Lauren Langman
Biographic Data
| ID | 97056 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lauren Langman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lauren |
| FAMILY NAME | Langman |
| SIGNATURE | LANGMAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola University Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2851-5220 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 343 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism
Generational Basis of Anti-Systemic Resistance: Mobilizations Against Extinction
Scientific research, empirical evidence, and the clearly visible environmental devastation due to climate change/global warming are largely the consequences of the quest for profits of “fossil capital” that portends the greatest danger to human life. A nuclear war may kill half of the world, a sixth extinction would end all humanity. Can the wealth and political power of fossil capital be halted and reversed? Is a de-growth world society possible…
Right-Wing Populism: Morbid Symptoms of Global Capitalism
With the ascent of Donald Trump and other authoritarian leaders it is vitally important to understand why middle-class and working-class voters are attracted to authoritarian solutions. Neoliberalism and globalization have provided the basis for alienation from the political process and democratic institutions. But to understand the psychological and cultural reasons we can turn to Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and others from the Frankfort schoo…
Democracy Rots from within: Capitalism, Crisis Character, and Reactionary Mobilizations
Right-wing populist movements have gained support and power in several countries. Why have so many supported reactionary movements? Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli pointed out problems with democracy, but to understand what's happening Marx offers a starting point in the 18th Brumaire. The Frankfurt School, updating Marx, integrated a psychodynamic perspective that suggested that in face of crisis, people felt alienated and powerless. Given fea…
Decency and Difference: Humanity and the Global Challenge of Identity Politics, written by Steven C. Roach
Steven C. Roach. Decency and Difference: Humanity and the Global Challenge of Identity Politics. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019) 273 p. $75.00 cloth. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9394344Steven C. Roach begins his analysis of decency with the telling moment when Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, asked Senator Joe McCarthy, the self-appointed grand accuser of communist sympathies, “have you no sense of decency?” At that moment t…
From Grievance to Insurrection: Authoritarian Populism Today
Identity, Social Character, and the Clash of Social Movements
At this moment in time, the very future of democracy in America has become a serious question. Many journalists and commentators have raised questions of crisis of White, Christian, male authority that impel an 'illiberal democracy', one-party rule, and/or a new civil War. The wave of progressive movements in the 1960s, resurgent in the 21st century, and challenging traditional, essentialist, identities and values were experienced by many as thre…
Capitalism, Crisis, and Contention: Race, Racism, and Resistance
For Marx, the alienation of wage labor and inherent crisis tendencies of capital would foster collective grievances and support for communist movements promising revolution and the abolition of private property, creating a society wherein “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” But a combination of material factors, the rise of the welfare state, increased wages, and later consumerism as well as ideologies…
Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work
Simulation: Fake News,” Junk Politics, and the Hyper‐Reality of Today
For a number of social theorists, the contemporary era, fundamentally different from the past, is often called “postmodern.” It is constantly bombarded by and defined by an endless barrage of mass‐mediated simulations, contrived, mass‐produced representations of a “reality” where an original may have never existed. It creates models of the real where there is no original. Billboards, movies, and television, along with cell phones, tablets, and co…
Simmel, Georg
While cities have existed for millennia, with the rise of modern capitalism the city became the center for the new, rational, exchange economy based on profits measured by cash values. Georg Simmel was one of the first sociologists to study the nature of the modern city, not only in terms of its architecture and commerce, but in terms of the culture of urban life and its relationship to the everyday lives of its people. Perhaps most notably, give…
Simulation and Simulacra
For a number of social theorists, the contemporary “postmodern” era is constantly bombarded by and defined by an endless barrage of mass‐mediated simulations, contrived, mass‐produced representations of a “reality” when an original may have never existed. Billboards, movies, and television, along with cell phones, tablets, and computers also provide never‐ending streams of simulations, dreams, and images. These simulations are largely a product o…
Symbolic interactionism and the Frankfurt School
