Isaac Ariail Reed - Böcker

The landscape of social theory has changed significantly over the three decades since the publication of Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner’s seminal Social Theory Today. Sociologists in the twenty-first century desperately need a new agenda centered around central questions of social theory. In Social Theory Now, Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed set a new course for sociologists, bringing together contributions from the most distinctive sociological traditions in an ambitious survey of where social theory is today and where it might be going.The book provides a strategic window onto social theory based on current research, examining trends in classical traditions and the cutting edge of more recent approaches. From distinctive theoretical positions, contributors address questions about how social order is accomplished; the role of materiality, practice, and meaning; as well as the conditions for the knowledge of the social world. The theoretical traditions presented include cultural sociology, microsociologies, world-system theory and post-colonial theory, gender and feminism, actor network and network theory, systems theory, field theory, rational choice, poststructuralism, pragmatism, and the sociology of conventions. Each chapter introduces a tradition and presents an agenda for further theoretical development. Social Theory Now is an essential tool for sociologists. It will be central to the discussion and teaching of contemporary social theory for years to come.

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination.  Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination.  Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

For the past fifty years anxiety over the problem of naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side pursues the idea of social science as another kind of natural science, while the other radically rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. All of the various developments in social scientific theory since then have reflected this dichotomy between naturalism and post-modernism. "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" suggests a third way, reframing this debate and offering a synthetic vision that sets out a new understanding of sociological interpretation. Analyzing the work of writers such as Theda Skocpol, Clifford Geertz, Leela Gandhi, Roy Bhaskar, Foucault, and Habermas, Isaac Ariail Reed delineates three epistemic modes of social research: realism, normativism, and interpretivism. Reed argues that the last mode provides a way forward for an anti-naturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.Both an examination of and a theoretical meditation on how social investigators do their work, "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" is an ingenious and fruitful exploration of what makes the human sciences uniquely capable of revealing and explaining our world.

Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today.In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism.Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.

Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today.In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism.Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.

Carefully considering all manner of arguments in metatheory and epistemology and moving towards a program of interpretive explanation focused on culture and power, Reed places sociology at the center of debates about knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences.