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 David Harvey
Future historians may well look upon the years 1978–80 as a revolutionary turning-point in the world’s social and economic history. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping took the first momentous steps towards the liberalization of a communist-ruled economy in a country that accounted for a fifth of the world’s population. The path that Deng defined was to transform China in two decades from a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism with sustained growth rates unparalleled in human history. On the other side of the Pacific, and in quite different circumstances, a relatively obscure (but now renowned) figure named Paul Volcker took command at the US Federal Reserve in July 1979, and within a few months dramatically changed monetary policy. The Fed thereafter took the lead in the fight against inflation no matter what its consequences (particularly as concerned unemployment). Across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher had already been elected Prime Minister of Britain in May 1979, with a mandate to curb trade union power and put an end to the miserable inflationary stagnation that had enveloped the country for the preceding decade. Continue reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Arnold I. Davidson
In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault’s significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault’s own aims in shifting his attention, in his last , writings, to what he himself called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault’s last works. Volumes z and of The His-t-o r-y- of- S-e -xu-a lity are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the-prison. As the modem prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault’s last writings. Continue reading Ethics as ascetics: Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought
(Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté)
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
The fundamental characteristic of marriage as a form of exchange is seen particularly clearly in the case of dual organizations. This term defines a system in which the members of the community, whether it be a tribe or a village, are divided into two parts which maintain complex relationships varying from open hostility to very close intimacy, and with which various forms of rivalry and co-operation are usually associated. These moieties are often exogamous, that is, the men of one moiety can choose their wives only from the other, and vice versa. When the division into moieties does not regulate marriages, this role is frequently assumed by other forms of grouping.
There may be a second bipartition of the group, parallel or perpendicular to this earlier division, the moieties may embrace exogamous clans, sub-clans or lineages, or, lastly, the modalities of marriage may depend upon specialized forms called marriage classes. Continue reading The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Claude Lévi-Strauss
En 1952, l’UNESCO publiait une série de brochures consacrées au problème du racisme dans le monde. Parmi celles-ci, C. le Lévi-Strauss donnait avec “Race et Histoire” un court essai qui dépassait de beaucoup son sujet pour introduire à une réflexion nouvelle sur la culture occidentale, le sens de la civilisation, le caractère aléatoire du temps historique, etc… Continue reading Race et Histoire
Max Weber (1904-1905)
Tous ceux qui, élevés dans la civilisation européenne d’aujourd’hui, étudient les problèmes de l’histoire universelle, sont tôt ou tard amenés à se poser, et avec raison, la question suivante : à quel enchaînement de circonstances doit-on imputer l’apparition, dans la civilisation occidentale et uniquement dans celle-ci, de phénomènes culturels qui – du moins nous aimons à le penser – ont revêtu une signification et une valeur universelle? Ce n’est qu’en Occident qu’existe une science dont nous reconnaissons aujourd’hui le développement comme « valable ». Certes, des connaissances empiriques, des réflexions sur l’univers et la vie, des sagesses profondes, philosophiques ou théologiques, ont aussi vu le jour ailleurs – bien que le développement complet d’une théologie systématique, par exemple, appartienne en propre au christianisme, influencé par l’hellénisme (seuls l’Islam et quelques sectes de l’Inde en ont montré des amorces). Bref, nous constatons ailleurs le témoignage de connaissances et d’observations d’une extraordinaire subtilité, surtout dans l’Inde, en Chine, à Babylone, en Égypte. Mais ce qui manquait à l’astronomie, à Babylone comme ailleurs – l’essor de la science des astres à Babylone n’en est que plus surprenant -, ce sont les fondements mathématiques que seuls les Grecs ont su lui donner. Continue reading L’ETHIQUE PROTESTANTE ET L’ESPRIT DU CAPITALISME
TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION By: Kurt H. Wolff
