2023. vol. 22. No. 2

The problem of irreversibility was raised in the second half of the 19th century in thermodynamics and, a few years later, in evolutionary biology. In the 1970s, economists accounted for the problem of irreversibility in the context of human-driven ecological change. Social theory missed the problem – with regard to social reality it did not receive any attention. This paper seeks to fill the gap. In order to do so irreversibility has to be redefined. In physics and life sciences it is conceived as a property of a process. In this paper, irreversibility is defined as a social situation wherein one reality is bound to disappear without any chance of recovery and another reality to emerge in its stead. Social situations of irreversibility are further classified into anoetic, rational, and ethical with each type discussed separately. The concluding section addresses formative conditions of respective situations of irreversibility, types of experience, and limitations of descriptive language.

This paper uses some of the conceptual tools developed by the primary authors of the Oxford-Cambridge tradition in the philosophy of language (especially G. Ryle and L. Wittgenstein) to analyze the “grammar” (in the specific Wittgensteinian sense of the word) of some basic concepts of social sciences such as “reality”, “action”, “consciousness”, etc., having mainly emerged in the language of E. Durkheim’s tradition in social theory. The focus of the paper is the concept of “institution”, which still occupies a privileged place in the language of contemporary social sciences. The paper highlights some conceptual problems, logical nonsenses, and philosophical myths embedded in the language of classical social theory coming from the philosophical language of the 19th century that, in turn, had inherited them from the centuries-old tradition of European metaphysics. Due to the specific metaphorical use of concepts, this language may undermine the clarification of reality and hide the real mechanisms of the functioning of institutions and real power relations in certain contexts. The paper also examines the grammar of the concept of “habitus” as introduced by M. Mauss, and argues that some traditional concepts in social theory can be effectively re-interpreted in the methodological perspective of the pragmatic turn in the social sciences (“theory of practices”).

French historian and archaeologist Paul Veyne argued for what he saw as the fundamental lack of object in sociology in 1971. This academic field would definitely not be a science, but, at most, an auxiliary to historiography, itself devoid of any scientific condition since it refers to sublunary causalities, not allowing predictions, only “retrodictions”. Conversely, a set of “praxeologies” could be identified, the core of a future science of man, radically different from both sociology and history, including instead pure economics, operational research, and game theory. While history (and sociology) would inevitably be “Aristotelian”, that is, sublunary and imprecise, scientific disciplines could and should be predominantly “Platonic”, aiming at formal logical elegance. Veyne was only partly right, since economics itself cannot be considered a science stricto sensu. Admittedly, sociology is going through a state of multilevel crisis, allowing us to confront this situation with important recent trends for the emergence of socio-historical grand narratives, sometimes officially called history, less often historical sociology, but all eminently trans-disciplinary. The aim of this research is to overcome the limitations associated with the biographical, elitist, and Eurocentric biases characteristic of traditional historiography. On the whole, the tendency of these studies is nomothetic, but the “laws” identified are at best, approximate. Therefore, they, like economics, are condemned to operate on a mere “Aristotelian” level, and thus, the great “novel of humanity” is bound to remain essentially indeterminate.

The article deals with the uniquely specific public profile of Max Weber, who, on the one hand, entered the history of social thought as a staunch supporter of the value-free scientific work, and on the other hand, was a passionate polemicist ready to cause a public scandal even for a minor occasion. At the outset, Weber’s ambivalent understanding of the ethos of modern science as a methodically-controlled search for objective knowledge of the world at the edge of the scientist’s self-denial and free from the influence of extra-scientific motives is pointed out. In so doing, the paradoxical combination in Weber’s anthropology of science of the imperatives of analytical sobriety and passionate loyalty to one’s “daemon” is recorded. It has been argued that his ambivalence was a specific trait of the classicist of German and world sociology, combining his titanic personality with the extremes of a scholarly hermit and a world celebrity with a reputation for unbalanced scandals. Following then are the judgments about the eminent social thinker made by representatives of opposing political currents, both right-wing conservatives and left-wing extremists. On the basis of a number of high-profile scandals that became known to the scientific and general public in early-20th century Germany, the mechanism of Weber’s involvement in conflicts with various opponents at the personal and institutional level is demonstrated. The practical significance for Weber himself of his scientific-theoretical and methodological principles, which became canonical for the self-understanding of the modern scholarly profession, is questioned. Finally, the passionate controversy surrounding Weber’s famous work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism is analyzed, reconstructed on the example of historian F. Raphael’s critique and the response of Weber’s First Anticritique.

A polemical article by the classic of sociology Max Weber in the genre of “anti-criticism” contains his response to a series of critical publications by the principal German historian Felix Rachfahl. As a specialist in the history of the Dutch Revolution in the second half of the 16th century, Rachfahl wrote five articles under the general title “Calvinism and Protestantism” that he sought to rebut Weber’s views on the genesis of capitalism from the spirit of the Puritan work ethic. In a rather harsh retort, Weber in turn tries to show the reader the entire inconsistency of Rachfal’s criticism. On the whole, he assesses the discussion as unfair on the part of his opponent and, therefore, as insufficient from the point of view of the subject itself — the cultural significance of the Protestant economic ethics for the emergence of the capitalist economy of the modern type. He accuses Rachfal of deliberately distorting both Weber’s own argument and the views of his friend and colleague, the eminent theologian and church historian E. Troelch. In attempting to defend his arguments advanced in the articles in the series “Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Weber rhetorically chooses an extremely aggressive tone, while allowing a number of insulting epithets to the recognized expert in his field. His general strategy in the polemic is aimed at discrediting the criticizing historian himself as a typical representative of a related academic discipline, clearly exceeding the limits of his competence. At the same time, Weber assigns the role of objective arbiter in this dispute to his reader, urging him to perceive the arguments put forward impartially. Weber concludes by claiming that Rachfal’s lengthy critique is so off-target that he need not change a single word in his writings.

The socio-legal theories of P. A. Sorokin and M. Weber are common in belonging to the normativist trend in the sociology of law. To determine the limits of their applicability to the analysis of the operation of legal norms, it is necessary to clarify the reasons for their differences. The notable differences between both theories are connected not only with the general differences in corresponding sociological systems, but also with fundamentally different conceptual foundations of socio-legal doctrines. The Russian-American sociologist P. A.Sorokin, in developing the ideas of L. I. Petrażycki, considered law as a set of norms with a certain content which indicates the permitted and proper behavior by means of the distribution of rights and obligations, which are always thought to be inextricably linked. This understanding of legal norms allows us to meaningfully separate them from the norms of morality, etiquette, technical norms, and rules of fashion. A key feature of law as a special kind of legitimate order for Weber is its coercion, ensured by the staff, i.e., a group of people specifically aimed at forcing compliance with the order. In contrast to Sorokin, Weber believed that law and other related phenomena are distinguished not at the level of individual norms, but at the level of normative systems (orders). Sorokin focused on organized groups, the skeleton of which are the norms that both determine the behavior of group members and create its structure. Contrary to Sorokin, Weber believes that normative motivation is only able to influence human behavior, but not to determine it. The difference in the researchers’ perceptions of the importance of normative motivation may be related to the focus on active duties in the case of Sorokin and on the framework model of the behavior of the empowered person in Weber’s case.

The nomos of the post-city forms specific phenomenologies of spatial development that go beyond the classical interpretations of the concepts of the biosphere and the noosphere. The ontology of planetarity is based on the spatial “inclusiveness” of any planetary object due to its specific localization, determined both by planetary conditions and the co-spatiality of the planet within the intelligible and explored cosmos. Post-urban co–spatialities are the ontological “base” for the emergence of specific terrestrial planetarities of special intensity. A post-city can be a topos of terrestrial planetariums becoming trans-planetary, first in metaphysical and then in physical relations. Post-urban trans-planetarity is the relativity of multiple imaginative cartographies representing the corresponding meta-geographies. Planetary post-urbanism is formed as coexisting planetary cartographies of the imagination, self-organizing into meta-cartography and relying on appropriate communicative co-spatialities. Trans-planetary post-urban geo-cultures in “cloning” local symbolic codes associated with the Earth include them in new cartographies of the imagination in co-spatial extraterrestrial loci. The co-spatialities of human communities become divided during the transitions from artificial internal environments to external trans-planetary environments that are not related to terrestrial geo-cultures. Post-urbanism, in contributing to the expansion of ambivalent networks of presence/absence cartographies, creates new opportunities for the ontological intensification of space-as-a-relationship, allowing post-urban human communities to think and act trans-planetarily. “Rhizomatic” post-nomadism makes or re-creates the Earth in the ontological sense as a giant cosmic “desire machine”. Fragments of trans-planetary post-urban noospheres will be understood as organic and autonomous geo-cultures, representing communicative fractals, whose placement can be considered as a kind of cosmo-geopolitics.

The article explores narratives of the “cross-border intimacy” in Russian-language digital media. The text arrays generated by migrants, representatives of the host community, and professional journalists in digital media are analyzed. We identified and compared the meanings that are given to marriages between migrants and “locals”. Texts were selected from 10 of the most quoted Russian Internet media, city public sites of the largest Russian social network Vkontakte, Internet forums on combinations of the keywords “migrant”, “marriage”, “married”, and “married”, as well as ethno-chronyms, that is, immigrants from the main donor countries to the Russian Federation. Qualitative content analysis has become a research tool. It has been established that migrants and representatives of the host community are equally involved in the production of values of cross-border proximity whose position is broadcast by professional media, especially the Russian bureaucracy. All three groups of the senders of statements on social networks discussing cross-border proximity reproduce the rhetoric of “purity” and “danger” in different forms. This rhetoric is similar to the description of objects that fall out of conventional social categories presented in the works of M. Douglas. In digital media, cross-border intimacy is seen as an existential threat to the integrity of an imaginary community, often metaphorically referred to as a female body. Physical contact with a “stranger”, such as “our” woman with a “stranger” man, is first of all considered as a contagious rite, a result of which the “dirt” peculiar to the “stranger” is transmitted to the imaginary community as a whole. People who broadcast this narrative make claims to the role of “defenders” of an imaginary community from “unconventional” contacts between “their own” and “strangers”. The narrative of “protection from dirt” is used as a way to legitimize their own power by men, bureaucrats, and parents. We found a watershed between the professional and social media. This watershed lies in the fact that the narrative about the need to keep the “purity” of an imaginary community is constantly challenged in social media, unlike professional ones. Love and freedom of individual choice are placed above the inviolability of the boundaries of imaginary communities, thus legitimizing cross-border closeness. The analysis of the material allowed us to put the hypothesis forward that social media contributes to the destruction and delegitimization of the nationalist narrative dominating in professional media. This is primarily used by social groups, in respect of which the power legitimized by the narrative of “purity” is applied; such groups are formed primarily by women, as well as representatives of the “second generation” of migrants.

In recent decades, criminologists around the world have observed a decrease in the level of crime, especially violent crime, that is, the so-called “great crime drop”. However, the actual safety may not correspond to subjective safety, i.e., how people perceive their safety against various threats. In this article, we use the Russian Crime Victimization Survey(2021) conducted by the Institute for the Rule of Law at the European University at St. Petersburg to study the relationships between fear of crime, and the sociodemographic and the criminological characteristics of the respondents. These data make it possible to assess how the experience of victims of various crimes and their fear of different types of crimes are related. We find that the relationships between socio-demographic characteristics and fear of crime in Russia are broadly similar to those observed in other countries. At the same time, we identify a number of noteworthy features regarding crime victims. First, the victim experience increases the level of fear of crime on average. Second, the more serious the crime incidents people have experienced in the past, the higher their level of fear of crime. Third, victims of classic in-person crimes (such as theft or assault) often fear future crime. Moreover, in case of property crime, they tend to fear future property crime but not violence. At the same time, victims of violence can fear future property crime along with violence. The fact that the incident was remote (committed via the Internet or telephone) is not related to the fear of crime. Thus, the fear of “classic” crimes is experienced differently by the victims as compared to remote crimes which poses broader questions about the dynamics of perceived safety and the demand for the law enforcement involvement in the future.

The article aims at the general description of the academic research that examines the fear of crime concept after September 11, 2001, when new areas of research became a part of security studies, substantially changing the very understanding of fear of crime. Thus, there was a change in the academic models for examining the social perception of crime. At first, there were some fruitful years for the sociological analysis of the fear of crime concept. Today, sociological studies of fear of crime continue, but this concept became even more important for criminological studies. Therefore, we analyzed the fear of crime category in the articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals in the criminological and sociological perspectives (Sage, Jstor, EbscoHost, and others). The findings explain the evolution of the fear of crime concept in the research from 2001 to 2021. For Latin America, the concept of fear is quite recent, which is very different from other regions of the world. Moreover, the interpretation of fear in Latin America is very different from both Europe and the United States. Although Latin America and the United States have much in common, the article presents the unique features of the Latin-American approach to this phenomenon.

Studies of older people’s social participation have only recently entered the field of Russian sociology, although the concept, approaches, and empirical indicators are debatable; additionally. significant foreign experience is not represented in the domestic scientific space. The purpose of the article is to systematically describe modern approaches to the analysis, measurement, and assessment of social participation of older people. Among the foreign approaches to the analysis of social participation, the sociological and political are well known; in the studies of older people’s participation, the correlated but more flexible socio-consumer, inclusive, and empowerment approaches are used, each offering its own content of the concept and assessment tools. The social consumer approach considers the social participation of an older person as a way to meet their basic personal and significant needs, and relies on standard methods in assessing functionality and health. The inclusive approach focuses on participation as a tool for social integration and self-realization, and combines quantitative and qualitative survey methods. The empowerment approach addresses seniors as actors of social changes, and relies on a critical analysis of engagement, including access to resources, power, and participation itself, based on the methodology of citizen participation. The understanding of participation in old age as a variety of activities of different levels (from involvement to engagement) and forms (direct and mediated, public, and nonpublic) on the basis of integration of social-consumer, inclusive, and empowerment approaches will allow taking into account personal, socio-environmental, and institutional participation factors flexibly, to notice “invisible” contributions, and to reconsider stereotypes of social passivity of older people. This leads to the designing of participation spaces on the principles of age-friendliness and co-productivity, allowing older people to perform and feel like social actors.

The authors focus on the history of the famous sociological work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, as well as on the biographies of both authors, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The combination of biographical analysis with socio-political context and the work in the genre of scientific biography makes it possible to understand not only the background of the creation of this major sociological project, but also to clarify the role of the sociologist-intellectual in social life. The appeal to the nonlinear fate of this work was stimulated by the drama of its realization and perception by the scientific public. The authors, relying on contemporary scientific commentaries, reconstruct this process from the description of the socio-political context, the strategies of the scientific careers of both authors till biographical facts, and the result of their common work. Discussing the process of transition of scientific knowledge, the authors consider the reception of the ideas of W. Thomas and F. Znaniecki during the process of perception and rooting of qualitative-interpretive sociology in Russia. Here, the ways of concepts and ideas transitioning themselves acquire significant interest, i.e., not only the translation of certain scientific works, but the very order of embedding ideas in the context of the ‘host’ scientific environment. More specifically, we consider the phenomenon of asymmetry (more Znaniecki, less Thomas), which accompanied the further scientific fate of both authors in the context of various national scientific schools, and primarily in Russia.

Martha Nussbaum is a famous American philosopher and an incredibly prolific author who published more than twenty books and five hundred articles on a wide range of issues of “good living” — from the fragility of goodness and poetic justice, love of country and cultivating humanity to the intelligence of emotions and the new religious intolerance (and this is not an exhaustive list). Unfortunately, only two books have been translated into Russian — Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2014) and Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2023). The first book is thematically focused and aims at proving both the flawed interpretation of education as an exclusively tool for economic growth and the value of the humanities and arts for the high quality of life and prosperity of democratic states. The second book also emphasizes the importance of education and the arts, compassionate citizenship and the pursuit of the common good, is based on personal observations of life in the United States and India, promotes the ideas of social justice and equality, but on a higher level of generalizations, relying on the author’s previous research and adding the most important emotional “ingredient” of social order — love. The article is an attempt to show the undoubted strengths of this great book (rich in research, concepts and illustrations) and its (more doubtful) limitations which are due primarily to the book’s implicit expectation of the reader’s awareness of its conceptual foundations (previous works of Nussbaum), and the past decade’s peculiar effect on its ideological, conceptual and illustrative content.

Book review: Zubkov K. (2023). Enlighten and Punish: The Functions of Censorship in the Russian Empire in the Middle of the 19th Century. Moscow: New Literary Review. — 520 s. (Series: “Scientific Application”, vol. CCL). ISBN 978-5-4448-1956-2. (In Russian).