2020. vol. 19. No. 2

The paper highlights the context and the main points of the speech given by Max Weber at the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis in September, 1904. It analyzes Weber’s views on the dynamics of social change as presented by the German classic in the shape of the comparative historical sociology of the European and American versions of modernity. The first part of the article covers the background and the most significant episodes of the trip to the United States undertaken by Max Weber and his wife Marianne. The second part of the article elucidates the main points of Weber’s speech in St. Louis. The third part examines the observations and conclusions of the specifics of American modernity made by Weber through his direct acquaintance with life in the United States. In conclusion, the paper proposes a brief analysis of Weber’s contribution to the development of historical sociology’s ideas about the nature and pathways of Western modernity.

This publication is the translation of the speech “The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Sciences” given by Max Weber at the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis (Missouri, USA) in September, 1904. In this speech, Weber examines several prevailing themes that are characteristic for his understanding of modernity. The first of them — the narrowest one — is related to the transformation of the agrarian sector of Germany, and the significance of the “agrarian question” for the historical destinies of the German nation in the context of differences between the east, west, and south regions of the country. The second important topic of the speech is the analysis of the general dynamics in the formation and development of modernity in Europe against the backdrop of the confrontation between two structural principles, defined by Weber as “tradition” and “capitalism”. Finally, the third prevailing topic covered in the speech is a comparative analysis of European and American modernity, substantiated by the German classic in the shape of comparative historical sociology.

The article of a well-known German social theorist Friedrich Tenbruck, which once provoked a heated debate among Weberian scholars, analyzes the works of Max Weber in terms of their thematic structure and general heuristics. The first section reconstructs the genesis and content of the idea that Economy and Society was the main work of the classic German scholar of sociology, an idea that was initially made popular among scholars by Marianne Weber. The second part is devoted to disenchantment as a fundamental process in the history of religion, the discovery of which is traditionally attributed to Weber’s famous work The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. The third part analyzes the broad conceptual field used by Max Weber to study Western rationalization. The fourth part critically analyzes the thesis of Western rationalization as Weber’s main, life-long topic, the thesis which was originally introduced by Reinhard Bendix. In the fifth part, an attempt is made to determine the exact place of Economic Ethics of the World Religions in the overall structure of Weber’s work. In the sixth part, the processes of Western rationalization are placed within the general context of Weber’s conception of the universal history understood as a field of tension between ideas and interests. The final section emphasizes the importance of Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion, with Economic Ethics of the World Religions in particular as the core of his entire mature sociology. It also poses the question of the problematic nature of various Weberian notions for contemporary sociology, and points out the persisting validity of Weber’s sociological diagnosis of the time for the analysis of current problems in the perspective of a world-wide historical significance.

The article analyzes the most significant properties of the dispute about Weber caused by attempts to “reconstruct” Weberian heritage in cultural-anthropological and liberal “paradigms”. It appears that Weber's theory of domination causes an implicit tension, which calls the canonization of Weber as a “classic” of institutionalized sociology into question. The cultural-anthropological “reconstruction” of Weber’s heritage is characterized by meta-theorizing on the basis of conceptual universalia, which fundamentally contradicts the main provisions of Weber’s understanding (interpretative) sociology in both the substantive and methodological aspects. The “paradigm” of the neoliberal utopia split into two camps: the former ignores Weber’s understanding of sociology as a scientific discipline, while the latter, is characterized by attempts to “distill” his legacy for the needs of the so-called new economic sociology.

The article provides a systematic review of the main, existing methodologies of the global monitoring and forecasting of socio-political destabilization. A systematic analysis of the correlation between the forecasts of destabilization generated by these systems and the actual levels of destabilization observed in the respective countries has been carried out. The analysis shows that the forecast, based on the assumption that the level of destabilization in each country in the following year will be proportional to the actual level of destabilization of the current year, turns out, in all cases, to be more predictive than the forecasts made on the basis of any of the considered indices of the risk of destabilization (at least for all cases when the relevant forecasts were published). At the same time, it is shown that, before the Arab Spring, the indices we considered still performed some useful function, allowing us to identify not so much countries with a high risk of destabilization as those countries with particularly low risks of this kind. However, in 2010–2011, all destabilization risk indices had a very serious failure. High index values not only turned out to be not-very-good predictors of a high degree of the actual destabilization in 2011, but also low index values turned out to be bad predictors of a low degree of actual destabilization. As a result, all destabilization risk indices in 2010/2011 showed extremely low statistically-insignificant correlations between the expected and observed levels of destabilization, which can be attributed to the anomalous wave of 2011 launched by the events of the Arab Spring. As we have shown in several ways, the predictive ability of indices had been restored to some extent, again becoming statistically significant after 2011, but it has not returned to the level observed before the Arab Spring. This confirms the conclusions of our previous work that the Arab Spring in 2011 acted as a trigger for the global phase transition, resulting in the World System changing into a qualitatively new state in which we observe some new patterns that were not taken into account by the systems developed before the Arab Spring. Thus, the existing systems of forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization have lost the last “competitive advantages” over the method of simple extrapolation. There are grounds to believe that the pandemic of the coronavirus infection COVID-19 may lead to an additional decrease in the prognostic ability of the indices we have examined. All this, of course, suggests the need to develop a new generation of systems for forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization.

