Money and Merit in French Renaissance Comedy*

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 852-882
Author(s):  
Jotham Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural System ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
French Renaissance ◽  
French Comedy

AbstractPierre Corneille’s Mélite (1629) resonated in part due to a social critique with deep roots in the French Renaissance. Corneille’s characters live by the canons of a (notionally) natural system of merit, divorced from money, implicitly noble, but open to upwardly-mobile commoners. Reconciling the traditional social order with the purchase of status and power by venal office-holders had preoccupied French comedy since the 1550s. While early playwrights hesitated to comment on this phenomenon (in which they took part), by about 1580 Odet de Turnèbe had already dramatized an educated elite’s transcendence of the economic, which Corneille would then go on to perfect. The biographies of these playwrights show that their plays’ ideological functions suited their own social situations.

Social critique as a scientific virtue: an external scientific ethos in the making

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Ilya Kasavin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
The State ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Distributed Knowledge ◽  
Ethics Of Science ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Scientific Ethos

The article discusses the possibility of using the external ethics of science to formulate a new social contract between science and the state (society). To do this, it is necessary to re-think the value thesaurus inherited from the cold war and the arms race, when the state gave scientists a social order, concentrated resources and allowed the scientists them-selves to distribute them on the basis of anonymous (secret) expert reviewing and refereeing. The resulting model of relationships within the scientific community can be called Pareto-competition, in which the winner re-ceives everything and the vanquished are screened to the periphery. The current situation of Big Science and Distributed Knowledge puts on the agenda the question of transition to a different relationship in the style of Pare-to-collaboration. In it, both victory and defeat are common cause, each group is prescribed its share of obligations and advantages, and all scientists have a chance to move in the sys-tem of epistemic virtues and sins. The new state of the scientific community, described by the term “full constituency” (S. Fuller), not only leads to internal democratic consensus, but also allows for social criticism. Its desirable result is such a restructuring of the whole society, in which cognitive and moral values come to the fore.

Everyday Essentialism

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 69-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dick Pels
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reality Effect ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
As If

This article takes up the challenge posed by ANT's principle of radical symmetry in a different way, by developing a counterargument to the Latourian (ethnomethodological) presumption that social and symbolic constructions are in themselves too fragile and weak to effectively knit together the social order which needs ballasting by a myriad of technological objects. It is argued that social orders are also maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what is called `everyday essentialism'. Social facts are routinely enacted by circular bootstrapping operations which are often misrecognized as such in order to produce an illusion of ontological transcendence. It is this practical everyday reification of social facts which also creates fixities, nodes, and sites for the symbolic `packaging' of material objects. Over against ANT's agnostic appreciation of this reifying practice as `something we all do', Pels, like Vandenberghe, therefore retains an interest in a critical theory of reification. This critique signals the normative significance of `acting-as-if' over against all forms of ontological essentialism: if social situations are more clearly defined `as if' they are real, we are less likely to be caught out by the stark reality of their consequences.

scholarly journals Children’s subversive interactions in the school mealtime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2198995
Author(s):  
Samantha Stone ◽  
Kyoko Murakami
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
South West ◽  
The Social ◽  
South West England

School mealtimes in England are highly orchestrated practices that have a specific temporal order of when and how the meal should be eaten. At the same time, the social conditions of the mealtime offer children opportunities for emergent interactions. In this study, we examine children’s non-legitimate voices and the dynamic conflictual nature of children’s interactions that are no longer fully governed by the established school mealtime order. To illustrate these ideas, data are drawn from the 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author in a primary school in South West England. The analyses address how children use the school mealtime chronotope as a resource to experiment and challenge predefined rules. Our findings illustrate how children transcend the edges of acceptability and probe social order to form their own social critique and uncovering what is not easily explainable or changeable. As an implication we underline the potential for researching children’s socialisation as part of expanding discussions on the significance of school mealtimes.

scholarly journals Aims of Citizenship Education Across Nordic Countries: Comparing School Principals’ Priorities in Citizenship Education 2009–2016

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
Idunn Seland ◽  
Lihong Huang ◽  
Cecilia Arensmeier ◽  
Jens Bruun ◽  
Jan Löfström
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
School Principals ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Nordic Welfare State

AbstractThe Nordic welfare state has been associated with certain ideas of citizenship, the highlights of which are equal rights, social mobility, democracy, and participation. To better understand how these ideas are interpreted in the educational system, this chapter compares school principals’ prioritization of the aims of civic and citizenship education in four Nordic countries as they are expressed in IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). We discuss our findings in relation to the Nordic model of education, meaning the governance of education epitomizing the Nordic welfare state. When comparing data from the survey of school principals in ICCS 2009 with ICCS 2016, we find a consistent prioritization of promoting students’ critical thinking, while items concerning democratic participation are the lowest priority. While these results are similar to the international sample, the Nordic principals’ support for promoting critical thinking is consistently stronger. In the Nordic welfare state, a shift toward neoliberal policies is seen as an adaption to economic challenges with an emphasis on development of human capital through knowledge, skills, and abilities. However, as critical thinking represents such abilities, this may also be seen as a prerequisite for social critique and political mobilization. We review these possibilities as representations of a break in or a continuation of the traditional ideas of citizenship associated with the Nordic welfare state. We conclude that, for Nordic principals, critical thinking may align with the recent international emphasis on competence while also relating to the concept of Bildung, an 18th-century emancipation ideal with deep roots in the Nordic model of education.

The Social Order Yields to Functional Analysis

1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

Sex and the Social Order.

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Social
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