Dick Pels
Biographic Data
| ID | 244607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dick Pels |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dick |
| FAMILY NAME | Pels |
| SIGNATURE | PELS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 292 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Spokespersonship
In modern communication‐ and media‐driven cultures, spokespersonship has increasingly become professionalized, offering an indispensable vehicle for advocating the identity and interests of persons, groups, and institutions. But, on a deeper level, we all act as spokespersons, by “presenting” that which is not immediately at hand (persons, things, ideas) in current face‐to‐face situations. All such representational acts crucially depend on belief…
Spokespersonship
In modern communication‐ and media‐driven cultures, spokespersonship has increasingly become professionalized, offering an indispensable vehicle for advocating the identity and interests of persons, groups, and institutions. But, on a deeper level, we all act as spokespersons, by “presenting” that which is not immediately at hand (persons, things, ideas) in current face‐to‐face situations. All such representational acts crucially depend on belief…
The Intellectual as Stranger
The Intellectual as Stranger explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man
Aesthetic Representation and Political Style
Introduction
Media and the Restyling of Politics
Introduction - John Corner and Dick Pels The Re-Styling of Politics Democracy's Inner Voice - Frank Ankersmit Political Style as Unintended Consequence of Political Action Aesthetic Representation and Political Style - Dick Pels Re-Balancing Identity and Difference in Media Democracy Mediated Persona and Political Culture - John Corner The Celebrity Politician - John Street Political Style and Popular Culture 'After Dallas and Dynasty We Have... …
Unhastening Science
What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied 'lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from 'faster' cultures such a politics and business. This 'unha…
Property and Power in Social Theory
Property and power perform a key role in social and political theories of class inequality and social stratification, however, theorists have yet clearly to define these concepts, their mutual boundaries and scopes of application. This book answers the property/power puzzle by undertaking a broad historical inquiry into its intellectual origins and present-day effects through a series of case studies, including:Marxism vs. anarchism* the fascist …
Socialism between fact and value
In the long rivalry between ethical and scientific socialism, which spans the better part of the twentieth century, the former has stage-managed a remarkable comeback. This article traces some of the similarities between the first 'long wave' of ethical socialism and its current Third Way revival, focusing more particularly upon the work of Hendrik de Man. de Man pioneered a cultural socialism which emphasized universalistic communitarian values,…
Third ways in political ideology
Everyday Essentialism
Everyday Essentialism
This article takes up the challenge posed by ANT's principle of radical symmetry in a different way, by developing a counterargument to the Latourian (ethnomethodological) presumption that social and symbolic constructions are in themselves too fragile and weak to effectively knit together the social order which needs ballasting by a myriad of technological objects. It is argued that social orders are also maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies…
The Status of the Object
In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imagi…
The Intellectual as Stranger
Introduction 1. Speaking the Spokesperson 2. The Proletarian as Stranger 3. Speaking for Social Things: Sociology and Socalism in Durkheim, Sorrel and Barres 4. Missionary Sociology between Left and Right: Karl Mannheim and the Rightwing Challenge 5. The Dark Side of Socialism: Hendrik de Man and the Fascist Temptation 6. Treason of the Intellectuals: Paul de Man and Hendrik de Man 7. Strange Standpoints 8. Privileged Nomads 9. Towards a Social E…
Three Spaces of Social Theory
This paper raises doubts about the traditional justification of the autonomy of the sociological object in terms of the of as demarcated from the state. Against the tendency to homogenize social theory from an overly or liberal image of its early history, it offers atriadic, knowledge-geographical tableau of interpretations of the social object-and-project, which aligns it more closely with political ideology, resisting any clear-cut delineations…
Property and Power in Social Theory
Reflexivity
Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the 'inescapable perspectivity' (Mannheim) of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object i…
Privileged Nomads
This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought (cf. Simmel's portrayal of the stranger as intellectual and Mannheim's picture of the freischwebende Intelligenz as collectively estranged). Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the 'exilic' or 'nomadic' intellectual, who is torn betw…
Property and Power in Social Theory
The proletarian as stranger
This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already all…
Fascism and the Primacy of the Political
One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question. With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had pr…
Property and power in social theory
Werner Sombart 1863-1941. Eine biographie
Mixing metaphors
Heilbron's Comte
The Status of the Object
In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imagi…
Media and the Restyling of Politics
Introduction - John Corner and Dick Pels The Re-Styling of Politics Democracy's Inner Voice - Frank Ankersmit Political Style as Unintended Consequence of Political Action Aesthetic Representation and Political Style - Dick Pels Re-Balancing Identity and Difference in Media Democracy Mediated Persona and Political Culture - John Corner The Celebrity Politician - John Street Political Style and Popular Culture 'After Dallas and Dynasty We Have... …
Reflexivity
Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the 'inescapable perspectivity' (Mannheim) of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object i…
Privileged Nomads
This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought (cf. Simmel's portrayal of the stranger as intellectual and Mannheim's picture of the freischwebende Intelligenz as collectively estranged). Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the 'exilic' or 'nomadic' intellectual, who is torn betw…
The Politics of Symmetry
While symmetry and impartiality have become ruling principles in S&TS, defining its core ideal of a `value-free relativism', their philosophical anchorage has attracted much less discussion than the issue of how far their jurisdiction can be extended or generalized. This paper seeks to argue that symmetry and agnosticism unwarrantably present as generalizable procedure what are in fact contingent knowledge-political attempts to reposition various…
Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
