Faith, Reason, and Charisma: Rudolf Sohm, Max Weber, and the Theology of Grace

Charismatic authority has been central to twentieth-century politics and theory, yet confusion about charisma is rife. Max Weber's classic texts on this subject have been a major source of insight, yet key features of his analysis remain obscure–so much so that many scholars who call themselves Weber's disciples defend views opposed to his. For Weber, charisma is a social status; for many "Weberians," charisma is a personal quality. For Weber, charisma is a quicksilver, unstable form of authority; for his errant followers, it is an existential limit to democracy. One reason for this contradiction is that, influenced by the theologian Rudolf Sohm, Weber used the vocabulary of the theology of grace. Many readers, unfamiliar with the nature of Weber's debt to theology, have thought that Weber, like Rudolf Sohm, viewed charisma as a divinely given personal quality. In fact, however, Max Weber's sociology of charisma is radically opposed to Sohm's theology.     

Narrating democracy in Myanmar: The struggle between activists,democratic leaders and aid workers,Tamas Wells, 2021, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

In Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers, Tamas Wells explores how central political concepts like democracy and democratization can bear radically different meaning to different political actors. With the example of Myanmar...s reform period, prior to the 2021 military coup, Wells shows that diverging narratives of what democracy means have impact on how different national and international political actors understand each other, and in turn may threaten democratic reforms.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF THE ARAB SPRING

There were large differences in the responses of Arab dictators to the Arab Spring protests. To understand these differences, I present a stylized model of how a dictator responds to mass protests for democratization in a polarized country with two ethnic or religious groups. In this model, the dictator's response crucially depends on oil revenues and his affiliation to either the majority or the minority group. I document that the model's predictions are consistent with the observed differences in the Arab dictators' responses. Hence, ethnic politics and religious divides may play an important role in political transitions and regime changes. (JEL D72, D74)     

Double disenchantment of politics: A systems theory approach to post‐socialist transformation

Many social scientists argue that the precarious future of post‐socialist societies is determined by cultural constraints to which the actors of transformation are exposed. In contrast to this approach, the paper focuses on those developmental obstacles which are inherent to the structure of post‐socialist societies. The analysis draws primarily on social systems theory, especially on the theory of functional differentiation. In the first part, the changing role of political actors is dealt with. The competitive nature of the democratic political process have forced the new and old political actors to adopt a pragmatic and professional attitude towards their activity. Not all of them, however, have been able to adapt to the new rules of the political game. Adaptation problems are mostly faced by those political actors who played a decisive role in the initial stages of democratization on the basis of their informal political influence. The second part of the paper focuses on the changes related to the societal functions of the democratic political system. Irrespective of the ambitions of political actors, democratic politics is inherently ‘unsuitable’ for the extensive regulation of society. A democratic political system presupposes a relatively high ability of other societal subsystems to rely on self‐regulation. The absence of this ability is an important source of systemic tensions in post‐socialist societies. These two sets of changes can be characterized as the double disenchantment of politics. Both on the systemic level and on the level of actors politics has lost many attributes of a ‘privileged’ societal activity. But the process of disenchantment can give rise to demands for a revival of the politics of ‘great deeds’.     

Popular discontent,divided perceptions,and political polarization in Taiwan

Popular discontent with political performance has been a preeminent feature in Taiwanese politics since the first power alternation in 2000. Potential explanations include economic decline, deteriorating quality of democratic governance, and electoral over-competition. For an emerging democracy like Taiwan, the political experience under the Chen Shui-bian administration was a crucial test for the transition to a mature democracy. While popular discontent with various political agencies might convey different messages, the author argues that the synthetic outcome is a partisan-laden perception of political accountability, which led to serious political gridlock and ingrained partisan rivalry that could have jeopardized Taiwan's fledgling democracy. More importantly, polarized politics in Taiwan under the Chen administration can be seen as a lesson, one that illustrates how the process of democratic consolidation can be possibly reversed in an emerging democracy.     

Situated Interpretations of Nationalism,Imperialism, and Cosmopolitanism: Revisiting the Writings of Liang in the Encounter Between Worlds

The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology – that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non-Western societies through showing that neither the “consumers of modernity” approach nor the “creative adaptations” approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang's accounts of the nation-state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed “global politics” beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.     

