W Outhwaite
Biographic Data
| ID | 175610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Outhwaite |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Outhwaite |
| SIGNATURE | OUTHWAITE W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6599-9826 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 194 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 78 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Rethinking European Modernity
In his book Rethinking European Modernity. Reason, Power and Coloniality , Schelkshorn lays the foundation for a new philosophical interpretation of European modernity, which critically responds to intra-European debates (Critical Theory, Heidegger, Blumenberg, Frankfurt discourse theory, Civilization theory) on the one hand, and the critique of modernity by postcolonial philosophies in Latin America on the other hand. In the light of the metathe…
A Tribute to Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)
Brexit
Brexit refers to the withdrawal in 2020, following a referendum in 2016, of the United Kingdom from the European Union; it had been a member of the European Communities since 1973. The entry distinguishes between a long and a short Brexit, where the short one ended at the beginning of 2020, and was soon followed by the COVID‐19 pandemic, while the long one will continue indefinitely (unless it is reversed). The economic and political consequences…
When critical realism was ‘new' and what came after
William Outhwaite is well-known as an early proponent of critical realism and for his work on European politics, critical theory and on Jürgen Habermas. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses his life and career, including how he came to write on subjects that intersected with and developed themes Roy Bhaskar was also working on at the time. This work resulted in three early books, Understanding Social Life, Concept Formation in Social Scie…
A Perspective on Perspectivism
Book review:Smith, Kenneth. Perspectivism. A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. London: Routledge, 2022. 320 pages
In Memoriam Margaret Archer
In memoriamMargaret Archer was one of Britain's leading sociologists and also played a major role on the world stage.My colIaboration with her was both intellectual and practical.We shared an attachment to the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar ( -), which she developed into fundamental analyses of structure and culture, and later of re exivity and what she called the 'internal conversation' .We diverged somewhat on what Anthony Giddens c…
Legitimate rule, sovereignty and transnational democracy
Beginning with a critical discussion of Max Weber’s concept of legitimate rule, this article explores the interplay between national and transnational democracy, the authoritarian degeneration of many democratic states such as Hungary, often with a rhetoric of national sovereignty, and the prospects for extending transnational democracy in the European Union. Europe is trusted more than their national state by most Europeans, but governance at bo…
Bourdieu Canonised
This article examines Pierre Bourdieu's canonical status among the sociologists of the second half of the 20th century. Particular attention is given to his own work, and other work inspired by his approach, on European integration and post-communist transition
Existence as a predicament
This short critical commentary on the article raises some questions about the authors' model of temporality and the linear conception of 'milestones', while endorsing this conception in cases where people feel deprived of something they might have expected to obtain
Editing at the end of the Soviet empire
Technocratic Planning and Political Strategies
This commentary examines the EU’s halting development of territorial policy, most recently in macro-regional planning, and the responses of member states’ local and national governmental elites. Whether populist or not in their overall programmes, these elites have tended to resist EU initiatives in the name of a perceived national interest or to instrumentalise them in order to maximise their domestic political pay-off. These ‘sovereignty games’…
A Caesura in Social Theory
The centenary of Max Weber's death raises the question of the wider significance of 1920 as marking a break in the history of social theory. This essay focuses on Germany and Austria, where the political break with the past was particularly sharp and the discontinuities in the social and intellectual configuration of the social sciences were most obvious. Three trends are particularly striking: the development of neo-Marxist social theory with Gy…
The heritage of classical sociology
This short contribution explores alternative conceptions of classical sociology and continuities and discontinuities in its history, with particular attention to the German and Austrian context and the sociological diaspora resulting from European fascism
Fabian Anicker, Entwurf einer Soziologie der Deliberation. Weilerswist
When did 1989 end
As with the 1968 movements in Western Europe and North America and their long-lasting subterranean effects, one can also ask when 1989 ended. A quick answer to the title question would be Christmas 1989, with the execution of the Ceauşescus, or New Year, with the installation of Václav Havel as President. Another would be December 1991, the date of the dissolution of the USSR, which would be more relevant for the post-Soviet space and could perha…
A Cosmopolitan Democrat. David Held (1951–2019)
David Held, one of the most creative and prolific political sociologists of our times, died suddenly of cancer in March, 2019. Born in London and the son of German refugees escaping Nazism, he studied at Manchester, MIT, and Cambridge. Held then obtained teaching posts at Cardiff and York, and a chair in Politics and Sociology at the Open University, the UK's innovative distance-learning university established in the 1960s by Prime Minister Harol…
De-europeanisation After Brexit
Europeanisation, for obvious reasons, has often been discussed in tandem with transnationalisation. It is therefore relevant to ask whether de-Europeanisation entails detransnationalisation, or what elements of the transnational might persist outside the EU framework. I address this issue in relation to the UK and also to Switzerland, whose links with the EU are also under pressure
Max Weber’s Conception of “Rationalization” and the 21st Century
Weber’s concept of “rationalization” is rightly seen as the core of his mature thought. At the same time, there has been increasing attention to his “ambivalence” towards the rationalization of economic, administrative and political process-es, and of the conduct of life altogether. The themes of his nationalism and the irrational tendencies of his complex personality have also become increasingly prominent. While nationalism may not be per se ir…
Karl Marx, Le Capital
This paper discusses the first French edition of Capital volume 1, revised by Marx, analyzed by Kevin Anderson (1983) in this journal and subsequent work, and partially incorporated into the new German edition by Thomas Kuczynski (2017), based largely on the second German edition. We argue that both Marx and Anderson are too generous (and Engels too negative) in their respective assessments of the translation and that it has found its appropriate…
The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology
DI-fusion, le Dépôt institutionnel numérique de l'ULB, est l'outil de référencementde la production scientifique de l'ULB.L'interface de recherche DI-fusion permet de consulter les publications des chercheurs de l'ULB et les thèses qui y ont été défendues.
