- Davis, California, United States
John R. Hall
University of California, Davis, Sociology, Faculty Member
- University of California at Santa Cruz, Sociology, Faculty Memberadd
- Sociology, Class, Class (Sociology), Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Sociology of Religion, Apocalypticism, and 27 moreReligious Violence, Religious and Political Violence, Sociological theory/analysis, qualitative research methods, social anthropology, political sociology, social movements, democratization, State-society relations, civil society role in developing countries, Sociological institutionalism, Historical Sociology, ADD Sociology of Culture, Cultural Sociology, Philosophy of History, Modernity, Weberian social theory, Max Weber, Utopian Studies, Eschatology, Millenarianism, Religion and Violence, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Max Weber (Philosophy), Early modern religious history, Prophecy, History of Religion, Historical and Comparative Sociology, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, Epistemology of the Social Sciences, Max Scheler, Phenomenology of Temporality, Alfred Schutz (Sociology), and Radical Reformationedit
Methodologies of historical sociology face research problems centered on the instability of historical referents, their historical non-independence, and the privileging of objective time of the clock and calendar. The present essay, by... more
Methodologies of historical sociology face research problems centered on the instability of historical referents, their historical non-independence, and the privileging of objective time of the clock and calendar. The present essay, by reflecting on an analysis of the apocalyptic in the long run (Hall 2009), proposes the potential to solve these problems by way of a phenomenology of history, which analyzes the enactment and interplay of multiple social temporalities. Whereas high-modern theories of modernity tended to portray a secular trend toward the triumph of rationalized social order centred in diachronic time, analysis of the historical emergence of apocalyptic times in relation to other temporalities - especially objective (or diachronic) temporalities, the here-and-now, and the collective synchronic - reveals that the apocalyptic has survived within modernity through the articulation of rationalized diachronic time with the sacred strategic time of apocalyptically framed ‘ho...
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This chapter investigates the circumstances of violence in a way that identifies alternative “domains” in which religious concatenations of violence arise. Despite the fluidity of empirical trajectories and theoretical transitions among... more
This chapter investigates the circumstances of violence in a way that identifies alternative “domains” in which religious concatenations of violence arise. Despite the fluidity of empirical trajectories and theoretical transitions among analytic types, diverse situations are not so idiosyncratically historicist as to prevent theorization of alternative patterns. Religious communities “contained” by a state may raise countercultural ideologies. The structural circumstances of violence have been modified by apocalyptic war. In social processes, the link of religion to political power differentiates a variety of hegemonic and counterhegemonic conditions in which religion and violence become concatenated. Theorizing relationships between religion and violence should not be an exercise in differentiating “ideal” and “material” causes but rather an effort to understand their complex interplay in social processes.
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Bauman liquido * *Este artículo es publicado simultáneamente en la revista Socio (Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme), número 8 (junio de 2017). Reconocemos una vez más la fructífera colaboración con Socio y agradecemos a su director, Michel Wieviorka, así como al autor de este artículomore
Conventionally, proposals to improve working relations between sociology and history have been interdisciplinary. The present essay advances an alternative approach -- consolidation of sociohistorical inquiry as a transdisciplinary... more
Conventionally, proposals to improve working relations between sociology and history have been interdisciplinary. The present essay advances an alternative approach -- consolidation of sociohistorical inquiry as a transdisciplinary enterprise. All sociohistorical inquiry depends on four elemental forms of discourse: discourse on values, narrative discourse, social theoretical discourse, and the discourse of explanation. Though inquiry is transdisciplinary in the problematics of these discourses, concrete methodology typically is oriented either toward theorization in relation to cases (historical sociology) or toward comprehensive analysis of a single phenomenon (sociological history). Varying the articulated relations among the four forms of discourse once for historical sociology and again for sociological history yields eight ideal typical strategies of inquiry. The four strategies of historical sociology include universal history, theory application, macro-analytic history, and contrast-oriented comparison. The parallel strategies for sociological history are situational history, specific history, configurational history, and historicism. These ideal types offer standard reference points that help clarify the underpinnings of a diverse rangeof scholarly practices.
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In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat?... more
In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusual but not unique development in two cases of the utmost significance for World War II: the March 1933 decision by the German Reichstag to give power to Adolf Hitler to modify the Weimer constitution without further recourse to parliament, and the French National Assembly’s decision in Vichy in July 1940 to transfer all state powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain. Ermakoff has woven a fabric of many threads—some historical, some methodological, some theoretical—drawn together in complex patterns. His analysis begins by artfully turning what in many books would be a historiographical review of previous work into a deep and thorough consideration of three alternative explanations of abdication.
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ABSTRACT In sociohistorical inquiry, no epistemology prevails as a widely accepted account of knowledge. Positivism yet retains its defenders. As alternatives, both structuralist and hermeneutic challenges to science are undermined as... more
ABSTRACT In sociohistorical inquiry, no epistemology prevails as a widely accepted account of knowledge. Positivism yet retains its defenders. As alternatives, both structuralist and hermeneutic challenges to science are undermined as foundations of knowledge by their own accounts, yielding the postmodern loss of certitude. Conventionalism, rationalism, and realism have been proposed as “local epistemologies” under the new conditions, and on a broader level, pragmatic and transcendental theories of communication substitute for epistemology classically conceived. As yet, these contending developments do not resolve the crisis of sociohistorical knowledge.
