Daniel Little
Izabela Wagner, author of Bauman: A Biography, is Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas (Poland) and fellow at Institute Convergence Migration (Paris). Thank you, Izabela, for this invaluable and insightful guest post! The Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman By Izabela Wagner Thank you, Dan Little, for your inspiring comment and questions. I want to mention a couple …
Continue reading "Guest post by Izabela Wagner on Zygmunt Bauman"
A recent post featured the evolution of the thought of Zygmunt Bauman. There I mentioned a comparison with his Warsaw contemporary, Leszek KoĊakowski, and suggested that KoĊakowski's break with Stalinism was earlier and more profound than Bauman's. I am not able to find a full-length biography of KoĊakowski, but his history parallels that of Bauman. …
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was an influential voice in the world of sociological theorizing. In the second part of his career -- following his expulsion as a dissident and a Jew from Poland in 1968 -- he came to be recognized as a non-conventional thinker about "modernity" and the modern world. His idea of "liquid modernity" …
Paul Roth is distinguished professor of philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Roth has written extensively on the philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and the history of analytic philosophy. His most recent book is The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (Northwestern, 2019). Thank you, Paul, for this substantive contribution. (Interested readers …
Continue reading "Guest post by Paul Roth on Neil Gross’s Richard Rorty"
A recent post comments on the value of biography as a source of insight into history and thought. Currently I am reading Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), which I am finding fascinating both for its portrayal of the evolution of a brilliant and unconventional mathematician as well as the honest efforts Hodges makes to describe …
I have always found biographies a particularly interesting source of learning and stimulation. A recent example is a biography and celebration of Muthuvel Kalaignar Karunanidhi published in a recent issue of the Indian semi-weekly Frontline. Karunanidhi was an enormously important social and political leader in India for over sixty years in the Dravidian movement in …
Here is a very interesting short piece by Pierre Bourdieu on the topic of biography, "L'Illusion biographique," that is very relevant to the prior post. (Thanks, Denis!) Here Bourdieu takes issue with common sense on the subjects of the self and the nature of biography. Here is the commonsense understanding that he rejects: the idea …
A biography is a narrative of a person's life. The biographer wants to tell the story of how the subject made it from childhood to adulthood; how he or she came to undertake certain actions in life; how various personal aspirations and commitments were played out in terms of extended projects with varying levels of …
Jeremy Adelman's detailed and illuminating biography of Albert Hirschman in Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman is an excellent example of intellectual biography. Even more, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of social science theories and frameworks. Born to a professional Jewish family in Berlin in 1915, Hirschman's …
I had the opportunity to have lunch with Mayer Zald in July last summer, a few weeks before his death. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but one segment in particular warrants publishing here. In this segment I asked Mayer how he thought about the connections among social psychology, organizational behavior, and social movements theory in the …
Continue reading "Mayer Zald on his development as a sociologist"
Understanding Society 