This article examines the political and conceptual dynamics in late eighteenth-century France that led to the emergence of “society” as both a framework for collective existence and an object of study, thus marking the birth of sociology. I argue that Sieyès’s pivotal role in coining the term “sociology” during the French Revolution was part of a subversive effort to redefine the relationship between the individual and society, the given and the possible. I analyze how the revolutionaries’ quest for self-institution along with counterrevolutionary reaction constituted a large-scale experiment in the “construction of social reality.” With divine authority dismantled and the arbitrariness of power exposed, critical questions arose: On what principles can new institutions be founded? How can a “society of individuals” truly be a “society”? This period of intense exploration provides an unprecedented sociological and political laboratory, offering valuable insights for citizens and sociologists alike.

A central issue in sociology concerns motivation. Generally, sociologists have followed Mills’s lead in emphasizing motive-talk, or post hoc explanations, over the “springs” of action themselves. Drawing from the interdisciplinary science of motivation, this article argues that we can tease motives apart from motive-talk by incorporating the affective disposition to seek into a theory of motivation. Seeking involves three dissociable phases—wanting, liking, and learning—each of which is intrinsically pleasurable. This suggests three things. First, mundane activities related to anticipation or learning are affective in nature. Second, not only does each phase of seeking involve different motives, but also, any given phase contains sequences of activities, likely indicating mixed motives. And third, people commit to routines and roles not because of their habits or automatic cognition but because of the affective urgency and expectation they feel in their bodies. Implications for the sociological literature on pleasure and for a sociology of motivation are discussed.

The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions of power, inequality, and democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how visibility operates as a lever and effect of social control in a racially and economically stratified society. By doing so, the article identifies a paradox. Race- and class-empowered groups often pressure state actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain and control disadvantaged populations. But they also tend to decry and disavow the necessary public costs of these disciplinary interventions. This creates a conundrum for authorities: how to satisfy popular demands for social control while concealing resource commitments. We use the term disciplinary tensions to describe the contradictory political desires that state actors must navigate to maintain legitimacy with privileged constituents. We examine two state projects that, in different ways, crystallize this dilemma: the expansion of low-income housing development in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and state prison construction in California in the 1980s and 1990s. In both episodes, officials responded to disciplinary tensions by turning to covert public finance options: specifically, revenue bonds, which seemingly detach policy from conventional tax-and-spend public finance. We argue that these cases shed light on the shifting nature of power as finance has come to pervade all aspects of government and covert governing tactics supplement and supplant society’s more direct practices of social control. Revenue bonds, in particular, allow governing actors to appease and placate the populace by reconfiguring the state’s disciplinary power so that social control appears to pay for itself.

Despite the prevalence of symbolic interaction’s theory of the self, alongside alternative implicit models in dual-process and practice theory, sociology continues to struggle with incorporating affect into models of the self. To address this gap, we distinguish between the conventional sociological understanding of Goffman’s self as cynical and masked and an alternative construct we excavate by paying close attention to negative cases like Goffman’s Asylums and Stigma. This alternative theory of self treats self and situation not as one-sided but as mutually constitutive. Unlike most models of self, our alternative is continuously motivated by humans’ desire to maintain reputation within a given situation; reputation making is dependent on the situation, and its ceremonial rules provide the context for the self’s realization of affective rewards. After considering how reputational claims around ceremonial rules reveal an affectively driven, moral self, we consider the theoretical and methodological implications of the theory for major strands within symbolic interactionism.

Basic oppositions between economic growth and environmental protection are well understood by sociologists, but the state’s role in environmental protection and regulation is underspecified in sociological theory. We define the environmental state and theorize two structuring forces central to its provision of environmental welfare. First, culturally distinctive constructions of nature shape environmental politics and statecraft. State actions linked to charismatic “special” nature often win broad political support, whereas actions linked to less resonant “ordinary” nature do not. Second, historical legacies of developmentalism shape environmental coalitions. Arms of the environmental state that combine extractive pasts with newer regulatory responsibilities are better able to build broad support, whereas narrowly regulatory or developmental arms struggle to do so. We illustrate the relevance of each process for the politics of environmental regulation and of technoscientific expertise. Both processes help explain the varied efficacy of environmental states and set the stage for their comparative study.

In this article, I explore how risk transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals by examining the history of public and private insurance in the United States. Rather than locate changes in how risk is managed in our society in the “great risk shift” that occurred with the emergence of neoliberalism, I suggest the individualization of risk in recent decades is only the latest instantiation of a recurrent conflict between security and freedom that has marked the evolution of capitalism. Seen from this longer historical perspective, the “personal responsibility revolution” appears not as the handiwork of neoliberal policymakers but, rather, as the unintended result of social movements that contested discriminatory practices in insurance markets. Thus, paradoxically, my account suggests that struggles against discrimination seeded the individualization of risk that is now the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism.