Jonathan Hearn
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Hearn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Hearn |
| SIGNATURE | HEARN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7035-4002 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 148 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Research Note on Dugald Stewart's reported views on David Hume
This brief research note scrutinises the claim made in the Edinburgh University Race Review that Dugald Stewart believed David Hume endorsed the enslavement of black Africans because of the latter's belief in the cognitive inferiority of these people. Closer inspection reveals that the evidence for this claim is equivocal, and while Stewart may have made this claim, he was also probably wrong. In this instance, the use of evidence appears to have…
Hume, Racism, and Slavery: A Rejoinder to Ian Stewart
This rejoinder responds to Ian Stewart's reply to my research note in this issue of Scottish Affairs. I clarify that the brunt of my criticisms are aimed at the University of Edinburgh Race Review as a whole, not Dr Stewart in particular. Further, the problem of the misrepresentation of David Hume's views on race and slavery still stands, despite Dr Stewart's disagreement with me
Challenging Times: Markets and Emotions as Modes of Governance in the University
This article describes setting up a University of Edinburgh Challenge Course called ‘Wicked Problems: Reason and Rhetoric’, and some resistance to it. The course aims to help students understand the nature of argument and disagreement, and how to engage in these productively in their university work and beyond. The article then explores the culture of modern universities, seeing them as shaped by processes of neoliberal marketisation, and discurs…
Echoes of the Past: The Reproduction of Social Imaginaries amongst the Yemeni Diaspora in Cairo
This article examines the social imaginaries of the Yemeni diaspora in Cairo, focusing on how nostalgia for a pre-conflict Yemen, transnational ties, and the persistence of social hierarchies shape their lived experiences. These imaginaries serve as reminders of Yemen’s deep-seated social, political, and economic disparities, reflecting unresolved tensions among its various factions and communities. Cairo’s cultural and historical ties with Yemen…
Introduction: Symposium on Tom Nairn
Body, heart, mind and soul: Power and Personhood in an Impersonal World
This essay outlines a conceptual model for thinking about how human susceptibility to power relations is anchored in basic aspects of the person, emphasising combined material, emotional, cognitive, and moral dimensions of personhood. It argues that these are primal, transhistorical aspects of personhood and society, but that the historical movement from small-scale societies of primarily interpersonal interaction to large-scale societies based o…
A Teachable Moment? David Hume and the Tower of Babel
This essay reflects on the de-naming of the David Hume Tower at Edinburgh University in September 2020. It critically examines and contextualises the racist footnote written by Hume, that was the focus of calls to remove his name from the building. It argues that an opportunity was lost to ask deeper questions about the contribution of David Hume to current thought, and why we may want to commemorate historical figures, despite their flaws. In sh…
Richard Lachmann: Sociologist of elites, empires and nation‐states
Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism, Meritocracy, Modernity
This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English lang…
The Idea of Competition in Dingxin Zhao'sThe Confucian-Legalist State
This article reviews Dingxin Zhao's book The Confucian-Legalist State (2015) with special attention to the use of the concept of competition in that work
Theoretical and methodological considerations for the study of banal and everyday nationalism
Power, culture, identity, and the work of Anthony Smith
How to Read The Wealth of Nations (or Why the Division of Labor Is More Important Than Competition in Adam Smith)
This article challenges the idea that competition was central to Adam Smith's thinking by scrutinizing the concept's role in Smith's work, particularly The Wealth of Nations. We will understand Smith's perspective better if we avoid reading later developments of the concept, particularly in economics, back into Smith's times and writings. Conversely, I argue that the division of labor is the governing idea providing the basic organizational struc…
Power
Power is a core concept in social theory. This entry examines definitions of the concept, starting with Max Weber, and emphasizing the importance of analyzing power in terms of key constituent concepts of domination, authority, and legitimacy. It further explores some of the key puzzles that have characterized the study of power: the relationship between power “over” and power “to,” the connections between physical and social power, the significa…
Liah Greenfeld, Globalisation of Nationalism: The Motive-Force Behind 21st Century Politics
Liah Greenfeld, Globalisation of Nationalism: The Motive-Force Behind 21st Century Politics." Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 19(3), pp. 299–300
Once more with feeling: The Scottish Enlightenment, sympathy, and social welfare
