Contributions by:

Mark Worrell

Discarding Simmel: Public Property, Neoliberalism, and Potlatch Capitalism

Posted in

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…

Moral Currents in Durkheim and Huysmans

Posted in

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…

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

Posted in

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…

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…