In Peculiar Institution David Garland offers a sociological explanation for America’s retention of the death penalty in an age of abolition. But the book does much more than that. Peculiar Institution appeared exactly two decades after the publication of Garland’s second major study Punishment and Modern Society. In that book he laid the foundations for a multidimensional sociology of punishment. However, Garland’s manifesto for a new pluralist sociology of punishment fell to a large extent on (...) deaf ears. It is against that background that I will argue that Peculiar Institution kills two birds with one stone: in addition to its declared intention to describe and explain America’s capital punishment complex, the book can also be read as a direct intervention in a much larger debate on how we should proceed when we aim to understand punishment in all its complexity. (shrink)

Law has been a close partner to sociology from its very beginning, and the partnership often has proven to be extremely prolific for sociology. Grand theories as well as vital conceptual tools can be counted among its offspring. Both disciplines share the common ground of socio-legal studies, which has developed into a nearly independent interdisciplinary enterprise where legal scholars and sociologists happily meander between the normative and the analytical. From the vast array of topics in the field of (...) socio-legal studies I select the sociology of criminal justice and punishment in order to demonstrate the characteristics of this relationship. The partnership between sociology and law emerged as part of the modernization project in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the sociology of punishment was part of this endeavour. Rooted in a strong tradition of old (Durkheim) and new (Elias, Foucault) classics, recent developments in this field are leaving the idea of an `unproblematically modern punishment' (Whitman, 2005a) behind, and new fields of inquiry for comparative lawyers and sociologists are opening up. (shrink)

This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical?sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garland's significant intervention in The Culture of Control. We take issue with some aspects of Garland's account, on both methodological and substantive grounds, and delineate (...) certain distinctions between his ?history of the present? and the historically situated hermeneutics that we favour. The latter, we suggest, can be more attentive to particular political and intellectual struggles that have had a formative bearing on the current field and, as such, offer new perspectives on the position of crime and punishment in contemporary political culture. (shrink)

I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, one searched almost in vain for allies if one wanted to approach a literary text from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure, there were Franz Mehring’s articles which I read with interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings hardly went beyond the limits of (...) a socialist journalist who wrote in essentially the same style about literature as about political and the economy. George Lukács had not yet published his impressive series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and interpretation of literature. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his fine little book, The Theory of the Novel , which I practically learned by heart. Besides Levin Schücking’s small volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major influence I can recall was George Brandes’ monumental work on the literary currents of the nineteenth century.Nonetheless, I had the courage, not to say hubris, to plan an ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish, and German literature, the beginning of which was to be formed by the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on the writes and literary schools which the German literary establishment either punished by total silence or raised up into the clouds of idealistic babble or relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology .In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of literature; for reasons which I hold to be sociologically and artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth century. While I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation between substructure and superstructure, between social currents and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some—frequently in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language—are so concerned with “mediation” that the connections between social being and social consciousness became almost obscured. Leo Lowenthal is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany. His collected works have been published in five volumes in German and in a parallel English edition. Lowenthal’s autobiographical writings, edited by Martin jay, will appear in the fall of 1987 under the title An Unmastered Past. Lowenthal’s present studies deal with German postmodernism. Ted. R. Weeks is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in imperial Russian history. (shrink)

Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policy-makers. The same can be said for academic researchers and students. Mass imprisonment has reached record high levels while public confidence is often lacking. New thinking is required urgently to address these challenges. Moreover, there have been several key developments in the philosophy of punishment over the last 20 years absent in leading guides including the communicative theory of punishment, restorative justice and my novel unified theory of (...) punishment. -/- My book Punishment is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment attempting to offer a new and refreshing approach to benefit scholars and students alike. While the book is primarily philosophical, it brings together relevant insights from law, criminology, criminal justice, politics and sociology. The aim is to provide both a comprehensive overview with new insights on many familiar theories of punishment. (shrink)

