Alan Sica

The tragedy of enlightenment : an essay on the Frankfurt School

Preface List of abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Horkheimers critical theory 3. The critique of ideology 4. The dialectic of enlightenment 5. Technological rationality 6. Language and politics 7. Critique of critical theory 8. Conclusion Notes Index.

Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory.

Subjects and agents structure and actio reasons and interests ideology and power tradition and revolution.

Rationalization and culture

Current uses of Webers rationalization theme “Rationalization” is a sturdy device for appraising Webers primary achievements. It is superior to other possible choices (charisma, value-freedom, ideal-types, status groups, bureaucratization), because Webers best working years were spent exploring it. In addition, this key set of linked processes, unlike other phenomena he studied in detail, still seems to be enlarging its range of meaning in contemporary societies rather than becoming a part of inessential history. Paradoxically, rationalization might also be viewed as the simplest to understand of all Webers principal innovations to social and economic thought. His discovery, if it can be so called, held that modern societies are forever striving to order what in its “natural” state is less ordered or even randomly occurring. Where people once noisily milled about, now they are put in rows or ranks of quiet obedience; where fiscal accounting was done from memory and rough approximation, now it is taken to the hundredth of one percentage point, or beyond; where music was the work of a single minstrel inventing melodies and lyrics as he strolled, now it requires an orchestra that plays perfectly in unison from a printed score, willful deviation from which is a cardinal sin. Weber realized that the organization of thought and action into regimented forms had virtually replaced religion as the unquestioned, motivating creed across much of “advanced civilization.” And while he recognized in these developments admirable achievements, particularly in the production of material goods, he saw as well those seedbeds of pathology that affected individuals as much as the societies in which they struggled, vainly he thought, to maintain their individuality and freedom.

What is social theory? : the philosophical debates

List of Contributors. 1. Philosophya s Tutelage of Social Theory: A Parody of Profundity? Alan Sica (Pennsylvania State University). 2. Mapping Postmodern Theory: Robert J. Antonio (University of Kansas). 3. A Thesaurus of Experience: Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology and Social Theory: Mary F. Rogers (University of West Florida). 4. A Social Epistemology of the Structure--Agency Craze: From Content to Context: Steve Fuller (University of Durham). 5. Making Normative Soup with Non--normative Bones: Stephen Turner (University of South Florida). 6. Criteria for a Theory of Knowledge: Jennifer Croissant (University of Arizona). 7. Examples, Submerged Statements and the Neglected Application of Philosophy to Social Theory: Stanley Lieberson (Harvard University). 8. Loosening the Chains of Philosophical Reductionism: Steven Rytina (McGill University). 9. Social Order and Emergent Rationality: Michael Macy (Cornell University). 10. Theoretical Models: Sociologya s Missing Links: John Skvoretz (University of South Carolina). 11. Sociological Models: Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia). 12. Culture and Social Structure: Peter Blau (University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill). Name Index. Subject Index.

Why "Unobservables" Cannot Save General Theory: A Reply to Mahoney

These mechanisms are empirically underspecified, exist outside specific spatial and temporal boundaries, and cannot be directly observed . . . they are original movers or “ultimate causes” . . . For example, instrumental rationality — the causal mechanism of rational choice theory — is an unobservable property devoid of precise empirical content and specific time/place referents . . . The positing of omnitemporal and unobserved mechanisms that serve as primitive causes has been discussed primarily in the natural sciences [In the penultimate version of the article, Mahoney’s supporting citations included the following in note 2: “A lesson from the natural sciences is that one should not evaluate general theories based on the empirical plausibility of their causal mechanisms” (Mahoney 2004a).], but the same practice applies to the social sciences. Taken together, a causal agent and a causal mechanism represent the “hard core” of a general theory, or that part of the theory that is shared by all scholars who use it. This hard core is not usually directly tested. . . . a general theory is not itself a testable hypothesis. (Mahoney 2004b:459–60)

Ink on Paper

Perhaps everyone by now knows that ‘‘podification’’ is the most efficient and effective way to fasten the wandering undergraduate mind to articles in certain ASA journals. For those few who may not, this is the newly created drill: the editor contacts the lucky author(s) whose article is to be featured on the journal’s website, perhaps with an eye toward what might most forcefully speak to a broader audience; they jointly or separately ‘‘Skype’’ a short pretend-interview, explaining how or why the article was written, embellishing it perhaps with some human dimension (‘‘We hiked across Mount Olympus to verify the data, tromping deadly vipers and armed rebels’’), enchanting music is added through the helpful efforts of Sage Publications, all so that students can then enjoy an article’s ‘‘take-home message’’ without having to read it or even to lay eyes on the journal itself if they so choose. Said students may, of course, pursue the actual featured article, but nobody has any data yet showing that they do or will, nor that—heaven forefend!—they might purchase the article or the journal. This general modus operandi, I have been assured, is the likely future of scholarly publishing. In fact, authors have quickly begun queuing up to add their skype-moments to the rapidly enlarging file, since it approximates a YouTube experience or a trenchant interview on National Public Radio—another line on the vita. Any scheme which succeeds in dragging young minds from their electronic gear to scholarly sociology must be congratulated and appreciated, it goes without saying. The international fight now being waged between ‘‘conventional’’ teaching and ‘‘social media’’ is nearly lost before begun, for many reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that speedy phonal interchange is apparently great fun in a way that annotating scholarly printed articles will never be. The most pressing issue for ASA and other scholarly associations, whose collective primary function is to sponsor journals highlighting their best work, turns around the question of continuing the money flow of old, a puzzle that affects so much of the information industry nowadays. When a famous European publisher was roundly pilloried in the 1990s because it charged libraries

Parsons, Jr.Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Vol. 1: Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies.Jeffrey C. Alexander

24,000 per year for a single hyper-specialized journal subscription, one suspected then that such a business model could not long endure, even in the best of times. One wonders if that particular journal any longer exists. Yet unbelievably enough, the director of Harvard’s libraries reports that the Dutch publisher, Elsevier, still loots library budgets for

Social Construction as Fantasy: Reconsidering Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality after 50 Years

39,082 if they subscribe to Tetrahedron (a chemistry journal appearing every week and consuming 10,000 pages per year), while Wiley charges

Book as Totem: THE “Green Bible” One More Time

27,465 for one year of The Journal of Comparative Neurology, a 5000page biweekly. Elsevier netted

The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences

1.1 billion from its publishing wing in 2009 while worldwide library budgets were slashed. (Robert Darnton, ‘‘The Library: Three Jeremiads,’’ New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, p. 24.) Conscientious librarians constantly consult computational sources that tell them not only how often a given journal is summoned up electronically by library patrons, but how often a particular article is ‘‘read.’’ (One uses ‘‘read’’ here in the same way that one uses ‘‘sleep with’’ as a euphemism for sexual congress, for if one ‘‘reads’’ an article on one’s ‘‘smartphone ,’’ then what one does with a printed version of From Max Weber no longer shares that definition.) Said librarians, of course, with decades of budget-cutting experience behind them, delete journals whose ‘‘cost per viewed article’’ is reckoned as too high—a perfect democratization of knowledge warily foreseen in the 1920s by Karl Mannheim and others. Because ‘‘everything is free’’ online (The Wall Street Journal excepted), and with library collection decisions being made ‘‘automatically’’ by freshpersons and sophomores via their usage ‘‘votes,’’ the dreaded question facing scholarly publishers is how to bring in enough revenue to American Sociological Association 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0094306110396852 http://cs.sagepub.com