Gerard Delanty

• University of Sussex

Resumo O trabalho destaca que o conceito de Antropoceno refere-se a uma dimensão temporal no tempo geológico: é a época em que os seres humanos provocaram uma grande transformação na estrutura física da Terra. Trata-se de uma forma de autocompreensão histórica. Representa, assim, uma grande transformação na natureza geofísica do sistema Terra que c...

With its origins in Greek thought, cosmopolitanism was consolidated in the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment in particular with Kant's ethic of hospitality. In the post‐1945 period it took on a renewed significance in articulating alternatives to war and violent nationalism. The idea of cosmopolitanism was revived in the 1990s and has attracted cons...

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in whic...

A fruitful direction for research on the European cultural heritage is to adopt a transnational approach. Rather than see cultural heritage as predominantly expressed in national contexts, it could be seen as primarily transnational and as plural. Such a view would also suggest a conception of national histories as themselves products of transnatio...

The question of a plurality of 'Europes' raises new questions about the nature of unity and diversity. The argument given in the article is that the problem of unity cannot be jettisoned in favour of diversity, but needs to be conceptualised in a way that includes plurality; accordingly a proposal is made for a theory of modernity that integrates b...

The essay seeks to explore the implications of transnational and global history for comparative historical sociology, especially in light of notions of entangled history, postcolonial critiques, theories of the ‘Global South,’ and new interpretations of empire. It offers an assessment of the implications of the transnational turn for comparative hi...

This article offers a theory of the notion ‘reference culture’ by taking as major examples modernity and Europe. Both constitute reference cultures and while different are closely related. A certain entanglement took place between the emergence of modernity and the formation of European culture whereby the latter came to be one of the main carriers...

The paper seeks to present a world regional approach to the analysis of modernity and in doing so it also aims to make a contribution to comparative sociology and social theory. It is argued that world regions are the most suitable entry-point for comparing different socio-political constellations of our time, preferable to continents, civilization...

The paper is concerned with the problem of “society” and in particular with the notion of “European society”. Rather than reject the possibility of society, it draws on theories of the social as networks. The thesis proposed is that the concept of society should rather be understood as a relational field of interconnections. It is argued that this...

Un importante desafio de los muchos que hoy se plantean al pensamiento cosmopolita es el problema de la traduccion conceptual y cultural, puesto que el cosmopolitismo puede ser altamente relevante para ciertos desarrollos del pensamiento indio y chino, incluso cuando no se utiliza el mismo termino en las fuentes o interpretaciones. Se abordan tres...

The notion of multiple modernities as developed by Eisenstadt has become increasingly influential in debates about modernity and the historical formation of societies in comparative perspective. On closer inspection, the theoretical framework is less than straightforward when it comes to specific applications. This article considers Brazil from the...

Of the many challenging issues facing cosmopolitan thought today, a major one is the problem of conceptual and cultural translation, since it is often the case that cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to Indian and Chinese thought, even though the term itself is not used in the sources or in the interpretations. Three problems are addressed, namely...

The volume is concerned with the vexed question of how ‘European’ is Europe and whether or not a European identity is likely to consolidate in Europe. The assumptions informing the volume are that, on the one side, a degree of collective identity is necessary for any kind of political community and, on the other side, some evidence can be found for...

The increasing individualism of modern Western society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging and, in recent years, as an alternative to the state as a basis for politics.

This book presents a historical and political sociology of European history and society. It offers a critical interpretation of the course of European history looking at the emergence of the idea of Europe and the emergence of modernity.

The article explores the considerations that are at stake in assessing the prospects of cosmopolitanism today. It is argued that there is scope for fruitful dialogue between sociology and political science around the question of how a normative idea, such as global justice, becomes an empirical phenomenon. The idea of global justice should be place...

From the end of the seventeenth century the idea of Europe took on a more concrete form as a result of the crystallization of new political structures and geopolitical frameworks in the wake of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. The post-1648 Westphalian political order that ushered in the age of sovereign states saw the end of the era of the wars ov...

As is now only too apparent, the open horizon of the future that seemed to have been signalled by 1989 considerably faded by the early 1990s when the European past re-asserted itself in the form of numerous nationalist conflicts and the revival of memory. Prior to 1989 it was possible to speak of European unity only at the cost of excluding Centra]...

