Reactivating the ‘communist hypothesis’: Alain Badiou and social work

It has been argued that Alain Badiou could contribute to social work's engagement with social theory. This paper critically responds to this assertion and identifies some of the theoretical problems associated with Badiou's core conceptualisations. Divided into two sections, it will begin by outlining his main thematic preoccupations and will go on to focus on his interpretation of the significance of Saint Paul, the apostle. The second half of the paper will dwell on Webb's attempt to connect Badiou to social work so as to disrupt focal ideas on ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’. This section will conclude by critically exploring Badiou's comments on children, children's rights and abuse. Although, so far receiving no attention in the social work literature, his interventions on these matters are problematic in that they imply that children lie outside the ‘one world’ politics that he promotes. Despite such criticisms, it is concluded Badiou's theorisation needs to be included within the academic literature of European social work.     

Peter Kireevskii and the Development of Moscow Slavophilism

Abstract

Although the name of the folklorist Peter Kireevskii is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Russia, comparatively little has been written about his place within the Slavophile circle. Some scholars have treated him as the 'first' Slavophile. Others have questioned whether his views were in any sense really Slavophile at all. This article argues that Peter Kireevskii's life-long interest in Russian folklore was rooted both in his understanding of the Russian countryside and his exposure to the influence of a Russian Romantic tradition that viewed the narod as the authentic representative of national identity. It suggests that Kireevskii was from his youth convinced that Russia possessed a culture and history that was equal in value to any country in the West, but that it was only in the late 1830s that he stressed the role played by Orthodoxy in shaping Russia's development. Although his mature views brought him closer to the Slavophile 'mainstream', there were always some elements that set him apart, perhaps reflecting the fact that Slavophilism was a more eclectic and diverse phenomenon than sometimes realized.     

Fewer and better

Throughout this century an increasing body of knowledge has been accumulating concerning the individual and the society in which he lives. In helping the emotionally disturbed individual to adjust to his environment we have been concerned with his intrapsychic conflicts and his relationships with the key figures in his life. Since the 1940's there has been a new concept evolving which combines the knowledge of the dynamics of an individual's emotional development and growth, communication theories and the work of social scientists concerning social systems.     

A Guide to Training Your Own Horses: The Flaneur Appproach and Erving Goffman's Uninhibited Research Practices in Sociology

While Erving Goffman's sociology has enjoyed great popularity and is cited often, the career of his work has been largely confined to other scholars reaping, adapting, and utilizing his concepts. Goffman was opposed to science that just reproduces and orders concepts, and opposed to his students using his concepts as easy tools. Instead, he recommended they train their own horses: While there is much to use in Goffman's work, there is little scholarship that continues the genius of his practical approach. As valuable as Goffman's categories are, his collection practice and his analytical scheme may be even more valuable. On the one hand, they offer an intricate framework for research that is as open as it is directed; on the other hand, they allow researchers to argue freedom from the ever more imposing bad imitations of natural scientific method that threaten to overgrow the social sciences. Together, they allow Goffmanesque work without merely parroting his concepts. This article attempts to outline Goffman's eclectic way of collecting material and his technique for fashioning this material into analyses, reordering this material around different metaphors that make Goffman's contribution distinct. I call Goffman's practical research a flaneur approach, and outline it. The paper then makes an argument for its continuation.     

Mead's Lost Conception of Society

The single best word to describe the impact of George Herbert Mead's ideas on the intellectual world is “ironic.” Although Mead was a philosopher, his ideas have been more influential in sociology than in philosophy. Despite Mead's belief that it is the job of sociologists to study society, it is his notion of the self rather than his notion of society that has received the most attention in this field. Mead himself is first and foremost responsible for this ironic state of affairs because his analysis of society is so obscure at points that it is hard for most sociologists to understand. However, Mead alone is not to blame. The two main expositors of his sociological thought since his death, Herbert Blumer and Hans Joas, added to the confusion by not making clear that Mead sees society as a “body of institutions.” To correct their distortions of Mead's notion of society, I provide an alternative exposition of that notion. I disclose how Mead addresses the three main problems that he believes must be resolved before society can be understood: (1) the operation of institutions in the daily lives of people; (2) the origination of early institutions, such as language, the family, the economy, religion, polity, and science; and (3) the change of these institutions after their inception.     

Making minorities history: population transfer in twentieth-century Europe

Leading Liberal Party politicians and some academic studies have suggested that the Liberal Party's stance on coloured immigration and race relations has been more principled than that of the other two major parties. However, close examination of the Liberals’ reactions to the issue of coloured immigration in the 1960s suggests that Liberal policy has not been very different from that of either the Labour or the Conservative Parties. All three parties moved to appease what appeared to be a hostile electorate.     

