Bryan Turner

Australian Catholic University | ACU · Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences

Some North American societies, especially Canada and the United States, are experiencing increasing numbers of Muslim citizens, and those communities have grown and become more integrated into the two societies. Predictably, they have sought the right to practice their faith in ways similar to how other minority religions are treated within the rel...

This article provides an introduction to the 20th Anniversary Special Issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology. It begins with some brief observations on the key developments that have shaped the disciplinary core of sociology over the past decades. It goes on to reflect on the role of classical sociology in Europe and beyond, drawing attention...

Critical scholarship has characterised the 2013–2014 bankruptcy of Detroit – the largest municipal bankruptcy in history – as a fiscal ‘state of exception’ which undermined the democratic foundations of urban citizenship. From this perspective, the imposition of emergency management and declaration of bankruptcy were acts of raw coercion. Drawing u...

The article concentrates primarily on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety in order to explore her treatment of agency in women’s piety movements. It argues that, while the influence of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu on her work is obvious, the influence of Aristotle on her key concepts (agency, habitus, practice, and embodiment) has been neglected...

Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont’s Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision‐makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) toward...

INTRODUCTION: PIETY AND SECULARIZATION IN HER TRAGICALLY short life, Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) established an international reputation for her critique of conventional secularization theories, her appreciation of religious practices, and her contribution to the so-called “ethical turn” in religious studies. Apart from edited works and numerous artic...

Wael B. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Pp. 380. $40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231187626 - Volume 51 Issue 3 - Bryan S. Turner

This article fully recognises the reality and detrimental impact of anti-Muslim sentiment and consequently that 'Islamophobia' describes an important social reality, especially in contexts where Muslims are a minority. However it is critical of ‘Islamophobia’ as a valid concept in the social science. In the sociology of Islam, it actually distorts...

The article examines Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation within the broader context of his sociology through an examination of the unintended consequences of action. This speech, alongside Science as a Vocation, from the end of his life is interpreted as a classic example of Weber’s pessimistic sociology in which the unintended consequences of actio...

Max Weber is one of the most important modern social theorists. Using his work as a point of departure, The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber investigates the Weberian legacy today, identifying the enduring problems and themes associated with his thought that have contemporary significance: the nature of modern capitalism, neoliberal global economic pol...

Regimes of Happiness is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions, and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’. A two-part book, it provides a historical view...

Edward Shils’ Portraits offers various intellectual biographies of major figures that played a large role in his life, mainly at the University of Chicago. The list is diverse including economists, sociologists, natural scientists, and historians of the ancient world. The diversity illustrates the breadth of Shils’ academic work. The famous Committ...

This article explores how Shari‘a is conceptualized and experienced by 50 Muslim legal professionals and leaders in Sydney and New York. It analyses qualitative data on issues concerning the experience of Muslims with Shari‘a, on how this can be improved in both countries and on how compatible Shari‘a is with their respective legal systems. While t...

The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at p...

Whereas happiness (eudaimonia or human flourishing) was fundamental to the classical thought of the Greeks and Romans, as felicitas and beatitudo were to Christianity and a ‘felicific calculus’ to utilitarian philosophers, since Max Weber’s criticism of happiness as a goal of social policy it has largely disappeared from mainstream sociology. The a...

This article focuses on the marginal extremities – the limits – of Shari’a practices in Australia, through the example of a criminal case in which four Sydney-based Muslim men whipped a Muslim convert to punish him for his excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. The men claimed they acted in line with the doctrines of Shari’a practice to ‘purif...

Happiness has historically enjoyed many different definitions, perspectives, and transformations. We provisionally understand “happiness” in terms of “regime of happiness” that is as a social configuration in which different discourses articulate a vision of human fulfillment. These social configurations or regimes change over time and in different...

The paper begins with an examination of three ideal types citizenship which are not necessarily mutual exclusive. The first type is national citizenship, typically associated with ethno-nationalism. The second form is social citizenship or ‘welfare citizenship’ refers to the creation of social rights and is closely connected to civil-society instit...

This edited book explores the impact of globalisation on the relationship between religion and politics, religion and nation, religion and nationalism, and the impact that transnationalism has on religious groups. In a post-Westphalian and transnational world, with increased international communication and transportation, a plethora of new religiou...

This introduction addresses the contributing chapters of this book and links their argument and findings through a discussion on religion, politics, nationalism and transnationalism within the prism of the multiple modernities theory. It deals with historical and contemporary cases to inform this study of comparative nationalism and transnationalis...

