C Thorpe
Biographic Data
| ID | 53185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Thorpe |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Thorpe |
| SIGNATURE | THORPE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8588-0507 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 101 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Genocidal Enjoyment
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on Gaza, following the 7 October Hamas attacks and breakthrough of Israel’s security wall, has been dubbed a “live-streamed genocide” as a growing number of entities around the world, including international human rights organizations and leading genocide scholars, have concluded Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute genocide. A key source used to highlight Israel’s genocidal conduct and intent towar…
The Carnival King of Capital
This paper argues that President Donald Trump may be understood as ruling through carnival. The theatrical reversal of conventional standards and rules, his carnivalesque incivility, is key to his political persona. It performs his claim to be an outsider, attacking and subverting the Washington DC establishment. But Trump's carnivalesque performance, far from undermining the dominant order, reflects it. What Trump represents is carnivalized capi…
The Co‐Construction and Co‐Deconstruction of Childhood and Sociology
Sociology and childhood are co‐constructed. The social construction of childhood was integral to the social processes that gave rise to sociology, involving a growth of social reflexivity—and also, therefore, a more conscious social control—in the emergence of the disciplinary society. Childhood was understood as the period of life in which social control was internalized. Childhood was the focus of discipline and the social ordering efforts in m…
Virtual diversity and the value-ladenness of science
Collins, Evans, and Reyes-Galindo develop the concept of interactional expertise into the idea of virtual diversity. They thereby provide a strong case against the epistemic barriers established by identity politics. This commentary questions, however, whether virtual diversity can incorporate the critique of institutional power that Wynne has argued is at the center of tensions between lay publics and scientific establishments. The commentary ar…
The Disorganization of America
This paper argues that the second presidency of Donald J. Trump represents the decline of both American democracy and American imperialism. American power was at its peak during the postwar boom and early Cold War when its imperialism could appear to be universalism. In this period, American democracy was legitimized by Fordist mass society. This period was the height of social liberalism, in which inequalities within the United States were being…
Tharfield - the story of an Eastern Cape farm and its inhabitants (1822-1977)
The story of the farm Tharfield is also that of the families Bowker and Webb. As one of the loveliest and most unspoiled farms in the Settler country it is not only a treasure house of Settler history: the wide variety of habitat it offers for bird and beast also makes it of interest to the conservationist and the ecologist, and a study of the farming methods practised from the time the farm was granted to its original owner in 1822 might prove m…
Social Studies of Science
Alvin W. Gouldner argued that the opposing thought-styles of classicism and romanticism formed the deep structure of sociology theory. This chapter applies this idea, arguing that the sociology of science, and the interdisciplinary science and technology studies that have developed from it, is an intellectual project in which the opposing deep orientations, or ideological structures, of classicism and romanticism are centrally at stake. The chapt…
The Carnival King of Capital
This paper argues that President Donald Trump may be understood as ruling through carnival. The theatrical reversal of conventional standards and rules, his carnivalesque incivility, is key to his political persona. It performs his claim to be an outsider, attacking and subverting the Washington DC establishment. But Trump’s carnivalesque performance, far from undermining the dominant order, reflects it. What Trump represents is carnivalized capi…
Postmodern Neo-Romanticism and The End of History in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy addresses the end of history in three senses: the global triumph of capitalism, the end of historicity, and the end of the world. Atwood weaves together these meanings of the end of history, showing how the eternal present of consumerist simulacra is also a trajectory toward ecological and social disaster. However, Atwood’s trilogy is itself symptomatic of this postmodern capitalist condition. Atwood accepts th…
God, Guns, Gold and Glory
Radical Intellectuals, History, and the Soviet Union
Necroculture
In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx's writings on alienation and Erich Fromm's conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domi
A New Approach for STS? A Synthesis of Marxism and Actor-Network Theory
From a micro-sociological focus on ‘laboratory life', the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is today increasingly concerned with broader questions of the relationship between science an
Life politics, nature and the state
Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understand…
Artificial Life on a Dead Planet
In this chapter, Charles Thorpe argues that the trajectory of capitalist technology is toward artificial life on a dead planet. The destruction of ecosystems and species by deforestation, chemical pollution, and the effects of climate change is being accompanied by a parallel process of the creation of artificial forms of life. We currently face crisis in all the systems that sustain life on this planet: from the oceans, to the soil, to the atmos…
Death of a Salesman
Producing the Post-Fordist Public
The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. P…
Participation as Post-Fordist Politics
In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift 'from deficit to dialogue' in conceptualizing the relationship between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a polit…
Community and the Market in Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science
The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which…
Alienation as Death
Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine is an exploration of the human effects of the replacement of workers by machines and a commentary on capitalist rationalization. It has continuing relevance to the disciplining and displacement of workers by information technology and robotics in the contemporary workplace. But Rice also develops a more far-reaching critique of the dehumanizing features of everyday life under capitalism. His portrayal res…
Authors of the Storm
Michael Polanyi and the politics of science studies
From Budapest to the US
An “entangled” history of technoscience
Science and political power
The separation of knowledge from power has been central to the legitimation of western science; yet, science has been fundamental to the augmentation of modern state power, especially the perfection of the means of violence.There is a liberal, secular theodicy that asks 'if science is pure and universalistic, how is scientific evil possible?'How could liberal conceptions of the neutrality and purity of scientific knowledge be maintained in the fa…
Producing the Post-Fordist Public
The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. P…
Participation as Post-Fordist Politics
In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift 'from deficit to dialogue' in conceptualizing the relationship between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a polit…
Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer
Charismatic authority flourishes in places where some social scientists evidently do not expect to find it - in late modernity and in highly complex and instrumentally orientated technoscientific organizations. This paper documents and interprets participants' testimony about the workings of wartime Los Alamos in relation to the charisma of its Scientific Director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. We treat charisma as an interactional accomplishment, and e…
Life politics, nature and the state
Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understand…
Science against modernism
Science, as an institution, is widely taken by sociologists to exemplify the modern tendency towards vesting trust and authority in impersonal offices and procedures, rather than in embodied human individuals. Such views of science face an important challenge in the social philosophy of Michael Polanyi. His work provides important insights into the continuing role of embodied personal authority and tradition in science and, hence, in late moderni…
Authors of the Storm
Violence and the Scientific Vocation
This article examines the implications for the notion of scientific vocation of the modern intersection between science and violence, realized most powerfully in the atomic bomb. Tracing the career and political trajectory of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and drawing on the theories of Max Weber, Julien Benda and Michel Foucault, the article addresses ethical ambiguities and tensions in the modern scientific vocation. I argue that Oppenh…
Disciplining Experts
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had emerged from World War II as America's foremost scientific advisor to government, faced a security hearing which stripped him of his security clearance and barred him from government work. This paper provides a novel interpretation of this event and its significance by arguing that the hearing exposed fundamental and endemic tensions in the place of science in liberal democratic politics. Science's image of…
Against Time
This article examines scheduling as a source of institutional momentum in the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory during World War Two. As well as allowing coordination of the large and geographically dispersed sites of the atomic bomb project, the scheduling regime operated as a system of social control, suppressing opposition to the use of the weapon. The analysis suggests the importance of historical and ethnographic attention to how schedule…
God, Guns, Gold and Glory
Community and the Market in Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science
The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which…
Virtual diversity and the value-ladenness of science
Collins, Evans, and Reyes-Galindo develop the concept of interactional expertise into the idea of virtual diversity. They thereby provide a strong case against the epistemic barriers established by identity politics. This commentary questions, however, whether virtual diversity can incorporate the critique of institutional power that Wynne has argued is at the center of tensions between lay publics and scientific establishments. The commentary ar…
The Sociological Imagination of R. D. Laing
The work of psychiatrist R. D. Laing deserves recognition as a key contribution to sociological theory, in dialogue with the interactionist and interpretivist sociological traditions. Laing encourages us to identify meaningful social action in what would otherwise appear to be nonsocial phenomena. His interpretation of schizophrenia as a rational strategy of withdrawal reminds us of the threat that others can pose to the self and how social relat…
Atomic Spaces and American Culture
During the Cold War, as science was being mobilized by both superpowers in the development of their nuclear arsenals, so it was also mobilized ideologically. Writers such as Karl Popper and Robert Merton presented science as antithetical to totalitarianism, and scientific community as isomorphic with the values and structures of political democracy. The obvious contradiction was that while science was being most loudly touted as the very embodime…
Atomic Spaces and American Culture
During the Cold War, as science was being mobilized by both superpowers in the development of their nuclear arsenals, so it was also mobilized ideologically. Writers such as Karl Popper and Robert Merton presented science as antithetical to totalitarianism, and scientific community as isomorphic with the values and structures of political democracy. The obvious contradiction was that while science was being most loudly touted as the very embodime…
Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer
Charismatic authority flourishes in places where some social scientists evidently do not expect to find it - in late modernity and in highly complex and instrumentally orientated technoscientific organizations. This paper documents and interprets participants' testimony about the workings of wartime Los Alamos in relation to the charisma of its Scientific Director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. We treat charisma as an interactional accomplishment, and e…
Science against modernism
Science, as an institution, is widely taken by sociologists to exemplify the modern tendency towards vesting trust and authority in impersonal offices and procedures, rather than in embodied human individuals. Such views of science face an important challenge in the social philosophy of Michael Polanyi. His work provides important insights into the continuing role of embodied personal authority and tradition in science and, hence, in late moderni…
Disciplining Experts
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had emerged from World War II as America's foremost scientific advisor to government, faced a security hearing which stripped him of his security clearance and barred him from government work. This paper provides a novel interpretation of this event and its significance by arguing that the hearing exposed fundamental and endemic tensions in the place of science in liberal democratic politics. Science's image of…
Disciplining Experts
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had emerged from World War II as America's foremost scientific advisor to government, faced a security hearing which stripped him of his security clearance and barred him from government work. This paper provides a novel interpretation of this event and its significance by arguing that the hearing exposed fundamental and endemic tensions in the place of science in liberal democratic politics. Science's image of…
Against Time
This article examines scheduling as a source of institutional momentum in the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory during World War Two. As well as allowing coordination of the large and geographically dispersed sites of the atomic bomb project, the scheduling regime operated as a system of social control, suppressing opposition to the use of the weapon. The analysis suggests the importance of historical and ethnographic attention to how schedule…
Violence and the Scientific Vocation
This article examines the implications for the notion of scientific vocation of the modern intersection between science and violence, realized most powerfully in the atomic bomb. Tracing the career and political trajectory of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and drawing on the theories of Max Weber, Julien Benda and Michel Foucault, the article addresses ethical ambiguities and tensions in the modern scientific vocation. I argue that Oppenh…
Telling All on Teller
Oppenheimer
The Sociological Imagination of R. D. Laing
The work of psychiatrist R. D. Laing deserves recognition as a key contribution to sociological theory, in dialogue with the interactionist and interpretivist sociological traditions. Laing encourages us to identify meaningful social action in what would otherwise appear to be nonsocial phenomena. His interpretation of schizophrenia as a rational strategy of withdrawal reminds us of the threat that others can pose to the self and how social relat…
A Splintered Function
Community and the Market in Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science
The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which…
Alienation as Death
Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine is an exploration of the human effects of the replacement of workers by machines and a commentary on capitalist rationalization. It has continuing relevance to the disciplining and displacement of workers by information technology and robotics in the contemporary workplace. But Rice also develops a more far-reaching critique of the dehumanizing features of everyday life under capitalism. His portrayal res…
Authors of the Storm
Producing the Post-Fordist Public
The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. P…
Participation as Post-Fordist Politics
In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift 'from deficit to dialogue' in conceptualizing the relationship between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a polit…
Death of a Salesman
Artificial Life on a Dead Planet
In this chapter, Charles Thorpe argues that the trajectory of capitalist technology is toward artificial life on a dead planet. The destruction of ecosystems and species by deforestation, chemical pollution, and the effects of climate change is being accompanied by a parallel process of the creation of artificial forms of life. We currently face crisis in all the systems that sustain life on this planet: from the oceans, to the soil, to the atmos…
Life politics, nature and the state
Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understand…
A New Approach for STS? A Synthesis of Marxism and Actor-Network Theory
From a micro-sociological focus on ‘laboratory life', the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is today increasingly concerned with broader questions of the relationship between science an
Necroculture
In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx's writings on alienation and Erich Fromm's conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domi
Radical Intellectuals, History, and the Soviet Union
God, Guns, Gold and Glory
The Carnival King of Capital
This paper argues that President Donald Trump may be understood as ruling through carnival. The theatrical reversal of conventional standards and rules, his carnivalesque incivility, is key to his political persona. It performs his claim to be an outsider, attacking and subverting the Washington DC establishment. But Trump’s carnivalesque performance, far from undermining the dominant order, reflects it. What Trump represents is carnivalized capi…
Postmodern Neo-Romanticism and The End of History in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy addresses the end of history in three senses: the global triumph of capitalism, the end of historicity, and the end of the world. Atwood weaves together these meanings of the end of history, showing how the eternal present of consumerist simulacra is also a trajectory toward ecological and social disaster. However, Atwood’s trilogy is itself symptomatic of this postmodern capitalist condition. Atwood accepts th…
Philosophy (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Social science (10 works) · Economics (8 works)