Peter Baehr
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 277405 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Peter Baehr |
| PRENOMES | Peter |
| SOBRENOME | Baehr |
| ASSINATURA | BAEHR P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Lingnan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7921-7162 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 103 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 333 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 96 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1974 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The Commfucianist
Rebecca West on communism's allure for the intellectuals
Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism's appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devasta…
Hong Kong Universities in the Shadow of the National Security Law
Out of Frankfurt
The arrest of sociology
A new book from Colin Campbell, the distinguished British sociologist, asks a disquieting question: Has sociology progressed? Campbell concludes that our discipline has made little progress in the past half-century. This essay describes what Campbell means by progress, and the factors that, on his account, impede it. The discussion focuses on one such obstacle: the politicization of the university. The older current of ideological advocacy, that …
Humanism and pragmatism
This chapter continues the overview of unmasking writers in sociology. It begins by considering Peter L. Berger’s commitment to debunking. Berger claims that while humanism sets the moral framework of sociology, debunking is its principal tool of enquiry. It is sociology’s job to “see through” and “look behind” hackneyed definitions of the situation, standard versions of everyday life, publicly approved interpretations. Sociology is an irreverent…
The Marxian template
No writer contributed more to the unmasking style in social theory than Karl Marx. This chapter explores the techniques he pioneered: reduction, inversion, deflation and weaponization. Marx advanced them, by his own declaration, to free the working class from illusions and to facilitate its revolutionary mission. Marx particularly decries the “illusions” of politics and religion. His analysis of Judaism is especially scathing. He unmasks it as th…
Unmasking in sociology
Only two of sociology’s classic figures contended directly with unmasking. They did so in radically different ways. The Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto transforms the unmasking style into a global optic; Marxism itself is unmasked. The Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim defangs the unmasking style to create the sociology of knowledge. A third classical sociologist, Emile Durkheim, appears to unmask religion but draws bac…
Avoiding unmasking
At its worst, in social theory and political life alike, unmasking inverts people’s statements and makes them look foolish. It reduces a concept or a theory to the ideological position of the writer. It trades on a mistaken concept of illusion. And, more generally, it burdens theoretical enquiry with a radical agenda of emancipation that people of different views have no reason to accept as valid. In some revolutionary situations unmasking weapon…
Unveiling religion, unmasking society
Through a series of illustrations, rather than a detailed intellectual history, the first part of this chapter sketches the contribution to the unmasking style made by radical critics of religion during the Enlightenment and nineteenth century. The popular belief in divine powers and an otherworldly order strikes at the heart of the theorist’s claim to uncover the fundaments of reality. God is thus the first pillar that unmaskers such as Baron d’…
Illusion more closely considered
This chapter considers a variety of uses of illusion and delusion – two keywords of unmasking – in social and political thought. It suggests that we should avoid using these terms and that more accurate alternatives exist to voice our appraisals. A variety of uses of illusion are briefly considered, notably those of Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Kenneth Minogue, Northrop Frye and Jacques Ellul. Recurrently in political and moral discussion, illusion…
Elements of unmasking
Following a brief retrospective on the persona , the original meaning of mask, this chapter describes the structure of the unmasking style in greater detail. In both politics and in politicized social theory unmasking consists of five major rhetorical techniques: weaponization , reduction , positioning , inversion and deflation . All are mutually reinforcing; sometimes, only a nuance separates one from another. By their own declaration, writers o…
The Unmasking Style in Social Theory
This book examines the nature of unmasking in social theory, in revolutionary movements and in popular culture. Unmasking is not the same as scientific refutation or principled disagreement. When people unmask, they claim to rip off a disguise, revealing the true beneath the feigned. The author distinguishes two basic types of unmasking. The first, aimed at persons or groups, exposes hypocrisy and enmity, and is a staple of revolutionary movement…
The image of the veil in social theory
Caesarism, Charisma and Fate
Founders, Classics, Canons
Founders, classics, and canons have been vitally important in helping to frame sociology's identity. Within the academy today, a number of positions feminist, postmodernist, postcolonial question the status of "tradition."In Founders, Classics, Canons, Peter Baehr defends the continuing importance of sociology's classics and traditions in a university education. Baehr offers arguments against interpreting, defending, and attacking sociology's gre…
Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World
For many centuries, Julius Caesar was a name that evoked strong feelings among educated people. Some of these responses were complimentary, but others came from the point of view of "political republicanism"—which envisaged Caesar as a historical symbol for some of the most dangerous tendencies a polity could experience. Caesar represented everything that republicans detested—corruption, demagogy, usurpation—and as such, provided an antimodel aga…
Caesarism, Charisma and Fate
Social Closure
A concept that originated with Max Weber, social closure depicts multiple sources of social privilege, strategies of social exclusion, and counterstrategies of usurpation. Social closure broadly belongs to theories of social conflict and stratification. Its originality consists in demonstrating that the ownership of means of production (as in Marxist theory) is only one basis of structured and purposive inequality
Plastic Words
Plastic words” evokes a class of terms that are amorphous, misleading, pseudoscientific – and omnipresent. Comparable to George Orwell's Newspeak, plastic words possess a formulaic character that impedes independent thinking. The entry describes plastic words and applies the concept to the widespread use of “phobic” language (Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, ecophobia, etc
Community of Fate
Although class cleavage and power struggles divide societies into opposing interests, a society of any longevity also possesses a common stock of cultural resources – language, traditions, and collective memories of belonging and past suffering – that enable it to cohere as a distinctive collective entity. Community of fate draws on this fact to depict the bases of enduring social recognition, the ability of states to coerce citizens to fight and…
Debunking
Debunking is a rhetorical style that challenges respectable mores and official definitions of reality. Ridicule and polemic are the defining features of debunking, though sociologists also seek to employ debunking in a more scientific way. This entry examines the American milieu that invented debunking, examines the debunking articulation of the American sociologist Peter Berger, and briefly mentions some criticisms of the debunking mode
Gray Zone
For the purposes of this entry, “gray zone” has two meanings. The first, and more complex, describes complicity and collaboration within the Nazi death camps. The second delineates political regimes that are stranded between the severest modes of repression (despotism, autocracy, totalitarianism) and constitutional liberal democracies
American Sociology and the Limits of Partisan Expertise
Stalinism in Retrospect
Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Or…
The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel
In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the "iron cage." This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the "shell as hard as steel": a reconstitution of the hum…
Conversations with Anthony Giddens. Making Sense of Modernity
This article reviews the book "Conversations with Anthony Giddens. Making Sense of Modernity" by Anthony Giddens, Christopher Pierson
Small States
The usefulness of the concept of “small states” as an analytical tool is discussed in a review of books by Edward Azar and Marshall Singer. The size of states has both domestic and international ramifications. Authors who use the concept of “small states” struggle with the problem of defining it. Such definitions can be clear and unambiguous but arbitrary at the same time; more sophisticated definitions are also more ambiguous and difficult to ap…
Of Politics and Social Science
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, David Riesman and Hannah Arendt were engaged in an animated discussion about the meaning and character of totalitarianism. Their disagreement reflected, in part, different experiences and dissonant intellectual backgrounds. Arendt abhorred the social sciences, finding them pretentious and obfuscating. Riesman, in contrast, abandoned a career in law to take up the sociological vocation, which he combined with…
The Unmasking Style in Social Theory
This book examines the nature of unmasking in social theory, in revolutionary movements and in popular culture. Unmasking is not the same as scientific refutation or principled disagreement. When people unmask, they claim to rip off a disguise, revealing the true beneath the feigned. The author distinguishes two basic types of unmasking. The first, aimed at persons or groups, exposes hypocrisy and enmity, and is a staple of revolutionary movement…
Identifying the Unprecedented
How does one identify a phenomenon as radically new or "unprecedented"? Do, in fact, "unprecedented" phenomena exist at all, as presumably some degree of continuity marks every state of affairs? If, however, the idea of continuity is taken too far, are we not at risk of domesticating a radical tendency by conceptually transmuting it into something that is already known? These questions are of pressing importance since September 11th, as commentat…
A Commitment to Campaign. A Sociological Study of CND
This article reviews the book "A commitment to campaign. A sociological study of CND" by John Mattausch
Social extremity, communities of fate, and the sociology of Sars