This article examines the concept of ‘sympathy’ that is prominent in the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume and Adam Smith, attempting to tease out some of its implications for issues of social welfare. After commenting on the rediscovery of the interest in ‘sentiment’ in recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment, I look more closely at the differences in the concept of sympathy as formulated by Hume and Smith. I contras…
Anderson, Benedict (1936–)
Benedict Anderson is a leading specialist in Southeast Asian history and politics whose book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) has been one of the most influential in the nationalism studies literature. Anderson argues that the nation was a peculiarly modern conception of political community that originally took shape in the colonial Americas, and was made possible by the spread of literacy and print…
H obsbawm, E ric J . (1917–2012)
Eric J. Hobsbawm was the leading British Marxist historian of his generation, articulating strong views on the nature and fate of nationalism in the modern period. His book Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1992) charted the rise and supposed decline of nationalism in the modern period, attributing both largely to the development of global capitalism. The book The Invention of Tradition (1983), coedited with Terence Ranger, advanced the thesis …
Nationalism and Globalization: Challenging Assumptions
This article challenges a set of common assumptions and misconceptions about nationalism and globalization. First, nationalism and globalization are historically entwined and reinforcing processes, and not fundamentally opposed to each other. Second—and closely related—the modern nation-state is premised on interdependence of economic and political forms of power, not their opposition. Third, nation-states are highly variable in their powers, res…
Demos before Democracy: Ideas of nation and society in Adam Smith
What did Adam Smith understand by the term 'nation' in The Wealth of Nations? This article uses this relatively simple question as a way of exploring the roots of current debates about the concept of the nation, prevalent in the study of nationalism. I argue that contending senses, ethnic versus civic, cultural versus political, can be traced back to the formation of the modern concept in the eighteenth century, and that its current ambiguity, or…
On the social evolution of power to/over
The distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, and the conceptualisation of their relationship, is highly relevant to an understanding of social evolution. They are in fact causally and historically interdependent. I claim that major social transformations such as the neolithic and industrial ‘revolutions’ need to be understood in this light, as does the heightening of formalised competition in contemporary liberal society. I consider the c…
Nationalism and normality: A comment on the Scottish independence referendum
Debate on Bernard Yack's book Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community
Bernard Yack's Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (2012) was the subject of the eighth in a long‐running series of debates hosted by the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) and the journal Nations and Nationalism in November of 2013. These debates bring together the authors of recent important works in the study of nationalism and ethnicity with appropriate scholars to explore the questions they have provo…
Nationalism, Biography and the Ecology of Identity
IntroductionSince confession has been one of the classic genres of biography since Saint Augustine wrote his, let me begin with a confession: I am not a biographer. But while I haven't worked on biography, my work on nationalism and national identity has frequently been carried out through ethnographic research, forcing me to grapple with the specificity and variability of national identity. However general the discursive categories of 'the natio…
Seventh nations and nationalism debate: J oep L eerssen's N ational T hought in E urope : A C ultural H istory
National identity: Banal, Personal and Embedded
This article examines the theoretical problem of understanding the relationship between personal and social dimensions of national identity. It does this by relating ethnographic data collected during a study of a merger between a Scottish and an English bank to three conceptual frameworks. First, it considers Michael Billig's thesis of ‘banal nationalism’. Then it addresses Anthony P. Cohen's concept of ‘personal nationalism’. Finally, it adapts…
Theoretical and methodological considerations for the study of banal and everyday nationalism
Taking Liberties: Contesting Visions of the Civil Society Project
Civil society is an increasingly important concept for anthropology, encountered both in the social theories we employ, and in the discourses and practices of the people we study. This introductory article was written in dialogue with the articles in this issue and attempts to highlight and begin to theorize key themes emerging from those articles. These include: the dialectical relationship between civil society and the state; the important role…
