Peter Wagner
Biographic Data
| ID | 249844 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Wagner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Wagner |
| SIGNATURE | WAGNER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat de Barcelona |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4416-718X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 120 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 289 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 108 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 12 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1963 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A Philosophy of Crisis? Methodological and Critical Perspectives
Building on Miguel de Beistegui's Crisis: A Critique (2026, Bloomsbury Academic), this forum exchange debates the book's central arguments and their significance for contemporary social, political, and ecological thought. In contrast to philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, who question the relevance of the concept of crisis because of its entanglement with a meta-physical vision of temporality and history or scholars like Janet Roitman who decon…
Rethinking European Modernity: Reason, Power and Coloniality in Early Modern Thought
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…
Introduction to Food Security and Sustainability: Knowledge, Communication, Politics
The Task Force on Environment, Sustainability and Climate (TFESC) of Academia Europaea investigates ways of enhancing global science policy communication on the topic of food security and sustainability. This Focus reports the initial outcome of this investigation in the form of three articles. First, given the complexity of the link between food security and sustainability, and in particular the two-way relation between the impact of food produc…
Nostalgia for the light: The ecological emergency, the social sciences, and a (qualified) defense of human exceptionalism
Most insights about the ecological emergency come from the earth and climate sciences as well as from the life sciences, and as such they have upset established certainties in the social sciences and humanities. At the very least, they have forced the social sciences and humanities to refocus their attention on the ways in which human societies are dependent on the condition of planet Earth and of other life forms on it. In response, it is often …
Social theory, the ecological emergency, and the direction of history: A review essay
The current ecological emergency is sometimes seen as a new epoch in the history of humankind. The expressions Anthropocene and Great Acceleration are two recent proposals for naming this epoch, which have been and are being widely debated. However, this debate found social theory rather unprepared, with attempts at conceptualizing long-term social change having largely been abandoned in the face of conceptual, methodological, and empirical diffi…
Carbon societies’ past, present and future: History, crisis and social transformation
Ongoing societal commitments to carbon energy systems means that escalating climate catastrophe becomes the unavoidable outcome of a system of reasoning and institutional practice that historically has enabled the consolidation and global advance of a fossil fuel hegemony. To understand the ‘rational’ component of these developments, it is necessary to examine how the reasoning and practices associated with this hegemony gradually came to be embe…
A Model at its Limits: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the Inside
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has, over almost 35 years, developed into a model for effecting science-led governance for global environmental change. However, on the back of the sixth Assessment Report, and with preparations underway for the seventh, the IPCC arguably faces an identity crisis. With many inside and outside the IPCC perceiving a persistent disconnect between this immense scientific enterprise and meaningful p…
Processual Progress, the Deflation of History, and the De-substantiation of Problems
The following reflections are provoked by, and focus on, one of the key statements of synthesis in Rahel Jaeggi’s treatise on Progress and Regression , namely ‘Societies do not have goals, they solve problems.’ The phrase serves to criticize philosophies of history that work with a strong conception of progress in its first part and announces the step to elaborate a more adequate concept in the second. While agreeing with the underlying diagnosis…
Modern infrastructures through the lens of classical sociology: Unpacking ambiguities
Infrastructure-as a concept, word, and physical construct-is deeply intertwined with the shaping of modern societies. The term infrastructure emerged amidst the context of rapid societal changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, evolving from an initial specialized usage associated with railway development to a broader concept materially encapsulating 'sociotechnical imaginaries of modernity'. Therefore, an intriguing connection exists betwee…
Johann Arnason's unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy
Johann Arnason's work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political philosophy, drawing creatively on the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Invariably, his works introduce more nuance and sophistication into the analysis of even very well studied socio-historical phenomena. At the same time, he addresses such ma…
The lasting significance of viruses: Covid-19, historical moments and social transformations
Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article reviews the question of the lasting socio-political significance of the appearance of the virus, much and controversially debated at the beginning. We can see now - maybe rather unsurprisingly - that the expectations of rapid pandemic-related social change, whether positive or negative, were widely exaggerated. Rather, the pandemic has now entered into an interpretation of the glo…
