Special attention is paid to the fundamental philosophical principle that any moral ‘ought’ implies a practical ‘can’, which the paper interprets with regard to the economic viability of moral agency of the firm under the conditions of the market economy, in particular competition. The paper details an economic understanding of business ethics with regard to classical and neo-classical views, on the one hand, and institutional, libertarian thought, (...) on the other hand. Implications are derived regarding unintentional and passive intentional moral agency of the firm. The paper moves on to suggest that moral agency can be economically viable in competitive ‘market’ interactions, which is conventionally disputed by classical/neo-classical and institutional, libertarian economics. The paper here conceptualises active moral agency of the firm as the utilisation of ethical capital in firm--stakeholder interactions. This yields a reinterpretation of instrumental stakeholder theory. (shrink)

In his late work on Christianity, Talcott Parsons obviously built upon the writings of both Durkheim and Weber. While he departed from the idea that increasing differentiation of the system of action did not have to threaten the unity of the system as a whole, his emphasis on structural differentiation was also complemented by one on value integration. He believed that, especially in the New World, religion has gradually become able to impose its definition of the situation in highly different, (...) highly heterogeneous contexts of action. In this paper, I reconstruct Parsons’ historical-sociological analyses of the relation between Christianity and modern society. I discuss how Parsons appropriated the writings of Durkheim and Weber – in ways which did not fully exploit the potential of some of these writings. I suggest some alternatives, which rely less on a concern with value integration but more on one with the differentiation of meaning systems. (shrink)

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'. (shrink)

The goal of forming a science of intentional behavior requires a more richly detailed account of symbolic systems than is assumed by the authors. Cultural systems are not simply the equivalent in the ideational domain of culture of the purported Baldwin Effect in the genetic domain. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.

This article traces the historical impact of the church in transforming, developing and changing society. It looks at how the church in selected periods in history, mainly in the reformation era, worked towards the transformation of society and communities. Extracting from these the author attempts to show how this can be applied to the church in the South African context. Further, the author explores the changing dynamics and characteristics of being church today and establishes that it is not so much (...) about what the church believes, but in what it does that matters most in this day and age. The author, with the latter thought in mind, expresses that community transformation has to be an integral part of the ministry of the church today. (shrink)

Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for the origin, properties, condition and destiny of the modern world in work running from Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), to Situating the Self (1992), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996), and Another Cosmopolitanism (2006). I hope to show that Benhabib's view of modernity is ambiguous, and that inconsistencies in her position reach back, through Habermas and Weber, to Kant. I begin with a sketch of Benhabib's sense of what modernity is (...) about, turn then to what I think makes her position ambiguous, and conclude with a discussion of what I think is missing in her treatment of modernity. The gap I identify is strikingly pointed up when she uses the term modernism but does not talk about modernism at all. (shrink)

Is there anything outside the Christian Text or is the Christian Text all there is? The article will argue that the Christian Text has formed and shaped Western thinking to such an extent that it is impossible to think in the global world, co-created by various Western texts, without Christianity. The fact that the West colonised the world, and that today the Western media dominates the language of the global village, makes it nearly impossible to think outside the Christian Text (...) and thus the universal domination by the Text. This article will first argue that for the Western-influenced world, there is nothing beyond the Christian Texts, and then it will argue that although this Text has universal dominance, there is an interpretation of its central message as a message of weakness and vulnerability, which challenges its imperialism. This leads towards the question: what is a possible praxis of such a universal and 'imperial' Text with its message of vulnerable weakness, specifically from a post-colonial context like South Africa? (shrink)

The article presents a figurational sociological perspective on the recent history of the discipline of economics in the wake of the global financial crisis or ‘Great Recession’ that began in 2007–8. It is argued that the orthodox mainstream of economics has provided ideological cover for abstract individualism, for short-term greed, and for the denial of the wider social responsibilities of business and finance. The faith in ‘free markets’ has been associated with a blindness to power relationships and an indifference to (...) economic inequality. Orthodox economics is congruent with the mythical American Dream. The article draws upon the writings of Norbert Elias to reflect upon economics, and then in turn uses those reflections to raise some questions about Elias’s theories, particularly his ideas concerning functional democratization and increasing pressures towards more habitual foresight. (shrink)