This article identifies the chief factors which transform a group of people into a "community of fate". A community of fate refers to a temporary form of existence, born of duress and social emergency, which cuts across familiar divisions to elicit something socially consequential. One such community materialized during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong. It is examined here in detail together with a range of …
From the headscarf to the burqa
Opposition to the burqa is widespread in Europe but not in the United States. What explains the difference? Focusing primarily on the French case and its Belgian facsimile, we seek to underscore the role of social theorists in legitimizing bans on the full veil. Ironically, this role has been largely disregarded by Anglophone theorists who write on the veil, and who often oppose its prohibition. This article suggests that Europe tends to be more …
Susan Sontag, battle language and the Hong Kong Sars outbreak of 2003
The widespread use of military language to describe modern epidemics is often attributed to the popularization of the germ theory of disease. Whatever its origins, critics regularly deplore martial imagery in the medical context finding it by turns dangerous, humiliating, and offensive. This article examines the most famous of these critiques, Susan Sontag's rebuttal of disease-as-war language, and finds it problematic in a number of respects. Ma…
Amnesty International and its Self-Imposed Limited Mandate
This article deals with the development of the self-imposed limited mandate of Amnesty International and the considerations which are taken into account. The organization has gradually expanded its field of attention. It is suggested in this article that, although expanded, the mandate still remains ‘limited’ and in line with the principles as envisaged when the organization was founded in 1961. An important expansion or re-interpretation of the …
Carl Schmitt and the contradictions of liberal democracy
This article examines the contradictions Schmitt holds to exist between liberalism and democracy. The authors first examine Schmitt's descriptions of liberalism and democracy. They then proceed to his analysis of the political domain, which provides the basis of his criticism of liberal democracy. Following an evaluation of his argument, they propose a democratic conception of liberalism which both draws on Schmitt's account of the political whil…
Accounting or Caesarism
The Honored Outsider
Raymond Aron (1905-1983) assumed many guises over a long and fruitful career: journalist, polemicist, philosopher of history, counselor to political leaders and officials, theorist of nuclear deterrence and international relations. He was also France's most notable sociologist. While Aron had especially close ties with Britain, a result of his days in active exile there during the Second World War, he was widely appreciated in the United States t…
The Dutch Foreign Policy Elite
This study deals with aspects of the foreign policy-making process in a small Western European industrialized democracy: the Netherlands. A group of researchers from several Dutch universities carried out a research project regarding perceptions and attitudes held by members of the Dutch foreign policy elite. Interviews were held with members of the bureaucracy and the parliament (the formal elite) and with leading members of the churches, busine…
The image of the veil in social theory
Unmasking and disclosure as sociological practices
Unmasking is a recurrent feature of modern sociology and cultural criticism. While false consciousness is imputed by intellectuals to religious groups and to certain social classes, unmasking is, or claims to be, a corrective performed by intellectuals themselves. Unmasking supposes that enlightened enquirers are able to help the less rational to understand their real interests; a type of exposure, it offers a cognitive tool of emancipation. This…
Controversies in the current international human rights debate
An 'ancient sense of politics'? Weber, Caesarism and the Republican tradition
This article critically examines recent claims that Weber's political thought has close associations with classical republicanism. One salient indication of Weber's distance from this tradition is his theory of Ceasarism, and his view that modern polities are most robust when they assume a version of it consistent with civil liberties. By employing the resources of Begriffsgcschichte, I examine the extent of Weber's departure from the 'ancient se…
Weber and Weimar
THANKS IN good measure to the work of David Beetham (1985; orig 1974) and Wolfgang Mommsen ( 1984), an appreciation of Max Weber as a distinctively political thinker and actor is gradually gaining recognition in the English speaking world. Even so, Weber’s reception from British political scientists has remained hesitant and dilatory. A-level options devoted to Modern Political Ideas and Doctrines (London) or Political Theory (Oxford) have no spa…
Concern for Development Aid and Fundamental Human Rights
One of the basic assumptions made in dealing with human rights is the existence of universal norms that govern the way in which human beings ought to deal with other human beings. This assumption lies at the bottom of all debates on human rights. It is on this assumption that the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration which contains principles that are supposed to apply universally …
Hong Kong Universities in the Shadow of the National Security Law
Out of Frankfurt
The arrest of sociology
A new book from Colin Campbell, the distinguished British sociologist, asks a disquieting question: Has sociology progressed? Campbell concludes that our discipline has made little progress in the past half-century. This essay describes what Campbell means by progress, and the factors that, on his account, impede it. The discussion focuses on one such obstacle: the politicization of the university. The older current of ideological advocacy, that …