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Max Weber re-presents "Politics as a vocation," on the 100th anniversary of the lecture, originally given to students in Munich, Germany. A class at the University of California - Santa Cruz taught by Professor Hillary Angelo hears a... more
Max Weber re-presents "Politics as a vocation," on the 100th anniversary of the lecture, originally given to students in Munich, Germany. A class at the University of California - Santa Cruz taught by Professor Hillary Angelo hears a shorter, updated version. For a video of the performance go to: https://youtu.be/CyfwF90QI_E . As a special bonus, in the video, Weber takes questions concerning his own scholarship as well as politics in the wake of neo-liberalism today.
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Despite compelling scientific research that affirms the reality of climate change, including global warming, social and political engagement with the issue remains highly contested. To identify the cultural and social structurations of... more
Despite compelling scientific research that affirms the reality of climate change, including global warming, social and political engagement with the issue remains highly contested. To identify the cultural and social structurations of alternative approaches to climate change, this study draws on a temporally theorized ‘structural phenom- enology’ of social action and organization. Through hermeneutic analysis, it examines selected prominent contemporary constructions of global climate change. The general framework of structural phenomenology, orthogonal to, yet compatible with, field theory, is used empirically to identify various wider social domains of action. The cultural structures of domain practices are described by how they operate through, span, or hybridically combine alternative registers of temporally structured meaningful action – each with its distinctive meaningful logic. The study examines cultural structures in four domains con- cerned with global climate change – science and policy analysis, conservative skepticism and denial, geopolitical security, and environmental movements. Climate-change con- structions within these four domains differ in the ways that they compose various regis- ters among diachronic, strategic, pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic social action temporalities. The general potential of structural phenomenology for re-envisioning institutional arrangements of modern societies is considered, as are the implications of the analysis for research on and social engagements with climate change.
Research Interests: Field Theory, Climate Change, Climate change policy, Phenomenology, Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies, and 24 moreInstitutions (Political Science), Phenomenology of Temporality, Climate Change Impacts, Anthropocene studies, Global Warming, Temporality, global Climate change, Institutions, Global warming potential, Anthropocene, Climate change adaptation measures, Anthropocene Age and Environment Security, Climate Politics, Global Warming and Climate Change, Society in the Anthropocene, Culture and the Anthropocene, The Anthropocene, Global Warm Ing, Global Warming Mitigation, Climate Change $ Global Warming, Anthropocene Theory, Global Warming Research Paper Topics Global Warming Research Paper Topics, Climate change Is global warming a hoax? Is it being exaggerated?, and Anthropogenic Climate Change and Catastrophic Global Warming
To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times... more
To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I deconstruct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements – logic, setting, obligations, and resources – in order to show how state grants of land to individuals and corporations (notably railroad companies) constituted patrimonial practices embedded within modern structures. “Modern state patrimonialism” had its origins in royal patrimonialism. Monopolization of resources – by a state rather than an absolutist ruler – continued to offer the basis for patrimonial practice, but state patrimonial resource distribution became less personalistic and more connected to public goals (financing the state, rewarding state service, settlement of territory, development of a national economy, and construction of a transportation system). Recipients of patrimonial distributions often gained considerable control over disposition of resources that they received. In these patrimonialist practices, economic action was constructed in logics of action that occurred outside of “market” transactions. Future research should analyze patrimonial dynamics during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by identifying state monopolizations of scarce and desirable resources (mineral rights; city water systems; electrical systems; telephone systems; radio, television, and other airwave bandwidth; the internet), and analyzing how the distribution of those resources are entailed, controlled, licensed, or otherwise managed. A research program in the study of modern patrimonialism helps build out an institutionalist sociology of the economy.
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One way to recast the problem of cultural explanation in historical inquiry is to distinguish two conceptualizations involving culture: (1) cultural meanings as contents of signification (however theorized) that inform meaningful courses... more
One way to recast the problem of cultural explanation in historical inquiry is to distinguish two conceptualizations involving culture: (1) cultural meanings as contents of signification (however theorized) that inform meaningful courses of action in historically unfolding circumstanceas;n d( 2) cultural structures as institutionalizedp atterns of sociall ife that may be elaborated in more than one concrete construction of meaning. This distinction
helps to suggest how explanation can operate in accounting for cultural processes of meaning-formation, as well as in other ways that transcend specific meanings, yet are nonetheless cultural. Examples of historical explanation involving each construct are
offered, and their potential examined.
helps to suggest how explanation can operate in accounting for cultural processes of meaning-formation, as well as in other ways that transcend specific meanings, yet are nonetheless cultural. Examples of historical explanation involving each construct are
offered, and their potential examined.
