Struggle and solidarity: civic republican elements in Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolò Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.     

The idea of philosophical sociology

This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self‐reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non‐human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

The cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization

This paper explores the empirical, conceptual and theoretical gains that can be made using cosmopolitan social theory to think through the urban transformations that scholars have in recent years termed planetary urbanization. Recognizing the global spread of urbanization makes the need for a cosmopolitan urban sociology more pressing than ever. Here, it is suggested that critical urban sociology can be invigorated by focusing upon the disconnect that Henri Lefebvre posits between the planetarization of the urban – which he views as economically and technologically driven – and his dis‐alienated notion of a global urban society. The first aim of this paper is to highlight the benefits of using ‘cosmopolitan’ social theory to understand Lefebvre's urban problematic (and to establish why this is also a cosmopolitan problematic); the second is to identify the core cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization, tensions that are both actually existing and reproduced in scholarly accounts. The article begins by examining the challenges presented to urban sociology by planetary urbanization, before considering how cosmopolitan sociological theory helps provide an analytical ‘grip’ on the deep lying social realities of contemporary urbanization, especially in relation to questions about difference, culture and history. These insights are used to identify three cosmopolitan contradictions that exist within urbanized (and urbanizing) space; tensions that provide a basis for a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan investigation of planetary urbanization.     

Durkheim and the Homo Duplex: Anthropocentrism in Sociology

Previous analyses of anthropocentrism in sociological theory primarily attribute the origins of anthropocentrism in sociology to George Herbert Mead. This study addresses anthropocentrism in the influential works of David Émile Durkheim. At the core of Durkheim’s theory is his concept of the homo duplex, an inherent but tentative quality separating humans from all other animals. Durkheim uses the homo duplex as an ontological device, defining humanity as having the unique capacity to create and participate in the social. This collective process permits humans to transcend the profane, or what he observes as the immoral, passionate, animalistic individualism of nonhuman animals, into social solidarity: a realm generating morality and, ultimately, the sacred. This key distinction serves as the basis of all Durkheimian theory. This profound anthropocentrism becomes significant considering the degree of Durkheim’s influence on the field of sociology and the extent of anthropocentrism in sociology as a whole.     

The peculiar convergence of Jeffrey Alexander and Erik Olin Wright

Jeffrey Alexander and Erik Olin Wright are among the leading sociologists of their generation. Each has published his magnum opus in the past several years: The Civil Sphere (Alexander) and Envisioning Real Utopias (Wright). This paper—a dual review essay—lays out the core arguments of each work; situates each within the personal and intellectual contexts of its production; and critically assesses each in terms of its contributions to sociological theory and research. It also argues that the works converge (unexpectedly, given Alexander’s intellectual origins in neo-functionalism and Wright’s in neo-Marxism) upon a common intellectual position, that of Deweyan pragmatism. It tries to make sense of Alexander’s and Wright’s peculiar dual voyage in a Deweyan direction and offers some reflections as to what that journey might tell us about social theory and political thought today.     

Women’s Political Firsts and Symbolic Representation

ABSTRACT

The extent to which politics is still a “man’s game” is made evident every time a top political office has a female holder for the first time. These incredibly revealing moments may give a new social meaning to women in politics—women’s political presence—and women and politics—gendered social constructions about women’s capacity to rule. This article explores the types of gendered mediation underpinning the representation of first-ever women serving in historically male-dominated political offices in Spain. It shows that gender media frames are pervasive, which may lead to an effective annihilation of women’s symbolic representation.     

Sorokin as Lifelong Russian Intellectual: The Enactment of an Historically Rooted Sensibility

Prior to his 1922 emigration to Europe and thence to the United States, Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin had an exceptional intellectual and political career in Russia and the Soviet Union (Sorokin 1924, 1963a; Johnston 1995; Krotov 2005). Indeed, he was among the early founders of the science of sociology in his native land, where, according to a relatively recent bibliography (Sorokin 2000), he produced 162 Russian-language publications between the ages of 21 and 33. This listing includes not only book reviews and journal articles, but also substantial monographs and a two-volume theoretical treatise. While still a relatively young man, Sorokin had thus gained widespread recognition as a scholar of the first rank. He was also the initial chairperson (from 1919 to 1922) of a fledgling department of sociology at the University of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), an elected member of the national Constituent Assembly and an appointed staff member of the 1917 Provisional Government, the first democratic regime in Russia. This much would have sufficed for an entry in a sociological encyclopedia, and Sorokin’s political career has few parallels in the history of the field, other than the involvement of Emile Durkheim in French educational policy and the participation of Max Weber in creating the Weimar Republic in Germany. Nevertheless sociologists in the United States and most western historians of the field have not yet appreciated the full influence of the formative period, especially from 1905 to 1922. Lacking familiarity with Russian culture of that era and knowing little about the larger Russian socio-historical milieu, its intellectual discourse and collective memory, they have not been able to comprehend Sorokin’s outlook, behavior and professional output in the United States in relation to these earlier contextual factors. This is arguably a fundamental reason why many U.S. sociologists have tended to see Sorokin, especially since 1937, as a marginal figure and to regard his works largely as deviations from accepted social scientific practice. This paper will argue that a more adequate appreciation of Sorokin’s background and early adult life illumines both stylistic features of his works in America and also places into proper perspective several of his substantive foci that did not accord with contemporary “normal science” (Kuhn 1962). In short, despite his overall assimilation into American society and higher education, including his appointment at Harvard University and his election as president of the American Sociological Association, Sorokin should be understood in large measure as a life-long Russian intellectual. His was a Russian-born sensibility and consciousness—indeed a “Russian soul”—so deeply ingrained that it stamped his entire professional career in the United States, including his published researches, his popular sociology and his university teaching.     

Horace Cayton: Reflections on an unfulfilled sociological career

This article examines the abbreviated sociological career of Horace Cayton, the co-author of Black Metropolis and one of the most talented young black sociologists in the 1930s-1940s. In seeking to explain why Cayton failed to continue his promising sociological career, this article focuses on: his feelings of racial alienation; his inability to locate a theoretical paradigm in mainstream sociology through which he could express his anger about American racism; the narrow range of job opportunities open to blacks in sociology; his desire to become a novelist and, thereby, attain the intellectual freedom not afforded by mainstream sociology to protest American race relations; and, finally, his failure to comprehend the psychological perils of assimilation. He is presently doing research on the role of activist churches in Kenyan politics, attitudes toward skin color among African Americans and Africans, and normative accommodations of deviant survival strategies in Kenyan cities.     

Free agent or ‘conscious automaton’? Contrasting interpretations of the individual in Spencer's writing on social and moral life

Herbert Spencer remains an important and intriguing figure in thinking about political, social and moral matters. At present his writings in relation to idealist thought, social policy, sociology and ethics are undergoing reassessment. This article is concerned with some recent interpretations of Spencer on individuals in social life. It looks in some detail at Spencer's work on psychology and sociology as well as on ethics, seeking to establish how Spencer understood people as social individuals. In particular the neglect of Spencer's denial of freedom of the will is identified as a problem in some recent interpretations. One of his contemporary critics, J.E. Cairnes, charged that Spencer's own theory of social evolution left even Spencer himself the status of only a ‘conscious automaton’. This article, drawing on a range of past and present interpretative discussions of Spencer, seeks to show that Spencerian individuals are psychically and socially so constituted as to be only indirectly responsive to moral suasion, even to that of his own Principles of Ethics as he himself acknowledged. Whilst overtly reconstructionist projects to develop a liberal utilitarianism out of Spencer to enliven political and philosophical debate for today are worthwhile—dead theorists have uses—care needs to be taken that the original context and its concerns with the processes associated with innovation (and decay) in social life are not thereby eclipsed, the more so since in some important respects they have recently received little systematic attention even though the issues have contemporary relevance in sociology.     

Varieties of Normative Inquiry: Moral Alternatives to Politicization in Sociology

This article evaluates four different ways of relating the normative side of sociology to its empirical side. Two such ways are in existence at present. The first is “dualism,” the idea that sociology provides purely scientific results to political or moral projects that are conducted on some independent normative basis. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “value-free sociology.” The second is “monism,” the ideas that value-freedom is impossible and that sociology is inevitably value-driven, indeed perhaps that it should be openly so driven. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “the unity of theory and practice.” These existing approaches are complemented by two that do not yet exist in practice. Both are explicitly normative in part. The first of these is a “canonical” approach, like that of the subdiscipline of political theory, in which normative inquiry within sociology would be formally recognized within the discipline and would be organized around a classical canon of normative works. The second would be a “legalist” approach, which would grow out of new genres of writing that aimed at the systematic normative evaluation of bodies of work or literatures, thus working inductively, in contrast to the canonical approach’s deductivism. The article evaluates these four positions according to four criteria: feasibility, coherence, trajectory, and open-mindedness. It concludes that the current positions (dualism and monism) are both embarrassingly weak: typically unconscious and sometimes naïve, in many cases driven by the unacknowledged – and hence uncritical - assumption that one's particular politics are in fact universally desirable. The discipline should try to create an explicit but rigorously argued normative subdiscipline, probably combining both the canonical and legalist positions.     

Professors and politics: Noam Chomsky’s contested reputation in the United States and Canada

There is an extensive literature comparing the politics, sociology and economics of the United States and Canada, but very little work comparing the role that public intellectuals play in the space of public opinion and how their ideas are received in both nations simultaneously. Noam Chomsky provides a theoretically useful example of an established academic and public intellectual whose reputation is deeply contested in both countries. Our comparative case study offers leverage to contribute to debates on the sociology of knowledge, reputations, intellectuals, and the politics of professors using data from six major Canadian and American newspapers from 1995–2009 and an innovative coding of media portrayal. Earlier work has demonstrated that Chomsky is discussed as a public intellectual more prominently in Canada than in the United States (McLaughlin and Townsley in Canadian Review of Sociology, 48(4):341–368, 2011). Here we examine the comparative construction of a “public intellectual” reputation in the context of significant political change. We document small differences between the Canadian and American receptions of Chomsky, show change in the patterns of portrayal and number of publications over time, and offer an analysis of differences between political attacks and consecrations. We demonstrate more engagement with Chomsky’s political view in Canada than in the United States, a rise in Chomsky’s fame post 9/11, and illustrate clear political patterns in attempts to marginalize him.     

