G Therborn
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 8360 |
|---|---|
| NOME | G Therborn |
| PRENOMES | G |
| SOBRENOME | Therborn |
| ASSINATURA | THERBORN G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4652-4371 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 129 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 491 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 129 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1965 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
El momento latinoamericano de la igualdad en un contexto histórico global
A la luz de la historia global, el logro latinoamericano de los años 2000 es de proporciones bastante respetables, comparable, incluso, con los “Trente Glorieuses” europeos. América Latina ha proporcionado prácticamente el único rayo de luz, casi por sí sola ha demostrado la posibilidad de igualdad. ¿Conservarán su impulso los esfuerzos por la igualdad? Es aquí en donde una conclusión se desliza a la ambigüedad. Parece razonable esperar una compl…
Myrdalmonumentet
[The Myrdal monument] Review of Per Axelson & Per Nygren (eds.), Biblioteket. Om Jan Myrdals och Gun Kessles samlingar (Jan Myrdalsällskapet, Askim 2023). Citation: Therborn, Göran (2024) “Myrdalmonumentet”, review in Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys , issue 17, pp. 117–119. https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.17.R1
The two grand movements of socialism and their dialectics
This is an attempt to locate the idea of socialism and the socialist and working-class movements in history. This will here be done by relating the trajectory of socialism to capitalism, as a rival, and by highlighting the main social forces carrying the idea of socialism in the 20th century. These forces were two grand social dialectics, that of industrial capitalism and its generating working-class growth and strength; and, little studied, the …
The Future and the Left
Göran Therborn replies to Oliver Eagleton’s critique of ‘The World and the Left’ (NLR 137). Debates on the nature of dialectics and the triadic crisis of climate breakdown, imperial geopolitics and rising inequality. Could Bloch still be right about the grounds for rational hope
Världen och vänstern
[The world and the left] In this article, Göran Therborn takes a broad view of the world and the left today and compares the new century with the previous one. The 20th century was shaped by two great systemic dialectics, industrial capitalism and capitalist colonialism, which in all their devastation nevertheless strengthened their exploited parts so that the labour movement and colonial liberation movements could pave the way for historic human…
The pandemic experience and the post-pandemic world prospects
This is a global comparative analysis of the social, political and economic experiences, effects and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of it was written during an early stage of the pandemic and captures some of the initial reactions of competitive international panic. It demonstrates the new class structuration resulting from the management of the viral onslaught. It distinguishes coping and failing states of the pandemic world, and di…
The Middle Classes in Latin America
Since its ancient origin in Aristotle's Politics, the idea of the middle class has had three major boom periods, with periods of marginalization in between. The first was during the early nineteenth century in Europe. The middle class was the first explicit class, and it was hailed as a rising actor, against the aristocracy and monarchical absolutism, and as carrier of the new ideology of liberalism. Then followed a long decline, when the middle …
Knowledge and Power
The world’s centre of gravity is changing, from the North Atlantic to Eastern Asia. As world centres of knowledge have correlated historically with world centres of power, this ongoing geopolitical change is likely to bring changes also to the global map of cognition. Knowledge and power are intrinsically related, knowledge is power, it is based on power, and it produces instruments of power. Moreover, the vistas of social scientists and scholars…
Meritokratins uppgång och fall
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
The World and the Left
States, Nations, and Civilizations
Nation-states are inherently part of cultural formations, sustaining, legitimating, and inspiring them. The nations sustaining contemporary states are very different, and major routes of historical nation-state formation can be distinguished, which means that global discussions of nation-states cannot be confined to such states “in a European sense” only. Civilization(s) is a concept with different meanings in singular and in plural, belonging to…
Two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics
At the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened. Among the developed countries of the Global North, the secular trend of decreasing intra-national inequality turned into its opposite. At about the same time, the long period of global inequality began to bend down, among households as well as among nations, a turn less noticed but more significant than the reduction of extreme poverty in the South. The fou…
Knowledge and power
The world’s centre of gravity is changing, from the North Atlantic to Eastern Asia. As world centres of knowledge have correlated historically with world centres of power, this ongoing geopolitical change is likely to bring changes also to the global map of cognition. Knowledge and power are intrinsically related, knowledge is power, it is based on power, and it produces instruments of power. Moreover, the vistas of social scientists and scholars…
Inequality and World Political Landscapes
Critical assessment of a landmark international survey of electoral demographics, mapping the social fractures blunting opposition to inegalitarian politics. The weight in these of income and education, class and identity, and the longer historical arc of national political orders. What is the outlook for neoliberal economics after the pandemic, not least in the country where they were first violently imposed
Into the Hottest Century and into Epochal Change