Narrative, Agency, and Mood: On the Social Construction of National History in Scotland
It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations…
Europe in the Anthropological Imagination
Europe in the Anthropological Imagination. Susan Parman. ed. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.274 pp
Nationalism and normality: A comment on the Scottish independence referendum
What's wrong with domination
This article examines the concept of ‘domination’ as it is treated in the second edition of Steven Lukes’ (2005 Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A radical view , 2nd edn., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]) Power: A radical view. It argues that Lukes’ conception of domination is preoccupied with the condition of being dominated, neglecting to adequately define dominance and the relationship of domination. This conceptual imbalance is closel…
Once more with feeling: The Scottish Enlightenment, sympathy, and social welfare
This article examines the concept of ‘sympathy’ that is prominent in the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume and Adam Smith, attempting to tease out some of its implications for issues of social welfare. After commenting on the rediscovery of the interest in ‘sentiment’ in recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment, I look more closely at the differences in the concept of sympathy as formulated by Hume and Smith. I contras…
Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership
Identity, class and civil society in Scotland’s neo‐nationalism
Civil society has become a central and contested concept in the study of Scottish nationalism. This article aims to scrutinise and qualify the concept by relating it to Weber’s model of classes, status groups and parties, and by exploring the development of Scotland’s civil society along with the welfare state in the twentieth century. It argues that civil society needs to be understood as a zone of status‐group formation, and that attempts to re…
Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism, Meritocracy, Modernity
This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English lang…
The Origins of Modern Nationalism in the North Atlantic Interaction Sphere
This article challenges the standard narrative (e.g. Gellner) regarding the origins of modern nationalism in Europe, and Benedict Anderson's contrary suggestion that it first took shape in creole America, arguing instead that the formation of modern nationalism needs to be understood as a transatlantic process, in keeping with recent research on Atlantic history. More specifically, the North Atlantic dynamic of imperial competition between Britai…
Big City: Civic Symbolism and Scottish Nationalism
The stock symbols of Scotland and Scottishness are all too familiar. Living in Scotland one becomes almost numb to the drone of bagpipes and kilts, heather and kailyards, Nessie and Bravcheart the low hum of 'cultural subnationalism that has so perturbed Tom Nairn (1977) and others over the years. As an American with an academic interest in Scotland and nationalism I have often found myself straining to draw peoples' attention away from these sym…
Introduction: Symposium on Tom Nairn
Body, heart, mind and soul: Power and Personhood in an Impersonal World
This essay outlines a conceptual model for thinking about how human susceptibility to power relations is anchored in basic aspects of the person, emphasising combined material, emotional, cognitive, and moral dimensions of personhood. It argues that these are primal, transhistorical aspects of personhood and society, but that the historical movement from small-scale societies of primarily interpersonal interaction to large-scale societies based o…
A Teachable Moment? David Hume and the Tower of Babel
This essay reflects on the de-naming of the David Hume Tower at Edinburgh University in September 2020. It critically examines and contextualises the racist footnote written by Hume, that was the focus of calls to remove his name from the building. It argues that an opportunity was lost to ask deeper questions about the contribution of David Hume to current thought, and why we may want to commemorate historical figures, despite their flaws. In sh…
The Idea of Competition in Dingxin Zhao'sThe Confucian-Legalist State
This article reviews Dingxin Zhao's book The Confucian-Legalist State (2015) with special attention to the use of the concept of competition in that work
Power, culture, identity, and the work of Anthony Smith
How to Read The Wealth of Nations (or Why the Division of Labor Is More Important Than Competition in Adam Smith)
This article challenges the idea that competition was central to Adam Smith's thinking by scrutinizing the concept's role in Smith's work, particularly The Wealth of Nations. We will understand Smith's perspective better if we avoid reading later developments of the concept, particularly in economics, back into Smith's times and writings. Conversely, I argue that the division of labor is the governing idea providing the basic organizational struc…
Nationalism and Globalization: Challenging Assumptions
This article challenges a set of common assumptions and misconceptions about nationalism and globalization. First, nationalism and globalization are historically entwined and reinforcing processes, and not fundamentally opposed to each other. Second—and closely related—the modern nation-state is premised on interdependence of economic and political forms of power, not their opposition. Third, nation-states are highly variable in their powers, res…
Demos before Democracy: Ideas of nation and society in Adam Smith
What did Adam Smith understand by the term 'nation' in The Wealth of Nations? This article uses this relatively simple question as a way of exploring the roots of current debates about the concept of the nation, prevalent in the study of nationalism. I argue that contending senses, ethnic versus civic, cultural versus political, can be traced back to the formation of the modern concept in the eighteenth century, and that its current ambiguity, or…
On the social evolution of power to/over
The distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, and the conceptualisation of their relationship, is highly relevant to an understanding of social evolution. They are in fact causally and historically interdependent. I claim that major social transformations such as the neolithic and industrial ‘revolutions’ need to be understood in this light, as does the heightening of formalised competition in contemporary liberal society. I consider the c…
Nationalism, Biography and the Ecology of Identity
IntroductionSince confession has been one of the classic genres of biography since Saint Augustine wrote his, let me begin with a confession: I am not a biographer. But while I haven't worked on biography, my work on nationalism and national identity has frequently been carried out through ethnographic research, forcing me to grapple with the specificity and variability of national identity. However general the discursive categories of 'the natio…
Seventh nations and nationalism debate: J oep L eerssen's N ational T hought in E urope : A C ultural H istory
When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism
The Social Contract: Re-framing Scottish Nationalism
I mean, my father saw everything he had worked to build, crumble, and he put it all down to Mrs Thatcher. But in his time, he saw everything fall apart, and I think that is an absolute tragedy. And he's only typical of all that generation. They came out of the thirties, they came out of poverty, they fought against all the odds, they were wonderful people in the sense of humanity they brought to their lives, with courage and humor, and dedication…
Europe in the Anthropological Imagination
Europe in the Anthropological Imagination. Susan Parman. ed. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.274 pp
Taking Liberties: Contesting Visions of the Civil Society Project
Civil society is an increasingly important concept for anthropology, encountered both in the social theories we employ, and in the discourses and practices of the people we study. This introductory article was written in dialogue with the articles in this issue and attempts to highlight and begin to theorize key themes emerging from those articles. These include: the dialectical relationship between civil society and the state; the important role…
Narrative, Agency, and Mood: On the Social Construction of National History in Scotland
It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations…
Identity, class and civil society in Scotland’s neo‐nationalism
Civil society has become a central and contested concept in the study of Scottish nationalism. This article aims to scrutinise and qualify the concept by relating it to Weber’s model of classes, status groups and parties, and by exploring the development of Scotland’s civil society along with the welfare state in the twentieth century. It argues that civil society needs to be understood as a zone of status‐group formation, and that attempts to re…
Sovereign States or Political Communities? Civil Society and Contemporary Politics
Big City: Civic Symbolism and Scottish Nationalism
The stock symbols of Scotland and Scottishness are all too familiar. Living in Scotland one becomes almost numb to the drone of bagpipes and kilts, heather and kailyards, Nessie and Bravcheart the low hum of 'cultural subnationalism that has so perturbed Tom Nairn (1977) and others over the years. As an American with an academic interest in Scotland and nationalism I have often found myself straining to draw peoples' attention away from these sym…
Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership
Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction
When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism
National identity: Banal, Personal and Embedded
This article examines the theoretical problem of understanding the relationship between personal and social dimensions of national identity. It does this by relating ethnographic data collected during a study of a merger between a Scottish and an English bank to three conceptual frameworks. First, it considers Michael Billig's thesis of ‘banal nationalism’. Then it addresses Anthony P. Cohen's concept of ‘personal nationalism’. Finally, it adapts…
What's wrong with domination