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Parsons's epistemology of "analytical realism" could be developed only by first displacing Weber's alternative epistemology within the social action perspective. Reconsideration of Parsons's epistemological moves shows that he came to... more
Parsons's epistemology of "analytical realism" could be developed only by first displacing Weber's alternative epistemology within the social action perspective. Reconsideration of Parsons's epistemological moves shows that he came to conclusions unsupportable within the social action perspective. Reassertion of the postulate of Verstehen retrieves his achievements from the pure functionalism and positivism he opposed, by establishing a comprehensive action scheme centered on ideal-type analysis.
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Research Interests: Schutz, Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Research Methodology, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, and 8 moreAlfred Schutz (Sociology), Phenomenology of Temporality, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Husserlian phenomenology, Social Phenomenology, Husserl: Life-world (Lebenswelt), Alfred Schutz, and Phenomenology (Husserl
Research Interests: Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Phenomenological Research Methodology, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Max Weber (Philosophy), and 12 moreAlfred Schutz (Sociology), Phenomenology (Research Methodology), Phenomenology of Temporality, Husserlian phenomenology, Max Weber, Cognitive Sciences, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, contemporary continental philosophy, axiology (theories and applied research on values), philosophical and cultural anthropology, diversity managment, gender studies, intercultural communication, and translations studies, Verstehen, Weberian social theory, Alfred Schutz, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, and Phenomenology/Post-Phenomenology, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Early Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin, Marx and Western Marxism, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Literatureocial and
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In this chapter, an exploratory survey focuses on ‘popular theologies’ in relation to institutional religious formations in the US in order to bring to light affinities and disjunctures between alternative ways that global salvation can... more
In this chapter, an exploratory survey focuses on ‘popular theologies’ in relation to institutional religious formations in the US in order to bring to light affinities and disjunctures between alternative ways that global salvation can be (or fail to be) envisioned and engaged in relation to climate futures. Given climate change, the future of salvation is not simply a matter for individual souls, as religion often has it. The spectre of global warming poses salvation challenges of potentially apocalyptic proportions for the biosphere and peoples of the planet Earth. Religion in its discourses and practices brings issues of salvation into especially sharp resolution. It is also the ambivalent ur-source of the apocalyptic, which, along with other religious theologies and practices, can be mapped in relation to their distinctive social temporalities. Focusing on alternative temporalities—especially apocalyptic orientations towards the Millennium—lays bare the cultural antinomies of climate crisis.
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Research Interests: Climate Change, Climate Change Adaptation, Environmental Studies, Ecological Anthropology, Environmetal Earth Science, and 8 moreApocalypticism, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, Ecology, Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies, Environmental Sustainability, Climate Change Impacts, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Apocalypse
... 23. E. Fenzi, Armi e bagagli, 214. Italics added. 24. Brigadist Enzo Fontana to G. Bocca, Noi terroristi, 42. 25. Interview with the brigadist Mario Ferrandi, Una pistola per riconquistare il paradiso, 7 March 1984. 26. M. Weber,... more
... 23. E. Fenzi, Armi e bagagli, 214. Italics added. 24. Brigadist Enzo Fontana to G. Bocca, Noi terroristi, 42. 25. Interview with the brigadist Mario Ferrandi, Una pistola per riconquistare il paradiso, 7 March 1984. 26. M. Weber, Economia e società, 2:233. 27. ...
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... The shift from exclusionist snob to inclusionist omnivore can thus be seen as part of a ... have been more centrally concerned with narrative as a medium by which cultural meanings get ... have given atten tion to ritual (Berezin,... more
... The shift from exclusionist snob to inclusionist omnivore can thus be seen as part of a ... have been more centrally concerned with narrative as a medium by which cultural meanings get ... have given atten tion to ritual (Berezin, 1994; Kane, 1996; Sewell, 1996b), myth (Lincoln, 1989 ...
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... small piece of nature. Their practical reason is thus a superior form of knowledge to that of high modernist science. Scott's scholarship is formidable, his insights many, his rich detail usu-ally stilling criticism. I... more
... small piece of nature. Their practical reason is thus a superior form of knowledge to that of high modernist science. Scott's scholarship is formidable, his insights many, his rich detail usu-ally stilling criticism. I did groan at poor ...
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The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely... more
The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements of these changes ...
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Publication View. 4136113. The ways out: utopian communal groups in an age of Babylon. (1975). Hall, John R. Abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington.. Bibliography: l. [315]-323. Publication details. Download,... more
Publication View. 4136113. The ways out: utopian communal groups in an age of Babylon. (1975). Hall, John R. Abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington.. Bibliography: l. [315]-323. Publication details. Download, http://worldcat.org/oclc/19652440. ...
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... to retention (primary remembrance), reproduction (secondary remembrance), and anticipation of "the future." Thus, by intentional Acts, the Ego can inject ... IThe modes of enactment are inspired in part by Husserl's... more
... to retention (primary remembrance), reproduction (secondary remembrance), and anticipation of "the future." Thus, by intentional Acts, the Ego can inject ... IThe modes of enactment are inspired in part by Husserl's (1931) and Schutz's (1967) treatments of the natural attitude and ...