Material Considerations

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 35-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Pietz
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Object A ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Intent

If Harr emphasizes that things become social objects only within particular storylines, Pietz makes the reverse point about the essential materiality of social relationships, especially contractual ones, e.g. as expressed in the legal history of the `material consideration'. Departing from a similar conception of the performative micro-reproduction of social order and the communicative objectification of social facts, he argues that a theory of forensic objects as social facts disrupts not only capitalist presumptions about economic objects as the sole origin of monetary value but also enlightenment conceptions of society as a sphere of consequential human action distinct from nature as the sphere of material causality. The material consideration is one such forensic object. A `material consideration' refers to an obscure but important social object that embodies the power to transform subjective promises into objective obligations and thereby establishes the social fact of legal liability. The failed attempt of liberal philosophers and jurists since the eighteenth century to conceive considerations as mere symbolic evidence of subjective moral intent rather as real enactments of social power demonstrates how difficult it is for modern social theory to articulate the idea of social materiality found in social facts such as considerations, at least as long as it sustains a strict separation between society and nature or between the intentional action of humans and the physical causality of material objects.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

scholarly journals One sociological approach to some classic themes of English Political Economy

2018 ◽  
pp. 005-083
Keyword(s):  
Invisible Hand ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The North ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Value

Abstract.-The paper seeks to raise awareness of the sheer expansive force of capitalism, a social fact that has completely transformed Western societies in the last 600 years. Although the text draws on the simplest and most sound categories of Marx’s labour theory of value, its focus is to show the power and political relationships that take place within enterprises –a new servitude. Our analytical method, as well as its empirical validation, builds on Durkheim’s concept of ‘reaction of punishment’. The paper also explores the historical and structural relations between the advanced sociability of our middle classes and their government by representative assemblies elected by them. For this purpose, we draw on the history of English parliamentarianism, from its social origins in the Normand invasion (1066), to its historical eclosion in the North American democracy (1787). Our interpretation is sociological, seeking the meaning of those exceptional historical transformations, and finding it –paradoxically-in the contrast between the ideal types of Community and Association established by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. The text also analyses how individualism is originated in capitalist competition, and finishes by pointing out from where(within the social structure) such ideology is propagated as the only one that should shape our behaviour. Keywords:surplus value.-invisible hand.-English exceptionalism.-Ferdinand Tönnies.-empirical measurement.-Spencer-Brown Una aproximación sociológica a algunos temas clásicos de La Economía Política Inglesa Resumen.-El texto pretende hacernos conscientes de la tremenda fuerza expansiva del capitalismo, un hecho social que ha transformado por completo a las sociedades occidentales en los últimos 600 años. Utiliza las categorías más sencillas y consolidadas de la teoría del valor-trabajo de Marx, pero su objetivo es mostrar a las relaciones que tienen lugar en el interior de las empresas como relaciones de poder, como relaciones políticas, una nueva servidumbre. Para ello el método de análisis que aplicamos es muy próximo al concepto de ‘reacción penal’ de Durkheim - incluso en la propuesta que hacemos para su validación empírica. El estudio se pregunta además por las relaciones históricas y estructurales entre la sociabilidad avanzada de nuestras clases medias y su gobierno por asambleas representativas, que ellas mismas eligen. Para ello recurrimos a la historia del parlamentarismo inglés, desde sus lejanos orígenes sociales, que encontramos en la Invasión Normanda de la isla (1066), hasta su cabal eclosión histórica en la democracia norteamericana (1787). Pero nuestra interpretación es sociológica, busca el sentido de esas transformaciones históricas excepcionales, y lo halla (paradójicamente) en el contraste entre los tipos-ideales de Comunidad y Asociación establecidos en su día por el sociólogo alemán Ferdinand Tönnies.A lo largo del texto analizamos también cómose origina el individualismo en la competición capitalista, y finaliza señalando desde dónde (en el interior de la estructura social) se propaga dicha ideología, como la única considerada de recibo para orientar nuestro comportamiento. Palabras clave:plusvalía.-mano invisible.-excepcionalismo inglés.-F. Tönnies.-medición empírica.-Spencer-Brown