States,elites, and inequality in Latin America

In this article, I review the literature on elites and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the emergence of uneven state structures and how they came to foster the needs of elites for protection. States in Latin America are traditionally thought of as facilitating processes of top‐down modernization that transformed traditional agrarian economies into complex urban polities, while maintaining extreme inequality. The state is thus central in the genealogy of inequality and elite privilege in Latin America. The synergy between states and elites continues to mark Latin American societies, and it helps us to understand how major economic and political changes occur without significant changes in inequality. For the most part, Latin America's current uneven states emerged as the result of exclusionary projects of citizenship during the first half of the 20th century and were advanced by the advent of repressive regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. After democratic transitions during the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American states came to be characterized, on the one hand, by procedural democratic institutions and on the other, by high levels of state violence, exclusion, and segmented citizenship. The present situation is one of a problematic equilibrium between states, elites, and inequality.     

Struggle and solidarity: civic republican elements in Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolò Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

利比亚政治危机的历史探溯

卡扎菲集团没有构建合法型、传统型统治的基础,构建"魅力型统治"成为其目标。卡扎菲以"第三世界理论"和《绿皮书》为指导,以民众革命、伊斯兰社会主义、对抗西方等实践行为,构建"魅力型统治"。随着社会变迁和全球化的冲击,完全凭铁腕和魅力赢得民众认同来寻求合法性显得日益艰难。卡扎菲统治的42年,政治动员缺乏国民士气和公共精神所需求的能量。这次利比亚政治危机是北非政治危机"滚雪球效应"引发的利比亚国内政治斗争的扩大化,外来力量尤其是北约的干预直接放大了这种效应,反映了利比亚现代化中威权政治的衰朽,卡扎菲强人政治"魅力平凡化"的历程。     

Inequality, Democratization, and De–Democratization

Reversions from democratic to undemocratic regimes have often occurred historically and continue to occur frequently. Both increases in categorical inequality across a regime's subject population and declines in the insulation of public politics from categorical inequality tend to de–democratize regimes. A general account of democratization and de–democratization yields a series of conjectures concerning the processes by which changes in categorical inequality threaten democracy.     

Political discontent in new democracies: the case of Brazil and Latin America

Political changes related to globalization apparently produce similar effects on old and new democracies. All over the world, comparative research on democratization has showed that political distrust is a common variable affecting the whole of the State and the relationship between citizens and democracy. Nevertheless, political discontent in old democracies has stimulated citizens to adopt new attitudes and modes of political participation, while in newly democratized countries citizens tend to withdraw from politics as a consequence of institutional distrust. In fact, in many new democracies, although adhering to the normative meaning of the democratic regime, distrust of democratic institutions is associated to citizens’ negative feeling about political efficacy, low levels of political interest and political participation, and also preference for democratic models which exclude political parties and/or parliaments. This paper evaluates the meanings and consequences of the contemporary phenomenon of political discontent in Brazil and Latin America and discusses its implications for democratic theory.     

Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis

Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on inequality, democracy and cities, we explore the local level dynamics of democratization across urban settings in India, South Africa, and Brazil. In all three cases, democratic institutions are consolidated, but there is tremendous variation in the quality of the democratic relationship between cities and their citizens. We follow Tilly’s focus on citizenship as the key element in democratization and argue that explaining variance across our three cases calls for analyzing patterns of inequality through the kind of relational lens used by Tilly and recognizing that patterns of contestation are shaped by shifting political relationships between the nation and the city. We conclude that Tilly’s theoretical frame is nicely sustained by the comparative analysis of cases very different from those that stimulated his original formulations.     

Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: gendered violence on the Mexico-U.S. border

In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity "femicide," and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city's infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels. In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called "drug violence" unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government's war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.     

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

In this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.     