El siglo XXI será el siglo más caluroso en miles de años, y el paisaje social del mundo es volcánico. La política global y las relaciones sociales estarán dominadas por dos temas:la crisis climática y la rivalidad entre Estados Unidos y China.Este artículo analiza los efectos dela «pandemia de desigualdad»de Covid-19; efectos que han debilitadoalgunas fuerzas y han fortalecidootras. También profundizaenlos contextos y perspecti-vas de la crisis c…
Sweden's turn to economic inequality, 1982–2019
The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy
The relationship between advanced capitalism and democracy contains two paradoxes-one Marxist and one bourgeois. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as both political practice and constitutional debate clearly demonstrate, prevailing bourgeois opinion held that democracy and capitalism (or private property) were incompatible. In modern times, however, since at least the outbreak of the Cold War, bourgeois ideologists have maintained …
Dreams and Nightmares of the World’s Middle Classes
A survey of new shifts within the world’s vast ‘in-between’ classes and their contrasting trajectories in North and South. How should their theorization—or ideologization?—by development economists and financial journalists be read
Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy
Hailed with relief for fear of a bleaker outcome, the SAP’s poor performance in the September 2018 election underlines the malaise afflicting social democracy’s global flagship. Therborn charts the country’s SAP-led neoliberalization—and rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats—against the backdrop of recession and refugee arrivals
Modernity
“Modernity” developed in opposition to “antiquity,” mainly in aesthetic contexts. In social theory it rose as an epochal concept after the postmodernist challenge of the 1970s, with interpretations of the meaning and of the experience of the epoch, and inspiring investigations into its historical origins, crucial moments, and cultural forms. “Modernization” emerged in post‐World War II sociology and political science, referring to catching‐up pro…
The ”People’s home” is falling down, time to update your view of Sweden
Swedish society is changing profoundly. The egalitarian, solidaristic ”People’s Home”, which has attracted widespread progressive admiration internationally, is being eroded and dismantled. The political economy of this process, since the turn of the l980s, is highlighted; a process which includes a major, if not complete, substitution of a capitalist market of social provision for a welfare state, and of a stock market-driven capitalism for a fu…
Dynamics of Inequality
Behind the political upsets in the Atlantic world lie far-reaching shifts in the distribution of global wealth. Göran Therborn assesses the path-breaking research of Branko Milanovic on world income trends
An Age of Progress
Contradictions of social evolution: climate change, stagnant incomes and social exclusion entwined with rising per capita GDP and lengthening life-spans, challenges to racism and sexism, and a mounting capacity for the human species to take control of its destiny
Inequalities of the world
Over the last century, global inequality has developed and continues to develop in unexpected and disturbing patterns. In this important new book, Therborn and his colleagues connect current world inequality to different national constellations of class and power and transnational processes. Ranging from the US and post-Communist Russia to France and China, and spanning social mobility, labor markets, working-class cultures and global science, th…
The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology
Few concepts have been so intensely discussed or so widely sponsored as that of 'ideology'. Whether read as the expression of social classes or attributed a material independence and efficacy, whether devalued as false and non-scientific or asserted as the necessary element of social practice, 'ideology' has become an ineluctable conceptual reference across a range of works dealing with subjects as varied as science and politics, gender and cultu…
What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules
Entangled Modernities
Modernity is better defined as a time orientation, instead of as a set of institutions, which usually smuggles in some provincial or other aprioristic assumptions. A time conception of modernity also gives a precise meaning to postmodernity. Modernity in this non-Eurocentric sense, entails several different, competing master narratives, different social forces of, and conflicts between, modernity and anti-modernity, and different cultural context…
At the birth of second century sociology
The sociology of the next century is likely to differ from that of the twentieth century. The current situation and the future prospects of sociology are assessed by spelling out the trajectory over the past century of sociology's predominant assumptions about the character and direction of the social world and of its own task of cognition. Sociology is located in three spaces of identity: a space of disciplines, a stage of everyday practice, and…
Welfare States and Capitalist Markets
In spite of an impressive expansion predominant welfare state research suffers from five important weaknesses: a linear conception of welfare state growth, a neglect of welfare state efficiency, an excessive quantification of variables, a Social Democratic bias, and an underdevelopment of theory. While the first four are held to be untenable undercurrent societal cir cumstances, the paper concentrates on theoretical problems Welfare states are co…
Globalizations
Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensions of globalization include a number of substantial social processes as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemic and interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not new phenomena. At least six historical waves, begin…
Cultural Belonging, Structural Location and Human Action
Sociological theorizing is likely to change dramatically in the near future, moving from focusing on conceptualization onto explanation. Central to a new theoretical movement will be a spelling out and an elaboration of a core sociological mode of explanation, common, with variations, to most schools of sociology. In a comparison with rational choice models, the specificity of sociological explanations of action and its outcomes is found to resid…
