Aron's journey to sociology began with philosophy, metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. In his young years, Aron was strongly drawn to a thorough study of the works of Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. By contrast, his reading of Durkheim and Comte, who likewise featured on the philosophy curriculum at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where he studied in the 1920s, gave him—at least initially—little impetus to make closer acquaintance with the science of society. This apparent lack of interest endured until 1929, when Aron responded to the global economic crisis by turning to Karl Marx for explanations of the crash and the weakness that had befallen Europe's democratic, pluralist governments (Mesure 2015; Nelson 2019, 113–25).

Aron soon found Marx's prophecy that capitalism would eventually eat itself to be less than convincing. It was his reading of Max Weber that prompted his turn to sociology. The foci of the emphatic impression made on him by these works lay in his engagement with Weber's concept of understanding (Verstehen) the subjectively defined meaning of action in society and his ultimately pluralistic perspective on that society. Aron's distinctive brand of this pluralism in sociology remained consistently undergirded by an approach that drew on philosophy and the theory of knowledge and, in the final analysis, took a critical attitude toward ideology. Further, his focus was always the big picture of societal developments, such as class structures, social strata and the shape of intellectual, economic and political elites. It was a conscious decision on Aron's part to devote himself to this macrosociological field of research, albeit a decision taken in the face of the profound economic, social and political ruptures he experienced during his lifetime, including the global financial crash, the rise of National Socialism, the Second World War, Communism and the Cold War. Aron was not involved in any empirical microsociological studies of specific objects or issues during the 1930s (Mazon 1985, 331ff.; Tournès 2008, 1394ff.), with the possible exception of a case study, drawn up using empirical data, of the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany (Aron [1936] 1985, 1993).

Aron embarked upon his life's work as a sociologist at the ENS and subsequently, from 1934 onward, in his role at its attached institute Centre de Documentation Sociale (CDS), surrounded by former disciples of Durkheim.

For Raymond Aron the idea of progress was not a principle of action or a source of wisdom. As a philosopher of the limits of historical knowledge, Aron reflected on the persistence in the modern age of the perennial drama of history—“the rise and fall of empires, rivalry between regimes, and the beneficial or baleful exploits of great men.” Progressivism brings no end to the human drama, since it provides no univocal criterion of the human good.

Aron did not replace the ordinary distinctions of moral judgment or the virtues of government with the imprudent alternative between progress and reaction. He did not “believe” in progress; the progressive thesis is not believable for a French citizen of Jewish origin or for a good European who has lived through and taken seriously the boundless troubles that defined the twentieth century. He elaborated a sociology in which politics must remain a decisive experience, because the argument or dogma of progress cannot dictate the choices of nations or the analysis of societies. Aron did not distance himself by methodological abstraction from the responsibilities and obligations of human beings.

The title of one of Aron's last essays, “For Progress: After the Fall of Idols,” may give another impression, but the work itself confirms Aron's objections to progressivism. Aron sounds like a progressive in this work only if we forget that, in his last years, the idols of the century seemed to be taking reason down with them in their “postmodern” collapse, just as they had perverted reason in its totalitarian elevation. The unifying orientation of Aron's philosophy and sociology should at the outset exclude all misunderstanding on this question: the desacralization of the idolatry of history and the theoretical refutation of a comprehensive determinism were constitutive of his perspective. A reasoned refusal to reduce human accomplishment to history prepared the way for Aron's “praxeology” and motivated his effort to discern the “historical consciousness” of modern societies. This project produced, in the shadow of the war, a political and spiritual diagnosis of the European situation that included a finding that still impresses today, an analysis as simple as it is precise: “The political and historical optimism of the nineteenth century has died in every country. Today there is no question of saving bourgeois, humanitarian or pacifist illusions.

1. Wittgenstein's remarks on knowledge present a fragmented and inconclusive picture. It would, I think, be a mistake to try to extract from them anything that could properly be called a conception of knowledge. However, there are two themes that Wittgenstein returns to again and again, not only in OC but throughout the later philosophy: first, that the idea that ‘I know’ describes a state of affairs which ‘guarantees’ what is known is a wrong picture; and second, that there are circumstances in which doubt is excluded and questions of justification do not arise, and in which the use of ‘I know’ is equivalent to ‘There is no such thing as doubt in this case’ (OC §58). At least some of these remarks focus on the question of what is sometimes called ‘non-inferential knowledge’, that is, on how we are to understand the status of judgements that we make ‘straight off, without any doubt interposing itself ‘ (OC §524). It is this issue, and Wittgenstein's treatment of it, that I want to focus on in this chapter.

2. The idea that some knowledge is non-inferential is prima facie compelling. What is non-inferentially known provides known premises for arguments that justify knowledge based on inference. In this way, non-inferentially acquired knowledge provides both the starting point and an ultimate court of appeal within our overall system of empirical knowledge. However, for those who are moved by these reflections to hold that at least some knowledge is non-inferential, there is a question of what the authority of the relevant knowledge claims derives from. On the one hand, the non-inferential nature of the knowledge seems to preclude the idea of a rational base for the relevant claims, if ‘rational base’ is understood as essentially involving the idea of arguments in which the relevant claims figure as conclusions. On the other hand, the concept of knowledge is internally linked with the idea of being able to justify what one claims to know, where justifying involves giving grounds that are epistemically more secure than the proposition that is the content of the claim.

Raymond Aron was strongly influenced by the writings of Max Weber during two periods of his life and in two different manners. The first occurred in the early 1930s when Aron was working in Germany and wrote German Sociology. While he discussed a number of German sociologists, he focused a major portion of that book on Weber's sociology. The section on Weber not only revealed Aron as a competent interpreter of Weber's difficult sociology but also showed that Aron had learned much from Weber about regarding sociology as an interpretive science. The second period occurred in the 1950s and 1960s and is not quite as defined and delineated as Aron's earlier encounter with Weber's thought. In this second period, Aron concentrated mostly on Weber's politics. While Weber's political thinking influenced Aron's own general thinking about politics, it was specifically manifested in the way in which Aron approached the conjoined issues of “power politics” (Machtpolitik) and nationalism. Weber's influence and Aron's response to it are most fully articulated in the paper that Aron delivered at Heidelberg. This was the famous conference which was held in 1964 in honor of the centennial of Weber's birth. The focus of this chapter is primarily on that paper and is devoted to the ways in which Aron appropriated Weber's thinking about nationalism and modified Weber's approach to Machtpolitik and nationalism. While Aron devoted large parts of his paper to Weber's 1895 Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg, he also examined writings from throughout Weber's life. Given that Weber modified some of his thinking over time, Aron's approach might not have been the most accurate. Nonetheless, Aron offered a clear and mostly accurate account of Weber's main thoughts about nationalism and Machtpolitik.

Aron and Weber

Raymond Aron was a French scholar who was trained as a philosopher, and Max Weber was a German thinker who was educated as a jurist. Yet, they both came to be regarded as the preeminent sociologists of their time. In his biography of Aron, Robert Colquhoun quoted Ralf Dahrendorf who maintained that Raymond Aron was comparable to Max Weber and added that Aron himself regarded Weber as “the sociologist” (Colquhoun 1986a, 1). Indeed, one can argue that Aron not only revered Weber as a sociologist, but he learned from Weber's sociology.

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. His endeavor to enrich the social sciences with a comprehensive, encompassing examination of human life in society may even qualify him as an author of the century in which he worked, on a par, for instance, with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist with intellectual roots in both the German and Anglo-American contexts, once said of him:

The sociologist Edward Shils concurs: “I think that no academic of this century—certainly no academic social scientist, with the possible exception of John Maynard Keynes—was so widely known and appreciated as Raymond Aron” (Shils 1985, 4). While renowned universities across the globe invited him to hold guest lectures or conferred honorary doctorates upon him, his fame transcended the academic sphere, with leading policymakers in France and the United States turning to him for analysis of foreign policy and matters of national security.

His work is without doubt a shining beacon amid the hazardous cliffs and treacherous depths of the modern history of ideas and social thought, particularly with regard to the twentieth century. His oeuvre's luminosity stems in part from its sheer size and diversity, yet also, and indubitably, from the lifelong mission pursued by its author, the task of understanding his age both in its grand-scale political and socioeconomic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life. Throughout this, Aron remained consistently dedicated to the ideals of truth and reason while never losing sight of the limits of the human capacity for knowledge. His singularity arises from the decisive approach he took towards specific issues, but without actually identifying himself with political parties or ideologies.

