Cet article propose de faire dialoguer Adorno et Bourdieu en explorant certains de leurs textes sur l’opinion personnelle, l’opinion publique et le sondage d’opinion. À partir de leurs réflexions respectives concernant ces phénomènes socialement interdépendants, il s’agit de mettre en relief ce qui rapproche et distingue ces deux penseurs. En examinant d’abord la question de l’intériorisation de la domination par les acteurs sociaux, puis la production sociale et médiatique d’opinions et d’habitus communs, et enfin la consolidation a-critique de ces (...) derniers occasionnée par certains présupposés propres aux sondages d’opinion, l’article analyse trois niveaux différents où opère la domination sociale. Malgré les différences entre ces deux penseurs, je soutiens qu’il existe entre eux une complémentarité critique, théorique et méthodologique, qui permet à la fois de prolonger, d’enrichir et de mettre à l’épreuve aussi bien le projet d’une théorie critique de la société que la sociologie engagée et critique. (shrink)

Calhoun’s critical sociology relies not only on engagements with Habermas, Bourdieu and Taylor, but also on the middle range empirical traditions of American sociology. Through a review of his recent work on cosmopolitanism and globalization, community and solidarity, and public spaces and sociology, I propose that his search to explain different ways in which solidarity is developed offers a robust sociological foundation for the development of the most appropriate intellectual formation, and institutional sequel, to the emancipatory project (...) that undergirds critical theory’s hope and commitment. At the same time, we all need to rethink how both critical theory and more empirical sociologies can help us recognize the issues and agencies most vital for the address of contemporary cultural, social and biophysical needs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses shortcomings in the way that philosophers and cultural critics have considered propaganda by offering a new genealogical account. Looking at figures such as Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Stanley, this article finds that their consideration of propaganda has not necessarily been wrong but has missed some of the most significant and important functions of propaganda. This text draws on archival and published materials from propagandists, most notably Edward Bernays, to elaborate a new governmentality of (...) propaganda and public relations. Through focusing on the concept of public opinion, I argue that propaganda is best thought of as an apparatus whose function it is to construct, modify, counter, and destroy relations of force within public opinion in order to produce the subjectivities and conduct that propagandists and their clients desire. (shrink)

We present a short introduction to, and the first English language translation of, Theodor W. Adorno's 1964 article, "Meinungsforschung und Öffentlichkeit." In this article, Adorno situates the misunderstanding of public opinion within a dialectic of elements of publicness itself: empirical publicness' dependence on a normative ideology of publicness, and modern publicness' tendency to undermine its own principles. He also locates it in the dual role of mass media as both fora for the expression of opinion and, as he calls (...) them, "organs of public opinion." The introduction provides a discussion of Adorno's reception in the American academy, arguing that contemporary sociological practice should be concerned with the problems Adorno raises. We suggest that Adorno's relegation to the fields of philosophy and aesthetics belies his relevance to empirical sociological research. (shrink)

Converse's seminal 1964 article explored three crucial limitations of public opinion as it is revealed in conventional polls: information levels, belief systems, and nonattitudes. These limitations are significant from the standpoint of democratic theory, but it is possible to design forms of public consultation and of social‐science research that will reveal what public opinion might be like if these limitations were somehow overcome. Deliberative Polling is an effort to explore the contours of such a counterfactual public (...) opinion—one that is more informed and engaged than is the mass public. Doing so requires going beyond “polling alone.”. (shrink)

This major work surveys the historical roots, theoretical foundations, and normative claims of 20th-century conceptualizations of public opinion. It reanalyzes leading traditions, such as those of Lippmann, Dewey, and Noelle-Neumann, and reinvents some unjustly ignored ones, such as Toennies, Harrisson, and Wilson. The book critically examines popular modern research strategies such as polling and the 'spiral of silence' model and looks at the role of mass media in the formation and expression of public opinion.

ABSTRACT Benjamin Page's thoughtful critique of my book, The Illusion of Public Opinion, strives to reassure readers that all is well—despite the book's extensive documentation of measurement‐error artifacts in numerous public opinion surveys. Page's own careful polling practices are not followed outside of elite academic survey centers. Moreover, even in such well‐run surveys, the respondents are often ignorant of the issues being probed. The fact that nonrandom reasons of some sort must be determining on‐the‐spot survey responses may allow (...) us to call the respondents “rational” in a loose sense. But the responses still don't represent actual opinions about the specific policy issues being probed—let alone well‐informed answers. Finally, while Page argues that measurement errors are most likely random, and should cancel out in the aggregate, the “miracle of aggregation” doesn't occur when the form, wording, and context of questions varies from survey to survey. And even when wording and context are held constant, the respondents' understanding of the same words can vary dramatically or subtly over time, due to new political events and their changing interpretation. (shrink)

