The critique of intelligent design: Epicurus,Marx, Darwin,and Freud and the materialist defense of science

A new version of the age-old controversy between religion and science has been launched by today’s intelligent design movement. Although ostensibly concerned simply with combating Darwinism, this new creationism seeks to drive a “wedge” into the materialist view of the world, originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and manifested in modern times by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Intelligent design proponents thus can be seen as challenging not only natural and physical science but social science as well. In this article, we attempt to explain the long history of this controversy, stretching over millennia, and to defend science (especially social science) against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents – by defending science’s materialist roots.

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Unfinished Imagined Communities: States, Social Movements, and Nationalism in Latin America

This article addresses two shortcomings in the literature on nationalism: the need to theorize transformations of nationalism, and the relative absence of comparative works on Latin America. We propose a state-focused theoretical framework, centered on conflicts between states elites and social movements, for explaining transformations of nationalism. Different configurations of four key factors — the mobilization of excluded elites and subordinate actors, state elites’ political control, the ideological capacities of states, and polarization around ethnoracial cleavages — shape how contrasting trajectories of nationalism unfold over time. A comparative analysis of early– and mid–twentieth century Mexico, Argentina, and Peru illustrates the explanatory power of our theoretical framework. José Itzigsohn is Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Developing Poverty (Penn State University, 2000). His current research focuses on two main topics. The first is the formation of ethnic, racial, and national identities. The second is grassroots economies and workplace democracy. Matthias vom Hau is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. He is currently completing his dissertation, a comparative-historical analysis of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. His research interests involve the intersections among culture and identity, state power, and social movements.     

The subject of objects: Marx,new materialism, & queer forms of life

Abstract

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality.     

Marx and the Category of Individuality' in Communist Society*

Marx was one among the great humanist philosophers who, like the humanists from the Renaissance up to those of our day, have stressed the idea that all social arrangements must serve the growth and the unfolding of man; that man must always be an end and never a means; that each individual carries within himself all of humanity; that human progress in science and in art depends upon freedom; that man has the capacity to perfect himself in the process of history…. It is an ironical fact that the main accusation against Marxism in the capitalist countries has been his “materialism”; this is ironical because it was precisely Marx's aim to fight the materialism engendered in bourgeois life and to create a society in which man—the creative, “self-active” human being—is the summon bonum, in which the rich man is the one, as Marx put it, who is much, and not the one who has much.     

Sartre for the twenty-first century?

By virtually dominating French intellectual life (literature, philosophy, culture) during the early post-World War II period, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) embodied what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “total intellectual” – one who responds to and helps frame public debate on all the intellectual and political issues of the day. During his lifetime and even after his death in 1980, Sartre’s thinking and political engagements provoked sharp reactions, both positive and negative, in France and abroad. Marxism, decolonization struggles, and violence are three key themes on which Sartre’s public positions continue to generate considerable debate – a debate that remains relevant today.

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Consequences, opportunities, and procedures

This paper reflects on consequentialism which underlies the traditional normative economics. It asserts that the informational basis of normative economics should be expanded so that the intrinsic value of social choice procedures should be properly taken into account along with the value of their consequences. Three examples – the problem of fair cake division, the role of competition in the promotion of economic welfare, and bilateral trade restrictions – are invoked to pinpoint the services rendered by procedural considerations in making social welfare judgements. The Pareto libertarian paradox is also re-examined within the extended framework incorporating procedural considerations along with consequential considerations. Received: 25 March 1997 / Accepted: 8 July 1997     

Civil Society on Global Governance: Facing Up to Divergent Analysis, Strategy, and Tactics

This paper considers three different conceptualizations – three politico-ideological perspectives within civil society – on global-scale economics and geopolitics. The standpoints can be termed “Global justice movements,” “Third World nationalism,” and the “Post-Washington Consensus.” These three perspectives stand in contrast to the fusion of neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics that dominates the contemporary world. The three approaches sometimes converge, but more often than not they are in conflict; as are the civil society institutions that cohere to the three different political ideologies. From the three different analyses flow different strategies, concrete campaigning tactics, and varying choices of allies. The World Social Forum provides hints of a potentially unifying approach within the global justice movements based upon the practical themes of “decommodification” and “deglobalization” (of capital). It is, however, only by facing up to the ideological divergences that the global justice movement can enhance its presence.

Between Money,Morality and Masculinity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the supply-side of Chiang Mai's gay bars, that is, the male sex workers called dek bar or “bar boys”¹ in Thai. I formulate some explanations why these young men -more than half of whom do not consider themselves to be “homosexual” -take on a job as a male sex worker. In this analysis I focus on certain notions in traditional Thai society, trends in contemporary urban Thai society, the economics of work in a gay bar, as well as the sexual behaviour of male sex workers and the concepts they use to describe their work.     

