Scott Lash
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 127989 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Scott Lash |
| NOMBRES | Scott |
| APELLIDO | Lash |
| FIRMA | LASH S |
| AFILIACIONES | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3912-6896 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 86 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 2353 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 85 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
From Image to Structure
This interview with Philippe Descola, conducted on two occasions separated by the Covid pandemic, delves into his evolving theoretical framework concerning the anthropology of images. Descola reflects on his transition from written discourse in Beyond Nature and Culture to visual representation in Les Formes du visible . The discussion explores the intersection of structuralism, phenomenology, and iconology, highlighting Descola’s engagement with…
Against Ontology
François Jullien wants us to see what thought and life could look like without ontology, promising intellectual riches unavailable in the heavy ontological apparatus we are deeply invested in. The strength of Jullien's argument comes from a deep and unique alliance between philosophy and Chinese thought, a risky one - incurring predictable disgruntlement from both philosophy and sinology - but nevertheless enduring and productive. This is far fro…
Ontology or Theology? François Jullien and Chinese Vitalism
François Jullien intervenes into the ontology debates to understand Chinese thought as an anti-ontology, but instead in terms of 'life', that is as a sort of vitalism. Chinese anti-ontology features the juxtaposition of the wu (there-is-not) with the you (there-is). This, I argue, maps onto theology's counterposition of otherworldly and this-worldly. Here Daoism features an ascetic and unstratified wu in contraposition to Confucianism's you of mo…
Exile Politics, Judaic Thought
Jessica Dubow's In Exile - working through Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig - reads Judaic thought from the Exodus as exile. With Rosenzweig, she understands this as pitting the (Judaic) singular of faith against the (Greek) universal of reason. This 'bad universal' was Hegel's state, which Dubow also sees as Carl Schmitt's state. Dubow sees this as it were universal of dominance in today's Israeli state, against which she pits…
The Literati and the Dao
This chapter develops the argument that China is a civilizational state and follows a trajectory different from that of the Western nation-state. Weber is correct in selecting features of Chinese culture and social and political structure that stand in contrast to Western forms of rationalization: the role of magic, the particularism of guilds, the absence of the Western polis and Roman law, and the universalism demanded of Christianity in contra…
Lebenssoziologie. Georg Simmel im Informationszeitalter
Scott Lash unternimmt eine Neubewertung des Vitalismus in der soziologischen Theorie und macht die Relevanz einer solchen Lebenssoziologie insbesondere für das Verständnis des globalen Informationszeitalters deutlich. Der Aufsatz entwickelt eine solche vitalistische Soziologie dabei ausgehend vom Denken Georg Simmels: Er zeichnet zunächst den Einfluss von Kant, Bergson, Leibniz und Nietzsche in dessen Denken nach und zeigt dann Simmels Wende von …
Soziologien des Lebens
Die verschiedenen Soziologien des Lebens fassen das Leben nicht nur als Objekt, das gesellschaftlich erkannt, normiert und gesteigert wird. Sie verstehen es immer auch als Subjekt seines Wissens, seiner Normen und seines Wandels. Das Leben wird nicht vereinseitigt, sondern seine Verschränkungen werden analysiert: die Immanenz von Natur und Kultur, die Gleichzeitigkeit von Aktivität und Passivität, die Ko-Konstitution von Affekt und Kognition, die…
Introduction
This serves as an introduction to this section on Beck and as a standalone essay. In it we see that the writers in this section understand Beck's risk as modernity itself. And in this context risk's reflexive modernity is understood as 'indeterminate modernity'. The essay thematizes a radically subjectivist reading of Beck's risk. It sees reflexivity as opposed to the objectivism and positivism of Kant's (first) critique of pure reason, and inste…
An Interview with Philip Mirowski
In this interview, Philip Mirowski, a foremost economic historian and philosopher of economic thought, discusses his research into the history of economics along with its complex relationship to the natural sciences and the recent rise of neoliberalism. The conversation starts by focusing on his early work on the birth of neoclassical economics as an imitation of modern physics via energetic metaphors. We also discuss the subsequent impact of the…
Remembering Ulrich Beck
This is a commemoration of Ulrich Beck, written originally just after his passing. It understands Beck in terms of Kant's critiques. Here if, say, Latour incorporates the first critique of instrumentalism and Habermas the second critique of morality, then Ulrich points us to the third critique - hope