To clarify what is at stake in the contemporary attacks against critical sociology, this article begins by distinguishing two types of critical sociology critiques: those that compare critical sociologies with non-critical ones, and those that arise from controversies inherent to critical sociology. Both approaches tend to adopt an overly simplistic view of sociology itself. To counter this, it seems useful to highlight the diversity of the definitions and justifications of critical sociology belonging to the (...) various critical models operating in critical sociology. The first part of this article therefore deals with definitory issues, the second with justificatory issues, and the third with the critical models. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A review of two of the strands of cultural studies that Mark Fenster contends are superior to Murray Edelman’s analysis of mass public opinion—Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and Bourdieu’s sociology—and a more general look at work in the field of cultural studies suggests that all of these alternatives suffer from severe theoretical and methodological limitations. Future studies of culture and politics need to pose questions similar to the ones that preoccupied Edelman, but they must move beyond the (...) political and interpretive biases that have dominated cultural studies (some of which Edelman shared), as well as the questionable view of “ideology” as a matter of elite domination of the masses, rather than as a mediating, constitutive force in the process of individual opinion formation. (shrink)

Theoretical approaches to public opinion are hard to find in the sociological literature, with the exception of the seminal work of Jürgen Habermas. One important alternative, although almost unknown in the English-speaking world, is offered in a few contributions by the systems theoretician Niklas Luhmann. Both critical theory and systems theory start from a historical analysis of the conditions that led to the rise of a public sphere and understand its function as the limitation and control of (...) the arbitrariness of power. Critical theory considers the public sphere as a social space where citizens can (or should) participate and discuss freely and without constraints. Thus, it legitimizes political power. Systems theory presents a completely different concept of the public sphere and conceives of it in terms of second-order observation. Through public opinion the modern political system observes itself and stimulates as well as limits its decision-making processes. This paper argues that both approaches share the idea that the political system, like every other social subsystem, must generate a system-specific uncertainty (i.e. specific conditions that it cannot control) in order to limit its own arbitrariness and to be able to develop its decision-making potential. Both approaches locate this uncertainty in the sphere of public opinion. But they radically differ in the way they conceptualize public opinion’s effects on modern politics. Such differences between critical theory and systems theory are illustrated by an analysis of recent political events. (shrink)

A special issue of_ New German Critique_ The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the "heroic" or high-bourgeois era to late (...) modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s _Aktualität_—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past. Contributors Daniel K. L. Chua, Lydia Goehr, Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Brian Kane, Max Paddison, Alexander Rehding, Fred Rush, Martin Scherzinger. (shrink)

The theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno both conceive culture as legitimating the inequalities of modern societies. But they postulate different mechanisms of legitimation. For Bourdieu, modern culture is a class culture, characterized by socially ranked symbolic differences among classes that make some seem superior to others. For Adorno, modern culture is a mass culture, characterized by a socially imposed symbolic unity that obscures class differences behind a facade of leveled democracy. In his later writings, however, (...) class='Hi'>Bourdieu’s theory converges with that of Adorno. He too begins to privilege the high culture of intellectuals over mass culture by employing the universal standard of autonomy from economic interests. But there remains one vital difference between these theories. Bourdieu grounds the origins of a critical, autonomous culture in specific social structures, while Adorno grounds it in technology. (shrink)

Commercial public opinion polling is an increasingly important element in practically all elections in democratic countries around the world. Poll results and pollsters are relatively new and autonomous voices in our human communities. Here I try to connect such polling directly to morality and democratic processes. Several arguments have been and might be used for and against banning such polling during elections, i.e., for and against effectively silencing these voices. I present the arguments on both sides of this issue, (...) and try to show that there are reasonable responses to all the arguments in favour of banning polls. Then I review some proposed Canadian legislation concerning banning polls and, alternatively, requiring disclosure of methodological features of polls. Finally, I offer a model set of disclosure standards for the publication of poll results during election campaigns. (shrink)

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked 'whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded (...) by the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it serves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim. (shrink)

