scholarly journals Surrogates of Recognition. On the Reconstruction of a Possible Critical Hegelian Contribution to Current Discussions on “Identity”

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-77
Author(s):  
Rainer Adolphi

The article discusses a central topic of contemporary understandings of society that seems to have no place in Hegel’s theory: the topic of “identity”, which seems to fall between the process of a “struggle for recognition” on the one hand, and, on the other, a consolidated recognition of subjects and their rights within the established social order. The article would like to propose a further reconstruction here. It discusses which considerations should be included so that the discourse on “identity” does not end in any substantialist or ethno-national, egocentric understandings, but, instead, could become possibly a part of Hegel’s theory. In today’s dynamics and unsettling changes, there are undeniable needs for “identity” (which are also easily addressed, even fuelled, by corresponding offers). These are, as one could learn from Hegel, surrogates of a still not or no longer successful sufficient recognition. In this, “identity” is to be understood as critical work on oneself as a product of becoming, on inheritances, achievements, challenges, divisions, discrepancies, guilt and failures.

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Anna Ivanova

The article studies the concept of the global social order as a subject of social research. The author starts with pointing at the changes in the structure and the character of the today's global social order (acceleration of exchanges and flows, gradual disappearing of a single hegemony, multipolarity) and claims that it is exactly capitalism that becomes a foundation for multipolar but yet unequal constitution of the global order. The article proposes to deal with the global social order as an example of a global subject – alternative to world system or global system – which can be placed in focus of social research. Also, the paper offers a definition to the notions of social order and global social order. Then the author provides several possible classification of the approaches to the study of the global social order, and then moves on to pointing out their mutual positions. The paper considers capitalism as a special form of global social order and suggests to analyze imperialism and neocolonialism as, on the one hand, the products of this order, and on the other hand, as instruments for its legitimation and hegemony. In the further research the suggested model can be used, first, for the improvements in the study of sociology's global subject, and, second, for deepening the knowledge about the process of (re)production of global social order.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 882-901
Author(s):  
Julia Gallagher

AbstractThis article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on the one hand, and intimacy with a unified Africa on the other. By creating juxtapositions between Ghana and these idealised international others, he was able to create a fantasy of a coherent state, built on a fundamental misrecognition of the wider world. As the fantasy bumped up against the realities of Ghana’s failing economy, fractured social structures, and complex international relationships, it foundered, causing alienation and despair. I argue that the failure of this early fantasy was the start of Ghana’s quest to begin processes of individuation and subjectivity, and that its undoing was an inevitable part of the early stages of misrecognition, laying the way for more grounded struggles for recognition and the development of a more complex state-subjectivity.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Schwarz

This chapter considers the ways that personhood is experienced, staged, and politicized in the weekly Sunday services of the Galiwin’ku Uniting Church. Central to the discussion are the tensions between a kin-based social order—vestige of the hunting-gathering way of life—and a bureaucratic order that emerged with mission station life and the requirements of the state, institutional church, and market society. I argue that the particular dynamics of the Sunday services, including the thematic content as well as the roles, statuses, sequences, and the relations that are involved, work on the one hand to facilitate individual ways of being and the centralization of authority, and on the other hand, to continue relational ways of being and the dispersal of authority. I examine how these oppositional tendencies are brought to life in the same ritual space and even find some degree of stability. The chapter concludes with some comparative comments on the Galiwin’ku material in relation to discussions of personhood in the “anthropology of Christianity.”


Author(s):  
G. E. R. Lloyd

A sense of the difference between right and wrong and a corresponding recognition of a concept of morality can be widely, maybe even universally, attested, as has been suggested for the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you). But how far does the great variety of explicit codified legal systems that can be attested across the world and over time undermine any possibility of treating law or even ‘custom’ as a robust cross-cultural category? This chapter investigates the similarities and differences in those systems in ancient societies (Greece, China) and in modern ones (e.g. Papua New Guinea) to throw light on the one hand on the importance of law for social order but on the other on the difficulties facing any programme to secure lasting justice.


1992 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Assmann

In this comparative study of ancient belief and practice, the Egyptian evidence is analysed first, then placed in the wider context of the Near East. It is argued that, while laws and curses are both ways of preventing damage by threatening potential evildoers with punishment, the difference lies in the fact that in the one case punishment is to be enforced by social institutions, in the other by divine agents. Curses take over where laws are bound to fail, as when crimes remain undetected and when the law itself is broken or abandoned. The law addresses the potential transgressor, the curse the potential law-changer who may distort or neglect the law. The law protects the social order, the curse protects the law. These points are illustrated by extensive quotation from Egyptian and Near Eastern texts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debal K. SinghaRoy