Does Corporatism Really Matter? The economic crisis and issues of political theory
In spite of a recently growing interest in corporatism as a political explanation of cross-national variations of economic performance and as a device for successful crisis management, there is little evidence that corporatism matters as a determinant of economic outcomes. Two kinds of corporatism – as a pattern of interest intermediation or industrial relations, and as a system of concerted public policy-making – are distinguished and tested wit…
End of a Paradigm
Urban studies in the social sciences have for two decades been driven by a hegemonic conception, under slightly different, competing labels: world city, global city, and world city networks. While making important cognitive contributions, it has, I argue, been fundamentally flawed in assuming nation-states and state-processed national economies to be unimportant to the world economy and to world/global cities. While in several ways enriching urba…
Karl Marx Returning
Over the past two decades the prevailing postwar political theory paradigm of pluralism has been strongly challenged by other approaches, such as neo-Marxism, Corporatist theory, and a state-centered approach. After the exhaustion of the first wave of neo- Marxism, the 1980s have seen the development of an empirical neo-Marxism Mark II, largely focusing on comparative welfare state research. A critical overview of the bear ing of Pluralist, Corpo…
Science, Class and Society
Child Politics
The article analyses the different strands of public concern regarding children in the course of the 20th century, and the political process and the ideological constellation which led up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The ratification of the Convention and its political effects in northwestern Europe are analysed. Finally, a set of hypotheses are presented about likely determinants of the impact of the Convention in different p…
Science, Class and Society
Classes and States Welfare State Developments, 1881–1981
(1984). Classes and States Welfare State Developments, 1881–1981. Studies in Political Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 7-41
Monumental Europe
This is a study of the historical processes and the symbolic forms which made Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg/Moscow, and Vienna, into national capital cities. The preceding historical background are ecclesiastical sees, trading centres, and dynastic residence cities. Paris of the French Revolution meant the launching of a capital of the nation, a process then gathering momentum in the 19th century, taking different …
Sweden before and after Social Democracy
This is a first report on a research project entitled 'Sweden Under Social Democracy (1932-76)'. It aims at probing into the effects a uniquely long Social Democratic parliamentary reign have had on the present 'welfare state'. It is argued that a causal analysis such as this has to start from a historical study and that correlational methods have little value. Sweden is therefore compared with other Western societies before and at the end of the…
European Modernity and beyond
Another way of taking religion seriously
Class in the 21st Century
From São Paulo to Beijing, a rising middle class has been hailed by liberal commentators as a bulwark for consumption and democracy in the decades ahead. Taking stock of these claims, Göran Therborn offers a magisterial overview of the global class landscape and the still prodigious numerical weight of manual workers within it
Back to Norms! on the Scope and Dynamics of Norms and Normative Action
Social norms and normativity are important parts of social change and social concern, as well as of social order. They are highly pertinent to a number of social disciplines. It is paradoxical that their theorizing and their study, at the core of neoclassical sociology, have been neglected for some time by sociologists, and major advances made from perspectives of rational choice. The marginalization of norms within recent sociology is critically…
The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History
Class Perspectives
Portes, A. 2000. The Resilient Importance of Class: A Nominalist Interpretation. Political Power and Social Theory, 14, 249-284. Rokkan, S. 1966. Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism. In R. A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sklair, L. 2001. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Treiman, D. J. & Ganzeboom, H. B. G. 2000. The Fourth Generation of Comparativ…
Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others
A theoretical model of class formation must undergird any serious theory of capitalist politics, just as the concrete analysis of class formation must be the prerequisite for the realistic examination of the historical development of any particular capitalist country. So far, in contemporary Marxist research, two approaches to
Eastern Drama. Capitals of Eastern Europe, 1830S–2006
The theme of this part of the Review differs from the current mainstream of urban sociology, which is largely preoccupied with questions of political economy, around the buzzword of ‘global cities’, and/or of urban inequality, and focused on the present. Here the perspective is historical, and with a particular, if by no means exclusive, attention to changes of culture and symbolism. The approach is multidisciplinary, with major contributions by …
Globalização e desigualdade
O título do artigo refere-se a três conjuntos de questões fundamentais e controvertidas, não resolvidas entre os cientistas sociais, para não falar dos cidadãos sociais. Duas delas são basicamente conceituais e teóricas, a outra é, ao mesmo tempo, conceitual e empírica. Em primeiro lugar, o que é globalização? De que forma devemos conceitualizá-la? Em segundo, que tipos de desigualdade podem ser identificados e quais são os mais pertinentes? E, e…
Why Some People Are More Unemployed than Others
The Swedish Left
The general societal setting of contemporary Swedish politics has been analysed elsewhere by the present writer in terms of the combination of—to use Gramscian categories—working-class political dominance with a continuing latent hegemony of the bourgeoisie. This situation has positive implications for left-wing action and thinking. Working-class political dominance
From Petrograd to Saigon