The American death penalty is peculiar insofar as it is the only capital punishment system still in use in the West. It is peculiar insofar as the forms through which it is now enacted seem ambivalent and poorly adapted to the stated purposes of criminal justice. And it is peculiar insofar as it seems, somehow, to be connected to the South's ?peculiar institution? of slavery and its legacy of racial violence, though the precise relationship is by no means clear. (...) ? The aim of this book ? is to describe and explain the peculiar institution of American capital punishment in all its complex, controversial detail and to explore its relationship to the society that sustains it. ? The perspective pursued here develops a detailed description of death penalty practices and an explanatory account of their sources, uses, and meanings. In place of moral and legal argument, it provides historical and sociological analysis. Instead of discussing capital punishment in general it analyzes American capital punishment in particular. And rather than argue for the institution's reform or its retention, it describes exactly how it came to be retained and reformed in its present form. What is offered here, in short, is neither apology nor critique but a sociological history of an institution that forms a puzzling part of our present. (shrink)

One of the most important problems faced by the United States is addressing its broken criminal justice system. This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. In addition to focusing on the philosophical aspects related to punishment, the volume's diverse group of contributors provides additional background in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues. The first group of essays addresses whether or not our current institutions connected (...) with punishment and incarceration are justified in a liberal society. The next set of chapters explores the negative effects of incarceration as a form of punishment, including its impact on children and families. The volume then describes how we arrived at our current situation in the United States, focusing on questions related to how we view prisons and prisoners, policing for profit, and the motivations of prosecutors in trying to secure convictions. Finally, Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration examines specific policy alternatives that might offer solutions to our current approach to punishment and incarceration. (shrink)

In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely (...) punish cheaters. Instead, they avoid dealing with them and switch to other partners. I suggest that these data are better explained by individual selection, and in particular by partner choice models, in which individuals are in competition to be recruited by cooperative partners. I discuss two apparent problems for partner choice theories: large-scale cooperation and punishments in economic games. I suggest that rather than favouring group selection theory, these two phenomena provide evidence in favour of individual selection: (1) people produce large-scale cooperation through institutions in which punishment is not altruistic but rewarded on an individual basis; (2) punishment in experimental games can be explained without altruism and is indeed often better explained by individual interests. (shrink)

Unlike other treatments of legal punishment, this book takes both an external approach, asking why we punish at all, and an internal approach, considering issues faced by those 'inside' the practice: For what actions should we punish? Should we allow plea-bargaining? the insanity defense? How should sentencing be determined? The two approaches are connected: To decide whether to punish someone who is 'insane', or who cops a plea, we need to ask whether doing so is consistent with our theory (...) of why we punish at all. In connecting theory and practice, I draw on a broad range of thought: radical criticisms of punishment (Nietzsche, Foucault, Marxists), sociological theories (Durkheim, Girard), various philosophical traditions (utilitarian, German Idealism, modern liberalism), and the 'law and economics' movement. Against radical critics who argue we shouldn't punish at all, but who then leave us without an alternative for dealing with crime, I defend the practice, offering a version of retribution (which I distinguish from revenge and non-consequential theories) that holds we punish not to deter, reform, or otherwise augment social utility, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's condemnation of actions it deems blameworthy. I argue that this theory best accounts for how we do punish, and then use this theory to provide immanent criticism of certain features of our actual practice that don't accord with the retributive principle. (shrink)

What is Sociology? presents in concise and provocative form the major ideas of a seminal thinker whose work--spanning more than four decades--is only now gaining the recognition here it has long had in Germany and France. Unlike other post-war sociologists, Norbert Elias has always held the concept of historical development among his central concerns; his dynamic theories of the evolution of modern man have remedied the historical and epistemological shortcomings of structualism and ethno-methodology. What is Sociology? refines the (...) arguments that were first found in Elias' massive work on the civilizing process, in which he formulated his major assertions about the interdependence of the making of modern man and modern society. It is Elias' contention that changes in personality structure--embodied in phenomena ranging from table manners and hygiene habits to rites of punishment and courtly love--inevitably reflect and mould patterns of control generated by new political and social instututions. Elias' rejection of a dichotomy between individual and society, and his use of psychoanalysis, political theory, and social history, help restore a fullness of resource to sociology. (shrink)

This philosophical work on punishment includes coverage of retributivisms, moral education and reform, consequentialism and rights, sentencing and how to make the punishment fit the crime, abolitionism and sociological perspectives.