Although scholars have long recognized the importance of "elective affinity" as a key word in Weber's sociology, surprisingly little systematic research has gone into understanding this metaphor in Weber's writing, or the source from which he drew the term. For Weber, this was an implicit reference to Goethe's novel, well known to Weber's educated German audience, entitled Elective Affinities. In this article, I provide a systematic account of Goethe's conception of elective affinity as a chemical metaphor, and of the way (...) that it is related to Weber's uses of the term in the Protestant ethic essays and in his critical rejoinders. By understanding elective affinity as a Goethean chemical metaphor we can better understand the causal claims that Weber makes in his famous essay: Weber's argument is best understood as an analysis of emergence in the chemistry of social relations. (shrink)

Commentators on Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism have tended to view that work within the context of world-historical social processes and change. Recently, more literary forms of analyses have come to the fore emphasizing Weber’s indebtedness to the philosophical/literary efforts of Nietzsche and Goethe, among others. The following offers the preliminary observation that the concept of ‘drive’ understood as a mode of psychological operation and process considerably complicates any possible interpretation of the essay itself. Weber’s refusal (...) to specify the exact nature and extent of the psychological Antriebe underlying his rational actor may make a decisive interpretation of the text impossible. Nevertheless, there may be good reason for supposing that Weber’s usage of the terms ‘drive’ and ‘maxim’ is indicative of a Fichtean synthesis of anthropological impulses and the operations of the rational intellect via his reading of Hugo Münsterberg. (shrink)

The article explores a range of social scientific representations of credit and debt in the United States and Britain and how these have been organized around the problem of freedom. On the one hand, credit is projected as productive, embodying and securing liberal values of individual autonomy and self-determination. On the other, debt is portrayed as consumptive, ensnaring the individual, subverting her or his will and undermining the capacity for self-determination. The classic cultural injunction against consumer borrowing is captured under (...) the rubric of the Puritan ethic which portrays indebtedness as contrary to the values of individual freedom and autonomy; however, it is shown here how the meanings attached to credit and debt have always been ambiguous in practice. Over the 20th century, and continuing today, a number of economic writers have attempted to legitimize the development of consumer credit by demonstrating how it contributes towards freedom and security. However, it is shown how these accounts shift in response to changing economic discourses as well as credit’s growing pervasiveness. In contrast, sociological writers have tended to criticize the accumulation of debt as damaging to both individual autonomy and societal welfare. Again, these accounts also manifest a notable change in emphasis over time in response to shifting constructions of the problem of social change. Finally, recent empirical work is drawn upon to demonstrate the ways in which freedom itself can be a contingent and contextual element in the production of consumer credit. (shrink)

The authors of Habits of the Heart charge that America is losing the institutions that help “to create the kind of person who could sustain a connection to a wider political community and thus ultimately support the maintenance of free institutions.” Bellah fears that “individualism may have grown cancerous – that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentials, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.” Proponents of the liberal (...) free market order should, I will argue, take seriously the concerns that motivate Bellah and company: citizens of a liberal regime cannot live by exchanges alone. Liberal constitutionalism depends upon a certain level and quality of citizen virtue. But while the need for virtue is often neglected by liberal theorists, it is far from clear that the actual workings of liberal institutions have drastically undermined virtue in the way Bellah's dire account suggests. That analysis serves, moreover, as the springboard for a radically transformist argument that seeks, not so much to elevate and shape, but to transcend and deny, the self-interestedness that the free market exercises. Having argued against Bellah's analysis and prescriptions, I shall attempt to show how the phenomena he describes are open to an interpretation that is happier from the point of view of a concern with virtue. I shall end by using Tocqueville to suggest that combining liberal capitalism with intermediate associations like voluntary groups and state and local government helps elevate and shape self-interest, promoting a citizenry capable of and insistent upon liberal self-government. (shrink)

The predictive inadequacy of the social sciences is well documented, and philosophers have sought to diagnose it. This paper examines Brian Epstein’s recent diagnosis. He argues that the social sciences treat the social world as entirely composed of individual people. Instead, social scientists should recognize that material, non-individualistic entities determine the social world, as well. First, I argue that Epstein’s argument both begs the question against his opponents and is not sufficiently charitable. Second, I present doubts that his proposal will (...) improve predictive success for the social sciences, which I support with Edith Penrose’s resource-based theory of the firm. (shrink)

This article argues that the polemics accompanying the valuation of Islamist social movements occur because studies of political Islam are often oriented towards the debate over the relative worth of Western and Islamist routes to modernity and the civilizing process. The method pursued by Weber to delineate the Christian activism of The Protestant Ethic - minus its debilitating Eurocentrism - is suggested as a helpful model for analyzing the complexity of Islamist interventions. These theoretical remarks are grounded in a study (...) of the transformation of public space effected by the Turkish Islamist party Refah upon its winning the Greater Istanbul Municipality in the 1994 local elections. The construction of Islamist tea gardens/restaurants reveals the conflicting civilizing practices of Islamists themselves as well as the plurality of interests and ethical commitments seeking shelter under the universal ethic of the Islamic ümmet. (shrink)

This paper is one of the few attempts made by social scientists to measure social capital via psychometric approach, and is the only one of such kind to base its evidence on the AsiaBarometer survey data. After first reviewing the history of social capital, including its conceptual emergence and recent literatures, we expose the issue of difficulty in the measurement of social capital despite its topical popularity. We tackle this measurement issue by applying psychometric procedures to the AsiaBarometer survey data (...) of 2004, 2005, and 2006, focusing on questions pertaining to social capital of ordinary individuals residing in the 29 survey societies. This paper is significant in two aspects. First, using simple statistical procedures, it extracts various dimensions of social capital without first knowing what dimensions to extract. In short, it does not try to measure social capital using some kind of pre-defined concepts such as those outlined in the historical review of our predecessors. Rather, it succeeds in manifesting key factors of social capital by mechanically processing collective responses by individual respondents towards survey questions oriented with social capital. Though the paper does not aim to establish its methodology as a widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, it does give credence and recognition to psychometric approaches as effectives means to measure social capital, which, by its very definition, calls for approaches using collective data to measure notions of individual actions within networks. Second, this paper is the first systematic empirical analysis of social capital in all the subregions of Asia, i.e. East, Southeast, South, and Central. It builds on our earlier works, including the 2006 paper on social capital in Central and South Asia, and gives empirical credence to important concepts on Asian political culture. (shrink)

Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)

The ArgumentDespite more than fifty years of debate on the Merton thesis, there have been few attempts to substantiate Merton's argument through empirically based comparative studies. This study of the Jesuit scientific tradition is intended to serve as a test of some of Merton's central claims.Jesuit science is remarkable for its scope and longevity, and is distinguished by its markedly empirical and utilitarian orientation. In this paper I examine the ideological structure of the Society of Jesus and find at its (...) core an “apostolic spirituality” that explains the legitimation of these forms of science within the Society. The values of apostolic spirituality strongly encouraged an activist mentality among Jesuits, which in turn led to the formation of apostolates in education, at court, and in the overseas missions. The values associated with apostolic spirituality led to the initial acceptance of active-empirical sciences within the Society, which became established as traditions because they were useful in fulfilling the goals of the Society's apostolates.This study, by providing a qualified confirmation of Merton's central claims, suggests the importance of a supra-confessional sanctification of labor and learning in the growth of active-empirical sciences. (shrink)

This study aims to shed light on the relationship between individual and regional Christian religion and individual sustainable behaviors in an exploratory manner, with a special focus on sustainable consumption and investment decisions. To this end, we econometrically analyze online representative survey data that contains information on the self-reported importance of the consideration of ecological and social/ethical criteria in the context of a large variety of individual behaviors. The target group are financial decisions makers in German households, i.e., important actors (...) in the largest economy in Europe. Results of the econometric analysis suggest that Christian religion is positively related to a variety of ecological and social/ethical activities. Our findings empirically support explanations postulating a positive relationship between Christian religion and environmental behavior, such as the stewardship hypothesis, rather than opposite theories like White’s :1203–1207, 1967) dominion hypothesis. Particularly, we find that both individual and regional measures for Christian religion positively affect various behaviors emphasizing the importance of individual and contextual norms for individual behavior. Hence, we provide empirical evidence for the importance of Christian religion for another country than the USA, which is typically in the focus of similar studies. Our results can be used for targeted information campaigns by politicians to enhance sustainable behaviors or acceptance for related policy measures. (shrink)

Historians of Reformational philosophy often claim that Abraham Kuyper obtained the idea of sovereignty in its own sphere from Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer. But very little historical research has been done on Groen’s sources for and development of this idea. The first use of the Dutch phrase souvereiniteit in eigen sfeer is much earlier than previously thought; it was used in 1853 by J.I. Doedes, an associate of the “ethical theologian” Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye. Groen became aware of the (...) ideas of Franz von Baader through journals founded by them, and by reading and corresponding with them and others, such as J.H. Gunning Jr. and Friedrich Fabri. Groen himself owned some of Baader’s books. He also relied strongly on the work of the jurist Friedrich Julius Stahl, who was 37 years younger than Baader but taught for a while at the same Munich university and shared Baader’s anti-revolutionary ideas. (shrink)

Although the concept of ‘culture’ was once invoked by anthropologists for progressive social purposes, today it is often used to justify racial inequalities. Using theories and methods of critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how such everyday racism is manifest in the explanation offered by ‘Katherine,’ a White middle-class American, of the unequal socioeconomic achievements attained by her own family of origin and by that of her Latino, working-class husband. By basing her explanation on presumed ‘cultural differences’ between European and (...) Latino immigrants, Katherine implicitly denies the existence of race and class barriers impeding poor people of color, and makes it their obligation to renounce their old cultural values and embrace new ones. Yet elsewhere in her discourse Katherine implicitly acknowledges such barriers. The discrepancy between these competing cultural models can be resolved by construing cultures not as timeless entities that determine people's actions, but as historically based in unequal power relations among ethnic groups. By describing the connections between Katherine's discourse and discourses that circulate in more influential, public venues, we seek to encourage speakers, writers, and audiences of all ranks to think more critically about the political implications of ‘culture’ as used by themselves and others. (shrink)

This article describes Chester Barnard, the author of The Functions of the Executive, one of the twentieth century’s most influential books on management and leadership. The book emphasizes competence, moral integrity, rational stewardship, professionalism, and a systems approach, and was written for posterity. Barnard emphasized the role of the manager as both a professional and as a steward of the corporation. His teachings drew on personal insights as a senior executive of AT&T, which saw good governance as the primary means (...) of winning public acceptance of its telecommunications monopoly. Barnard provided a conceptual scheme of the theory of organization based on the following structural concepts: the individual and bounded rationality, cooperation, formal organization, and informal organization. The principal dynamic concepts include communication, consent theory of authority, free will, the decision process, dynamic equilibrium and the inducement–contributions balance, and leadership, executive responsibility, and moral codes. (shrink)

Bourdieu's work on modern cultural production has certain omissions. It fails to raise the possibility that authors such as Salman Rushdie, either writing from peripheral nations or from powerless minorities within a powerful nation, might be called `heroic modernists'. This would differentiate them from the routinized form of late 20th-century modernist avantgardism, which operates within the logic of the laws of the `restricted literary field' and contributes inadvertently to social reproduction rather than transformation. The argument of the article provides grounds (...) for seeing Rushdie as such a `heroic modernist'. The structural location for contemporary `heroic' modernism is linked to the particular position the writer occupies as a stranger or migrant. However, it is proposed that even writing such as Rushdie's, deriving as it does from the political good intentions of the radical, is constrained to establish itself within a highly competitive cultural field. The article asks whether the `double rupture' of the Verses - a rupture both with the bourgeois bestselling novel and with popular forms - is not the main source of those social contradictions on which the writer himself came to be so impaled. Not the least among such contradictions is the imperative for the purpose of literary distinction of the refusal of a traditional realist style, which led the author towards an ironic iconoclasm: a comic grotesque mode of subverting of the sacred. (shrink)

The philosophical problems of liberty may be classified as those of definition, of justification and of distribution. They are so complex that there is a danger of being unable to see the wood for the trees. It may be helpful, therefore, to provide an aerial photograph of a large part of the wood, namely, the liberty ofindividual persons. But it is, of course, a photograph taken from an individual point of view, as Leibniz would have put it.

