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This paper reviews and assesses the aim, substance, and impact of Simon Susen’s book, “The Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences.

The review follows the structure of Susen’s book, by description and by evaluation.

Susen’s book encompasses a very large volume of literature of the self-defined “postmodern,” then concludes that the covered material has contributed little that is new to the social sciences.

The review has not been previously published, does not replicate any prior assessment known to the author.

The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.

In his influential study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1971 [1959]), Erving Goffman provides an insightful account of the formation of social selves. Goffman’s work has been extensively discussed in the sociological literature. Yet, the presuppositional underpinnings, let alone the socio-ontological implications, of his conception of personhood have not been rigorously scrutinized.

The main reason for the lack of methodical engagement with the principal assumptions that lie at the heart of Goffman’s theory of the self is that his approach is widely regarded as an eclectic narrative that, while drawing on different sociological traditions, does not make any claim to universal validity.

The persuasiveness of the contention that Goffman’s analysis of the self cannot be reduced to a general theory of human personhood appears to be confirmed by the fact that both supporters and detractors of his sociological project tend to agree that it would be erroneous to deduce a foundational framework of investigation from his numerous studies concerned with the interaction between self and society.

Attention will be drawn to several controversial issues that arise when faced with the task of assessing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Goffman’s understanding of the self.

The aim of this paper is to challenge the aforementioned contention by demonstrating that Goffman provides a fairly systematic account of human personhood. More significantly, this enquiry suggests that a fine-grained examination of his key concepts permits us to propose an outline of a general theory of the human self.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.

After some discussion of Habermas’ model of reconstruction and the ways in which he and others have applied it to the European Union (EU), I venture some remarks about the development of EU law and European democracy.

I trace the way in which a meta-theory of social science can be extended to illuminate questions of political and constitutional legitimacy.

It is found that Habermas’s model points to the double character of EU citizenship, in which one is a citizen both of the Union and of one if its member states, and the corresponding creative tension between these two levels of governance.

A contribution to the so-far rather under-developed theorisation of the political philosophy of a united Europe.