Hans Joas

The Axial Age and Its Consequences

The first classics in human history--the early works of literature, philosophy, and theology to which we have returned throughout the ages--appeared in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical texts of the Hebrew scriptures, the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing, the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha--all of these works came down to us from the compressed period of history that Karl Jaspers memorably named the Axial Age. In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Robert Bellah and Hans Joas make the bold claim that intellectual sophistication itself was born worldwide during this critical time. Across Eurasia, a new self-reflective attitude toward human existence emerged, and with it an awakening to the concept of transcendence. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter through human thought and action. Bellah and Joas have assembled diverse scholars to guide us through this astonishing efflorescence of religious and philosophical creativity. As they explore the varieties of theorizing that arose during the period, they consider how these in turn led to utopian visions that brought with them the possibility of both societal reform and repression. The roots of our continuing discourse on religion, secularization, inequality, education, and the environment all lie in Axial Age developments. Understanding this transitional era, the authors contend, is not just an academic project but a humanistic endeavor.

Social action and human nature

This work applies itself to a critique of Marxian theory, which is especially sensitive to issues in the new social movements, ecological and feminist. The work of writers such as Gehlen and Plessner, and that of three historical anthropologists is discussed.

Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition

George Herbert Mead is widely recognized as one of the most brilliantly original American pragmatists. Although he had a profound influence on the development of social philosophy, he published no books in his lifetime. This makes the lectures collected in Mind, Self, and Society all the more remarkable, as they offer a rare synthesis of his ideas. This collection gets to the heart of Meads meditations on social psychology and social philosophy. Its penetrating, conversational tone transports the reader directly into Meads classroom as he teases out the genesis of the self and the nature of the mind. The book captures his wry humor and shrewd reasoning, showing a man comfortable quoting Aristotle alongside Alice in Wonderland. Included in this edition are an insightful foreword from leading Mead scholar Hans Joas, a revealing set of textual notes by Daniel R. Huebner that detail the texts origins, and a comprehensive bibliography of Meads other published writings. While Meads lectures inspired countless students, much of his brilliance has been lost to time. This definitive edition ensures that Meads ideas will carry on, inspiring a new generation of thinkers.

Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis's Political Philosophy

If it is not to lapse into academic sterility, sociological theory must continually debate the important public issues and approaches to social theory that arise outside its own boundaries. Otherwise, sociological theory is in danger of occupying itself with merely self-posed problems without hope of capturing the publics interest and risking a creeping loss of influence within the family of socialand human-scientific disciplines. The extraordinarily strong interest evinced in the writings of Jiirgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens in recent American discussions of sociological theory testifies to a recognition by sociologists of this need to expand their enquiries, but it is also clear that this need cannot be fully satisfied by its own intellectual means and resources. The publication of the English translation of a decade-old French book provides an occasion for calling attention to the work of a social theorist whose stature as a thinker is, without qualification, comparable to that of the aforementioned theorists, but whose work has heretofore gone almost unnoticed by sociologists. Certain of Cornelius Castoriadiss ideas have exercised a surreptitious influence through the writings of Alain Touraine, which, however, offer a wealth of empirical data at the expense of theoretical exactness. Cornelius Castoriadis is not a sociologist, and he is, moreover, quite skeptical about the sociological project insofar as it seeks to replace the old political philosophy with technical knowledge modeled on the positive sciences and oriented to immediate application.

War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present

Preface vii * Introduction 1 * War and Peace before Sociology: Social Theorizing on Violence from Thomas Hobbes to the Napoleonic Wars 16 * The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology 65 * The Classical Figures of Sociology and the Great Seminal Catastrophe of the Twentieth Century 116 * Sociology and Social Theory from the End of the First World War to the 1970s 156 * After Modernization Theory: Historical Sociology and the Bellicose Constitution of Western Modernity 194 * After the East-West Conflict: Democratization, State Collapse, and Empire Building 217 * Conclusion 252 Notes 257 Bibliography 277 Name Index 315 Subject Index 323

The Changing Role of the Social Sciences An Action-Theoretical Perspective

Almost a decade ago, the Gulbenkian Commission for the Restructuring of the Social Sciences published its report under the title ‘Open the Social Sciences’ (Wallerstein et al., 1996). The report – as is well known – combined a concise retrospective on the history of the social sciences with the preliminary formulation of a vision for their future. In its historical parts the report put great emphasis on the dynamics of the constitution and differentiation of scientific disciplines. The authors demonstrated a keen sense of the advantages and disadvantages of the formation of disciplines and kept equal distance from a Whiggish belief in constant advancement within the framework of disciplines and from a postmodern blurring of all distinctions between disciplines and between high and low culture, professional and lay knowledge. Disciplines – according to them – contribute to the ‘disciplining’ of intellectual work, the empirical control of knowledge and the socialization of new producers of knowledge. But one always has to bear in mind that a system of disciplines never mirrors ontological structures; though such a system is by no means arbitrary, there are realistic alternatives as every look at the variety of national scientific traditions can easily demonstrate. Thus the debate on disciplines, their genesis, boundaries and national variations can be called a prototypical case for the current controversy about functional differentiation in sociology; a critique of a specific type of functional differentiation does not express fundamental opposition to the principle of functional differentiation as such. The Gulbenkian Report ends with a list of four main ‘problematiques’ for contemporary social science, namely – in my words – a non-Cartesian understanding of human nature, a dissolution of the latent identification of the social with the processes within nation-states,

