2021. vol. 20. No. 3

The article develops a middle-range theory offering a novel perspective of the logic of the distribution of attention, allocation of status, and competition in academia. Since Merton, the relations between these processes were usually cast in quasi-market terms in which individuals exchanged novel information for attention and recognition; investing the latter into the production of further information, the symbolic struggle takes the form of a market competition. As an alternative, I suggest a theoretical vocabulary comparing the academic world to an aristocratic society in which the status of each agent is estimated on the basis of visits they pay and is being paid. The major form of the symbolic struggle is conspicuously ignoring each other. Visits in this model stand for a distribution of publicly recognized attention to the work of one’s colleagues. Academics tend to create circles or scenes requiring mutual recognition on the part of their members, and suppressing recognized awareness of intellectual developments in the outside world. Scenes could be more or less legitimate depending on if their borders coincide with the divisions of classifications of areas and/or subjects, with established disciplines being prototypically-legitimate scenes. I discuss the conditions of the emergence of less-legitimate scenes typical for the periphery of the academic world system.

The purpose of the present paper consists of two points. First, it is to show how the internal structure and the “inner logic” of science as a value sphere are formed in Max Weber’s theory. Then, relying on logical-methodological foundations proposed by Weber, the second point is to identify how the action carried out by scientists in a “vocation” mode in a situation of “value polytheism” is realized within science. Analyzing the content of recent discussions about the empirical validity and character of Weber’s argumentation in one of his central works, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, as well as about the autonomy and conceptual boundaries of Weber’s science, we draw a line of reasoning as follows. Firstly, we trace the changing of the methodological role of values in general, and the value of truth, in particular, in the “sciences of culture” in connection with the transition from the transcendental solution of Heinrich Rickert to Weber’s “value polytheism”. Secondly, we analyze how the relationship between Weber’s science, progress, and rationalization is structured. Thirdly, we explicate the mode of “vocation” in science, relying on the logical-methodological foundations proposed by Weber. Fourthly, we identify the development of Weber’s idea of the value autonomy of science. It is shown that Weber rejects the criterion of truth’s universality proposed by Rickert’s logical solution. However, the construction of ideal-typical concepts and the mechanics of “cognitive interest” described by Weber allows scientists to separate extra-scientific pragmatics from the scientific research itself. The progress of the “sciences of culture” for Weber is the differentiation and the emergence of new research approaches and the refinement of concepts. At the same time, science is not teleologically connected with “progress in general” and the rationalizing world, the configuration of which is a specific historical constellation. As associated with scientific work, “gaining the clarity” turns out to be not its own goal, but a possible effect of using scientific knowledge. The mode of “vocation” in a “value polytheism” situation forces scientists to contribute to the endless scientific progress; they formulate such ideal-types and causal explanations that seem adequate and sufficient from the point of view of their cognitive interests. The stability of science’s boundaries and its value autonomy are formed in Weber’s theory gradually; epistemological studies and the implementation of his sociology of the religion research “programme” make the difference between vocations in science and politics clear.

The article is focused on youth politics in the UK, Germany, Finland, and Russia. Based on a constructionist approach, we analyze the rhetoric of youth policy, subjects of problematization, as well as the image of the country and youth of the future presented in the documents. The empirical base of the article is 21 youth-policy documents (laws, state programs, and youth strategies) of Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Russia. The analysis of normative documents showed that the discourse of youth policies in the European Union is dominated by the rhetoric of entitlement, and the motifs are equality of opportunity and access, rights, independence, empowerment, sustainable development of society, participation, and citizenship. The discourse of Russian youth policy is distinguished by the rhetoric idiom of ‘unreason’. The main motifs of the rhetoric are traditional values, education, and patriotism. European youth-policies, which emphasize rights and opportunities of youth, are oriented toward the development and support of young people, while the Russian youth policy is “state-centric”, oriented to the development of the country.

