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Featured Book:

Reclaiming Beauty

Collected Essays in Political Anthropology Volume I - Series on Contemporary Mimetic Revival

Reclaiming Beauty is a title bringing together authors from a wide spectrum (architecture, political and social disciplines) employing their particular view from their respective fields to emphasize the parallels between the current period of beauty concerns and earlier stages. The idea for producing this book was born from the perception that beauty in the contemporary world is not simply based on the pursuit of senses, rather – it is deeply penetrated by rational concerns and forces, visible in the phenomena of Palaeolithic cave paintings, ancient Greek politics and culture, Renaissance paintings or modern city planning. The International Political Anthropology Series on Contemporary Mimetic Revival by the series editors, Agnes Horvath and James B. Cuffe, publishes monographs, comparative studies, interdisciplinary projects and other edited works.

Arpad Szakolczai

Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland. His recent and major publications include The Dissolution of Communist Power (Routledge 1992), Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (Routledge, 1998), Reﬂexive Historical Sociology (Routledge, 2000), The Genesis of Modernity (Routledge, 2003), and Sociology, Religion and Grace: A Quest for the Renaissance (Routledge, 2007), as well as articles and essays among others in Social Research, the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Political Science, the International Review of Sociology, International Sociology, Theory, Culture, and Society, Theory, current Sociology, the European Journal of Social Theory, and the European Sociological Review. He has an forthcoming book entitled “Comedy and the Public Sphere”, which intends to go beyond Habermas’s rationalistic account by demonstrating the central importance of the re-birth of comedy, from the late Renaissance onwards, in forming the modern democratic public “arena”.

Nikos A. Salingaros

Nikos A. Salingaros MA PhD ICTP CNU ICAA is deﬁning an innovative way of conceiving, constructing, and repairing our built environment. The author of six monographs on architectural and urban design translated into six languages and over 130 scientiﬁc papers, he has derived evidence-based rules for achieving beauty through scientiﬁc inquiry. These rules replace images driven by an ideology that created inhuman and dysfunctional buildings and urban regions following World-War II. Beauty as a measurable quality is supported by developing disciplines such as Complexity and Biophilia. Dr. Salingaros was selected by UTNE Reader as one of the “50 Visionaries who are Changing Your World” in 2008. In Planetizen’s 2009 survey, he was ranked 11 th among “The Top Urban Thinkers of All Time”. He is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Sixto J. Castro

Sixto J. Castro is currently Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Valladolid in Spain. He is guest professor of the same topic at Bayreuth Universit¨at in Germany since 2004. He has been visiting scholar and researcher at the universities of Houston, Temple and Oxford. He has published “La trama del tiempo” (Salamanca, 2002),“En teor´ıa, es arte” (Salamanca: 2005), “Vituperio de orbanejas” (M´exico: 2007), and edited “The paths of creation” with Alfredo Marcos, (Bern, Peter Lang; 2011). He has published many research papers in scientiﬁc journals, mainly on aesthetics and philosophy of religion. He is currently the editor of the Spanish journal “Estudios Filos´oﬁcos.”

Meredith Eliassen

Meredith Eliassen (M.S.L.I.S., Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts) is the Operations Manager for Special Collections at the J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University. She has studied the family in the United States. She is interested in how legislation has inﬂuenced the lives of ordinary individuals and shaped historic memory. She has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and most of her research reﬂects life and customs of this region. However,“Columbia’s Beauty” is a projectthat was a decade in the making that celebrates her twenty years curating the Marguerite Archer Collection of Historic Children’s Materials.

Philipp Ruch

Philipp Ruch is a political philosopher and founder of the Center for Political Beauty, a think tank for studies of acts of moral beauty. He is currently research fellow with the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment with a research project on the visual perception of genocides and is writing his Ph.D. on “The feeling of honour”. In 2010, he gained oﬃcial support from 6,000 victims of the Srebrenica-Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina to build a ‘Pillar of Shame’ against the United Nations.

