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Introduction
(2017)
In the course of the last four decades, neo-liberalism has established itself as the dominant form of governing both national societies and global affairs. On the foundation of both Keynesian economic policies and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates among currencies, the world economy recovered. The classical sociological meaning and concept of citizenship as defined by T. H. Marshall and others after World War II rests on an analysis of the relationship between the capitalist economy and political democracy against the background of 'embedded liberalism'. Today, however, the enforcement of neo-liberal principles in order to turn modern democracies into 'market societies' impinges heavily on our idea of citizenship. The critical aspects of a flawed citizenship go directly to the heart of the idea of citizenship itself, as both democratic and social participation and a substantial conception of individual liberty all seem to be under attack from the global politico-economic regime.
Introduction
(2017)
The history of citizenship is one of social struggle against pre-modern authorities, nobles and aristocracies, of class struggles and the demands of social movements, and no less of cultural, ethnic, indigenous protests against the long history of colonialism. Paths to citizenship in Europe have taken very different directions, as Charles Tilly has shown with regard to England, the Netherlands, Russia or Prussia. Max Weber's dictum of defining the state by the accomplishment of the monopolisation of the legitimate means of violence is of utmost significance for the history of citizenship. There can be no doubt that the experience of World War II prepared the ground for the twentieth-century idea of citizenship. Consequently the Western concept of citizenship has been promoted as a role model in the march towards modernity as peaceful, democratic and universalistic. Finally, this chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
Introduction
(2017)
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the role of Frontex in the European Union as an agency to protect its external borders in the Mediterranean from irregular or 'illegal' migration. It discusses that Europe is an arrangement for European citizens only – and for some privileged non-citizens as in the Swiss case. The book explains the points to the possibility of a transnational membership regime that, however, bears certain antinomies that also point to unresolved problems. It offers an interesting view on the symbolic boundary between the citizen and the consumer, discussing this nexus from the perspective of citizenship studies, consumer culture and surveillance studies. Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis has most urgently brought to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion
New forms of communication and greater accessibility of Islamic texts on-line allow Muslims to shape their own religiosity, to become less dependent on established sources of authority, and thereby to become more aware of their own cultural diversity as a community. New practices of transnational Islam, and the growth of new concepts of Muslim identities currently emerging in the on-line community, are relatively free from immediate constraints. This article provides the result of a sociological analysis of three Internet sites in Sydney which deliver on-line fatwas. Even if cyberspace has allowed the Muslim world to be de-territorialised and provides a way for people to distance themselves from traditional communities if they wish, this research points out a variety of approaches, including one case which is aiming at re-localising an Australian Muslim system of values. This case highlights ways in which first generation Muslims are re-territorialising Shari'a in a specific western country.
Successful societies
(2020)
Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont’s Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision-makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) towards subjectively valued and morally legitimate forms of life. Late modern societies consist of a plurality of forms of life, each providing grounds for what Alasdair MacIntyre has called internal goods—valued and morally valuable practices. The status of such goods is examined, and distinctions are drawn between their manifest and latent, and transposable and situationally specific, characteristics. We integrate this refined idea of internal goods into a developed conception of habitus that is both morally informed and situationally embedded. The sociological approach of strong structuration theory (SST) is employed to demonstrate how this conception of habitus can guide the critique of decision-making that damages internal goods. We identify the most pervasive and invidious forms of damaging decision-making in contemporary societies as those involving excessive forms of instrumental reasoning. We argue that our developed conception of habitus, anchored in the collectively valued practices of specific worlds, can be a powerful focus for resistance. Accounts of scholarship in higher education and of the white working class in America illustrate the specificities of singular, particular, social worlds and illuminate critical challenges raised by the perspective we advocate.
Happiness as the ultimate goal of human endeavour is a thread running through theology and philosophy from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Such a claim raises immediately a host of critical objections and problems relating to the idea of cultural relativism. Can the theme of happiness be continuous and how would we know that? One way to overcome this dilemma is to identify ‘regimes of happiness’ – that is, clusters of ideas, practices and institutions that in one way or another connect to broad ideas of human wellbeing, flourishing and satisfaction or Eudaimonia to use the word that dominates Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Contreras- Vejar and Turner, 2018). Contemporary discussions of happiness almost invariably start with Aristotle (Nagel, 1972). However, the methodology here is to some extent borrowed from Michel Foucault to understand the ‘genealogy’ of happiness across different social and cultural formations. In the Western world one could identify an Aristotelian regime of happiness based on the idea of a sound polity and flourishing citizens. There is also a Christian regime of happiness around such figures as St. Augustine and within which there have been radical shifts most notably brought about by Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Regimes of happiness can overlap with each other and their borders are obviously fuzzy. Some regimes may last a long time in various forms. For example, Aristotle's treatment of happiness is one of the most cited versions of happiness across the West. The idea of happiness is, however, not confined to the West. For example, the Vietnamese Constitution that was devised by Ho Chi Minh, an admirer of America society, crafted the 1945 Constitution with three key words as its primary values – Independence–freedom–happiness (or niem hanh phuc). The 2013 version of the Constitution in Article 3 says, ‘The state guarantees […] that people enjoy what is abundant and free for a happy life with conditions for all- round development.’
One further notion behind our discussion of ‘regimes of happiness’ is that in principle we can detect important shifts in regimes that are associated both with specific networks of individual thinkers, and with institutional changes in the location of intellectuals in these networks. In this chapter I am especially interested in the transitions in thinking about happiness from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century.