Demographic changes associated with the transition from traditional to modern economies underlie many modern theories of protest formation. Both the level of urbanization and the “Youth Bulge” effect have proven to be particularly reliable indicators for predicting protest events. However, given that in the course of economic development these processes often occur simultaneously, it seems logical to put forward the hypothesis that the combined effect of urbanization growth and an increase in the number of young people will be a more relevant factor for predicting protests. Our study of cross-national time series from 1950 to 2016 shows that the combined effect of these two parameters is an extremely strong predictor of anti-government protests in a single country, even more so than traditional indicators such as democratization, per capita GDP, and the level of education.

Paul Ricœur’s essay “Practical Reason” was initially published in 1979, and later became part of the book Du texte à l’action: essais d’herméneutique II (1986), marking Ricœur’s transition from the general problems of the justification of hermeneutics as a legitimate philosophical discipline to the problems of practical philosophy in a broad sense. Relying on the analytical theory of action, the interpretative sociology of M. Weber, and the Hegelian critique of Kantian ethics, Ricœur seeks to restore the Aristotelian concept of phronesis or “practical wisdom” in the context of modern philosophizing. This turns out to be unexpectedly relevant where neither Kant’s deontology nor the Hegelian Sittlichkeit can adequately express the entirety of human practical experience in a world where ideology and alienation have become inevitable components of social life.

In Japan’s early modern period, Confucian philosophy was considered as a pattern of political discourse. Hence, many Japanese thinkers of the time were involved into solving political problems. The paper deals with the theory of social order developed by Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), a major Confucian philosopher and the most progressive thinker of the time, who criticized modern schools for the practical incompetence of their ideas. Sorai’s theory unfolded around the idea of the Way of Early Kings, which he saw as a complex of principles that formed the foundation of social order. The Confucian concept of Dao is fundamental for this idea, the ethical interpretation of which was proposed by Sorai’s contemporaries, while Sorai considered the Way as a political category. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the role that Confucian thought played in the forming of the language of political discourse in Japan. Further, the author discusses Sorai’s ideas on the early kings and the Way created by them, as well as on social order, the role of the ruler, and human nature. The author pays special attention to Sorai’s theory of language that connects his lexicographic and political works. The fact is that since Sorai’s attention to the Way was grounded on his methodology, he believed that careful work with the language was the way to proper government and social order. The article concludes with an analysis of the way Sorai theorized the concept of Dao. On one hand, in his practical precepts, Sorai offered a pragmatic and politically-problematized interpretation of Dao. On the other hand, in his ideas on Heaven, gods, and spirits, Sorai offered a metaphysical perspective of Dao that is characterized with concerns for ontological and epistemological questions. As a result, in order to point out the significance of Sorai’s utilitarian and disenchanting world ideas since they were an important step in the history of Japanese philosophy that preceded modernity, the author attempts to describe Ogyū Sorai’s logic of social order based on both the pragmatical and metaphysical perspectives of his theory.

This paper conceptualizes the experience of the child in need of palliative care. Incurable diseases expose the pathic experience of the body as an object of treatment and care. The child’s life is subject to regulation in clinical or hospice care institutions that arranges the flow of time, routine actions, and communication. This leads to the reduction of the patient’s personality, as if woven into the triad “child-parent-doctor”. Articulation of a cognitively intact child’s self is embedded in the strategies of silence and half-truths, finding ways of manifestation in games, conflict behavior, and attempts of separation. The traditional view of doctor-patient communication underlying this difficulty requires revision since it is based on the abstraction from the embodied intersubjective interaction in the triad. A child receiving palliative care does not conform to the normative concept of a rational autonomous patient. This requires ways of conceptualizing the patient’s status as the owner of the pathic experience which manifests itself through the development of the disease. Instead of normative and universalist ethics, a phenomenological and medical anthropological view of “maternalism” is proposed, which points to the socio-cultural ambiguity of the idea of the “innocence” and “immaturity” of the child. The interaction within the triad is cross-cultural, and, hence, requires reconsideration of concepts of individuality, autonomy, and communication.

