• Abundant research in adjacent disciplines shows forgiveness (including forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, and not being forgiven) to be an ordinary feature of how personal relationships are maintained, repaired, and rescinded. Sociologists, however, have scarcely considered forgiveness at all. This paper shows why sociologists of personal life should be interested in forgiveness, and how this contributes to sociological interpretations of conflict and repair in relationships. Indeed, it i…Read more
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    Noting that Benhabib’s ethical theory has seldom been engaged with by sociologists of morality, this paper introduces and interrogates Benhabib’s ethical theory from a sociological perspective. It is argued that Benhabib’s critiques of Enlightenment conceptions of morality complement sociological theories of morality. Her concepts of the ‘concrete’ and ‘generalized’ other and ‘interactive universalism’ can potentially inform recurrent debates in the sociology of morality about the extent to whic…Read more
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    Providing a theory of moral practice for a contemporary sociological audience, Owen Abbott shows that morality is a relational practice achieved by people in their everyday lives. He moves beyond old dualisms—society versus the individual, social structure versus agency, body versus mind—to offer a sociologically rigorous and coherent theory of the relational constitution of the self and moral practice, which is both shared and yet enacted from an individualized perspective. In so doing, The Sel…Read more