Gary Wickham

The term ‘post-national formations’ is a product of some of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas. In using this term, Habermas highlights what he regards as a laudatory trend in social and political research. This is the trend away from an intense focus on the role of nation-states – a role he believes to be unconducive to progressive politics – and towards a focus on the role of new configurations – a role he believes to be much more conducive to this type of politics. ‘Post-national formations’, then, is the term Habermas uses to describe new non-state configurations he has identified. He is confident these configurations will eventually break free of the supposed yoke of the nation-state and usher in a new era of progressivism. This article is not concerned with the post-national formations literature per se. Rather, it is concerned with this literature’s failure to take into account the full history of both the nation-state and the notion of sovereignty that helps the nation-state to function. In pursuing this concern, the article draws material from various sources to offer a short historical defence of the sovereign state.

In this chapter, we discuss the reception of Foucault's work in Anglophone countries and survey the recent work done on his ideas in the twenty-first century. We highlight how Foucault gained traction in those areas, thanks to his novel tools and methods that allowed him to analyze power while distancing himself from Marxism and its followers. Foucault's work on power structures and governmentality offered concrete insights from precise historiographies that changed political and social theory since its inception. Some such analyses, including genealogy and archaeology, helped uncover the threads of power that drew scholars to Foucault's thought. We also offer some criticisms of his work, including how his conception of power and society wasn't so different from the Marxists’ line of thought, as well as how some of Foucault's historiographies tended to exclude certain specificities that endangered parts of his theory. Yet, despite this criticism, we suggest that Foucault belongs in the pantheon of thinkers who have profoundly influenced social and political thought today.

The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils.

Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analyze the plethora of identities being promoted, invented, or rejected around the world. Rather, it focuses on only the ‘social’ component in ‘social identity’, arguing that the field as a whole would be stronger if all its contributors, or at least the great majority of them, granted this component a more important role. In particular, the paper offers the field three definitional possibilities it might usefully add to the ‘society is human interaction’ definition.

There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes’s work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enough to give them a limited capacity for sociability – enough, that is, to achieve a rudimentary level of self-preservation – but not nearly enough to produce society. He builds this argument directly against the scholastic argument that nature in fact supplies to humans so much reason that, were they to apply it in the manner in which nature intends, they would achieve a perfect society. In forging his particular direction against the scholastics, Hobbes draws mostly on his Epicurean political philosophy, whereby the rule of a strong authority, the sovereign, disciplines the wills of subjects in order to properly balance their passions, to the extent that a distinct domain of peace and security is created and maintained, a domain he mostly calls simply ‘society’. His account of society is normative in only one respect, a very important respect – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security.

This chapter is an attempt to develop a framework for nonessentialist power analysis. By 'non-essentialist analysis' I mean analysis which does not understand its object in terms of an allimportant essence (like the economy, the state or the creative individual). As Barry Hindess describes it: Essentialism ... refers to a mode of analysis in which social phenomena are analysed not in terms of their specific conditions of existence and their effects with regard to other social relations and practices but rather as the more or less adequate expression of an essence (Hindess, 1977, 95).

The environment has not always been protected by law. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that ‘the environment’ came to be understood as an entity in need of special care, and the law-politics duo firmly fixed its focus on this issue.In this book Wickham and Goodie tell the story of how law and politics first came upon the environment as an object in need of special attention. They outline the unlikely intersection of aesthetics and science that made ‘the environment’ into the matter of great concern it is today. The book describes the way private common-law strategies and public-law legislative strategies have approached the task of protecting the environment, and explore the greatest environmental challenge to have so far confronted environmental law and politics; the threat of global climate change. The book offers descriptions of many of the strategies being deployed to meet this challenge and present some troubling assessments of them.The book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers of environmental law, socio-legal studies, environmental studies, and political theory.

The recent collection Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory provides plenty of evidence in support of the proposition that there is not a strong mood within sociology today to conduct an ongoing productive debate about 'society' as the core object of the discipline, in the way that, for example, economics conducts such a debate about 'the economy'. Instead, sociology is much more likely to have disparate debates, each organized around a different object or candidate-object. That is, most debates within the discipline about what is, are, or should be its object or objects are conducted by advocates of some theoretical trend or other which these advocates think more important than other trends, and certainly more important than the object society. This situation is far from conducive to increased public relevance, especially because, in most cases, the target audience of each debate is a cohort of insiders. If the discipline were to more strenuously organize and/or participate in public debates about society it would at very least find itself associated with a notion which has currency beyond the field itself, such that even if sociologists were to debate society using technical language they might still attract wide public attention, in the way that economics attracts such attention when it debates technical aspects of the economy, like monetary policy or 'irrational exuberance' or the technicalities of the derivatives behind the global financial crisis. Using Sociological Objects as a launching pad, this paper explores the decline within sociology of the object society and shows how easily the lessons offered by historical insights can be undermined by a particular attitude toward the use of theory.

After suggesting that Stephen Turner's work is characterized by a determination to offer viable alternatives to blockages generated by adherence to dogmas, particularly those generated by adherence to Kantian metaphysics, this review article concentrates on his recent book Explaining the Normative. The article sets out the book's descriptions of a wide variety of positions, 'each of which accounts for a different kind of normativity'. Perhaps the only common feature of these positions is the idea of 'the necessity or indispensability of the normative'. Turner challenges the normativists' certainty, employing a range of argumentative strategies which add up to the project of explaining the normative. The article seeks to show how Turner goes about this project and to show that he succeeds in his quest to undermine the normativists' claim that the normative itself cannot be explained. Ultimately, Turner is able to say to them, politely but firmly, 'Yes it can'.