Charles C Lemert

The Race of Time: DuBois and Reconstruction

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:46:13 PDT

Who's In? Who's Out?

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:30:38 PST

A World of Differences

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:27:47 PST

Max Weber: A Man of Many Words

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:15:05 PST

Say Everything/ the Social Imperative

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:11:57 PST

Can the Worlds be Changed? On Ethics and the Multicultural Dream

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:08:32 PST

Multiculturalism is, among other things, an attitude toward values - hence, an ethic of a kind. The question it poses, however, is what kind of ethics are possible when it is assumed that the one world culture that stood behind classical social ethics no longer pertains. The issue binds most strictly when it is further assumed that social ethics entail political commitments to change the worlds. Hence, the practical consideration of whether or not plural worlds of incommensurable values allow for ethical strategies sufficient to change for the better - where ‘better’ is itself open to doubt.

On the Aging of Social Theory

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:04:30 PST

The Risk of Scholarship

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:59:06 PST

Liberating Critical Talk

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:54:57 PST

Searching for the Millennium

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:49:31 PST

Multiculturalism

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:47:38 PST

Review of French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic Transformations in the Post‐Sartrian Era by Niilo Kauppi

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:37:51 PST

Knowledge or Knowledges?

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:20:57 PST

Social Ethics?

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:14:15 PST

Most of the sciences of social behavior arose initially out of social ethics. The question asked is whether social ethics can revive itself as a central occupation of social thought. Such a revival faces the challenge of rethinking the normative foundations of late modern, global conditions which themselves are seen as inhospitable to the classic terms of philosophical and social ethic reflection. Though the privileged doubt it, the world is in fact inclining towards stark conditions of economic and natural instability, to say nothing of social discord—towards a triage, or latter-day Malthusian, state. These conditions require a social ethics able to sustain itself, in the absence of global cultural accords, against a world in which social ideals of the good are uncertain, if not impossible.

The Clothes Have No Emperor: Bourdieu on American Imperialism

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:10:33 PST

`The Clothes Have No Emperor' (a title borrowed from Paul Slansky's hilarious critique of the Reagan years in the USA) means to say that Bourdieu's criticism of American imperialism is an understandable slip of his brilliant visual sociology. He writes to those of a disposition to agree completely because they know the facts all the better. Bourdieu may well be the only person alive today who has so perfectly combined theoretical, empirical and political work. Why then has he allowed this critique to be published for all the world to see? Not, I think, because he is wrong, but because the entailments of his own visual sociology do not translate well from place to place. Bourdieu has taught us that the sociology of social space is the next necessary step for those who would become public intellectuals. The question is how to think and speak of the world as such. Bourdieu has given us the outlines of a beginning, but this little essay in question shows that there is more work yet to be done.

The Might Have Been and Could Be of Religion in Social Theory

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:04:33 PST

Religion may well be the most inscrutable surd of social theory, which began late in the 19th century dismissing the subject. Not even the renewal of interest in religion in the 1960s did much to make religion a respectable topic in social theory. It is possible that social theory’s troubles are, in part, due to its refusal to think about religion. Close examination of social theories of Greek religion suggest, for principal example, that religion is perfectly able to thrive alongside the profane provided both are founded on principles of finitude, which in turn may be said to be the foundational axiom of any socially organized religion. The value of a social theory of religion, thus defined, may be seen as a way out of the current controversies over the politics of redistribution and politics of recognition. Any coherent principles of social justice, whether economic or cultural, may only be possible if one begins with the idea that all human arrangements are, first and foremost, limited—that is to say: finite; hence, strictly speaking, religious. Durkheim got this only partly right.

Poetry and Public Life

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:00:30 PST

The public life is one entered more by the patience of the poetic ear than by the sharpness of the pen or the truth of the facts.

Can Critical Realism be Critical? Review Margaret Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:57:12 PST

After Mills: 1962 and Bad Dreams of Good Times

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:43:33 PST

Said & “Edward”: Dispossession and Overcoming Nostalgia

Charles C. Lemert — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:41:15 PST