The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent transformation of those countries occurred at much the same time as the project of European integration entered into a new phase with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. On the one side, the countries of the Warsaw Pact underwent a transition to capitalism and to democracy, as well as in m...

The project of European integration has been marked by many shifts in its more than five decade history. This history can of course be viewed as having a much longer span since the foundation of the EU. The general dominant tendency both in academic discussion and in popular opinion has been to see in that project a progressive movement towards uni...

From the perspective of the twenty-first century the previous century as far as Europe is concerned can be seen as defined by the two world wars and the political systems to which they gave rise. It is now commonplace to observe that 1918 did not mark the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one, which ended not in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi...

The topic of this chapter returns to a theme discussed in Chapter 7 concerning the plural nature of Europe and offers an interlude before a more detailed survey of the twentieth century, which follows in the next chapters. The emphasis so far has been on identifying underlying processes of unity and departures from broadly common civilizational str...

Two events that loom large in the making of European modernity occurred in the eighteenth century: the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and in 1789 the French Revolution. Both events had a European-wide significance in that they had a considerable impact across Europe in both the shape of the natural and political landscape of the continent. While the Enl...

This book seeks to provide an interpretation of the idea of Europe through an analysis of the course of European history. In order to undertake This formidable task it is necessary to clarify some of The theoretical questions that are at stake and to place the question of Europe in a broader framework of analysis. The starting point in any such stu...

The idea of Europe has now become a reality in a number of very specific senses and which are a challenge to some of the conventional conceptions of the meaning of Europe, The traditional view is that the primary reality is the nation-state and that Europe is nothing much more than an aggregation of largely separate nations. This is also one of the...

Rethinking the nature of the relationship between Europe and Islam in our own time requires a re-evaluation of perceptions of history. In this chapter the argument is made that Islam is a part of the European civilizational heritage and that as a result of migration in recent decades, a European Islam now exists and can be viewed as the latest expr...

The legacy of classical antiquity is an obvious place to begin an account of the origins of the idea of Europe, which has often been traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity. But the nature of that relation is far from clear as is the question of the relation of the ancient civilizations to what later became known as Europe, a notion that was more...

Since the emergence of a European consciousness from about the sixteenth century the question has been frequently posed as to the meaning of Europe, This was bound to be a contested matter and since then many definitions of Europe have been controversial. For some it is a political project while for others it is a cultural heritage that has been pr...

Christianity was not originally European but Asiatic and its origins were in Judaism, The oldest known Christian church is in Jordan. Yet it was to become the most characteristically European feature of the civilization that followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. The Christian church did not see itself as European as such but universal. It was n...

The very notion of European history suggests that there is a pattern that constitutes the basic unity of its history. Indeed, the very notion of a historical process seems to presuppose a structural pattern. Yet, a closer look at the historical experience reveals a more complicated situation, instead of unity one finds divisions that undermine clai...

The Renaissance marks the arrival of both modernity and the crystallization of the initial form of Europe’s cultural model. It refers to the cultural movement generally taken to he spanning the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. As the term suggests, the Renaissance means ‘rebirth’, it stood for the rebirth of classical antiquity, which was mos...

Most accounts of European civilization neglect the place of Byzantium. The Byzantine world is often dismissed as a chapter in the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, whose legacy in the conventional account was taken up by the western monarchies and modern Europe emerged from a path that supposedly goes back to Rome and Athens. In this acco...

The year 1989 marked a significant turning point in European history for many reasons.1 Politically it marked the end of major ideological divides within Europe and opened the way for a new phase in the European project as a well as a new mode of self-reflection. It also marked the end of the so-called ‘short twentieth century’ and with it the narr...

Instead of identity and other concepts drawn from the EU's own discourse about itself, there needs to be greater attention given to the balance between capitalism and democracy in the making of Europe and that this must be seen in terms of a ‘European societal model’, related, but in tension, with the more domestic notion of what has been called a...

A systematic typology or comparative analysis of European historical regions does not exist and there is relatively little literature on the topic. The argument in this paper is that a six-fold classification is needed to capture the diversity of Europe's historical regions and that these should be seen in terms of different routes to modernity and...