Collective identities of people have remained largely transitional despite largely remaining rooted in certain inherited essentialities. The essential dynamics of identity often get negotiated with various forces and processes like those of the economic transformation, technological reorientation, collective mobilisation, modernisation, colonisation, globalisation, penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs), mass and social media among others. The contemporary society is marked by the fast transformation of its economic order from agriculture and industry to knowledge/information-driven post-industrial society, fast transference of information, images, ideas, services, goods and people across spaces and the borderless expansion of ICTs. These have paved the way for the emergence of a new social order which has been widely described as the knowledge society. Within this emerging economic, social and technological order, new varieties of social interaction and solidarities are constructed from within the pre-existing varieties causing a good deal of fluidity of collective identities on the one hand and their consolidation on the other. Thus, with fast social transformation and increasing interconnectivity and mobility of people across the globe on the one hand and consolidation of new forms of social collectivities on the other, the contours of contraction and configuration of identities have undergone phenomenal change. Against such a backdrop, this article is an attempt to develop an understanding of the nuances of identity: its essence, construction, transformation and configuration within the broad processes of social transition. This article is arranged in five sections. The Dynamics of Identity section deals with the dynamics of identity. In the Social Movements. Modernity, Colonisation, Globalisation and Identity: Changing Facets of Fluidity and Solidarity section, the processes of construction and reconfiguration of identity in the context of social movements, modernity, colonisation and globalisation are discussed. The key dimensions of the emergence of knowledge society are explained in the Emerging Knowledge Society and its Key Dynamics section. In the Solidarity and Fluidity in Identity: The Emerging Facets section, the emerging facets of solidarity and fluidity of identity are elucidated. Finally, the Conclusion section makes the concluding arguments.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anat Kainan

This article presents an integrated socio-literal approach as a way to analyze work stories. It uses a case of teachers' stories about the administration as an example. The stories focus on grumbles about various activities of members of the management of a school in a small town. The complaints appear in descriptions of the action, the characters, and, in particular, in the way the story is presented to the audience. The stories present a situation of two opposing groups-the administration and the teachers. The presentation of the stories creates a sense of togetherness among the veterans and new teachers in the staff room, and helps the integration of the new teachers into the staff. The veterans use the stories as an opportunity to express their anger at not having been assigned responsibilities on the one hand and their hopes of such promotion on the other. The stories act as a convenient medium to express criticism without entering into open hostilities. Behind them, a common principle can be discerned- the good of the school. The stories describe the infringement of various aspects of the school's social order, and it is possible to elicit from them what general pattern the teachers want to preserve in the school.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 150-171

The article is the study of such a phenomenon as institutional competition in the framework of a civilizational approach. An institution is described as a complex, composite category. Various approaches of modern authors to its definition and the divergence of their interpretations are revealed. The author of this article identifies informal institutions with culture, which is defined as rooted mass beliefs about a just social order. Formal institutions are ultimately determined by culture, but are not related to it. Civilizations, or social orders, are divided into two types: lawful and violent. The former is based on protected private property, whereas the latter represents the so-called power-property, when the state is the explicit or implicit supreme owner. Institutional competition between the lawful and violent civilizations implies competition for the replacement of one of the competing parties’ fundamental institutions with alternative institutions of the other. In this respect, it differs radically from institutional competition between countries of the same civilization type, where evolutionary selection of institutions occurs while maintaining a common institutional core. Modernization is a dual concept. On the one hand, it acts as westernization, i.e. the displacement of institutions of the violent civilization by its alternative. Completed westernization would mean, for one country or another, a change in the civilizational paradigm. On the other hand, countries belonging to the violent civilization hold back westernization, and resort to adaptive modernization in the form of organizational and technical improvements as well as controlled market transformations that do not destroy their institutional cores. In the 21st century, no rapprochement of civilizations can be observed: on the contrary, they are being alienated from each other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 288-297
Author(s):  
Clovis Demarchi

The article focuses on Human Dignity and Fundamental Rights. The objective is to characterize Human Dignity as the foundation of Fundamental Rights. It is sought to demonstrate that the content of Human Dignity is the Fundamental Rights. The text is divided into five parts, initially with the proposal of creating a concept and the characterization for Human Dignity. In the next step, religious, political and philosophical elements of the idea of ​​dignity are discussed. Then, the dignity in the Brazilian legal system is discussed, and the same occurs with Fundamental Rights. At the end of the article, there is a confrontation between Human Dignity and Fundamental Rights showing their intertwining. It was concluded that Human Dignity imposes limits on the actions of any organism and form of political or social organization. It is the foundation that determines the role of the Fundamental Rights. It is the condition of the existence of the human being. It is up to Human Dignity to bring the essence of what characterizes the human being in the juridical-social order. On the one hand, Fundamental Rights guarantee the realization of Human Dignity; on the other hand, dignity is concretized when Fundamental Rights are realized. The inductive method was used and the research was bibliographic and documentary. Predefined paragraph styles


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Christ

This paper analyzes a dual relationship between Adorno and Durkheim: on the one hand, Adorno adopts Durkheim’s perspective on society, describing it as an obscure, opaque thing that individuals cannot understand by themselves; on the other, he tries to get out of the opacity that he recognizes as a structural moment of the society he lives in. This last point engages us in a discussion of the relationship between political sociology and philosophy of emancipation, which allows to study in a new perspective the only text Adorno published in his lifetime on Durkheim: his preface to Philosophy and Sociology, the critical violence of which is well known and often interpreted as a complete rejection of Durkheim’s sociology. The thesis of this article is that the conflict between Adorno and Durkheim is a political one and that the division between the two authors lies in their evaluation of the capacity of the modern capitalist society to produce out of itself common ideals that assure the justice of the actual social order.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document