The poems constituting Blake's Urizen cycle—The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los—present his most sustained nightmarish portrayal of the fallen world as seen from the perspective of a philosophy that strips the natural world of divinity. The philosophical first cause of the cataclysmic events in these poems is Urizen's Newtonian metaphysics; though he is here unnamed, the shrill trumpet blast, which had been blown by Newton to usher in the dark modern age in Europe, sounds again in the first chapter of Urizen. Blake's conflation of cosmology and embryology in the poem testifies to the fact that Newtonian philosophy had influenced the discoveries being made in the eighteenth-century life sciences. Ironically, however, emerging vital materialist physiologies, though voicing allegiance to the laws of Newton, ultimately described a living world that could not be explained by his metaphysical system—a state of affairs that I argue Blake dramatizes in the Urizen cycle. Despite their non-Newtonian aspects, the vitalist natural philosophies were for Blake another form of natural religion, for they too denied divinity to the self-active living matter of the universe. This chapter argues that Blake satirizes both Newtonian law and the materialist embryological theories that transgressed it, presenting equally horrific visions of a petrified world in which man is enslaved to a transcendent, abstract deity, and of a violently monstrous chaos teeming with repugnant forms, which, in contrast to The Marriage, are portrayed as unholy. On Blake's reading, either philosophical perspective, in positing an immaterial God separate from the universe, or in implying that the divine is altogether unnecessary, occludes the living, intelligent, energetic flames that comprise the infinite, divine universe.

But in the Urizen cycle, Blake's pantheist counter-vision is not delivered as forcefully as in his earlier works, or in The Song of Los's conclusion. This is partially due to the fact that unlike with No Natural Religion's “b” series and The Marriage's Devil, no protagonist or speaker articulates Blake's philosophical perspective.

As a natural philosopher arguing via poetry and visual art, Blake eclectically integrated numerous traditions in developing the panpsychist and pantheistic metaphysics of his early work. But his monist materialism, which argued for the divinity of all things, becomes increasingly muted and eventually abandoned by the end of the Urizen cycle. Blake's rejection of all forms of nonhuman nature as well as the human body is glaringly evident in his address “To the Christians” in the last illuminated prophecy, Jerusalem (1804–c.1820), wherein he asserts that “this Vegetable Universe is / but a faint shadow” of the “eternal World” one enters when “these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.” Here the material universe is a shadowy hindrance to divine vision, and the corporeal, or “Vegetable” body, which Blake earlier in the poem calls an “excrementitious husk,” prevents its realization. Blake makes the same assertion in his annotation to George Berkeley's Siris: “The Natural Body is an Obstruction to the Soul or Spiritual Body.” This is clearly not the same philosopher who in The Marriage declares, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul.” A detailed analysis of Blake's later prophecies is beyond the scope of this work, which has challenged the prevailing assertion that such statements from Jerusalem and the Siris annotations are characteristic of Blake's philosophy throughout his oeuvre. And just as Blake's philosophy is modified in each work studied here, I do not assume that a rigid Christianized dualism or Berkeleian Idealism uniformly characterizes everything Blake wrote, drew, painted, printed or engraved from the mid-1790s until his death in 1827. Indeed, a strain of pantheism persists in the later works, as in the following lines from The Four Zoas (1797): “So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast / Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body / Into the Elemental forms of every thing that grows.”

1. At the beginning of what is sometimes called ‘the chapter on philosophy’ in PI, Wittgenstein remarks:

He has earlier spoken of our ‘tendency to sublimate the logic of our language’ (PI §38). It is clear that he believes that this tendency is one that he himself succumbed to in the Tractatus, and that the discussion which begins at PI §89 sets out both to characterize this tendency in detail and to point to how we might liberate ourselves from its grip.

At PI §108, he writes:

This makes clear that throwing off ‘the preconception of [the] crystalline purity [of logic]’ – which is connected with the idea of ‘sublimating’ the logic of our language – represents a decisive shift in Wittgenstein's philosophical development. The suggestion is that liberating ourselves from the grip of this idea involves ‘turning our whole inquiry round’. Insofar as he sees his own early work as governed by this idea of logic, there is an implication that Wittgenstein now believes that the direction of his investigation should be the exact opposite from the one he’d previously taken. The questions I want to consider in this chapter are: How are these ideas to be understood? What is it to ‘sublimate the logic of our language’? What is involved in ‘turning our whole inquiry round’?

2. When Wittgenstein first introduces the idea of ‘sublimating’ in the Investigations, he connects it not with his own early work but with Russell's claim that the word ‘this’ is ‘the only real name’. He describes the idea that ‘this’ is the only real name as an ‘odd conception’ which ‘springs from a tendency to sublimate the logic of our language’ (PI §38). And we can perhaps get some hint of what he thinks is involved in ‘turning our whole inquiry round’ when he responds to this ‘odd conception’ as follows:

The idea to write this monograph grew out of my panel presentation at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) conference held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in July 2017. I had been intrigued by the panel proposal titled ‘Self-Presentation and Self-Praise: The Neglected Speech Acts’ put forward by Daria Dayter and submitted my abstract, feeling that the topic was suitable to corporate communication.