“Machinisme”, Marxism,humanism: Georges Friedmann before and after WW II

Georges Friedmann (1902–1977) is known for the humanist sociology of work he founded after World War II. Before the war he was a Marxist intellectual, close to the French Communist Party and an admirer of the young Soviet Union. The effect of this political and ideological itinerary on his sociology of work has never been analyzed systematically. Here the question is handled by following the presence of a central concept in his work, “machinisme” [see note¹]. This concept does not come from Marx's thinking but from that of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet, whose writings Friedmann was fully familiar with. A key term in Friedmann's early writings, it was abandoned after World War II in favor of the “natural milieu/technical milieu” conceptual pair. This terminological change went together with a radical change in Friedmann's point of view.     

Chrysalid Goffman: A Note on “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience”

Goffman's first substantial sociological work, his M.A. thesis entitled “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience,” has hitherto escaped critical commentary. Inspection of the thesis yields insights into the early development of Goffman's sociology. It shows that Goffman's later dismissal of positivistic and experimental approaches, his suspicion of interview methods, and his valorization of observational data have their origins in his research experiences in late 1940s Chicago while he worked toward his first graduate degree. The thesis fails to deliver the findings promised by the approved thesis proposal but succeeds as a demonstration of Goffman's methodological acuity.     

The Origins of Sociability

Reading this latest work of Bowlby's gives us a sense of completing an inevitable circle. Here he deals fully with what has always really been his core concern—the nature of the child's tie to his mother. We associate his work, however, mainly with the rupture of that tie. His fruitful work on separation of mother and child, with its only partly intended results in the care of sick and separated children, has materially affected the work of other researchers and practitioners. In the interim between the publication of his famous monograph, “Maternal Care and Mental Health” and this new book, we have had from him and many others increasingly refined analyses of the effects of maternal deprivation on children of various ages and in various situations. In fact the literature was becoming too large and repetitive for the ordinary practitioner.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

José Ortega y Gasset (1934), Ibn Khaldūn Reveals the Secret to Us (thoughts on Africa Minor) translated from Spanish by Cynthia Scheopner

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was puzzled how Melilla remained a Spanish enclave on the North African coast. By 1927, Spain had solidified its hold on Northern Morocco and several books on the history and culture of “Africa minor” had been published; in one Ortega encountered Ibn Khaldūn. Ortega read the Prolegomena to History in the French translation by William MacGuckin de Slane. He found a key to understanding Spain that he explored in this essay, first published in El Espectador journal of Madrid in 1934. It introduced Ibn Khaldun to European audiences as the first philosopher of history three decades before an English translation of his work. Ortega, then, knew of Ibn Khaldun's theory of generations at the time he was developing his own. Ortega noted page numbers in parentheses in the text where he quoted from De Slane. The end notes are from the text as well, documenting Ortega's secondary sources for his impressions of Ibn Khaldūn, Islam, and North African culture.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

The Medium Is the Mass: Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism and catholicism

Conflicting assumptions have been proffered about Marshall McLuhan's Roman Catholic beliefs: (a) that he was a "compartmentalized Catholic" who kept his Sunday beliefs separate from his Monday-to-Saturday academic thinking; (b) that his Catholicism was ubiquitous, and thus the "global village" is a longing for one world body as camouflaged Teilhard de Chardin; (c) that McLuhan was an academic who addressed all topics, including religious ones, orally and in writing but not with a proselytizing perspective; (d) that as a convert to Catholicism (in the spirit of Chesterton and Lewis) he was a clever and subtle evangelical who infused academe with adapted theology; and (e) that some mixture of these assumptions is likely to be true, although McLuhan kept his articles of faith largely off the record. Based on interviews with McLuhan and with some of his closest colleagues and friends, as well as on research about the religious vein within McLuhan's writing, I report aspects of the "Marist McLuhan," that is, the McLuhan moved by Mary, and by her church, as well as aspects of McLuhan's theological subtext within his writing and thinking.     

