If it were possible, we would ask objects and other designed objects not what they are, but what they enable and – necessarily – what they prevent. A table allows you to meet for a meal, while a barrier prevents you from passing. Viewed in this way, design will always be entangled in networks of relationships between animate and inanimate entities. It tells stories about them and co-creates them. It is an often unnoticed but significant element of modernity, and now a co-conspirator in climate change and at the same time a source of hope for a more justly ordered, ... See the full issue

More than one funeral has been held for metaphysical thinking. Its death is long behind us, and the authors who discovered or contributed to its demise are today read as classic thinkers on the order of Aristotle or Kant. On the other hand, the social sciences have been recording increasing amounts of empirical evidence pointing to a return of metaphysical thinking. This return is not simply a reappearance of the same thing – that is, it is not a rejection of the critique of metaphysics. Marked by its own termination, metaphysical thinking has reappeared and is looking ... See the full issue

Historical sociology is interested in processes rather than events, in structures over characters, in path dependence more than historical turns. As a research stream, historical sociology is distinguished by its subject and nature: on the one hand, it is a sociological analysis of past phenomena, and on the other, it is a study of social processes that began in the past but whose consequences are an important contemporary phenomenon. The first type of research activity is called historical microsociology; the second is historical macrosociology. The first searches for a ... See the full issue