Craig Calhoun
Biographic Data
| ID | 85326 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Craig Calhoun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Craig |
| FAMILY NAME | Calhoun |
| SIGNATURE | CALHOUN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7218-3780 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 187 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2567 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 184 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 23 |
Making majorities ethnic
Can Empowered Citizens Save Democracy
This forum offers critical perspectives on Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor’s Degenerations of Democracy. In her contribution, Ilaria Cozzaglio, raises questions on the standpoint from which a critical perspective on our current democratic crisis is most effectively formulated. Taking an internalist perspective from the citizens’ perspectives on democracy’s contemporary crisis, as the book does, is essential for understanding our c…
Neither Gods nor Emperors
Democracy Is Incomplete
We appreciate four reviews addressing our book, Degenerations of Democracy. Each points to ways democracy may be advanced and also raises questions about our argument. We respond to the latter and briefly build on the former. These are directions for further work, but none stands alone or offers the crucial path forward. This is not surprising, since no democracy in the past or today, even when celebrated as good, just, secure, and stable by a ma…
Immanuel Wallerstein and the Genesis of World-Systems Analysis
Even radical innovations are shaped by historical paths and contexts. They depart from some features, reproduce others, and show the marks of their origins. It takes nothing away from the achievements of remarkable creators, save perhaps individualistic illusions, to note that they are made possible by preparation, pathways, and contributions from many sources
Degenerations of Democracy
On intellectual friendship
The importance of friendship to the lives, careers, and accomplishments of intellectuals is too often neglected.Partly, of course, this reflects a pervasive modern individualism that is sadly prominent among intellectuals -including even those who denounce it.But from an older sociology of knowledge to more recent exercises in 'positionality', the individualism is countered by acknowledgments -or accusations -of class, gender, race, and membershi…
Degenerations of Democracy
Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, and Charles Taylor argue that democracies have embraced individual freedom at the expense of equality and solidarity, economic growth at the expense of democracy. Rebuilding local communities and large-scale institutions is now crucial, with attention to the public good beyond private advantage or ingroup loyalty.
Authenticity and Meritocracy
Authenticity and Meritocracy
Degenerations of Democracy
Degenerations of Democracy
For Sociology
Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup
A Cosmopolitanism of Connections
Business as Usual
This book situates the current crisis in the historical trajectory of the capitalist world-system, showing how the crisis was made possible not only by neoliberal financial reforms but by a massive turn away from manufacturing things of value towards seeking profit from financial exchange and credit. Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, this is a potential historical turning point. The book establishes w…
Moishe Postone and the Transcendence of Capitalism
Antidemocracy in America
Antidemocracy in America is a collective effort to understand the fragility of American democracy and how to protect it from the buried contradictions that Trump’s victory brought into view. It offers essays from leading scholars on topics including race, religion, gender, civil liberties, protest, inequality, immigration, and the media.
Indirect Relationships and Imagined Communities
This chapter presents general features of modernity that social theory has pointed to but inadequately thematized and that help to provide a much stronger sociological foundation for grasping some of the phenomena to which postmodern thought calls our attention. Modern political and economic affairs are distinguished by the increasing frequency, scale, and importance of indirect social relationships. The reproduction of embodied but social sensib…
Antidemocracy in America
Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. \n \nCovering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre an…
Thinking better of ourselves
The Rhetoric of Nationalism
This paper assesses the contribution of Billig’s Banal Nationalism arguing that it moved us beyond the dichotomies of civic versus ethnic and patriotism versus nationalism to focus attention on the omnipresence of nations and the question of when they are flagged and unflagged. In acknowledging the importance of these insights, it is also suggested that an undue focus on ideology, interests and the political may not do justice to the strength of …
La importància de Comunitats imaginades, i de Benedict Anderson
El remarcable llibre Comunitats imaginades de Benedict Anderson va reconfigurar l’estudi de les nacions i el nacionalisme. Sorprenentment original, va trencar amb l’èmfasi excessiu posat fins al moment al continent europeu i els arguments falsament polaritzats sobre si les nacions existien des de sempre o eren mers epifenòmens dels estats moderns. Comunitats imaginades\ndirigeix l’atenció a la dinàmica de la imaginació organitzada socialment i cu…
The Importance of Imagined Communities - and Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson's remarkable book Imagined Communities reshaped the study of nations and nationalism. Strikingly original, it broke with previous over-emphasis on the European continent and falsely polarized arguments as to whether nations were always already in existence or mere epiphenomena of modern states. Imagined Communities stimulated attention to the dynamics of socially and culturally organized imagination as processes at the heart of …
Social theory and the politics of identity
Preface. 1. Social Theory and the Politics of Identity: Craig Calhoun (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). 2. Reclaiming the Epistemological a Othera : Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity: Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson (University of Michigan). 3. Dark Thoughts about the Self: Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University). 4. The Politics of Identity in American History: Norbert Wiley (University of Illinois). 5. From Uni…
