STUDI DI SOCIOLOGIA - 2005 - 2

The interview to Ulrich Beck is divided into three broad parts. In the first one, the crucial passages in his intellectual biography are reconstructed with particular reference to authors and fields of reflection that he considers essential for the structuring of his own thought. In the second part, the questions focus on the status of contemporary sociology with some refers to the decline of the previous sociological categories and with the emerging of the cosmopolitan turn into the sociological theory and methodology. The third part focuses on the present human condition and the social challenges deriving from the cosmopolitan turn, in which our lives and scholarly endeavours are embedded.

The article presents the Italian translation of the chapter “Church and State in Russia” from Weber’s Bourgeois Democracy in Russia (1906), with interesting remarks on Orthodox Church and tsarist autocracy, Russian Orthodox hierarchy, Old Believers and sectarian movements, “white clergy” and “black monks”, Christian Social movements and Orthodox doctrine. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) Weber had studied social and economic role of puritan worldly asceticism in the development of western capitalism, and defined the puritan believer as God’s instrument to fulfil His will. In this essay, in a comparative way he examines Russian spirit and relationship to the divinity and to the world, Orthodox believer’s ethical and social ideas; so Weber describes Orthodoxy as worldly mysticism, which searches mystical contact in spite of a modest acceptance of the world. According to Weber, this apolitical and anti-individualistic attitude would not have supported the development of bourgeois and liberal ideals in the struggle for Duma and constitutional monarchy in Russia.

Why is there violence in mass media? This question has two aspects. The first one regards the choices, the motivations and the strategies of the producers, i.e. all those people – journalists, authors, directors, those in charge of the programming, pressure groups – who, with different capabilities and at various levels, influence the making or the diffusion of the contents. People who produce or broadcast violent contents act on the basis of particular expectations regarding the preferences of the audience, yet they cannot force anybody to switch on or to be interested in violence on television. For this reason it is of particular interest to analyse the audience’s motivations. This is the other aspect of the question, that one of the addressees. Do violent messages attract the audience? If so, why? Which type of audience, in what conditions and in what contexts? What kind of satisfaction and gratification does the audience, that voluntarily exposes itself to violent messages, actually gain? This paper aims to investigate why the addressee is attracted by programmes, whether of news or fiction, containing violent messages; reasons that may have nothing to do with the «pleasure of violence». An additional aim is to analyse how different practices of exposure to and consumption of the television violence can influence the processes of decoding and interpretation, and so, in turn, affect individuals and groups.