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In (...) the ancestral environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

That discrimination exists in courts of law is beyond dispute. In American murder cases, for instance, studies show that blacks who kill a white are much more likely to receive the death penalty than if they kill a black. Indeed, in Georgia, they are 30 times more likely to be condemned, and in Texas a staggering 90 times more likely. Conversely, in Texas, of 143 whites convicted of killing a black, only one was sentenced to die. But how extensive is (...) discrimination in the courtroom? Is it strictly a matter of racial prejudice, or does it respond to a wide range of social factors? In Sociological Justice, eminent legal sociologist Donald Black challenges the conventional notion that law is primarily an affair of rules and that discrimination is an aberration. Law, he contends, is a social process in which bias is inherent. Indeed, Black goes well beyond the documented instances of racial discrimination to show how social status, the degree of intimacy, speech, organization, and numerous other factors all greatly influence whether a complaint will be filed in court, who will win, and what the punishment or other remedy will be. Moreover, he extends his analysis to include not only the litigants, but also the lawyers, the jurors, and the judge, describing how their social characteristics can also influence a case. Sociological Justice introduces a new field of legal scholarship that will have important consequences for the future of law: the sociology of the case. Black discusses how lawyers can use the sociology of the case to improve their practice and, for those interested in reform, he suggests ways to minimize bias in the courtroom. Beyond this, Black demonstrates that modern jurisprudence, with its assumption that like cases will be treated in like fashion, is out of touch with reality. He urges the adoption of a new sociological jurisprudence, with a new morality of law, that explicitly addresses the social relativity of justice. A major contribution to legal scholarship, this thought-provoking volume is essential reading for anyone interested in law and justice in modern society. (shrink)

The article develops an explanation of corporal punishment (CP) as an expression of family violence by developing a multi-level, conciliatory model of human behavior. The synthesis builds upon a review of the relevant analytic approaches and empirical evidence spanning multiple levels of human behavior to include five interrelated frameworks: (1) behavioral investment; (2) socialization; (3) cultural justification; (4) social location; and (5) societal context. The analytic levels highlight the various explanatory principles that address questions relevant mainly to investigators who (...) study behavior in terms of different levels of informational complexity. The paper outlines the most important factors that shape the use and non-use of CP within family settings. The model identifies key ontogenetic and biophysiological factors linked to the fitness of parents’ offspring, along with primary socialization processes and cultural justification mechanisms that increase the probability of the intergenerational transmission of violence. In addition, the model identifies the sociological dimensions of family relationships and the importance of social locational variables in shaping parental usage of CP, as well as the importance of communities and institutions as situated within sociocultural contexts. The main conclusion suggests that to understand and explain more fully why human beings use violence in the context of familial relationships—including corporal punishment practices—analysts must consider the different influences and possible impacts of factors across all five levels. (shrink)

What remains anti-democratic in our criminal justice systems, and where does it come from? Geoffroy de Lagasnerie spent years sitting in on trials, watching as individuals were judged and sentenced for armed robbery, assault, rape, and murder. His experience led to this original reflection on the penal state, power, and violence that identifies a paradox in the way justice is exercised in liberal democracies. In order to pronounce a judgment, a trial must construct an individualizing story of actors and their (...) acts; but in order to punish, each act between individuals must be transformed into an aggression against society as a whole, against the state itself. The law is often presented as the reign of reason over passion. Instead, it leads to trauma, dispossession, and violence. Only by overturning our inherited legal fictions can we envision forms of truer justice. Combining narratives of real trials with theoretical analysis, Judge and Punish shows that juridical institutions are not merely a response to crime. The state claims to guarantee our security, yet from our birth, we also belong to it. The criminal trial, a magnifying mirror, reveals our true condition as political subjects. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR), cultural evolution and the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and (...) cultural evolution. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signalling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modelling. This is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology, the Handbook will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Unlike other treatments of legal punishment, Punishment: Theory and Practice takes both an external approach, asking why we punish at all, and an internal approach, considering issues faced by those 'inside' the practice: For what actions should we punish? Should we allow plea-bargaining? the insanity defense? How should sentencing be determined? The two approaches are connected: To decide whether to punish someone who is 'insane', or who cops a plea, we need to ask whether doing so is consistent (...) with our theory of why we punish at all. In connecting theory and practice, I draw on a broad range of thought: radical criticisms of punishment (Nietzsche, Foucault, Marxists), sociological theories (Durkheim, Girard), various philosophical traditions (utilitarian, German Idealism, modern liberalism), and the 'law and economics' movement. Against radical critics who argue we shouldn't punish at all, but who then leave us without an alternative for dealing with crime, I defend the practice, offering a version of retribution (which I distinguish from revenge and non-consequential theories) that holds we punish not to deter, reform, or otherwise augment social utility, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's condemnation of actions it deems blameworthy. I argue that this theory best accounts for how we do punish, and then use this theory to provide immanent criticism of certain features of our actual practice that don't accord with the retributive principle. (shrink)