Two of the major perspectives on the nature of selfhood/subjectivity, namely the Frankfurt School (FS) on the one hand and symbolic interaction (SI) on the other, have generally taken little heed of each other. While SI has paid little attention to the historical context of selfhood, underlying typically unconscious motivation, and the socialisation of selfhood as part of a hegemonic process that maintains domination, FS has paid little attention…
Transgression
Every society has a dominant set of values and norms regarding appropriate beliefs and practices that attempt to (1) regulate behavior to make social life possible, and (2) provide a meaning for life. At the same time, as Durkheim showed, societies also foster a variety of pressures toward deviance, the transgression of accepted norms and values, which generally has two consequences. First, the punishment of transgressive behavior, whether public…
Advertising
Advertising is the process through which an organization (or individual) that provides a product or service uses a variety of announcements through signs, billboards, and mass media (that now includes the Internet) to encourage people to purchase those goods or services
Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond
Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond is a collection that begins with economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book. Most chapters critique Piketty from the perspective of critical theory, global political economy or public sociology, drawing on the work of Karl Marx or the Marxist tradition. The emphasis focuses on elements that are under-theorized or omitted entirely from the economists’ analysis. This includes the impo…
Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice
M arcuse, H erbert
Herbert Marcuse, one of the members of the original Frankfurt School, remained in the United States after World War II to become one of the best known critical theorists. His writings on capitalism and sexuality, one‐dimensional (constricted) thought, and “great refusals” not only influenced a number of students and scholars, but inspired social movements as a “guru” of the movements insofar as he often spoke out against the war in Vietnam, was c…
Alienation and Reification
Alienation has been an important concept in religion, law, psychiatry, social analysis, and social critique. It was a central concept for Hegel that in turn influenced the Marxist critique of capitalism that not only exploited workers, like earlier systems, but led to their alienation, for example, their objectification and estrangement. When workers sold their labor, as they used the tools of the capitalist to transform raw materials and produce…
Critical Theory
A very long tradition of philosophical analysis from Plato through Kant and Hegel, and more recent social science, consists of critique, a rigorous examination of the relations of appearance and reality. For Marx, critique revealed the nature of capitalist domination. But there were other critical theories from Nietzsche to Weber who saw the Enlightenment as itself a form of domination, a theme that would become central for the Frankfurt School o…
Frankfurt School, The
Marx, notwithstanding his critique of Hegel's idealism, incorporated the active side of idealism (agency), the dialectical movement of history, domination, and alienation (estrangement and objectification) in his work. The importance of culture, ideology, alienation, and commodity fetishism were central moments of his critique of capitalism. But with the ascent of communist parties, and indeed the Bolshevik Revolution, by the time of the Second I…
From Great Refusals to Wars of Position: Marcuse, Gramsci, and Social Mobilization
Infotainment
One crucial aspect of modern life has been a concern with broader events and the people who live in social worlds beyond our local community or nation. Thus information about people and events from wars to disasters to sports that are typically outside our limited range of contacts has meant that people are interested in the news. But news has become a commodity that is provided by media organizations and consumed by audiences. There are a vast n…
After Marcuse: Subjectivity—from Repression to Consumption and Beyond
Response to George Gonzalez
This response pertains to the review of our book, God Guns Gold and Glory—American Character and its Discontents, reviewed in this journal by George Gonzalez. Our response contends that the “review” is not really a critical reflection on our book, but something more like a dismissal. In essence, Gonzalez says that this is not the book he would have written; he wants to present his own thoughts, not critique ours
Simulacra and Simulation
For a number of sociologists, media theorists, and social critics, the current era, with its global market, advanced technologies, mass media and digital information, and the all-present marketing of goods and politics, must be seen as radically different from the industrial age of machine-based mass production. One of the central technological innovations of the industrial era was the capturing of visual images, sounds, and later media with both…
The effects of affects: The place of emotions in the mobilizations of 2011
We have recently seen the proliferation of a variety of progressive, democratic social movements across the globe. In the wake of various contradictions and implosions of capitalism, from the meltdown of the US banks to the euro crisis, vast numbers of people have challenged neoliberal globalization. In this article the authors offer a theoretical frame for the analysis of the most recent challenges posed to neoliberal social and economic policie…
