Islamic Democracy and Popular Sovereignty: A Critical Essay on Andrew March’s The Caliphate of Man

In this review of Andrew March’s book, The Caliphate of Man, I shall focus on one central concept and one central claim to be found in the book: the concept of Islamic democracy, and the claim that al-Ghannūshī’s vision of popular sovereignty “reflects a genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought.” I suggest that the concept of Islamic democracy is logically possible only on the assumption of a purely procedural, value-neutral conception of democracy, and that the vision of the umma [the demos, populus] to be found in al-Ghannūshī is not such as to make the notion of popular sovereignty desirable by modern standards. I will suggest further that liberal Islamist thinkers stand to offer a superior view of Islamic democracy, one toward which al-Ghannūshī himself seems to be moving in his post-Revolutionary political practice.

Recovering the primitive in the modern: The cultural turn and the origins of cultural sociology

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

THE GROWTH OF PRODUCTIVITY OF THE SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS: PATTERNS, HISTORICAL TRENDS, PROSPECTS

In the article by the founder and head of the Russian civilizational school, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Yakovts Yu.V. This report introduces for the first time the concept of the productivity of the social intelligence of civilizations, examines the patterns and historical trends of the accelerating growth of productivity with the change of civilization cycles, reveals the peculiarities of the dynamics of the productivity of public intelligence in the conditions of the modern civilization crisis, the tendency for the decline in productivity and the increasing polarization of the intellectual potential of local civilizations. Strategic priorities of the acceleration of productivity growth in the context of the intellectual revolution of 2030–2050 are substantiated.

Sociocultural Landmarks of Cognition and Problems of Scientific Creativity in the Media World

In the article the thoughts about science as a creative process are presented in the context of the historical-cultural epistemology, specificity of which is presented in the material by B.I. Pruzhinin and T.G. Shchedrina. Tendencies in the modern world’s development – social, economic, political, communication – do not give rise to doubts about the presence of a paradox: the more globalized the world becomes, the more science gravitates towards the status of applied – this determines its effectiveness. Nonetheless, what is lost when emphasizing efficiency? To answer this question is worth remembering that the intellectual revolution in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was based not only on the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton but also on the radical position expressed in Machiavelli’s “Sovereign” who placed utility above virtue. As soon as science becomes a pragmatic business, prestige, fame, safety, and comfort begin to depend on its success. Knowledge is power, but in the new political and social realities, the main thing is practical, utilitarian, and effective. By becoming disciplinary, technical, science gains power – but is this power not limited to its own constructions? Paradoxically, science, performing a service function, begins to lose the status of an instance of meaning. Serving society, it, nevertheless, is not a connecting force in society – they resort to it for recipes and solutions, but they do not consider it as a common cause, and as a platform for social interaction, they expect a product from science, but not meanings and values, benefit, but not virtues. However, what is a product of science? How is its performance measured? And who determines the effectiveness? This article attempts to partially illuminate these issues, including in the field of their consideration existentially loaded aspects of the scientific community’s creativity – aesthetic, technical-digital, including computer games. Collective intuition as the acquisition of new experience, as the creation of previously nonexistent contexts in which new objects, events, and phenomena are placed – all these are key conditions for a world of uncertainty in which science is already required not only objective results but also involvement in the joint comprehension of existential projects. Truth there is not always the result, but rather a beginning, which requires, among other things, the derivation of all scientific consequences for which other forms of habitation of experience are open – aesthetic, playful, performative.

THE NEW BATTLE OF IDEAS: HOW AN INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION WILL RESHAPE SOCIETY

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

London's Burning: Structuralist Readings of the Urban Inferno in the 1950's British Literature of Multi-culturalism

This article examines a literary triangle treating a modern re-imagining of the Dantean Inferno in Caribbean migrant experience. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners advanced a stylistic and intellectual revolution in post-World War II British literature, inspiring Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners in the founding literary texts of contemporary British multi-cultural society. It followed the template of Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark. We must read these complex texts to understand the conflicted multi-cultural society that Britain has become today: they deal with identity and solidarity, atomisation and commodification, Empire and capitalism, while throwing light on the most recent advances in historical and theoretical scholarship by pioneers such as Olivette Otele and Reni Eddo-Lodge. Moreover, these texts throw new light on unanswered Structuralist and Post-Structuralist debates from Emile Durkheim to Martin Heidegger. This article examines the intersectionality of class, gender and race within both the national British framework of post-war capitalism and the wider colonial heritage of slavery and forced labour, highlighting voices who articulated an ideal of multi-cultural humanism that remains crucial today.

The Contribution of Female Writers in the Libyan Post Arab Spring: The Voice of Azza Al-Maghour`s Short Stories

Alongside the rapid political and social change post Arab Spring, Libyan writers were constantly producing volumes of literary work, whether in print or online, to reflect on the socio-political issues in the society. Among these writers is Libyan lawyer and writer Azza Al-Maghour; Al-Maghour has published a great many short stories during and after the revolution. What makes her work distinctive is that she not only narrates fictional events, but that she simultaneously reflects on the Libyan reality post revolution; and her voice, she is the voice of the people. Her narrative style is structured as a cultural and intellectual revolution. Using a critical discourse analysis, this paper will examine how Al-Maghour contributes to the socio-political construction of Libyan society, and argues that Al-Maghour`s narrative structure, story frame, language style, and word connotations are used as tools to channel her political views. This paper will pay special attention to Al-Maghour`s discussions of women rights, social justice, and Libyan nationalism through her story settings and her characters. This paper begins by giving a brief overview of the context of Libyan women in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, followed by Azza Al-Maghour`s biography. The paper will then present an analysis of her stories through language, style, story structure, socio-political discussions, and her contribution as a Libyan female writer to the context of the post Arab Spring.

Semiotics

Semiotics refers to an intellectual tradition that deals with processes of making and interpreting meaning in all kinds of text, in all modes. However, semiotics was never integrated into mainstream disciplinary structures. Because of this marginal status semiotic tendencies flourished outside and between the major disciplines. As a discipline semiotics seems small, vulnerable and out-of-date. But as a broad intellectual tradition semiotics can be seen as a meta-theory which encompasses literary theory. This second perspective makes semiotics more useful for literary readers, and hence is emphasized in this chapter. Semiotics’ value is enhanced when it is seen as a complex, heterogeneous field with fuzzy boundaries and productive entanglements with literary objects and theories. “Semiotics” comes from Greek semeion (sign, omen, or trace), something that points towards important, often hidden meanings. Signs in this sense go beyond words and verbal media. This scope gives “semiotics” a radically disruptive quality. Western culture in the modern era has been based on the primacy of words as carriers of all meaning and thought. Semiotics is the site of a radical challenge to this dominance. Semiotics sees signs and meanings everywhere, in every mode, not just in words. The changing media of literature in the present and past raise many semiotic issues for literary theory. Poetry always carried meanings through sound as well as words. Drama needs to be performed. Film and multimedia carry the role of print fiction in new contexts. In the multimedia 21st century, literature has gone beyond writing, and its theories need a semiotic dimension. Semiotics has a divided history, with two founding fathers. Peirce emphasized complexity and flow, and Saussure emphasized structure. Before 1960 structuralism dominated, but by the end of the 20th century post-structuralism prevailed. Semiotics went underground, but left traces everywhere of the intellectual revolution it participated in. It helped to trigger the turn to meaning across the social sciences and celebrated the irreducible complexity and diversity of forms and meanings in literature and life in the modern world.