The humanities have not enjoyed preeminence in academe since the Scientific Revolution marginalized the old trivium. But they long continued to play a subordinate educational role by helping constitute the distinguishing culture of the elite. Now even this subordinate role is becoming expendable as devotees of the profit motive seek to reduce culture to technological delivery of cultural products (Noble, Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). The result is a deliberate downsizing of (...) the humanities as traditionally understood. Personal preferences aside, is this planned obsolescence morally defensible? Arguably not, if one appeals to traditional ethical norms. But what if its legitimacy is assessed instead according to the quite different norms of capitalism that figure so prominently in university administrators’ rationales as they embrace corporatization? The corporatization of American universities has had multiple effects, and some of these have not been entirely positive. In particular, it has had an adverse effect on the professional status and values of faculty. But how faculty respond to these changes varies according to their institutional situation. (shrink)

Daniel Kahneman was not the first to suggest that attention and effort are closely associated, but his 1973 book Attention and Effort, which claimed that attention can be identified with effort, cemented the association as a research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. Since then, the paradigm has rarely been questioned and appears to have set the research agenda so that it is self-reinforcing. In this article, we retrace Kahneman's argument to understand its strengths and weaknesses. The central notion of effort (...) is not clearly defined in the book, so we proceed by constructing the most secure inferences we can from Kahneman's argument regarding effort: it is cognitive, objective, metabolic expenditure, and it is attention. Continuing, we find from Kahneman's argument that effort-attention must be a special case of sympathetic dominance of the autonomic nervous system that is also an increase in metabolic activity in the brain that has crossed a threshold of magnitude. We then weigh this conception of effort against evidence in Kahneman's book and against more recent evidence, finding that it does not warrant the conclusion that effort can be equated with attention. In support of an alternative perspective, we briefly review diverse studies of behavior, physiology and neuroscience on attention and effort, including meditation and studies of the LC-NE system, where we find evidence for the following: 1) Attention seems to be associated not with the utilization of metabolic resources per se but with the readying of metabolic resources in the form of adaptive gain modulation. This occurs under sympathetic dominance and can be experienced as effortful. 2) Attention can also occur under parasympathetic dominance, in which case it is likely experienced as effortless. (shrink)

Weber’s concept of rationalization internally relies on an opposition that is borrowed from a religious semantics: the opposition between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Taking as point of departure the expression ‘the disenchantment of the world’ I argue that this expression, and the concept of rationalization, which is connected with it, have to be understood as elements of a categorical field of tension that is dominated precisely by the mentioned opposition. Referring to the sociology of religion, in which Weber for (...) the first time developed and deployed this opposition as an analytical tool, it appears that 1) the concept of rationalization in Weber is multivocal; 2) that the extraordinary and the ordinary relate to one another as do charisma and institution; and finally 3) that the description of the western rationalization process in terms of ‘disenchantment of the world’ by no means signifies that modern society is no longer characterized by the relationship between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Weber, for that matter, indeed attaches great importance to the extraordinary as a factor of revolutionary change, both in modern history and in modern politics. (shrink)

I try to understand the ordeal of solitude by beginning with Marc Augé’s usage on transitional sites as a provocation, which leads us to rethink solitude as a condition of subjectivity and its various inflections, most conventionally as loneliness and, in sociology, as fragmentation, anonymity, alienation, privatization and the various opinions that link it to the deprivation of separation that longs for connection, or, more fundamentally in Simmel, as the ontological view of the tragedy of human limitation. Instead of restricting (...) us to sites, Augé’s provocation suggests that if solitude is one of a family of such usages related to the experience of being alone or apart in such a space, we might then examine ways in which it is oriented to as a condition that can vary according to extremes, say, in the way Arendt and others have contrasted the pain of loneliness with the creativity of solitude. In linking solitude to transitional sites, Augé suggests that there is something about the experience of the in-between, whether of time or space, that illuminates solitude and that makes any relationship to it a potential ordeal. I test the notion by asking how the ordeal pertains to language itself and the intermediacy of a human subject in linguistic space. (shrink)

