Beyond a socio-centric concept of culture: Johann Arnason's macro- phenomenology and critique of sociological solipsism (original) (raw)
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Civilization, Modernity, and Critique Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory
Routledge, 2023
Civilization, Modernity, and Critique provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge engagement with the work of one of the most foundational figures in civilizational analysis: Johann P. Árnason. In order to do justice to Árnason's seminal and wide-ranging contributions to sociology, social theory and history, it brings together distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts. Through a critical, interdisciplinary dialogue, it offers an enrichment and expansion of the methodological, theoretical, and applicative scope of civilizational analysis, by addressing some of the most complex and pressing problems of contemporary global society. A unique and timely contribution to the ongoing task of advancing the project of a critical theory of society, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in historical sociology, critical theory and civilizational analysis.
2023
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
On Johann Arnason and the Religio-Political Nexus: Some Preliminary Reflections
This essay focuses on Arnason's most recent work, and reconstructs his developing account of the religio-political nexus. Arnason's elaboration of the religio-political nexus aims to extend 'the civilizational dimension' beyond the Axial Age to archaic civilizations. He situates the religio-political nexus within the Durkheimian-Maussian current of civilizational thought, and fortifies it through engagement with debates in historical anthropology (Gauchet, Clastres, Godelier) and Castoriadis's notion of power and religion. The second part of the essay discusses Arnason's articulation of the sacred, and argues that consideration of Ricoeur's work on the 'symbolic function', in dialogue with Castoriadis and Arnason, would enrich our understanding of the interplay between the imaginary, symbolic, and the sacred.
Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue
The dialogue focuses on the sources, contexts, and configuration of Johann P. Arnason’s intellectual trajectory. It is broadly framed around the interplay of philosophy, sociology, and history in his thought. Its scope is wide ranging, spanning critical and normative theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and contemporary and classical sociology. It explores the importance of Castoriadis, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka for Arnason’s understanding of the human condition from a comparative civilizational perspective; his engagement with Habermas and Eisenstadt for the development of his hermeneutic of modernity and multiple modernities; his ongoing, albeit subterranean, dialogue with Charles Taylor; and concludes with a discussion of his recent focus on the religio-political nexus.
Well before it became autonomous, which made possible contemporary value pluralism and multiculturalism, neo-classical sociologists had been aware of the ascendancy of culture. For instance, Parsons registered the process of 'cultural revolution' through which the cultural system was being differentiated from the social, political and economic systems; and Habermas saw a growing concern with 'motivation and meaning' in 'postmodern societies' taking the place of the older concern with 'value'. The increase in the significance, awareness and discursive availability of culture anticipated by these and other authors took, at least from a neo-classical sociological point of view, a rather unexpected turn. It culminated in the cultural heterogenization of the social that favoured such new developments as postmodernism and cultural studies and, by the same token, threatened sociology with obsolescence and placed sociologists on the defensive. 3
Book Review: Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas
Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2005
Inglis and Hughson explore the sociology of culture by providing an extensive survey of late 19thand 20th-century perspectives on culture and society. Their goal in this broad overview is to establish a relationship between culture and society and show how sociology, as a discipline, is equipped to undertake a rigorous analysis of both. Although recognizing the work that other disciplines have done in the study of culture, the authors privilege a sociological approach and champion a positivistic orientation. Their rationale is that much of the work of disciplines outside of sociology is too theoretical and without the benefits of empirical data. For them, the sociology of culture aims at particular discernments and resists universal generalizations. At the same time, however, it avails itself of historical insights from sociology, but only insofar as those insights are still relevant and, thus, useful for the contemporary scene. The book spans the intellectual distance from Marx to Bourdieu, through critical theory with Barthes, Saussure, and Raymond Williams in supporting roles. Marx is invoked to reassert the notion that culture is largely determined by socioeconomic conditions. By contrast, Bourdieu’s perspective is employed to address the interplay between culture and society, an interplay that cannot be reduced to material factors if only because such factors operate on a logic of their own. The rest of the authors cited are recognized as having made less, but significant, contributions to the study of culture, and, as such, they ought to be taken into account. In a very real sense, the book resembles a history of sociology, a history predicated on the Hegelian notion of progress. Accordingly, the authors postulate that Bourdieu’s thinking represents a more advanced and sophisticated conception of culture than Marx’s. The book does not offer an explicit statement on the relationship between culture and society despite the authors’plea that this relationship is a central concern for sociology. In place of a definitive statement, the book resorts to the work of numerous scholars who have suggested that such a relationship does exist. The authors, however, endorse only those views that use empirical data to study the relationships between social structure and social action and cultural and social factors. These restrictions are seemingly aimed at working out a sociological canon for cultural study. The authors make an exception to this rule by including classical sociologists in this canon. According to the authors, early sociologists focused primarily on society and left culture, at best, implied. Subsequent thinkers, such as cultural theorists, recognized the importance of paying attention to both. Despite the shortsightedness of early sociologists, their work is forgiven on account of its early, and as such, unsophisticated nature. Their inclusion into the canon allows them to continue exerting influence on modern, sociological developments.