This article examines the concept of ‘domination’ as it is treated in the second edition of Steven Lukes’ (2005 Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A radical view , 2nd edn., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]) Power: A radical view. It argues that Lukes’ conception of domination is preoccupied with the condition of being dominated, neglecting to adequately define dominance and the relationship of domination. This conceptual imbalance is closel…
The Identity of Nations by Monserrat Guibernau
The Origins of Modern Nationalism in the North Atlantic Interaction Sphere
This article challenges the standard narrative (e.g. Gellner) regarding the origins of modern nationalism in Europe, and Benedict Anderson's contrary suggestion that it first took shape in creole America, arguing instead that the formation of modern nationalism needs to be understood as a transatlantic process, in keeping with recent research on Atlantic history. More specifically, the North Atlantic dynamic of imperial competition between Britai…
The strength of weak legitimacy: A cultural analysis of legitimacy in capitalist, liberal, democratic nation-states
Adapting Granovetter’s idea of the ‘strength of weak ties’ (1973), this article argues that capitalist, liberal democratic nation-states (‘liberal societies’) distribute both power and processes of legitimation widely across society. Against the view that such societies are only weakly legitimate, relying primarily on ideological hegemony, I argue that they enjoy real, but highly systemically diffused legitimacy. To advance this argument I consid…
A Mann for our times? Michael Mann as theorist of the present
Nationalism, Biography and the Ecology of Identity
IntroductionSince confession has been one of the classic genres of biography since Saint Augustine wrote his, let me begin with a confession: I am not a biographer. But while I haven't worked on biography, my work on nationalism and national identity has frequently been carried out through ethnographic research, forcing me to grapple with the specificity and variability of national identity. However general the discursive categories of 'the natio…
Seventh nations and nationalism debate: J oep L eerssen's N ational T hought in E urope : A C ultural H istory
On the social evolution of power to/over
The distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, and the conceptualisation of their relationship, is highly relevant to an understanding of social evolution. They are in fact causally and historically interdependent. I claim that major social transformations such as the neolithic and industrial ‘revolutions’ need to be understood in this light, as does the heightening of formalised competition in contemporary liberal society. I consider the c…
Nationalism and normality: A comment on the Scottish independence referendum
Debate on Bernard Yack's book Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community
Bernard Yack's Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (2012) was the subject of the eighth in a long‐running series of debates hosted by the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) and the journal Nations and Nationalism in November of 2013. These debates bring together the authors of recent important works in the study of nationalism and ethnicity with appropriate scholars to explore the questions they have provo…
Anderson, Benedict (1936–)
Benedict Anderson is a leading specialist in Southeast Asian history and politics whose book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) has been one of the most influential in the nationalism studies literature. Anderson argues that the nation was a peculiarly modern conception of political community that originally took shape in the colonial Americas, and was made possible by the spread of literacy and print…
H obsbawm, E ric J . (1917–2012)
Eric J. Hobsbawm was the leading British Marxist historian of his generation, articulating strong views on the nature and fate of nationalism in the modern period. His book Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1992) charted the rise and supposed decline of nationalism in the modern period, attributing both largely to the development of global capitalism. The book The Invention of Tradition (1983), coedited with Terence Ranger, advanced the thesis …
Nationalism and Globalization: Challenging Assumptions
This article challenges a set of common assumptions and misconceptions about nationalism and globalization. First, nationalism and globalization are historically entwined and reinforcing processes, and not fundamentally opposed to each other. Second—and closely related—the modern nation-state is premised on interdependence of economic and political forms of power, not their opposition. Third, nation-states are highly variable in their powers, res…
Demos before Democracy: Ideas of nation and society in Adam Smith
What did Adam Smith understand by the term 'nation' in The Wealth of Nations? This article uses this relatively simple question as a way of exploring the roots of current debates about the concept of the nation, prevalent in the study of nationalism. I argue that contending senses, ethnic versus civic, cultural versus political, can be traced back to the formation of the modern concept in the eighteenth century, and that its current ambiguity, or…
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Nationalism (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · History (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works)