This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of children from being a reasonable method of chastisement to one that is harmful to children and troubling to families. In addition, the article suggests shifts in thinking about physical punishment were originally pioneered as part and parcel of the dismantling of national laws granting fathers’ specific rights to admonish children under conventions of patria potestas. A comparative historical framework of analysis involving two case studies of (...) Ireland and Ghana illustrates non-unilinear pathways of international convergence towards the prohibition of physical punishment. The comparative historical analysis highlights the 1930s and 1940s as an era when Ireland began to reject patria potestas and religious or judicial rulings which allowed for children to be given ‘a good beating’ in family and school settings. However, from the same period, Ghana is seen to experience Christian remonstrations not to ‘spare the rod’ leading to the ‘conventional’ tradition of ‘this is how we do it here’. Two case studies serve to illustrate that banning physical punishment was less controversial in Ireland where allied traditions of patria potestas and disciplinarian Christian beliefs had lost their moral hegemony than in Ghana where such beliefs still held influence. The article concludes overall that normative campaigns against physical punishment of children emanate from a coherent paradigm of family policy where childcare, education, and well-being of children are embedded as everyday societal responsibilities rather than privatised or patriarchal familial obligations. The coherent model offers an alternative moral hegemony to neo-liberal and Janus-faced conceptualisations of good or ‘intact’ families versus ‘broken’ or ‘troubled’ families. (shrink)

How does a democracy that has survived a close brush with authoritarianism start to recreate conditions of meaningful democratic political competition? What steps are to be taken, and in what order? Certain lessons can be gleaned from comparative experience with the challenges of “front-sliding”—that is, the process of rebuilding the necessary political, legal, epistemic, and sociological components of democracy. This essay maps out those challenges, examines the distinctive and difficult question of punishing individuals who have been drivers of democratic backsliding, (...) and reflects on how to sequence different elements of front-sliding. (shrink)

This essay discusses criminal law theories in late Imperial Russia. It argues that, although the political climate of Reform and Counter Reform effectively undermined attempts to implement new legislation premised on the idea of the 'rights-enabled person', paradoxically, it fostered the growth of juridical scholarship. Russian criminal law theorists engaged critically with Western juridical science, which, beginning in the 1870s, witnessed a shift away from absolutist theories inspired by the classics of philosophical idealism towards various strains of positivism arguing for (...) the restoration of the person as a concrete, physiological being. However, while Russian scholars were drawn to these new trends of criminal anthropology and the sociology of crime, they were also obliged to take stock of an indigenous legal culture that scarcely differentiated between pravo and zakon, together with a long tradition of customary practices that equated crime and punishment with sin and redemption. (shrink)

What makes the rule of law so special that it is to conscientiously punish the â oebadâ doers and reward the â oegoodâ onesâ "such that, where there is the rule of law, peace and order are to be expected, so that â oethe rule of law is better than the rule of any individualâ? Take the case of international law, as an illustration. While different international courts have been busy going after the killers of innocent victims in Rwanda and (...) Liberia, they have turned a blind eye to the major powers which have killedâ "on a much larger and more brutal scale, by comparisonâ "innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, just to cite two current examples. Contrary to the conventional wisdom conveniently held by many in human history, the rule of law has its other side which has not yet been systematically understood, such that the rule of law is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the defenders of legal institutions in human history would like us to believe. Lest any misunderstanding hastily occur, this is not to imply that the rule of law is absolutely useless, or that the literature in jurisprudence (and other related fields like political philosophy, ethics, law and economics, and the sociology of law) should be dismissed because of its scholarly irrelevance. Of course, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of law, in relation to its necessity and contingency in the context of justiceâ "while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). In the process, this book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature in a new directionâ "in that, in the end, there is no justice without injustice and that it will be transcended too. This seminal project, if successful, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of law, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its â oepost-humanâ fate. (shrink)

