Collective Action and Political Transformations

Mota, Aurea; Wagner, Péter

doi:10.1515/9781474442985

Cited by 7 publications

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“…That achievement is also why their subsequent transformations create a nostalgia for the recent past in many observers, including critical theorists (for a reflection see Offe, 2010). However, while it was not normally overlooked that this region was only a small part of a globe that elsewhere fell significantly short of such achievement, it was conveniently ignored that the Northwest European achievement was to a considerable degree based on a constellation that undermined similar achievements elsewhere by externalizing ‘costs’, reaching from social inequality to climate change (Lessenich, 2016; Stråth and Wagner, 2017; Mota and Wagner, 2019; Wagner, 2019b).…”

Section: The Temporal Ordering Of the World: The Direction Of Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?

Wagner

2023

Thesis Eleven

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Johann Arnason’s work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political philosophy, drawing creatively on the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Invariably, his works introduce more nuance and sophistication into the analysis of even very well studied socio-historical phenomena. At the same time, he addresses such major phenomena in terms of modernity, democracy and capitalism, agreeing that there often – maybe always – is a combination of empirical, conceptual and normative issues at work when analysing human history. Nevertheless, readers of his work may at the same time be impressed by the nuance and sophistication and at a loss with regard to what such further refinement of our socio-historical knowledge entails in terms of understanding our own time in its historical context. Searching through Johann Arnason’s work, this article identifies unexplored questions in the conceptual and historical relation between civilization, modernity, and equality and tries to understand why they have been left open.

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Section: The Temporal Ordering Of the World: The Direction Of Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?

Wagner

2023

Thesis Eleven

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“…In Western Europe, emigration limited the population (growth), and industrialization concentrated workers in factories and facilitated their organization. In regions of European settlement, in contrast, the divide between the (descendants of) settlers and the indigenous and (in some countries) slave population became reinforced, and hierarchical command at workplaces was enforced against a background of abundant ‘labour supply’ (Mota & Wagner, 2019). Claims for equality were in both settings combined with calls for democracy, as a means to enforce the will of the majority.…”

Section: The World-historical Background: Equality and The Energy Dividementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 5. A key question across different approaches has been whether the situation in other regions mirrors the one of the West, possibly with a time-lag (critically discussed by Chakrabarty, 2021, ch. 4); deviates from it either for institutional reasons (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012) or through systemic dependency (as in world-systems and dependency theory); or shows a parallel yet entangled trajectory (Mota & Wagner, 2019). …”

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confidence: 99%

The triple problem displacement: Climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration

Wagner

2022

European Journal of Social Theory

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Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations since the middle of the 20th century, which have been referred to as the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the use of biophysical resources and in environmental degradation. It provides an analysis of the socio-political mechanisms that brought the resource-intensive path of social development about, showing how Western democratic societies tended to ‘solve’ difficult social problems by means of a triple displacement: onto other societies; onto nature and the planet; and into the future. As an unintended consequence, this displacement politics led to the globalization of resource-intensive development and to a planetary situation in which, at least as it appears in much of current debate, no further displacement is possible. The article concludes with insights for a more adequate approach to social phenomena of large scale and long duration in social theory.

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Modernity

Wagner¹

2020

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory

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Collective Action and Political Transformations

Cited by 7 publications

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Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?

Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?

The triple problem displacement: Climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration

Modernity

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