This article explores the representation of the citizens in the discourse of new residential areas in Moscow. The article focuses on how different agents of discourse representing citizens helps to reveal which citizens are taken into account in the production of urban spaces and who is left out of it. In Moscow, new residential areas represent the contradictions of how citizens are represented in certain agendas. For authorities, such areas embody extensive policy, capital, and successful political management. In the media, such a type of housing becomes stigmatized: it is labelled as “ghetto” and imaged as environmental, which does not suit the correct path of city development. In this article, focusing on the production of urban citizenship in the part of public discourse produced by authorities, developers, and critical agents, I will show (1) when citizens are used as a faceless, impersonated category in the discourse in one row with the infrastructural achievements of the current government; (2) the construction of the “average citizen”, who is the main character in space production; (3) the grounds behind the “consumer-citizen” in discourse, who is entitled with only the economic agency on housing market; and (4) citizens who are symbolically excluded from their right to the new residential areas’ space. Through the characters-citizens in the discourse, I will show the lack of fundamental differences in the discourse of different agents, such as the authorities, developers, and critical agents.

The article considers a new approach to the research of aging — material gerontology and the application of this approach to the empirical study of the everyday life of elderly people who are in boarding schools and living separately. The article answers the question of how aging is collected within the framework of the interactions of older people with material and social resources present in two different environments in which older people are located. The article uses the concept of tunability of material and social resources, on the basis of which conclusions are drawn about how the assemblies of aging as a complex inhomogeneous category occur in various environments. Different environments are a nursing home in the city of Petrozavodsk and villages in Karelia, where elderly people live separately. A total of 20 biographical interviews with elderly people (n = 20) and 16 semi-structured interviews (n = 16) with nurses and volunteers working in a boarding house were collected. The article aims to fill the gap in the study of aging, which consists, firstly, in the absence of social research on aging through the prism of considering the material and social resources (actors) present in various environments and collecting aging, and secondly, in the absence of discussion about the possibilities of applying material gerontology in social research and the features of the application of this direction. To fill these gaps, I empirically illustrate the features and roles of material and social resources in the lives of older people and show how aging processes occur and how material and social resources can affect the agency of older people. The study shows that, depending on the environment in which the assemblies of aging take place, its meanings and the understanding of the tunability and features of the tunability of material and social resources by older people also differ.

In this article, the author attempts to consider the lacuna of “applied” ontology as proposed by the Lancaster version of the actor-network theory within the framework of a broader philosophically funded approach of Graham Harman (complemented by Levi Bryant’s ideas). This is done in order to clarify the position of the Lancaster version of ANT, according to which the same object may have several ontological modes, being, nevertheless, the same “real” object. For the purposes of analysis, the classical works of A. Mol and J. Law in addition to the works of L. Wittgenstein, L. Bryant, and H. Harman are used. The author of the article concludes that the ontological reality of objects and the perception of single objects as discrete ones within the framework of the ANT Lancaster branch results from the fact that Mol and Law do not fit their research into the framework of broader ontologies. They create their own local ontologies instead. Nevertheless, this “ontological lack” can and should be improved to increase research fruitfulness and complexity.

At the turn of the 21st century, sociology as a science has become an object of criticism both from inside and outside the discipline. At the same time, the late-20th and early 21st centuries endorse an unprecedented splash of technological development, specifically the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies. The paper tries to show a relation between these two tendencies. For the authors, two questions are in the spotlight: (1) how have evaluations of the professional sociologists on what is happening to the discipline changed over the last 20 years? and (2) how could these evaluations be related to the research questions that the development of AI technologies brings to social sciences? In the first part of the paper, the authors examine and compare the participants' positions in the discussion about the future of sociology organized by the journal Contemporary Sociology in 2000. The second part of the paper examines two articles published in 2019 where it was proclaimed “the end of sociology.” The paper discusses why the debates about the crisis of sociology have shifted towards radical criticism during these years and how new arguments refine and supplement the previous discussions. In conclusion, the authors propose one way out of the crisis in sociology. They suggest the radical renewal of sociological science into a-typical and anti-disciplinary social analytics with the central orientation into “artificial sociality” inquiries.

Book Review: Artemy Magun (ed.), The Future of the State: Philosophy and Politics (Lanhmam: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

Book Review: Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Book Review: Steven Pinker, Luchshee v nas: pochemu nasiliya v mire stalo men’she [The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined] (Moscow, 2021) (in Russian).

Book Review: Mikhail Gefter, Antologija narodnichestva [Anthology of Narodnichestvo] (Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria, 2020) (in Russian).