In recent years social science has been characterized by a cosmopolitan turn. Of the many questions that arise from this the most important are those that concern the implications for explaining social change. While cosmopolitanism is centrally about social change, much cosmopolitan theory due to its normative orientation lacks a capacity for expla...

La idea de una Europa cosmopolita se define en contraposición a, por un lado, una ‘Europa nacional’ y, por otro, a una ‘Europa global’ en la que una Europa internacionalista dirigida por la UE juega un papel fundamental en el mundo. El concepto de Europa cosmopolita constituye una denominación más precisa de la forma de europeización que está surgi...

This volume addresses the question of migration in Europe. It is concerned with the extent to which racism and anti-immigration discourse has been to some extent normalised and democratised in European and national political discourses. Mainstream political parties are espousing increasingly coercive policies and frequently attempting to legitimate...

The most appropriate way of theorizing cultural diversity is to situate it in the context of a broader relational theory of culture in which the key dynamic is cultural encounters. The relational conception of culture places the emphasis on the relations between social actors and the processes by which some of these relations generate enduring cult...

The notion of critique, as in the idea of a critical theory of society, is in urgent need of clarification both theoretically and methodologically. At least five major uses of the term can be found within sociological theory, the positions associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School from Adorno to Habermas and Honneth, Bourdieu's cr...

This monograph is based on the research carried out by the Euro-Festival project ‘Arts Festivals and the European Public Culture’ supported by the Seventh RTD Framework Programme of the European Union and specifically the latter’s ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’ (SSH) Programme.What do arts festivals have to tell us about European society, its cul...

The emergence of new kinds of racism in European societies – referred to variously as ‘Euro-racism’, ‘symbolic racism’, ‘cultural racism’ or, in France, as racisme différentiel – has been widely discussed (see for example Holmes 2000; Macmaster 2001). While these accounts differ, there is widespread agreement that racism in Europe is on the increas...

The question of the place and role of religion in modern secular societies has been a subject of much discussion in scholarly debates. Sociologists of religion have noted the increasing secularization of modern societies in terms of the separation of church and state and have noted the overall declining importance of religious belief and practice....

In this contribution to the 100th issue of Thesis Eleven I would like to address the tradition of critical theory with which the journal has been closely associated. A distinctive feature of Thesis Eleven has been a concern with the critical analysis of the present as well as a concern with the critical appraisal of history. This has been refl ecte...

The question of the European cultural heritage and the wider historical legacy of Europe has been the subject of much discussion in recent years as is reflected in new approaches to memory and commemoration, values, and European identity. Unlike earlier histories, which generally contained a ‘grand narrative,’ new histories of Europe are now genera...

The increasing individualism of modern Western society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging and, in recent years, as an alternative to the state as a basis for politics. Gerard Delanty begins this stimulating introduction to the concept with an analysis of the origins of the i...

Cosmopolitanism has been understood as a postnational identity. This conflates the distinction between nation and nationalism. Most accounts of cosmopolitanism emphasise its legal form (e.g. Habermas’ constitutional patriotism) or its cultural dimension (transnational communities) or its political (e.g. democratic cosmopolitanism). This paper argue...

IntroductionThe Rise of the Social and Enlightenment social TheoryThe Enlightenment Legacy and Classical European Social TheorySocial Theory and the Disenchantment with ModernityClassical American Social TheoryConclusion NotesBibliography

This article deals with the importance of cosmopolitanism as a world force in relation to Europeisation and to the wider context of globalization. The author examines the implications for Europe of the process of global social transformation, and in what way a cosmopolitan political project is required. Cosmopolitanism can be considered as an alter...

By investigating the narratives of everyday life, Identity, Belonging and Migration provides some understanding of the many socio-political, historical, discursive and socio-cognitive processes involved in expressions of everyday racism in European countries. Consisting of three parts, the book provides a contextual understanding of European societ...

In recent years a major challenge for the EU has emerged around social issues and collective identities. With the emergence of a European political community that has diminished national sovereignty at a time when global forces are also undermining nation states, both Europe and migration become linked as sources of instability. Anxieties about Eur...

The political significance of Mitteleuropa has grown in that much of it is now within the EU. Mitteleuropa is a discourse; it is not just a semantic term or a label to refer to a geopolitical region in which power and culture are interwined. Although people may identify with it, it is not primarily a term of identity but a cultural mode of interpre...

