The Dynamics of Inequality and Habitus Formation: Elias, Bourdieu, and the Rise of Nationalist Populism

This article deals with the dynamics of social inequality and social stratification from a historical-sociological perspective. It purports to clarify basic problems in this field with the help of insights developed by sociologists Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. I systematically compare both thinkers’ ideas on the dynamics of inequality, pointing out similarities and divergences, and critically discuss them. After a summary of basic notions in their work, the paper deals subsequently with the reproduction of inequality in connection with habitus formation; changes in inequality structures over time - more specifically, trends of de-creasing inequality (functional democratisation) and increasing inequality (functional de-democratisation); and the causal connections between changes in inequality structures and changes in habitus, mentality, and ideology. The final section of the paper focuses on a current issue: the emergence of populism in contemporary Western societies. On the basis of the preceding argument, I advance a tentative explanation of the rise of nationalist populism in the context of tendencies of increasing socioeconomic inequality

Increasing and Decreasing Inequalities of Power: A Processual View. A Response to Cas Wouters, and a Proposal for Clarification

Responding to an essay by Cas Wouters in this journal, this article aims to clarify historical trends of increasing and decreasing power inequalities. It criticizes Wouters's rejection of the notion of "functional de-democratisation," his claim that "functional democratisation" was a dominant trend in the whole of human history, and his idea that this process results from long-term trends of differentiation and integration. This paper specifies when and under which conditions processes of functional democratisation did occur, and when and under which conditions developments in the direction of growing power inequality were dominant. Explanations for trends in these different directions are advanced. The paper's final section argues that for the past 40 years processes of both functional democratisation and functional de-democratisation can be discerned, which take place on different integration levels and along different axes

Where nations meet : national identities in an international organisation

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Processos civilizadores em uma perspectiva evolucionária

Resum

Goudsblom's Law of Three Stages: The Global Spread of Socio-Cultural Traits in Human History

In several publications, Johan Goudsblom advanced a “law of three stages” concerning the spread of certain socio-cultural traits (x, y, z...) over humanity. In the first stage, no human society has trait x; in the second stage, some societies have that trait; and in the third stage, all societies have the trait. Important examples of such traits pertain to what Goudsblom has depicted as the great “ecological transformations” in human history: the control of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, and industrialisation. Other examples are metallurgy, writing, money, state organisation, clocks, and computers. This paper elaborates this model and explores its scope, validity, and usefulness for understanding long-term trends in human history. It discusses the model’s theoretical implications (section 2), causal interconnections between socio-cultural traits that spread globally (section 3), explanations for the transition from the second to the third stage (section 3, which includes a brief discussion of Cultural Darwinism), and different mechanisms by which socio-cultural traits spread from some to more societies (section 4). Section 5 deals with the consequences of this spread for power relations between societies. Section 6 focuses on recent developments, including the digital revolution and the transition from the use of fossil fuels to the exploitation of other energy sources. The concluding section discusses briefly the scope and validity of Goudsblom’s “law of three stages” in view of these recent developments

Studying Long-Term Processes in Human History : [Die Erforschung von langfristigen Prozessen in der Menschheitsgeschichte]

Studying long-term processes in human history has over the past decades become a broad and multidisciplinary affair, which draws on various intellectual traditions. The work of sociologist Johan Goudsblom, to whom this special issue is dedicated, was an effort to transgress disciplinary bound-aries and to synthesise different perspectives in this field. In this introduction we distinguish four important scholarly lineages: social evolutionism, Dar-winian theory, historical sociology, and world history with its extensions into environmental history and big history. We characterise in broad outlines each of these traditions and specify how Goudsblom combined parts of them in his own work on long-term social processes, extending in particular the sociol-ogy of Norbert Elias. The final section of this introduction gives a summary overview of the content of this HSR Special Issue