Book Review: Cultural Trauma? On the Most Recent Turn in Jeffrey Alexander’s Cultural Sociology

For many years now, Jeffrey Alexander has been – together with Richard Münch – the most fervent proponent of a neo-Parsonian approach in social theory. More than Münch, however, Alexander has distanced himself from Parsons’ own understanding of culture and attempted to integrate recent developments of cultural theory and the potential of the late-Durkheimian writings into his work. More than Parsons’ former co-author Edward Shils, Alexander is sensitive to the disruptive sides of charisma (or the sacred) and the openness of situations in which its repercussions are felt. Whereas Shmuel Eisenstadt, together with Robert Bellah perhaps the greatest student of Parsons, has devoted his life to a thorough revision of Parsonianism in the light of historical sociology, Alexander’s work focuses on the present and the recent past, on the conditions which enable the functioning of civil society and on the ‘social construction’ of moral universalism in the 20th century.1 The keyword for the most recent development of his work is ‘cultural trauma’. This concept, which is by no means plausible without further discussion, is not just seen as a useful addition to the conceptual arsenal of sociology, but as the core assumption of a far-reaching research programme. The theoretical development indicated by that term is not restricted to the writings of Alexander himself, but can be found in a circle of highly-respected sociologists whose spiritus rector Alexander undoubtedly is. The present volume Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity collects representative contributions from this circle. The list of contributors is very impressive. Next to Alexander we find Neil Smelser, who as a very young man co-authored Parsons’ work on economic sociology (Economy and Society). Like few others, Smelser retains and continues Parsons’ intense interest in the connection of sociological and psychoanalytic theorizing and is now one of the ‘elder statesmen’ of American sociology. Piotr Sztompka, the European Journal of Social Theory 8(3): 365–374

Bauman in Germany Modern Violence and the Problems of German Self-Understanding

This text of a lecture describes the importance of Zygmunt Baumans work for sociological theory and intellectual debate in Germany. The main points are: (1) the tension between the German Sonderweg thesis and Baumans analysis of the Holocaust; (2) the relationship between Baumans theory of modernity/postmodernity and the writings of Elias, Horkheimer/Adorno and Beck; (3) a critique of Baumans neglect of democratic alternatives within modernity, particularly American intellectual and political traditions; and (4) a discussion of Baumans emphasis on pre-societal sources of morality in his postmodern ethics and the pragmatist understanding of intersubjectivity and morality.

Der Kommunitarismus — eine neue „progressive Bewegung“?

Plotzlich sprechen alle vom Kommunitarismus. Wahrend der achtziger Jahre, als sich in den USA die moralphilosophische Debatte um Verdienste und Grenzen von John Rawls’ „Theorie der Gerechtigkeit“ entwickelte, interessierten sich in Deutschland nur wenige Fachleute der Sozialphilosophie und der Amerikakunde fur die immer subtiler werdenden Argumentationen der beteiligten amerikanischen Philosophen (vgl. Honneth 1991, Kersting 1992). Nach dem Ende der achtziger Jahre, als die amerikanische Debatte in ihrem moralphilosophischen Kern praktisch an ihr Ende gelangt war — und dies in der wunschenswertesten Weise, namlich durch beiderseitige Selbstrevision und eine sich abzeichnende Einigung auf eine Synthese —, begann man auch in Deutschland, diese Debatte unter groser offentlicher Aufmerksamkeit zu fuhren. Irritiert durch spezifisch deutsche Empfindlichkeiten gegenuber jeder „Gemeinschafts“-Rhetorik (vgl. Joas 1993), werden gegenwartig die Argumente der amerikanischen Kontrahenten hierzulande vielfaltig nachvollzogen oder auch erweitert.

Communitarianism, Pragmatism, Historicism

America has its own cultural traditions and achievements. It is the crucial mistake of many interpretations in the fields of intellectual history to reduce American philosophy or scholarly disciplines to mere continuations of European approaches. Whenever the classical philosophers of American pragmatism were not attacked by their German contemporaries as being the “typical product of a country in which the people are degraded to the status of slaves of materialism, of industry, i.e. of dollars” (Gutberiet [1908], p. 445), their thinking was simply traced back to European sources.