Performativity or Discourse? An Interview with John Searle
Scott Lash interviews John Searle, one of the foremost contemporary philosophers. Over the course of the conversation, Searle discusses his research into performativity, language and intentionality, the question of information and his account of social ontology. The conversation initially deals with the early influence of John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as Searle's relationship to phenomenology and the rest of the philosophical tradit…
Communicative Rationality and Desire
This chapter examines the compatibility or otherwise of the standpoints of desire and communicative rationality. Rationality is a concept primarily applicable to agents, whether individual or collective. Clearly, in Habermas&s;s case, such a theory is being developed through the interanimation of the ideas of communicative rationality and those of moral identity. The radical projects of both the poststructuralist theory of desire and Habermas&s;s…
Modernity or Modernism? Weber and Contemporary Social Theory
A number of chapters in this book address – directly or indirectly – the issue of what is distinctive about modern social life. Here, in keeping with much of the best and predominant currents of sociological wisdom, ‘the modern’ is mainly understood in contradistinction to the traditional. More specifically, most of those who characterize our times, and Weber&s;s times, in terms of the modern are speaking about modernity . Conventional usage has …
Sociology of Postmodernism
This authoritative and revealing book provides the first sociological examination of postmodernism. Lash examines the differences betweeen modernism and postmodernism, providing a clear explanation of why postmodernism is important. This book should be of interest to students of sociology, communications, philosophy, visual arts, and modern languages
Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion
Max Weber on Erotic Love: a Feminist Inquiry - 1
Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity
Experience, Time and the Religious
This essay addresses the question of experience in today’s ‘technological modernity’. The essay sets up the earlier classically modern notion of experience in Kantian critique and finds that it is irreducibly connected to Kant’s self-identical subject. We interrogate the temporal dimension in Kant’s transcendental aesthetic in the context of such experience and subjectivity. We then shift our attention to today’s technological modernity. Here we …
China White
This article reflects on some themes in Harrison White's work in the context of China, where the social and cultural construction of markets is quite literal. We explore how we get markets where previously there were no markets and draw on White's central themes of 'uncertainty', 'value' and 'order'. We maintain a distinction, with White and with Frank Knight, of risk, on the one hand, and uncertainty, on the other, where 'risk' has to do with en…
Deforming the Figure
Topology is integral to a shift in socio-cultural theory from a linguistic to a mathematical paradigm. This has enabled in Badiou and Žižek a critique of the symbolic register, understood in terms of pure conceptual abstraction. Drawing on topology, this article understands it instead in terms of the figure. The break with the symbolic and language necessitates a break with form, but topologically still preserves a logic of the figure. This becom…
Intensive Culture
Introduction Culture: Extensive and Intensive What is Intensive Culture? Ontology and Religion Overview Social Theory Intensive Sociology: Georg Simmel's Vitalism Forms: From Cognitive a priori to Social a priori Value: Nietzsche and Simmel Social substance: from Labour to Life Monadology: Simmel, Bergson, Metaphysics Conclusions: Towards a Global Politics of Flux Intensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference Leibniz, Aristotle, On…
Against Institutionalism
This is a complement to Anne Haila's critique of institutionalism in Chinese urbanism. This is understood as an extension of Ronald Coase's transaction cost economics in urban space. The focus is well-defined property rights which, extended to both urban land and intellectual property, allow monopoly competition and internalise public goods - whether social or environmental - into the logic of the neoliberal commoditized transaction. This ('Washi…
Afterword
This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology - Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx - moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society become…
Economies of Signs and Space (introduction)
The authors consider the transformation of capitalism that related to the transition from material goods production towards the signs production, related to the watering out of the big social structures and their displacement by information and communication structures, transformation of the economy into the space of cognitive and esthetic reflexivity
Capitalism and Metaphysics
Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a 'physical' capitalism - of the national and manufacturing age - with a 'metaphysical capitalism' of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of (1) extensity, (2) equivalence, (3) equilibrium and (4) the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism's (1) intensity, (2) inequivalence (or difference), (3) disequ…
Power after Hegemony
The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will …
Economies of Signs and Space
Economies of Signs and Space presents a novel account of social change that supplants conventional understandings of 'society'. In this extraordinary and wide-ranging book, two eminent theorists develop a sociology that takes as its main unit of analysis social and cultural flows through time and across space. Focusing on post-industrial economies, the study examines social inequality and changing experiences of time, space, culture, travel, the …
The end of organized capitalism
Risk, Environment and Modernity
This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in 'risk societies'
Modernity and identity
Power after Hegemony
The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will …
Sociology of Postmodernism
This authoritative and revealing book provides the first sociological examination of postmodernism. Lash examines the differences betweeen modernism and postmodernism, providing a clear explanation of why postmodernism is important. This book should be of interest to students of sociology, communications, philosophy, visual arts, and modern languages
Reflexive Modernization
Reflexivity as Non-Linearity
This article attempts to re-think the notion of reflexivity in terms of non-linearity. It tries to understand the second modernity as a non-linear modernity. This second modernity is understood as much in terms of communications as social norms. It is a modernity that is thoroughly monist. It features non-linear socio-technical systems
Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a 'Regime of Signification
Lebenssoziologie
This article presents a case for the revaluation of vitalism in sociological theory. It argues for the relevance of such a Lebenssoziologie in the global information age. The body of the article addresses what a vitalist sociology might be through a consideration of Georg Simmel. The analysis works from the juxtapositon of vitalist monadology with postivist atomism. It shows how Simmel drew on the Kantian cognition to develop an idea of the socia…
Recognition and Difference
Are there any cultural universals left? Does multiculturalism inevitably involve a slide into moral relativism? This timely and insightful book examines questions of politics and identity in the age of multicultures. It draws together the contribution of outstanding contributors such as Fraser, Honneth, O'Neill, Bauman, Lister, Gilroy and De Swann to explore how difference and multiculturalism take on the arguments of universalist humanism. The a…
Technological Forms of Life
This article attempts to gain purchase on the information society via the notion of 'technological forms of life'. It first addresses the idea of 'forms of life'. Forms of life are a mode of conceiving of culture that arose at the turn of the 20th century in conjunction with phenomenology. Previously, in early modernity, culture was conceived very much on a representational model. The rest of the essay explores the possibility that a new paradigm…
Life (Vitalism)
This entry is about the concept of vitalism. The currency of vitalism has reemerged in the context of the changes in the sciences, with the rise of ideas of uncertainty and complexity, and the rise of the global information society. This is because the notion of life has always favoured an idea of becoming over one of being, of movement over stasis, of action over structure, of flow and flux. The global information order seems to be characterized…
Intensive Culture
Introduction Culture: Extensive and Intensive What is Intensive Culture? Ontology and Religion Overview Social Theory Intensive Sociology: Georg Simmel's Vitalism Forms: From Cognitive a priori to Social a priori Value: Nietzsche and Simmel Social substance: from Labour to Life Monadology: Simmel, Bergson, Metaphysics Conclusions: Towards a Global Politics of Flux Intensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference Leibniz, Aristotle, On…
The New Marxism of Collective Action
This paper argues there is a new theoretical current in Western sociology - 'game-theoretic Marxism'. It situates the current in what seems to be a more general paradigm shift from the mid-1970s, that is, from a focus on structure to an emphasis on agency. In this context we consider the debate between the new theory's foremost proponent Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, advocate of functional explanation. It is shown, then, how this new theory of coll…
Deforming the Figure
Topology is integral to a shift in socio-cultural theory from a linguistic to a mathematical paradigm. This has enabled in Badiou and Žižek a critique of the symbolic register, understood in terms of pure conceptual abstraction. Drawing on topology, this article understands it instead in terms of the figure. The break with the symbolic and language necessitates a break with form, but topologically still preserves a logic of the figure. This becom…
Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity
Introduction - Scott Lash and Brian Wynne PART ONE: LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION - THE CONTOURS OF THE RISK SOCIETY On the Logic of Wealth Distribution and Risk Distribution The Politics of Knowledge in the Risk Society PART TWO: THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY - LIFE-FORMS AND THE DEMISE OF TRADITION Beyond Status and Class? 'I am I' Gendered Space and the Conflict Inside and Outside the Family Individualization, Institutiona…
Environmental Sociology
Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion
Max Weber on Erotic Love: a Feminist Inquiry - 1
Afterword
This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology - Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx - moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society become…
Capitalism and Metaphysics
Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a 'physical' capitalism - of the national and manufacturing age - with a 'metaphysical capitalism' of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of (1) extensity, (2) equivalence, (3) equilibrium and (4) the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism's (1) intensity, (2) inequivalence (or difference), (3) disequ…
Postmodernity and desire
Reflexive Modernization
Postmodern Ethics
The Experience of Work
Histoire des Usines Renault, 1, Naissance de la Grande Entreprise 1898/1939
Productive Labor, Class Determination and Class Position
Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today
Servants of Post-Industrial Power
The Experience of Work
Genealogy and the Body
Communicative Rationality and Desire
Over the past three years or so, Telos and New German Critique have opened a debate in which Habermas's theory of communicative rationality has been counterposed to the ‘aesthetic-sensual forms of subjectivity’ advocated by certain French theorists, who have come to be known as the ‘post-structuralists’. Among the latter, the most significant figures are Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This confrontation…
The New Marxism of Collective Action
This paper argues there is a new theoretical current in Western sociology - 'game-theoretic Marxism'. It situates the current in what seems to be a more general paradigm shift from the mid-1970s, that is, from a focus on structure to an emphasis on agency. In this context we consider the debate between the new theory's foremost proponent Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, advocate of functional explanation. It is shown, then, how this new theory of coll…
The End of Neo‐corporatism?
Postmodernity and desire
The Militant Worker
This is a consummately polemical yet ultimately plausible endeavor to recast our theoretical, empirical, and historical understanding of social class. The author demonstrates that neither technology, nor skill, nor wage level is the prime determinant of militancy. Instead it is ideological and organizational forms
Max Weber, rationality and modernity
The end of organized capitalism
Fragments of Modernity
Fragments of Modernity provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early 20th century. In their different ways, all three illuminated the experience of the modern in urban life, whether in mid-19th-century Paris or in Berlin at the turn of the century or later as the vanguard city of the Weimar Republic. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money econom…
Labour Relations in Disorganized Capitalism
A critique of the 'Regulation School's' account of the development of 'post-Fordist' patterns of industrial relations is presented. An alternative account of the 'disorganization' of capitalist social relations is presented with particular emphasis on the role of agents of disorganization of labour relations, It is shown through a comparative analysis of recent developments in industrial relations in Sweden, West Germany, France, Great Britain, a…
The Militant Worker
Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a 'Regime of Signification
Weberian Therapy for Contemporary Western Society
Crisis in the French Labour Movement, a Grassroots Perspective
Learning from Leipzig - or Politics in the Semiotic Society
Genealogy and the Body
Modernity and identity
Postmodernism or Modernism
Postmodernism, in social theory and in social practices, is understood usually as a categorical rejection of modernism. Postmodernism in this interpretation thus signals the death of humanism. Foucault (1977b) in this sense speaks, not just of the dismembered totality of the oeuvre, but of the 'death of the author'. Structuralism had already meant the rejection of theories which featured the independence of the social actor or of 'agency'. In Fra…
Structure, Agency, and Practical Knowledge
Reflexive Modernization
Sociology (60 obras) · Philosophy (53 obras) · Epistemology (47 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · Philosophy (33 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Aesthetics (21 obras) · Social science (20 obras) · Law (19 obras)