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

Governing Low Profile Issues: A Frame Analysis of Drug Addiction in a Local Setting

Frame analysis was developed by Erving Goffman as a sociological concept, used for understanding how individual actors relate themselves to the world, creating coherent frames out of individual social experiences. We apply frame analysis in the emergent field of sociology of governance, using the example of low profile public issue of drug addiction in a specific local social and political context of a municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to understand the roles of governance actors and their social interactions in the attribution of meaning. We focus on mental organization of governance experiences related to drug addiction and the strategic involvement of different governance actors which use given frames. We discuss the importance of frame coherence and ways in which it can be achieved for the low profile issues.Frame Analysis, Sociology of Governance, Low Profile Issues, Frame Coherence

Christendemocratisch burgerschapsidee strijdig met de mythe van eigen verantwoordelijkheid

Christendemocratische partijen in Europa hebben hun identiteit verloochend door het neoliberale begrip ‘eigen verantwoordelijkheid’ te omarmen. ‘Eigen verantwoordelijkheid’ is slechts een instrument in de hervorming van de verzorgingsstaat. Maar het christendemocratisch begrip van burgerschap is gebaseerd op een integraal beeld van de geschapen mens. Deze mens is van ‘onschatbare waarde’, in staat om zichzelf te transcenderen, om de haat, nijd en het geweld – het kwaad – in zichzelf tot naastenliefde om te vormen. De omvorming van mensen tot burgers zou de essentie moeten zijn van christendemocratische politiek

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

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

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