Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

The separation between ethics and politics: Max Weber on ancient Judaism and modernity

For Max Weber, modernity is characterized by a tragic conflict among value spheres, each claiming to possess the ‘true meaning’ of human life. In particular, Weber argues that while the political sphere is dominated by the unifying, exclusionary, power-driven, and war-prone nation state, the ethical sphere is characterized by the universalization of individually based, deontological norms. For Weber, I argue, the modern separation between the ethical and political spheres originates in ancient Judaism. His work on Judaism, mostly neglected by political theorists, describes the emergence of politics as an autonomous, naturalistic sphere with the establishment of kingship. Biblical prophets, simultaneously, were the inventors of an idealistic, mulish, universal ethics Weber termed the ‘ethics of ultimate ends’. Thus, against the Greek model harmonizing ethics and politics, Judaism invented an antagonistic model of the two. This Jewish imagination lay dormant for almost two millennia but returned to the stage in secularized modernity.

Machine learning and social theory: Collective machine behaviour in algorithmic trading

This article examines what the rise in machine learning (ML) systems might mean for social theory. Focusing on financial markets, in which algorithmic securities trading founded on ML-based decision-making is gaining traction, I discuss the extent to which established sociological notions remain relevant or demand a reconsideration when applied to an ML context. I argue that ML systems have some capacity for agency and for engaging in forms of collective machine behaviour, in which ML systems interact with other machines. However, ML-based collective machine behaviour is irreducible to human decision-making and thereby challenges established sociological notions of financial markets (including that of embeddedness). I argue that such behaviour can nonetheless be analysed through an adaptation of sociological theories of interaction and collective behaviour.

Human self-selection as a mechanism of human societal evolution: A critique of the cultural selection argument

Natural selection is the main mechanism that drives the evolution of species, including human societies. Under natural selection, human species responds through genetic and cultural adaptations to internal and external selection pressures for survival and reproductive success. However, this theory is ineffective in explaining human societal evolution in the Holocene and a cultural selection argument has been made to remedy the theory. The present article provides a critique of the cultural selection argument and proposes an alternative conception that treats human self-selection as an emergent mechanism of human societal evolution characterized by a new type of selection pressure and a separate fitness criterion. Specifically, the evolution of human societies is divided into two major periods, each driven by a different mode of selection: natural selection acting on genes and cultures for survival and reproductive success prior to the Neolithic Revolution, and human self-selection acting on cultures – and potentially genes as well – for thrival and prosperous living after the Neolithic Revolution. The conditions for the transition from the first mode of selection to the second and the implications of this transition for social research are also discussed.

Emancipatory politics at its limits? An introduction

Emancipatory politics and the very idea of emancipation have come under pressure. Feminist and post-colonial critiques, the appropriation of emancipatory ideals by right-wing populists and the crises triggered by the transgression of planetary boundaries all expose emancipatory paradoxes and raise questions about the further suitability of emancipation as a regulative ideal guiding any socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. With this article, which introduces a Special Issue entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation - Transgressing Boundaries and Boundaries of Transgression, we are working toward a research agenda that acknowledges the current impasse of emancipatory politics and explores its ambivalences and further potentials. Following an outline of the emancipatory paradox and a review of how emancipatory movements have continuously contested – and redrawn – restrictive boundaries, we scan sedimented understandings of the two key terms, emancipation and dialectic, feeding into the concept that we are suggesting as an analytical lens for investigating the current impasse and future prospects of emancipatory politics: the dialectic of emancipation. We preview how the contributors to this Special Issue make use of these terms as they are engaging with this research agenda and conclude by reflecting on the dangers and pitfalls associated with the concept dialectic of emancipation.

Claiming solidarity: A multilevel discursive reconstruction of solidarity

Solidarity is one of the central concepts in social theory and has gained much attention due to the multiple challenges that the EU has been facing the last decade and due to the most recent COVID-19 pandemic. Although the debate on the nature and conditions of solidarity has been revitalized, there remains a large variety in how to conceptualize solidarity. In contrast to other approaches, we do not conceive solidarity as normative concept, but as descriptive–analytical one. Therefore, we provide a theory-based definition that is prone to capture the empirical dimensions of solidarity. Accounting for the dynamic and interactive character of solidarity as subject to permanent societal and political renegotiation, we conceptualize solidarity from a discourse perspective and follow a multilevel design breaking down the understandings of solidarity on different levels. This approach contributes to the research of solidarity that is interested to capturing the ‘real world’ dimensions of solidarity.