The article concerns the social theory of an unconditional basic income (a regular payment to each person regardless of their level of need or employment). The article points out that, during the last three years in Russia, the idea of a basic income has been actively discussed. This applies mainly to economists, whereas the author puts the question of a basic income in the context of Western social theory. In a situation of ever-accelerating changes that affect society (from technologicalization and automation to the reduction of social time), the world faces many global challenges. A basic income is one of them. The article highlights the reasons for the actualization of the topic of a universal basic income in contemporary social theory of the last ten years. These include automation, the transformation of the economy leading to changes in the types of employment, experiments on the implementation of a basic income in some countries, and most importantly, the discussion of “bullshitization”, which has happened to many jobs in the framework of contemporary financial capitalism (David Graeber). It reveals the understanding of a basic income by its key proponents and theorists (Srnicek, Williams, Van Parijs, Vanderborght, Ford, Graeber, Standing, and others), as well as the fact that freedom is often called as the main goal of a basic income implementation. The paper demonstrates that, in fact, we are mostly talking about the imperative of freedom, which is not always properly clarified. However, it does not matter how freedom is understood in the works of basic income theorists since it is unlikely to be realized in modern socio-economic conditions, and because current capitalism has mutated so much that it now uses the very fabric of human experience rather than labor as its raw material. In this context, talks about automation is more of a thought experiment, and therefore the discussion should be shifted to another perspective. Despite the fact that, according to the author’s case, a basic income is not entirely impossible in practice (and even perhaps not being desirable), it provides fruitful material for the development of contemporary social theory.

This article is based on research of international ethnic-migrants’ residential concentrations in Russian cities. The research is based on the uncertainty as to whether such concentrations exist in Russia; there is scholarship which both supports and refutes this thesis. Stemming from the social-ecology approach of the Chicago School of Sociology, the authors concentrate on locations in three Russian cities where the residential concentration of migrants is the highest. These places are the town of Kotelniki in Moscow Region, Sortirovka in Yekaterinburg, and KrasTEC in Krasnoyarsk. Utilizing both field and theoretical methods, the authors describe how these places appeared and what processes occur there. Based on a comparative analysis, the authors hypothesize a pattern which lies behind these cases and distinguishes these cases from other-country cases. According to the hypothesis, migrants form residential concentrations around those large markets which started appearing on the peripheries of Russian cities after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the following decades, the succession of the migrant population also settled there, and now a substantial share of these neighborhoods’ population are migrants, both those who work at the market and their relatives and friends who work in other parts of cities. Additionally, the migrant infrastructure evolved, and the neighborhoods started to be considered as ethnic and migrant.

The paper presents the outcomes of the field research oriented towards studying the usage of urban space by female labor migrants from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Saint Petersburg in comparison with the practices that they have developed in their places of origin. The paper is based on the sociology of everyday life. The authors focus on the migrants’ transnational practices and a scope of their integration into the host society, as well as the perception of the urban space of Saint Petersburg in comparison to the migrants’ homelands. The informants for the study were 28 legal transnational labor migrants. The methods of the research are in-depth interviews in combination with mental maps. The hypothesis of the study includes two assumptions. The first is that migrant women from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have transnational practices that indicate their inclusion in the social networks of both the country of origin and the host society, while their everyday life will be characterized by a rather low degree of integration into the host society. The second assumption is that the mental maps of St. Petersburg that were drawn by the informants are detailed and diverse compared to the mental maps of the place of residence in their homelands. These assumptions were partly confirmed. Results of the inquiry raise new research questions that demand further research of migrant workers to be answered.