Simmel,rationalisation and the sociology of money

Simmel was born in 1858. Raised in the centre of the Jewish business culture of Berlin. Simmel studied history and philosophy, becoming a Privatdozent in 1885. Although he published numerous books and artickes, simmel was excluded from influential university positions as a result of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the period and it was bot until 1914 that Simmel was finally promoted to a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg. Like Durkheim. Simmel was both the object of anti-Semitic prejudice and a fervent supporter of the nationalist cause in the First World War. Simmel died in 1918 if cancer of the liver.¹ This basic and naïve factual biography of Simmel in many respects provides many of the themes in Simmel's sociology. First, his sociology is held to be the brilliant reflection of the glittering, cospospolitan world of pre-war Berlin and that his commentary on that world took the form of impressionism his sociological essays are snapshots sub specie aeternitatis”? simmel's perspective has been regarded as an example of the nature of modern society as contained in Robert Musil's The Man's Without Qualities. That is a social existence without roots, commitments or purpose.³ Secondly, Simmel was and remained a social outsider despite his good connections with Berlin's cultural elite. His writing has been as a result characterised as perspectivism and an aestheticication of reality. As an indication of this, Simmel's influence has in the past often rested on such minor contributions as‘The Stranger’⁴ Thridly, because Simmel failed to secure an influential location within the German university system, there was no development of the Simmelian school of sociology at all comparable to Durkheimain sociology. Decades of sociological interpretation of Simmel's work have still left Simmel as a theoretical enigma on the ambitus of the sociological tradition. His sociology has been categorised as interactionist, formal and conflict sociology.⁵ In more recent years there has been a renewal of interest in Simmel which has begun to show a greater appreciation of the unity and stature of his sociology. This renewal has been brought about by the cominentaries of Levine. Frisby, Robertson, and Holzner. ⁶ More importantly, the translation of Simmel's The Philosophy of Money⁷ by Bottomore and Frisby provides a new opportunity for a systematic evaluation of Simmel's sociology of modern culture. The main burden of this paper is that existing commentaries have failed to focus on the central theme of‘alienation’and‘rationalisation’in The Philosophy of Money which provided the major theoretical backing for on the one hand, Weber's analysis capitalism as the iron cage and on the other Lukács so-called rediscovery of the alienation theme in the young Marx.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Ilyenkov on Aesthetics: Realism,Imagination, and the End of Art

It is sometimes claimed that Evald Ilyenkov's writings, particularly those on the problem of the ideal, best express the philosophical framework of Russian cultural-historical psychology and activity theory. In this article I consider a neglected part of Ilyenkov's legacy: his work on aesthetics. Ilyenkov's writings on art cast significant light on his views of culture and mind and on the humanistic vision at the center of his philosophy. In 1964, on a rare trip to the West, Ilyenkov visited an exhibition of pop art in Vienna. He was disgusted by what he saw and wrote a scathing critique entitled "Chto tam, v Zazerkal'e?" ("What's there, through the looking glass?"). Does Ilyenkov's antipathy to pop-and, indeed, to so-called modern art in general-show him to be enamored of a narrow, reactionary form of socialist realism? If so, how can this be squared with his reputation as a creative, critical voice within Soviet Marxism? I examine Ilyenkov's other writings on aesthetics in search of a nuanced interpretation of his reaction to pop. I consider his idea that art should serve to cultivate higher forms of perception and his attendant concepts of aesthetic sensibility and imagination, and I explore how these notions contribute to his view of the unity of the cognitive virtues, his hostility to the division of labor, and his ideal of genuine human activity, guided by reason. Such themes are vital constituents of Ilyenkov's humanism, which celebrates free, creative activity as a life principle that must assert itself against the mortifying forces of mechanization and standardization. Although these ideas may not entirely redeem Ilyenkov's hostility to modern art, they reveal his stance to be far more sophisticated than appears at first sight.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Bernard Barber’s social system theory

Conclusion Barber’s theory writing expressed his vocation. For him theory-user-friendliness, academic-sociological-openness, and scientific-empirical-insightful-encouragement seem to have been synonyms. Hence, there is a hypothesis implicit to this memoire that should be tested by a full assesssment of Barber’s academic contribution, perhaps by a doctoral dissertation. It is this: Bernard Barber has continued to contribute sociological theory in the way he began (before his courage students to scientifically reflect upon the “paradigmatic” theory enunciated by Parsons (and Merton), how it bad developed, and how it could he made more fruitful. This was also a special “field of study” which gave ongoing stimulus to his studies in the sociology of science and, finally to his late-in-career exposition of his social system theory. This would have to be confirmed by a careful study of all his works, based upon what he wrote, the accounts of those who knew him, and of those who have studied his work as students and colleagues. It would also involve analysis of the work of his students, colleagues, and collaborators.     

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract

This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.     

Fighting Battles with History: The Novelist Louis Golding and the Story of the ‘Doomington Wanderer’

This article explores the writing of Louis Golding in the context of existing scholarship on the Anglo-Jewish novel. It assesses the importance of Golding's background and beliefs in shaping his fiction. Golding's views bridge the cultural gap between eastern European Jewish schtetl life and interwar British society. On one hand, he was a militant supporter of Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriage, of secular Judaism and religious freedom. At the same time his writing reveals a sustained belief in Jewish ‘race’ and Jewish spirituality. Golding's writing on ‘race’ will receive particular attention. Like so many other British Jews in the period, the author seems to have been caught between his desire to fight the racism of the Third Reich and his own confused ‘racial’ attitudes.