Redefining the Situation

The Writings of Peter McHugh

Peter McHugh, Kieran Bonner, Stanley Raffel, Kieran Bonner, Stanley Raffel

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780773556928
• eBook ISBN: 9780773558182
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Peter McHugh (1929–2010) was an internationally known sociologist within the field of anti-positivist social theory. As the only collection of McHugh's sole-authored writings, Redefining the Situation presents a comprehensive yet surprising view of this key theorist's influence in his field. Redefining the Situation is a compendium of McHugh's published and unpublished short-form writings, along with three new essays on McHugh's work, one by his long-time collaborator and friend Alan Blum. The collection contributes to the project of reinventing social theory by providing a new perspective from which to imaginatively rethink the development of sociology over the last fifty years. It locates McHugh's work not only within the modern and postmodern sociological tradition but also within contemporary social theory broadly, including hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and Hannah Arendt's political theory. The essays in this volume show the development of a method to analyze everyday behaviour in light of fundamental questions, exploring conflicts and connections between socialization and recidivism, fragmentation and ethnic cleansing, justice and affirmative action, teaching and university politics, and intimacy and aesthetics. This book moves beyond contemporary debates about big data/postmodernism, and along the way it identifies convergences in Anglo-American and Continental thought. By tracing the development of Analysis, the tradition of social inquiry, from its beginnings until today, Redefining the Situation re-establishes a prominent sociologist as one of the leading intellectuals in the field of interpretive social theory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1 Social Disintegration as a Requisite of Resocialization
• 2 Structured Uncertainty and Its Resolution: The Case of the Professional Actor
• 3 On the Nature of Rule Following
• 4 On the Failure of Positivism
• 5 A Common Sense Conception of Deviance
• 6 Confrontation
• 7 A Letter of Resignation
• 8 On a Letter of Resignation
• 9 Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance
• 10 Insomnia and the (T)error of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism
• 11 Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action
• 12 Notes on Circulation
• 13 Intimacy
• 14 Furthermores on the Aesthetic
• 15 Delicacy, Desire, and Dream in the Work of Peter McHugh: Towards a Sociology of Jouissance
• 16 The Invention of Analysis: “If This Is Sociology, I Want to Be in It”
• The Works of Peter McHugh
• Index