I have just finished what I regard as an excellent volume of analyses and reflections on capitalism and its future by a group of sociology’s big hitters, namely, Immanual Wallerstein, Rndall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. It’s called Does Capitalism Have a Future? Ok, so theyre all ageing white males, but as… Read More »
A little over a week ago I asked a question on twitter, curious as to how people would respond. I gave people a week to respond. The question and responses were as follows: ‘If a sociologist set out to study whether those identifying as Jewish are under- or over-represented among British elites, would this be… Read More »
Surprisingly often ideas advance, theses refined, by serendipitous means. So it is in this case. I have just finished Michiko Kakutani’s excellent The Death of Truth, a discourse on our present era, one which has been understandably characterized as ‘post-truth’. In most of my publications, and blogs too, I have short-changed culture, so keen have… Read More »
I have to date blogged some 70+ fragments of ‘sociological autobiography’. They are, as my father would have said, ‘mixed pickles’. The rationale for the rubric was that I intended from the outset to temper chronology and events with bouts of introspection and reflection, and given that I have long been a sociologist, these would… Read More »
Every now and again – most recently in the excellent Does Capitalism Have a Future?, featuring a star casting of Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian and Calhoun – I come across references to Kondratiev waves. Maybe it’s age but I often forget its detail. So I thought a blog to remind myself, and possibly others, might… Read More »
In February 2007 I received an unexpected email from Selwyn College Cambridge inviting me to attend a formal, black-tie dinner and give an after-dinner speech. I had at it happens spoken at an array of Cambridge Colleges, including a formal lecture at St John’s, but only to deliver standard sociological fare. This was different. I… Read More »
Blogs to my mind allow for an interlude of ‘thinking out loud’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that the blog I intended to write when I turned on my laptop has already been superceded. The reason for this is sheer frustration at the level of ineptitude and, far more seriously, of corruption in… Read More »
The point I’ve reached in this ‘sociological autobiography’ was one of flux and change. I had managed to work my way around what had been presented to me by Stan Newman as an attempt to get me out of UCL – though all was later mired in confusion – and Graham Hart had welcomed me… Read More »
I have not (yet) written on Lacan, who has been a catalyst for much social and sociological thought. Luce Irigaray studied with Lacan before developing her own influential feminist standpoint. I shall as ever in these ‘taster blogs’ have to abbreviate my exposition. The feminine, Irigaray maintained, cannot be captured, represented or symbolised adequately under… Read More »
Stuff often happens more or less by chance. I haven’t thought seriously about Poulantzas since my undergraduate days in the late 1960s (when he was on a few reading lists). At the back of my mind, however, has been Bob Jessop’s admiration for Poulantzas’ analyses of the state. Then the other day, serendipitously, I came… Read More »