John Torpey | Graduate Center of the City University of New York (original) (raw)

Papers by John Torpey

Modern Italy, Mar 23, 2022

The paper explores the tale of two 'epicentres’ – metropolitan New York and Lombardy – and se... more The paper explores the tale of two 'epicentres’ – metropolitan New York and Lombardy – and seeks to depict the socio-demographic patterns that characterise the worst cases of infection, hospitalisation, and death during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. By drawing upon secondary data concerning sub-territorial units within the two regions – ZIP-code level and counties in New York and municipalities in Italy – the paper compares the characteristics of the two areas in an effort to understand both how they became the original major epicentres and how their experiences of the pandemic differed. We suspected initially that the pandemic in Lombardy was a function of a complex constellation of variables, such as the age of the population, the unexpected emergence of the virus, and features of the local health system. In New York, the pattern seemed to fit a more familiar dynamic, the kind one would expect from the course that most pandemics take: the poor suffer the worst. The paper tries to extend the understanding of the complex and not univocal mix of social variables that can facilitate the spread of a pandemic and make its effects extreme.

Harvard University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2013

Princeton University Press eBooks, 2001

Theory and Society, Mar 24, 2013

The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a pe... more The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a period in the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major religious and philosophical figures and ideas throughout Eurasia, has gained an established position in a number of fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of religion. We explore whether the notion of an "axial age" has historical and intellectual cogency, or whether the authors who use the label of a more free-floating "axiality" to connote varied "breakthroughs" in human experience may have a more compelling case. Throughout, we draw attention to ways in which uses of the axial age concept in contemporary social science vary in these and other respects. In the conclusion, we reflect on the value of the concept and its current uses and their utility in making sense of human experience.

Sociologia, 2021

This paper addresses how the tech elite has benefited financially from the Coronavirus crisis, as... more This paper addresses how the tech elite has benefited financially from the Coronavirus crisis, as well as how they have sought to give back some of their gains in order to help the broader population. We have gathered data on the stock prices, corporate revenues, and profits of the Big Tech firms and on the incomes and wealth of the tech elite, and we compare these winnings with their philanthropic giving during the pandemic year of 2020. We note that tax policies undergird both the explosion of tech profits and the growth of philanthropic giving in response to the crisis. We find that the winners among the tech elite have benefited dramatically from the pandemic without necessarily donating large amounts of money relative to their wealth. We argue that tax reforms are necessary to ensure that more of the social product comes under the democratic control of the public treasury.

The American Historical Review, 1998

... The alternative to criminology or psychology is not a general theory of society. ... On the c... more ... The alternative to criminology or psychology is not a general theory of society. ... On the contrary: the concentration camp demolished the central concepts of civilization, the ideals of reason, progress, freedom, and understanding. ...

... to be in a state of war were required to have a passport giving a proper ... BIRTH OF THE MOD... more ... to be in a state of war were required to have a passport giving a proper ... BIRTH OF THE MODERN PASSPORT SYSTEM 263 tation in the poorly paid and worse-fed infantry of ... on December 15, 1915, re-quiring all persons leaving the United States for a foreign country to have a ...

Documenting Individual Identity, 2002

The British Journal of Sociology, 2011

Hannah Arendt's hostility to the social sciences is a recurrent theme in her writing. In this boo... more Hannah Arendt's hostility to the social sciences is a recurrent theme in her writing. In this book, Peter Baehr examines and evaluates her main objections, with a particular focus on the sociology of the 1950s. Along the way, he addresses many other issues, including the adequacy of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism, the foundations of her political theory and how we might draw on her work to comprehend the novel political developments of our own time, especially the rise of militant Jihadism. As Baehr makes clear, Arendt's criticisms of sociology are inseparable from her theory of totalitarianism. That theory remains enormously influential, if contentious, among social and political scientists. Its defining characteristic, according to Baehr, is Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was a unique political constellation, an 'unprecedented event', that defied comprehension within our existing conceptions of political and social forms. The crimes committed under the aegis of totalitarian rule similarly exceeded our understanding, and fundamentally altered our grasp of what 'crime' and 'criminality' could mean. Consistent with this theory, Arendt offered three main criticisms of the social sciences. First, she argued that the commitment to value-neutrality blinded social scientists to the radical evils of totalitarianism, particularly when they attempted to address the horrors of concentration camps. The attempt by sociologists and psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s, to examine the Nazi camps through the same impartial lens that they brought to other areas of social life both falsified the reality and produced disturbing resonances with the Nazis' use of the camps as 'human laboratories'. Second, Arendt objected to the various forms of functionalism that she believed pervaded sociology, and which she traced to Marxism. Arendt understood functionalism very broadly, as the refusal to treat phenomena on their own terms, but only in terms of their role within some general underlying schema, remote from the world of appearances. Apart from what she perceived to be their intellectual slovenliness, Arendt saw dangerous parallels between such habits of thinking and the toxic ideologies that pervaded totalitarian rule. Third, Arendt was allergic to what she saw as the tendency of sociologists to attempt to subsume every phenomenon under some general description, without proper reflection on the relevant historical and substantive differences. The outstanding example was the failure of social and political scientists to grasp the unprecedented character of totalitarian regimes, seeing them merely as augmentations of, or variations on, earlier forms of political tyranny, or as 'political religions'.

The American Historical Review, 1995

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur... more Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1994 by Oxford ...

Contemporary Sociology, 1995

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Naming, categorizing, periodizing ... more List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Naming, categorizing, periodizing 2. Clarification of concepts 3. Demographics of production and reproduction 4. State strategies and kinship 5. Victimization, political reconstruction, and kinship transformations in East Berlin: generation I 6. Sentimentalization, fear, and alternate domestic form in East Berlin: generation II 7. Hausfrauenehe and kinship restoration in West Berlin: generation I 8. Politicized kinship in West Berlin: generation II 9. Marriage, family, nation Postscript Notes References Index.

PLOS ONE

The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economi... more The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic view of the world, b) whether they have a “mission” for the future, and c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic endeavors. Automated “bag-of-words” text and sentiment analyses reveal that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently promise to “make the world a better place,” but they do not differ from other extrem...

The Art and Science of Sociology, 2016

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur. © De Boeck Supérieur. Tous droits r... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur. © De Boeck Supérieur. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

The American Historical Review, 2011