Space creator
Covid-19 - crisis events and social transformations
Capitalism, autocracy, distrust: Elements of a diagnosis of the present
Mind the gap(s): Moral philosophy, international law and interpretative historical sociology
Given the diversity of opinions about whether, how, and towards which end Western societies should defend Ukraine against the ongoing Russian aggression, it would be desirable to spell out clear moral principles and apply them in a contextually adequate way to the situation. This is what Hans-Herbert Kögler tries to do in his contribution to this issue. However, his reasoning remains unclear about the relation between moral philosophy and empiric…
The triple problem displacement: Climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations sinc…
Progress and modernity: The problem with autonomy
The idea of modernity is inextricably tied up with the one of progress. One mainreason for this connection is that the late eighteenth century, often consideredto be the onset of modernity, was in Europe also seen as the dawn of a newsociety evolving according to a different logic than any preceding one, namelywith an open horizon of future possibilities. This article explores the meaning ofthis opening by first looking at the elaboration of what…
History 4o Celsius. Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene; The Climate of History in a Planetary Age; Grand Transitions. How the Modern World was Made
Neither rhyme nor reason? Understanding science evaluation today
After illustrating by comparison why large segments of the current practices of science evaluation should be seen as absurd in procedure or outcome and often in both, this contribution asks why these practices have emerged in the first place and why they persist despite widespread criticism
Evaluating science: Opening a debate
This article briefly reviews the long-lasting commitment of Social Science Information to the critical analysis of orders of knowledge and the conditions for their creation to, subsequently, reflect on the current co-existence of a plurality of orders of justification across society, including the institutions of knowledge production. Furthermore, it suggests that recent social transformations have accentuated an asymmetry within this plurality, …
Science evaluation and social transformations
This editorial and introductory article outlines some of the aspects that are being addressed and questions that are being raised in the subsequent special section on science evaluation. It sets the emergence of new evaluation practices in the context of changing state forms; it reflects on the distinction between internal and external evaluation procedures as an expression of boundaries between fields of social practice or between orders of just…
Imaginationen von Nachhaltigkeit: Katastrophe. Krise. Normalisierung
Imaginationen von Nachhaltigkeit entwerfen unterschiedliche Möglichkeitsräume eines sozial-ökologischen Wandels. Als positive oder negative Vorstellungswelten tauchen Katastrophenängste und Endzeitszenarien, Normalitätsbeschwörungen und ökologische Ignoranz, Technikglaube und Fortschrittsoptimismus, aber auch utopische Bilder eines guten Lebens im Zukunftsbewusstsein der Gegenwart auf. Welche Spannungen und Konfliktlinien entstehen, wenn sich mod…
The Economy as a Polity: The Political Constitution of Contemporary Capitalism
Part I - The Economy as a Polity: Renewing a Debate: Theorising the Economy as a Polity: The Point of View of Contemporary Economics The Problmatique of Economic Modernity: Critical Theory, Political Philosophy and the Analysis of Capitalism Civilizational Perspectives on Capitalism One World Or Three?: Globalization and the Future of Welfare Capitalism. Part II - Capitalism, co-ordination, Constitution: Capitalism, Coordination, and Economic Cha…
Uncertainty and the prospect of major social transformations
This editorial addresses the current public-health emergency and assesses its potential to become an event in the sense of a structure-transforming occurrence. This emergency is briefly compared with climate change and the current challenges to democracy, arguing that all these phenomena point to similar deficiencies in societal self-understanding and socio-political organization
Democracy and Capitalism
Dispute, Uncertainty and Institution in Recent French Debates
Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines
After Justification: Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity
This article presents the moral and political sociology developed by the research group around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot from its gradual dissociation from the tradition of critical sociology during the 1980s to the present. Taking the major presentation of this approach, De la justification, as the point of departure, the key items of criticism to which this book was exposed are discussed, both in terms of their intellectual merit and i…
From interpretation to civilization - and back: Analyzing the trajectories of non-European modernities
This article identifies civilizational analysis as one response to a recent crisis in the sociology of large-scale social configurations and explores how far the concept of civilization can go in analyzing the contemporary global social constellation. The reasoning proceeds in four steps. First, a brief review of the recent conceptual debate in social theory and historical sociology leads to the conclusion that concepts such as 'civilization' and…
Multiple Trajectories of Modernity: Why Social Theory Needs Historical Sociology
The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity
Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads
Modern social sciences have been committed to the improvement of public policy. However, doubts have arisen about the possibility and desirability of a policy-oriented social science. In this book, leading specialists in the field analyse both the development and failings of policy-oriented social science. In contrast to other writings on the subject, this volume presents a distinctively historical and comparative approach. By looking at earlier …
Sociology and contingency: Historicizing Epistemology
L'A. examine les convictions des sociologues en ce qui concerne la validite des theories et des analyses qu'ils elaborent. Il montre que pendant les annees 1960 les textes publies semblent temoigner d'une certaine confiance, d'un certain «optimisme epistemologique». En revanche, les annees 1980 paraissent marquees par une tendance au scepticisme. Il s'efforce d'etudier, d'evaluer les conditions epistemologiques necessaires pour parvenir a la cert…
Successive Modernities and the Idea of Progress: A First Attempt
The idea that modern society is not a unique institutional arrangement, functionally and normatively superior to all others, but that plural forms of modernity may exist is by now rather widely accepted. Its implications for a social theory and political philosophy that keeps normative concerns alive and aims to articulate them with socio-political analysis, however, are often unclear. Embracing the concept of plural modernities is often seen to …
Modernity, Capitalism and Critique
The twin theories of late 20th-century societal constellations, functionalist modernization theory and neo-Marxist theories of late capitalism, fell into crisis and disrepute during the 1970s and 1980s. Social theory responded to such double crisis of the theorizing of `capitalism' and of `modernization' by embracing the term `modernity', a term that, almost unknown in social thought before the end of the 1970s, appeared to provide a new common g…
Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age
Debates about the legitimacy and ‘essence’ of political rule and the search for ‘ideal’ forms of government have been at the very heart of political thought ever since antiquity. Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age explores the complex relationship between democracy and dictatorship from the 18th century onwards. More concretely, it assesses how democracy emerged as something compatible with dictatorship, both at the level of political though…
Towards a Theory of Synagonism
Singularity: A New Key for the Sociological Diagnosis of the Present Time? - Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne (Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017)
Singularity: A New Key for the Sociological Diagnosis of the Present Time? - Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne (Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017) - Volume 59 Issue 3
Sensitivity of life disparity with respect to changes in mortality rates
This article is concerned with sensitivity analysis of life disparity with respect to changes in mortality rates. A relationship is derived that describes the effect on life disparity caused by a perturbation of the force of mortality. Recently Zhang a
The Resistance that Modernity Constantly Provokes: Europe, America and Social Theory
During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms avai…
The triple problem displacement: Climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations sinc…
Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme
Die Soziologie der Genese sozialer Institutionen: Theoretische Perspektiven der ‘neuen Sozialwissenschaften’ in Frankreich
In den letzten Jahren ist in Frankreich eine Forschungsperspektive entwickelt worden, die schon als die ‘neue Konfiguration in den Sozialwissenschaften’ sowie als ‘theoretischer Durchbruch’ bezeichnet worden ist. Dieser Aufsatz skizziert die theoretische Hauptlinie dieser Arbeiten in drei Schritten und argumentiert dabei, daß dieser Durchbruch insbesondere einen anderen soziologischen Blick auf soziale Institutionen und deren Genese erlaubt. Nach…
Liberty and discipline: Making sense of postmodernity, or, once again, toward a sociohistorical understanding of modernity
The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, or, What's Wrong with Post-1968 Individualism
The thesis that `1968' resulted in the rise of the individual, on the one hand, and the end of politics, on the other, is critically discussed by interpreting the events of 1968 as a project of emancipation and by distinguishing between the individual and the collective aspects of emancipation
From Domination to Autonomy: Two Eras of Progress in World-sociological Perspective
In recent decades, the belief in progress that was widespread across the two centuries following the French Revolution has withered away. This article suggests, though, that the diagnosis of the end of progress can be used as an occasion to rethink what progress meant and what it might mean today. The proposal for rethinking proceeds in two big steps. First, the meaning of progress that was inherited from the Enlightenment is reconstructed and co…
The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form
European integration needs to be analyzed in terms that address the normative self-understanding of the emerging polity or, in other words, the self-understanding of European modernity. While it is often argued that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presupposi…
Covid-19 - crisis events and social transformations
Evaluating science: Opening a debate
This article briefly reviews the long-lasting commitment of Social Science Information to the critical analysis of orders of knowledge and the conditions for their creation to, subsequently, reflect on the current co-existence of a plurality of orders of justification across society, including the institutions of knowledge production. Furthermore, it suggests that recent social transformations have accentuated an asymmetry within this plurality, …
Science evaluation and social transformations