This article seeks to address current debates comparing polls and opinion mining as empirically based figuration models of public opinion in the light of in-depth intellectual debates on the role and nature of public opinion that began after the French Revolution and the controversy over public opinion spurred by the invention of polls. Issues of historical quantification and re-conceptualisation of public opinion are addressed in four parts. The first summarises the history of the rise and fall (...) of the concept of public opinion. The second re-examines the key controversies in the debates on the theoretical, empirical and social implications and consequences of the invention of polling. The third part scrutinises the datafication of public opinion that started with polling industry and continues in the age of big data and data mining. The final section discusses the controversial potentials of opinion-mining technology and suggests ways in which social scientists could critically respond to the big data and opinion-mining challenges in order to reintegrate the ideas of publicness, the public and public sphere into public opinion research. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of pollster and sociological approaches to electoral research.The article shows that conducting electoral research in modern election campaigns is carried out equally by pollster (for purely political purposes) and sociological (for scientific and sociological purposes) technologies. It has been proven that optimal results can be achieved by combining pollster and sociological approaches to electoral research. It was determined that today the organization of an effective election campaign requires equally (...) sociologists-pollsters and sociologists-analysts, the result of whose work is respectively collected empirical data and an analytical product, scientific expertise.It has been demonstrated that pollster and sociological approaches to conducting electoral research differ not only in the concepts of public opinion and the styles of its research, but also in the subject field. The electorate as a subject of electoral research acquires different content for different approaches. The pollster approach is more likely to understand the electorate as a circle of voters who vote for one or another party or candidate for an elected position and, in fact, are supporters of a certain political force or personality, while representatives of the sociological approach mostly consider the electorate as a collection of all citizens who vested with the right to vote and who exercise or do not exercise it under specially created conditions. It is argued that the integration of the subject fields of electoral polling and electoral sociological research will allow more effective and productive use of analytical potential in the election campaign, since such an organization of patronage work will help not only to record the results of electoral research, but also to predict the trends of electoral choice, the flow of votes, the reactions of electoral groups to specific political events. The availability of systematic ideas about the types of voters and their personal profiles will help to meaningfully approach the understanding of the electorate. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the pragmatic social critique as one of the most influential patterns of contemporary social critique. It is focused on the evolution of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of the critique, which initially refused to play an overtly critical role and restricted itself to reconstructing the modalities of critique social actors recourse to in their everyday practices. In his most recent publication, however, Boltanski seems to return to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of sociology as a (...) class='Hi'>critical sociology. According to Boltanski, the critical vocation of sociology is supposed to answer the increasing critical deficit that social actors experience in the context of contemporary societies with their complex forms of domination.The aim of our study is to make this two-sided transformation comprehensible by putting into question the underlying methodological and political arguments. The pragmatic sociology seems methodologically more convincing but politically weaker than Bourdieu’s critical sociology. Moreover, it seems more legitimate but less efficient in its critical effects. How could this dilemma of social critique opposing requirements of legitimacy and requirements of efficiency be solved? (shrink)

Contextualist moral philosophers criticise hands-off liberal theories of justice for abstracting from the cultural context in which people make choices. Will Kymlicka and Joseph Carens, for example, demonstrate that these theories are disadvantageous to cultural minorities who want to pursue their own way of life. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's critique of moral reason radicalises contextualist moral philosophy by giving it a sociological turn. In Bourdieu's view it is not enough to provide marginalised groups or subgroups with equal (...) access to public institutions and specific cultural rights—in some cases this may in fact be detrimental. He contends that scientists, politicians and other intellectuals have a duty to take seriously the social presuppositions of free deliberate choice and public opinion and to support cultural minorities with instruments to liberate themselves from their often precarious situation. (shrink)

We naturally tend to think of our own opinions as akin to the coins we carry around in our pockets, transferable and yet inalienable. We may share or alter them, yet in form they remain fundamentally our own, sacrosanct as registers of our very sense of self. Hegel was aware of this relationship between opinion and subjectivity, and regarded such a bond as one of the great accomplishments of modernity itself. Yet for Hegel, excessive estimation of inwardness comes at a (...) dangerous price. Truth reducible to subjective and arbitrary will, to caprice and without philosophical reflection, sets, in his view, a corrosive standard for ethics, politics and thinking itself. This essay will excavate from Hegel's corpus the conceptual groundwork for a critical theory of opinion relevant for the twenty-first century. The overall aim is to offer a holistic reading of Hegel's critique of opinion by drawing on both his early and late writings, tracking its appearance as an initial critique of subjectivism but subsequently developed in his political philosophy. We begin with Hegel's polemics during the Jena years and unearth opinion as an index for self-certitude. Second, we proceed to a focused analysis of Elements of the Philosophy of Right, paying particular attention to what Hegel describes as the contradiction of public opinion. Thirdly, Hegel's epistemological critique of opinion will be synthesized with his political critique of public opinion by returning to the category of certainty, not as a certainty found in an individual opinion, but a certainty in one's own subjective standpoint, while employing elements from Adorno's critique of epistemology. We will conclude by examining the contradiction of public opinion specifically in accordance with the historical conditions of civil society and therewith begin to situate the socio-epistemological problem of opinion as historically specific to capitalist society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Political scientist James Fishkin has devised “deliberative polling” as a means to better informed, more autonomous, and more reflective participant opinion. After a deliberative poll, this improved form of public opinion can be disseminated to the general public and to policy makers so as to influence public opinion (as it is normally construed) and public policy. Close examination of the results of deliberative polling, however, suggests no evidence of a normatively desirable gain in informed, autonomous, (...) or considered opinion—as opposed to minor gains in participants' general political knowledge and in ideological constraint, which is likely attributable to the pre-packaged “expert” views set forth in the briefing materials provided to the participants. (shrink)

This Critical Reader provides a new perspective on the work of France's foremost social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by examining its philosophical import and promoting a fruitful dialogue between Bourdieu and philosophers in the English-speaking world. The contributors include leading philosophers who critically assess Bourdieu's philosophical theories and their significance from diverse philosophical perspectives to reveal which dimensions of his thought are the most useful for philosophy today. These discussions also raise important questions about the current institutional (...) limits of philosophy and how those limits may be overcome through a more robust alliance with the social sciences and the practical social world. The contributions cover Bourdieu's use of central figures in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition; his relationship to analytical philosophy and pragmatism through his concept of habitus; his position in twentieth-century continental philosophy; the political dimension of his work; the function and limits of his notion of "the field"; and the relation of his explanatory models to new directions in the philosophy of science. The book also discusses some of his most recent writing not yet translated into English, and it concludes with a chapter by Bourdieu in which he analyses the diverse structural problems and the transformations involved in importing intellectual ideas from one national field to another. The volume also offers a specially prepared comprehensive bibliography of Bourdieu's publications in French and English from 1958 to 1998. (shrink)

