Suchergebnisse

The new issue of "European Journal of Social Theory" (May 2023) features articles on "The Critical Theory of Society":* Patrick O'Mahony - "Introduction to special issue: The critical theory of society" (PDF)* Klaus Eder - "Pandora's box: The two sides of the public sphere" (PDF)* Piet Strydom - "The critical theory of society: From its Young-Hegelian core to its key concept of possibility" (Abstract)* Johann P. Arnason - "Lessons from Castoriadis: Downsizing critical theory and defusing the concept of society" (Abstract)* Hartmut Rosa & Peter Schulz - "Synthesis, Dynamis, Praxis: Critical Theory's ongoing search for a concept of society" (Abstract)* Regina Kreide - "Social critique and transformation: Revising Habermas's colonisation thesis" (PDF)* Tracey Skillington - "Thinking beyond the ecological present: Critical theory on the self-problematization of society and its transformation" (PDF)* Patrick O'Mahony - "Critical theory, Peirce and the theory of society" (PDF)* Daniel Chernilo - "On the relationships between critical theory and secularisation: The challenges of democratic fallibility and planetary survival" (Abstract)

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. "There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment."

The second-generation critical theory of Apel and Habermas was substantially built on the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Peirce. Along with critical theory generally, this variation requires a theory of society in which to embed its wide-ranging normative commitments. The article proposes re-orienting Habermas's decades-old theory of communicative action, which contained essential pointers to a critical theory of society that has never been adequately taken up in either the critical social sciences or critical theory proper. Revising Habermas, Peirce is drawn upon to crystallize the preferred critical semiotic realist theory of society. Asemiotic social ontology of the necessary range and scope is accordingly put forward that centres on inferential communal reasoning within the wider contexts of social perception and social actuality. The resulting approach, overcoming established dichotomies, is realist and processual as well as substantive, critical as well as hermeneutic and phenomenological, transcendent as well as immanent, realist as well as idealist, a priori as well as a posteriori, cognitive as well as normative, macro as well as micro, individual as well as collective and creative as well as habitual.

1. The problem of social change in the technological society -- 2. The individual in the great society -- 3. The containment of social change in industrial society -- 4. Political preface to Eros and civilization, 1966 -- 5. Beyond one-dimensional man -- 6. Cultural revolution -- 7. The historical fate of bourgeois democracy -- 8. Watergate : when law and morality stand in the way -- 9. A revolution in values -- 10. Letters -- 11. Afterword.