This editorial and introductory article outlines some of the aspects that are being addressed and questions that are being raised in the subsequent special section on science evaluation. It sets the emergence of new evaluation practices in the context of changing state forms; it reflects on the distinction between internal and external evaluation procedures as an expression of boundaries between fields of social practice or between orders of just…
Some Observations on the Budget Concept
Fra kunstkammer til moderne museum
From Kunstkammer to Museum In 1759 the Natural Cabinet at Charlottenborg was established as an extension of the Royal Botanical Institute at Amalienborg founded in 1752. Both institutions were planned as places of research and teaching for the learned as well as for laymen. The disciplines studied and taught were botany, agriculture, forestry, gardening, zoology, mineralogy, mining and economy
Social Sciences and Political Projects: Reform Coalitions between Social Scientists and Policy-Makers in France, Italy, and West Germany
Dissertations on the history of sport
The Politics of a Discipline: Policy Orientations in West German Political Science
The policy orientation: Legacy and promise
The social sciences came into being as part of the modernization of Western societies in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the start they were preoccupied with the far-reaching effects of the transformation of traditional societies into modern ones. Their focus was on key features of the transformation. The ‘social question’, the rationalization of the world (in German debate captured by the term ‘die Moderne’), dev…
Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads
Modern social sciences have been committed to the improvement of public policy. However, doubts have arisen about the possibility and desirability of a policy-oriented social science. In this book, leading specialists in the field analyse both the development and failings of policy-oriented social science. In contrast to other writings on the subject, this volume presents a distinctively historical and comparative approach. By looking at earlier …
Beyond serving state and bureaucracy: Problem-oriented social science in (West) Germany
Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society. Charles E. Lindblom
Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines
Les sciences sociales et la question écologique en Allemagne: Faiblesses politiques et théoriques d'un débat fort
L'environnement fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches soumises directement aux institutions politiques, ou intégrées à des théories sociales qui laissent la nature hors champ. L'impuissance des sciences sociales face à la question écologique en découle
Liberty and discipline: Making sense of postmodernity, or, once again, toward a sociohistorical understanding of modernity
Hogarth's Graphic Works
Die Soziologie der Genese sozialer Institutionen: Theoretische Perspektiven der ‘neuen Sozialwissenschaften’ in Frankreich
In den letzten Jahren ist in Frankreich eine Forschungsperspektive entwickelt worden, die schon als die ‘neue Konfiguration in den Sozialwissenschaften’ sowie als ‘theoretischer Durchbruch’ bezeichnet worden ist. Dieser Aufsatz skizziert die theoretische Hauptlinie dieser Arbeiten in drei Schritten und argumentiert dabei, daß dieser Durchbruch insbesondere einen anderen soziologischen Blick auf soziale Institutionen und deren Genese erlaubt. Nach…
A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline
Dispute, Uncertainty and Institution in Recent French Debates
Sociology and contingency: Historicizing Epistemology
L'A. examine les convictions des sociologues en ce qui concerne la validite des theories et des analyses qu'ils elaborent. Il montre que pendant les annees 1960 les textes publies semblent temoigner d'une certaine confiance, d'un certain «optimisme epistemologique». En revanche, les annees 1980 paraissent marquees par une tendance au scepticisme. Il s'efforce d'etudier, d'evaluer les conditions epistemologiques necessaires pour parvenir a la cert…
Anthony Giddens, Konsequenzen der Moderne
Certainty and Order, Liberty and Contingency. The Birth of Social Science as Empirical Political Philosophy
Not All That is Solid Melts into Air: Modernity and Contingency
The Resistance that Modernity Constantly Provokes: Europe, America and Social Theory
During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms avai…
Liberté et discipline: Les Deux Crises De La Modernité
After Justification: Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity
This article presents the moral and political sociology developed by the research group around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot from its gradual dissociation from the tradition of critical sociology during the 1980s to the present. Taking the major presentation of this approach, De la justification, as the point of departure, the key items of criticism to which this book was exposed are discussed, both in terms of their intellectual merit and i…
Inescapability and Attainability in the Sociology of Modernity: A Note on the Variety of Modes of Social Theorizing
It is a background assumption of much of social science - here called modernist social science - that, in principle, there are neither questions that it cannot decline nor answers that cannot be found. Modernist social science does not accept the issues of inescapability and of attainability; they are names for adversaries that need to be fought against. In contrast to modernism in social theory, this article argues that social theory not only ca…
L'Europe comme enjeu politique
Sociology (81 works) · Political science (70 works) · Philosophy (62 works) · Law (55 works) · Epistemology (51 works) · Politics (46 works) · Social science (35 works) · Modernity (28 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (21 works) · History (20 works)