01
Questions to keep thinking about
Li Junpeng is a professor at the School of Sociology of Central China Normal University and a doctoral supervisor. Ph.D. in Sociology, Columbia University, research in the fields of politics, history and cultural sociology, translated works include "Why", "Merit and Fault", etc.
Li Junpeng: The problems I think about in 2021 are love as a "social process" and forgotten sociologists. The former is related to my growing interest in the second generation of sociology in recent years in the Chicago School of sociology, which sees love as a dynamic, phased, variable social process, a socialization process that needs to be learned, an interactive process of establishing, de-embedding, negotiating, reconstructing, or breaking down relationships. My experience over the years is that the seemingly simple theory of symbolic interaction is actually very mysterious, so I am more and more interested in using symbolic interaction theory to explain micro-social phenomena such as love and friendship.
The latter has to do with my dissatisfaction with the existing history of social theory, which tends to be written (both domestically and abroad) as a brief introduction to a few figures or schools of thought, as if the "classics" we read today are the product of what they deserve. Non also! The establishment of the academic model is full of struggle and contingency, and any "master" whom we worship today is not necessarily a master. For example, Durkheim, Tard was his academic rival, and Durkheim was often regarded as a negative model in the English-speaking world at that time; for example, the most admired sociologist at the end of the 19th century was Spencer, who is no longer read; for example, Gurdner, who was a contemporary of Mills, was similar to Mills in many ways, but "The Sociological Imagination" successfully entered the academic temple, and "The Coming Crisis of Sociology" was not reprinted for a long time. Understanding the phenomenon of forgetting in academia is a very interesting sociology of knowledge.
Tian Lei is a professor, doctoral supervisor and vice dean of the Law School of East China Normal University, and the director of the Legislative and Rule of Law Strategy Research Center. His research interests include constitutional law and history, the history of the practice of rule of law in China, and the history of the U.S. Constitution. He is the author of "Succession as a Prologue: Institutional Unfolding of the Chinese Constitution".
Tian Lei: The issue that can be called "continuous" thinking is the study of the drafting process of the current constitution on the mainland, and legal scholars generally refer to the current constitution as the "1982 Constitution", that is, it was adopted and entered into force in 1982. The reason why I am so concerned about this issue recently is because this Constitution will be implemented forty years next year (referring to 2022), which is a great achievement in the history of the mainland Constitution, forty is not confused, but I myself face it still has many problems, so I try to trace back to the source to understand, I read a lot of Peng Zhen's materials this year, think about what they think, and go back to history to do research on Chinese constitutional law.
Hualing Ma, Associate Professor of the Department of History, East China Normal University, Ph.D. in Political Science of Fudan University, was a visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University and a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Columbia University, whose main academic interest is the history of Western political thought. He is currently published in Freedom Against Liberty: The Ideological Dispute between Berlin and Strauss.
Marvling: My previous research has focused on people, mainly the political ideas of Berlin and Strauss. In recent years, my research orientation has shifted from being people-centric to being problem-centric. More than a decade ago, I embarked on the academic path in response to a range of socio-political issues of concern to my heart. However, more than a decade of character research has moved me further and further away from these fundamental questions. For this, I am very ashamed. Instead of confronting the problem, I avoided it. Therefore, I hope to return to the study of the history of ideas centered on the problem.
In 2021, my focus is on populism. The populism of the 20th century, marked by Nazism, brought great disaster to the entire world. Since 2016, a new wave of populism around the world has forced me to reflect on whether the historical tragedies of the last century will be repeated in this century. Therefore, I want to find out what the logic of populism operates, how the mindset of the party fighting in the name of the people has emerged, and where the practice of populism will go.
02
Books to watch
Li Junpeng: I recommend Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies by Isaac Ariail Reed. I actually didn't finish this book, but a few of my students spontaneously organized a reading club under my recommendation, so I couldn't lag behind the students too much. It has many interlocutors, including Weber's theory of power, what Cantorovitz calls "the king's two bodies," and Fanon's theory of the other, which completely reconstructs the phenomenon of power from the perspective of social networks and is one of the most ambitious and important works that have emerged in recent years in social theory and historical sociology. I am organizing a special book review for this book at International Sociology Reviews, the journal of the International Sociological Society, which I edit, and have invited some well-known scholars to write.
Isaac Ariail Reed，Power in Modernity：Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies，University of Chicago Press 2020年3月。
Tian Lei: I myself have participated in publishing, and what I am particularly touched by is that now our attention has been arranged to a small number of head publications all year round, and perhaps it can be said that 1% of good books attract 99% of the traffic, which is a reality. Now it's the end of 2021 again, and the lists are highly overlapping. This situation is that a considerable number of good books must be very low in visibility because they are not the books themselves. If you don't want to salvage, I will say two books, one is "Thirty-Six Flavors of Fireworks: Markets, Tables, Food and People" by Sanlian Bookstore, and the other is "Yushan Danchi: Traditional Chinese Travel Literature" published by Yali in Century Wenjing, one about eating and drinking, and the other about play.
"Thirty-Six Flavors of Fireworks: Markets, Tables, Food and People", Sansan, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, October 2021.
Ma Hualing: I think one book worth paying attention to in 2021 is "Anti-Federalism" (Zhejiang University Press, 2021), but unfortunately this book has not caused much repercussions in the domestic academic community. This book is a companion piece to the Federalist Papers, which has long been translated, the "Anti-Federalist Papers". For a long time, based on the logic of success and defeat, academics paid little attention to the ideas of anti-Federalists, because the Federalists seemed to succeed and the anti-Federalists failed. In this way, the ideas of the anti-Federalists were slowly drowned.
In 2019, the literature I chaired at the Western Intellectual History Reading Club was the Federalist Anthology. As I read it, I came to discover that the ideas of the anti-Federalists were very important. Anti-Federalists feared that the Federalist line of big government would swallow up civil rights, and therefore strongly demanded that the power of the federal government be limited by a Bill of Rights, which seemed to be closer to classical liberal thinking. I noticed that Herbert J. Storing of the Straussians edited a seven-volume set of The Complete Anti-Federalist. I have suggested to many publishers that the complete collection be translated and published, but none of them have followed. Translated this year, Anti-Federalism is a collection of essays by Störin's disciple Murray Dry from a collection painstakingly compiled by his teacher, and hopefully its publication will serve as a starting point for domestic academic research on anti-Federalist thought.
Anti-Federalism, eds. Murray Delhi et al., Zhejiang University Press, May 2021.
03
Looking forward to the original work
Li Junpeng: I look forward to social theory textbooks that truly integrate the author's understanding, clarify the ideological context, have personal characteristics, and speak human words. It's a very difficult job, and I'm interested in trying it out at the right time.
Tian Lei: It's hard to describe, or just take an example, Huang Deng's "My Second Student", Li Kaiyuan's "Hanxing". In the final analysis, paper books cannot avoid the competition with mobile phone reading, as if only a well-written book can attract us to read in one breath, not necessarily to pursue profound, especially not to treat boring as profound.