LAUSR

Göran Therborn introduced his new book (2013) at the International Sociological Association’s Yokohama conference with the remark that sociology did not have much to offer in terms of theorizing inequalities. Coming from Germany, I found this remark amazing. Beck’s (1992) individualization theory came to my mind as well as Hradil’s (1987) multi-dimensional theories of status-inconsistent social layers. The university of Bremen had a 12-year multi-million research centre on life-course analysis (Mayer, 2000) and currently we have a lively debate on life-worlds and milieus (Isenböck et al., 2014). I thought of the German reception of Bourdieu’s class theory and even considered attempts to replace social structure with methodological individualism (Rössel, 2011) which would connect well with Therborn’s mechanistic approach (Diewald and Faist, 2011). Did German sociology do anything else besides theorizing social inequalities? I did wonder. Therborn’s remark may not only be a symptom of English hegemony in the social sciences. Sociologies of social inequalities, be they German or Marsian, do omit one important concern and giving Therborn due respect he probably meant to address it. Sociologists still believe that a Westphalian notion of the nation-state is the sine qua non of theorizing inequalities. According to Fraser’s (2008) critique the ‘who’ of participatory justice are always the citizens of a nation-state. The ‘how’ of achieving justice is slightly more debated, but the institutions of the national welfare state still seem to be sociology’s best hope for achieving justice. The ‘what’ of justice focuses on economic 712949 SOC0010.1177/0038038517712949SociologyBook Review Essay book-review2017