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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Martins (2015a: 255–256).
- 3.
The essay on the Estado Novo was written at the request of Stuart J. Woolf, for the collection entitled European Fascism (1968), on the recommendation of Perry Anderson of the New Left Review, who was very interested in Portugal and encouraged Martins to pursue the topic (Martins 1968). The 1969 article ‘Opposition in Portugal’ (on the opposition to the dictatorship of Salazar’s Estado Novo) was written at the request of G. Ionescu, editor of the academic journal Government and Opposition, under guidance from Ernest Gellner (Martins 1969). The 1971 article ‘Portugal’ was written at the invitation of the Catalan sociologist Salvador Giner and published in a volume he co-edited with Margaret Archer on class structure in various European countries, Contemporary Europe: Class, Status and Power, together with articles by Pierre Naville, Nicos Mouzelis, René König, Frank Parkin, and Giner himself (Martins 1971). The article ‘The collapse of the First Republic’ was written at the request of Juan Linz, for a symposium he organized with Al Stepan, at Yale, on the collapse of democratic regimes in Europe and Latin America. This last study was first published in Martins (1998b), a Portuguese-language work that brings together the above-mentioned four essays on Portugal from that period. At this time he also wrote another article on Portuguese topics, on emigration. This was presented at the first conference of the International Conference Group on Modern Portugal, headed up by Douglas Wheeler, of the University of New Hampshire, in 1973, but was never published.
- 4.
A set of his texts on technology will be published in the book The Tech nocene: Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Markets, edited by Ravi Rajan with Danielle Crawford (Martins forthcoming).
- 5.
In addition to the republished essay on the Kuhnian revolution, the other five essays cover the following topics: Truth, Realism and Virtue 2.0; Images and Imaging in Science; Thought experiments in science and philosophy; Michael Polanyi and the philosophy of science; and Time and Explanation. The six essays are collected in the volume edited by Príncipe (2015), Évora Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (Martins 2015b, c, d, e, f, g).
- 6.
The article on Celestin Bouglé and the Durkheimian school was handed to me in its final version one month before Martins’ death and is almost certainly the last article he wrote in Portuguese. It will be included in the volume Lições de Sociologia Clássica (Lectures in Classical Sociology), which Martins and I were co-editing, and will be published in 2018 by Edições 70, Lisbon, Portugal.
- 7.
- 8.
In addition to the book (Martins 1998b), he wrote a long essay on regime changes in modern Portugal which will be published in 2017 by the Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, the publishing arm of the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa.
- 9.
In the essay entitled ‘Time and Theory in Sociology’, we also find the invention of the concept of ‘methodological nationalism’, which may include the broader conception of caesurism. With the sensibility of a Portuguese intellectual in exile from a dictatorship which professed an authoritarian form of nationalism, and of a foreigner working in the social sciences in the ‘core’ countries where there was not much work done on the idea of the nation-state, Martins shows how, in general, macro-sociological work was subject to nationally predefined views of society, in which the national community was seen, in a limiting way, as the terminal unit and limiting condition within which issues and events were addressed in social science. Methodological nationalism thus presupposes that the nation-state is the necessary form of representation of society and the natural organizing principle for the emergence of modernity, binding itself to it in the study of sociological phenomena. On this concept, Chernilo argues that a first wave of debate on methodological nationalism arose in the 1970s, driven by Martins himself, who coined the term; and a second wave came at the turn of the twentieth century, above all in connection with the issue of globalization, which would overshadow the importance of the nation-state and the controversy over the exhaustion of universalist concepts in the social sciences (Chernilo 2006: 235–237).
- 10.
It should be noted, however, that Martins does not deny the existence of caesurial changes in history, on condition that incisions and breakages are not repeated at random to the extent that they make it impossible to understand the particular characteristics which give meaning to social events, phases, and historical periods. It is in this sense that he accepts Gellner’s suggested caesurism based on the undeniable discontinuity between the modern world and the world prior to the industrial and scientific revolution. In Thought and Change, Gellner (1964), lending support to Popperian critiques of historicism, set out a version of caesurism which attracted many sociologists, partly because it placed sociology in a privileged position in relation to history. He defined an episodic model of social change, according to which the object of study for the social sciences is not long-term sequences of historical transformation but rather the historical and delimited specificity of an ‘episode’.
- 11.
Martins deals extensively with the issues of technological utopianism in connection with the task of modern sociology, in an extended electronic version of the essay published in the journal Revista Nada, following an interview he gave to João Urbano and Paulo Urbano. See Martins (2004a).
- 12.
