26:T42b,

This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing the emergence and development of an increasingly influential strand of Anglo-American thought that challenges liberalism, known as postliberalism. The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends. The article argues that a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications.

27:T40d,

Legitimacy remains a key concept in political sociology, and perhaps even more so in lay understandings of political processes and structures, as evidenced by conflict over territories and regimes around the world. However, the concept suffers from a rather static representation, and even when addressed in processual form, in terms of specific moments in the process, such as conditions favouring legitimacy or its effects. Building from an Eliasian perspective, we argue for a more processual concept of legitimisation to encompass the dynamic social networks (figurations) that constitute the more unintentional context for deliberate legitimation claims. As networks expand and intensify, processes of legitimisation incorporate changing and more diverse bases for legitimacy claims, as well as a greater variety of such claims and counterclaims. As the power relations between contending groups change, legitimation practices become part of the integrating functions of the state, shaping figurations and the social habitus.

28:T50a,

This article demonstrates the underappreciated import and potential of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, a classic work published 65 years ago. Its aim is not simply to correct misunderstandings of Winch but to rehabilitate the text as indispensable for understanding past and present woes and cementing the future of sociological endeavour. I reconstruct and defend the claims put forth by Winch and then explicitly draw out their implications, which demonstrate the incoherence of the predominant disciplinary self-image that sees sociology as having a method and/or critical thinking prerogative. This problematic self-conception is jeopardizing the coherence and wider relevance of sociology and is responsible for its perennial difficulties in articulating a mode of discourse that can be seen as cogent by the public. A defensible alternative sees sociology as a second-order study of practices that is premised on a conceptually accurate relation to those practices and on answerability to the criteria and abilities of understanding, description, explanation and criticism they afford. This conception can support the reconfiguration of existing forms of sociological inquiry as well as the development of new ones.

29:T45c,

In this article, I apply the colonization thesis from Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action to capitalist societies’ relationships with their natural environment. Resolving the fixation of his critique of capitalism on the so-called lifeworld (Lebenswelt) to include questions of the environment (Umwelt) opens up new vistas in the ongoing ecological reorientation of Critical Theory. If we think about the exploitation of the natural environment in Habermasian terms, the paradoxical irrationality of the expansion of instrumental rationality from the market mechanism becomes evident, providing us