Populist things. A study on the materiality of political ideas

Is there such thing as a populist thing? This article tries to answer this question by comparing two iconic populist objects: the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap and the yellow vest. Despite their centrality to populist politics, there is remarkably little systematic examination of these objects' populist affordances, let alone a comparative study. We propose to address this lacuna by performing a pragmatic analysis of each object's role in the populist politics of the United States and France, respectively. Our comparison uncovers two findings, which, in turn, help us answer our research question. First, our study of the MAGA cap reveals how nationalism and populism can be combined into a powerful political message. Second, the yellow vest exemplifies how populism functions on its own that is, as a way of doing politics that is centred on feelings of resentment. Either in conjunction with other political phenomena (e.g., nationalism) or by itself, populism emerges from our analysis as a logic of action that involves both linguistic claims and physical objects. Things, in this reading, are surprisingly central to how populism operates.     

Emerson,Cooley, and the American Heroic Vision*

Willful leaders and mindless masses are governing images in Carlyle's and Nietzsche's romantic conception of political domination. In contrast, the nineteenth century American notion of heroic leadership was inspired by liberal sentiment and drew mainly on classical republican definitions of greatness. These sentiments and definitions supplied the basis for Ralph Waldo Emerson's theory of heroes and hero worship. The first part of this paper shows how the tension between elitist and democratic conceptions of the hero permeated Emerson's early work, and how this tension was finally resolved in his essays on representative men. The second part of the paper deals with Charles Horton Cooley's admiration of Emerson, and the affinity between Emerson's mature ideas and Cooley's studies of genius, emulation, fame, and leadership. Cooley's political sociology, like Emerson's, was based on a profound attachment to democratic principles. Cooley also believed, as did Emerson, that these intangible principles only remain secure as long as society emulates the great men who personify them. Building upon Emerson's conception of the heroic figure as a symbol rather than a source of social order and social change, Cooley passed on to later generations of American sociologists a conception of heroic leadership that differs sharply from the romantic visions which prevailed in Europe from Emerson's time to Cooley's own day.     

Where are we when we litigiously judge? Politics and aesthetics in Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the scenario depicted by Carl Schmitt, contemporary theory has contradicted the “thesis of differentiation” between aesthetics and “the political.” Critical theorists claimed aesthetic analysis’ relevance for grasping aspects of the political realm. And political thought took an “aesthetic turn.” Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière have been influential figures in this turn. Their thought offers a clear response to the challenges to the aesthetico-political Schmitt poses. To approach Arendt and Rancière’s responses, this essay proceeds in three parts. The first section analyses Arendt’s reading of the connection between aesthetics and politics. Focusing on a major shift in her perspective on judgement, I argue that her account is influenced by the ungrounded character of politics. The second section thematises the role that the relationship of aesthetics and politics has in Rancière’s work. I claim that his writings might be read as a challenge to Arendt’s attempt to “stabilise” politics by distinguishing it from the social question. Finally, the third section explicitly contrasts Arendt and Rancière’s accounts of the aesthetic-political. I conclude by arguing that their projects are crucial resources for formulating a critical theory that should resist the exceptionalist temptation to conceive “the political” as an incontestable nature.     

“思政课”教师与辅导员专兼结合的制度创新

推进思想政治理论课教师与辅导员专兼结合的制度化、规范化、科学化，需要制度创新。以“大思想政治教育”理念为指引，建立健全协调统一的领导体制和整体联动的工作机制，优化岗位设置及其职责，创新专兼结合的形式，构建符合中国国情的有别于西方的大学生思想政治教育制度体系。     

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DEMOCRACY IN A NEW DEMOCRACY

Taiwan made the transition from political authoritarianism to democracy in the late 1980s. Data from representative samples of the Taiwan population in 1992 and 1997 show how, in the early phase of democratization, citizens varied in the extent of their democratic political behavior and attitudes. I attempt to explain these variations on the basis of variables drawn from social capital theory (participation in voluntary organizations and trust), controlling for the individual's position in the social structure (sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, socioeconomic status, and social class). The findings of the multivariate analysis support only one of the social capital hypotheses: The more organizations one participates in, the more one engages in various forms of democratic political behavior . However, organizational participation has no effect on democratic political attitudes . There is no positive reciprocal relationship between the two key social capital variables of organizational participation and trust. Trust, instead of having a positive effect, either has no net effect (on some forms of democratic political behavior) or a significant negative effect (on democratic political attitudes and petitioning a government agency). The political context of Taiwan may explain why people who distrusted Taiwan's political system were more democratic and more tolerant in their attitudes than those who had more political trust.