The social context of iron forging on the Kenya coast

Africa ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chapurukha M. Kusimba
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Power ◽  
High Status ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambiguous Position

Ironsmiths occupy an important yet ambiguous position in many African societies. They are both revered and feared, because they wield social power which arises from their access to occult knowledge, not only of metallurgy but of healing, divination, circumcision and peacemaking. In some societies smiths enjoy high status and are the wealthiest people. In others they are feared, covertly maligned, and blamed for societal misfortunes. In still others the smiths' position is often marginal except when they are needed to intercede on their society's behalf to solve natural or cultural predicaments. The forge or smithy plays a central role in the community as tool-making centre, a place of refuge from violence, of purification, and for healing. This article examines the social context of iron forging among the ironsmiths of the Kenya coast, focusing on the role of iron forging in the coastal economy, the forge, the smiths' life cycle, the institution of apprenticeship, the ritual and technical power of smiths, the role of women in the smiths' community, and the future of iron forging on the coast. It is argued that, while coastal smiths are marginal and despised, they hold important ritual and spiritual powers in coastal society. The article concludes that a detailed understanding of the traditional crafts historically practised on the coast can do much to illuminate the complex history of coastal society.

The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership’s trial in 1938.

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Tatiana Melnichenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Political History ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Black Spots ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

This article is devoted to one of the most tragic topics in the history of this party and the history of the Spanish Republic as a whole, namely, the trial of the leaders of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. The following unpublished documents stored in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History were used for the analysis (F. 495. Op. 183): letters, personal files, protocols of interrogations after May Days, lists and reports on the “connection” between Trotskyi and the POUM, reports on the preparation and course of the trial of the POUM. Members of the POUM were accused of participating in a “rebellion”, moving to change the social order of the Republic. The accusation of the POUM connections with Franco did not seem convincing, either in Spain or abroad. The international public’s attention was focused on the trial of the POUM. Despite the fact that Spain failed to organize a show trial in the style of the “Moscow trials” and the “conspiracy between Trotskyi and Fascists” was not confirmed, the verdict had a negative impact on the POUM reputation. Thus, the trial of the POUM remained in history as one of the “black spots” in the interaction between the Spanish Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, the prisoners of the POUM resisted pressure, they were supported morally by participants of the campaign of solidarity in Spain and abroad. The struggle for a kind of rehabilitation of the party continued in emigration.

The cycle of the new left in the recent history of Argentina

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-279
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Tortti ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
New Left ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Actors

This paper aims at outlining the main processes that, in Argentina’s recent past, may enable us to understand the emergence, development and eventual defeat of the social protest movement and the political radicalization of the period 1960-70s.Here, as in previous papers, we resort to the concept of new left toname the movement that, though heterogeneous and lacking a unified direction, became a major unit in deeds, for multiple actors coming the most diverse angles coincided in opposing the vicious political regime and the social order it supported. Consequently, we shall try to reinstate the presence of such wide range of actors: their projects, objectives and speeches. Some critical circumstances shall be detailed and processes through which protests gradually amalgamated will be shown. Such extended politicization provided the frame for quite radical moves ranging from contracultural initiatives and the classism in the workers’ movement to the actual action of guerrilla groups. Through the dynamics of the events themselves we shall locate the peak moments as well as those which paved the way for their closure and eventual defeat in 1976.

Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Orru
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

Émile Durkheim is generally recognized to be one of the founders of sociology as a distinct scientific discipline. Trained as a philosopher, Durkheim identified the central theme of sociology as the emergence and persistence of morality and social solidarity (along with their pathologies) in modern and traditional human societies. His distinctive approach to sociology was to adopt the positivistic method in identifying and explaining social facts – the facts of the moral life. Sociology was to be, in Durkheim’s own words, a science of ethics. Durkheim’s sociology combined a positivistic methodology of research with an idealistic theory of social solidarity. On the one hand, Durkheim forcefully claimed that the empirical observation and analysis of regularities in the social world must be the starting point of the sociological enterprise; on the other hand, he was equally emphatic in claiming that sociological investigation must deal with the ultimate ends of human action – the moral values and goals that guide human conduct and create the essential conditions for social solidarity. Accordingly, in his scholarly writings on the division of labour, on suicide, on education, and on religion, Durkheim sought to identify through empirical evidence the major sources of social solidarity and of the social pathologies that undermine it.

scholarly journals UMA HISTÓRIA DA IDÉIA DE UTOPIA: O REAL E O IMAGINÁRIO NO PENSAMENTO POLÍTICO DE THOMAS MORUS

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Antônio Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Intensive Agriculture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agrarian Communities ◽  
Article Analysis ◽  
History Of

Morus não é o criador do pensamento político utópico, mas é o teórico que fez circular o ideal utópico, em sua corrente mais influente. Foi ele quem criou a palavra Utopia. Morus foi o primeiro a criticar a ordem social orientada pela exploração do trabalho e pela força do dinheiro. Ele é crítico da agricultura intensiva que leva à desestruturação das comunidades agrárias. Como Maquiavel, ele transita pela esfera do poder, uma esfera de ligações perigosas. De um modo diferente, ele tentou também separar a ética da política. Este artigo analisa estes aspectos de seu pensamento político. A history of the idea of utopia: reality and imagination in the political thought of Thomas More Abstract Morus is not the creator of the utopian political thought, but it is the theoretical that makes to circulate the utopian ideal, in its more important version. It went him who created to word Utopia. Morus was the first to criticize the social order guided by the exploration of the work and for force of the money. He is critical of the intensive agriculture that upside down the agrarian communities. As Maquiavel, he walk for the sphere of the power, a sphere of dangerous connections. In a different way, he also tried to separate the ethical of the politics. This article analysis these aspects of its political thought.

Reflections on American Religion

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
James A. Nuechterlein
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
American Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Religious Nation

America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)

Songs with Consequences?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Stirr
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Labor Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Exchange

This chapter focuses on the pragmatics of dohori singing in rural songfests. With a comparative focus on different types of songfest across Nepal’s rural hill areas, it addresses how songfests frame performances in ways that allow for particular pragmatic effects. These are based on forms of ritualized material and musical exchange that idealize the production of equality, yet often still reproduce inequality. It tells the history of dohori as a means of communication across social divides, often with significant material stakes in binding contests that could end in marriage. It discusses dohori’s historical connections with labor exchange and marriage exchange to show how this practice of singing is grounded in ways of producing equality and hierarchy. It gives examples of how binding dohori contests or song duels have been considered threats to the social order and how their outcomes have been reintegrated, changing aspects of individuals’ lives and social relations.

scholarly journals From duties to rights: revisiting the ‘Social Catholics’ in twentieth-century France

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-605
Author(s):  
Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Social Surveys ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic Organizations

Abstract Apropos the history of human rights in France, one spontaneously thinks of the French Revolution and then of left-wing activists, particularly socialists. Their opponents, the Catholics, normally considered to be right wing and usually opposed to socialism, appear as a counterpoint. This article argues that some Catholics, especially those who referred to themselves as ‘social Catholics’, also contributed to the adoption of certain rights, particularly social rights, in France in unexpected and paradoxical ways. Their contribution was made through their social activities, visible in their organizations’ archives more than through their discourse. Social Catholics spoke little of ‘rights’. Yet paradoxically, discourses about ‘duties’ can lead to the defence of rights, especially through the practice of social surveys and the importance of social ‘facts’. Examples are taken from the history of the Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs, the Union Féminine Civique et Sociale and other French Catholic organizations such as the Secrétariats sociaux.

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