Contributions by:

Mark Worrell

Discarding Simmel: Public Property, Neoliberalism, and Potlatch Capitalism

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Every year the university library at Cortland distributes lists of journals that it proposes to dispense with due to budget constraints and the department of sociology/anthropology advocates for their preservation. The titles they wish to eradicate run the gamut from ASA ‘flagship’ publications down to niche periodicals. This is the same library that, when I…

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Moral Currents in Durkheim and Huysmans

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Between science and art there is no longer a gulf, and one may pass from one to the other without any break in continuity. – Durkheim If, as it has been said, photography is always real but never true, literature is always, if conversely unreal, nevertheless true.[i] I find it curious that sociology would forsake…

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The Twilight of Liberal American Imperialism: Trump, Debt, and War

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One of the most remarkable predictions in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) is that, on its current trajectory and without a dramatic political correction, the United States will reach a point of wealth inequality that is historically unprecedented in the modern era and that nation states do not sink to asymmetries of this…

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Totems, Fetishes, and Enchanted Modernity: Hegelian Marxism Confronts Idolatry

Translation is an odd business. In the Preface to the Phenomenology Hegel has a wonderful characterization of Understanding as being metaphorically akin to a table of contents compared to the rest of the book: i.e., skeletal and reliant for meaning and substance upon something external to itself: Wenn die Bestimmtheit auch eine solche, wie zum…

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