Introduction

The main themes of the book are introduced, and in particular the relation between immigration, identity, social cohesion, and egalitarian justice is highlighted. The progressive’s dilemma is explained, as is the idea that social cohesion may require a shared identity at the societal level. The notion that the investigation relies on an implausible form of methodological nationalism is rejected. Also, the content of the individual chapters is summarized. Furthermore, the methodology employed in the book is explained and argued for. This methodology relies on the distinction between ‘basic levelʼ and ‘regulativeʼ justice, and it is explained how the book operates at both levels. Finally, alternative methodologies, including Rawlsian ideal theory, political realism, and various forms of contextualism, are critically discussed.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

Global Crime Ethnographies: Three Suggestions for a Criminology That Truly Travels

This chapter proposes a novel ethnographic approach to global crime/criminology—an approach centered on the following four main points: (1) an attentiveness to how global dynamics afford criminal flows and transnational figurations; (2) a theoretical and methodological sensibility that moves beyond methodological nationalism; (3) a research design that follows criminal flows, rather than merely investigating their starting, middle, or endpoints; and (4) an approach that takes flows to constitute the spatial criminal(ized) phenomena being research, rather than being epiphenomenal to such crime. In criminology, looking at a growlingly globalized world of crime and criminalization, there have been increasing calls for a globalization of criminological methods and theories—or for a “criminology that travels.” With such calls in mind, following the four points may be what is needed to make criminology sufficiently itinerant in a global day and age.

The Gift of The Nation

In order to question the modernist common sense of mainstream sociology, epitomised today by the charge of methodological nationalism, this article offers an overall reading of Marcel Mauss’s The Nation. Conceived during the Great War and written mainly in 1920, Mauss’s work radically re-examined both the nation and nationalism from a regenerated sociological viewpoint centered on the relations between societies. Distinguishing between partial relations of exchange and total relations of encounter, Mauss came to discover the gift as a total social fact, seeing it as the traditional unconscious spring of the federative dynamics that had to be reactivated in Europe to associate its nations in a great ‘Inter-nation’ and avoid the risk of a new total war. The Nation, by reviving the original ambition of Émile Durkheim’s sociology to be a way rethinking and reshaping the concepts and institutions of modernity, helps us explore the contradictions and pathologies involved in the concept and history of the nation, in a situation currently marked by the return of nationalism and the quest for a social Europe.

Pushing Social Philosophy to Its Democratic Limits

Roberto Frega’s Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy reformulates the question of democracy posed by our current historic conjuncture using the resources of a variety of pragmatic thinkers. He brings into the contemporary conversation regarding democracy’s fortunes both classical and somewhat neglected figures in the pragmatic tradition to deal with questions of power, ontology, and politics. In particular, Frega takes a social philosophical starting point and draws out the consequences of this fundamental shift in approach to questions of democratic and political theory. This turn to social philosophy as a theoretically more sufficient conceptual vocabulary, extended in detail by Frega, raises questions regarding the work that a social ontology does in clarifying the role of economic and political approaches to democracy that are worth further exploration. Likewise, the practical proposals for moving beyond methodological nationalism with respect to forming publics for the sake of problem-solving, while providing a clarifying and fresh starting point, are still too beholden to models of agency and expressions of coordinated action that themselves are the very fruit of those systems which undermine democratic power in the first instance.

Of Education, Humanism and Civilizational Progress: An Explorative Study of Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh’s Life and Work from the Perspective of ‘Global Intellectual History’

The Himalayas have long been perceived as a region at the margins between South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, the area received continuously more scholarly attention, particularly with regards to historiography and historical research. Researchers started to explore the manifold historical connections, entanglements, and interdependencies of the Himalayas with its neighboring regions and the rest of the world, which have long been disregarded due to the prevalence of implicit methodological nationalism, historiographical isolationism, and exceptionalism. Anticipating these changing perspectives, my paper explores the life and works of Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh in an attempt to render the global historical connections of the Central Himalayas further visible and enrich broader debates from the perspective of ‘Global Intellectual History’. At the intersection of this newly emerging discipline and the intellectual history of the Himalayas, my paper seeks to address the research questions: Who was Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh and why is his life and work relevant for a better understanding of the multifaceted historical entanglements of the Central Himalayas? I argue that Jaya Prithvi’s thoughts, specifically those on education, humanism, and civilizational progress will add new thematic dimensions, empirically diversify and, thus, broaden the scope of contemporary discourses on ‘Global Intellectual History’ as well as Himalayan History.

Migration and New Ethnic Minorities

Until recently, comparative social policy research remained strongly influenced by methodological nationalism (i.e. an approach equating social boundaries with state boundaries) and has rarely considered immigration-driven changes in welfare states. Yet, over the past decades, immigrant populations have grown in size and become increasingly diversified, both in terms of origin countries and in terms of integration patterns, in all Western countries. Immigrants are a more visible, but also contested, presence in Western societies, which affects also the development of the national labour market and welfare systems. This chapter focuses on the link between immigration-driven ethnic diversity and welfare state development by considering four interrelated issues: (1) how the patterns of immigrants’ labour market incorporation in host societies affect the social rights they are entitled to; (2) how increasing international migration contributed to the reconfiguration of care arrangements; (3) the implications of immigration-driven multiculturalism for welfare state sustainability; and (4) the connection between immigration and public support for the welfare state. Then, we narrow down our analysis by providing a more detailed account of recent development of migration policies in some European countries. Based on the analysis of the country cases, we put forward the argument that recent institutional developments point to an ‘Americanization’ of European migration policy and, therefore, to an increasing ‘racialization’ of European welfare states.

Information Technologies, Reading, and the Future of Higher Education

The article addresses the challenge for universities and colleges to prepare students for the world they inhabit through relevant course offerings and new approaches to teaching. Unfortunately, these structures of higher education still resemble chapels, where the professor is ‘priest,’ and with a pedagogy that is informed by monologue, methodological nationalism, and a general lack of awareness of the rapidly changing social and physical world around us. Starting with the Gutenberg revolution, and following the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Sven Birkerts and Joseph Brodsky,the article approaches the consequences of the new information technologies that are profoundly rewiring our minds and replacing our ability to think critically. The author asks: what might education look like today? How might we challenge young people to learn how to think? The first task appears to critique and transform the political architecture of classrooms and the teacher centeredness of pedagogical activity, replacing monologue with dialogue. Students need to be shown how to critically distance themselves from the seductions of information technologies, and educational institutions should return to requiring deep reading and discussion of extended narratives.