The article is devoted to the problem of the perception in the USSR of C. Schmitt and his works. It is shown that the Russian Empire paid attention to and criticized Schmitt’s 1912 work Law and Judgment. Soviet readers in the 1920s–1940s were already acquainted with the content of Schmitt’s key works such as Political Romanticism, Dictatorship, The Historical and Spiritual State of Modern Parliamentarism, Political Theology, The Concept of Political, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, and On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, and a discussion of these works was a part of the intellectual life of the USSR in the 1920s–1940s. Moreover, Soviet Marxist-theorists of law, while criticizing Schmitt’s ideas, agreed with some of his ideas regarding the criticism of the bourgeois state and law until 1933. However, after 1933, Schmitt’s works in the USSR turned into an object of harsh criticism, and he himself was proclaimed a key fascist theoretician of state and law. Since the late 1940s, because of the so-called struggle with “cosmopolitanism”, Schmitt’s works received less attention. In the 1950s–1970s, Schmitt’s works appeared only in some critical statements, and the works of Soviet authors of the 1920s-1940s about Schmitt actually fell into oblivion. A new wave of interest in Schmitt began only in the second half of the 1980s, and his works can already be considered in the context of the intellectual history of modern Russia.

It is unlikely that any other state attracts more attention of the world community than China; there are endless debates about its geopolitical status, social-economic potential, demographic challenges, environmental threats, political structure, etc. However, scientific and popular-science discourses focus rather on finding an answer to the question of what type of social system China has in terms of the classical dilemma of “capitalism vs socialism”, and there are no universal nominations for either the historical past or present. The article aims at identifying the key discursive representations of the “Chinese economic miracle” by reconstructing them from three books recently translated into Russian: Zhang Yu’s China’s Economic Reform: Experience and Implications, Yifu Lin’s Demystifying the Chinese Economy, and How China Became Capitalist, written by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. The article summarizes the main arguments of the three books. Although their interpretations of the “Chinese economic miracle” differ, including the degree of the politicized enthusiasm and optimism, they agree that developing countries should follow the Chinese path of reforms and ignore a number of this path’s serious problems. The article concludes that the books represent three discourses: an ideological-politicized scenario of developing a special type of socialism “from above”, a description of the capitalist economy developed from both “above” and “below”, and a statement of the completed transition to capitalism not under the party leadership control but mainly “from below” and, despite prohibitions and anti-capitalist rhetoric, “from above”. Such discursive contradictions are especially interesting for the Russian reader who remembers disputes about the type of “Russian capitalism” in the 1990s–2000s, and for the sociologist of the “classical type”, i.e., one studying historical changes to understand current social transformations.

Otthein Rammstedt was an outstanding sociologist who spent most of his life editing Georg Simmel’s Gesamtausgabe, or collected works. Rammstedt gave much of his strength and energy to get this important publication completed. In 1993, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Simmel’s death, we put together a selection of his works and the articles written in his honor which was published in 1994 in the second issue of the Sociological Journal. Rammstedt then provided us with his manuscript on Simmel which we are going to republish in the Sociological Education section of our quarterly. His manuscript deserves to be published anew, not just for sad reasons — in the last issue, we announced that Ramstedt passed away after having completed his huge body of work — but also for reasons that are quite substantial. Classical sociology may seem to be a completed project, but it is still a resource that has not been fully exhausted or fully evaluated. The article by Rammstedt, who was experienced not only in the history of sociology but in its theory as well and was the long-term dean of the Faculty of Sociology in Bielefeld University, one of the most renowned sociological institutions in Europe, allows us to see how much we can take from the legacy of the classics. His text has obviously retained its considerable suitability, but, like many classical sociological writings, it needs a new revision or even perhaps a new translation. In any case, we hope this publication will give a new impetus to the study of Simmel’s writings as well as of sociological classics, while at the same time paying a debt of gratitude to the prominent German sociologist, Otthein Rammstedt

Book review: Thomas Piketty, Capital et idéologie (Paris: Seuil, 2019).

Book review: Edward C. Banfield, Moral’nye osnovy otstalogo obshhestva [The Moral Basis of a Backward Society] (Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo, 2019) (in Russian).

Book review: Timothy Morton, Stat’ ekologichnym [Being Ecological] (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2018) (in Russian).

Book review: Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, Mashina, platforma, tolpa: nashe cifrovoe budushhee [Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future] (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov, and Ferber, 2019) (in Russian).

Book review: Modest Kolerov, Pyotr Struve: revoljucioner bez mass [Pyotr Struve: Revolutioner without Masses] (Moscow: Tsiolkovsky Book Store, 2020) (in Russia).