Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

172 Chapter 10

be institutionalized. The transformation of public sociology into a subject

to be studied risks turning it into an exercise in academic credentialism

rather than a contribution to the development of the public sphere. One of

the most important justifications for public sociology is the contribution

it can potentially make to the emergence of a more intellectually oriented

public sphere. Such a contribution requires that sociology evolve through

a wider engagement with public life in order to assist the influence of the

sociological imagination in society. Indeed as this essay argues, one of the

main purposes of public sociology has to be its commitment to rising to the

challenge of recapturing the sociological imagination.

Michael Burawoy (2005) has made an important contribution by pro-

viding a framework for conceptualizing the division of sociological labor

between what he calls professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies.

However, these conceptual distinctions aside, it is important to note that the

sociological imagination has always been open to engagement with a wider

public and has always been critical. Indeed the very fact that we now talk

about public sociology may suggest that the relationship between sociolo-

gists and their audience requires to be made more self-conscious. As Burawoy

(2005:17) argues, public sociology justifies itself “on the basis of relevance.”

But relevance is a very tricky concept. In current times relevance is often used

as a term that celebrates common sense and in that sense encourages an

uncritical view of life as it is. In education the curriculum of relevance often

privileges the affirmation of people’s immediate experience and deprecates

the more abstract and conceptual dialogue that is required to capture com-

plex reality. Of course Burawoy (2005:17) is aware of this problem and he

warns of the “danger that public sociology speak down to its publics.” Flatter-

ing “ordinary folk” and speaking down to them often go hand in hand when

sociologists become more concerned with connecting than with the content

of their ideas. Such an approach is motivated by the conviction that people

will feel alienated unless they engage with experiences that are deemed to be

directly relevant to their lives and linked to their personal experiences. But

inevitably this emphasis on relevance exists in a state of permanent tension

with the acquisition of sociological knowledge and of an understanding of

the way that society works. Powerful ideas often have an abstract character

and are developed through the assimilation of a range of conflicting experi-

ences. That is why they often appear so much at odds with everyday common

sense and with the insights gained through personal experience. Acquiring

sociological knowledge can not be confined to the process of reflecting on an

individual’s story of life. It also requires a form of education that actually dis-

tances people from the immediate and everyday so as to stimulate the mind

to imagine other possibilities. Unfortunately there is no direct route from

personal emotions to objective knowledge and we all need to be confronted

with worlds that are “irrelevant” to our lives.

172 Chapter 10

Recapturing the Sociological Imagination 173

The relevance of public sociology today can be demonstrated through its

ability to encourage its audience to discuss and debate issues that both tran-

scend individual experience and possess a capacity to bind people together

in a common conversation. I believe that the key challenge it faces is to as-

sist the recovery of the public’s sociological imagination. This problem will

be addressed in section 2. But before dealing with this problem it is worth

reflecting on current thinking about the public.

THE PUBLIC

Those engaged in the pursuit of public sociology can not take the focus of

their engagement to be self-evident. The public is itself subject to important

cultural and historical variations and its meaning is far from self-evident.

Habermas’s (1991) discussion of the transformation of the public sphere

points not only to national and cultural variations but also to important

differences in the way that the public is conceptualized and the manner

in which it asserts itself. As Habermas remind us it was not until the late

eighteenth century that public opinion came to constitute an important

role in the political and social life of France and Britain. Consequently in

Britain there was a growing belief that the public could arrive at “a con-

sidered opinion” through “education and information.” The shift from

“common opinion” to “public opinion” was symptomatic of the growing

valuation of the latter (Habermas 1991:66). However as the public sphere

began to encompass people without property the dominant elites began

to feel uncomfortable with the influence of this new force. Tensions in the

public sphere acquired intensity and gradually the ruling elites began to

experience the enlargement of the public as an intimidating force. It is at

this point that anti-mass theories begin to raise anxiety about the “yoke of

public opinion” or the “tyranny of public opinion.” More benevolent con-

servative thinkers adopted the view that since the public could not always

be counted on to do what was in everyone’s interest it needed to be steered

by enlightened leaders.

Within the Anglo-American social sciences, from the late nineteenth cen-

tury onward the negative reaction to mass movements is palpable. Writers

on both sides of the Atlantic emphasized the volatility of the urban mob,

its vulnerability to manipulation by the media, and its ultimate destruc-

tiveness. As I note elsewhere there was a powerful elitist consensus that

transcended the political divide: for conservative writers, the entry of the

masses into social and political life represented a danger to civilized society,

whereas for those from a liberal/leftist perspective the threat was to democ-

racy (Furedi 1994:112–115). Although these sentiments were substantially

modified in the twentieth century, they continued to exercise a formidable

174 Chapter 10

influence on the conceptualization of the public. In current times this ori-

entation toward the public assumes that the public (a) is rarely capable of

grasping its own interest, and (b) is easily swayed through the manipula-

tion of its irrational emotions by the media or other cultural influences.

Despite the rhetorical valuation of the public and of its opinion, cyni-

cism toward “ordinary” folk has acquired an unprecedented force. As in the

past, such elitist attitudes are not confined to one section of the political

divide. Traditional conservative anti-mass sentiment coexists with so-called

cosmopolitan leftist contempt for the silly people who voted for George W.

Bush. Whenever I travel to the United States I meet fellow sociologists who

are convinced that the problem with “the people” is that they do not know

what’s in their best interest. During the past two decades this sentiment

has gained influence among liberal and left-wing activists and thinkers.

“People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American politi-

cal life is all about,” notes Thomas Frank in his best seller What’s the Matter

with America. Otherwise Frank argues, how could they possibly vote for the

Republicans (Frank 2004:1). This diagnosis of the problem is symptomatic

of the sort of “intellectual vanguardism” that Burawoy hinted at when he

warned of the danger of speaking down to the public (2005:17). Unfortu-

nately such patronizing assumptions about ordinary folk are widespread in

contemporary political discourse—and sociologists are not immune to its

influence.

The belief that people are too simple to understand the complexities

of public life was also widely expressed during the heated exchanges that

surrounded the recent referenda on the European Union (EU) in France

and Holland. Margot Wallstrom, vice president of the EU, commented on

her blog that because the constitution is a “complex issue to vote on” it

can confuse many citizens and lead them to “use a referendum to answer

a question that was not put to them” (Furedi 2005). Whatever the rights

and wrongs of the populist rejection of the EU treaty, the manner in which

the No campaign was disparaged by professional politicians betrays a pow-

erful anti-democratic temper. It is not just in the EU where the political

elites express their disappointment with a public it does not understand

through disparaging the electorate. In the United States, this sentiment has

been systematically articulated by Democratic Party activists, who can not

understand why many blue collar workers vote for Republicans. Accord-

ing to George Lakoff, one of the most influential thinkers influencing the

liberal wing of the Democrats, “people do not necessarily vote in their self-

interest” (Lakoff 2004:11).

The belief that the public is too simplistic or too gullible has led some

Democratic Party activists to blame the defeat of their presidential candi-

date in two successive elections on the stupidity of the people. One liberal

activist, Michael Gronewalter, states that “civility and intelligent dialogue

Recapturing the Sociological Imagination 175

are useful tools among intelligent people” but are inappropriate for engag-

ing with the public. He argues:

I really think the problem is that we liberals are in general far more intel-

ligent, well reasoned and educated and will go to astonishingly great lengths

to convince people of the integrity and validity of our fair and well thought

out arguments. The audience, in case anyone has been paying attention, isn’t

always getting it! I suspect the problem is not the speaker—it is most of the audience.

(Gronewalter 2002)

This point was reinforced by Arianna Huffington. “Thanks to the Bush

campaign’s unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not

with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their

more emotional right brain,” she observed (Huffington 2004). The audi-

ence, which is another name for the public, is implicitly condemned for

not getting the incredibly sophisticated message articulated by very clever

political activists. “Do you feel like you live in a nation of idiots?” asks the

consummate cynic, Michael Moore (2001:87), knowing that his very edu-

cated readers will share his contempt for his moral inferiors.

In the United States, the Left’s apprehension with the growing influence

of the so-called Religious Right is often motivated by the suspicion that it

finds it difficult to connect with the emotional and cultural life of ordinary

folk. But instead of coming to terms with the challenge of overcoming this

barrier, it prefers to dwell on the irrationalism of those who can be so eas-

ily swayed by the Religious Right. Sometimes the Left’s denunciation of the

Religious Right sounds like a critique of the mental capacity of significant

sections of the electorate. According to one Democratic Party activist, the

American public has become a sort of “Fast Food Electorate” and it is as if

“Americans suffer collectively from a plague of Attention Deficit Disorder.”

In the EU this recalcitrant public is dismissed as a bunch of backward look-

ing xenophobes. After the rejection of the EU treaty by the French and the

Dutch electorate, the UK Liberal Democratic member of the European Par-

liament, Andrew Duff, characterized the opponents of the EU constitution

as neither liberal nor democratic. “The rejectionists are an odd bunch of

racists, xenophobes, nationalists, communists, disappointed centre-left and

the generally pissed-off,” he told Parliament Magazine (2005).

Throughout history the political elites have tended to be anxious and

sometimes hostile to public opinion. Most of the classical studies of public

opinion—many written from a liberal perspective—tend to be negative

about their subject matter. Often it is the liberal disappointment with the

inability of the people to do what it is in their interest that shapes the discus-

sion of public opinion. Not surprisingly public opinion is invariably treated

as a “problem.” The American commentator Walter Lippman’s 1922 study,

Public Opinion, provides the classic statement. He warns that the proportion

176 Chapter 10

of the electorate that is “absolutely illiterate” is much larger than we suspect

and that these people who are “mentally children or barbarians” are natural

targets of manipulators (Lippman 1934:75). This view of public opinion

dominated the social science Anglo-American literature on the subject.

Frequently it conveyed the patronizing assumption that public opinion

does not know what is in its best interest. Edward Paget (1929:439), an

American sociologist, argued in 1929 that “public opinion is often very

cruel to those who struggle most unselfishly for the public welfare.” By the

fifties many liberal intellectuals regarded populist strands of public opin-

ion with hostility. According to one account, for fifties liberal intellectuals

like Bell, Shills, Lipset, and Hofstader “populism became the paradigmatic

case of American-style xenophobia” (Singh 1998:513). Even a progressive

thinker like C. Wright Mills, who did so much to promote the ideal of the

sociological imagination, could adopt a relatively pessimistic account of the

public. In the early sixties he asked, “must we not face the possibility that

the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cul-

tural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming

accumulation of technological gadgets?” (Mills 1963a:245).

So the tendency to stigmatize populist politics as a symptom of psycho-

logical disorder and irrationalism has a long history. In his important study

The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin notes that in the United States dur-

ing the Cold War, populism became the “great fear of liberal intellectuals”

(Kazin 1995:287). They blamed mass democracy and an “authoritarian”

and “irrational” working class for the rise of McCarthyism. Indeed their

hostility to McCarthyism like their antagonism to the Religious Right today

was underpinned by distrust and antipathy toward “the very kinds of white

American-Catholic workers, military veterans, discontented families in the

middle of the social structure—who had once been the foot soldiers in

causes such as industrial unionism, the CIO and the Popular Front in the

1930s and 1940s.” A decade later they were perceived as the enemy of liber-

alism. Whereas “formerly liberals had worried about the decline of popular

participation in politics,” now “they began to wonder whether ‘apathy’

might not be a blessing in disguise” notes Christopher Lasch (1991:153) in

The True and Only Heaven, his important study of the populist revolt against

the liberal elite.

Elite apprehensions toward populism were linked to the belief that the

mental outlook of the “lower classes” was distorted by its brutal upbring-

ing. It was claimed that the emotional outlook of the working class created

a propensity to adopt anti-democratic and authoritarian causes. The com-

ments of the American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a leading

voice on this subject during the Cold War, is paradigmatic in this respect:

“to sum up, the lower-class individual is likely to have been exposed to

punishment, lack of love, and a general atmosphere of tension and aggres-

Recapturing the Sociological Imagination 177

sion since early childhood—all experiences which tend to produce deep-

rooted hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice, political authoritarianism,

and chiliastic transvaluational religion” (Lipset 1963:114). The contrast

drawn between the emotionally refined middle classes and the emotion-

ally illiterate working classes was also forcefully drawn by Hans Eysenck,

a well-known British psychologist. Eysenck claimed that “middle-class

Conservatives are more tender-minded than working-class Conservatives;

middle-class Liberals more tender-minded than working-class Liberals;

middle-class Socialists more tender-minded than working-class Socialists

and even middle-class Communists more tender-minded than working-

class communists” (Eysenck 1960:137).

Lipset and Eysenck’s pathologization of the political behavior of the

lower classes continues to influence social attitudes today. George Lakoff,

whom Howard Dean has described as “one of the most influential political

thinkers of the progressive movement,” characterizes Bush supporters as

dominated by a “strict father morality” which is hostile to “nurturance and

care.” That’s another way of saying that they are morally inferior people.

And they are certainly inferior to progressives, who apparently have a “nur-

turant family” orientation. In Eysenck’s vocabulary, they are more “tender-

minded” than those nasty brutes in Ohio who voted for Bush. Through

counterposing two different types of moral beings, Lakoff and his adherents

can reconcile themselves to the fact that it was their moral superiority that

lost them the election. In this way they prove to be no less committed to

playing the moral card than the target of their opprobrium—the Religious

Right. The difference between the two is that Lakoff has seen the “psycho-

logical light,” whereas those with a “strict father morality” have opted for

the “religious light” (Lakoff 2004:11–12).

The view that a significant section of the public is too stupid to grasp the

high-minded and sophisticated ideals of American liberals expresses a pro-

found sense of contempt toward ordinary folk. Furthermore, it uncritically

transfers responsibility for the contemporary malaise of political life on the

simplistic and uneducated electorate. From this standpoint, it is not the in-

ability of liberal politics to connect with significant sections of the public,

but the narrow-mindedness of the electorate that accounted for the defeat of

Kerry. In Britain a similar argument was used to account for the ascendancy

of the Thatcher era. Thatcher’s electoral victims were associated with the

influence of working-class authoritarianism. Left-wing and liberal academ-

ics characterized Thatcherism as a form of authoritarian populism that had

somehow seduced sections of an easily misled working class (Gamble 1994).

They argued that a heady mixture of nationalism, racism, and appeal to

self-interest created a powerful right-wing populist movement that provided

Thatcher with grassroots support. In those days it was fashionable to poke

fun at “Essex Man” and “Essex Woman,” supposedly the embodiment of the

178 Chapter 10

irrational but materialistic and selfish working-class supporters of Thatcher

who would not respond to the high-minded appeals of left-wing politicians.

Today, a not dissimilar argument is used to account for the limited gains that

right-wing fringe groups have made in working-class constituencies such as

Barking in East London.

The direct and transparent denunciation of people’s mental capacities

made by leftists and liberal political thinkers and activists is rare in a cul-

ture that professes to be anti-elitist. Such stereotyping would meet with

condemnation if it were directed at minorities or another section of society.

That is why usually such contempt is transmitted through euphemisms

and through nods and winks. In the sixties, critics of populism pointed the

finger at “hard hats” and “materialist” working people. Today in the United

States such attitudes are expressed through terms like “NASCAR dads,”

“Valley Girls,” “Joe six-pack,” or “redneck.” Lakoff claims that Bush’s popu-

larity with the NASCAR dads is due to their common identification with

strict father values. The old Cold War thesis of the “authoritarian working

class” has been recycled to help liberals rationalize their sense of isolation

from everyday society. The pathological roots of backward attitudes are to

be found in the poor quality of parenting experienced by Lakoff’s stereo-

type conservative. In the UK, NASCAR dads have a different name. They are

dismissed as “chavs,” “white van man,” “Worcester Woman,” or “tabloid

readers.” Since these are people who can not be mobilized for progressive

causes, the best course of action is to try to isolate or ignore them and mini-

mize their influence on society.

The tendency to treat supporters of populist campaigns as the enemy be-

trays a feeble attachment toward democratic politics. After all, supporters of

populism constitute an important section of the people and they need to be

taken no less seriously than those whose views appears more enlightened.

It is also important to note that populist movements are influenced by a

variety of contradictory motives. Disenchantment with the political system

and the elites can lead people to adopt a narrow-minded divisive attitude

of them-and-us toward other groups. But often populist movements are

influenced by an aspiration for social solidarity and even by egalitarian

impulse. It is worth recalling that historically many populist movements

such as the Chartists were associated with the politics of the Left. As Kazin

observed, in the United States for over a century the language of populism

was an inspiration to movements of the Left. It was only in the 1940s that

American populist political discourse began to migrate from the Left to the

Right. In principle there is no reason why the populist imagination should

be monopolized by one single political voice (Kazin 1995).

As sociologists, it is important to realize that our public should not be

confined to those whose sentiments resonate with the culture of universi-

ties and associated institutions—non-governmental organization, advocacy

Recapturing the Sociological Imagination 179

groups, and social movements. One of the challenges confronting public

sociology is to promote a sociologically informed view of the world.

RECOVERING THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Today, Western culture makes sense of the experience of social isolation by

interpreting behavior through the highly individualized idiom of therapeu-

tic discourse. Our culture has fostered a climate where the internal world of

the individual has become the site where the problems of society are raised

and where it is perceived they need to be resolved. This shift of focus from

the social to the internal life of the individual has also led to a reorienta-

tion of intellectual life toward a preoccupation with the self. And since the

self is defined through feelings, the state of emotion is often represented

as the key determinant of both individual and collective behavior. Social

problems are frequently recast as individual ones that have no direct con-

nection to the social realm.

Today, the conviction that our experiences are the outcome of personal

choices is fueled by a heightened sense of individuation. In an age of

hyper-mobility and the fragmentation of communities and social networks,

people’s lives have acquired an intensely atomized character. The German

sociologist Ulrich Beck writes of the “isolation of individuals within homo-

geneous social groups” (Beck 2002:33). As a result our ability to perceive

the many things that we share and to grasp the wider social forces that

influence our decisions is compromised by the experience of isolation. In

such circumstances finding meaning in our social experience is fraught with

difficulty. Isolation also encourages individuals to interpret the difficulty

they have in making sense of their lives as the product of their internal life

rather than as a statement about the inability of society to provide people

with a common web of meaning. In current times the distress that emerges

from social conditions is frequently experienced as a problem of the self.

The cumulative outcome of this process is the decline in the influence of

the sociological imagination.

Since modernity the sociological imagination has influenced different

publics to acquire a grasp of the historical and social dimension of their

experience. In his classical account, C. Wright Mills observed that the

“sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger

historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external

career of a variety of individuals” (Mills 1959:5). For Mills the sense of

history provides people with a web of meaning through which individual

experience is connected with the life of others. Mills believed that “through

this imagination, individuals understand their own experience and their

personal trajectory through grasping the period they live in and the fate of

180 Chapter 10

other people.” As a result people grasp how their individual biography is

bound up with the fate of others. Mills took the view that the “sociologi-

cal imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation

between the two within society” (Mills 1959:5).

For a variety of reasons the sociological imagination does not resonate

with the cultural temper of our times. And as we noted elsewhere increas-

ingly the distress that emerges from social conditions is often experienced

as individual deficits. Back in the fifties Mills noted that “many great public

issues as well as many private troubles are described in terms of ‘the psy-

chiatric’—often, it seems, in a pathetic attempt to avoid the large issues and

problems of modern society” (Mills 1959:12). It seems that this tendency

has intensified and exercises a significant influence on the conduct of pub-

lic life.