From indignation to occupation: A new wave of global mobilization
The present monograph issue focuses on the 2011-2012 global wave of protests that began in Tunisia in 2011. This introductory article notes that two streams of mobilization can be distinguished in terms of the specific grievances they express, and the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they have emerged. The article argues, however, that despite these differences both threads find their antecedents in the increasing and widespread soci…
From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements
From the early 1990s when the EZLN (the Zapatistas), led by Subcommandte Marcos, first made use of the Internet to the late 1990s with the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Trade and Investment and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, it became evident that new, qualitatively different kinds of social protest movements were emergent. These new movements seemed diffuse and unstructured, yet at the same time, they forged unlik…
Occupy: A new new social movement
The recent mobilizations in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and United States were both inevitable given the implosion of global capital, and at the same time unexpected and unpredictable. How are we to understand these mobilizations? This article suggests that NSM, New Social Movement theory, with its concerns for identity, culture, and meaning, in which the transformation of identity becomes the basis of subsequent social transformation remai…
Culture, Identity and Hegemony: The Body in a Global Age
The article argues that capitalism has reconstituted itself as a globalized system of transnational corporations and that a universalized, mass-mediated, consumer culture sustains its legitimacy in face of massive redistributions of wealth. The author argues that consumerism and privatized hedonism provide, on one hand, the basis for profits as well as identities that sustain hegemony, and, on the other hand, the ideological control of culture to…
From the streets and squares to social movement studies: What have we learned
In the editors' introduction they noted how the various mobilizations starting in 2011 raised important questions for social movement scholars. The various articles in this issue have explored the emergence, dynamics, and significance of the social mobilizations, contestations, and confrontations that started with the Arab Spring mobilizations and continue to this day. This concluding article is focused on three main aspects that emerge from the …
Punk, Porn and Resistance: Carnivalization and The Body in Popular Culture
Following work by Michel Foucault and Bryan Turner, the body has become an important topic for social inquiry. One major debate concerns the nature of social control vs agency. For Foucault, the gaze, surveillance, imposes disciplinary practices that inscribe identities upon docile bodies. Yet he also notes that domination fosters resistance. For others such as Turner or Shilling, the body can be seen as a site of agency and locus of empowerment.…
Cycles of Contention: The Rise and Fall of the Tea Party
Right wing populism has typically consisted of anti-statist/elitist mobilizations by the 'common people' opposed to government policies and/or various out-groups. Such cycles of contention, typically prompted by various social changes and/or crises, have long been an essential feature of American society. The Tea Party (Parties) appeared in 2009 as a response to economic stagnation and crisis, secular challenges to traditional religious identitie…
Alienation and Everyday Life: Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
Alienation, a legacy of the Marxian Hegelian critique of domination, remains one of the most heuristic yet ambiguous concepts in social thought. Yet there endure questions of its definition, indications, level of analysis, relationships to capitalism or modernity in general. To speak of alienation raises a notion that there was once either a pristine era of bliss or a Utopian promise of universal self‐realization. I cannot enter this debate but o…
An Overview: Hegemony, Ideology and the Reproduction of Domination
One of the more fundamental questions for sociological theory and research is the extent to which rule though consent is generally far more effective than coercion, but how do ruling classes, or perhaps status groups, engineer that very consent? How do elites get large masses of people to 'willingly assent' to their claims of entitlements to their wealth, power and status? This was a fundamental question for Marx, who attempted to understand how …
Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear
Although it is often condemned as an imprecise concept, alienation continues to flourish as critique in contemporary philosophy, theology, and psychology, as well as in sociology. Historically originating in Roman law, where it referred to the transfer of land ownership, alienation has since been applied extensively to analyses of labor relations, politics, and culture. In the 19th century, Marx showed that workers' alienation, their dehumanizati…
Down the Rabid Hole to a Tea Party
Capitalism and the Carnival Character: The Escape from Reality