An argument is made in this article that there exists a trend in today's society toward a phenomenon that can tentatively be called neocharisma and that this trend poses important challenges to organization theory and the modern organization. This phenomenon, it is suggested, is expressed in today's intense pressure for innovation, something that makes it imperative to develop a distinction between constructive and destructive innovation. Organization theory has some difficulty in handling innovations, radical change, and irrationality, as a review of (...) the literature shows. In order to better understand a phenomenon such as neocharisma, it is proposed that organizations be seen as embedded in society in a typology based on Max Weber's four types of social order (tradition, instrumental rationality, value rationality, and charisma). The article ends with a comparison between charisma and neocharisma, a discussion of what differentiates constructive from destructive innovations, and suggestions for future research related to neocharisma. (shrink)

This article investigates the status assigned to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a case study on the development of the concept of theory in twentieth century sociology. I trace this development in the interplay between scholars in the United States and Germany and distinguish three waves of meaning given to the text. The transitions between these phases were brought about by an initial process of mystification of the text in the 1930s and a dynamic (...) of de- and re-mystification beginning in the 1980s. Following this process of (re)interpretation over time, I show that at the beginning of the century the work was perceived as an empirical inquiry, while at the end of the century it was treated as pure theory. Based on the example of the peculiarities of the Weberian expert communities in the United States and Germany, I analyze how the invention of a concept of theory as independent from empirical evidence helped to stabilize the value of scholarly expertise on Weber in the face of otherwise declining resonance of the text. The analysis of this paradigmatic case adds to our understanding of the development, uses, and meaning of theory in contemporary sociology. (shrink)

In this article, cognitivism is understood as the view that the engine of human (individual and collective) action is the intentional, dispositional, or other mental capacities of the brain or the mind. Cognitivism has been criticized for considering the essence of human action to reside in its alleged source in mental processes at the expense of the social surroundings of the action, criticism that has often been inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This article explores the logical extent of the (...) critique of cognitivism, arguing that by positing collectively shared knowledge of criteria as the engine of human action many such critiques themselves display latent cognitivism. (shrink)

In this article, cognitivism is understood as the view that the engine of human action is the intentional, dispositional, or other mental capacities of the brain or the mind. Cognitivism has been criticized for considering the essence of human action to reside in its alleged source in mental processes at the expense of the social surroundings of the action, criticism that has often been inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This article explores the logical extent of the critique of cognitivism, (...) arguing that by positing collectively shared knowledge of criteria as the engine of human action many such critiques themselves display latent cognitivism. (shrink)

This research addresses an emerging scholarship examining relations between media, religion, and culture in contemporary society. Whilst it acknowledges the value of this growing body of work, the study is based on a recognition that an overwhelming concern with the contemporary scene has resulted in a neglect of the history responsible for the conditions of the present. Given the prominence of America as both a source and an object of this scholarship, moreover, the particular national context in which the institutions (...) and practices of the US media have developed has been taken for granted somewhat. Oriented towards these perceived lacunae, this thesis examines the interaction between religion and film as an influence upon the development of American culture in the twentieth-century. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first of these is devoted to an extended discussion of the scholarly background to the research, and argues that the historical dimension of the interrelationship between religion and film in America is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In particular, it stresses the fundamental importance of religion within the discourse of national identity in the United States, and posits the notion of a non-denominational American civil religion as a useful theoretical tool with which to examine Hollywood as a distinctively 'American' form of cinema. Part Two develops this position through a case study of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and one of the most famous films of all time. Discussing the picture as a response to a crisis in American Protestantism, the study argues that the race controversy prompted by its Southern viewpoint was, to some extent, a function of Griffith's ambitions to revive the traditional religious bases of U.S. national identity via the medium of film. Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of Birth helped enact a broader transformation of American culture, wherein the cinema became instrumental in sustaining the belief that the United States was a nation uniquely favoured by Providence. (shrink)