There is a swell developed argument from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jose Casanova that Christianity is not only deeply embedded in the founding myths of American society as the First New Nation and the Israel of the New World, but also an important component of contemporary American politics from the Moral Majority to the Tea Party. This chapter look...

Robert Neelly Bellah (1927−2013) was the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and internationally famous for his research and publications in the sociology of religion. A student of Talcott Parsons, he received a PhD from Harvard University. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a member of the Communist Party US...

One simple definition of legal pluralism is that it concerns the development of different legal traditions or legal sources within a single sovereign jurisdiction. It is often seen therefore to be a challenge to legal centralism or the thesis that the sovereign state has a monopoly over law making to the exclusion of all other sources. It is helpfu...

This article investigates how Shari’a is experienced in the everyday life of 57 Muslims from Western Sydney. It focuses on their opinions about its application in Australia, and on how they negotiate their lives around the necessity or non-necessity of adhering to Shari’a principles. The findings show that their observance of Islam tends to be nego...

This article makes a contribution to the general theory of citizenship. It argues that there is a need for a supplementary concept of ‘denizenship’ to illustrate changes to and erosion of postwar social citizenship as famously described by T H Marshall. The first aim is to construct a more theoretically developed idea of what the concept of a ‘deni...

The 2013 and 2014 announcements by major car manufacturers that they would wind down all their remaining Australian automotive operations by 2016/2017 pre-empted the March 2014 release of the Productivity Commission’s final report into motor vehicle manufacturing. The Commission suggested that government subsidies had only delayed car plant closure...

It is a common complaint that sociology has little regard for history. One important exception to this standard criticism is the sociology of religion of Robert N. Bellah and his ‘revival’ of Karl Jasper’s notion of the axial age. In this article, Bellah’s evolutionary notions of religion are explored within a debate about historical disjunctures a...

New forms of communication and greater accessibility of Islamic texts on-line allow Muslims to shape their own religiosity, to become less dependent on established sources of authority, and thereby to become more aware of their own cultural diversity as a community. New practices of transnational Islam, and the growth of new concepts of Muslim iden...

Generations represent an important element in the social structure, alongside social class, race, and gender, but they have often been neglected in contemporary sociology. However, from a historical and comparative perspective, generations have played an important role in social change in terms of youth revolts against the established order. In the...

David Ricardo is widely regarded as a founding figure in both classical economics and political economy alongside such figures as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. As a practicing financier on the London stock market, he brought his practical understanding of economics to basic problems in economic theory. Although his contributions to economics have...

Biomedical and geriatric technologies are having major impacts on the development and management of human longevity. Our contention in this special issue is that longevity should be considered as a point of departure for new forms of politics in which social sciences, in particular sociology and politics, can play an important role. In this introdu...

The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the impera...

Legal pluralism may be simply defined as the development of a number of different legal traditions within a given sovereign territory. Legal pluralism is often held to be a challenge to legal centralism, a legal doctrine claiming that the state has a monopoly over law making in its sovereign space. Opponents of state centralism based on state sover...

Singapore can be described as a sea-port that became a city-state. In the process it has successfully managed religious and ethnic diversity through the use of law to regulate society and to manage religion. Inheriting English common law, Singapore has managed legal pluralism and religious diversity through state agencies, such as MUIS (Islamic Rel...

Looking back on this collection of chapters on the comparative study of legal pluralism, we can summarize our findings by proposing that legal pluralism appears in or is related to at least three different social and political contexts. The first example is the presence of legal pluralism in imperial systems before and during the consolidation of n...

This article identifies two different senses in which the concept of ‘community’ can be seen to underpin the norm of vocal participation in democratic politics. The first is a broadly liberal view of community – traceable to Alexis de Tocqueville – that promotes active, vocal, and autonomous citizens and acts as a buffer between the state and the i...

In this chapter we examine the acrimonious public debate about same sex marriage from the perspective of John Rawls’s liberal theory of decent democratic and plural societies , and in terms of Jürgen Habermas’s critical theory of post-secular society

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Paul Weller, Kingsley Purdam, Nazila Ghanea and Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor (2013), Religion or Belief, Discrimination and Equality: Britain in Global Context. London and New York: Bloomsbury. £65.00, 296 pp., hbk. - Volume 44 Issue 4 - BRYAN S. TURNER

The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and its corollaries, Occupy Sandy and Occupy Debt, have been largely understood as secular movements. In spite of this, religious actors not only participated, but in some cases played an integral role within the movement, lending material support, organizing expertise, and public statements of support. We re...

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