In the context of the Cold War, opinion polling as a method of observation stood for the shift from confrontation and clandestine preparations for a hot or cold civil war towards a competition between systems in the fields of political and cultural attractiveness and economic capabilities. Based on the cases of the West German polling institute Infratest and the East German Institute for Opinion Polling of the Socialist Unity Party, the article highlights the shifts in the external observation and internal (...) self-observation of socialist society with respect to the change in epistemological approaches, research topics, patterns of construction of societal structures and the confluence between political expectations, professional self-understandings and impact on policy-making processes. (shrink)

This book offers an unprecedented account of recent and future developments in the sociology of intellectuals. It presents a critical exchange between two leading contemporary social theorists, Patrick Baert and Simon Susen, advancing debates at the cutting edge of scholarship on the changing role of intellectuals in the increasingly interconnected societies of the twenty-first century. The discussion centres on Baert's most recent contribution to this field of inquiry, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (...) (2015), demonstrating that it has opened up hitherto barely explored avenues for the sociological study of intellectuals. The authors also provide an overview of various alternative approaches that are available for understanding the sociology of intellectuals, such as those of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins and Neil Gross. In doing so, they grapple with the question of the extent to which intellectuals can play a positive and empowering role in shaping the current and future development of society. This insightful book will appeal to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly to those interested in social theory and the history of intellectual thought. (shrink)

This work is a survey of the efforts through which women have changed their place in American society from the nation's founding to the present. Examining the historical struggle for suffrage, legal and property rights, and rights in the work place, the authors show how these experiences have shaped a contemporary movement for economic, political, and social equality that has become increasingly independent and less and less likely to place women's issues second to other national concerns. The authors recount a (...) history of women activists who repeatedly set aside their own issues in favor of others that seemed more pressing--from abolition and preserving the Union, to labor solidarity in the 1920s, and civil rights and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Male domination of these movements and a lack of support for women's issues have been major factors in creating the contemporary feminist philosophy of going it alone. The book is divided into three topical sections, each of which offers a historical analysis and draws on a variety of sources such as legal statutes and judicial decisions, demographic information, public opinion polls, and biographies and other narrative accounts. It is a richly documented resource for courses and research in women's studies, sociology, politics, and U.S. legal and political history. (shrink)

In this paper, we respond to a critique by Erik Thorstensen of the ‘Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation in Emerging Nanotechnologies’ project concerning its ‘realist’ treatment of narrative, its restricted analytical framework and resources, its apparent confusion in focus and its unjustified contextualisation and overextension of its findings. We show that these criticisms are based on fairly serious misunderstandings of the DEEPEN project, its interdisciplinary approachand its conceptual context. Having responded to Thorstensen’s criticisms, we take the opportunity to clarify and (...) develop our approach to narrative. We articulate the need for novel, theoretically robust approaches to the formation of public attitudes which transcend the limitations of both survey-based approaches—which remain wedded to methodological individualism and which presume that individuals hold distinct and relatively stable attitudes and preferences—and interactionist approaches to public talk, which focus too strongly on individuals-in-interaction as reasoning agents and which ignore the constitutive role of culture and discourse in the formation of public opinion. We suggest that our use of narrative can help to better understand the process through which public attitudes to emerging technology develop out of interactive an engagement with wider cultural arguments and accounts of science and technology. We finish by pointing to parallel developments in social thought—from Charles Taylor’s treatment of social imaginaries to recent developments in post-Bourdieuian cultural sociology—as related projects in understanding the cultural resources and grammars that provide the conceptual infrastructure for modern social life. (shrink)