Kuhn and Social Science
Eurasianism
Eurasianism is a diffuse set of ideas based around the geographical region of Europe and Asia and often includes the idea of a special position of Russia and other states in the region.
Fascism
Fascism can be narrowly defined as an early twentieth‐century extreme right political movement and regime form or, more broadly, as a continuing tendency and a threat to democratic societies.
Populism
Populism, like nationalism and democracy, is an ideology of popular rule. However, where nationalism (in some of its aspects) stresses the civic or ethnic “belonging” of the people, populism invokes “the people” as opposed to elites, such as an established political class. It can therefore take a left‐ or right‐wing form, and is often ambiguous or ambivalent between them.
R ousseau, J ean‐Jacques
Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is notable for his contributions to social and political theory, and is a political thinker for whom relations of government are entwined with individual education, social relations, and cultural context.
New Philosophies of Social Science
Canon Formation in Late 20th-Century British Sociology
This article examines the 'canonical' status achieved in recent British sociology by four writers: Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Along with other key thinkers of the later 20th century such as Foucault and Habermas, these four sociologists, from different geographical and theoretical bases, transformed the shape of British sociology and its relation to social theory
The Black-Well Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought
Understanding Social Life
Max Weber
Journal Article Max Weber: Selections in Translation Get access Max Weber: Selections in Translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Translated by Eric Matthews. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Pp. xii + 398. £12.50 hardback, £3.95 paperback.) William Outhwaite William Outhwaite University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 88, Issue 352, 1 December 1978, Pages …
Understanding Social Life
The Myth of Modernist Method
Postmodernist thinkers have often claimed that there is something like a 'modernist' model of theory and metatheory in the social sciences which is objectivistic, dogmatic, and generally over-ambitious, aiming to dominate the theoretical landscape like a modernist skyscraper. This paper suggests that there is little to support such a view, and that most sociologists and social anthropologists, and many other social scientists, have been much more…
The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought
A Caesura in Social Theory
The centenary of Max Weber's death raises the question of the wider significance of 1920 as marking a break in the history of social theory. This essay focuses on Germany and Austria, where the political break with the past was particularly sharp and the discontinuities in the social and intellectual configuration of the social sciences were most obvious. Three trends are particularly striking: the development of neo-Marxist social theory with Gy…
Recovering Ethical Life
Realism, Naturalism and Social Behaviour
Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel
The future of European democracy
Given that we have democracy of a kind in most of Europe, and that there seems a reasonable prospect of its survival in, and extension to the rest of, the sub-continent, this article asks whether and to what extent we also need European-level democratic politics and how we might hope to achieve this, against the background of the current crisis. This article examines the ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU and the tensions between its formal decision-…
Existence as a predicament
This short critical commentary on the article raises some questions about the authors' model of temporality and the linear conception of 'milestones', while endorsing this conception in cases where people feel deprived of something they might have expected to obtain
Technocratic Planning and Political Strategies
This commentary examines the EU’s halting development of territorial policy, most recently in macro-regional planning, and the responses of member states’ local and national governmental elites. Whether populist or not in their overall programmes, these elites have tended to resist EU initiatives in the name of a perceived national interest or to instrumentalise them in order to maximise their domestic political pay-off. These ‘sovereignty games’…
The heritage of classical sociology
This short contribution explores alternative conceptions of classical sociology and continuities and discontinuities in its history, with particular attention to the German and Austrian context and the sociological diaspora resulting from European fascism
When did 1989 end
As with the 1968 movements in Western Europe and North America and their long-lasting subterranean effects, one can also ask when 1989 ended. A quick answer to the title question would be Christmas 1989, with the execution of the Ceauşescus, or New Year, with the installation of Václav Havel as President. Another would be December 1991, the date of the dissolution of the USSR, which would be more relevant for the post-Soviet space and could perha…
De-europeanisation After Brexit
Europeanisation, for obvious reasons, has often been discussed in tandem with transnationalisation. It is therefore relevant to ask whether de-Europeanisation entails detransnationalisation, or what elements of the transnational might persist outside the EU framework. I address this issue in relation to the UK and also to Switzerland, whose links with the EU are also under pressure