Agnes Horvath: Pulcinella, or the metaphysics of the nulla: in between politics and theatre

Pulcinella, or the metaphysics of the nulla: in between politics and theatre
AGNES HORVATH
ABSTRACT
This article argues that Pulcinella, a figure of classical Italian commedia dell’arte, could also be considered as emblematic for the reordering of politics in the early-modern and modern periods. By placing emphasis on the common underlying theatrical aspects of ‘representation’, it effectively connects the absolutist and democratic periods and helps us to understand why actors and acting came to play such a prominent role in contemporary politics, whether as politicians imitating actors, or as actors actually becoming politicians. The article also shows that this sublimation of theatre into politics is not even a contemporary phenomenon but can be traced back to the ancient mime, following the origins of Pulcinella, and the first crisis of democracy, in classical Athens, in the footsteps of Plato.
Key words mask, mimesis, nothingness, theatre, trickster

Arpad Szakolczai: Reflexive Historical Sociology

Reflexive Historical Sociology

Editorial Reviews Review One cannot but hope that Szakolczais ambitious, scholarly and stylish work will have the warm reception it deserves and that it will succeed in triggering genuine and fruitful debates. - Angelos Mouzakitis, European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2) Product Description This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called reflexive historical sociology. There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally, the book examines the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity.

Harald Wydra: Communism and the Emergence of Democracy

Featured Books: Communism and the Emergence of Democracy

Before democracy becomes an institutionalized form of political authority, the rupture with authoritarian forms of power causes deep uncertainty about power and outcomes. This book connects the study of democratization in eastern Europe and Russia to the emergence and crisis of communism. Wydra argues that the communist past is not simply a legacy but needs to be seen as a social organism in gestation, where critical events produce new expectations, memories, and symbols that influence meanings of democracy. By examining a series of pivotal historical events, he shows that democratization is not just a matter of institutional design, but rather a matter of consciousness and leadership under conditions of extreme and traumatic incivility. Rather than adopting the opposition between non-democratic and democratic, Wydra argues that the communist experience must be central to the study of the emergence and nature of democracy in (post-) communist countries.

Hardback

(ISBN-13: 9780521851695)

DOI: 10.2277/0521851696

Also available in eBook format
Published February 2007

Bjørn Thomassen: Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate

Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate

This article suggests a need to link the anthropological debate of multiple modernities more closely to Weberian social theory, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadt and Eric Voegelin. This implies readdressing the question concerning the anthropological contribution to the understanding of modernity, forcing a link to historical-social theory. In this context, the article discusses the growing axial age debate in social theory, which was indeed an important background to the very idea of ‘multiple modernities’.

Anthropological Theory December 2010 10: 321-342, doi:10.1177/1463499610386659

Arpad Szakolczai: Sociology, Religion and Grace

Sociology, Religion and Grace

Editorial Reviews Review In sum, the book is an adventurous critique of the modern world. -- Duane J. Osheim, Renaissance Quarterly Product Description Grace is a central concept of theology, while the term also has a wide range of meanings in many fields. For the first time in book format, the sociology of grace (or enchantment) is comprehensively explained in detail, with fascinating results. The author’s writings on this topic take the reader on an intriguing journey which traverses subjects ranging from theology, through the history of art, archaeology and mythology to anthropology. As such, this volume will interest academics across a wide range of disciplines apart from sociology.

Arpad Szakolczai: The Genesis of Modernity

The Genesis of Modernity

Editorial Reviews Product Description This book reconstructs the ideas of three of the most important theoriests of the Twentieth Century, Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Eric Voegelin. Their ideas on the distant roots and sources of modernity are discussed. About the Author Arpad Szakolczai studied in Budapest, Hungary and has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1990 to 1998 he taught social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence. He is now Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at University College, Cork. This book follows his Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (1998), and Reflexive Historical Sociology (2000), also published by Routledge. Product Details Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (December 23, 2002) Language: English ISBN-10: 0415253055 ISBN-13: 978-0415253055 Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches