L Ray
Biographic Data
| ID | 56540 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Ray |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Ray |
| SIGNATURE | RAY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1592-3425 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity ed. by Robert A Yelle and Lorenz Trein (review)
Reviewed by: Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity ed. by Robert A Yelle and Lorenz Trein Larry Ray Robert A Yelle and Lorenz Trein, eds., Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), vii + 262 pp. (pbk). ISBN 9781350327757. £26.09. This is a collection of eight chapters plus the editors' introduction that arise from a conf…
Down with communism - Power to the people: The legacies of 1989 and beyond
This special issue brings together reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989 and considers their consequences for our understandings of European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time, there …
Social Theory, Photography and the Visual Aesthetic of Cultural Modernity
Social theory and photographic aesthetics both engage with issues of representation, realism and validity, having crossed paths in theoretical and methodological controversies. This discussion begins with reflections on the realism debate in photography, arguing that beyond the polar positions of realism and constructivism the photographic image is essentially ambivalent, reflecting the ways in which it is situated within cultural modernity. The …
Verstehen
Usually translated as “understanding,” the concept of Verstehen has become part of a critique of positivist approaches to the social sciences. Associated with the sociology of Max Weber, Verstehen derives from the hermeneutic critique of positivism that emerged in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s that gave rise to a dispute over method in the social sciences ( Methodenstreit ). Verstehen refers to understanding the meaning of action fro…
Globalization
Globalization has become one of the central but contested concepts of contemporary social science. The term has further entered everyday commentary and analysis and features in many political, cultural, and economic debates. The globalized world order originates in the international organizations and regulatory systems set up after World War II – including the United Nations, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organizatio…
Civil Society
Civil society is often understood as a defense against excessive state power and atomized individualism, which otherwise threatens to create conditions for authoritarianism. The term can be traced to Roman juridical concepts ( ius civile ), but its contemporary use to describe contractual relations, the rise of public opinion, representative government, civic freedoms, plurality, and “civility” first appeared in seventeenth and eighteenth‐century…
Introduction to the special issue – disputed Holocaust memory in Poland
Society
The concept of society is both core to sociological analysis and subject to wide‐ranging dispute that is often informed by the theoretical disputes within the discipline. When in 1987 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said in an interview “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” many sociologists offered a robust defense of the concept. There is, however, an uncertainty within the disc…
Introduction - Bicentennial Marx
Interview with David McLellan July 2018
David McLellan, interviewed here, is a Fellow of Goldsmiths College, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of Kent. Since the 1970s he has been one of the leading biographers, translators and commentators on Marx in the English-speaking world. He is the author of several books on Marx and Marxism, including The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx; Karl Marx: His Life and Thought; Karl Marx: Selected Writings; Marx …
Violence and Society
In this compelling and timely book, Larry Ray offers a wide-ranging and integrated account of the many manifestations of violence in society. He examines violent behaviour and its meanings in contemporary culture and throughout history. Introducing the major theoretical debates, the book examines different levels of violence - interpersonal, institutional and collective - and different forms of violence - such as racist crime, homophobic crime an…
Explaining Violence ‐ Towards a Critical Friendship with Neuroscience
The neurosciences challenge the ‘standard social science’ model of human behaviour particularly with reference to violence. Although explanations of violence are interdisciplinary it remains controversial to work across the division between the social and biological sciences. Neuroscience can be subject to familiar sociological critiques of scientism and reductionism but this paper considers whether this view should be reassessed. Concepts of bra…
Arendt's 'conscious pariah' and the ambiguous figure of the subaltern
Hannah Arendt's Jewish writings were central to her thinking about the human condition and engaged with the dialectics of modernity, universalism and identity. Her concept of the 'conscious pariah' attempted both to define a role for the public intellectual and understand the relationship between Jews and modernity. Controversially she accused Jewish victims of lack of resistance to the Nazis and argued that their victimization resulted from apol…
Critical Theory: Contemporary
Where Do You Draw the Line?”: Negotiating Kashrut and Jewish Identity in a Small British Reform Community
This study explores the importance of food and the negotiation of kosher laws in the context of strategies to maintain an individual and collective Jewish identity among a British Reform Jewish community in a non-metropolitan area. Based on interviews with active members of the local synagogue, it explores the challenges to maintaining Jewish life in a small, disparate community remote from any major Jewish settlement. In the interview data, food…
Shame and the City - 'Looting', Emotions and Social Structure
The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological-situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame-rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not hav…
Mark of Cain: Shame, desire and violence
Violence presents a paradox. There is evidence that violence is universal in all in human societies. However, in writing mostly from the standpoint of relatively peaceful social spaces, violence often appears exceptional, and a product of the breakdown of integrating social institutions and conventions. Norbert Elias persuasively identified growing thresholds of repugnance towards violence with the transition to modernity, although understanding …
Jewish Identities in Poland and America: The impact of the Shoah on religion and ethnicity
Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
Violence & Society
In this compelling work, Larry Ray offers a wide-ranging and integrated account of the many manifestations of violence in society. He examines violent behaviour and its meanings in contemporary culture and throughout history
Prediction and Prophecy in Communist Studies
Contrary to Popper's classic article with this title, it can be argued that the principal failure of Western analyses of communism was not the failure to predict the collapse of most of the communist regimes in and around 1989 but more a failure of prophecy, in the sense of a more speculative theory of the contradictions of those regimes and their unsustainability. The reasons can be found in the polarisation between overblown theories of totalit…
Migration and Remembrance: Sounds and Spaces of Klezmer 'Revivals
This article discusses the cultural meanings of recent revivals in Yiddish music in the USA and central Europe. It does this with reference to Adorno's critique of lyrical celebration of the past as a means of forgetting. It examines the criticisms that recent 'Jewish' cultural revivals are kitsch forms of unreflective nostalgia and considers the complexity of meanings here. It then explores the ways in which klezmer might be an aural form of mem…
At the End of the Post-Communist Transformation? Normalization or Imagining Utopia
This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, seco…
Globalization and Everyday Life
Globalization and Everyday Life provides an accessible account of globalization by developing two themes in particular. First, globalization is an outcome of structural and cultural processes that manifest in different ways in economy, politics, culture and organizations. So the globalized world is increasingly heterogeneous, unequal and conflictual rather than integrated and ordered. Secondly, globalization is sustained and created by the everyd…
Civil Society
Civil society is often understood as a defense against excessive state power and atomized individualism, which otherwise threatens to create conditions for authoritarianism. The term can be traced to Roman juridical concepts ( ius civile ), but its contemporary use to describe contractual relations, the rise of public opinion, representative government, civic freedoms, plurality, and “civility” first appeared in seventeenth and eighteenth‐century…
Community, mobility and racism in a semi-rural area: Comparing minority experience in East Kent
Much research into community, racism and racialization has been conducted in metropolitan urban settings. It is only recently that race in rural areas has received some attention. A key theme of existing research on race in rural areas has focused on the issue of racial violence. Drawing on interviews with a variety of ethnic minority groups in East Kent the article will focus on broader issues of race and ethnicity in a semi-rural area. The stud…
Post-Communism: Postmodernity or Modernity Revisited
Coinciding with the popularity of postmodern theory, the fall of communism appeared to offer further evidence of the exhaustion of modernity. Such analysis is grounded in a view that the Soviet system was the epitome of modernity. An alternative approach regards post-communism as opening new terrains of struggle for modernity. Thus Habermas and others suggest that post-communist societies are rejoining the trajectory of western modernity whose pr…
Racist Offenders and the Politics of ‘Hate Crime’
Shame and the City - 'Looting', Emotions and Social Structure
The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological-situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame-rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not hav…
Pragmatism and Critical Theory
This article discusses Habermas's project of reformulating Critical Theory through a pragmatic philosophy of communication, while defending post-metaphysical reason and commitment to grounded critique. Habermas's use of pragmatics is contrasted with Rorty, who argues for a non-foundational pragmatism that eschews the idea of science as the only site of reason and social progress. The argument moves through three stages. First, it outlines Haberma…
Crossing Borders? Sociology, Globalization and Immobility
Globalization theorists frequently claim that the disembedding of social relations across various dimensions renders obsolete the former object of sociology, namely 'society'. The exceptional change to social life arising from globalization demands that sociality is viewed in more fluid and complex ways than in the past. A closer examination of classical concepts of the social would reveal more nuanced and multidimensional concepts. I suggest tha…
Memory, Trauma and Genocidal Nationalism
Nationalism poses several analytical problems for sociology, since it stands at the intersection of familiar binary conceptual contrasts. It further has the capacity to appear alternatively democratic and violent. This paper examines the conditions for violent nationalism, with particular reference to the Kosovo conflict. It argues that the conditions for potentially genocidal nationalism lie in the apparently routine rituals through which 'natio…
Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists
Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements
State and Class in Kenya – Notes on the Cohesion of the Ruling Class
This article attempts to situate the recent power struggle between President Daniel arap Moi and the ex-Minister for Constitutional Affairs, Charles Njonjo, in the context of class antagonisms in the Kenyan state. Over the past few years, Moi survived a number of crises partly as a result of the consistent support he has received from Njonjo. During the run-up to the general election of 26 September 1983, however, Moi was hoping that he could mob…
Critical Theory and Positivism: Popper and the Frankfurt School
New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity
Introduction to the special issue – disputed Holocaust memory in Poland
Explaining Violence ‐ Towards a Critical Friendship with Neuroscience
The neurosciences challenge the ‘standard social science’ model of human behaviour particularly with reference to violence. Although explanations of violence are interdisciplinary it remains controversial to work across the division between the social and biological sciences. Neuroscience can be subject to familiar sociological critiques of scientism and reductionism but this paper considers whether this view should be reassessed. Concepts of bra…
Mark of Cain: Shame, desire and violence
Violence presents a paradox. There is evidence that violence is universal in all in human societies. However, in writing mostly from the standpoint of relatively peaceful social spaces, violence often appears exceptional, and a product of the breakdown of integrating social institutions and conventions. Norbert Elias persuasively identified growing thresholds of repugnance towards violence with the transition to modernity, although understanding …
Racist Offending, Policing and Community Conflict
Since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry several initiatives have transformed the policing of racism, and have entailed significant changes in the criminal justice system. This article reviews these in the light of our research on racist offenders in Greater Manchester between 1998 and 2001. We argue that racist offending is not necessarily consistent with the assumptions underlying some of these initiatives. The conclusions from this work are then dis…
From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World
"Communicative Action, Essays on Jurgen Habermas's "The Theory of Communicative Action
Politics and Social Theory
The Kenya state, agribusiness and the peasantry
It is obvious that LHAT has gained great influence in a short space of time. President Momoh himself has said 'LIAT have come to stay, and they are going to stay'. PANAFU members who have publicised and criticised LHAT's activities in Sierra Leone have been detained by the Government. At the moment it seems lhkely that projects like FOREX and the bridge from Lungi Airport to Freetown will go ahead. However, it would be wrong to assume that LHAT a…
The Pambana of August 1—kenya's Abortive Coup
Going up in smoke: The case of British American tobacco in Kenya
Where Do You Draw the Line?”: Negotiating Kashrut and Jewish Identity in a Small British Reform Community
This study explores the importance of food and the negotiation of kosher laws in the context of strategies to maintain an individual and collective Jewish identity among a British Reform Jewish community in a non-metropolitan area. Based on interviews with active members of the local synagogue, it explores the challenges to maintaining Jewish life in a small, disparate community remote from any major Jewish settlement. In the interview data, food…