A cosmopolitan approach to the explanation of social change: social mechanisms,processes, modernity

In recent years social science has been characterized by a cosmopolitan turn. Of the many questions that arise from this the most important are those that concern the implications for explaining social change. While cosmopolitanism is centrally about social change, much cosmopolitan theory due to its normative orientation lacks a capacity for explanation. The problem of explanation is also a problem that besets all ‘big question’ approaches in social science. In this paper a broad definition of cosmopolitanism is given and elucidated by an outline of its epistemological, ontological and methodological frameworks. Emphasizing the latter two, a relational conception of cosmopolitanism is developed as an alternative to dispositional/agency based and systemic accounts. First I argue that there are four main kinds of cosmopolitan relationships, which together constitute the social ontology of cosmopolitanism. These are the relativization of identity, the positive recognition of the other, the mutual evaluation of cultures, and the creation of a normative world culture. A methodological framework is advanced that distinguishes between the preconditions of cosmopolitanism, its social mechanisms and processes (of which three are specified: generative, transformational and institutionalizing) and trajectories of historical change. The argument is made that cosmopolitan phenomena can be accounted for in terms of this ontological and methodological framework. The advantage of this approach is that it offers cosmopolitan analysis a macro level account of social change that is broadly explanatory and which can also account for both the diachronic and synchronic levels of the emergence of cosmopolitanism as both a counter‐factual normative cultural model and as a part of social and political practices and institutional arrangements.     

An accidental journey: Becoming a sociologist

This sketch describes how I accidentally became a sociologist. More importantly, it describes undergraduate sociology training at a private liberal arts university during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The University of Maryland began a Ph.D. program in sociology just before World War II began. I report on graduate training there, as well as the social and intellectual life of the department. C. Wright Mills began his academic career at Maryland. I consider his place in the department, my experiences with him as my dissertation director, and how he influenced my lifelong study on the bearing of social stratification to politics.     

Mann,war, and cyberspace: dualities of infrastructural power in America

Not long after the completion of Michael Mann’s “quadrilogy” on The Sources of Social Power (1986–2012), social scientists began to interrogate the meaning of his concepts of “despotic” and “infrastructural” power. While we know that the former is the most evident sign of danger in times of war, less well understood is the role of infrastructural power in state/civil society relations. Most important is the ambiguous relationship between the two types of power and the possibility that—especially in times of war—infrastructural power can become the vehicle for despotic ends. But infrastructural power is also reciprocal, offering firms and civil society groups channels with which to contest the state’s projects. In this article, I first explicate the different meanings that Mann gave to his concept of infrastructural power. In the second section, I turn to how the concept has been “received” in political science and historical sociology. In the third part, I argue that the main danger to American democracy in wartime lies not in its becoming a despotic state, but in the use of the state’s infrastructural channels for the exercise of despotic ends. The fourth part illustrates the complexities of infrastructural power in business/government/civil society relations in cybersecurity, which Mann—for understandable reasons—did not examine in his encompassing work.     

The politics of figurational sociology

Figurational sociology is so often said to distance itself from the political issues of the day. Whilst this is certainly true with regards to the present day, it in no way follows that figurational sociology seeks to distance itself from politics as such. On the contrary, as will be shown within this paper, politics is and always has been a central concern for figurational sociologists. This political concern, however, is an exclusively long term concern; figurational sociology purposively postpones present political engagement for the sake of developing a sufficiently detached sociology that would eventually facilitate in the delivery of effective practical and political measures. This paper discusses the stakes involved in, as well as the reasoning behind, the assignment of such a place to politics. It gestures towards two distinct and separate concepts of social control that exist within figurational sociology and then proceeds to offer a critical consideration of the consequences that can be derived from any temporal demarcation of the political done on their basis. The paper ultimately suggests that figurational sociology's position on politics raises a series of as yet unanswered questions, questions which can no longer remain unanswered by the contemporary figurational sociologist.     

The social welfare impact of privatisation in sub‐Saharan Africa: A discussion

Against the background of rising levels of anxiety around the state of the social fabric in South African society, this paper explores the disjuncture between the post-apartheid state’s policy discourse on social cohesion and the local discourses of South African residents in 24 focus groups held in townships around the country, which reveal significant levels of social fragmentation and intense contestation regarding the new regime of rights. The paper argues that the state’s policy discourse on social cohesion is part of an attempt to manage a complex social environment in terms of a project of developmental nation-state building that seeks to constitute the social domain as a normative realm of imagined homogeneity in which citizenship is premised on constitutional values. I argue that while the state’s concern with the ‘social’ relates to the critical question of solidarity in modern democracies, this has led, in the South African context, to the constitution of the social domain as a site of pathology, divorced from the broader political and economic relations of power in which this ‘pathology’ is embedded. At issue in this interaction between state and local discourses on the question of solidarity are the terms of membership in the political community. Who will and will not be part of the ‘new’ nation?