How can otherwise normal, moral persons - as citizens, voters, and jurors - participate in a process that is designed to take the life of another? In DEATH BY DESIGN, research psychologist Craig Haney argues that capital punishment, and particularly the sequence of events that lead to death sentencing itself, is maintained through a complex and elaborate social psychological system that distances and disengages us from the true nature of the task. Relying heavily on his own research and that (...) of other social scientists, Haney suggests that these social psychological forces enable persons to engage in behavior from which many of them otherwise would refrain. However, by facilitating death sentencing in these ways, this inter-related set of social psychological forces also undermines the reliability and authenticity of the process, and compromises the fairness of its outcomes. Because these social psychological forces are systemic in nature - built into the very system of death sentencing itself - Haney concludes by suggesting a number of inter-locking reforms, derived directly from empirical research on capital punishment, that are needed to increase the fairness and reliability of the process. The historic and ongoing public debate over the death penalty takes place not only in courtrooms, but also in classrooms, offices, and living rooms. This timely book offers stimulating insights into capital punishment for professionals and students working in psychology, law, criminology, sociology, and cultural area studies. As capital punishment receives continued attention in the media, it is also a necessary and provocative guide that empowers all readers to come to their own conclusions about the death penalty. (shrink)

The provocation defence, which militates against full legal responsibility for unjustified killings in several common law jurisdictions, has been the subject of considerable controversy during recent decades. Much of the criticism focused on substantive legal issues. This article examines the philosophical bases for the defence in hopes of establishing a theoretical groundwork for future debate on the legal defence. The defence originated on desert bases and continues to be understood on those grounds. This article thus examines it in light of (...) two dominant desert-based theories of punishment originating with Aristotle and Immanuel Kant respectively.Ultimately, the best theory of punishment and the best theory of defence are provided by different approaches. The more plausible and robust Kantian theory of punishment can nonetheless be supplemented by the Aristotelean theory of defence as a continent sociological morality to create a more nuanced account of defence that better explains both excuses in general and the provocation defence in particular. From a substantive legal perspective, this position justifies continued use of the provocation defence in our imperfect legal order, but the partial excuse of provocation will not exist in the ideal legal order. An ideal political order will sufficiently control its citizens’ emotions such that the defence cannot be justified. A partial excuse of provocation is only necessary in the interim. (shrink)

Given instances of widespread citizen cooperation with political regimes widely perceived as illegitimate, why are some individuals subsequently branded as collaborators who had engaged in “treasonous cooperation” with the enemy whereas others who had been involved in similar or identical forms of cooperation were not? Using the branding and punishment of Nazi collaborators in the postwar Polish criminal court system as a case study, this article excavates how the perceived betrayals undergirding the social construction of collaboration are shaped by (...) the interaction of macro- and micro-level bonds associated with membership in national and local communities. This analysis highlights how highly localized perceptions of betrayal, manifested as individual grievances, became intertwined with larger understandings of loyalty to the nation, thereby selecting who was eligible for membership in the postwar political and social order. In addition to laying the groundwork for a sociological theory of collaboration, this study also contributes to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to “everyday nationhood.”. (shrink)