Nursing has evolved, yet media representation has arguably failed to keep up. This work explores why representation has been slow in accurately depicting nurses' responsibilities, impacts on public perceptions and professional identity. A critical realist review was employed as this method enables in-depth exploration into why something exists. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing from feminist, psychological and sociological theories to provide insightful understanding and recommendations. One main feminist lens has been implemented, using Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male-Gaze’ framework for (...) content analysis of three nurse-related advertisements to explore how the profession's female status influences representation, public perception and how this might impact nursing. Nurse representation has important real-world consequences. It is essential to improve unnecessary negative portrayals and contest ingrained stereotypes as there are costs to public opinion and nursing's self-identity. Nursing's female status has an impact within a male-dominated media industry, with a leisurely approach adopted toward changing representation. Media images become societally ingrained, this reiterates the significance of accurate/positive depictions. Social media is an instant method of communication with the public to combat stereotypes and maintain engagement to provide better understanding of what nurses do. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Did Habermas Cede Nature to the Positivists? Gordon R. Mitchell Jürgen Habermas's "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis (1987, 332-73) posits that many of society's pathologies are due to the tendency of institutions to convert social issues that ought to be sorted out by a debating citizenry into technical problems ripe for resolution by expert bureaucracies, thus pre-empting important (...) class='Hi'>public discussion. Habermas has attempted to lay bare the pernicious effects of this colonization process in his analysis of public opinion polling, welfare policy, education, German reunification, immigration, and other social issues (see Habermas 1997, 1994, and 1970; Holub 1992). In each of these contexts, Habermas has publicly challenged the encroachment of scientistic modes of decision-making into spheres where joint communicative action by deliberating citizens would yield more appropriate and legitimate judgments. This critical impulse is also evident in Habermas's methodological reflections on the proper role of academic scholarship, where he has argued vigorously against attempts to graft "objectivating" methods of natural scientific inquiry onto research projects in the social sciences (1971, 304-17).From all of this, one might gather that Habermas's commitment to rolling back the influence of technical forms of reasoning is connected to some intrinsic quarrel he has with the natural sciences. Yet such a sweeping generalization is hard to sustain in light of the fact that Habermas does not oppose technical reasoning per se; he recognizes that the daunting complexity of social life in late capitalism requiresthat certain "steering" tasks be delegated to systems that utilize largely instrumental logics to co-ordinate action. Likewise, he acknowledges that the disciplines of the natural sciences necessarily play important supporting roles in such steering projects.One normative presupposition of Habermas's colonization thesis is that there exists some proper boundary demarcating where the sphere of technical reasoning ends and the realm of communicative rationality begins. [End Page 1] On one side of this boundary, Habermas has provided many details on what he sees as the essential qualities of a properly functioning "public sphere," where "new social movements" continuously reweave the threads of communicative fabric holding society together (1996, 359-87), and where "historico-hermeneutic" academic study reflects on public life, sluicing insight back into the capillaries of democratic deliberations (1987, 374-403).What lies on the other side of the boundary is murkier. The proper role of natural scientific investigation has received relatively scant attention in Habermas's critical theory of society, and this has led to some confusion regarding his account of the natural sciences, as well as debate over whether this account has political purchase. One would think that sympathetic commentators, such as Helen Longino (who bases much of her own coherence theory of scientific truth on Habermas), would have reassuring things to say on this point. Yet her lukewarm assessment that, "in trying to clear a space for an autonomous social and critical theory, [Habermas] has ceded nature to the positivists" (1990, 202), raises questions about the flexibility and scope of Habermas's theory of communicative action as a basis for critique of scientific practice.One way to test Habermas's account of the natural sciences on this count is to put his views in conversation with science studies commentators who share a similar commitment to the idea that dialogue and argumentation are constitutive elements of scientific practice. Such an approach recasts the "ceding to positivism" question into a moment of controversy over the role of dialogue, not only as an essential motor driving the scientific enterprise, but also as a vehicle for democratic decision-making on issues related to the purpose and direction of scientific inquiry in society.Part one of this essay locates discursive norms embedded pragmatically in the notion of scientific objectivity. By bringing a modified version of Habermas's theory of communicative action into conversation with other approaches to science studies that foreground intersubjective dialogue as the key motor driving the scientific enterprise, I develop a foundation for robust criticism of systematically distorted scientific communication. Specific strategies of... (shrink)

In the past two decades, Ukraine has significantly deepened its relations with NATO. Following Russia’s seizure of Crimea and instigation of conflict in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas in 2014, Ukraine’s interest in NATO entry has particularly intensified. According to public opinion polls in Ukraine, membership in the Alliance is critical to the country’s security. On the other hand, Russia presents the further expansion of NATO to the east as the main threat to its national security. The (...) current developments on the ground and the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia will affect NATO’s attitude towards Ukraine’s membership prospects in the Alliance. The potential for further escalation of the war in Ukraine is significant, although it is more likely that the war will flare up and target Ukrainian forces and the civilian population, but the likelihood of the involvement of the Western Allies in the conflict is also more certain. Ukrainian authorities will have to limit their expectations for NATO membership and focus only on maximum cooperation with the Alliance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions (...) in Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

We are inundated by scientific and statistical information, but what should we believe? How much should we trust the polls on the latest electoral campaign? When a physician tells us that a diagnosis of cancer is 90% certain or a scientist informs us that recent studies support global warming, what should we conclude? How can we acquire reliable statistical information? Once we have it, how do we evaluate it? Despite the importance of these questions to our lives, many of us (...) have only a vague idea of how to answer them. In this admirably clear and engaging book, Mark Battersby provides a practical guide to thinking critically about scientific and statistical information. The goal of the book is not only to explain how to identify misleading statistical information, but also to give readers the understanding necessary to evaluate and use statistical and statistically based scientific information in their own decision making. (shrink)