Every social epoch fosters certain distinctive kinds of 'social character' - a widely shared constellation of values and self-identity. Today, as the crises of capitalism become more and more evident, we have also witnessed the emergence and diffusion of the 'carnival character' for whom public rituals of moral transgression express a critique of capitalist culture - and at the same time, the transformation of political critique into a profitable…
From Grievance to Insurrection: Authoritarian Populism Today
"Capitalism, Crises, and "Great Refusals: Critical Theory, Social Movements, and Utopian Visions
“Great refusals,” the progressive movements that shattered the status quo, can be best understood through the prism of critical theory that sees these mobilizations as responses to the legitimation crises of advanced capitalism that migrated into the realms of subjectivity, rendering identity a contested terrain while eliciting powerful emotions that impelled social mobilizations. Among these emotions, rooted in the FreudoMarxist philosophical an…
Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community
Self, Identity, and Social Institutions
The Dialectic of Unenlightenment: Toward a Critical Theory of Islamic Fundamentalism
The foundational critique of modernity, (DoE), showed how the quest for domination, rooted in the Greek pursuit of control over nature, articulated in the emancipatory promise of Enlightenment based rationality, indeed led to new forms of totalitarian thought and practice. While the (il)logic of capital and the erosion of meaning disposed WWII and its final solution, contemporary global capitalism has fostered wide spread anti-modernist, reaction…
Countercultural Values at a Catholic University
Journal Article Countercultural Values at a Catholic University Get access Lauren Langman, Lauren Langman Loyola University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Richard L. Block, Richard L. Block Loyola University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Ineke Cunningham Ineke Cunningham Temple University Search for other works by this author o…
Dionysus-Child of Tomorrow: Notes on Postindustrial Youth
Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work
Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice
After Marcuse: Subjectivity—from Repression to Consumption and Beyond
Why Is Assent Willing? Culture, Character and Consciousness
Throughout history, people have accepted ideologies that 'legitimate' certain hierarchical social arrangements and subsequently valorize the 'desirability' of consent to the system and its leadership cadres. While rules, norms and regulations, as well as leadership, are essential for social life in any complex society, all too often certain political economic systems, their dominant values and leadership cadres tend to move beyond maintaining soc…
Dionysus-Child of Tomorrow: Notes on Postindustrial Youth
Countercultural Values at a Catholic University
Journal Article Countercultural Values at a Catholic University Get access Lauren Langman, Lauren Langman Loyola University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Richard L. Block, Richard L. Block Loyola University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Ineke Cunningham Ineke Cunningham Temple University Search for other works by this author o…
Culture, Behavior and Personality
Elmtown's Youth and Elmtown Revisited
The Inner Experience
The Making of Political Women: A Study of Socialization and Role Conflict
Constructing the Political Spectacle
Alienation and Everyday Life: Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
Alienation, a legacy of the Marxian Hegelian critique of domination, remains one of the most heuristic yet ambiguous concepts in social thought. Yet there endure questions of its definition, indications, level of analysis, relationships to capitalism or modernity in general. To speak of alienation raises a notion that there was once either a pristine era of bliss or a Utopian promise of universal self‐realization. I cannot enter this debate but o…
From Capitalist Tragedy to Postmodern Farce: The Eighteenth Broomstick of H. Ross Perot
(1994). From Capitalist Tragedy to Postmodern Farce: The Eighteenth Broomstick of H. Ross Perot. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 115-137
I Hate, therefore I am
Although right wing colun~nis
The Other Freud: Religion, Culture, and Psychoanalysis
Journal Article The Other Freud: Religion, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, by James J. DiCenso. London: Routledge, 1999, 174 + vii pp., $75. 00 (cloth), $24. 99 (paper) Get access Lauren Langman Lauren Langman Loyola University Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 61, Issue 3, Fall 2000, Pages 344–345, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712587 Published: 01 October 2000
Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas, and Beyond
This thesis criticizes Marx's labour theory of value in terms of Habermas's critique of subject-centred thinking, before going on to criticize Habermas's subject-centred approach to the economic system in terms of an intersubjectively re-formulated conception of labour, for while Habermas restores normative content to the principle of self-constitution he restricts it to communicative action. This places the economic system (and its bureaucratic …
Suppose They Gave a Culture War and No One Came: Zippergate and the Carnivalization of Politics
