George Thomas

George M. Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Politics and Global Studies.  His research and teaching have examined the ways in which culture constitutes individual actors and their agency, identity, and authority. He was part of the development of world society / world culture theory that studies the world as … well … as a global society and culture that constitutes among other things nation-state authority and individual rights. Modern societies and world culture globally can be characterized as a culture of rationalism by which is meant that action is strategized and evaluated as means or techniques which paradoxically come to replace the original abstract ends (for example, the “means” of increasing GDP replaces the “end” of human flourishing).

            One current project identifies glory and glorification as integral to the modern nation-state and traces this to early modern and medieval sources. Another criticizes the fashionable “deconstruction” of the individual and of belief, while still understanding that individuals and beliefs are shaped by cultural institutions.

            Early work examined religious revivalism in the United States (Revivalism and Cultural Change, 1989, University of Chicago Press.), showing that it helped build nationalism and individualism in the nineteenth century and was the source of the evangelical connection to the Republican Party. Revivalism developed religious techniques and more broadly a culture of pragmatism.

            Research on world rationalistic culture involved collaboration with Stanford colleagues: John Meyer (his mentor), John Boli, and Francisco Ramirez (Institutional Structure, 1987, Sage).  One major undertaking was the first systematic study of international nongovernmental organizations that led to several student doctoral dissertations. Studies were published in Constructing World Culture (edited with John Boli, Stanford University Press, 1999). 

            Continuing research looks at religion in world culture. One line of research analyzes religious rights nationally and internationally, including empirical analysis of religious rights cases in the European Court of Human Rights. Another research program examines how religious people engage modern rationalistic culture. A core finding is that there are two related trends in such responses: one doubling down on the objective rational nature of religion and the other embracing subjective mysticisms and spiritualities. This research calls into question facile explanations of religion functioning as reactions to crises. The concept of “new religious orthodoxies” was developed with Neslihan Çevik, capturing the fact that many religious movements are neither liberal compromises, nor retreatist, nor political fundamentalist.