Dr Daniel Chernilo
biography : publications : workshops & talks : links
I am the author of three books and a number of articles in both English and Spanish. I have been invited to deliver papers and lectures in nearly fifty workshops, seminars and conferences in universities in Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Singapore and the UK. I am also a member of the international advisory boards of the British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory and Revista de Sociología.
My main research area is classical and contemporary social theory broadly understood. I am interested in the rise and main features of modern social theory as an intellectual endeavour that has sought to grasp, over the past two hundred years or so, what is it that makes modern social life both ‘modern’ and ‘social’. On the one hand, there is always the question in social theory as to whether, and how, are modern forms of organization different from previous forms of human life. On the other hand, there is also the attempt to grasp what is it exactly that makes social relations patterned yet unpredictable, individualized yet collective, liberating and simultaneously repressive. In so doing, I have engaged with the historical roots of modern social theory in Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, or Parsons as well as with such contemporary writers as Margaret Archer, Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas or Niklas Luhmann.
More specifically, I have done work on three main subject areas: (1) nationalism and cosmopolitanism; (2) universalism and the natural law-tradition; (3) the problem of ‘society’ – or what makes social relations ‘social’.
1. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This is the subject of my first two books, A Social Theory of the Nation-State (Routledge 2007) and Nacionalismo y Cosmopolitismo (UDP 2010). These works seek to provide a novel account of the nation-state’s historical development and recent transformations on the basis of a number of different general sociological theories of modernity from classical social theory to the present. I sought to challenge the view that social theory has understood the nation-state as the necessary representation of society in modernity. This argument, which in current debates has been referred to as methodological nationalism, is rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory’s intellectual tradition and the nation-state’s own problematic trajectory in modernity. In opposition to methodological nationalism, it is advanced the thesis of the ‘opacity of the nation-state in modernity’ – that is, the nation-state as unfinished project that seeks to present itself with a sense of closure that it has never actually achieved. In so doing, moreover, I attempt to develop a robust defence of society as both concept and reality. Rather than referring to the nation-state, the idea of society is social theory’s key tool to grasp the ultimate conditions of modern social life.
In relation to cosmopolitanism, I am of the idea that rather than looking at it from its political or institutional dimension, we assess whether, and to what extent, many key sociological concepts (rationalisation, bureaucratisation, the state, functional differentiation, class, power, discipline or emancipation) all point to certain cosmopolitan human traits that constitute humanity as a single species. And as I have been trying to think through the connections between cosmopolitanism and universalism, this opened up another field of theoretical enquiry.
2. Universalism and the natural-law tradition. The book I am currently completing is entitled The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory: A quest for universalism and will be published by Cambridge University Press.Its main argument is that the comprehension of social theory’s key features needs to be traced back to the corpus of natural law. As an enquiry into the normative foundations of social theory, this means that all the ethnic, religious and cultural variations to be found in modernity pushed social theory to make use of natural law presuppositions to establish its fundamental normative standpoint; namely, the universalistic claim of the ultimate unity of the human species. The book’s aim is neither to restore natural law nor to argue that social theory is simply natural law writ large. Rather, it seeks to reconstruct and re-evaluate the relationship between natural law and social theory as one of Aufhebung: social theory is always trying to overcome, but in so doing is also constantly reintroducing, those themes and concerns that are the dearest to natural law.
I have thus been fascinated over the past couple of years not only by the works of the well-known sociologists mentioned above but also by such writers as Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Reinhart Koselleck, Eric Vogelin, Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Cassirer, or Ernst Bloch all of whom, from their radically different theoretical and normative perspectives, developed beautifully subtle understandings of the connections between the natural law tradition, the question of universalism and modern social life.
3. What makes social relations ‘social’. This is the project for a new book that has just been offered a contract by SAGE. The key idea behind this project is that social relations can then be defined as the emergent outcome of human interaction in the sense that what takes place during these interactions never fully coincides with the actors’ intentions nor can their results be fully predicted by the social scientific observer. Writers and schools of thought will of course have completely different substantive definitions of what these social relations are actually made of. Yet looking at the intellectual task of social theory from the question of what makes social relations social can offer social theory a sense of identity that at times is regarded as lacking.
Does it make a difference if we speak about actions or interactions? What is power and does it have primacy over other types of interaction? Does human language lead towards understanding? Do societies have an organising centre or are they best seen as fully differentiated systems? Does the material priority of the reproduction of social life imply its primacy over other social spheres? Is nationalism necessarily opposed to cosmopolitanism? The relevance of looking at particular answers is twofold. On the one hand, these ways of addressing the problem of social relations imply a certain vision of who we are as human beings. What we say about social life reflects, and is reflected upon, what we consider as the main features that make up our common humanity. On the other hand, their relevance lies in their actual use for the scientific advancement of sociology as an empirical discipline. Social structures, communication and nations are among the key aspects of social life to which empirical sociology devotes its attention. In other words, these are not mere concepts whose relevance is taken for granted for paradigmatic reasons or intellectual modes. Rather, it is my contention that if and when these concepts stick, they do so because they have proved able to touch upon a particular feature of how people understand their own life in society and, accordingly, how they decide to act upon it.
Finally, as a result of a recent invitation from the Graduate School in Social Sciences at the University of Jena in Germany, I have started a new project on the different possibilities and meanings of doing ‘theory research’. My starting point for this project is the factual recognition that the kind of guidance that is readily available when pursuing empirical research is simply not available in social theory broadly understood. While this may have to do with the very nature of theoretical research itself, it should not prevent us from distinguishing between different styles of theorising and from reflecting the implications that we may derive from them. At the very least, we should be able to distinguish different strategies and forms of theorising in sociology; for instance, ‘sociological theory’, ‘theory of society’, ‘metatheory’ and ‘social theory’. Furthermore, these need to be differentiated not only among themselves but also in relation to other such fields as ‘normative political philosophy’, ‘history of ideas’, ‘conceptual history’ or even ‘historical sociology’.
I welcome applications from prospective doctoral students in any of the areas and topics mentioned above (and others you might think that are related to them!).
Please feel free to email me at: D.Chernilo@lboro.ac.uk