Books by Hans Joas
War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present
A sweeping history of social theories about war and peace, from Hobbes to the twenty-first century
This book, the first of its kind, provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Hobbes to the present. Distinguished social theorists Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl present both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as they trace the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years―from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science.
Joas and Knöbl demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers―including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists―had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, Joas and Knöbl argue, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.
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War and Modernity: Studies in the History of Vilolence in the 20th Century
by Hans Joas
Written by one of Europe's leading social theorists, this book takes up the claims of modernity and confronts them with a stark reality: the ongoing proliferation of war. How can contemporary social and political thought come to terms with this apparent failure of modernity? Throughout the 20th century the global struggle of ideologies put paid to the dream that wars were somehow the relic of a bygone, unenlightened age. But now in the aftermath of the Cold War era, how are we to account for the persistence of war and state violence?
Drawing on a wide range of material, from World War I and Vietnam to the Gulf War and the conflicts in the Balkans, Joas engages with current debates in the sociology and politics of war and develops his own distinctive line of argument concerning the role of warfare in modern societies. He aligns himself with figures such as Giddens and Mann in the attempt to establish a new and non-functionalist theory of social change.
This compelling and timely study confronts one of the great paradoxes of our era, and Joas's book is a substantial contribution towards a new historico-sociological perspectiveon the twentieth century. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology and politics, and will appeal to anyone who has puzzled over the persistence of modern war, and the limits of enlightenment as an historical force.
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Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit der Idealismus als Diskurs der Moderne
by Robert B. Pippin, Axel Honneth, Hans Joas
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Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Hans Joas
Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to society's spiritual and moral well-being. But does modernization lead to secularization? Does secularization lead to moral decay? Sociologist Hans Joas argues that these two supposed certainties have kept scholars from serious contemporary debate and that people must put these old arguments aside in order for debate to move forward. The emergence of a "secular option" does not mean that religion must decline, but that even believers must now define their faith as one option among many.
In this book, Joas spells out some of the consequences of the abandonment of conventional assumptions for contemporary religion and develops an alternative to the cliché of an inevitable conflict between Christianity and modernity. Arguing that secularization comes in waves and stressing the increasing contingency of our worlds, he calls upon faith to articulate contemporary experiences. Churches and religious communities must take into account religious diversity, but the modern world is not a threat to Christianity or to faith in general. On the contrary, Joas says, modernity and faith can be mutually enriching.
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Pragmatism and Social Theory
by Hans Joas
Rising concerns among scholars about the intellectual and cultural foundations of democracy have led to a revival of interest in the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In this book, Hans Joas shows how pragmatism can link divergent intellectual efforts to understand the social contexts of human knowledge, individual freedom, and democratic culture.
Along with pragmatism's impact on American sociology and social research from 1895 to the 1940s, Joas traces its reception by French and German traditions during this century. He explores the influences of pragmatism—often misunderstood—on Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge, and on German thought, with particularly enlightening references to its appropriation by Nazism and its rejection by neo-Marxism. He also explores new currents of social theory in the work of Habermas, Castoriadis, Giddens, and Alexander, fashioning a bridge between Continental thought, American philosophy, and contemporary sociology; he shows how the misapprehension and neglect of pragmatism has led to systematic deficiencies in contemporary social theory.
From this skillful historical and theoretical analysis, Joas creates a powerful case for the enduring legacy of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead for social theorists today.
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The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights
by Hans Joas
What are the origins of the idea of human rights and universal human dignity? How can we most fully understand―and realize―these rights going into the future? In The Sacredness of the Person, internationally renowned sociologist and social theorist Hans Joas tells a story that differs from conventional narratives by tracing the concept of human rights back to the Judeo-Christian tradition or, alternately, to the secular French Enlightenment. While drawing on sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Ernst Troeltsch, Joas sets out a new path, proposing an affirmative genealogy in which human rights are the result of a process of "sacralization" of every human being.
According to Joas, every single human being has increasingly been viewed as sacred. He discusses the abolition of torture and slavery, once common practice in the pre-18th century west, as two milestones in modern human history. The author concludes by portraying the emergence of the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as a successful process of value generalization. Joas demonstrates that the history of human rights cannot adequately be described as a history of ideas or as legal history, but as a complex transformation in which diverse cultural traditions had to be articulated, legally codified, and assimilated into practices of everyday life. The sacralization of the person and universal human rights will only be secure in the future, warns Joas, through continued support by institutions and society, vigorous discourse in their defense, and their incarnation in everyday life and practice.
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The Axial Age and Its Consequences
by Hans Joas, Robert N. Bellah
The first classics in human history―the early works of literature, philosophy, and theology to which we have returned throughout the ages―appeared in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical texts of the Hebrew scriptures, the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing, the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha―all of these works came down to us from the compressed period of history that Karl Jaspers memorably named the Axial Age.
In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Robert Bellah and Hans Joas make the bold claim that intellectual sophistication itself was born worldwide during this critical time. Across Eurasia, a new self-reflective attitude toward human existence emerged, and with it an awakening to the concept of transcendence. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter through human thought and action.
Bellah and Joas have assembled diverse scholars to guide us through this astonishing efflorescence of religious and philosophical creativity. As they explore the varieties of theorizing that arose during the period, they consider how these in turn led to utopian visions that brought with them the possibility of both societal reform and repression. The roots of our continuing discourse on religion, secularization, inequality, education, and the environment all lie in Axial Age developments. Understanding this transitional era, the authors contend, is not just an academic project but a humanistic endeavor.
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The Varieties of Transcendence: Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion (American Philosophy)
by Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, Magnus Schlette
The Varieties of Transcendence traces American pragmatist thought on religion and its relevance for theorizing religion today. The volume establishes pragmatist concepts of religious individualization as powerful alternatives to the more common secularization discourse. In stressing the importance of Josiah Royce’s work, it emphasizes religious individualism’s compatibility with community. At the same time, by covering all of the major classical pragmatist theories of religion, it shows their kinship and common focus on the interrelation between the challenges of contingency and the semiotic significance of transcendence.
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The Creativity of Action
by Hans Joas
Hans Joas is one of the foremost social theorists in Germany today. In this outstanding book he outlines the fundamentals of a new theory of action, drawing on philosophical pragmatism. The work is based upon Joas's celebrated study of George Herbert Mead, but also establishes direct ties between Mead's work and approaches drawn from German traditions of philosophical anthropology.
A major feature of Joas's theory is an emphasis on the creative character of human action. Human activity is not coincidentally, but in a fundamental sense, creative. The work contains new discussions of the nature of human intentions, the embodied character of human action and the character of intersubjectivity.
The problem of action is of crucial importance in both sociology and philosophy, and this book adds fresh impetus to the lively discussions current in the English-speaking world.
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Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures
Social theory is the theoretical core of the social sciences, clearly distinguishable from political theory and cultural analysis. This book offers a unique overview of the development of social theory from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present day. Spanning the literature in English, French and German, it provides an excellent background to the most important social theorists and theories in contemporary sociological thought, with crisp summaries of the main books, arguments and controversies. It also deals with newly emerging schools from rational choice to symbolic interactionism, with new ambitious approaches (Habermas, Luhmann, Giddens, Bourdieu), structuralism and antistructuralism, critical revisions of modernization theory, feminism and neopragmatism. Written by two of the world's leading sociologists and based on their extensive academic teaching, this unrivalled work is ideal both for students in the social sciences and humanities and for anyone interested in contemporary theoretical debates.
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The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age
The discipline of sociology was born-and has been recurrently reconstituted-in response to the fragmentation of ideas about the social world. For two centuries, sociologists have sought refuge in 'synthesis:' programs designed to integrate multiple perspectives within a unifying framework. Yet even as this cause has inspired many of the discipline's major thinkers, past and present, its objective has proven elusive, leaving nearly as many syntheses as synthesizers. This volume considers an alternative response that has recently developed within sociology to the crisis of intellectual fragmentation: 'the dialogical turn.' Rather than decry the multiplicity of social theories, research methods, and results, this response welcomes a plurality of orientations and approaches as the essential basis for establishing and maintaining productive dialogue. Examining this exciting development, The Dialogical Turn builds on the ideas of Donald N. Levine, whose extensive writings on the forms and functions of intellectual dialogue provide the point of departure for twelve original essays. Written by an internationally renowned group of scholars, these innovative chapters explore the dialogical possibilities for sociology both constructively and critically. The contributors assess the role of sociology in the conversation across contemporary academic disciplines, exploring the fundamental structural and conceptual reconstructions now taking place in sociology and neighboring fields.
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The Cultural Values of Europe
What is the cultural identity of Europe? Are there specifically European values? Questions like these are at the centre of a considerable number of political and scholarly debates in contemporary Europe. In this international best-seller, a group of acclaimed thinkers – including Orlando Patterson, S. N. Eisenstadt, Mark Mazower and Wolfgang Schluchter – examine the most important innovations and culturally vital value traditions of Europe to produce an image of contemporary European self-understanding. The volume combines two possible approaches, examining both specific cultural traditions (‘Athens and Jerusalem’) and specific values (‘freedom’; ‘rationality’). Boasting some of the leading thinkers in Europe and edited by Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, The Cultural Values of Europe will be required reading for anyone hoping to understand the common cultural ground in Europe.
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The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead
by Hans Joas, Daniel R. Huebner
Introduction / Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner -- History, historiography, historical sociology -- Changing "movements of thought in the nineteenth century": historical text and historical context / Charles Camic -- On Mead's long lost history of science / Daniel R. Huebner -- Pragmatism and historicism: Mead's philosophy of temporality and the logic of historiography / Hans Joas -- George Herbert Mead and the promise of pragmatist democracy / Robert Westbrook -- The theory of intersubjectivity as a theory of the human being: George Herbert Mead and the German tradition of philosophical anthropology / Karl-Siegbert Rehberg -- Nature, environment, process -- Naturalism and despair: George Herbert Mead and evolution in the 1880s / Trevor Pearce -- George Herbert Mead as a socio-environmental thinker / Bradley H. Brewster and Antony J. Puddephatt -- Social worlds: the legacy of Mead's social ecology in Chicago sociology / Daniel Cefaï -- Mead, Whitehead, and the sociality of nature / Michael L. Thomas -- Cognition, conscience, language -- Mead, the theory of mind, and the problem of others / Ryan McVeigh -- Imitation and taking the attitude of the other / Kelvin Jay Booth -- Mead meets Tomasello: pragmatism, the cognitive sciences, and the origins of human communication and sociality / Frithjof Nungesser -- Conscience as ecological participation and the maintenance of moral perplexity / Joshua Daniel -- Presentation and re-presentation: language, content, and the reconstruction of experience / Roman Madzia -- G. H. Mead's understanding of the nature of speech in the light of contemporary research / Timothy Gallagher
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