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Category Archives: Research Notes

More From Max Weber

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

From the chapter on the types of legitimate domination: The members of the administrative staff may be bound to obedience to their superior (or superiors) by custom, by affectual ties, by a purely material complex of interests, or by ideal motives. The quality of these motives largely determines the type of domination. Purely material interests [...]

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Backhanded Compliments

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Of the three patriarchs of sociology (viz., Marx, Weber and Durkheim), it is generally recognized that Marx was both the most humorous and most vicious. While Durkheim reviewed nearly a thousand books in his day (including a famously thorough trashing of a book by Marianne Weber, the wife of Max), his tongue isn’t quite as [...]

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Regarding American Sociology

Monday, October 23, 2006

Despite calling myself a “sociologist” in the sense that “I could very well be wrong: I’m not a philosopher, after all, but a sociologist” or somesuch, I came to sociology rather late (my honours year was the first sociology class I took – “Contemporary Sociological Theory” – taught by a historical sociologist/post-structuralist) and didn’t “become” [...]

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From an anthropological perspective…

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The best thing about aging faculty is that not only do they eventually retire, hence opening up the possibility of up to three more tenure-track jobs (depending upon salary levels and faculty politics insofar as the distribution of salaries/positions is concerned), but also they often clean out their offices as that day approaches and, consequently, [...]

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Claude Lefort Special Issue of Thesis Eleven

Monday, October 16, 2006

The highly anticipated – for me, anyway – special issue on Claude Lefort in Thesis Eleven is now available to those with access to a decent library, SAGE online, or unscrupulous sorts who freely violate copyrights on behalf of others. I’ll comment on the papers anon, but, for now, the table of contents for the [...]

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Reflections on Political Theology

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Used in a rather imprecise – and, indeed, uninteresting – sense, society has two possible “origins” or “sources;” the “theological/mythical” and the “political.” That is, a transcendent or an immanent “source.” Analytically, these appear as two different “sources,” but, in actuality they are one: what we might call the “theologico-political” or the “politico-theological.” (Are these [...]

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Carl Schmitt

Saturday, September 30, 2006

I’ve posted an updated version of the “Carl Schmitt in English” bibiliography here. In addition to being better organized and completing a number of incomplete entries, it also has a number of ‘previously unknown’ translations listed. Below, a poem by Schmitt and an extract of a letter on the poem of Schuldt (who?) to G.L. [...]

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Aristocratic Political Theory

Saturday, September 2, 2006

Classically, the political is thought in the forms of regimes referring to the number who rule: simply, the one, the few or the many. That is, respectively, royal power, aristocratic power and popular power. None have argued that in each type of regime that the other two are not present in some way (the reduction [...]

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Machiavellian

Sunday, August 27, 2006

There are, at the very least, two ongoing major tragedies in English-language social and political theory: the non-translation of Carl Schmitt’s Die Diktatur and the non-translation of Claude Lefort’s Le Travail de L’Oeuvre Machiavel. While the non-translation of Schmitt is inexcusable (it’s a pampthlet, it’s an essential work and, yet, somehow we have two translations [...]

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Power and its Representations

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

What follows are some notes in what is rapidly becoming an article I’m writing about Foucault’s political theory. It originally began as an attempt to clarify my understanding of Foucault in relation to the writing of my dissertation proposal… these things have a life of their own. One is tempted to interject a Spinozist metaphor [...]

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