From his return to Europe in 1949 to his death in 1969, Adorno was one of the most prominent public voices in West Germany. As a professor and institute director, a frequently heard expert on radio, a prolific cultural critic, and even a sort of public counselor, he helped shape the self‐image of German postwar society. The very term “postwar society” is partly an achievement: Adorno approached Germany sociologically, as a configuration of organizations and groups, as opposed to (...) a community of blood, race, and fate, and he sought to encourage an earnest postwar and post‐genocide reckoning with the crimes committed under National Socialism, against widespread tendencies of evasiveness and disavowal. More insistently and effectively than most, Adorno reminded Germans that they lived “after Auschwitz.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has attempted to restore the reputation of the American electorate, even though its level of political interest and information has not measurably increased. Scott Althaus’s Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics challenges this revisionist optimism, arguing that opinion polls misrepresent the interests of a large segment of society, and that they therefore get too much attention as a guide to policy makers, because those being polled are so ill informed. But Althaus overestimates the degree to which respondent ignorance (...) is responsible for the instability of survey responses; and he is perhaps too critical of polling as the vehicle for transmitting voter interests. His analysis of information effects on political attitudes, however, raises the important question of how public opinion would be different if it were well informed. The answer is, I believe: only minimally different. (shrink)

When something serves a function, it is easy to overlook its origins. The tendency is to proceed directly to function and retroactively construct a story about origin based on the function it fills. In this article, I address this problem of origins as it appears in the sociology of knowledge, using a case study of the publication of the 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980. The manual revolutionized American psychiatry and the treatment (...) of mental illness, because it served the function of classification that had become critical to the field of mental health by this time. But this function must be bracketed in order to reveal the “extra-functional” origins of the DSM-III. Using field theory, I argue that the manual was necessary for reasons other than the function it filled as a classification. Specifically, its origin lies in a series of conflicts among psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and clinical psychologists within the field of mental health, which followed in the wake of the collapse of psychoanalysis as the dominant treatment type for mental illness. I reveal the generative formula behind the production of the DSM-III, capturing a variety of social processes that influenced the format of the manual and made it a useful classification, but which are not reducible to function. In this way, I reproduce its raison d’etre in a manner similar to how the DSM-III appeared for the people who produced it. This focus on generative formulas offers the sociology of knowledge a way to capture the epistemic importance of a range of different social processes. Most importantly, it avoids the functional fallacy of reducing origin to function, and ignoring the idea that innovations might appear necessary even without clear recognition of their functional consequences. (shrink)

Theodor W.Adorno was one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth century. His contributions cover such a myriad of fields, including the sociology of culture, social theory, the philosophy of music, ethics, art and aesthetics, film, ideology, the critique of modernity and musical composition, that it is difficult to assimilate the sheer range and profundity of his achievement. His celebrated friendship with Walter Benjamin has produced some of the most moving and insightful correspondence on the origins and objects of the (...) Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This unprecedented collection, devised and assembled by one of Europe's rising social theorists, distills the best from published assessments and responses to Adorno's oeuvre. The collection is divided into 4 volumes: Volume 1: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory Part 1: Negative Dialectics Included here are contributions on the concept of totality in the writings of Adorno and Lukacs; Adorno and Bourgeois Philosophy; the relationship between Adorno and Kierkegaard; Adorno's Critique of Idealism; Adorno and Linguistics; Adono and Habermas. Part 2: Ethics and Redemption This is comprised of contributions on Adorno and Truth; Adorno's Inverse Theology; and Adorno and the Ineffable Part 3: Critical Theory, Ideology Critique and Social Science Included here are contributions on Adorno's relation to the Positivist Dispute; the Popper-Adorno Controversy; Adorno and Empirical Research; and Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Volume 2: Aesthetic Theory Part 1: Art and Politics in 'Aesthetic Theory' This includes material on the De-Aestheticization of Art; Adorno, Utopia and Mimesis; Adorno and autonomous art; Adorno and Dialectics; Adorno, Marxism and Art; Art and Criticism in Adorno's Aesthetics; Adorno's concept of the Avant-Garde. Part 2: Philosophy of Music This includes contributions on Adorno's music and social criticism; Adorno and nostalgia; Adorno, Heidegger and the meaning of music; Adorno and Wagner. Part 3: On Jazz The material included here addresses questions of Adorno and Popular Music; Adorno's encounter with jazz; Adorno, Jazz and Society; and the reasons for Adorno's apparent hatred of jazz. Volume 3: Social Theory & The Critique of Modernity Part 1: On 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' Included here are chapters on the dialectic of enlightenment and post-functionalist thought; dialectic of enlightenment as genealogy critique; the relationship between the dialectic of enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity; Adorno's critique of progress; Adorno and theories of subjectivity; and the dialectic of enlightenment and rationality. Part 2: Anti-Semitism This consists of material on Adorno and Horkheimer; and Adorno and Public Sphere Part 3: Popular Culture and Capitalism Included here are contributions on Adorno and Sport; Adorno's alleged left-wing elitism; Adorno's critique of astrology and the Occult; Benjamin and Adorno on Disney; Adorno, Totalitarianism and the Welfare State; and Adorno and Mass Society. Volume 4: Cultural Theory and the Postmodern Challenge Part 1: 'Damaged Life': Exile in America This section includes Leo Lowenthal's insightful recollections of Adorno; Adorno and the primal history of subjectivity; Adorno and Los Angeles; Adorno's relation to American culture; and Adorno's exile in England. Part 2: Film Theory This section includes chapters on Adorno and the Culture Industry; Benjamin, Adorno and Contemporary Film Theory; Adorno, Aesthetics and the Social. Part 3: Wellmer and Adorno Included here are papers on Aesthetic, Psychic and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer; and New German Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Part 4: Jameson on Adorno Included here are papers on Jameson, Adorno and the persistence of the Utopian; and a Marxism for Postmodernism Part 5: Modernism and Postmodernism This section contains papers on Adorno, Foucault and the Modern Intellectual; Adorno, Foucault and Two forms of the Critique of Modernity; Adorno and the Habermas-Lyotard Debate; Adorno, Postmodernism and Edward Said; Adorno, Heidegger and Postmodernism; Adorno and the Decline of the Modern Age; The literary process of modernism; Adorno, Tradition and the Postmodern Part 5: The Feminist Response Included here are contributions on Adorno and Judith Butler; Adorno, Art Theory and Feminist Practice; and Gender in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. The collection comes with a superb Introduction to Adorno by Gerard Delanty which elucidates the main contributions of this penetrating and enduring thinker. Comprehensive and consistently illuminating, the collection includes the thought on Adorno from some of the most distinguished commentators on social theory. Included here are selections from the writings of Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Agnes Heller; David Frisby; Johann Arnason; Richard Wolin; Andrew Bowie; Robert Hulnot-Kentor; Leo Lowenthal; Richard Rorty Axel Honneth; Albrecht Wellmer; and Jurgen Habermas. The result is a peerless research resource allowing readers to delve into all aspects of Adorno's extraordinary accomplishments in social thought, philosophy and cultural criticism. It will be required reading for students of the Frankfurt School, Marxism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics and Social Theory. (shrink)