At the End of the Post-Communist Transformation? Normalization or Imagining Utopia
This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, seco…
The Sociology of Social Change
Haberma, Legitimation, and the State
Critical Theory and Positivism: Popper and the Frankfurt School
Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives
Reply to Wilson
Systematic Functionalism Revisited
State and Class in Kenya – Notes on the Cohesion of the Ruling Class
This article attempts to situate the recent power struggle between President Daniel arap Moi and the ex-Minister for Constitutional Affairs, Charles Njonjo, in the context of class antagonisms in the Kenyan state. Over the past few years, Moi survived a number of crises partly as a result of the consistent support he has received from Njonjo. During the run-up to the general election of 26 September 1983, however, Moi was hoping that he could mob…
Going up in smoke: The case of British American tobacco in Kenya
Recent trends in contemporary British anthropology: Innovations and revival
Problems of substance abuse: Exploitation and control
Class Formation within the Peasantry: Recent Theoretical Developments in the Analysis of the Peasantry with Specific Reference to the East African Debate
Debate over the 'agrarian question' has continued throughout this century. In recent years, however, partly arising from a renewed interest in Marxist theory, research into rural transformation in Latin America, Africa, and India has both attacked and modified the notion of undifferentiated 'peasant societies' (Chayanov, Shanin), and approached the classical Marxist model of assumed differentiation (Marx, Engels, Kautsky) as an empirical question…
The Pambana of August 1—kenya's Abortive Coup
The Kenya state, agribusiness and the peasantry
It is obvious that LHAT has gained great influence in a short space of time. President Momoh himself has said 'LIAT have come to stay, and they are going to stay'. PANAFU members who have publicised and criticised LHAT's activities in Sierra Leone have been detained by the Government. At the moment it seems lhkely that projects like FOREX and the bridge from Lungi Airport to Freetown will go ahead. However, it would be wrong to assume that LHAT a…
Foucault, Critical Theory and the Decomposition of the Historical Subject
Critical Social Science: Liberation and its Limits
This book is a systematic attempt to understand the circumstances in which social can contribute to the assessment of social institutions. The author makes a distinctive contribution to analyzing fundamental problems of modern philosophy and social theory, expanding upon his previous writings in this area. Fay defines a critical social science as an attempt to understand in a rational fashion the nature of a just and humane social order and discu…
Politics and Social Theory
"Communicative Action, Essays on Jurgen Habermas's "The Theory of Communicative Action
Les inégalités sociales de santé en France et en Grande-Bretagne - Analyse et étude comparative (Book)
Theory of Societal Constitutionalism. Foundations of a Non-Marxist Critical Theory
Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements
The Rectifying Revolutions? Organizational Futures in the New Eastern Europe
The democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe were united in what they were opposing, but contained diverse visions of organizational futures. Whilst their leaders claimed to be rejoining the path of western modernity, a view echoed in Habermas's notion of the `rectifying revolutions', past communist experience structures the shape of emergent organizational forms. The transformation encounters problems of the scale of privatization and of creatin…
Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements
Introduction Marx, Critical Theory and Social Movements PART ONE Authority and Tradition From Praxis to Communication Communication and Evolution Social Movements and the Lifeworld PART TWO Introduction Legitimation in Peripheral States The Crisis of State Socialism Islamic Jacobins State, 'Race' and Regulation Conclusion Modernity's Unfinished Business
The Sociology of Social Change
Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists
Social Theory and the Crisis of State Socialism
The collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union requires a major rethink of many sociological theories of social integration and change. Drawing on a wide range of social theory, Social Theory and the Crisis of State Socialism offers a comparative analysis of the democratic revolutions, combining historical understanding with accounts of the crisis of communism in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Larry Ray identi…
New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity
Sociology (61 works) · Political science (48 works) · Law (41 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Politics (30 works) · Law (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Social science (16 works) · Economics (13 works)