L'affaire Clinton, a president lured by the thong of temptress Monica, became the major media spectacle of the late '90s. Rural, Southern, conservative Christians regarded him as the symbol of the social, sexual, and civil rights revolutions of the '60s that had been an affront to their values. The attempt to remove him from office was a "culture war" in which his detractors had not understood just how far the political center of the country had …
Philip Rieff's Mission: Character, Culture and Morality
The work of Philip Rieff remains seminal for sociological concerns with morality and values. Informed by Freudian theory, noting the impact of Freud in fostering a 'therapeutic culture' in which 'psychological man' places 'feeling good' over community-based, transcendental systems of meaning and value, Rieff, like many intellectuals of his age, defended the importance of repression for maintaining civilization in face of the growth of mass-mediat…
Culture, Identity and Hegemony: The Body in a Global Age
The article argues that capitalism has reconstituted itself as a globalized system of transnational corporations and that a universalized, mass-mediated, consumer culture sustains its legitimacy in face of massive redistributions of wealth. The author argues that consumerism and privatized hedonism provide, on one hand, the basis for profits as well as identities that sustain hegemony, and, on the other hand, the ideological control of culture to…
Culture, Identity and Hegemony: The Body in a Global Age
The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality
The Dialectic of Unenlightenment: Toward a Critical Theory of Islamic Fundamentalism
The foundational critique of modernity, (DoE), showed how the quest for domination, rooted in the Greek pursuit of control over nature, articulated in the emancipatory promise of Enlightenment based rationality, indeed led to new forms of totalitarian thought and practice. While the (il)logic of capital and the erosion of meaning disposed WWII and its final solution, contemporary global capitalism has fostered wide spread anti-modernist, reaction…
From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements
From the early 1990s when the EZLN (the Zapatistas), led by Subcommandte Marcos, first made use of the Internet to the late 1990s with the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Trade and Investment and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, it became evident that new, qualitatively different kinds of social protest movements were emergent. These new movements seemed diffuse and unstructured, yet at the same time, they forged unlik…
Transgression
Transgression, violating a formal rule and/or moral principle, crossing a boundary of acceptable conduct, or exceeding a social limit, is central to understanding social life in general and deviance in particular (Jenks 2003). Although there is no clear‐cut distinction between the criminal and moral, few societies ignore theft while publicly breaking wind or picking one's nose is not usually punished as a criminal offense. At various moments, ins…
Shopping Malls
The shopping mall is one of the most important social locations and symbols of contemporary consumer society and its cornucopia of goods. It is typically a “self‐contained” social environment with an assembly of stores and shops, carts and kiosks, and surely various eateries located in food courts. Shopping malls are the points of intersection between a vast globalized system where the production of highly advertised goods is distributed to indiv…
Infotainment
The twentieth century, with its new forms of mass production and mass media, gave rise to what has been called consumer society, a world largely concerned with personal gratifications and desirable selfhood gained through consuming goods and experiences. An essential part of this new “amusement society” has been a focus on entertainment from watching television sitcoms to attending sport events, various rock concerts, or the symphony. As mass‐med…
Critical Theory/Frankfurt School
Critical theory, the legacy of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, is rooted in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and in Marx's critique of capitalism which claimed that it exploited and alienated workers, while its ideologies of reason, freedom, and democracy disguised its actual operations. “Critical theorists” integrated Weber's notions of rationality and Freud's theories of character and desire into a theory of…
Advertising
Advertising is the attempt to bring attention to a product or service using paid announcements in mass media that encourage people to purchase those goods or services
Simulacra and Simulation
For a number of sociologists, media theorists, and social critics, the current era, with its global market, advanced technologies, mass media and digital information, and the all-present marketing of goods and politics, must be seen as radically different from the industrial age of machine-based mass production. One of the central technological innovations of the industrial era was the capturing of visual images, sounds, and later media with both…
Sociology (55 works) · Political science (53 works) · Law (48 works) · Politics (38 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Capitalism (17 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (16 works) · Economics (16 works)