Medal for Professor Johann Arnason

The laudatio was presented by Marek Hrubec, director of the Centre of Global Studies (on the right).

Professor Arnason studied philosophy, sociology and history at universities in Frankfurt, Prague and Rome. After studies he has given lectures at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bielefeld. From 1975 to 2003 he worked at La Trobe University in Melbourne, since 2004, is a Professor Emeritus.

Prof. Johann Arnason with his wife 

Johann Arnason started his academic career in Germany before coming to Australia in 1975. His early research focused on the work of the Frankfurt school, specifically on the Marxist concept of pr a xis . His critical appraisal of Marcuse's reappropriation of this concept led him to stress the need for critical theory to be grounded in an anthropological basis if it were to escape from reductive technological determinism. Retaining the concept's insight into the cultural creativity of human activity, he went on to engage with macro-sociological issues and to formulate a theory of modernity motivated by the need to do justice to both the contingency and cultural creativity/diversity of human history.

Photos: Stanislava Kyselová, Academic bulletin

This led him to turn away from Habermas' evolutionary view of human development back to Weber's concept of culture. As part of this, Arnason has engaged extensively with civilizational theory. More recently, he has become one of the leading figures in a new strand of thought known as the school of "multiple modernities," which has been gaining increasing recognition since the publication in 2000 of a special issue of the journal Daedalus devoted to it. This school of thought seeks to overcome both the classical modernization paradigms of the cold-war period and the notions which gained favour after the collapse of East European communism of an "End of History" (Fukuyama) or a clash of civilizations (Huntington).