After his iconic studies of modern systems of thought and power, Michel Foucault abruptly refocused attention to ancient ‘cultures of the self’. Whether this sharp turn was denounced as insidiously neoliberal, or extolled as emancipatory ‘arts of self-fashioning’, the responses centred the ‘self’ for decades to come. In the meantime, the much-delayed publications of his later works allow for resituation of their significance beyond such typifications. This paper shifts emphasis from ‘self’ to ‘culture’, which Foucault not only explicitly redefined in ontological and axiological terms as social ethos but functionalized as intersubjective therapeutic practice and as a missing ‘hinge’ that links self to power. This definition explores what culture accomplishes existentially rather than what it is symbolically, and reconnects ‘forms’ of first-person experience to larger, ‘trans-historical’ themes of good life. This sociologically useful vocabulary underwrites what, following Edward Said, we call Foucault's ‘late style’.
This article is a critique of a critique. I argue that over the last 20 years, intersectionality has been included in various sectors: it clearly appeals to many people – not only in the academy, but also in the public domain, where it became a slogan or even a commodity. Unlike Bilge, I consider the width of intersectionality with its various interpretations as an important tool to asking ‘other questions’, and as a contribution to the understanding of global debates about racism and social inequality.
This paper argues that sociology's operational goal must be restricted to the production of factual knowledge, not extended to evaluating or changing the phenomena it studies or transforming society at large. In other words, its goal is defined by epistemic not practical values. At the same time, there are two roles which practical normative assumptions necessarily perform in sociological inquiry. First, they are involved in determining which research questions are worth investigating – this is Max Weber's concept of ‘value relevance’ or ‘value-relatedness’. Second, ethical and prudential considerations must regulate the pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination. However, neither of these roles involves committing research to a practical goal: value relevance frames the questions to be investigated, it does not make the conclusions of the research normative; meanwhile, ethical and prudential considerations act as an external constraint on the pursuit of inquiry rather than constituting its goal.
Foucault's intellectual legacy is vast, spanning a wide range of fields and analytical concerns. However, he has very little to say about one of the most important phenomena that has shaped modern world – nationalism. This article argues that the social dynamics of modernity and the transformation of collective subjectivities cannot be adequately understood without addressing processes of nation-formation. Since nationalism operates as the dominant organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional infrastructure of late modernity, the article examines what Foucault's fragmentary reflections on nationhood can contribute to understanding the contemporary social world. The article offers a critical assessment of poststructuralist approaches that conceptualise nationalism primarily as a grand metanarrative and it traces how Foucauldian analytical tools have been adapted and extended to engage with the realities of a deeply nation-centred global order. The article identifies key strengths and limitations of Foucauldian perspectives on nationalism and advances an alternative theoretical framework to explain its enduring potency. This framework emphasises the expanding coercive capacities of social organisations, their intensifying ideological penetration, and their increasing envelopment of micro-level solidarities.
Optimism is vital to doing sociology. I explain how pessimism and optimism have featured as orientations within sociology and argue for the continued importance of a critically optimistic sociology, especially in our troubled times. I propose that insights from the sociology of emotions can help sociologists in doing optimistic sociology by rethinking how to do critique and in understanding how present feelings inform actions that produce futures. Symbolic Interactionist ideas can also aid critical optimism by conceptualising feeling multiple selves as formed in changing relations to others. I envision critically optimistic sociology as a gentle, relational achievement that can resist capitalist appropriation of what feels good. Critical forms of optimism are important if sociologists are to contribute to teaching, and other forms of knowledge sharing, that can make sense of the present but also feel our way toward better days.
The Convivialist movement was founded over a decade ago in order to meet the challenges that our inherited modern political philosophies – liberalism, socialism, communism and anarchism – are no longer able to meet. Convivialism is a new political philosophy that aims to give a coherent answer to the most urgent problems of today. This new manifesto updates the diagnosis of the ecological, economic, ideological, anthropological, democratic and geostrategic challenges. It has been written in the hope of serving as a basis for discussion and as a possible starting point for debates between social movements from the North, South, East and West, to elaborate a solemn Declaration of General Interdependence.
While domestic civil spheres extend Lockean ties of mutual understanding, they often legitimate a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ among nations outside their national boundaries. As cultural trauma theory suggests, however, there is a sociological pathway for extending civil solidarity beyond the nation state, such that war between nations is prevented. The European Union underwent just such a process in the wake of the Second World War. Even as Civil Sphere Theory develops an empirical understanding of Kant's universalizing moral claims, the frustration of these claims in ‘actually existing’ civil spheres is conceptualized in a Hegelian manner – as generated by the fundamental contradictions of space, time, and function. These contradictions generate extraordinary strains inside and outside of nationally bounded civil spheres, triggering social movements for peace and justice.
This Further engagement article takes up Blok and Jensen's recent call, made through a Dialogues in Sociology Forum, to ‘invent around’ the work of Bruno Latour to highlight his continued relevance and contribution to the practice of sociology. It is proposed that one way in which Latour might be usefully invented around is by bringing his work, particularly on matters of concern, into greater relation with Alain Touraine's concept of social conflicts where knowledge and morals are contested. This is argued to represent a unique conversation between Latour and Touraine which indicates one means by which Latour's work can be useful, especially for the study of narratives, social movements, and the environment and climate. The Latour-Touraine framework created by this conversation could help sociologists identify and critically analyse dominant values, perceptions and practices specifically concerning human-Nature relationships as a novel focus, alongside possibilities to challenge and re-negotiate these in response to pressing environmental and climate crises.
The third Convivialist Manifesto advocates a coherent, balanced, humanist political philosophy. In rejecting pressures to confine ourselves to narrow empirical work and instead nailing its colours to a progressive future it acts as a beacon for politically engaged academics. This response raises concerns, however, about the authors’ vision of how convivialism should be employed. The project of assembling a global assembly of the good and the wise to agree on a convivialist philosophy seems impractical but also tangential to what the progressive movement needs. Could convivialism, instead, be a practical political philosophy, that can be used to resolve disagreements, build better policy solutions, and bring more people into the movements for climate justice and social justice?
This response article to Sirma Bilge's analysis of the 40 years of the discussion on intersectionality welcomes its core contribution, sounding an alarm around the tendency of academia to appropriate and dilute radical ideas and remain faithful to exploitative and oppressive power structures, despite using overtly ‘progressive’ sounding language. Bilge argues that in this historical conjuncture, intersectionality is not only co-opted but researchers using it actively perpetuate the racist-capitalist ‘intersectional empire’. Intersectionality serves as an illuminating case study due to its still growing popularity and the ease with which it lends itself to destructive forces and serves as a device to erase race, despite the original intention to highlight race in conjunction with other oppressive systems. Despite my overall appreciation of this alert, I find it questionable if it is reasonable to wish that any concept can reverse a wider trend in society. Somewhat narrow, even outdated, expectations as to what theory can and should do, are not the only currently available views on theory, and in such debates social science can afford disagreement, even at times of destruction. Nuance and detail, and a future orientation as well as contextualised empirical work, are suggested as next steps to move forward and stay alert to destructive uses of social sciences, with or without the need to engage with the specific term of intersectionality.
This brief reply reflects further on three inter-related questions raised in the thoughtful commentaries provided by my respondents. I argue: (i) that whilst they are right to caution against the dangers of a reductive materialism, we should not discard the analytical move which seeks to explain dominant forms of knowledge by reference to economic imperatives; (ii) that whilst critical attention to historical and cultural specificity is important, the materialist tradition offers us a way beyond the face-off between two forms of exceptionalism: that which fetishes Western historical experience, and that which responds by reifying ideas of colonial or indigenous alterity; (iii) that we can continue to learn from histories of political struggle which rejected dogmatic historical assumptions in favour of the hard graft of identifying correspondences, and nourishing solidarities, across and between different movements of resistance.
Adnrew Smith contends that postcolonial and decolonial thought have eschewed materialist analysis in favour of a preoccupation with language and epistemology. He suggests that there are materialist tendencies in anticolonial thought that better explain these pre-occupations, while also providing resources to confront contemporary capitalist imperialism. In response, I note that anticolonial thought contains both materialist and culturalist resources that together helped construct large-scale movements that dismantled colonial rule. I call for a decoupling of ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ thought, and argue that the former has been concerned with political economy that is lacking in the latter approach. I outline a materialist framework to understand the rise of postcolonial and decolonial approaches in the academy. I conclude that, as in the case of anticolonial nationalism, a pooling together of cultural and materialist resources underpins contemporary movements confronting capitalist imperialism, whose ‘singular logic’ of economic exploitation has historically failed as an inclusive and effective banner of counterhegemonic political mobilisation.
This commentary responds to Andrew Smith's ‘What post-colonial sociology forgets: Recovering the materialist tradition of anti-colonial critique’. It argues that, rather than being forgotten, the key figures that populate this tradition have become hegemonic in ways that have made them vulnerable to capture by antagonistic ideological tendencies. The argument is illustrated with reference to contemporary invocations of the work of Ngũgı˜ wa Thiong’o in neoliberal and fascist appropriations of ‘decolonisation’. It then suggests that while Smith frames the key tension between materialist and post/decolonial sociology in terms of a temporal sequencing of knowledge and power, his dichotomous framing neglects a third possibility in which knowledge neither anticipates nor follows power but is imbricated with it in a relationship that is better thought of as dialectical.
The essay offers an evaluation of the legacy of the writings of Jürgen Habermas. In part personal, it considers the fate of critical theory, especially in light of Habermas's turn to normative political philosophy. I argue that the core of his work was to find normative foundations of reason in human communication, which is open-ended but fragile. The guiding thread in his writings was that truth claims are implicit in communication and are what enables critique, providing it with its conditions of possibility. This is ultimately what allows human beings to transcend historical experience and what provides them with a constant orientation to the future. The distinctive achievement of his work was a conception of modernity as the expansion in the reach of reason, such that domination is constantly challenged by people demanding justifications for the exercise of power. The threads of reason are interwoven into the fabric of social life, enabling people to challenge power. However, despite the sociological importance of this perspective, his later work despite its unquestionable value for deliberative democratic theory lacked engagement with pressing political problems and social struggles.
This article is a brief, retrospective overview of key deliberations within afro-pessimism with an eye toward how sociologists have, and can continue to engage with the paradigm. The anchoring theoretical and epistemological puzzle for the article is whether and how afro-pessimism can be used for sociological analysis of race within the latest technological transformations in artificial intelligence and computational power. To think through this puzzle, I examine the epistemological basis of criticisms of political ontology to argue for the ongoing necessity of the concept to critically complement empiricist study of anti-blackness. By examining recent work coming from Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, I argue that academic conversations stemming from afropessimism have begun to grapple with the racial implications of the increased role that the computational sphere could play in social life. In doing so, I conclude that it is possible, and increasingly necessary to recuperate political ontology as a means to pointedly interrogate how anti-blackness may function without Black populations.
Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2026) recent contribution to the comprehension of how warfare relates to what he conceptualises as ‘civil spheres’ rather strikingly and unexpectedly puts centre-stage The Eumenides , the final play of ancient Athenian tragedian Aeschylus’ Oristeia trilogy. What Alexander might construe as the Athenian civil sphere was at its symbolic foundation made dramatically and rhetorically compatible by Aeschylus with potentially vicious and violent relations with other polities. The problem here may go beyond the making compatible of apparent incompatibles: civility as it occurs within the polity and possibly radical incivility between polities. It may also be that the former is dependent upon the latter as a condition of its possibility. If there is a dark side to modernity, there is also a dark side to Greek antiquity's possible imaginings of what civility is, even in what we might take as its most apparently democratic dimensions. This paper situates Alexander's treatment of Aeschylus within the history of interpretations of the Oristeia , to encourage the author and others to take analysis of Aeschylean themes further for Civil Sphere and other kinds of social theory. The contingent rather than necessary dependence of civil spheres on warfare is emphasised.
In his war essay, Jeffrey C. Alexander ties cultural sociology and civil sphere theory together in a tragic account of violence and war throughout the ages. The application of the precepts of cultural sociology, most notably the binary code, leads him to a rather Hobbesian vision of anarchy in internal relations. Drawing on Johan Galtung's peace research, the article enjoins Alexander to shift the analysis from a culture of war to a culture of peace.
This article explores Albert Piette's idea of non-ethnography, which suggests that anthropology should shift its focus from relying on ethnography and assumptions of social relationality to concentrating on human existence as a unique entity – a volume of being. By situating this idea within sociological debates on individuality, structure, and analytical scale, the article investigates the epistemological implications of Piette's concept of ‘extraction’ in response to critiques about reductionism and decontextualization. Engaging with phenomenology and the tradition of interpretive sociology, this article argues that attempts to completely separate individuals from social relations encounter significant epistemological challenges, as human existence inevitably occurs within structured social contexts. Analysing works focused on individual lives shows that relationality does not necessarily obscure singularity; instead, it can be a condition that makes it analytically visible. Rather than being viewed as a strict disciplinary alternative, non-ethnography is proposed as a complementary analytical approach that temporarily sets aside structural explanations to enhance individual descriptions before reflexively reintegrating them into relational analysis. In this way, the article positions non-ethnography as a theoretical provocation, encouraging the social sciences to reconsider their foundational assumptions regarding the relationship between individuals and social structures.
Can civil spheres extend beyond the nation state? This question lies behind the essay written by Jeffrey C. Alexander that reconstructs ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’. This article argues that the twenty-first century and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine teach us that freedom and democracy, but also war and trauma, are intricately entangled with both nation-bound and transnational civil spheres in wartime Europe. Uncivil events such as war and trauma can give rise to civil spheres, which remain fragile and vulnerable if not safeguarded by institutions. Ukraine's defence, resilience and solidarity, however, show that civil spheres can extend beyond the nation state – and that civil sphere theory could be at the nucleus of a contemporary sociology of international relations and transnational complexity.
In ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’, offers a meditation framed by civil sphere theory to explore what is necessary for effectively combatting interstate war and related forms of violence, doing so by discussing both the historical origins of civil society and the matter of boundaries in limiting the exercise of civic power beyond a state's borders. Agreeing with Alexander's assessment, this reflection stresses the agonistic character of the perpetual struggle between peacemakers and warmakers and the increased dangers to humanity resulting from the new weapons of war made possible by the Military-Industrial Complex. It concludes by highlighting the centrality of law if civil power is to trump warrior culture, and if democracy is to offer a path to a more peaceful world.