The use of voluntary assisted dying as an end‐of‐life option has stimulated concerns and debates over the past decades. Although public attitudes towards voluntary assisted dying (including euthanasia and physician‐assisted suicide) are well researched, there has been relatively little study of the different reasons, normative reasoning and rhetorical strategies that people invoke in supporting or contesting voluntary assisted dying in everyday life. Using a mix of computational textual mining techniques, keyword study and qualitative thematic coding to analyse public (...) submissions to a parliamentary inquiry into voluntary assisted dying in Australia, this study critically examines the different reasons, normative reasoning and rhetorical strategies that people invoke in supporting or contesting voluntary assisted dying in everyday life. The analysis identified complex and potentially contradictory ethical principles being invoked on both sides of the debate. These findings deepen our understanding of the moral basis of public reasoning about end‐of‐life matters and will help to inform future discussions on policy and law reform. The findings underscore the importance of sound normative reasoning and the use of caution when interpreting opinion polls to inform policy. (shrink)

According to surveys and opinion polls, citizens in Nordic welfare societies have positive, supportive attitudes towards medical research and biobanking. In Finland, it was expected that this would result in the active biobank participation of patients and citizens. Indeed, public support has been rhetorically utilised as a unique societal factor and advantage in the promotion of Finnish biobanks, underlining the potential Finland offers for the international biomedical enterprise. In this paper, we critically analyse the use of notions such as (...) ‘willing population’ and ‘engaged people’ in the promotion and legitimation of biobanking. First, there is a seeming contradiction between positive attitudes and actual participation rates, as biobanks have faced unexpected challenges in participant recruitment during the first years of their operations. As a result, the concept of a willing population was redirected to problematise the necessity of informed consent. Second, we question whether it is even meaningful to assume the existence of an informed and engaged population with regard to biobanking. Therefore, we suggest that it is problematic to talk about a willing population at the same time as the relevance of the informed consent system is being questioned by biobank actors and policy makers. We analyse this tension in relation to existing data on Finnish people’s attitudes, pointing out that positive, supportive views do not directly transform into high participation rates; nor do they justify the claims of policy makers and biobank proponents that people are willing to participate, when in fact surveys report that people know very little about biobanks. (shrink)

The intention of this paper is to relate the various standpoints regarding anxiety and uncertainty. Within the humanities and social sciences, research is pursued in many different disciplines without much interaction between them. Everyone's thinking is based on concepts which are domain-specific, and the distinctions, methods and arguments used are the ones that are generally accepted within the discipline. The divergent conclusions constitute pieces of a puzzle that are seldom if ever put together. There are even doubts about whether such (...) a puzzle can be put together. It can hardly be denied, however, that inspiration is to be found in a consideration of the views and findings of colleagues from other disciplines who are working on the same problems. Now that we have as our guests two prominent academics, each with specific views about our subject, we should take this opportunity to discuss together some of the sociological, anthropological, economic, philosophical and theological approaches to anxiety and uncertainty.If a number of well-known authors are to be believed, lack of trust, uncertainty and insecurity affect the most affluent and modern societies. In French one speaks of précarité , in German of Unsicherheit and Risikogesellschaft , and in English of “fear”, “risk” and “insecurity” . All modern Western societies seem to be afflicted with the same dismal and frustrating human experience.Belgian society is no exception to this. In recent years we have regularly been subjected to the emotional reactions provoked by sensational events in the areas of politics , justice and public health . Less spectacular but no less real were the results of opinion polls which showed that confidence in public institutions in general, and politics in particular, is at an all-time low. (shrink)

Introduction to Sociology distills decades of distinguished work in sociology by one of this century’s most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory ...

