2008. vol. 7. No. 2

Philip Smith is one of the main followers of the “strong program in cultural sociology”. Along with Jeffrey C. Alexander, he is a co-author of a number of works which are constitutive for the tradition itself. Several of those are the strong program in cultural sociology “manifesto”; some texts which affirm late-Durkheimian program to be productive theoretical resource as well as history of the sociology fact; review of the second English translation of the “Elementary Forms” by Emile Durkheim. The work is representing a theory-oriented research of French revolution punishment technologies. It involves an analysis of expert and mass discourse concerning the guillotine as a regime’s crucial symbolic representation. Cultural sociological reasoning is opposed to Foucault-inspired theoretical tradition which is dominant in criminology and the sociology of punishment.

A translation of Michel de Certeau’s celebrated piece of urban analysis is published for the first time in Russian. The author opposes the gaze of planners and managers gaze, their power to render city transparent – to practical, tactile knowledge of the city of those who inhabit it. Those who walk in the city employ a peculiar set of “walking rhetoric” and transform, through myths and memories, the planned and readable city into migrational and metaphoric one. 

In the introduced fragments of the book by famous Italian philosopher G. Agamben some key symbolic figures of modernity or rather postmodern which are brought into a focus of sociality are considered. Because of his non-classical approach originally developing concepts of «waste» by G. Bataille and «inoperative community» by J.-L. Nancy, Agamben succeeds to show the necessity of radical de-ontologization of general clenches of social contemporaneity – «body», «language», «community», as a way of its shared re-reading. Re-reading within the community. The sketch of such a re-reading is proposed in the book.

The paper written by Evelyn Tennant “Locating Transnational Activists. The United States Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Confines of the National” considers the problem of how different aspects of national, transnational and local action influence the study of social movements. By analyzing the USA anti-apartheid movement, the author suggests a new perspective for such kind of research. Firstly Tennant presents the general theoretical scope of the research, after that she turns to consideration of the historical examples. In conclusion, the author considers some general techniques, technologies and translocal circulations.

The issues of changing political life due to peculiar organization of social life in a contemporary city are the prominent themes for the article. The flows of immigrants into European cities alter the features of their political landscape and encourage emergence of the new kind of political subjects. The latter Barlett calls Political Selves. They are built up in the process of political identification and demarcation of Self and Other basing on the difference in ideas, beliefs and political orientations. The later developments in technologies, especially communicative ones, makes possible for those subjects to affect actively any political process in any place of the world staying in large European cities.

This text is a synopsis of the article “Ghetto cosmopolitanism. Making theory at the margins by Rami Nashashibi, witch was published in the book “Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scalings and Subjects”, edited by Saskia Sassen. In that article author shows, by the example of postindustrial American slum ghetto, how ghetto becomes cosmopolitan, through the spreading of Islam and hip-hop culture.

In article attempt of systematization of sociological concepts of the power in T. Parsons's structural functionalism, N. Luhmann's system theory and R. Munch's neofunctionalism is undertaken. It is shown, that these three concepts are united by the notion of the power as symbolically generalized intermediary in social interaction. The power problematic as instability and fluctuations of power relations is revealed and by terms of inflation and deflation is described.

The translation of classical essay, the first chapter of Weber’s work «Economy and Society». Weber constructs the system of sociological categories, beginning with the concept «action» and finishing with concepts «unity» and «state».