Outhwaite 2023 book review Civilization Modernity and Critique Engaging Johann P. Arnason's Macro-social Theory (original) (raw)

This extremely valuable collection is based in part on a virtual conference organised by Ĺubomír Dunaj in Vienna in 2021 to mark Jóhann Á rnason's 80th birthday. The contributors have all engaged (in many cases very closely) with Á rnason's work over the past years, and they bring to the book a wide variety of critical perspectives and possible extensions of it. Á rnason is one of those theorists who turns up in many different contexts: critical theory, on which he wrote his first book (1971) and most recently in this journal (2023), and the theorisation of state socialism, under which he had lived in the 1960s (1993) 1 and of European integration (2019). The core of his work is a distinctive conception of human civilisations, involving the interplay of culture and power, which he has developed in a wide variety of historical and geographical frames and presented most fully in Á rnason (2003). Reworking Karl Jaspers' (1953) conception of the Achsenzeit or Axial Age around 500 BCE, in his recent work Á rnason has looked even further back and also engaged closely with anthropology, notably in a co-edited book focused on Eurasia. 2 As Axel Honneth notes in his preface to the present book (p. 2), Á rnason moved. .. away from the premises of the Habermasian theory according to which social development depends primarily upon world-historical rationalizing processes. .. [to]. .. an alternative conception: it is the specific world-interpretation of a given cultural and civilizational space that first decides what. .. counts as increasing rational knowledge-and thus what should be understood as 'rationalization' in the first place. In the first chapter following Dunaj's Introduction, Suzi Adams, who has thoroughly explored Á rnason's project in her own work and in interviews with him, discusses his conception of the political in relation to Karel Kosík, Marcel Gauchet, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jan Patočka. (This list of names gives an idea of Á rnason's typically wide range of reference.) JiřiŠubrt, who had founded with Á rnason a programme in historical sociology at Charles University in Prague, contrasts historical sociology with social constructionism and thus implicitly raises a question which runs through the book as a whole: should comparative and historical sociology be seen, as it standardly is, as a sub-variant of