Bourdieu
The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers
Research Article| October 01 2002 The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism Craig Calhoun Craig Calhoun Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2002) 101 (4): 869-897. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-4-869 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Craig Calhoun; The Class Consciousne…
Nationalism and Ethnicity
Neither nationalism nor ethnicity is vanishing as part of an obsolete traditional order. Both are part of a modern set of categorical identities invoked by elites and other participants in political and social struggles. These categorical identities also shape everyday life, offering both tools for grasping pre-existing homogeneity and difference and for constructing specific versions of such identities. While it is impossible to dissociate natio…
Imagining Solidarity
Research Article| January 01 2002 Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere Craig Calhoun Craig Calhoun Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2002) 14 (1): 147–171. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-147 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Craig Calhoun; Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitu…
Belonging'in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary
L'A. examine la maniere dont la solidarite sociale - et sa manifestation individuelle dans un sentiment d'appartenance a des dispositifs culturels ou sociaux specifiques - est marginalisee et souvent stigmatisee dans l'imaginaire asocial des nouvelles variantes cosmopolites du liberalisme. Il s'interroge sur le statut possible de la culture ou de l'ethnicite dans ce type de theorie, autre qu'en tant que stigmatisation de l'alterite, plus ou moins…
Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China
Direct citizen voices are relatively absent from China's public arena and seldom influence government policymaking. In early 2004, however, public controversies surrounding dam building on the Nu River prompted the Chinese government to halt the proposed hydropower project. The occurrence of such public debates indicates the rise of a green public sphere of critical environmental discourse. Environmental nongovernmental organizations play a centr…
Community without Propinquity Revisited
Recent discussions of the Internet have touted 'virtual community' and a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present essay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) suggests that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology may do more to foster 'categorical identities' than they do dense, multiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to …
Civil Society and the Public Sphere
Research Article| May 01 1993 Civil Society and the Public Sphere Craig Calhoun Craig Calhoun Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1993) 5 (2): 267–280. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-5-2-267 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Craig Calhoun; Civil Society and the Public Sphere. Public Culture 1 May 1993; 5 (2): 267–280. doi: https://doi.org/10.1…
Cosmopolitanism and nationalism
Occupy Wall Street in perspective
The University and the Public Good
Universities have flourished in the modern era as central public institutions and bases for critical thought. They are currently challenged by a variety of social forces and undergoing a deep transformation in both their internal structure and their relationship to the rest of society. Critical theorists need to assess this both in order to grasp adequately the social conditions of their own work and because the transformation of universities is …
The promise of public sociology
Michael Burawoy's Presidential Address to the 2005 ASA meeting was an extraordinary event. There was a buzz of excitement, the culmination of a week of high energy discussions of 'public sociology', and the product also of a year in which Burawoy had criss-crossed the USA speaking to dozens of groups and urging those who often give the ASA a pass in favour of local or activist meetings to come to San Francisco. The excitement was fueled also by a…
Community
1980). Community: Toward a variable conceptualization for comparative research. Social History: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 105-129
Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary
One day in the early 1980s, I was riding in the backseat of an old Land Rover through the desert southwest of Khartoum. There was no road, but the landscape, mostly flat, was marked by the occasional saint's tomb distinctive to Sudanese Islam. My companions and I hadn't seen another vehicle for a couple of hours when one appeared as a tiny dot on the horizon. It was headed our way, and as is typical both cars slowed down to see who else might be …
The Radicalism of Tradition
An equation has often been made, especially but not exclusively by Marxists, between radicalism and the rational understanding of objective interests. I argue that, on the contrary, commitments to traditional cultural values and immediate communal relations are crucial to many radical movements, (a) because these commitments provide populations with the extent of internal social organization necessary to concerted, radical collective action, and …
A World of Emergencies
Les interventions dans les ≪ cas d'urgences humanitaires complexes ≫ sont devenues une partie essentielle de la société planétaire. Le texte fournit un compte rendu de la conception des ≪ urgences ≫en termes d'imaginaire social qui procure une caractéristique à la fois de la perception et de l'action. Cet imaginaire moule la définition et la rhétorique des urgences, les façons dont elles se présentent et sont reconnues, et l'organisation de l'int…
Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation
argued, not on individuals' variant faculties, nor on moral choice as an exercise of free will, but on social processes more basic than individuals. The effect of a moral order was produced directly by social causes. For the most part, sociologists have not carried forward Durkheim's task of creating a sociology of morality. We have tried to sever normative from empirical discourse even more sharply than he did. We have lost sight of the philosop…
