Contemporary liberal democracies are seeing a surge of nihilistic violent extremism, a form of hostility that existing theories of political violence struggle to explain. This article argues that Erich Fromm's neglected social-psychological theory of destructiveness offers crucial resources for understanding this phenomenon. We revisit and systematically update Fromm's distinction between reactive and malignant destructiveness, situating it within recent empirical research on the Need for Chaos and national collective narcissism. Drawing on this reconstruction, we develop a heuristic typology of destructive affects distinguishing situational, social, dispositional and ontological forms of destructiveness. This typology allows disparate phenomena of destructiveness to be analysed within a common framework, sensitising research to hybrid forms and transitions. It enables a more precise sociological account of hostile affects in liberal democracies, capturing both the structural conditions under which destructiveness emerges and the affective logics through which it is mobilised.
Drawing on Bernard Lahire's sociological approach to dreams and revisiting its critical dialogue with Bourdieu, this article presents dreaming as an involuntary modality of reflexivity: an internal communication in which the subject reflects on existential concerns experienced in waking life. Like other forms of reflexivity—from artistic self-expression to reflections articulated on the psychoanalytic couch—dreaming constitutes a “deferred elaboration” of significant issues triggered in prior experience but insufficiently elaborated due to the intrusion of the “urgencies of practice” in everyday social life. The conceptualization of dreaming as reflexivity builds on pragmatist notions of “imaginative rehearsal” and “internal conversation,” as well as on phenomenology's contrast between dreaming and the “paramount reality” of ordinary life. Conceived as part of a research program on modes of reflexivity, the sociology of dreams emerges not only as an application of, but also as a central contributor to sociological accounts of human subjectivity.
This article argues that the genocide in Gaza should raise foundational questions for social theory, engendering a radical re-evaluation of fundamental questions about knowledge, the age of colonial modernity, and decolonization. Drawing on decolonial theorists and studies, I focus on what lived realities of Palestinians can teach social theory about the defining features of this stage in the age of colonial modernity, as well as the contours of a path towards decolonization. My argument is less about “decolonizing social theory,” and more about asking: what does the devastation of Palestinians tell social theorists about fundamental concepts for understanding the world, and what can it teach theorists about an alternative mode of theorizing that aims towards a cessation of colonial devastation, one that moves away from the age of colonial modernity, and charts an alternative to it.
I present a brief and plea for historicist-analytical sociology. Analytical because it seeks to logically break down reality and the arguments developed to capture it into their constituent elements, planks, cogs and wheels; historicist because it takes time, discontinuity and contingency seriously; it digs into the specificity of empirical objects; and it strives to retrieve forsaken lateral possibilities in the unfolding course of events. I bring Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu together to articulate the six principles guiding this epistemological-methodological approach: (1) eschew the logic of the trial which seeks to establish responsibility and attribute culpability to social agents and institutions (social scientists are not moralists); (2) differentiate folk from analytic constructs; (3) define your concepts clearly and formulate your theory expressly; (4) disaggregate phenomena by breaking them down into their baseline constituents; (5) search for mechanisms, that is, recurrent processes producing, reproducing or transforming the phenomenon of interest; (6) heed temporality, detect discontinuities and specify counterfactuals. Historicity and analyticity are commonly seen as antagonists, the one wedded to the search for concrete specificity and the other geared toward abstract generality. I argue instead that they are moments of social analysis and that they can be practically brought together into a tensionful hitch driving the carriage of inquiry, and that this tension can be epistemically fruitful.
When social theory seeks to explain violence, it often faces a recurrent suspicion: that understanding its causes, contexts, or meanings amounts to excusing it. This article takes that suspicion seriously, but subjects it to conceptual reconstruction. Its aim is not to decide when violence may be morally permissible, but to clarify what happens when explanation, understanding, condemnation, justification, legitimation, and excuse become conflated in public debate. Through a series of distinctions, the argument shows that making violence intelligible does not mean making it acceptable. Yet the conflation is not accidental: it becomes persuasive when moral condemnation seeks to preserve itself as absolute rejection and perceives any contextualization as a threat. The most decisive case is excuse, because explanations can provide materials relevant to assessing responsibility without themselves amounting to exoneration. The article thus defends a critical intelligibility of violence: thinking the intolerable without neutralizing its condemnation.
In this interview, Isaac Ariail Reed discusses the place of theory in contemporary sociology and the conceptual trajectory that connects interpretation, explanation, power, and modernity in his work. Starting from his intellectual formation and his engagement with the Strong Program in cultural sociology, the conversation revisits Interpretation and Social Knowledge and its account of theory as a set of abstract languages for constructing interpretations. It then examines how the problem of interpretive explanation led Reed toward a multidimensional theory of power in Power in Modernity , centered on agency relations, delegation, authorship, and responsibility. The interview also addresses Reed's current research on artists and architecture in Las Vegas, a project that challenges established readings of the city as a postmodern simulacrum. It closes with a reflection on theory as conceptual labor: an effort to work on concepts, making them more portable and sharpening their capacity to make better sense of social life.
Theories of institutional change explain persistence and transformation through adaptive efficiency, path dependence, distributive conflict or gradual drift. This article argues that these approaches remain incomplete when, within a historically available institutional horizon, binding institutional choices must give form to constitutive claims that cannot be fully co-realised. Such choices produce not only costs, winners or losers, but a constitutive loss whose socially organised afterlife is institutional residue. The article distinguishes the tragic structure of the originating choice from the subsequent life of the residue, which may sustain grief, critique, learning, reparation and future change. It interprets residue as a stratified component of institutions and distinguishes three strategies of residue management: encapsulation, displacement and recursive contestation. It thus proposes a middle-range theory of socio-institutional change as the conflictual management of unabsorbed losses.
This article asks how the label ‘grand theory’ has been used in the history of sociology and uses its findings to offer an argument about the nature of sociological inquiry. It discusses two episodes, which involve a demarcation against ‘grand theory’ on strikingly similar terms: The term was initially used to reject Parsons’ structural functionalism after World War 2 and was also applied to Marxism in this period. These arguments were anticipated in reactions to Comte and Spencer and to the philosophy of history in the founding of German sociology in the late nineteenth century. I argue that the patterns underlying the meanings ascribed to ‘grand theory’ enable a better understanding of the instability (or unique pluralism) often attributed to sociology: The rejection of a range of internal tendencies as ‘grand theory’ provides a foundation to the discipline, but one that requires constant navigation between different ‘others’ of open-ended inquiry.
Failure is often perceived as negative, destructive, and demoralising to all things utopian. Indeed, charges of failure routinely confront utopian experiments in living. But whilst failure is a key part of utopian thinking and projects, we still lack a sufficiently nuanced and focused account of its different purposes and affordances. This introduction highlights how the Special Issue on Utopia and Failure addresses this lacuna by interrogating three overarching research questions: To what extent have utopias provided imagined spaces of escape from failure – for individuals and groups – by offering alternatives to the success/failure dyad of competitive mainstream society? How is the propensity for failure incorporated, deliberately or unintentionally, into different utopian projects, from social experiments to the built environment? In what ways may we think differently about failure, by engaging with various utopian practices, ambitions and projects from the past and the present? This Special Issue is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Utopia and Failure network, that hosted four events between 2023 and 2026. In addition to introducing the papers, this introduction discusses the everyday work of these workshops and their creation of temporary utopian communities of academic practice.
This article critically examines French pragmatic sociology and how it can operate as an analytical framework for understanding human-animal relations. While pragmatic sociology specifically accounts for nonhuman elements, it grounds its approach in the notion of common humanity, which excludes nonhuman animals. After identifying this tension, the article contrasts common humanity to the critique animal rights theorizing has directed at such humanistic starting points. This alternative form of commonality, promoted by animal rights, is based on sentience. Instead of focusing on various nonhumans in general, commonality based on sentience focuses on the shared capacities between humans and nonhuman animals. Following this, the article examines how the boundaries of such sentient commonality are demarcated and how sentience could operate in situational justifications. The article concludes that pragmatic sociology holds the potential to work as a promising analytical framework for analyzing human-animal relations if it can account for this new form of commonality.
Recent commentaries increasingly identify threats to liberal democracy posed by new authoritarianisms, populisms, nationalisms and super-rich elites, with historical parallels made with the rise of fascism in 20th century Germany and elsewhere. This article frames these threats within a sociological, materialist and micropolitical analysis of the interactions between contemporary capitalism and liberal democracy. In place of extensive yet unresolved debates in political philosophy, political science and political sociology over whether liberal democracy and capitalism are complementary or competitive social formations, it applies a post-Deleuzian ethological and micropolitical analysis, to explore the social capacities of liberal democracy, capitalism and the capitalist state. It first offers a monist analysis of the pivotal role of the capitalist state and establishes an ethology of the assemblages of capitalism and liberal democracy. Then the article explores the micropolitics of threats to capitalist liberal democracy via two case studies on terrorist attacks on minority ethnic groups and the rise of platform capitalism. The insights gleaned from these analyses supplies a basis from which to evaluate sociologically the contemporary challenges to liberal democracy.
This paper offers a theoretical framework to study the circulation of (grand) theory, based on the hypothesis that theory does not circulate on its own but is mediated through social agents (individuals and institutions), and that its circulation follows certain regular patterns. This framework furthers Bourdieu's analysis of the social conditions for the international circulation of ideas, as well as the sociology of translation developed by the author. The article first addresses importation strategies and types of theory appropriation. Five types are distinguished: paradigm shift; creation of a new (sub)field; resolving scientific questions related to controversies; appropriation as a “research program” (Lakatos); and creation of new concepts. The second section focuses on the role of intermediaries, translators, and mediators in the making of world authorship, through translations, commentaries, and citations. The final section analyzes a set of factors that favor or impede the circulation of theory: linguistic asymmetries in the translation market; unequal power relations within the transnational academic field and the disciplinary fields; unequal power relations within the transnational publishing field; social properties and symbolic capital of the author; and properties of the book itself. Most examples are drawn from sociology, but other disciplines are also evoked.
