Suchergebnisse

chapter 1 Empowering the Self: Romanticism, the French Revolution, and the Rise of Sociological Hermeneutics -- chapter 2 Reforming American Democracy: Socialism, Progressivism, and Pragmatic Reconstruction -- chapter 3 Envisioning Pragmatist Sociology: Philosophical Sources, Methodological Principles, and Political Underpinnings of Social Interactionism -- chapter 4 Challenging Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School, Communicative Action, and the Pragmatist Revival -- chapter 5 Reading Text Pragmatically: Modernity, Postmodernism, and Pragmatist Inquiry -- chapter 6 Signing in the Flesh: Pragmatist Hermeneutics, Embodied Sociology, and Biocritique -- chapter 7 Reframing the Law: Legal Pragmatism, Juridical Moralism, and the Embodied Democratic Process -- chapter 8 Cultivating Democratic Demeanor: Liberalism, Affect Control, and Emotionally Intelligent Democracy -- chapter 9 Becoming a Public Intellectual: Advocacy, National Sociology, and Paradigm Pluralism.

This volume examines the roots of pragmatist imagination and traces the influence of American pragmatism in diverse areas of politics, law, sociology, political science, and transitional studies.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Continuity and Change in Russian Culture -- 1 Historical Culture -- 2 Intellectual Culture -- 3 Psychological Culture -- 4 Religious Culture -- 5 Everyday Culture -- 6 Moral Culture -- 7 Popular Culture -- 8 Literary Culture -- 9 Artistic Culture -- 10 Labor Culture -- 11 Civic Culture -- Conclusion: Toward a Post-Soviet Society -- Afterword -- About the Book and Editor -- About the Contributors -- Index

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life.

This study is based on the premise that Soviet civilization represented a concerted effort to harness emotions to an ideological cause, to reshape human affect according to the Communist Party's political agenda. Even though these efforts largely failed, they left deep scars on the Russian psyche. The emotional culture that evolved during some 75 years of Soviet rule continues to persist after the coercive institutions supporting it have broken down, and this inertia greatly complicates the transition to a democratic society in Russia.