The article explores the implications of major social transformation in Asia for Europe. It specifically addresses expressions of cosmopolitan engagement between transnational organizations representing Asia and Europe. Within Asia, there is some evidence to indicate that cosmopolitanism is becoming a significant factor in culture and in politics,...

This chapter contains section titled:

Aleš Debeljak has written of the ways that America affects a poet from a country the size of his own Slovenia. Its literary community is small, and its borders are maintained, more or less, by its language: the world is split into poetry which is Slovene and non-Slovene (but with some obvious overlaps with surrounding countries). The poet's place i...

Este artículo aborda la importancia del cosmopolitismo como fuerza mundial en relación con la europeización y con el contexto más amplio de la globalización. Se examinan las implicaciones que tiene para Europa el proceso de transformación social global y de qué manera requiere un proyecto político cosmopolita. El cosmopolitismo puede considerarse c...

While the notion of a European citizenship in the sense of a formal mode of citizenship that is specific to the EU has a certain reality today, a significant development has been the Europeanization of national regimes. This has occurred under the impact of the broader context of the rise of cosmopolitan forms of citizenship. A historical contextua...

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is now widely recognised as one of the most important Marxist public intellectuals and German philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. Adorno was central to the development of the Frankfurt School, or simply critical theory, a movement that played a formative role in the rise of Western Marxism (a...

Since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty (1992) — yet extending back to the Single European Act (1986) — critics have claimed the European Union (EU) suffers from a double deficit: a democratic deficit and a cultural one. Underlying both deficits is a perceived lack of legitimacy resulting from a weak political community and a thin cultural commu...

The demise of a liberal political culture is a feature of contemporary Europe which has not been fully recognised in academic thought. Liberal values have been the basis of the nation-state since the latter part of the nineteenth century and have defined the modern idea of peoplehood, which refers to a broadly civic conception of the people as coin...

The paper explores the concept of borderlands with respect to current developments in European societies, especially in the context of the recent enlargement of the EU. It examines the changing nature of borders with a view towards offering an assessment of the notion of a post-western Europe. The thesis advanced in the paper is that Europe is taki...

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has important implications for our understanding of the meaning of Europe. Although the precise nature of this process is uncertain, the very fact that it is underway is in itself of major significance. Indeed the very term integration may be inadequate when it comes to the current scale of Europea...

European borders are characterized by alternating hard and soft forms on one axis and open and closed forms on another. The border is a networked and fluid process rather than a fixed line; it is constituted in new and changing relations between cores and peripheries, and is the site of political contestations where power and culture interact. Euro...

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as pa...

The idea of a cosmopolitan Europe is defined against a ‘national Europe’, on the one side and on the other, ‘global Europe’ where an internationalist EU-led Europe plays a major role in the world. A cosmopolitan Europe is a more accurate designation of the emerging form of Europeanization as a mediated and emergent reality of the national and the g...

Dominant approaches to the transformation of Europe ignore contemporary social theory interpretations of the nature and dynamics of social change. Here, Delanty and Rumford argue that we need a theory of society in order to understand Europeanization. This book advances the case that Europeanization should be theorized in terms of:• globalization •...

Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Edited by Richard K. Herrmann, Thomas Risse, and Marilynn B. Brewer. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 328p. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. The extent to which people in European countries are becoming more European in their identity is the subject of this very timely book, which presents impo...

The paper explores the notion of Europeanism, asking the question: what does it mean to be a European? In much the same terms as in Michael Walzer s often-cited essay 'What does it mean to be an American?', Walzer's analysis will serve as a point of departure for a discussion of different conceptions of European self-understanding. Some points of c...

The debate about the university today is very different from some of the major debates on the university over the past century and a half. The grandiose and programmatic visions of the modern university in the seminal works of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Karl Jaspers, Talcott Parsons, Jürgen Habermas, Alvin Gouldner, and Pierre Bour-dieu reflected...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

A relatively neglected dimension of citizenship is learning processes. A theory of learning is outlined, distinguishing between individual learning processes and collective ones. Linking learning to citizenship suggests a model of cultural citizenship, which entails mechanisms of translation whereby the different levels of learning are connected. I...