Issues of life and death such as abortion, assisted suicide, capital punishment, and others are among the most contentious in many societies. Whose rights are protected? How do these rights and protections change over time and who makes those decisions? Based on the author's award-winning and hugely popular undergraduate course at The University of Texas, this book explores these questions and the fundamentally sociological processes that underlie the quest for morality and justice in human societies. The author's goal is (...) not to advocate any particular moral "high ground," but to shed light on the social movements and social processes that are at the root of these seemingly personal moral questions"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) is now widely regarded as one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century. The challenge and profundity of his work are still being assimilated. Some have suggested that in time, he will be regarded as the Copernicus or Darwin of sociology, the man who set the subject on its scientific course. These four volumes provide a comprehensive and penetrating survey of Elias's life and work. They pinpoint the main fields of research which Elias and his (...) followers have explored: the civilizing process; state-formation; knowledge, religion and science; informalization; power; established-outsider figurations in fields such as class, gender and race; the sociology of the body; the sociology of the emotions; the sociology of leisure, sport and the arts; the sociology of the professions; medicine and psychoanalysis; crime and punishment; drug use and abuse. The collection also explores the various critiques of Elias's `figurational' or `process' sociology and counter-critiques by Elias's followers. The volumes successfully locate the work of Elias and his followers in the context of modern sociology, especially in relation to writers such as Mannheim, Adorno, Parsons, Goffman, Foucault and Bourdieu. In the penetrating, original and informative Introduction, Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell elucidate Elias's sociological contributions and the bearing his life experiences had on his work. The collection is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the sociological contribution of Norbert Elias. The collection is organized in the following 4 volumes: Volume 1 Focuses on Elias's work in the context of his life and career, and reviews his place in the contemporary social sciences, especially in relation to such figures as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Also discussed in this volume are Elias's pathbreaking contributions to such issues as: the 'agency-structure' dilemma; habitus; power; involvement and detachment; knowledge and the sciences; time; and the relations between history and sociology. Volume 2 Addresses Elias's major empiricallybased contributions to sociological theory, especially the theories of the civilizing process, state formation and established-outsider figurations. Also discussed are informalization and de-civilizing processes, and the applications of the established-outsider theory to such fields as race, gender and sexuality. Volume 3 Examines figurational contributions to special areas of sociology such as: the sociology of the body; the sociology of the emotions; the sociology of everyday life, sport, leisure, lifestyles, taste, music and the arts; deviance and crime; the sociology of health and illness; psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology; death and dying; and drugs and tobacco use. Volume 4 Focuses on criticisms of Elias's work and the responses of Elias and his sociological followers. Key themes are: civilization and the Holocaust; sports violence, especially soccer hooliganism; the meanings and value of concepts like 'development', 'evolution' and 'change'; and the relative merits of long-term and short-term approaches. The end of the volume returns to the issue of Elias's place in contemporary sociology and the growing worldwide recognition of the significance of his contribution. Eric Dunning is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leicester; Stephen Mennell is Professor of Sociology, University College Dublin. (shrink)

The simple model of conflict-prone situations called Prisoner’s Dilemma is discussed. Whereas the best strategy for the model is to defect, in the case of its iterated version (Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma—IPD) it is possible and more profitable to cooperate with the opponent.The simple strategy called Tit for Tat (TFT) which is easy to recognize, never defects first, punishes every defection but is also forgiving is presented. The TFT strategy is very successful being able to establish the cooperation with its opponents. (...) The possible outcome of the competition between the TFT strategy and non-cooperative strategies is considered. It turns out that even small number of TFT strategies can overcome the greater number of more “egoistic” strategies.The described model can give the better understanding of some psychological, sociological and biological processes as well as help to propagate the altruistic attitudes in the society. (shrink)

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring to (...) primary texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate. (shrink)

In politics, we often observe stasis when, at first sight, no reason exists for such policy blockades. In contrast., we sometimes see policy change when one would expect blockades resulting from veto points or countervailing majorities. How can we explain these contradictory results concerning policy stability? In order to solve this theoretical puzzle, we develop an agent-based model (ABM). We combine established models of veto player theory (Tsebelis 2002: Ganghof-Bräuninger 2006) with the findings of political sociology and party competition. (...) By aggregating previous party-level findings, we show that dynamic representation (Stimson et. al. 1995) provides an additional mechanism that can explain these macro-level outcomes. Parties behaving responsively to their electorate do not automatically guarantee perfect responsivity on the party system level. Further, if opposition parties also fear punishment by the electorate for government inaction, the opposition behaves more accommodatingly than previous approaches have predicted. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an analysis of perceptions of migrants in press releases and regulatory documents of law enforcement and civil government agencies. We considered these texts within the framework of a "soft" constructionist approach, as a tool for problematizing the social process and one of the key ways of producing the discourse of power. The purpose of the study was to use a combination of quantitative content analysis and discourse analysis to identify the "equivalence chains" that give (...) meanings to the nodal sign "migration" in the texts of power. The objectives of the study were to collect a text array relevant to the topic and determine the social context in which the migrant is placed: the spaces in which they are present, the actions of which they are the subject and object. In most of the 548 texts reviewed, the migrant is presented as a suspicious, impersonal object of state paternalism. The most extensive category of social actions in which a migrant acts as a subject are crimes, mainly related to violation of the regime of stay in the Russian Federation. The most common actions committed against a migrant are inspections and raids, as well as various kinds of punishment. The subject of action against a migrant in regional government texts is not the Main Directorate for Migration Affairs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, but the Main Directorate for Public Order Maintenance, the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, and the courts. The article proposes a hypothesis according to which law enforcement agencies use press releases simultaneously as a way to problematize migration and maintain public attention to it. Having monopolized the problem, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Prosecutor's Office, and the courts use it to repeatedly "sell" this issue to the public through the only tool available to them - symbolic and physical violence. (shrink)

