Issue 129, August 2015

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 70th anniversary of the bombings This special issue of Thesis Eleven has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The concern is to think about what the bombings mean today and how their challenge can be confronted across social and cultural thought and action. The…

Issue 128, June 2015

Ernest Gellner and Historical Sociology The principal aim of this special issue is to shed light on the broader scope of Gellner’s work with a view to demonstrating the contemporary relevance of his ideas. More specifically, the ambition is to engage with his key theories and concepts in philosophy of history and historical sociology and…

Issue 127, April 2015

Cultural systems, crisis, and entrepreneurship Articles: What is world-systems analysis? Distinguishing theory from perspective Salvatore Babones Abstract: World-systems analysis is a well-established but poorly-defined critical research tradition in the social sciences. Its undisputed progenitor, Immanuel Wallerstein, steadfastly maintains that world-systems analysis is not a theory, yet it is widely referred to as such by commentators,…

Issue 126, February 2015

György Márkus: Antinomies of Modernity Introduction: György Márkus at 80 David Roberts Articles: Philosophy in the times of late modernity: Reflections on György Márkus’s Culture, Science, Society János Kis Abstract: It is a central claim of György Márkus’s philosophy of (modern) culture that the Enlightenment project ended up in deep, apparently irresolvable antinomies. But, unlike…

Issue 125, December 2014

Ágnes Heller: A Philosophical Suite   “There is no rigorous philosophy which does not depend on history of philosophy, and which does not acknowledge this dependence; there is no cogent research on history of philosophy which does not take also a philosophical position. This is the credo informing the contributions to this Thesis Eleven special…

Issue 124, October 2014

On Luc Boltanski: Contradictions and Critiques   “Boltanski is described as challenging formulaic approaches in sociology and as developing instead novel theoretical insights and an innovative pragmatist methodology. It is suggested that these innovations are complemented by Boltanski’s substantial investigations into empirical developments. Links are drawn between the themes of Boltanski’s work, especially on the…

Issue 123, August 2014

Art, Aesthetics and the City   August 2014; 123 Articles Bernard Smith’s Formalesque and the end of the history of art Jim Berryman Abstract: The concept of the Formalesque preoccupied Bernard Smith during the last decades of his life. First propounded in Modernism’s History (1998), the Formalesque is a proposed period style describing the art…

Issue 122, June 2014

State of in/security Table of Contents: Articles: Contesting representation:  on democracy and representative government Matthias Lievens Abstract: Several authors have recently stressed the constitutive and ubiquitous nature of representation, which, as a result, can no longer be conceived as a relation between pre-existing entities. This has important consequences for democratic representation, traditionally thought in terms…