Populist Politics, Communications Media and Large Scale Societal Integration
Faced with a minimally participatory democracy, a variety of populists have sought to revitalize popular political participation by strengthening local community mobilizations. Others have called for reliance on frequent referenda. Assessing the limits of these proposals requires theoretical attention to two key issues. The first is the growing importance of very large scale patterns of societal integration which depend on indirect social relatio…
Structures of Power and Constraint
Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied …
Explanation in Historical Sociology
The Books Division of the University of Chicago Press has been publishing books for scholars, students, and general readers since 1892. The Books Division has published more than eleven thousand books since the Press was founded. It has more than five thousand books in print at the present time, including such well-known works as The Chicago Manual of Style; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn; A River Runs Through It, by Norm…
Pierre Bourdieu and Social Transformation
sociological perspective is deeply rooted in his studies of Algeria.The most famous of
Nationalism, Political Community and the Representation of Society
Discussion of political and legal citizenship requires attention to social solidarity. Current approaches to citizenship, however, tend to proceed on abstract bases, neglecting this sociological dimension. This is partly because a tacit understanding of what constitutes a `society' has been developed through implicit reliance on the idea of `nation'. Issues of social belonging are addressed more directly in communitarian and multiculturalist disc…
"New Social Movements" of the Early Nineteenth Century
General Status
Friends and Lovers
History, anthropology and the study of communities
(1978). History, anthropology and the study of communities: Some problems in Macfarlane's proposal. Social History: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 363-373
The Fall of Public Man
The Communist Movement
A History of Sociological Analysis
Theoretical Methods in Social History
Transition in Social Foundations for Collective Action
Craig Calhoun, Transition in Social Foundations for Collective Action: Communities in the Southeast Lancashire Textile Region in the 1820s and 1830s, Social Science History, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 419-451
Transition in Social Foundations for Collective Action
During the 1820s and early 1830s, two largely different populations of working people lived alongside each other in the region surrounding Manchester. Today, they represent, in an important and clear contrast, the social foundations which have supported distinctive directions of popular protest and collective action. The theory of working-class radicalism, as developed by Marx and others, has tended to confound the two. The necessary radicalism a…
Community
1980). Community: Toward a variable conceptualization for comparative research. Social History: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 105-129
The Authority of Ancestors
Forte's account of ancestor worship and kinship among the Tallensi has recently been subjected to a variety of criticisms. Most of these have stemmed at least in part from misunderstandings of Fortes. More fundamentally, many have tended to stress cultural categories and terminology to the exclusion of sociological analysis. They have reduced the authority of ancestors to a static set of norms or a seemingly random collection of ritual observance…
Democracy, Autocracy, and Intermediate Associations in Organizations
Organizational participation has often been treated as a matter of securing the involvement of individuals in a more 'democratic' structure. Organizational responsiveness has often been sought in increasing ease and rate of change. These parallel approaches are criticized in this paper as overreactions to a myth of autocratic organization. They give inadequate attention to formal factors which constrain or encourage participation. Both extreme in…
Main Currents of Marxism. Volume 1
The Microcomputer Revolution
The technology on which microcomputers and allied developments are based is rapidly progressing, but the extent and directions in which development continues will be determined largely by social, not autonomously technical, factors. This technology can, within the next decade or two, advance to the point where an enormous range of new applications will be economically practicable. A wide variety of microcomputer applications are already underway …
The Question of Class Struggle
Modernization and Other Modes of Producing Muddled Thinking
Reviewed work: From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment by John G. Taylor
Protest and Participation
The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England.Tony Hayter
As Sociology Meets History. Charles Tilly
The Question of Class Struggle
The Question of Class Struggle
The Radicalism of Tradition
An equation has often been made, especially but not exclusively by Marxists, between radicalism and the rational understanding of objective interests. I argue that, on the contrary, commitments to traditional cultural values and immediate communal relations are crucial to many radical movements, (a) because these commitments provide populations with the extent of internal social organization necessary to concerted, radical collective action, and …
Industrialization and social radicalism
A Social History of the English Working Classes
Under the Skin of English Life
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, then the workshop of the world and the first industrial nation, there was a yawning gap between the objective conditions of social life and their subjective recuperation. In the face of rapid change and seemingly overnight development, older forms of inter-class rela tions proved, in many places, to be a sheet-anchor of stability and continuity. The helplessness of the working class, adrift in chaos, is nowhere bett…
Sociology (136 works) · Political science (112 works) · Law (89 works) · Politics (76 works) · Philosophy (62 works) · Epistemology (48 works) · Social science (42 works) · Law (41 works) · History (34 works) · Computer Science (33 works)