Christopher Bennett presents a theory of punishment grounded in the practice of apology, and in particular in reactions such as feeling sorry and making amends. He argues that offenders have a 'right to be punished' - that it is part of taking an offender seriously as a member of a normatively demanding relationship that she is subject to retributive attitudes when she violates the demands of that relationship. However, while he claims that punishment and the retributive attitudes are (...) the necessary expression of moral condemnation, his account of these reactions has more in common with restorative justice than traditional retributivism. He argues that the most appropriate way to react to crime is to require the offender to make proportionate amends. His book is a rich and intriguing contribution to the debate over punishment and restorative justice. (shrink)

This book shows how, on the basis of a phenomenological account of knowledge, values, and intersubjectivity, Max Scheler defends the objective structure of being and value and the distinctiveness of the Other against mechanistic attempts to ...

Michel Foucault's historical and philosophical investigations have gone through many phases: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical among them. What remains constant, however, is the question that motivates them: who are we? Todd May follows Foucault's itinerary from his early history of madness to his posthumously published College de France lectures and shows how the question of who we are shifts and changes but remains constantly at or just below the surface of his writings. By approaching Foucault's work in (...) this way, May is able to offer readers an engaging and illuminating way to understand Foucault. Each of Foucault's key works - "Madness and Civilization," "The Archaeology of Knowledge," "The Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish" and the multi-volume "History of Sexuality" - are examined in detail and situated in an historical context that makes effective use of comparisons with other thinkers such as Freud, Nietzsche and Sartre. Throughout this book May strikes a balance between sympathetic presentation and criticism of Foucault's ideas and in so doing exposes Foucault's contributions of lasting value. "The Philosophy of Foucault" is an accessible and stimulating introduction to one of the most popular and influential thinkers of recent years and will be welcomed by students studying Foucault as part of politics, sociology, history and philosophy courses. (shrink)

This paper follows Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy and his non-religion and non-theology to suggest anon-philosophical approach to the sociology of religious pluralism. The entanglements of experiences of the religious end-user are analysed vis-a-vis Laruelle’s thought and a dogma free inclusive approach to religion is envisaged.

Thom Brooks criticizes utilitarian and retributive theories of punishment but argues that utilitarian and retributive goals can be incorporated into a coherent and unified theory of punitive restoration, according to which punishment is a means of reintegrating criminals into society and restoring rights. I point to some difficulties with Brooks’ criticisms of retributive and utilitarian theories, and argue that his theory of punitive restoration is not unified or coherent. I argue further that a theory attempting to capture the (...) complex set of rules and behaviors that constitute the practice of legal punishment cannot persuasively be unified and coherent: legitimate features of the practice advance goals and promote values that in some cases conflict. (shrink)