In previous decades, a regrettable divorce has arisen between two currents of theorizing and research about and science: the Mannheimian and Wittgensteinian traditions. The radical impulse of the new social studies of science in the early 1970s was initiated not by followers of Mannheim, but by Wittgensteinians such as Kuhn, Bloor, and Collins. This paper inquires whether this Wittgensteinian program is not presently running into difficulties tha…
Knowledge politics and anti-politics
Unhastening Science
What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied 'lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from 'faster' cultures such a politics and business. This 'unha…
Everyday Essentialism
This article takes up the challenge posed by ANT's principle of radical symmetry in a different way, by developing a counterargument to the Latourian (ethnomethodological) presumption that social and symbolic constructions are in themselves too fragile and weak to effectively knit together the social order which needs ballasting by a myriad of technological objects. It is argued that social orders are also maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies…
Carmen - or the Invention of a New Feminine Myth
Elias and the Politics of Theory
Hendrik de Man and the ideology of Planism
On 26 December 1933 the front page of the socialist daily Vooruit (Forward) carries a lyrical description of the Christmas Congress of the Belgian Labour Party, already glorified by its old patron Emile Vandervelde as “the most wonderful socialist convention of the past 25 years”. In a long speech on the first day of session “comrade Rik de Man” has elaborated the Plan of Labour. When he leaves the rostrum he is embraced by Vandervelde and floode…
Three Spaces of Social Theory
This paper raises doubts about the traditional justification of the autonomy of the sociological object in terms of the of as demarcated from the state. Against the tendency to homogenize social theory from an overly or liberal image of its early history, it offers atriadic, knowledge-geographical tableau of interpretations of the social object-and-project, which aligns it more closely with political ideology, resisting any clear-cut delineations…
Mixing metaphors
The dark side of socialism
Missionary Sociology between Left and Right
Treason of the Intellectuals
The proletarian as stranger
This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already all…
Strange Standpoints
Socialism between fact and value
In the long rivalry between ethical and scientific socialism, which spans the better part of the twentieth century, the former has stage-managed a remarkable comeback. This article traces some of the similarities between the first 'long wave' of ethical socialism and its current Third Way revival, focusing more particularly upon the work of Hendrik de Man. de Man pioneered a cultural socialism which emphasized universalistic communitarian values,…
Third ways in political ideology
Fascism and the Primacy of the Political
One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question. With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had pr…
Hendrik de Man and the ideology of Planism
On 26 December 1933 the front page of the socialist daily Vooruit (Forward) carries a lyrical description of the Christmas Congress of the Belgian Labour Party, already glorified by its old patron Emile Vandervelde as “the most wonderful socialist convention of the past 25 years”. In a long speech on the first day of session “comrade Rik de Man” has elaborated the Plan of Labour. When he leaves the rostrum he is embraced by Vandervelde and floode…
Carmen - or the Invention of a New Feminine Myth
Elster's Tocqueville
Three major claims advanced by Elster are subjected to critical review. First, the strict Elsterian type of methodological individualism seems absent from Tocqueville's writings. Second, Elster's separation between Tocqueville's formal structures of reasoning and the substantive content of his sociohistorical explanations look artificial and strained. Third, Elster misreads Tocqueville as a simple defender of democracy, while he rather provides a…
Elias and the Politics of Theory
Treason of the Intellectuals
The dark side of socialism
Missionary Sociology between Left and Right
The Politics of Critical Description
Knowledge politics and anti-politics
Heilbron's Comte
Indifference or Critical Difference? Reply to Bogen
L'A. repond a D. Bogen. Ce dernier a mis en doute le bien-fonde de ses analyses de l'evolution de la sociologie de la connaissance. Il montre qu'un certain nombre d'analystes ont, comme lui, souligne le faible nombre de recherches qui ont etudie le rapport entre science, politique et norme sociale. Il met en doute le lien entre description naturaliste et evaluation normative defendu par Wittgenstein, la perspective qui affirme l'existence d'une l…
The Politics of Symmetry
While symmetry and impartiality have become ruling principles in S&TS, defining its core ideal of a `value-free relativism', their philosophical anchorage has attracted much less discussion than the issue of how far their jurisdiction can be extended or generalized. This paper seeks to argue that symmetry and agnosticism unwarrantably present as generalizable procedure what are in fact contingent knowledge-political attempts to reposition various…
Strange Standpoints
Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
In previous decades, a regrettable divorce has arisen between two currents of theorizing and research about and science: the Mannheimian and Wittgensteinian traditions. The radical impulse of the new social studies of science in the early 1970s was initiated not by followers of Mannheim, but by Wittgensteinians such as Kuhn, Bloor, and Collins. This paper inquires whether this Wittgensteinian program is not presently running into difficulties tha…
Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism
Mixing metaphors
Property and Power in Social Theory
The proletarian as stranger
This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already all…
Fascism and the Primacy of the Political
One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question. With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had pr…
Property and power in social theory
Werner Sombart 1863-1941. Eine biographie
Privileged Nomads
This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought (cf. Simmel's portrayal of the stranger as intellectual and Mannheim's picture of the freischwebende Intelligenz as collectively estranged). Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the 'exilic' or 'nomadic' intellectual, who is torn betw…
Property and Power in Social Theory
Reflexivity
Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the 'inescapable perspectivity' (Mannheim) of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object i…
The Intellectual as Stranger
Introduction 1. Speaking the Spokesperson 2. The Proletarian as Stranger 3. Speaking for Social Things: Sociology and Socalism in Durkheim, Sorrel and Barres 4. Missionary Sociology between Left and Right: Karl Mannheim and the Rightwing Challenge 5. The Dark Side of Socialism: Hendrik de Man and the Fascist Temptation 6. Treason of the Intellectuals: Paul de Man and Hendrik de Man 7. Strange Standpoints 8. Privileged Nomads 9. Towards a Social E…
Sociology (32 works) · Law (25 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)