Karl Marx, Le Capital
This paper discusses the first French edition of Capital volume 1, revised by Marx, analyzed by Kevin Anderson (1983) in this journal and subsequent work, and partially incorporated into the new German edition by Thomas Kuczynski (2017), based largely on the second German edition. We argue that both Marx and Anderson are too generous (and Engels too negative) in their respective assessments of the translation and that it has found its appropriate…
Remarks on Simon Susen’s The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences
The lure of technocracy
Prediction and Prophecy in Communist Studies
Contrary to Popper's classic article with this title, it can be argued that the principal failure of Western analyses of communism was not the failure to predict the collapse of most of the communist regimes in and around 1989 but more a failure of prophecy, in the sense of a more speculative theory of the contradictions of those regimes and their unsustainability. The reasons can be found in the polarisation between overblown theories of totalit…
Rethinking Europe
New developments in realist philosophy
Understanding Social Life
Understanding Social Life
Imaginative Participation
Understanding Social Life
Max Weber
Journal Article Max Weber: Selections in Translation Get access Max Weber: Selections in Translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Translated by Eric Matthews. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Pp. xii + 398. £12.50 hardback, £3.95 paperback.) William Outhwaite William Outhwaite University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 88, Issue 352, 1 December 1978, Pages …
Wilhelm Dilthey
On Cliches
Current Trends in Weber Interpretation
Shorter Notices
Exploring the Marx-Weber Nexus
Critical Hermeneutics, Realism and the Sociological Tradition
In Chapter 3, I sketched out very briefly the way in which I think realism should deal with the interrelated issues of interpretation, common sense, consensus (in the sense of progress in science) etc. In Chapters 4 and 5, I worked through these claims in more detail, presenting the main themes of hermeneutics and critical theory and trying to show that they can, after all, be incorporated within the realist naturalist position advanced in Chapte…
Realism and Hermeneutics
This chapter and Chapter 5 are intended to form a unit, since the relations between hermeneutics and critical theory are extremely close, though also very complex. First, it is worth noting that it was Jürgen Habermas’s development of critical theory which introduced the term ‘hermeneutics’ into the social scientific culture of the English-speaking world. One of Habermas’s central preoccupations has always been the issue of ‘methodological dualis…
Philosophies of Social Science
As I said in the introduction, I do not intend in this book to add to the existing literature on positivist philosophies of science. We need, however, to look at them briefly in order to set the scene for the growth of the hermeneutic, critical and realist alternatives. One of the best recent books on positivism distinguishes no fewer than twelve senses of the term. 1 For present purposes, however, we can get by with three variants.
Realism and Critical Theory
The ‘critical theory’ of what came to be called the Frankfurt School has been so fully discussed that there is no point in providing yet another outline history here. 1 I shall be concerned almost entirely with the work of Jürgen Habermas, and I shall refer to the earlier generation of critical theorists only to set the scene for a juxtaposition of Habermas and Bhaskar.
The Realist Alternative
It may seem paradoxical that a philosophy of science, especially one which calls itself realist, should start from the premiss that science, like humanity itself, is a historical accident. But can this premiss be seriously questioned, except on some creationist view? The paradox is on the other foot, that of the apparently robust epistemologies which allow us to be certain about our experiences but not about that of which they are experiences (th…
Conclusion
The crucial issue for realist naturalism is the sense to be given to structural concepts in the social sciences. Unlike reductionist forms of positivist naturalism, which tend to be attracted by behaviourism, a realist naturalism emphasises the stratification of reality as a general metaphysical principle. In the form defended here, it also accepts the ‘hermeneutic’ principle that the concepts and theories of the social sciences must make substan…
Realism and Social Science
What are the implications of the approach outlined in the previous chapter for the practice of social research? We can begin to answer this question by reviewing some of the realist principles which have already been mentioned. In the sphere of ontology, we have
New Philosophies of Social Science
Studies in the Theory of Ideology
New developments in realist philosophy
Social Theory and Social Criticism
Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel
Interview with Tom Bottomore
Realism, Naturalism and Social Behaviour
Tom Bottomore
Sociology (58 works) · Philosophy (47 works) · Epistemology (44 works) · Political science (32 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (27 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Social science (18 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (16 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (14 works)