Suchergebnisse

This chapter concerns the roots and increasing diversification of cosmopolitan social thought and the research it inspires. It shows that cosmopolitan matters now constitute central topics for research, debate, and controversy across the social sciences. Having begun as a sense of non-national affiliation – declaring oneself to be a 'citizen of the world' rather than of any specific polity – it now encompasses a much wider range of issues. Cosmopolitanism today simultaneously refers to a scholarly field, a set of research agendas, a series of substantive phenomena, moral and ethical norms, ideals and practices, and ways of thinking, both socially and politically, as well as in more purely academic terms of analysis and research procedures. Running through all these is a common theme: the limits of nation-states and national frames of reference, and the need to think and act beyond these. This is a scholarly area directed towards developing non-Western-centric, post-universalistic, multi- and inter-disciplinary inquiry, rendering ideas of cosmopolitanism more open, flexible, and multiple, especially as regards becoming more cognisant of forms of difference and plurality in the world. The overarching intellectual tendency over time has been to cosmopolitanise cosmopolitanism itself. ; Peer reviewed

When the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought were the main consequences of the French Revolution, he is alleged to have replied that it was too early to tell. The same response may be given today as to what the eventual ramifications of Brexit will be. It will take many decades for these to play out, both for the UK, for the EU and the wider world. Yet consideration of some strands of Émile Durkheim's sociology - reading these either in the manner Durkheim intended, or somewhat against the grain - allow us to look forward in time and make some plausible predictions. This essay considers what the ideas of one of the most major classical sociologists, Émile Durkheim, can illuminate about both Brexit and the entity that the United Kingdom is leaving, the European Union. I will attempt to show that the phenomena which Durkheim pointed to in terms of the emergence of pan-European social integration - in other words, what he said about Europe as a single social and cultural entity - can be used to identify some elements of Brexit, which might otherwise not be as apparent or as precisely identifiable as they would be without a Durkheimian thematization of them.

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and other awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees.

Published ; Article ; It is clear that the European Union (EU) is currently in the worst crisis situation it has ever been in. The forms of social solidarity, inter-national cooperation, and trans-national structures and processes that many commentators have seen as the basis of 'cosmopolitan' Europe' are under severe strain. Decades of apparent cosmopolitization – of political bodies, economic networks, social connections and the patterns of everyday life – seem to be rapidly going into reverse, being pulled apart or self-destructing. If the last several decades could be understood as involving the increasing appearance and strength (albeit unevenly and in contested ways) of cosmopolitan features both within the EU as an entity and 'inside' its external borders, then today the tearing fabric of 'European' life seems to point in the opposite direction. This paper poses the question: how 'cosmopolitan' really was the EU before the current set of crises, and how have the latter undermined what cosmopolitan features there were? The argument proposed is that the EU was from the very beginning ambivalently cosmopolitan, for it was structured around a liberal economic, market-based cosmopolitanism, as well as a rights-based conception of citizenship and democracy, a kind of legal-political cosmopolitanism. Both forms of cosmopolitanism existed up until recently in a highly ambivalent relationship with each other. But as over time, and especially from the late 1970s, liberal-economic cosmopolitanism mutated into neo-liberal cosmopolitanism, then the tensions between the two cosmopolitanisms now stand out very starkly

It is clear that the European Union (EU) is currently in the worst crisis situation it has ever been in. The forms of social solidarity, inter-national cooperation, and trans-national structures and processes that many commentators have seen as the basis of 'cosmopolitan' Europe' are under severe strain. Dec-ades of apparent cosmopolitization - of political bodies, economic networks, social connections and the patterns of everyday life - seem to be rapidly going into reverse, being pulled apart or self-destructing. If the last several decades could be understood as involving the increasing appearance and strength (albeit unevenly and in contested ways) of cosmopolitan features both within the EU as an entity and 'inside' its external borders, then today the tearing fabric of 'European' life seems to point in the opposite direction. This paper poses the question: how 'cosmopolitan' really was the EU before the current set of crises, and how have the latter undermined what cosmopolitan features there were? The argument proposed is that the EU was from the very beginning ambivalently cosmopolitan, for it was structured around a liberal-economic, market-based cosmopolitanism, as well as a rights-based conception of citizenship and democ-racy, a kind of legal-political cosmopolitanism. Both forms of cosmopolitanism existed up until recently in a highly ambivalent relationship with each other. But as over time, and especially from the late 1970s, liber-al-economic cosmopolitanism mutated into neo-liberal cosmopolitanism, then the tensions between the two cosmopolitanisms now stand out very starkly, and have reached breaking point. The nature and con-sequences of this situation are diagnosed.

"In recent years, sociology in Britain -and in national contexts influenced by British sociology- has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of selfcriticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology's knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social "usefulness". A markedly more selfaware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today." (author's abstract)