The Undoing of Humanism
Parliamentary Control over Foreign Policy in The Netherlands
THE SUBJECT OF PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL OVER FOREIGN POLICY IN the Netherlands has increased in importance in recent months following the latest Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing reduction in Arab oil production. In addition to their general cutback of oil production, the Arab states singled out the United States and the Netherlands as ‘friends of Israel’ to whom oil supplies were to be limited even further. While the United States seemed an obvious …
Small States
The usefulness of the concept of “small states” as an analytical tool is discussed in a review of books by Edward Azar and Marshall Singer. The size of states has both domestic and international ramifications. Authors who use the concept of “small states” struggle with the problem of defining it. Such definitions can be clear and unambiguous but arbitrary at the same time; more sophisticated definitions are also more ambiguous and difficult to ap…
Futures studies and policy analysis in the political process
Forecasting in foreign policy
The Dutch Foreign Policy Elite
This study deals with aspects of the foreign policy-making process in a small Western European industrialized democracy: the Netherlands. A group of researchers from several Dutch universities carried out a research project regarding perceptions and attitudes held by members of the Dutch foreign policy elite. Interviews were held with members of the bureaucracy and the parliament (the formal elite) and with leading members of the churches, busine…
Concern for Development Aid and Fundamental Human Rights
One of the basic assumptions made in dealing with human rights is the existence of universal norms that govern the way in which human beings ought to deal with other human beings. This assumption lies at the bottom of all debates on human rights. It is on this assumption that the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration which contains principles that are supposed to apply universally …
The United Nations
The United Nations
Think tanks—Who needs them
Accounting or Caesarism
Peace and political theory
Max Weber as a critic of Bismarck
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Weber and Weimar
THANKS IN good measure to the work of David Beetham (1985; orig 1974) and Wolfgang Mommsen ( 1984), an appreciation of Max Weber as a distinctively political thinker and actor is gradually gaining recognition in the English speaking world. Even so, Weber’s reception from British political scientists has remained hesitant and dilatory. A-level options devoted to Modern Political Ideas and Doctrines (London) or Political Theory (Oxford) have no spa…
Critical Realism, Cautionary Realism
Human Rights
Peace ‘Politics
Max Weber's 'Science as a Vocation
This article reviews the book "Max Weber's 'Science as a Vocation'" by Peter Lassman & Irving Velody; "Weber and Rickert. Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences" by Guy Oakes; "Fleeing the Iron Cage. Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber" by Lawrence A. Scaff
The United Nations in the 1990s
Carl Schmitt and the contradictions of liberal democracy
This article examines the contradictions Schmitt holds to exist between liberalism and democracy. The authors first examine Schmitt's descriptions of liberalism and democracy. They then proceed to his analysis of the political domain, which provides the basis of his criticism of liberal democracy. Following an evaluation of his argument, they propose a democratic conception of liberalism which both draws on Schmitt's account of the political whil…
A Commitment to Campaign. A Sociological Study of CND
This article reviews the book "A commitment to campaign. A sociological study of CND" by John Mattausch
From Colonialism to Independence
Most of the present members of the United Nations are former colonies that gained political independence through direct or indirect involvement of the United Nations. In 1945, more than 750 million people lived in non-self-governing territories of various kinds: by 1990, after Namibia gained its independence in a world that had undergone rapid growth of its population, fewer than two million lived in the remaining 18 dependent territories.
Amnesty International and its Self-Imposed Limited Mandate
This article deals with the development of the self-imposed limited mandate of Amnesty International and the considerations which are taken into account. The organization has gradually expanded its field of attention. It is suggested in this article that, although expanded, the mandate still remains ‘limited’ and in line with the principles as envisaged when the organization was founded in 1961. An important expansion or re-interpretation of the …
The Russian Revolutions
1. Editor's Introduction. 2. Bourgeois Democracy in Russia. 3. Russia's Transition to Pseudo-constitutionalism. 4. Russia's Transition to Pseudo-democracy. 5. The Russian Revolution and the Peace. Political Parties and Associations in Russia, 1905-1906. Glossary. Index
Problems of aid conditionality
(1997). Problems of aid conditionality: The Netherlands and Indonesia. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 363-376
Sociology and Interpretation
This article reviews the book "Sociology and Interpretation: From Weber to Habermas" by Charles A. Pressler, Fabio B. Dasilva
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