Social inequality and art institutions

Our objective is to examine how several aspects of the class structure influence the prevalence of artistic institutions. The analysis is based on quantitative comparisons of the 125 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Most of the literature on the history of art concludes that artistic developments depend on the patronage of an elite—as noble patrons, as rich donors, or even as affluent bourgeois donors and audiences. Whereas these conclusions imply that class inequalities further the growth of the arts, our empirical findings indicate the opposite. Both lesser inequality and reductions of inequality in a metropolis increase a variety of artistic institutions, and these influences persist when other influences on these institutions are controlled.     

Correction to: Language and imagined Gesellschaft: Émile Durkheim’s civil-linguistic nationalism and the consequences of universal human ideals

Theory and Society - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09436-2     

Language,ethnicity, and the nation-state: on Max Weber’s conception of “imagined linguistic community”

Methodological nationalism in sociological theory is unfit for the current globalized era, and should be discarded. In light of this contention, the present article discusses Max Weber’s view of language as a way to relativize the frame of the national society. While a “linguistic turn” in sociology since the 1960s has assumed that the sharing of language—linguistic community—stands as an intersubjective foundation for understanding of meaning, Weber saw linguistic community as constructed. From Weber’s rationalist, subjectivist, individualist viewpoint, linguistic community was a result of social actions, not a prior entity as assumed by German metaphysical organicism (and historicist holism). Indeed, Central Europe in Weber’s era was a battlefield of linguistic nationalism(s); in contrast to the national societies of the Cold War period, national borders were unstable and ultimately the multiethnic empires of the region were dismantled after World War I into ethnolinguistic nation-states. Experience of this contemporary reality brought Weber to the core of the relationship between language and politics: A language community is an imaginary one demarcated not by language itself but by conscious opposition against outsiders, with monolingual contexts within borders created artificially by homogenizing policies like linguistic standardization and national education—the first modernity of language. In this way, Weber felt, language can be a means to domination.