Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue

Thesis Eleven, 2019

This essay unpacks Johann Arnason's theory of culture. It argues that the culture problematic remains the needle's eye through which Arnason's intellectual project must be understood, his recent shift to foreground the interplay of culture and power (as the religio-political nexus) notwithstanding. Arnason's approach to culture is foundational to his articulation of the human condition, which is articulated here as the interaction of a historical cultural hermeneutics and a macro-phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon. The essay discusses Arnason's elucidation of his theory of culture as a contribution to debates on the 'meaning of meaning'. It traces its beginnings from his critique of Habermas's theory of modernity to its development via a trialogue with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. It argues that Arnason's theory of culture moves beyond socio-centric perspectives, and, in so doing, offers a critique of what we might call sociological solipsism. In decentring society/anthropos, a more nuanced understanding of the human condition as a unity in diversity is achieved. The essay concludes with a discussion of some tensions in Arnason's understanding of culture, and argues for the importance for incorporating a qualitative notion of 'movement' in order to make sense of historical novelty and social change.

2023

This extremely valuable collection is based in part on a virtual conference organised by Ĺubomír Dunaj in Vienna in 2021 to mark Jóhann Á rnason's 80th birthday. The contributors have all engaged (in many cases very closely) with Á rnason's work over the past years, and they bring to the book a wide variety of critical perspectives and possible extensions of it. Á rnason is one of those theorists who turns up in many different contexts: critical theory, on which he wrote his first book (1971) and most recently in this journal (2023), and the theorisation of state socialism, under which he had lived in the 1960s (1993) 1 and of European integration (2019). The core of his work is a distinctive conception of human civilisations, involving the interplay of culture and power, which he has developed in a wide variety of historical and geographical frames and presented most fully in Á rnason (2003). Reworking Karl Jaspers' (1953) conception of the Achsenzeit or Axial Age around 500 BCE, in his recent work Á rnason has looked even further back and also engaged closely with anthropology, notably in a co-edited book focused on Eurasia. 2 As Axel Honneth notes in his preface to the present book (p. 2), Á rnason moved. .. away from the premises of the Habermasian theory according to which social development depends primarily upon world-historical rationalizing processes. .. [to]. .. an alternative conception: it is the specific world-interpretation of a given cultural and civilizational space that first decides what. .. counts as increasing rational knowledge-and thus what should be understood as 'rationalization' in the first place. In the first chapter following Dunaj's Introduction, Suzi Adams, who has thoroughly explored Á rnason's project in her own work and in interviews with him, discusses his conception of the political in relation to Karel Kosík, Marcel Gauchet, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jan Patočka. (This list of names gives an idea of Á rnason's typically wide range of reference.) JiřiŠubrt, who had founded with Á rnason a programme in historical sociology at Charles University in Prague, contrasts historical sociology with social constructionism and thus implicitly raises a question which runs through the book as a whole: should comparative and historical sociology be seen, as it standardly is, as a sub-variant of

This essay focuses on Arnason's most recent work, and reconstructs his developing account of the religio-political nexus. Arnason's elaboration of the religio-political nexus aims to extend 'the civilizational dimension' beyond the Axial Age to archaic civilizations. He situates the religio-political nexus within the Durkheimian-Maussian current of civilizational thought, and fortifies it through engagement with debates in historical anthropology (Gauchet, Clastres, Godelier) and Castoriadis's notion of power and religion. The second part of the essay discusses Arnason's articulation of the sacred, and argues that consideration of Ricoeur's work on the 'symbolic function', in dialogue with Castoriadis and Arnason, would enrich our understanding of the interplay between the imaginary, symbolic, and the sacred.

Soziolpolis, 2021

Frantz Fanon's work has been read in the context of his training in psychiatry, his immersion in phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and his activities as a revolutionary. There is at least one intertextual dimension of Fanon's writing that has not been sufficiently explored, however, which is his relationship with sociology. By this, I do not mean sociology in general, or sociology today, but rather, sociology as it existed in France and its colonies during Fanon's lifetime. Several features of this scientific and intellectual formation are extremely relevant for Fanon's thought. One is its attention to the colonial context and the central role of racism and crisis in colonialism. Another aspect of sociology and other social disciplines as they existed in France, and especially in the colonies, during Fanon's lifetime was relative openness and fluid boundaries. We can try to determine some of the possible points of contact between Fanon and this sociology. After that, we can return to his classic Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and recognize some of the resonances with this intellectual environment, which was especially powerful at the turn of the 1960s when Fanon was composing his more sociological texts.

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) assumed many guises over a long and fruitful career: journalist, polemicist, philosopher of history, counselor to political leaders and officials, theorist of nuclear deterrence and international relations. He was also France’s most notable sociologist. While Aron had especially close ties with Britain, a result of his days in active exile there during the Second World War, he was widely appreciated in the United States too. His book Main Currents in Sociological Thought was hailed a masterpiece; more generally, Aron’s books were extensively reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review (in earlier days, it hosted a review section), Contemporary Sociology, and Social Forces. And he was admired and cited by sociologists of the stature of Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and David Riesman. Yet despite appearing well poised to become a major force in international sociology, analogous to his younger collaborator, Pierre Bourdieu, Aron has almost vanished from the sociological landscape. This article explains why, offering in the process some observations on the conditions—conceptual and motivational—of reputational longevity in sociological theory and showing how Aron failed to meet them. Special attention is devoted to a confusing equivocation in Aron’s description of sociology and to the cultural basis of his ambivalence toward the discipline.

Comparative Sociology, 2003

A sense of the contingency of human, nite existence, re ections on its temporal embeddedness and on the possibility to act, to bring about other states of affairs in the world, i.e. what has sometimes been labeled the re exivity of modernity, are not phenomena that appear only in the epoch of modernity. However, they become articulated in a distinctly new way, at the turn of the 18th century, one in which categories of the social and new notions of temporality and of agency become key components. Sociology came to depend on the existence of certain epistemic, institutional and existential conditions that allowed the new discourses of society to uphold epistemic claims to valid knowledge but also to re exively engage in societal practices and their transformations. This article focuses on the ways in which this dilemma was articulated at three crucial historical junctures, namely the turn of the 18th century; the period of classical sociology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and nally; the present situation in the early 21st century with a global diffusion of professional sociological practices. This comparison in historical time is, for the last two periods of transformation, complemented also by a comparative analysis in space, by juxtaposing a Continental European experience with a North American one.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2007

This is an introduction to Johann Arnason's essay, 'The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity', which I translated. It was published in Social Imaginaries 1:1, pp. 131-134 (May, 2015).

A large portion of the conference presentations were devoted to the intersection of Ricoeurian hermeneutics with practical philosophy and social sciences such as sociology, history, economics, political science, law, and psychology. While a few of those presentations are included in this issue, the call for papers for this special issue was open to all and solicited articles that focused especially on the impact of Paul Ricoeur's oeuvre in the domains of social ontology and cognition. This issue thus hopes to build on existing debates over social theory, actions and events, the anthropology of capable man, theories of recognition, the role of social institutions, and memory studies. Through dialogue with other approaches in sociology and social philosophy, this issue examines the extent to which Ricoeur's philosophy can contribute to the study of social phenomena, showing both the advantages and limitations of his analyses. The mixture of different research backgrounds of the authors represented in this issue further underscores the interdisciplinary dialogue affirmed by the journal's mission.