Civilianization Elsewhere

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-191
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
German Economy ◽  
Military History ◽  
Employment Policy ◽  
Military Buildup ◽  
The Social

Aversion of the discipline of economics to things military, which Sovietology, its peripheral field, emulated, is shown to be a part of a more general pattern in the social sciences. A survey of articles about the German economy in 1934–1939 finds that the authors largely ignored another great peacetime military buildup of the twentieth century. It was seen as a peculiar and successful variant of employment policy, with potential lessons for other Depression-stricken economies. Archeologists and anthropologists bypassed the evidence of warfare in pre-literate societies, or gave it strained pacific interpretations. Academic historians marginalized their colleagues specializing in military history. Civilianizing tendencies in the study of other countries and in other disciplines support some of my arguments about Sovietology, and at the same time make its case all the more instructive.

Rhythm

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Theoretical Category

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.

Die Macht der Institution

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

This volume examines Arnold Gehlen’s theory of the state from his philosophy of the state in the 1920s via his political and cultural anthropology to his impressive critique of the post-war welfare state. The systematic analyses the book contains by leading scholars in the social sciences and the humanities examine the interplay between the theory and history of the state with reference to the broader context of the history of ideas. Students and researchers as well as other readers interested in this subject will find this book offers an informative overview of how one of the most wide-ranging and profound thinkers of the twentieth century understands the state. With contributions by Oliver Agard, Heike Delitz, Joachim Fischer, Andreas Höntsch, Tim Huyeng, Rastko Jovanov, Frank Kannetzky, Christine Magerski, Zeljko Radinkovic, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Christian Steuerwald.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Charisma’

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conceptual Debate ◽  
The Individual

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.

THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS OF ISLAMIST ACTIVISM: ELITE STUDENTS AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS IN EGYPT*

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Ketchley ◽  
Michael Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
Secular Institutions

The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the population of male undergraduates, it analyzes how the arrest rate varied across 348 university faculties. We find that activists came disproportionately from institutions that provided a religiously inflected education. This contradicts the conventional emphasis on secular institutions. Most importantly, we find that Islamists tended to come from faculties that required higher grades and that admitted students who studied science in secondary school. Controlling for grades, engineering and medicine were not especially prominent. These findings suggest that Islamist students conform to the more general pattern: political activism attracts the academic elite.

scholarly journals The “false” debate between positivism and Verstehen in the origins of sociology

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ullan de la Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractThe article revisits the debate between the positivists and non-positivists currents in sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concluding that it is actually a false debate, due to the fact that, beyond their differences, both shared some of the basic principles of the paradigm of modernity. From this historical analysis the article seeks to draw lessons for the social sciences in the present, at a time when these seem to have reached a certain synthesis between the modern and postmodern epistemologies. The article shows us that such a synthesis was already prefigured in the writing of classical theorists as it is, in fact, an ineluctable structural law of science itself if it wants to escape from the trap of skepticism and epistemological nihilism. The article also explores how, as a consequence of the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm, a common ethnocentric bias can be traced in all the fathers of sociology and wonders whether sociology today has actually got rid of this problem.

Inter- and Extra-textual Hauntings: Unravelling the Semantic Web of Václav Havel’s Leaving

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-251
Author(s):  
Katie Fry
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Real Life ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantic Complexity ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

Leaving (2007), the first play written by Václav Havel since the start of his political career in 1989, is a theatrical tour de force that categorically defies generic classification. In this article Katie Fry draws on methodologies of theatre semiotics and intertextuality to elucidate the semantic complexity of Havel’s highly unconventional play. Leaving is analyzed in terms of its engagement with intertexts, its incorporation of ‘real-life’ material from Havel’s political and artistic careers, and its subversion of theatrical conventions. Katie Fry is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. She has worked as a translator and dramaturg for independent theatre projects in Madrid and Toronto. Her dissertation project examines the attribution of religious import to theatre, opera, and literature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. She holds a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

From political economy to sociology: Francis Galton and the social-scientific origins of eugenics

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS RENWICK
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Biological Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Francis Galton ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractHaving coined the word ‘eugenics’ and inspired leading biologists and statisticians of the early twentieth century, Francis Galton is often studied for his contributions to modern statistical biology. However, whilst documenting this part of his work, historians have frequently neglected crucial aspects of what motivated Galton to establish his eugenics research programme. Arguing that his work was shaped more by social than by biological science, this paper addresses these oversights by tracing the development of Galton's programme, from its roots in a debate about political economy to his appeals for it to be taken up by sociologists. In so doing, the paper not only returns Galton's ideas to their original context but also provides a reason to reflect on the place of the social sciences in history-of-science scholarship.

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