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Social Theory and the Political Imaginary

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary PDF Author: Craig Browne
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003823165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary PDF Author: Craig Browne
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003823165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.

Modern Social Imaginaries

Modern Social Imaginaries PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822332930
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France PDF Author: Olivia Bloechl
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652289X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.

The Imaginary Institution of Society

The Imaginary Institution of Society PDF Author: Cornelius Castoriadis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262531559
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
This is one of the most original and important works of contemporaryEuropean thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society.

Imaginary Communities

Imaginary Communities PDF Author: Phillip Wegner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520926769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.

The Social and Political Body

The Social and Political Body PDF Author: Theodore R. Schatzki
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572301405
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. It explores the way that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our experience of our physical selves and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities and desires reinforce or challenge the status quo.

A Social Theory of the Nation-State

A Social Theory of the Nation-State PDF Author: Daniel Chernilo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134150121
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
A Social Theory of the Nation-State: the political forms of modernity beyond methodological nationalism, construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state. It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline. Its main aim is therefore to provide a renovated account of the nation-state’s historical development and recent global challenges via an analysis of the writings of key social theorists. This reconstruction of the history of the nation-state into three periods: classical (K. Marx, M. Weber, E. Durkheim) modernist (T. Parsons, R. Aron, R. Bendix, B. Moore) contemporary (M. Mann, E. Hobsbawm, U. Beck, M. Castells, N. Luhmann, J. Habermas) For each phase, it introduces social theory’s key views about the nation-state, its past, present and future. In so doing this book rejects methodological nationalism, the claim that the nation-state is the necessary representation of the modern society, because it misrepresents the nation-state’s own problematic trajectory in modernity. And methodological nationalism is also rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory’s intellectual canon. Instead, via a strong conception of society and a subtler notion of the nation-state, A Social Theory of the Nation-State tries to account for the ‘opacity of the nation-state in modernity’.

An Invitation to Social Theory

An Invitation to Social Theory PDF Author: David Inglis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566587X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act, and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals. Cutting through the often off-putting writing styles of social theorists, this book demonstrates exactly what social theory is about, clearly presenting the key themes of major social theory from the classical thinkers onwards. Areas covered include Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, feminism and structuration theories. Wide-ranging in scope and coverage, the book is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for students across the social sciences seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area.

Human Rights as Political Imaginary

Human Rights as Political Imaginary PDF Author: José Julián López
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319742744
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
In this book, López proposes the ‘political imaginary’ model as a tool to better understand what human rights are in practice, and what they might, or might not, be able to achieve. Human rights are conceptualised as assemblages of relatively stable, but not unchanging, historically situated, and socially embedded practices. Drawing on an emerging iconoclastic historiography of human rights, the author provides a sympathetic yet critical overview of the field of the sociology of human rights. The book addresses debates regarding sociology’s relationships to human rights, the strengths and limits of the notion of practice, human rights’ affinity to postnational citizenship and cosmopolitism, and human rights’ curious, yet fateful, entanglement with the law. Human Rights as Political Imaginary will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, international relations and criminology.

Social Imaginaries

Social Imaginaries PDF Author: Suzi Adams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Offering a field-defining survey of the topic, this is the first book to engage all the key figures in the social imaginaries field. It offers new perspectives on the productive tension between social imaginaries and the creative imagination, providing the first programmatic approach to the field as a whole.