For the Love for the World. The Banality of Evil in the Light of Arendt’s Political and Social Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-55
Author(s):  
Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The World

History, Theory, and Education

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Rury
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Attention To Detail

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”

Imaginary and Rational: From Social Theory to Social Order

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4-1) ◽  
pp. 168-179
Author(s):  
Elena Erokhina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Research

The article is devoted to the analysis of imagination as a philosophical and sociological concept that played a significant role in the development of social theory in the middle of the 20th century. Exploring the premises of the contradictory relationship between science and society, it is easy to find a connection between the development of science and social change. Currently, it is generally accepted that scientific, including social theories, through the transfer of ideas, transform the social order and, on the contrary, social practices transform knowledge about the world. The article proves that imagination plays a key role in this process. An excursion into the theory of ideas reveals the connection between imagination and irrational and experiential knowledge. The author of the article refers to the works of P. Berger and T. Luckmann, C. Castoriadis and C. Taylor, who showed a direct connection between theoretical ideas and the world of "social imaginary", collective imaginary and social changes. For the first time in the history of mankind, thanks to imagination, society does not see the social order as something immutable. Methodological cases are presented that illustrate the specific role of the concept of imagination as a source of the formation of new research strategies that allow for a new look at the problem of nationalism (social constructivism) and the study of public expectations from the implementation of technological innovations (STS). For decades, Benedict Anderson's work “Imagined Communities” predetermined the interest of researchers of nationalism in social imagination and the collective ideas based on it about the national identity of modern societies, their history and geography. The research of Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim has formed a new track for the study of science as a collective product of public expectations of an imaginary social order, embodied in technological projects. The conclusion is made about the contradictory nature of social expectations based on collective imagination: on the one hand, they strengthen the authority of science in society, on the other hand, they provoke the growth of negative expectations from the introduction of scientific discoveries. The article substantiates the opinion that imagination is an effective tool for assessing the risks of introducing innovations.

Postscript

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-144
Author(s):  
Mirco Göpfert
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
The World

This postscript studies the significance of the frontier. The frontier-space is not only the borderland between life governed by public institutions and life outside of the state's grasp; it is also the site where bureaucracy and the world it is charged with managing meet and the tension between the two becomes tangible. This tension then gives birth to a particular condition of doing and being. As such, the frontier is a project that aims to extend its reach beyond its confines. It is right here at the frontier where the prevailing moral standards become palpable, and it is right here that the value of the modern state, of bureaucracy, and of the gendarme's work must be judged. Understood as a space, a condition, and a project with particular stakes, the idea of the frontier can be of heuristic significance for the understanding of bureaucracy, the postcolonial condition, and for the project of anthropology and social theory.

Cartographies of social transnationalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-60
Author(s):  
Mike Savage ◽  
Niall Cunningham ◽  
David Reimer ◽  
Adrian Favell
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
Post War

The chapter takes up the challenge of a ‘cartography of social transnationalism’ first proposed by Steffen Mau (2010) in his study of German nationals in the post-war period. It emphasises, as Mau did, the need to find modes of operationalising the grand, abstract social theory of globalisation at a regional European scale. Using EUCROSS data on Europeans’ familiarity of other countries, the chapter maps variations in global connections across the six countries of the EUCROSS study, going on to map for each the particular cartography of their citizens’ social relations within Europe. It also visualises the kind of stratification apparently inherent in access to these transnational lifestyles. European nations still have quite specific, historically rooted ‘imperial’ relations with the rest of the world, something which anchors their overall geo-politics.

Foreword to Social Theory After Strathern

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Paul Rabinow
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Today, somewhat counter-intuitively, we no longer have an obvious venue for thinking-in-the world about our actuality. Despite, or because of, the endless conferences, seminars, mobility, publication outlets, new media and the like in which it is easier and easier to be connected, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the diagnostic that it is harder and harder to relate. This Foreword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ considers the contemporary problem of the inversion of connectedness and relatedness in the light of Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre. Proceeding from a discussion of the three kinds of friendship distinguished by Aristotle, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual persona is invoked as a way of thinking through conceptual friendship and the forms of relationality that an engagement with Strathern’s work requires and sustains.

scholarly journals “We Offer Nuffle a Sausage Sacrifice on Game Day”. Blood Bowl Players’ World-building Rituals through the Lens of Theory of Sociocultual Viability

2020 ◽  
pp. 089124162094824
Author(s):  
Benedict E. Singleton
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
American Football ◽  
Mary Douglas ◽  
The World ◽  
Building Activities

This article explores the world-building activities of players of the tabletop game Blood Bowl—a game that parodies American Football within a fantasy setting. It utilizes a ritual framework to focus on players’ activities relating to the considerable amount of luck inherent to the game. Based on fieldwork and survey data, it interprets players’ rituals and other actions as an effort to enact a particular social space, a “magic circle,” where enjoyable risk-taking and “edgework” take place. This social space is then analyzed within the Mary Douglas-derived theory of sociocultural viability (cultural theory). Using the theory’s typology, Blood Bowl tournaments can be characterized as individualist–hierarchy hybrid institutions. The article contributes by offering cultural theory as a tool for analyzing and comparing risk-taking behavior in diverse social contexts. The worlds built through Blood Bowl play are both analyzable and comparable with those integral to other social institutions, with cultural theory’s social solidarities ubiquitous. The article thus innovates by linking literatures on leisure and gaming with broader social theory.

Khôra as the condition of possibility of the ontological without ontology

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
BADREDINE ARFI
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
World View ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Meta Theory

Is social theory possible without a positive ontology? Do we need ontology as the very first step toward/of theorisation? Is or isn't ontology a consequence of the theorisation process? Is a meta-theory/theory delineation nothing more than a rhetorical/discursive artifice? If that were the case, why should we give priority to one assumption/consequence (for example, ontology) over others? What are the conditions of possibility and/or limitations for giving priority to any ontological assumption? It is almost unthinkable among social scientists nowadays to envision a formulation of social theory that does not posit an ontological beginning point, that is, by making explicit/implicit assumptions on the most basic entities – subjects, objects, agents, structures, and/or processes – that one takes to be the foundations of the (world-) view being explored or posited. This is usually considered a theoretical necessity of, as much as a desire for, soundness driven by our conception of what theorising means, or should mean. The issue is even put at the heart of what politics is, or is about. ‘Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’, says Wight. He, and, well before him, Walker, and Wendt, as well as most of today's social scientists, all assert that theories necessarily presuppose a basic positive ontology upon which all other considerations are built and that there is no social theory without ontology.

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