SIMMEL’S READERS MAY well find themselves puzzled once they try to analyze their impression: does it come from an extraordinary mind or from its product, from a process or from an achievement, from an attitude or from the discoveries made by virtue of it? The dichotomies may be clarified by testimonials of Simmel’s hearers, who “too, helped build”; Simmel took “his students down an oblique pit into the mine”; he was not a teacher, he was an “inciter.” “Just about the time when . . . one felt he had reached a conclusion, he had a way of raising his right arm and, with three fingers of his hand, turning the imaginary object so as to exhibit still another facet.” A lecture by Simmel was creation-at-the-moment-of-delivery: the essence of Simmel’s spell seems to have been the spontaneous exemplification of the creative process. Continue reading The Sociology of Georg Simmel
A cross-national data collection
Arno TAUSCH*
This data set combines the most up-to-date data on globalization and gender relations (combining these with data from the World Values Survey). The dataset in EXCEL format is freely available and draws on the following sources: Continue reading Globalization, global gender relations and value change in global society
Volume 1 : Abortion-Cognitive Dissonance
William A. Darity Jr (Editor in Chief)
From the Introduction:
(…) The new edition reflects the impact of the rise of critical theory in its postmodernist forms on the social sciences, especially in the arenas of cultural anthropology, qualitative sociology, and methodology. Simultaneously, it includes the most sophisticated theoretical reaction to those developments—the reaction that has sublated those developments by challenging the nihilistic thrust of postmodernism—in the form of realist theory; the latter is not to be confused with “realism” or “realpolitik.” The new edition incorporates transformative developments in the social sciences: the routinization of the use of applied statistics and mathematical modeling in economics, psychology, and sociology; the rise of cultural studies, including the study of popular culture; the exploration of race, ethnicity, phenotype, and identity across the social sciences; the emergence of gender studies and women’s studies; the “coming out” of queer studies; the study of memory as something far more than a biomechanical act; and the recent construction and development of concepts like “the other,” Orientalism, causality, postcolonialism, the clash of civilizations, the gaze, marginalization, occupational crowding, generation X, and gentrification(…) Continue reading International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
Alain Boyer, François Furet, Georges Canguilhem, Jean Gatyy
Textes édités par Jean-Claude Chamboredon
Colloque organisé par l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (1988) Continue reading Raymond Aron, la philosophie de l’histoire et les sciences sociales
Attitudes toward race not significantly improved from previous years
by Frank Newport – Gallup
PRINCETON, NJ — A majority of Americans, 56%, believe that a solution to America’s race-relations problem will eventually be worked out — a figure that is roughly the same as those Gallup found in the years prior to last fall’s historic election of Barack Obama as president.
Continue reading Little “Obama Effect” on Views About Race Relations
Stephane Lelay
Summary
How précarisation salariale and social sufferance has transformed governmentability of the working class
The question of precariousness is often addressed in terms of link to work and its reorganization following “fordism” and “post-fordism”. For the past 20 years, analyses have focused on how workers status and access to work evolved as a consequence of organizational transformations and managerial strategies.
In addition to this approach, other works explored the changes experienced by salaried workers in their relation to work, shedding light on the worsening of working conditions and the increase of productivity pressure.
However, approaches were rare that composed with these two angles to show how they happen to be dynamic and interdependent: breaking free from the anthropological dimension of precariousness, an approach in terms of précarisation salariale provides some perspective on new transformations that simultaneously reorganize employment and work social relations. A new governmentability of the working class thus appears in which social sufferance is used to reorganize power relations.
Key-words : gender, governmentability, précarisation salariale, social sufferance, working class.
Continue reading Précarisation salariale et souffrance sociale : une transformation de la gouvernementalité des classes populaires
Article for the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Charles Tilly
Columbia University
In 1844, Auguste Comte’s Lecture on the Positivist Outlook (Discours sur l’esprit positif) proposed the name “sociology” for the general science of humanity. In Comte’s vital vision, the hierarchy of sciences proceeded from mathematics at the base through astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology to sociology at the summit. The maturing of basic sciences, he declared, now made it possible to construct the capstone science, sociology. In that defining moment for the sociological discipline, Comte’s conception of sociology included history, in fact consisted largely of analyzing the development of humanity through historical stages. From that point onward, however, professional history and professional sociology moved in very different directions.
Continue reading HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY
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