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1. Exhuming humanism -- 2. The phoenix of humanism -- 3. A humanistic conception of knowledge and its political implications -- 4. Beginning with ends : from technocratic to transformative knowledge -- 5. The poverty of moral philosophy and the strength of sociological 'ethics' -- 6. The responsibility for social hope -- 7. The value of a humanistic sociology.

"Examining an intramural conflict that erupted within the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge in the early 1980s, this book develops a theoretical analysis of disputes as they unfold within the academy. It shows how broad structural changes taking place within the English higher education system at the time reverberated through to local contexts, investigates the reception of theories originating in other countries and other disciplines upon English Studies in the United Kingdom, as well as demonstrating the significance of local institutional factors in structuring the form and content of the dispute. Capturing a key moment in the development of modern English Studies it reveals the social performance lying at the heart of public controversy and develops a new theory for analysing the workings and tribulations of intellectual life."--Publisher's website

AbstractThis article interrogates dominant definitions of "populism" found in the social sciences, focusing on the term's conceptual utility in understanding recent changes in Western polities. Though populism is typically treated as a deviant form of politics, this article finds that it in fact holds remarkable continuities with conventional politics, and indeed culture more generally. It argues that these more general cultural processes can be illuminated by cultural sociology, just as the more specific but still routine political processes can be illuminated by Civil Sphere Theory (CST). The article goes on to argue that when populism is understood as a formal mode of public signification, rather than a substantive ideology, the substance it signifies becomes crucial to determining its civility. It suggests that while populism can certainly have anti-civil effects, there is nothing inherent in it that precludes it from also acting to promote civil repair.

This article interrogates dominant definitions of "populism" found in the social sciences, focusing on the term's conceptual utility in understanding recent changes in Western polities. Though populism is typically treated as a deviant form of politics, this article finds that it in fact holds remarkable continuities with conventional politics, and indeed culture more generally. It argues that these more general cultural processes can be illuminated by cultural sociology, just as the more specific but still routine political processes can be illuminated by civil sphere theory (CST). The article goes on to argue that when populism is understood as a formal mode of public signification, rather than a substantive ideology, the substance it signifies becomes crucial to determining its civility. It suggests that while populism can certainly have anti-civil effects, there is nothing inherent in it that precludes it from also acting to promote civil repair.

Through analysis of the UK government's management of the Covid-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture's relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had real impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or 'social drama', it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action though simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally-charged events such as human death.

This article provides a case study of the relationship between performance and power in social movements. It reveals how movements are able to reiterate established cultures of resistance across time and space through performative means. It also shows how – given requisite stage settings and skilful actors – methods of performance allow movements to subvert established structures of domination to their political advantage. It does this through focussing on Steve Biko's role as a defence witness in an apartheid-era political trial of leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). It demonstrates how, within the courtroom setting, Biko and the defendants improvised upon various pre-established codes, scripts, and dramatic techniques, augmenting the likelihood that their performances would resonate successfully with their audiences. In addition, it shows how Biko and the defendants used social performance to subvert many of apartheid's established culture structures, enabling them not only to explicitly articulate the principles of BC philosophy, but also to implicitly embody and act them out.

This article provides a case study of the relationship between performance and power in social movements. It reveals how movements are able to reiterate established cultures of resistance across time and space through performative means. It also shows how – given requisite stage settings and skilful actors – methods of performance allow movements to subvert established structures of domination to their political advantage. It does this through focussing on Steve Biko's role as a defence witness in an apartheid-era political trial of leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). It demonstrates how, within the courtroom setting, Biko and the defendants improvised upon various pre-established codes, scripts, and dramatic techniques, augmenting the likelihood that their performances would resonate successfully with their audiences. In addition, it shows how Biko and the defendants used social performance to subvert many of apartheid's established culture structures, enabling them not only to explicitly articulate the principles of BC philosophy, but also to implicitly embody and act them out.

Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger's different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions.

This article makes both a more general and a more specific argument, and while the latter relies upon the former, the inverse does not apply. The more general argument proposes that empirical disciplines such as sociology are better suited to the production of ethical knowledge than more characteristically abstract and legalistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology. The more specific argument, which is made through a critique of Bauman's Levinasian articulation of ethics, proposes what it calls 'pragmatic humanism' as a viable alternative model for sociological ethics to follow. This model rejects the abstract notion of some innate and universally distributed moral impulse, and instead turns to acknowledgement of the precariousness of life as a strategic resource in the construction, rather than revelation, of ethical solidarity.