One of the consequences of this decline in the sociological imagination

is a growing tendency to redefine public issues as the private problem of the

individual. This mood is vividly captured through the individualized idiom

of therapy. Through the language of psychology, therapeutic culture frames

the way that problems are perceived. “The result is that social problems are

increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as personal

inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses,” concludes

Beck (2002:39). As British psychologist David Smail argues, the language

of therapy helps to construct a common sense that regards feelings and

behavior as the outcome of “interior causation” (Smail 2001:ix). Everyday

common sense instructs us to regard feelings and behavior as the product

of passions that come from inside ourselves.

Of course understanding the self and the internal life of the individual

is important for comprehending individual behavior and the wider life of

the community. However, a one-dimensional preoccupation with the self

often leads to overlooking the social and cultural foundations of individual

identity. This approach leads to a novel and specific representation of the

self—one that the sociologist John Rice has characterized as an “asocial

self” (Rice 1996:88–89). From the standpoint of the asocial self what mat-

ters is its internal life. The significance of social and cultural influence is

discounted in favor of a narrow psychological deliberation of personal

emotions. In previous periods of modern life, important intellectual trends

tended to attach little significance to the individual self in their explana-

tions of society. A crude economic or social determinism had little room

for the individual subject. For example, a bewildering variety of human

action—why people joined clubs, why women had small families, or why

a particular group hated foreign people—was explained as the outcome of

economic circumstances. But yesterday’s economic and social determinism

has been overtaken by a new and far cruder variety of determinism—that

of emotional determinism. The state of our emotions is now represented

Recapturing the Sociological Imagination 181

as the cause of many of the problems faced by contemporary society. The

way we feel about ourselves—our self-esteem—has become an important

explanatory tool for making sense of the world (Furedi 2004:24–43).

On both sides of the Atlantic, explanations oriented toward the emotions

are now used to make sense of problems that in the past were illuminated

through socioeconomic or philosophical analysis. “Problems that were

once considered political, economic, or educational are today found to be

psychological,” notes Eva Moskowitz (2001:2) in her important study of

the history of therapeutic culture in the United States. Moskowitz notes that

America’s “obsession with feelings” in the 1970s helped establish an envi-

ronment where social problems tended to be framed from a psychological

perspective. This trend was particularly evident in relation to the problem

of racial oppression, where increasingly the consequence of discrimination

was interpreted in therapeutic terms. According to this approach those who

suffered from racism suffered permanent damage to their personality. In

effect they became damaged people. In turn Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (2001)

has noted that the cure for the damaged personality requires therapeutics

leading to an emphasis on managing attitudes and away from tackling the

question of equality. In Britain too there is a growing tendency to psycholo-

gize the problem of racism. Whereas in the past critics of racism empha-

sized the salience of economic inequality, discrimination, and violence, to-

day there is a tendency to adopt the therapeutic language of victimization.

The tendency to perceive the failures of institutions and of society in

terms of their impact on individual emotions is not confined to the issue

of racism. When The Guardian newspaper published a major report on the

crisis in Britain’s education system, its emphasis was on the emotional

damage suffered by poor children, rather than on their social conditions or

the failure of the system of education: “Poverty does its worst damage with

the emotions of those who live with it” (The Guardian 1999). It seems that

society is far more comfortable in dealing with poverty as a mental health

problem than as a social issue. This approach is supported by a widely held

premise that adverse circumstances, even relatively banal ones are stress-

inducing and cause trauma and various forms of mental illness. The prevail-

ing cultural climate provided a fertile terrain for the growth of therapeutic

critique of social problems. Its orientation toward psychological damage

caused by systemic forces was one that could readily be accommodated by

the individualistic temper of our time. The cumulative effect of these trends

was to individualize protest and encourage what Beck characterizes as the

“individual-therapeutic ways of handling problems” (Beck 2002:37).

The individual-therapeutic response is symptomatic of the tendency

to experience problems in an individuated and fragmented manner. The

shift of focus from society to the individual has important implications

for the way that the public is conceptualized. From this perspective the