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Displaying: 21-40 of 792 documents


studies about contemporary societies
21. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Luis Roniger Contesting Liberal Citizenship: The Populist Challenge
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Political and social research on populism has discussed its development in the framework of modern constitutional democracies. Populism thrives as ‘parasitic’ to those democracies by addressing their unfulfilled promises. Citizens’ loss of trust in the system opens the way for varied forms of ‘populist ruptures’, facilitating the construction of the category of ‘the people’, through which leaders and their followings claim to stand for all citizens and embody the common will. This article analyzes how, both discursively and performatively, populism addresses major parameters and antinomies of Liberal democratic citizenship, e.g., by recalibrating representation and mass participation. Analysis indicates that by impacting the contours of collective identity as much as citizen expectations, entitlements and commitments, populism challenges the Liberal conceptions of citizenship that uphold modern constitutional democracies.
22. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Manussos Marangudakis, Theodoros Chadjipadelis The Transcendental and the Immanent as Liturgical Experience – the Greek Orthodox Case
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The essay is a quantitative analysis of a questionnaire distributed to a sample of 775 worshipers immediately after the Sunday Liturgy in a random number of churches in Athens, Thessaloniki and Mytilini. The questions addressed to them try to grasp feelings and thoughts felt during liturgical experience and effervescence as such, as well as reflections concerning the religious and the political self. The findings suggest that the liturgy has profound effects on those who attend service often, but it is not irrelevant even to those who attend service less often. Those who attend service often and feel strongly the liturgical rite tend to identify religion, both doctrinal and vernacular (the ‘little traditions’), with politics, consider themselves to be rightist and hold political beliefs revolving around antinomian egotism and authoritative paternalism. Those who attend service rarely and do not experience any effervescence, as the mirror-image of the former, tend to identify themselves as leftist and hold political beliefs revolving around revolution, defiance and the like, and reject democratic institutions. The study underlines the very close connection of church attendance to ‘magical’ aspects of the Orthodox religion, as well as the very strong presence of icons in the life of the believers irrespective of their frequency of liturgical attendance.
the next society
23. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Vittorio Cotesta The New Shape of the World: Note on “Sociology of the Next Society: Multiple Modernities, Glocalization and Membership Order”
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Preyer and Krausse’s Sociology on Next Society proposes a new perspective on interpreting the global society of the future. In these Notes, the author discusses some of the key points of the volume. The paradigm shift in the sciences is often introduced by the creation of a new language, a new view of the relationship between words and things. The question is whether this semantic and epistemological feature also characterizes the approach proposed by Preyer and Krausse. The sociology of the Next Society – observes the author – is in fact the latest attempt to get rid of the sociology of social systems based on the analogy between society and living organism. This attempt has been underway for at least 50 years and this volume constitutes the final result. In reality, it is a question of freeing sociology (of social systems) from the hegemony of the socio-biological sciences. And it is not an easy task. The author asks whether this attempt has been successful and what the results are in terms of interpreting the new form of the world. On the one hand, the sociology of the Next society places itself in the sphere of the new theories on the world but, on the other, it still adopts a traditional model. In fact, it aims at overcoming the “society of individuals”, typical of the modern-bourgeois western society, with a society based on the membership of social, professional, etc. orders. The ordering of society should be based on the “membership order”. The authors themselves qualify the next society as a neo-feudal society. How prolific is its approach is still an open question. The numerous researches promoted and directly conducted by the authors are an attempt to give an empirical basis to their proposal. Compared to other theories of global society, the sociology of the next society shows its vitality in placing itself at the level of the “global” analysis of the world. Its limits, perhaps, are in not seeing that there are different “projects” or “forms of globality” competing with each other. Each civilization has a claim to universality and a project of hegemony over the world that could be better understood through an approach based on the concept and paradigm of social conflict, both within societies and between societies and civilizations.
24. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Athanasios Gromitsaris On Problem-References: Review Essay on “Sociology of the Next Society: Multiple Modernities, Glocalization and Membership Order”
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The book under review treats sociology as a science that identifies and reconceptualizes problems already defined by others. Such definitions are viewed to be dependent on conditions that the book calls “membership orders”. The book argues that the sociological observer should look for and observe from the boundaries that keep “members” and “non-members”, along with their corresponding views of problems, apart. The review essay approaches the book with the dual question, “Who describes the reality in which it is determined that social situations are treated as problematic by those involved?” And “Who determines whose problem is the problem considered relevant in each case?” The essay discusses the answers given by the authors to these questions with the help of their conceptualization, data, and object constitution. Similarities and differences are highlighted in comparison with Luhmann’s theory. For illustration purposes, the authors’ theory is applied to law.
25. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Eliezer Ben-Rafael Contributing to Next-Society Sociology: Discussing Kibbutz’ Metamorphosis
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The formation and evolution of multiculturalism and hybridization (Nederveen Pieterse, 1995; 2016) belong today to the leading research priorities of social sciences. These developments assumedly forward a kind of new or next society features of which seemingly emerge and may be captured in processes taking place in given partial structures. We think especially of subsystems that, at the origin, concretized utopic orientations that were abandoned over time to leave room to new ambitions. One such subsystem consists of the kibbutz that was for long viewed as one of the most successful utopia that was both rigorous and performing, and which illustrates today an appropriate example of next-society emergence. The general validity of this assumption resides in this setting’s multigenerational survival through far reaching structural, cultural and ideological changes. A model of communitarian collectivity at its start that now is best defined by the oxymoron of “individualistic community”.
26. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Contributors
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27. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Imprint
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28. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
eBooks and Books on Demand
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29. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Subscription – Single Article
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30. ProtoSociology: Volume > 38
Bookpublications of the Project
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31. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Barrie Axford, Manfred B. Steger Editorial: The Globalization of Populism
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part i concepts and contexts
32. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Paul James Defining Populism and Fascism Relationally: Exploring Global Convergences in Unsettled Times
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What is the relationship between right-wing populism and contemporary fascism? How has fascism changed since the 1920s? And how do the answers to these questions concern a global shift that can be called the Great Unsettling—including a postmodern fracturing of prior modern ‘certainties’ about the nature of subjectivity, political practice and meaning, deconstructing the consequences of ‘truth’? This essay seeks to respond to these questions by first going back to foundational issues of defnition and elaborating the meaning of populism and fascism in relation to their structural ‘moving parts’. Using this alternative scaffolding, the essay argues that right-wing populism and an orientation to postmodern fascism represented by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have converged. The context of this convergence is a globalizing shift that now challenges democratic politics.
33. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Rico Isaacs Vico and Populism: the Return to a ‘Barbarism of Refection’
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This essay brings Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico’s thought to bear on the issue of contemporary populism. Contemporary populism can be refected in Vico’s cyclical philosophy of the three ages of civilisation: the divine, heroic and human ages (corso e ricorso). Contemporary populism represents a return to the barbarism of the heroic age through the descent into individualism and private interest, the return of divinely ordained rulers and the recourse to myth, violence and morality. Humankind’s reason has become corrupted by the complexity of highly developed society, releasing the destructive forces of contemporary populism and a descent into a ‘barbarism of refection’. Corsi e ricorsi illustrates how contemporary populism remains but a stage in the Vichian cycle, alluding to how it represents an essential form of political life throughout history.
34. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Jonathan Friedman Populism and Cosmopolitanism as a Unitary Structure of Global Systemic Process: Notes and Graphs
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Populism is discussed here in terms of the larger global systemic matrix in which it occurs. It is suggested that it is not, as has been claimed so often, recently, somehow related to what is labelled as right-wing extremism. It is an expression of an aspiration to sovereignty, control over one’s conditions of existence and its links to either left or right are based on that aspiration. And, of course, right and left are themselves terms that have shifted or even been inverted over the past 30 years. The core argument is that populism and cosmopolitanism form a complementary opposition that has emerged as a product of the hegemonic decline of the West.
35. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Simon Tormey No Going Back?: Late Modernity and the Populisation of Politics
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This paper takes up the challenge posed in recent commentary concerning the nature or ontology of populism. I suggest that we need to take a sociological approach that seeks to locate populism within the wider processes and tendencies associated with late modernity in order to fully capture not only what populism is, but also why we are seeing a greater prevalence of populism around the world. I locate populism in relation to fve dominant tendencies: The decline of traditional authority structures; the rise of individualisation; the growth of bureaucracy and complexifcation; the intensifcation of globalisation and the emergence of a new media ecology. These processes together are creating enormous strains on representative democracy, lead­ing to “democratic grievance”. Those who are represented become uncoupled from their own representatives, leaving a vacuum which is increasingly flled by populist initiatives. Populism thus needs to be read as a symptom of an intensifying crisis of democracy, as much as a cause of it.
part ii global and (g)local incursions
36. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Heikki Patomäki Neoliberalism and Nationalist-Authoritarian Populism: Explaining their Constitutive and Causal Connections
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Can the rise of nationalist-authoritarian populism be explained in terms of neo­liberalism and its effects? The frst half of this paper is about conceptual under­labouring: in spite of signifcant overlap, there are relatively clear demarcation criteria for identifying neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism as distinct entities. Neoliberalism has succeeded in transforming social contexts through agency, practices and institutions, with far-reaching efects. The prevailing economic and social policies have also had various causal efects such as rising inequalities, progressively more insecure terms of employment, and recurring economic crises. I argue that these have led to discontent with globalization and various political responses, including those of nationalist and authoritarian populisms. Finally, by juxtaposing constitutive and causal explanations, and by stressing the history of national-authoritarian populism, I raise questions about geo-historical specifcity of diferent formations. The standard Karl Polanyian interpretation of Trump, Brexit and such like phenomena is misleading, yet a partial historical analogy especially to the interwar era populism is valid if understood in a subtle, processual, and suffciently contextual way. The Polanyi-inspired historical analogy can be explored further. While the 19th and 20th century working class movement emerged from a variety of socio-economic conditions, socialists who believed in its world-historical role actively made it. Since the 1970s the working class has been largely unmade both as a result of impersonal processes and deliberate attempts to undermine it. Only a learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of refexivity can help develop global transformative agency for the 21st century.
37. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Roland Robertson Populism and Worldwide Turbulence: A Glocal Perspective
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This contribution consists in an attempt to make sense of one central aspect of the present worldwide turbulence, one which might well be called the contemporary, perfect, global storm. A pivotal problem that will be interrogated is the issue of the circumstances that have produced this phenomenon in most parts of the world, although it should be emphasized that the term populism is, more often than not, applied to the Western world rather than the East or, for the most part, the global South. However, this reservation does not amount to a severe caveat, since all the contemporary signs are that what is here called populism is sweeping across the entire world as a whole, even though it is not necessarily given this name in non-Western regions. To this generalization it should be added that there are, rather obviously, parallels to what has become known as populism in the West. Examples of this are anarchism in nineteenth century Russia and the movement known as the Long March under the leadership of Mao Zedong in the years 1934 and 1935 particularly, as well as al Qaeda and its various offshoots.
38. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Victor Roudometof Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and 21st Century Populism
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The contemporary debate on 21st century populism centres on a term (“populism”) that can be flled with multiple meanings. It provides the social sciences with a “meta-concept” that offers coherence to disciplinary discourses. In the 21st century, globalization and cosmopolitanism are often viewed as an irresistible force by intellectuals, with advocacy of cosmopolitanism becoming commonplace. For the most part, the academic community has only belatedly and reluctantly decided to address the electoral success of political parties that reject the political consensus of the post-1989 “New World Order”. In sharp contrast to the intellectuals’ stance, the empirical evidence suggests that it is localism (and not cosmopolitanism) that has been on the rise in recent decades. Glocalization is connected to the formation of varied collective responses and representations, thereby giving rise to the mutually defined pair of cosmopolitanism and localism. The cosmopolitanism–localism binary relationship is a result (or outcome) of glocalization. However, the majority of social-scientifc perspectives do not give proper consideration to the notion of “local”. The notions of localization and de-globalization as part of post-Great Recession trends are discussed. The extent to which these can rectify shortcomings in current theorizing is explored.
39. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Roland Benedikter The Five Origins of European Populism: The “Old Continent” Between Fixing Techno-Wars And A Global Order In The Re-Making
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This essay deals with the five origins of European populism. It touches upon a number of themes in the lexicon of re-globalization and the changing warp of populist globalization as a process. It carries a lively normative message, principally as to the required comportment of the European Union during a period of global change and dislocation, which prefigures, or may give rise to a post-populist era.
on contemporary philosophy
40. ProtoSociology: Volume > 37
Jürgen Stolzenberg “But how is self-consciousness possible?”: Holderlin’s criticism of Fichte in “Judgment and Being”
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