Margaret Somers

Cet article a déjà paru dans Dissent, Spring 2014. Nous remercions Margaret Somers et Fred Block, ainsi que la revue Dissent, de nous avoir donné l'autorisation de le reproduire sur RHUTHMOS. On le trouvera en ligne également ici. In the first half century of Dissent's history, Karl Polanyi almost never made an appearance in the magazine's pages. On one level this is surprising, because Polanyi was a presence in socialist circles in New York City from 1947 through the mid-1950s, the period of (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act that ended the entitlement of poor families to government assistance. The debate leading up to that transformation in welfare policy occurred in the shadow of Speenhamland—an episode in English Poor Law history. This article revisits the Speenhamland episode to unravel its tangled history. Drawing on four decades of recent scholarship, the authors show that Speenhamland policies could not have had the consequences that have been attributed to them. The article ends with an alternative narrative that seeks to explain how the Speenhamland story became so deeply entrenched.

Hannes Lacher’s article misrepresents and then denounces both the substance and the spirit of our book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique. Lacher claims his interpretation of Polanyi to be the only acceptable one, and vociferously alerts readers to beware the dangerous influence of our work. Because we continue to believe that familiarity with Polanyi’s theoretical framework is valuable for those resisting the depredations of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, we restate our commitment to interpreting Polanyi’s work in the most capacious way possible, treating it not as Scripture but as a body of work multidimensional enough for varying perspectives. In our reply to Lacher, we revisit several themes central to our book, including Polanyi’s complex use of “utopianism”; the “always-instituted economy”; the gold standard’s attack on the “democratic virus” and the rise of fascism; and Polanyi’s socialist commitment to democratizing the economy. We also suggest that by exploring several apparent puzzles in the text of GT it is possible to derive a more fruitful and powerful interpretation of Polanyi’s thinking.

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology

Theories of social capital are popular because they claim to insulate society against both the coercion of states and the individualism of markets, as well as to better explain social prosperity and economic performance. But in fact laws, citizenship rights, compulsory associations and political institutions do a much better job of the former, while large-scale civic movements, like Poland’s Solidarity, with demonstrable impacts on the configuration of political power, are the historic keys to democratic prosperity and social confidence