Cowboy of the World? Gender Discourse and the Iraq War Debate

In this article we examine the debate preceding the most recent war in Iraq to show how gendered framing can compromise the quality of debate. Drawing on a sample of national news discourse in the year before the war began, we show that both anti-war and pro-war speakers draw on binary images of gender to construct their cases for or against war. Speakers cast the Bush administration’s argument for invasion either as a correct “macho” stance or as inappropriate, out-of-control masculinity. The most prominent gendered image in war debate is that of the cowboy, used to characterize both President Bush and US foreign policy in general. The cowboy is positioned against a diplomatic form of masculinity that is associated with Europe and valued by anti-war speakers, but criticized by pro-war speakers. Articles that draw on gender images show a lower quality of the debate, measured by the extent to which reasons rather than ad hominem arguments are used to support or rebut assertions.

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

A pedagogical proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

In this note I consider a simple proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Arrow 1963). I start with the case of three individuals who have preferences on three alternatives. In this special case there are 13³=2197 possible combinations of the three individuals' rational preferences. However, by considering the subset of linear preferences, and employing the full strength of the IIA axiom, I reduce the number of cases necessary to completely describe the SWF to a small number, allowing an elementary proof suitable for most undergraduate students.  This special case conveys the nature of Arrow's result. It is well known that the restriction to three options is not really limiting (any larger set of alternatives can be broken down into triplets, and any inconsistency within a triplet implies an inconsistency on the larger set). However, the general case of n≥3 individuals can be easily considered in this framework, by building on the proof of the simpler case. I hope that a motivated student, having mastered the simple case of three individuals, will find this extension approachable and rewarding.  This approach can be compared with the traditional simple proofs of Barberà (1980); Blau (1972); Denicolò (1996); Fishburn (1970); Kelly (1988); Mueller (1989); Riker and Ordeshook (1973); Sen (1979, 1986); Suzumura (1988), and Taylor (1995). Received: 5 January 1999/Accepted: 10 December 1999     

Intellectual Integration and Articles in Core Sociology Journals, 1960–2000

This study builds on and extends two studies by Oromaner (J Am Soc Inf Sci, 28:34–37, 1977; Int J Inf Manage, 6:29–35, 1986) in which he examined the integrating role of sociology’s three core general journals (American Journal of Sociology (AJS), American Sociological Review (ASR), Social Forces (SF)) among both core (N = 3) and specialty (N = 7) journals. In each study he traced the number of citations received by full-length articles published in the core journals (1960, 1973) during the first 10 years after publication. The present study replicates this methodology for articles published in 1990. In addition, the present study looks at the relationship between each of the core journals and each of the ten citing journals. The percent of core articles cited has increased from 67 to 84, however, the percent cited in five or more journals has remained quite stable and low (13%, 10%, 12%). Core journal articles are more likely to be cited in core journals than they are in specialty journals, and there appears to be some relationship between specific core journals and certain specialty journals. More in depth analysis is presented for the 1990 cohort.     

Modernity and the hybridization of nationalism and religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a heuristic case

This article looks at nationalism and religion, analyzing the sociological mechanisms by which their intersection is simultaneously produced and obscured. I propose that the construction of modern nationalism follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of “religious” and “secular” practices; purification refers to the separation between “religion” and “nationalism” as two distinct ontological zones. I test these arguments empirically using the case of Zionist nationalism. As a movement that was born in Europe but traveled to the Middle East, Zionism exhibits traits of both of these seemingly contradictory principles, of hybridization and purification, and pushes them to their limits. The article concludes by pointing to an epistemological asymmetry in the literature by which the fusion of nationalism and religion tends to be underplayed in studies of the West and overplayed in studies of the East/global South.

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Consistency between tastes and values: A universalization approach

The object of this paper is to propose a consistency test for an individual involved in collective choice process. Collective choice processes considered in the paper are those that transform individuals ‘tastes’– which reflect the self-interested view point of the individuals – into (social) ranking of alternatives. In addition to her tastes, an individual has values about the way by which collective decision should be made. We distinguish two categories of such values. First, there are end-values that restrict the class of social rankings that the individual considers ethically acceptable. Second there are aggregation-values that specify the way by which the social ranking should depend upon the individuals tastes. The consistency test stands on an hypothetical operation of universalization of the individual tastes to everyone. Five illustrations of the potential usefulness of our approach for interpreting social choice theory and welfare economics are proposed. These illustrations deal with utilitarian aggregation in the presence of income inequality aversion, the so-called ‘ethics of responsibility’ and the aggregation of individual ranking of opportunity sets based on their freedom of choice. A discussion of the relevance of the consistency test for addressing the problem of ‘laundering’ individual preferences is also provided. Received: 25 June 1998/Accepted: 16 March 1999     