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a key contribution to political philosophy, media history, democratic theory and political economy – published almost 60 years ago – that left a deep imprint on the process of democratic consolidation of the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, the Habermasian model of the public sphere was used to test out the possibilities of democratisation beyond the nation-state. The theory of the public sphere was, however, mainly discussed (...) as a contribution to normative political theory and, as such, the applicability of its normative standards remained contested. In this article, I focus instead on a second sociological reading of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere as an exploration of the cognitive foundations of modern society. The relevance of this approach can be shown in an exemplary way by discussing the functioning of publicity, which, by creating social visibility and facilitating public opinion formation, on the one hand, provides the knowledge base of a shared social world and, on the other hand, becomes the main driver of social change through critical self-reflection. The article goes on to take a look at recent public sphere transformations in the context of digitalisation and globalisation, and argues that public sphere principles are both undermined and gain new relevance when facing the challenges of new and digital media. (shrink)

In summer 1960, Adorno gave the first of a series of lectures devoted to the relation between sociology and philosophy. One of his central concerns was to dispel the notion, erroneous in his view, that these were two incompatible disciplines, radically opposed in their methods and aims, a notion that was shared by many. While some sociologists were inclined to dismiss philosophy as obsolete and incapable of dealing with the pressing social problems of our time, many philosophers, influenced by Kant, (...) believed that philosophical reflection must remain 'pure', investigating the constitution of knowledge and experience without reference to any real or material factors. By focusing on the problem of truth, Adorno seeks to show that philosophy and sociology share much more in common than many of their practitioners are inclined to assume. Drawing on intellectual history, Adorno demonstrates the connection between truth and social context, arguing that there is no truth that cannot be manipulated by ideology and no theorem that can be wholly detached from social and historical considerations.his systematic account on the interconnectedness of philosophy and sociology makes these lectures a timeless reflection on the nature of these disciplines and an excellent introduction to critical theory, the sociological content of which is here outlined in detail by Adorno for the first time. (shrink)

Philosophy’s engagement with mass media has often been ambiguous: many critical theorists, from Benjamin to Bourdieu, recognised the emancipatory potential of modern communication technologies, but they also denounced the economic, political and ideological forces at work in the creation and dissemination of public opinion. Looking at different media, these authors emphasised the dialectical tension between the plurality of the public sphere and different forms of control and manipulation. In the present paper, I argue that this line (...) of criticism, albeit important, is no longer sufficient. I claim that contemporary forms of communication, defined by a unique emphasis on interactivity, cannot be analysed simply in terms of the opposition between dominant and marginalised agents or discourses. In its most extreme form, interactivity leads to an implosion of the distinction between the sources and the targets of the information flow, which calls into question the very possibility of a meaningful communicative exchange. To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, I retrace the evolution of modern political communication, from live speeches to digital platforms and social networks, and discuss its implications for recent debates on political authority, participation and representation. (shrink)

In recent years, documentary formats have entered prominently into the realm of the culture industry, especially since Hollywood and Netflix started to invest in costly productions addressed to the mainstream. Many of these documentaries claim to show reality in its immediacy (“as it really is”), to reveal that which is obscured, or to critically assess societal evils. They use aesthetic strategies that reinforce the appearance of authenticity, while concealing the mediation of what they represent, and the authoritarian stances they presuppose. (...) This turns them into powerful instruments for diffusing authoritarian and populist ideologies. Their political impact on society, their performative power of opinion-shaping, and their subliminal influence on how we perceive and understand reality call urgently for critical assessment. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, along with their philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic writings, provide a constructive starting point. This essay aims to mobilize their critical theory of society for the problematization of documentary films in terms of their dialectical relation to society. (shrink)

This book explores Pierre Bourdieu's philosophy and sociology of science, which, though central to his thought, have been largely neglected in critical examinations of his work. Addressing the resultant confusion that surrounds Bourdieu's sociologized philosophy of science, it expounds his epistemology and sociology of science, situating it within the context of Anglo-American post positivist philosophy of science and shedding light on the critique of relativist sociology of science that emerges from his field theory. From a detailed critique (...) of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and his attempt to enhance the uneasy epistemic status of the social sciences, the author draws on the thought of Jürgen Habermas to suggest critical ethnography as a way of going beyond Bourdieu's critical theory. As such, Bourdieu's Philosophy and Sociology of Science will appeal to sociologists, philosophers and scholars across the social sciences with interests in the work of Bourdieu and the sociology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach (...) to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)