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Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences
This book examines the nature of totalitarianism as interpreted by some of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was an entirely unprecedented regime and that the social sciences had integrally misconstrued it. A sociologist who is a critical admirer of Arendt, Baehr looks sympathetically at Arendt's objections to social science and shows that her complaints were in many respects justified.
Avoiding broad disciplinary endorsements or dismissals, Baehr reconstructs the theoretical and political stakes of Arendt's encounters with prominent social scientists such as David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. In presenting the first systematic appraisal of Arendt's critique of the social sciences, Baehr examines what it means to see an event as unprecedented. Furthermore, he adapts Arendt and Aron's philosophies to shed light on modern Islamist terrorism and to ask whether it should be categorized alongside Stalinism and National Socialism as totalitarian.
eBook
Hong Kong Universities in the Shadow of the National Security Law
How did Hong Kong’s transition from a largely free, semi-independent city to a full-blown Communist Party dictatorship affect its academic life? A watershed moment was Beijing’s imposition, in June 2020, of a National Security Law. The author examines the impact of that law on the conduct of university senior managements, on local and expatriate faculty, and on students. Senior management responded to the new law by disciplining students, monitoring faculty, and cleansing universities of anything deemed hostile to the new order. Faculty rapidly capitulated to government and management edicts, though locals showed more grit than expatriates did. Students were the most defiant actors of all until university managements severed ties with their students’ unions, effectively defunding them. A case of surveillance in Lingnan University, the author’s former place of employment, is related and its implications considered. The author describes how, and explains why, journalists in Hong Kong acted with greater defiance than professors did. He suggests that Identity Politics, a Western import, is congenial to Chinese Communist Party rule in Hong Kong.
Journal Article
The image of the veil in social theory
Social theory draws energy not just from the concepts it articulates but also from the images it invokes. This article explores the image of the veil in social theory. Unlike the mask, which suggests a binary account of human conduct (what is covered can be uncovered), the veil summons a wide range of human experiences. Of special importance is the veil's association with religion. In radical social thought, some writers ironize this association by \"unveiling\" religion as fraudulent (a move indistinguishable from unmasking it.) Baron d'Holbach and Marx offer classic examples of this stratagem. But other writers, notably Du Bois and Fanon, take a more nuanced and more theoretically productive approach to both religion and the veil. Refusing to debunk religion, these authors treat the veil—symbol and material culture—as a resource to theorize about social conflict. Proceeding in three stages, I, first, contrast the meanings of mask and unmasking with more supple veil imagery; second, identify anti-religious unveiling that is tantamount to unmasking; and, third, examine social theories of the veil that clarify the stakes of social adversity and political struggle. Du Bois's and Fanon's contributions to veil imagery receive special attention.
Journal Article
The \Iron Cage\ and the \Shell as Hard as Steel\: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the \"iron cage.\" This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the \"shell as hard as steel\": a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which \"steel\" becomes emblematic of modernity. Steel, unlike the \"element\" iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a \"shell\" suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's \"iron cage\" as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a \"traveling idea,\" a fertile coinage in its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers.
Journal Article
Out of Frankfurt: A Response to Critics of The Unmasking Style in Social Theory
This article responds to appraisals of
The Unmasking Style in Social Theory
(Baehr,
2019
). Critics of the book point to missed opportunities, arcane interests, and overstatements of the book’s central thesis. A structural sociology of unmasking is proposed. A cultural pragmatics of unmasking is recommended. The reply offers clarifications of the style, discusses the unmasking technique of elongation, and considers ways to mitigate unmasking in classroom teaching. Topics discussed include the limits of transparency and the hyperbole of “white privilege.”
Journal Article
The Anthem companion to Hannah Arendt
'The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt' offers the best contemporary work on Hannah Arendt, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Arendt students and scholars alike. 'Anthem Companions to Sociology' offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
eBook
The Honored Outsider: Raymond Aron as Sociologist
Raymond Aron (1905-1983) assumed many guises over a long and fruitful career: journalist, polemicist, philosopher of history, counselor to political leaders and officials, theorist of nuclear deterrence and international relations. He was also France's most notable sociologist. While Aron had especially close ties with Britain, a result of his days in active exile there during the Second World War, he was widely appreciated in the United States too. His book Main Currents in Sociological Thought was hailed a masterpiece; more generally, Aron's books were extensively reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review (in earlier days, it hosted a review section), Contemporary Sociology, and Social Forces. And he was admired and cited by sociologists of the stature of Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and David Riesman. Yet despite appearing well poised to become a major force in international sociology, analogous to his younger collaborator, Pierre Bourdieu, Aron has almost vanished from the sociological landscape. This article explains why, offering in the process some observations on the conditions—conceptual and motivational—of reputational longevity in sociological theory and showing how Aron failed to meet them. Special attention is devoted to a confusing equivocation in Aron's description of sociology and to the cultural basis of his ambivalence toward the discipline.
Journal Article
STALINISM IN RETROSPECT: HANNAH ARENDT
Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Amont students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of \"the social\" in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid-to-late 1940s? \"Stalinism in Retrospect,\" her contribution to Columbia University's Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt's foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the \"whole taste\" of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. \"Stalinism in Retrospect\" documents Arendt's arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar's participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter's National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt's argument.
Journal Article