Cracking the Code: Race,Class, and Access to Nightclubs in Urban America

Using ethnographic data collected in the downtown nightlife of Athens, Georgia, we explore black males’ responses to being rejected from nightclubs via dress code enforcement in predominately white settings. We contrast these responses to the general experiences of other black males who gained access. Although race is a factor in the enforcement of dress codes, we find a fluid relationship between race, class, and taste that influences black males’ responses and experiences. We illustrate how the nuanced reality of lived racial and class experiences for many young black males problematize the narrow interpretation of a black cultural essence.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: GALATY, J. G., e.a., Future of the Pastoral Peoples Marx, Engels und Lenin über grenzüberschreitende Migrationen im Kapitalismus, deren Ursachen und Wirkungen LEITNER, H. Gästarbeiter in der städtischen Gesellschaft; Segregation, Integration und Assimilation von Arbeitsmigranten. Am Beispiel jugoslawischer Gastarbeiter in Wien     

Radical Outcasts versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests

Field observation of anti-emperor protests in Japan reveals two key processes through which the interaction of police and demonstrators gradually narrows the limits of permitted dissent through soft repression. The first process stigmatizes demonstration participants and sharply separates them from the mainstream of Japanese public life, discouraging public attention to or participation in their causes. The second process divides protest movements internally, decreasing support for groups that operate at the prevailing limit of tolerated dissent, and gradually constricting the limit itself. Great variability in police-demonstrator interactions within demonstrations suggests the limitations of newspaper content analysis methods for such research. Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. A Japan specialist who studies Japanese radical left groups, she is the author or editor of twelve books, including three in Japanese, and eighty articles and book chapters. Recent publications include Doing fieldwork in Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), which she co-edited with Theodore Bestor and Victoria Lyon Bestor, and “Kidnapped Japanese in North Korea: The New Left connection” Journal of Japanese Studies 30:1, Winter, 2004, pp. 123–142.     

University expansion and the knowledge society

For centuries, the processes of social differentiation associated with Modernity have often been thought to intensify the need for site-specific forms of role training and knowledge production, threatening the university’s survival either through fragmentation or through failure to adapt. Other lines of argument emphasize the extent to which the Modern system creates and relies on an integrated knowledge system, but most of the literature stresses functional differentiation and putative threats to the university. And yet over this period the university has flourished. In our view, this seeming paradox is explained by the fact that modern society rests as much on universalistic cosmological bases as it does on differentiation. The university expands over recent centuries because – as it has from its religious origins – it casts cultural and human materials in universalistic terms. Our view helps explain empirical phenomena that confound standard accounts: the university’s extraordinary expansion and global diffusion, its curricular and structural isomorphism, and its relatively unified structure. All of this holds increasingly true after World War II, as national state societies made up of citizens are increasingly embedded in a world society constituted of empowered individuals. The redefinition of society in global and individual terms reduces nationally bounded models of nature and culture, extends the pool of university beneficiaries and investigators, and empowers the human persons who are understood to root it all. The changes intensify universalization and the university’s rate of worldwide growth. For the university’s knowledge and “knowers,” and for the pedagogy that joins them together, the implications are many. The emerging societal context intensifies longstanding processes of cultural rationalization and ontological elaboration, yielding great expansions in what can and should be known, and in who can and should know. These changes in turn alter the menu of approved techniques for joining knowledge and knower as one. The “knowledge society” that results is distinguished by the extraordinary degree to which the university is linked to society. But it is also distinguished by the degree to which society is organized around the university’s abstracted and universalized understandings of the world and its degree-certified graduates.

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Keynes, legacies, and inquiry

As President Nixon once observed, “we are all Keynesians.” And we do indeed live in a macroeconomic world, essentially, as defined and elucidated by Keynes. But Keynes himself is underrepresented in both political science and in mainstream economics. This is a costly intellectual error. Keynes’ prodigious writings, as well as his actions, offer a treasure trove of inspiration, analysis, and insight. This article considers four themes in Keynes’ oeuvre that are especially worthy of revisiting: the importance of economic inequality, the potentially fragile underpinnings of international economic order, the inherent dysfunctions of the international monetary economy, and, perhaps most important, Keynes’ philosophy and its relationship to economic inquiry.

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Theorizing the institution: foundations,duality, and data

Although a central construct for sociologists, the concept of institution continues to elude clear and full specification. One reason for this lack of clarity is that about 50 years ago empirical researchers in the field of sociology turned their gaze downward, away from macro-sociological constructs in order to focus their attention on middle-range empirical projects. It took almost 20 years for the concept of the institution to work its back onto the empirical research agenda of mainstream sociologists. The new institutional project in organizational sociology led the way. Since then, scholars in this tradition have achieved a great deal but there is still much more to accomplish. Here, future directions for research are considered by reviewing how the concept of the institution has come to be treated by mainstream philosophers, sociologists of science and technology studies, and social network theorists.

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