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.

Death and Mastery

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Y. Fong
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Drive Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
The One

In this masterful and enlivening study of the ways in which the concepts of death and mastery have been elaborated in Freudian and post-Freudian social theory, Ben Fong has given us the means to think about human nature and human community now, under conditions of advanced capitalism, without succumbing to the scientism of the new neurobiology or to the social constructivism of recent historicist social and cultural theory. The argument turns on the ambiguity embedded in the notion of mastery: on the one hand, the capacity to engage creatively with the world, to master the tasks of living a historical form of life; on the other, the temptation to enslave, to compel others to exercise this competence in one's place. Fong is able to analyze with remarkable lucidity a complex array of individual and social phenomena by fleshing out the imbrications of these twinned responses to what Freud called the drives' demand for work. Fong makes abundantly clear that drive theory and social theory are strongest when thought together.

The Social Imagination of Radical Christianity

1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
The Common

This article reviews Gary Dorrien's Reconstructing the Common Good and Christopher Rowland's Radical Christianity. Dorrien aims to retrieve Christian socialism as a central and vital tradition of Christian social theology and practice. Rowland endeavours to show that despite, or because of, its historically marginalised position vis à vis the institutional churches, radical apocalypticism is anything but heretical. Christian hope represents a life-affirming disposition for a humanity confronting the possibility of its own collective death. If hope is to be prophetic, however, its witnesses must stipulate in what they hope and for whom. The constructive imagining of social order implies the need of a theological anthropology and social theory and ethics as well.

What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge

1998 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gerard Ruggie
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Neoliberal Institutionalism ◽  
Dimensions Of Space

Social constructivism in international relations has come into its own during the past decade, not only as a metatheoretical critique of currently dominant neo-utilitarian approaches (neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism) but increasingly in the form of detailed empirical findings and theoretical insights. Constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect. It also concerns itself with issues that neo-utilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology. The constructivist project has sought to open up the relatively narrow theoretical confines of conventional approaches—by pushing them back to problematize the interests and identities of actors; deeper to incorporate the intersubjective bases of social action and social order; and into the dimensions of space and time to establish international structure as contingent practice, constraining social action but also being (re)created and, therefore, potentially transformed by it.

Commentary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Personal Meanings ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.

scholarly journals A Sociology of Foreign Aid and the World Society

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Swiss
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
World Society ◽  
World Society Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
New Research ◽  
Society Research

This article highlights an emerging research agenda for the study of foreign aid through a World Society theory lens. First, it briefly summarizes the social scientific literature on aid and sociologists' earlier contributions to this research. Next, it reviews the contours of world society research and the place of aid within this body of literature. Finally, it outlines three emergent threads of research on foreign aid that comprise a new research agenda for the sociology of foreign aid and its role in world society globalization.

scholarly journals “Intersubjectivity”: The Emergence of a Socio-Phenomenological Concept

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Irina Shmerlina
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Life World ◽  
Gradual Loss ◽  
Analytical Potential ◽  
The Social ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Phenomenology

The article outlines the author’s vision of the formation and development of “intersubjectivity” as a concept of socially oriented thought. Introduced into sociohumanitarian knowledge by E. Husserl’s phenomenology, this notion initially possessed powerful sociological potential and was called to explain on an abstract-philosophical level the existence of social order from an egological perspective (which is the perspective of a subject with a sphere of consciousness that other participants of interaction have no access to). The main tendency inherent to the post-Husserlian change in the concept’s semantic profile is linked to the gradual loss of its metaphysical potential, as well as its psychologization and instrumentalization. Intersubjectivity — which is something that was brought into sociology by A. Schütz’s social phenomenology — gained a pragmatic interpretation, effectively becoming an axiomatically presupposed attribute of the “life world”. Constructivist semantic valences of the analyzed concept were implemented in the social constructivism of P. Berger and T. Lukman, and at this point said concept had pretty much exhausted its initial analytical potential. The reinvigoration of sociological interest towards this category is associated with a postclassical redirection of attention towards interactive processes of generating meanings within situations of the “life world”, processes that are multidimensional, conditioned by context and cannot be fully reduced to just the subject. The matter of whether returning to Husserl’s intuitions is appropriate demands further consideration, in order to consider other interpretations of intersubjectivity, including those that focus on the historical course of the social process.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Generational Theory ◽  
Cultural Schemas ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.

Being-at-home and Homelessness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
At Home

In Chapter 3, the previous focus upon place is narrowed to that of ‘home’, an element of Being-in-the-world that is granted particular significance throughout Woolf’s writings. Heideggerian understandings of ‘not-Being-at-home’, ‘thrownness’, and ‘theyness’ are drawn upon in order to explore Woolf’s representations of women in the private space as ‘homeless at home.’ From her autobiographical accounts, to her essays and her fiction, Woolf emphasises the ways in which the physical spaces of the home – including its objects, and architectural features such as doors and rooms – are representative of the social order. Reflecting a recurrent preoccupation throughout her writings, Woolf also explores the sense of homelessness and deep unease experienced by social ‘outsiders’ such as Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, and Louis and Rhoda in The Waves, each of whom unveil, question and reject society’s call for conformity and compliance.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

The Introduction includes an overview of the content of each of the following chapters. This chapter explores the context of war and modernity that provided a shared backdrop for Woolf and Heidegger. An explication of Woolf’s sustained engagement in the critique of the social order throughout her writings is included, and is compared with Heidegger’s largely apolitical approach to Being-in-the-world in his 1927 book, Being and Time. A review of potential philosophical influences upon Woolf’s writings is provided, as well as a survey of published literature that touches upon the connections between Woolf’s writings and Heidegger’s Being and Time.

4. The modern world

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-84
Author(s):  
Steve Bruce
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Intellectual Discipline

Although we can view sociology as a disinterested intellectual discipline that stands aside from the world it observes, sociology is itself a symptom of the very things it describes. ‘The modern world’ summarizes what sociology sees as distinctive about the social formations that concern it, considering modernity, social order, social mobility, and postmodernity. The key sociological proposition that much of our world is inadvertent and unintended is important, not just for understanding why things do not go as planned, but also for understanding why things are as they are. This has serious policy implications, because if we misunderstand the causes of what concerns us, we misdirect our efforts to change it.

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