The staggering blows that the National Liberation Front has now dealt the American military expedition in Vietnam have changed history. When some half a million American troops with enormous technological superiority are no longer capable of keeping even the us Embassy in Saigon safe, the most rabid
Swedish Communism--End of an Interlude
The Twenty-Second Congress of the Swedish Communist Party—since 1967 called Left Party (Communist) or VPK—on September 19th–21st put an end to a period in the history of the party, hitherto unique in the annals of the international movement. A balance-sheet of this period and of the congress
The Frankfurt School
In France and Italy, the post-War period has seen the emergence of new schools of Marxist thought (Althusser, Della Volpe). In the German-speaking world, on the other hand, there is a complete continuity from the pre-War years. The veterans Lukács and Bloch are still active and influential, but
Jurgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is at present the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School and the only one as yet well-known outside the Federal German Republic. In an article in nlr 63, I discussed the work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the original nucleus of the
The Working Class and the Birth of Marxism
The theory of historical materialism makes it possible to situate Marxism itself—just as much as market economics or normative sociology—in relation to capitalist development and the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism emerged in the second half of the 1840s, in the heartlands of industrial capitalism. Its birthplaces were the
Social Practice, Social Action, Social Magic
The Greek word praxis means 'action', and praxis (practice) and action are central concepts in two important theories, Marxism and the sociological theory of action. In an analysis of the concept of action in Parsons, Weber, and Homans, and of the practice concept in Marx' works the two concepts and theories are compared. The conclusion is that the theory of action is the opposite of the theory of practice. In a critique of Gouldner et al. the au…
The Theorists of Capitalism
Even the most abstract theoretical discourses and scientific endeavours are the product of particular societies in a particular historical period. As human beings live in societies and as these societies—like the rest of the universe—have a time dimension, the products of the human mind always have some kind
What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules
The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy
The relationship between advanced capitalism and democracy contains two paradoxes—one Marxist and one bourgeois. Any serious Marxist analysis has to confront the following question: How has it come about that, in the major and most advanced capitalist countries, a tiny minority class—the bourgeoisie—rules by means of democratic forms
Science, Class and Society
Science, Class and Society
Sweden before and after Social Democracy
This is a first report on a research project entitled 'Sweden Under Social Democracy (1932-76)'. It aims at probing into the effects a uniquely long Social Democratic parliamentary reign have had on the present 'welfare state'. It is argued that a causal analysis such as this has to start from a historical study and that correlational methods have little value. Sweden is therefore compared with other Western societies before and at the end of the…
The Travail of Latin American Democracy
The shifting complexity of Latin American politics baffles the observer, frustrates the theoretician and challenges both the committed endurance and the tactical subtlety of the revolutionary. Continent of military coups and dictators—but also of (male) bourgeois democracies as old or even older than some West European or North
What Does the Ruling Class do When It Rules? State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism
Rethinking the Ruling Class
The Shaping of the Swedish Health System
Classes in Contemporary Capitalism
Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others
A theoretical model of class formation must undergird any serious theory of capitalist politics, just as the concrete analysis of class formation must be the prerequisite for the realistic examination of the historical development of any particular capitalist country. So far, in contemporary Marxist research, two approaches to
Classes and States Welfare State Developments, 1881–1981
(1984). Classes and States Welfare State Developments, 1881–1981. Studies in Political Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 7-41
The Prospects of Labour and the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism
Even a pair of very myopic eyes are sufficient to discern the mood of the Left today, particularly the Socialist Left, in the countries of advanced capitalism. The general picture is one of gloom, with some extra-dark strokes over the British Isles, some pale-pink touches where holding operations
The New Questions of Subjectivity
The Dominant Ideology Thesis by Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner is first of all the story of a hunting exploit. It relates how the authors hunt down and finally kill a beast called ‘the dominant ideology thesis’. To save some space for due evaluation
The Irreversible Welfare State
The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s meant important changes within the Western states: apparatuses of armed forces, bureaucratic ordering, and public transport and communication became institutions of transfer payments to households, and public education, caring and social services. In this article we describe the influence of the current economic crisis on the welfare state. Average yearly growth of social security expenditure c…
Die Analyse der Sozialen Ungleichheit
Karl Marx Returning
Over the past two decades the prevailing postwar political theory paradigm of pluralism has been strongly challenged by other approaches, such as neo-Marxism, Corporatist theory, and a state-centered approach. After the exhaustion of the first wave of neo- Marxism, the 1980s have seen the development of an empirical neo-Marxism Mark II, largely focusing on comparative welfare state research. A critical overview of the bear ing of Pluralist, Corpo…
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