Craig Calhoun

A comparative and historical sociologist and social theorist, Calhoun is engaged in anthropology, communications, economics, history, international studies, political science, philosophy, and science and technology studies.

Biography Publications

Craig Calhoun

University Professor of Social Sciences

Craig Calhoun serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University where he holds joint appointments in several schools, including the School of Politics and Global Studies, the School of Public Affairs, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the School of Sustainability, the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, and the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Professor Calhoun contributes actively to the intellectual life of the university through leadership, teaching, and mentoring. His roles have included Chair of the Advisory Board for the Center for Work and Democracy, Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee for Sociology at ASU, and the President of the Board of T he Melikian Center.

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Publications

Craig Calhoun is the editor, with Benjamin Fong, of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia University Press, 2022) and, with a group of his former students, of the most widely used anthologies of Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Blackwell, 4th ed, 2022). He is the author of nine earlier books including Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference; Roots of Radicalism and Does Capitalism Have a Future? (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Georgi Derluguian and Michael Mann), has edited more than twenty more, and published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, articles and chapters.

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Degenerations of Democracy

Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy’s social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good.

Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy’s other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal. (hup.harvard.edu)

Selected Book Reviews and Responses

Global Perspectives

Global Perspectives. Vol. 4, no. 1. (2023)

The three books featured in this Global Perspectives review symposium – Stein Ringen’s How Democracies Live; Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents; and Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor’s Degenerations of Democracy – each raise important and urgent concerns about the fate of democracy, both domestically but also in the face of the challenge autocracies pose to the liberal order worldwide. We have asked leading scholars to offer commentaries, and invited the books´ authors to respond.

Technology and Democracy by Steven E. Zipperstein

Degenerations of Democracy by Jan Zielonka

Review of Degenerations of Democracy by Michael Hechter

Democracy for the Few by Crawford, B.

The Tocqueville Review

The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville 45, no. 2 (2024)

The Tocqueville Review offers critical perspectives on Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor's Degenerations of Democracy. In her contribution, Ilaria Cozzaglio, raises questions on the standpoint from which a critical perspective on our current democratic crisis is most effectively formulated. Taking an internalist perspective from the citizens' perspectives on democracy's contemporary crisis, as the book does, is essential for understanding our current condition, but it also raises new questions on how best to challenge the status quo while respecting citizens' demands.

Perceiving Democracy by Ilaria Cozzaglio

The Deep Media and Communication Structure of Degenerations (and Renewals)

Doubling Democracy by Stephen W. Sawyer

Can Empowered Citizens Save Democracy? by Craig Calhoun , Charles Taylor

Projects

Craig Calhoun’s current research focuses on contemporary transformations, and possible futures: for the political economy of the modern world-system, for universities and knowledge institutions, for democracy, and for shifting structures of social solidarity from local communities to nations, transnational relations, and the reorganization of regions. More philosophically, he is exploring the relationship between transformation and transcendence in understanding human existence itself.

The Human Infrastructure Social and Political Theory Democracy Possible Futures Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Universities

Craig Calhoun

Craig Calhoun

University Professor of Social Sciences

Publications

Degenerations of Democracy

​Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy’s social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good.

Selected Book Reviews and Responses

Global Perspectives

The Tocqueville Review

Projects

Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy’s social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good.