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

Do we live in a time of “identity tyranny” Our public and private lives are filled with the pursuit of building, shaping, maintaining, expressing, defending, and preserving our identities. Identity is the totem concept of our time. But in scholarly reflection on collective identities an uncritically positive perception of identity is not without risk. In this issue, as a starting point for examining that risk, we approach identity neutrally as a “relational” concept: we can have an identity only in regard to someone who is not us. What does this signify in the s ... See the full issue