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4 - The Environmental Sociology of the Good: Nature, Faith, and the Bourgeois Transition

from Part I - Theory in Environmental Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

Environmental sociology strikes me as a deeply moral endeavor.I argue that understanding the good is not only relevant to the project of even having an environmental sociology.As well, there is an environmental sociology to the very idea of the good and its typical conception as being the non-political, removed from the human and therefore untainted and unpolluted by our desires and their corrupting hungers. The apartness with which we now typically regard both nature and the divine gives these realms innocence in our minds – which we then marshal in pursuit of our ambitions, yielding the common and deeply problematic paradox I call non-political politics.Such attempts at moral externalization characterize much of political debate in the present day, but has old roots. I show how the non-political idea of the good arose during bourgeois transition of the late Iron Age, and remains caught up in a social and economic conflict of long-standing and yet little notice: the pagan–bourgeois conflict and the ancient triangle of ideological separation between nature, the divine, and the human that this conflict birthed.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Alkire, Sabina, Chatterje, Mihika, Conconi, Adriana, Seth, Suman, and Vaz, Ana. 2014. “Poverty in rural and urban areas: Direct comparisons using the global MPI 2014.” Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael M. 2018. City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael M. 1994. Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael M. with Bauer, Donna, Jarnagin, Sue, and Peter, Greg. 2004. Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability. Rural Studies Series of the Rural Sociological Society. College Station, PA: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Company.Google Scholar
World Bank. 2018. Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018. Washington, DC: The World Bank.Google Scholar

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