After the conference, all the panellists were asked to contribute their papers to a joint volume on self-praise. It was while working on the draft paper that I realised the inability to confine my ideas to an 8,000-word format, within the boundaries of a single research discipline only (i.e. Pragmatics). By then I had already moved a long way from teaching applied linguistics and business English (communication) courses, being more and more drawn towards business as a research and educational field. Currently working in a private business school, teaching business and management courses, as well as instructing students from all over the world how to successfully complete their research projects, and supervising many in a wide range of research topics, as well as engaging in conversations with practitioners representing various industry sectors, I have finally found my interdisciplinary ‘niche’.

Most of my own recent research projects have also tended to be of interdisciplinary nature (combining methods and insights of numerous academic disciplines), with the interest lying specifically in the interconnections between business and society (including technology), and the multi-stakeholder view on business practices. Such an approach is also mostly suitable to the topic at hand for it is impossible to investigate the complexity of self-presentation and self-praise from a single perspective. In order to account to this complexity, an exploration of the interconnectivity of and interdependency between the numerous factors impacting multilayered corporate behaviour, both on the macro and micro levels, incorporating the applied, ‘hands-on’ practitioners’ vantage point, as well as that of theoreticians and academic researchers is necessary.

Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Self

In the current socio-economic climate, where profit increase is not achieved by expansion to new markets anymore but rather by increase in or optimisation of productivity and efficiency, social and economic aspects are becoming combined as a part of the neoliberalism paradigm in which an individual plays an instrumental role in the market, and not vice versa (cf. Precht 2018; Flassbeck & Steinhardt 2018). The primary enablers of the so-called time-tomarket (TTM) strategy (which refers to the time period starting from when a company initially conceives a product or service idea to the point when the actual product or service is accessible to buyers in the market) are information technology (IT) and digitalisation, as reflected in corporate vision and mission statements. Siemens’ Vision 2020+ serves as an example here: ‘Vision 2020+ is our strategy to shape the next-generation Siemens. With Vision 2020+ we are setting the course for long-term value creation through accelerated growth and stronger profitability with a simplified and leaner company structure’ (https://www.dc.siem ens.com/vis ion2 020p lus/).

Consequently, as will be argued below, the pressure to monitor one's digital footprint and manage the ‘cyber-self ‘ and consistently present oneself in a positive light (self-brand) keeps increasing, with the primary objective being that of pursuing individual interests and meeting one's own goals (since no one else will).

As depicted in Figure 1.1, created for the purpose of illustrating the broader background of self-praise, on the micro level of socio-economic developments, neoliberalism and technology impact corporate and workplace communication, facilitating transparency, visibility, and knowledge sharing, further resulting in shifted roles and scope of work responsibilities. These factors constitute important aspects to be addressed, with the focus placed on self-presenting behaviour, mainly of so-called knowledge workers (or ‘nocollar workers’), functioning in the new economy (mainly referring to highgrowth industries that are on the cutting edge of technology and are believed to be the driving force of economic growth and productivity – cf.

Introduction

As indicated in the title, this chapter is devoted to the affordances granted by enterprise social media (ESM) and their role as enablers of self-presentation in the collaborative digital workplace environment. ‘Enterprise collaboration system’ stands for a system of communication among corporate employees that encompasses the use of enterprise social networking tools and the corporate intranet. Business users can trade knowledge, store and exchange files, create and jointly modify documents, and interact with each other in real time in collaborative workspaces. ESM strategies are closely aligned with key business goals and build up on non-corporate social media and gaming practices and behavioural patterns.

Social network collaboration software is one of the tools for internal action-oriented communication in the environment of gamified business processes. As discussed below, in order for the tools to match the way people naturally interact, game-like motivational elements are utilised that centre on the fundamental desires people have for status, reward, achievement, selfexpression, and competition (Burke 2014; Hamari 2015).

Defined as online applications used in business contexts to foster communication, collaboration, and exchange of information among knowledge workers (Cetto et al. 2018; Nissen 2018), the implementation of enterprise social software (ESS) has been increasing, following on the popularity of public social media platforms (Schwade & Schubert 2018).

An important aspect of ESS is that it is adaptable, thus requiring individual sense-making and reflection on the beneficial usage (Richter & Riemer 2013, also cited in Tykholoz et al. 2020).

Self-presentation, as a manifestation of impression management, involves engagement in attempts to lead people to think of one in a particular way, thus creating desired impressions (Schlenker 1980; Leary 1996; Krämer & Winter 2008) that help demonstrate capability since one presenting a confident front can persuade others that they are competent and desirable (Brown 2007; Hogan & Briggs 1986). It is used as a means of achieving corporate success, that is gaining material and social rewards (or avoiding material and social punishments) within an organisation.