In a summary on Time, Martins (2006b) observed that there is a significant volume of work on the temporal in human action, by methodological individualists, who drew on Husserl, by Durkheimian sociologists, and by macro-sociological authors. Among the latter, with whom he had the most affinity on account of the type of research he carried out, it is possible to distinguish the importance of great timescales, of ‘trendless fluctuations’ (Pitirim Sorokin), and of civilizational processes (Norbert Elias), sometimes linked to systemic conceptions (Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world systems’). Martins identified with this form of interpreting the social world with the long duration, or which ties this temporal form to intermediate timescales and events (something which Fernand Braudel did for history and which he felt sociology lacked), and he subscribed in particular to the view set out by Sorokin in Sociocultural Causality, Space and Time. In this book, Sorokin (1964) revisits the triple structure of human and social time: tempus, time in the ordinary sense, ‘of coming into being and passing away’ (in the English translation of Aristotle), aevum, and aeternitas. Aevum is the temporal mode of created things, thus having a beginning, at least in one sense (e.g. the discovery of a theorem or a technical invention), but lasting with no defined time-limitation, either in themselves or in their ramifications and implications, which are potentially infinite. Aeternitas can be seen as the temporal mode of uncreated things and can be generalized as ‘non-temporality’, in addition to that which is to come, in a sense of being beyond or outside of time, corresponding more or less to our experiences as epiphanies. But it was in Gabriel Tarde that Martins found the best understanding of the way in which the social present is constituted. In his view this was a social present time which was narrow, formed by the rapid dynamics of ephemeral events and socio-technical accidents, and with which the main body of sociologists are obsessed (almost to the point of having a ‘professional bias’ in his opinion), leading them to ignore the social past and their own sociological past and to deny any serious attempt at perspective, missing the significance of time as a radically conditioning factor in its dual status as primordial boundary and scarce good. He saw sociologists as captives, often unconscious ones, of the very movement of time as defined by the momentum of technological and economic change, by the brief transitory nature of fluctuations in taste influenced by the market, and by the lack of historical depth and horizons of the state machines of the world in which we live. Martins is not, however, a radical temporalist, for whom everything is continuous becoming, with a propensity for total metamorphic change, who jumps from hermeneutic hiatus to hermeneutic hiatus, from logical abyss to logical abyss, from incommensurability to incommensurability, with nothing being comprehensible unless it be in fieri (coming into existence) and exclusively so.
- 13.
This term was coined by the theologian Paul Tillich and adopted by Parsons to define one of the most important systems of human action, the cultural system, one of the functions of which was to concern itself with the ‘frontier-conditions’ of the human being.
- 14.
Martins is closer to those authors who escape the prosaic mentality and retain that sensitivity to ultimate issues, which, deriving almost always from contacts with religion, as a result of education or out of intellectual curiosity, are not the sole prerogative of authors who are also believers. Martins offers the examples of the post-modernist Derrida and the Marxist Walter Benjamin, whose ‘mystic materialism’ derives from an affinity with Judaism, of Ernst Bloch, also a Marxist and Schellingian materialist who was such a strong influence on German Protestant theology, the anarchist Gustav Landauer, and Daniel Bell, whose thought reflects his knowledge of the history of Kabbalism. Some of the profoundest interpreters of political and technological modernity had in-depth knowledge of the history of religions in the West, in particular the Gnostic tradition (both Jewish and Christian), such as Eric Voegelin, for example, who studied in great depth the religious roots of European racism and of political religions, and Hans Jonas, a significant voice in the philosophy of technology and bioethics who, with his ‘Responsibility Principle’, criticized the work of Bloch as an exponent of radical Marxist technology (Martins 2004a).
- 15.
See Garcia (2016: 1–18).
- 16.
This is the idea of a Third Nature, one of the most recent of a series of planetary technological images which include H. G. Wells’ ‘brain world’, Edouard Le Roy’s and Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noosphere’, Gaston Bachelard’s ‘radio sphere’, Yuri Lotman’s ‘semiosphere’, Peter Russell’s ‘global brain’, the ‘infosphere’ of many modern technophiles and, more remotely, is present in various writers and poets up to at least Nathaniel Hawthorne, and also in the futurists at the beginning of the twentieth century.
- 17.
The ideas of plenitude and continuity spread above all in the Middle Ages. They are found in Abelard, who in the twelfth century arrived at the deductive conclusion that sufficient reason and plenitude derive from the infinite power of the Creator; or in St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom all things tended to perfection, in a movement of divine and natural origin. Leibniz took up this thought under the strong influence of Espinoza, who believed in Nature’s Grand Design, according to which all that may happen in the future is contained in the present. Later on we find these ideas in the writings of the eighteenth-century biologists, and even in Darwin.
- 18.
At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth, the realization of all the potential forms of art in a given state of artistic production, and in the transition from one state of artistic production to another, seemed to be the idea animating Western late modernist art which, in the pursuit of originality, experimentation and creativity, freed itself from the more durable aesthetic conventions, and focused on caesurist ideas like variation, rupture, and diversion. The tendency towards aesthetic plenification was encouraged by the pressure of technological innovation, above all those inventions most directly related to the means of artistic production and image creation, starting with photography (Martins 2001b: 63–64).
- 19.
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Garcia, J.L. (2018). Hermínio Martins’ Philosophical Sociology of Technology: A Short Introduction. In: Castro, J., Fowler, B., Gomes, L. (eds) Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71519-3_10
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