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Contents -- An Invitation to Critical Sociology -- What Is Critical Sociology Today? -- On Conceptual Oppositions and Tensions -- Artistic Versus Scientific -- Idiographic Versus Nomothetic -- Normative Versus Analytical -- Hermeneutical Versus Structuralist -- Outlining Foundational Principles -- Critical Sociology's Three Themes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Part I: Rethinking Society -- Political Friendship and the Social Bond -- Introduction -- Political Friendship and the Stranger -- Friendship, Strangership, and the Social -- Strangers and Inequality -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Interaction, Indifference, Injustice: Elements of a Normative Theory of Urban Solidarity -- Introduction -- Differentiation and Indifference -- Conceptual Contributions -- Rethinking Recognition: Sociology at the Limits of Political Philosophy -- Micro-Foundations: Anonymity, Mutual Indifference, and the Urban Interaction Order -- Asymmetrical Recognition: From Mutual to Non-mutual Indifference -- Soft Solidarity and Minimal Mutual Recognition -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Towards a Sociological Account of Political Agon: (Re)considering the Social Dimensions of Agonal Democracy -- Introduction: Antagonistic and Agonal Accounts of Democracy -- Contingent Ontologies -- A 'Purely Political' Account of Agonal Democracy -- Rethinking the Social: The Value of Classical Perspectives -- Between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft -- On Conflict, Strangers, and Strangership -- Sociation and Political Agon-An Alternative View -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Part II: Configuring Power -- The Business Cycle and Capitalist Social Regulation: The Origins of Economic Government -- Introduction -- Performativity and Critique -- Representing Economic Fluctuations -- The Life of the Working Population in the Age of Depressions

Introduction : Western social theory and the ethnological imagination -- On civilized savagery : Rousseau and the birth of the ethnological imagination -- Disenchanting the commodity : Marx and the defetishization of capitalism -- The view from the magical garden : Weber's comparative sociology of the modern ethos -- In the shadow of the other : Durkheim's anthropological sociology -- Mythologizing the modern West : Lévi-Strauss's view from afar -- An ethnology by other means : Foucault's critique from the outside -- Conclusion : the ethnological imagination then and now

Cet article explore les sources et conséquences d'une tension constitutive du discours humanitaire, soit celle entre la reconnaissance d'un égalitarisme socioculturel (qui ressort d'un cosmopolisme critique) et l'attachement à un universalisme moral individuel axé sur la personne souffrante (qui provient d'un libéralisme humaniste). Nous commençons par analyser les origines ethnocentriques du projet humanitaire, qui rendait l'appel à la charité et à la sympathie compatible avec une hiérarchisation des peuples à bases raciales ou ethnoculturelles. La seconde partie de l'article étudie un mécanisme-clé mais sous-estimé de l'humanitarisme, soit son régime de sentimentalisme visuel à travers lequel la personne souffrante est représentée comme victime méritant d'être sauvée à condition que son image évoque la pitié ou la sympathie dans la sphère publique. Enfin, nous expliquons comment le régime visuel de l'humanitaire accentue le paradoxe entre l'individualisme moral sentimental de l'humanitarisme libéral et le projet de justice mondiale prisé par le cosmopolitisme critique.

This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accomplishments and limitations of cultural sociology in all these areas, the paper indicates ways to strengthen it by setting it in conversation with other and more explicitly critical currents of thought.

Constructs a theory of the practice of preventative foresight that advocates principles of responsibility for the future. It is argued that a shift in the sociopolitical & cultural climate facilitates increased farsightedness in world affairs to create a culture of prevention. Flawed conceptions of the future's lack of predictability & tendencies to focus on the short term can be overcome by an enhanced public capacity to produce, disseminate, & receive early warnings combined with a sense of ethical responsibility toward them. Decisionmakers & the citizenry's critical judgment of farsightedness are refined by "the precautionary principle" & a vision of global justice. L. Collins Leigh