In recent times developments in the natural sciences and in the sphere of environmental politics have compelled social scientists, and also some natural scientists, to rethink the relations that hitherto have been held, in Western thought generally and within particular disciplines, to characterize ‘nature’ on the one side and ‘culture’ on the other. This article considers the history of this conceptual boundary and looks at new conceptualizations of nature/culture, stimulated by developments both in biotechnology and in the ongoing controversies about (...) environmental degradation. It argues that while some of the contributions to reconfiguring, or abolishing, the nature/ culture division have been productive and stimulating of new ways of conceiving the world, there has nonetheless been an unfortunate tendency for social scientists to bring to bear inherited analytic dispositions on biotechnological and environmental matters. Instead of using these issues as means of challenging social scientific disciplinary dogmas and of engaging in constructive rapprochement with natural scientists, social scientists have in their analyses of such matters often merely asserted the hegemony of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, and thus in effect the superiority of social scientific over natural scientific conceptualizations of the world. Far from overcoming the nature/culture boundary, social scientists have too often merely asserted the primacy of the sorts of subject matters and analytic techniques they feel comfortable with, rather than subjecting their practices to fully reflexive self-scrutiny. (shrink)

v. 1. Classical contributions to cosmopolitanism -- v. 2. Key contemporary analyses of cosmopolitanism -- v. 3. Cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanisms -- v. 4. Contested cosmopolitanisms.

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and other (...) awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees. (shrink)

The ancient Greek historian and political scientist Polybius is not as well known in the present day as figures such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. This is in part due to his having lived in the Hellenistic period, an epoch often thought to be characteristic of Greek cultural and political decline, rather than in the earlier ‘golden age’ of Greek intellectual life in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Yet Polybius’s ideas have been of profound importance in modern western (...) thought, in areas as diverse as historiography, philosophy of history and the theorization of political institutions. This article illustrates the main contours of how subsequent thinkers have received and made use of Polybian ideas and themes, and argues for regarding Polybius as an important precursor of contemporary social scientific analyses of ‘globalization’. The article first excavates and identifies some of the main forms of appropriation of Polybius’s ideas that have occurred in the West over the last 500 years. Secondly, it delineates the most important appropriation of Polybius in the human sciences that has been effected in recent times, namely the use made of Polybian themes by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, their influential diagnosis of the contemporary state of world affairs. Thirdly, the article proffers a critique of these authors’ use of Polybius, and in its stead offers an alternative mode of appropriation of his work for the purposes of analytically reorienting the human sciences in light of present-day concerns with globalization and conditions of globality. It is argued that, far from being a figure of only antiquarian interest, Polybius continues to be of much relevance for human scientists today, for he may be seen as a foundational figure in efforts to think about the ‘global’ level in human affairs. (shrink)

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both (...) a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented. (shrink)

The article discusses the philosophy of sportive existence, as put forward by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega is widely recognized as the major figure in Hispanic philosophy in the 20th century. Sports are an integral aspect of Ortega's philosophical output, both as aids toward understanding more general issues in ontology and philosophical anthropology and as explicit topics for reflection and analysis in and of themselves. Issues to do with sports and the sportive aspects of life were central to (...) Ortega's reflections on the nature of the human condition. Ortega argued that in many ways, the figure of the sportsperson represented more than any other symbol the human being's quintessence. (shrink)

This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian (...) we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification. (shrink)

Of all sociology's `strange others', cultural studies is perhaps the least unfamiliar to many sociologists. Yet cultural studies exists in one of the most ambiguous relationships with sociology of any academic discipline. In this article, it is argued that the complicated nature of the relationship is compelled by the very closeness of the two participants in it. What often seems to be an ongoing state of ritualized antagonism between them flows not from their ostensible differences but in fact from their (...) striking underlying similarities. Their symbiotic bond both compels, and is hidden by, the rhetorical displays of selfhood in which they both often engage. The article reviews and assesses this state of affairs, and argues that the similarities between the two disciplines are actually based on a number of shared epistemological assumptions, a priori ways of thinking that in fact are very much open to question. A critique of these assumptions is outlined, and it is suggested that by recognizing their shared nature, both sociology and cultural studies, and the relationship between them, would enter into a greater state of intellectual maturity. (shrink)

The automobile has figured as an important issue of concern and a profound source of fascination for a wide range of intellectuals in France since the 1950s. The car has been understood variously as a covert vehicle of creeping Americanization and consumerization, a threatening object that obliterates nature, a harbinger of hyper-modern futures, and as a constitutive element of everyday practices. This article traces out the diverse ways in which the car has been ‘good to think with’ for a range (...) of French intellectuals in the period spanning roughly from 1950 through to the 1970s. It seeks to demonstrate the richness of those currents of thought in post-war France which were concerned to comprehend the nature of car cultures. It is argued that these ways of thinking can be drawn upon in the present day by those wishing to analyse contemporary features of automobility. (shrink)

Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals. The new edition of this popular book continues to cut to the core of what social theory is about. Covering key themes from the classical thinkers onwards, including Marxism, post-structuralism, (...) phenomenology, feminism and more, the second edition features a new chapter on Actor-Network Theory and enhanced discussion of postcolonial theory. Wide ranging in scope and coverage, the book is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for readers seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis of the kind propounded by Eisenstadt and globalization theory are apparently wholly incommensurate paradigms, with radically differing visions of the contemporary world order, the former championing the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ and the latter envisioning a world of trans-national processes and institutions. This articles challenges such a dichotomizing view, and seeks to illustrate how in various ways they overlap and can come to inform each other. Particular attention is given to how a focus on inter-civilizational interactions can lead (...) to productive rapprochements between civilizational analysis and globalization theory, as it allows some of the themes of the latter to be analysed through civilization-analytic lenses. The pioneering work in this regard of Benjamin Nelson is shown to provide a basis for future civilizational analyses of globalization, especially in the pre-modern world. (shrink)

In his lifetime, Bruno Latour (1947-2022) made many provocative and controversial arguments, such as about the nature of the practices of the natural sciences, and against standard social scientific forms of critique. Running through many of Latour’s interventions, aimed at what he took to be stultifying forms of academic and intellectual orthodoxy, was a concern with the nature of truth. Whether emphasising how science fabricates its ‘facts’, or in having to deal with uncomfortable similarities between that sort of analysis and (...) the attacks on the allegedly fraudulent nature of climate science by climate sceptics, or in presenting the societal bases of standard forms of social critique as fictitious, Latour was constantly engaged in battles about and polemics concerning what counts as truths and truthfulness. In this paper, we consider the nature of some of the main contours of Latour’s battles about and with truths. We present an account of his practice in a critical light. Sometimes that involves stepping outside of the ‘anti-critical’ frame of reference he sought to construct and impose on how philosophy, sociology and other ways of thinking are done, but it also sometimes involves using that apparatus, while turning it against the intentions of the author. The purpose of this paper is not to try out-do Latour in the dismissal of intellectual positions other than one’s own. Instead, we focus on other types and levels of failure in the career-long endeavours and engagements with matters of truth of this curious but undoubtedly unavoidable figure, ‘Bruno Latour’. We end by speculating if more ‘Bruno Latours’ will be fabricated in the service of new modes of truth-creation in the future. (shrink)

Philosophical issues of hospitality are bound up with broader issues of cosmopolitanism in thought and in practice. This paper considers the interplay of human faces, masks, forms of hospitality, and cosmopolitanizing and anti-cosmopolitanizing socio-political dynamics in the time of Covid-19. Despite confident assertions by some interested parties that it is now finished and past history, Covid-19 remains a major challenge across the globe, and so reflections on the interplay of masking, cosmopolitanism, and hospitality remain pertinent today and are not merely (...) a quaint feature of life during the early years of the pandemic. Voluntary acts of self-masking are argued to be more than just mundane forms of micro-level action and interaction among persons. Instead, freighted sometimes with political meaning, and certainly loaded with ethical force, the donning of a face mask can operate as a small but compelling quotidian act of cosmopolitan concern and hospitableness towards other people, including those perceived to be very unlike oneself. (shrink)

Many influential stances within the social sciences regard nature in one of two ways: either as none of their concern (which is with the social and cultural aspects of human existence), or as wholly a social and cultural fabrication. But there is also another strand of social scientific thinking that seeks to understand the interplay between social and cultural factors on one side and natural factors on the other. These volumes contain the main contributions that have been made within each (...) of these streams of thought. The selections illustrate to the reader the complexity of the various positions within these streams, and the strengths and limitations of each perspective. A new introduction places these articles in their historical and intellectual context and the volumes are completed with an extensive index and chronological table of contents. (shrink)

Of all sociology's `strange others', cultural studies is perhaps the least unfamiliar to many sociologists. Yet cultural studies exists in one of the most ambiguous relationships with sociology of any academic discipline. In this article, it is argued that the complicated nature of the relationship is compelled by the very closeness of the two participants in it. What often seems to be an ongoing state of ritualized antagonism between them flows not from their ostensible differences but in fact from their (...) striking underlying similarities. Their symbiotic bond both compels, and is hidden by, the rhetorical displays of selfhood in which they both often engage. The article reviews and assesses this state of affairs, and argues that the similarities between the two disciplines are actually based on a number of shared epistemological assumptions, a priori ways of thinking that in fact are very much open to question. A critique of these assumptions is outlined, and it is suggested that by recognizing their shared nature, both sociology and cultural studies, and the relationship between them, would enter into a greater state of intellectual maturity. (shrink)