Gary Wickham

In a recent paper Martin Loughlin laments the fact that during 'the last 20 years or so' a serious misunderstanding of constitutional authority has found its way into a great deal of social, legal, and political thinking. Loughlin contends that this misunderstanding is a reaction to 'the growing range of governmental functions now being exercised through supra- or transnational institutional arrangements'. In a not-unrelated set of papers, Grahame Thompson highlights the way this problematic thinking about constitutionalism has infected discussions about the role of global corporations, especially those that attempt to grant to some global corporations the status 'global corporate citizen'. After setting out a distinctive understanding of 'the social', this paper explores some aspects of these interventions by Loughlin and Thompson. The paper then builds on their insights to develop an argument that the category of social citizenship is unsustainable.

By declaring the social to be universal and timeless the formalised study of social identity – drawn mostly from sociology, social policy, social psychology, and cultural studies – ignores the fact that as a discrete domain the social has a definite a history. This paper argues, first, that modern social identity depends on the existence of the social as a separate domain of relative peace and freedom which emerged in early modern Europe – the civil-peace social. The paper then goes on to its main argument, that culture – as patterns of enculturation, or the formation of particular personae – can, by providing a distinction between culture and the social, help to clarify the way social identity actually works. In this way, the study of social identity needs to put more stress on the fact that for the civil-peace social to have emerged and to continue to flourish, the culture that produced unrestrained individuals and groups had (and still has) to be overcome in favour of the culture that produced (and continues to produce) more restrained persons as new moral personae.

The failure of the Copenhagen Conference to produce a legally binding agreement marks an impasse. It also poses difficulties for sociology. This paper will not attempt to directly explain why no agreement could be reached in Copenhagen. Rather, it will sketch the sociological difficulties faced by this and other such mechanisms to use politics and law to facilitate the long term stability of the interface between natural environments and modern societies. In particular, the paper will indicate the role of each of science, morality, law, politics, and economy in producing competing understandings of „environment‟ and „society‟, competing understandings which are drawn on by many participants in the climate change debate. Our appreciation of how and why it presents a crisis, how it might have occurred, its consequences, and the fact that it is an environmental problem is a product of a certain type of specifically „environmental‟ thinking. Our project is to undertake a close exposition of how various understandings of the potential threat of climate change are generated.

Sociology and international law are closely related. Both fields were formalised as disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century, though this is not the source of their closeness. Rather, they are closely related because of their joint reliance on the notion of the social. Both made much use of an organic-communitarian understanding of the social and in both a counter-current arose against this direction, around a distinctly politico-legal understanding. In building its organic-communitarian tradition, international law actually borrowed heavily from the sociological discourses of the time, particularly from the work of Durkheim. The borrowings concerning the politico-legal tradition, however, ran the other way, with sociology borrowing from those public law discourses about sovereignty that informed most discourses of international law. The paper sketches the main method involved, sets out each of the two aforementioned rival understandings of the social, discusses international law’s use of the organic-communitarian understanding, and discusses sociology’s borrowing from public law in deploying a politico-legal understanding through the notion of sovereignty.

The attacks on New York in September 2001 and subsequent attacks on other Western targets continue to serve as a stimulus for a number of academic disciplines. In this way, in a bid to remain relevant to the needs of post-9/11 Western governments, the likes of international relations, political science, middle eastern studies, and comparative religion have, at least to some extent, reassessed their objects. Sociology has not reacted in anything like the same manner, assuming, it seems, that its object needs no adjustment for the field to be as relevant to post-9/11 Western governments as any of the other disciplines listed. Taking ‘the social’ to be sociology’s fundamental object, this paper will argue that sociology’s stance is much more complacent than it should be. The paper sketches the contours of three understandings of the social that are available to sociology and emphasises three points: one, that while the basic-interaction understanding is still useful to the discipline’s work, it is not helpful in making the discipline relevant to the needs of post-9/11 Western governments; two, that the reason-morality understanding is actually an obstacle to this type of relevance; and three, that the politico-legal understanding needs to be given more credence within the discipline, for it is in fact the key to this type of relevance.

This paper provides a brief analysis of Michel Foucault’s work on power and governmentality, and mounts the argument that the treatment of these concepts by Foucault is theoretical rather than empirical or historical. Foucault’s approach – a Kantian dialectical approach – allows the social to engulf politics, sovereignty and the state. Ultimately, Foucault follows a Kantian line to a moral critique of society. Given this critical edge to Foucault’s work, it is not surprising that endeavours such as critical discourse analysis use Foucault’s work to ballast their approach. Like Bruno Latour, however, we suspect that the fascination with social and moral critique is exhausted; and we suspect that the commitment to critique masks the understanding of the critic as an historically specific persona, and disallows – on moral grounds – non-teleological descriptive analyses. Rather than critique critique, however – and risk being hoist by our own petard – our purpose here is an exploration of those who adopt the critical persona

The structure of this paper is as follows. We begin with a brief discussion of Michel Foucauft’s (1970) account of the centrality of ‘Man’ to the modernist project. We suggest that the emergence of this figure is connected to the practice of interpretation, or hermeneutics. We restate Foucault’s (1972) call for a method, which is non-interpretive and non-anthropological. We then move on to a discussion of Bruno Latour’s (1993) critique of modernism and postmodernism. There are important lessons in his analysis for a sociology, which wishes to develop some of the lines of thought characteristic of postmodernism. We then discuss Latour’s attempt to construct a new type of inquiry that we can call a ‘sociology of criticism’. Latour’s new ‘methodology’ learns from the errors of postmodernism. This sociology of criticism, a nonmodernist sociology, should not be hermeneutic, but relational, or what Dean (1994) calls semiological.