The phenomenon of fallacy is directly related to the nature of the person himself and the environment in which he lives. Knowing in which situations and how people are wrong will greatly prevent them from making Fallacies. For this reason, one of the most important aims of religions is to bring their followers to the happiness in this world and the hereafter, to determine the Fallacies that people may fall into beforehand and to reveal their reasons and solutions. The religions (...) of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are basically divinely based religions based on oneness (tawḥīd). However, Judaism and Christianity have been distorted for various reasons and have come out of the creed of oneness. One of the main reasons for their distancing from this primary source is that they make Fallacies on many issues, insist on this and do not take the necessary studies for a realistic solution. Because it is not possible to eliminate the fallacy without identifying the causes and finding solutions. The human being in communication and interaction with the beings around him establishes connections with them and makes decisions by reaching some conclusions. Disturbances in these connections, which are based on previous knowledge and experience, may cause fallacies in humans. Since the Tanakh and the Bible are sacred texts with distortion dimensions, the connections established with these sources may lead people to false beliefs on some issues instead of saving them from their Fallacies. The biggest mistake of the People of the Book, which is also the source of others, is that they see themselves not as servants of Allah but as their sons, adopted sons and especially friends. This situation led them to the distortions that they are exempt from certain orders and prohibitions and that they will be treated with privilege on the day of reckoning, or only they can enter the Paradise or they will stay in Hell for a limited number of days. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that lead them to think like this is the statements about themselves in the holy books they distorted. However, the Qurʾān has clearly revealed that their belief that they will be punished for a short time in Hell is a mistake and the truth is not as they claim. One of the most important issues of the Christian faith is the belief in the Trinity, which is the subject of constant debate both in the Christian world and in the Islamic world. Christians' excessive love for Jesus led them to the mistake of seeing Jesus as a divine being sent to save people from original sin, by not assuming him a human being. These thoughts of theirs were rejected in many verses of the Qurʾān and it is emphasized that Jesus is the servant and messenger of Allah. Another important mistake of the People of the Book is claiming that they were descended from Prophet Abraham and claiming the supremacy of lineage and therefore they did not accept the invitation of the Prophet Mohammed. In our study, we have discussed some basic distortions in the light of the Qurʾān, such as thinking that they are the beloved servants of Allah, ascribing deity to other than Allah, saying that Allah is not generous and that Paradise belongs to them what the people of the Book have fallen into while distorting their religion. From this point of view, first of all, we tried to determine the factors that affect Jews and Christians to fall into distortion that is to make wrong decisions that may result in disaster both worldly and otherworldly. Next, we examined how these factors, which we determined, affect the decision-making process and voluntary behaviors of people. Finally, we tried to determine the distortions that the Qurʾān deals with and the solutions it offers to eliminate these distortions in terms of the People of the Book. Although the Qurʾān and tafsīr (exegesis of the Qurʾān) sources constitute the main axis of our study, we also benefited from the sources of science such as psychology, sociology and morality. Unfortunately, it is seen that the People of the Book do not accept the distortion despite all the evidences, they still continue to feel superiority and choice both in terms of material and lineage, which leads them to distortions, and they act according to their old beliefs and behaviors. In addition, the fact that some Muslims in the past and today are led to these distortions is an indicator of how important the issue is. (shrink)

In her later writings Jean Hampton develops an expressive theory of punishment she takes to be retributivist. Unlike Feinberg, Hampton claims wrongdoings as well as punishments are expressive. Wrongdoings assert that the victim is less valuable than victimizer. On her view we are obligated to punish because we are obligated to respond to this false assertion. Punishment expresses the moral truth that victim and wrongdoer are equally valuable. We argue that Hampton's argument would work only if she held (...) that exerting power over another provides evidence (albeit defeasible) of one's greater value. This is clearly a premise that neither she nor her readers are likely to accept. (shrink)

_Once Out of Nature_ offers an original interpretation of Augustine’s theory of time and embodiment. Andrea Nightingale draws on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and social history to analyze Augustine’s conception of temporality, eternity, and the human and transhuman condition. In Nightingale’s view, the notion of embodiment illuminates a set of problems much larger than the body itself: it captures the human experience of being an embodied soul dwelling on earth. In Augustine’s writings, humans live both in and out of (...) nature—exiled from Eden and punished by mortality, they are “resident aliens” on earth. While the human body is subject to earthly time, the human mind is governed by what Nightingale calls psychic time. For the human psyche always stretches away from the present moment—where the physical body persists—into memories and expectations. As Nightingale explains, while the body is present in the here and now, the psyche cannot experience self-presence. Thus, for Augustine, the human being dwells in two distinct time zones, in earthly time and in psychic time. The human self, then, is a moving target. Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints, by contrast, live outside of time and nature: these transhumans dwell in an everlasting present. Nightingale connects Augustine’s views to contemporary debates about transhumans and suggests that Augustine’s thought reflects our own ambivalent relationship with our bodies and the earth. _Once Out of Nature_ offers a compelling invitation to ponder the boundaries of the human. (shrink)