Tocqueville's Christian Citzen

Tocqueville's Christian Citizen Marinus Ossewaarde Introduction Alexis De Tocqueville is well known for his critique of democracy. A French statesman, he was left with the legacy of the French Revolution that had torn his fatherland and had changed the course of human history for good. Tocqueville, unlike many of his contemporaries, believed that the Revolution ought not to be seen as incidental or unexpected, despite the fact that it was without precedent in human history and so tarnished with human blood. The French Revolution is part of a trend that traces the path of democracy. Living in the revolutionary France of the nineteenth century, he hoped to find out what France may expect from its course of civilization, what it may expect from its democracy. Tocqueville was a social critic: he deplored what he saw happening around him in France. He believed that France was poorly governed. He was critical of the rise of the bourgeoisie and believed that everything had become vulgar, low, and mean. He rejected the rising materialism as "a dangerous disease of the human mind," which he found in positivism (Comte and St. Simon) and socialism (Proudhon and Blanc). He believed that scientific and economic determinisms were serious threats to liberty and human

Cosmopolitanism and the Society of Strangers

In this article the implications of cosmopolitan thought for the cohesion of groups are explored. The central argument is that cosmopolitanism signals a shift from sociality to humanity, which eyes an all-inclusive society of strangers as its end result. Cosmopolitanism is discussed as a manifestation of the mentality of the global elite, as world citizenship, as a politics of human rights, as a religion of humanity and as global mores. In these distinct dimensions, cosmopolitanism appears to pave the way for the society of strangers

The Sociologists’ Struggle for a European Identity

In recent years, the European identity has been widely researched by sociologists who take an interest in mass and elite identification with the European project. In this article it is argued that the European identity is not only a research object for sociologists interested in identification: it is also their creation. Sociologists theorize and shape a European identity in, by and through their writings. The main objective of this article is to narrate the history of European identity making in sociology. In the first part, it is argued that these two different, clashing approaches to the European identity–namely, the civilizational and the cultural approaches-can be discerned in sociological works throughout European history. They persist in the post-war period when the European identity increasingly comes to depend on the EU. The objective of the second part is to show that the post-war identities ‘Social Europe’, ‘Cosmopolitan Europe’ and more recently, ‘German Europe’ are equivocal. It is found that they are interpreted differently depending on whether sociologists endorse the civilizational or the cultural approach

Unmasking scenario planning:The colonization of the future in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program

In the Netherlands, the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program has been introduced by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in 2014, in the context of the ongoing transformation of the Dutch welfare state; more specifically, the transformation of the social care sector. Scenario planning is a major preoccupation in this program and two major reports have been published in this connection. In this article, the authenticity of the scenario planning of the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program is questioned. It is found that the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program’s scenario planning is not a real scenario planning but, instead, a continuation of the neoliberal discourse by hegemonic stakeholders that seek to ‘close’ the future. It is concluded in this article that in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program the future is colonized and presented as an impersonal trend in which governmental agency for creatively negating and transcending the neoliberal discourse is irrelevant

Sociological imagination for the aged society

The aim of this article is to explore how the sociological imagination may generate new insights regarding the dangers and possibilities that arise when an old order disintegrates and a new one has to be created. The new order is theorized as the “aged society”. The aged society is demarcated by radical population aging that also constitutes our main challenge, especially when coupled with globalization and new technological developments. In this article, the questions and challenges of the aged society, as an emergent world, are not perceived as purely financial, neuroscientific, biological, or technological ones, but as issues of freedom and reason. Contemplating the aged society, however tentative it might be since it regards social realities that are still becoming, might enable us to reconsider and reassess presuppositions of most current aging studies in terms of these values at ris

Citizenship in civil society?

This article seeks to provide a conceptual framework to complement and guide the empirical analysis of civil society. The core argument is that civil society must be understood, not as a category of (post)industrialized society, but as one of individualized society. Civil society is characterized by individualism that is sustained and protected by the civil values of autonomy and emancipation. This, accordingly, implies that empirical data of civil society can be understood most fruitfully within the framework of individualized society. Classical sociology, however, perceives this very individualism and its values as being antagonistic to its own civic vision. Hence, the crucial question is whether there can be any scope for citizenship, classically understood, within civil society. This article begins with the conceptual reconstruction of the social organization of civil society. Thereafter, two distinct civil society perspectives—mediating structures and Tocquevillianism—are explored to see how civil individualism and citizenship relate to each

Living Off Dead Premises: the Persistence of Enlightenment Mentalities in the Making of Social Science

Enlightenment beliefs in progress, development, growth, civilizing process and evolution have played a central role in the history of social science. After two world wars, influential scholars like Horkheimer, Adorno and Gehlen came to question Enlightenment premises. Science could no longer be taken as the paradigmatic human activity, as an activity that discovers truth. Yet, in spite of what such critical scientists had declared, enlightenment beliefs persisted in much scientific work. In this article, I endeavour to show to what extent Enlightenment premises underlie and permeate in the works of social scientists, and how the different political attitudes and mentalities of scientists are intricately related to different manifestations of such beliefs. This article provides a narrative of illustrative scholarly works, to show how such different attitudes and mentalities have shaped the making of social science throughout the history of modern politics. The purpose of such an overview of scientists is to rethink the vocation of social science in general, and political science in particular, by problematizing the relationship between science and Enlightenment premises – a relationship that, it is argued, has become more ambiguous in the current epoch