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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century.
Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Epigraph
Title Page
Copyright Page
Tables
Preface
Introduction: The Promise of Sociology
Note
Part One: Theory and Practice
1. Theory: Utopia and Anti-Utopia
The Canon That Was
Reconstructing the Canon
2. Practice: The (Di)vision of Sociological Labor
From Professional Sociology to Public Sociology
From Policy Sociology to Critical Sociology
Defining Four Sociologies
Competition in the National and Global Arenas
Sociology’s Standpoint: Civil Society
Part Two: Policy Sociology
3. The Language Question in University Education
4. Job Evaluation in a Racial Order
Part Three: Public Sociology
5. The Color of Class
6. Student Rebellion
Part Four: Critical Sociology
7. Race, Class, and Colonialism
8. Migrant Labor and the State
Note
9. Manufacturing Consent
10. Racial Capitalism
Note
Part Five: Professional Sociology
11. Advancing a Research Program
12. Painting Socialism
13. The Great Involution
Part Six: Real Utopias
14. Third-Wave Marketization
Notes
15. Whither the Public University?
Unmaking the Public University
Fiscal Crisis
Governance Crisis
Identity Crisis
Legitimation Crisis
The Future
Note
16. Living Theory
Notes
Conclusion: Biography Meets History
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1:
The Division of Sociological Labor
Chapter 5
Table 5.1:
The Progress of Zambianization
Chapter 10
Table 10.1:
The Dimensions of Racial Domination under Racial Capitalism
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Epigraph
Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.
—Max Weber
What do they know of sociology, who only sociology know?
—Adapted from C. L. R. James and Rudyard Kipling
For all the students who have taught me so much.
Public Sociology
Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Michael Burawoy
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Michael Burawoy 2021
The right of Michael Burawoy to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1914-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1915-6(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Title: Public sociology : between utopia and anti-utopia / Michael Burawoy.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Why sociology matters, how sociologists can help the people they study and how it can help us to deal with the crises of the 21st century”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006108 (print) | LCCN 2021006109 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519149 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509519156 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509519187 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology.
Classification: LCC HM435 .B87 2021 (print) | LCC HM435 (ebook) | DDC 301--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006108
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006109
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Tables
2.1 The Division of Sociological Labor
5.1 The Progress of Zambianization
10.1 The Dimensions of Racial Domination under Racial Capitalism
Preface
To the 1960s generation sociology promised so much – addressing questions of social justice, social inequality, social movements, and social change. Its potential was famously captured by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his definition of sociology as turning “personal troubles” into “public issues.” This proves to be easier said than done.
In the chapters that follow I explore the promise of sociology by tracing my own trajectory into and through the discipline. I set out for India in 1967 with the naïve view that sociology would fix social problems if only we have adequate knowledge based on rigorous research. We just have to inform policy makers and they will do the right thing. I call this species of sociology policy sociology. My first lesson in sociology was to learn the importance of the social, political, and economic context of decision-making. Recognizing the limits of this policy sociology led me to public sociology, which did not speak to policy makers. It transmitted the result of research to broad publics. Here, again, I was naïve, overlooking the operation of power within the public sphere that repressed, diverted, or co-opted the aims of public sociology. That was my second lesson – a lesson I learned in newly independent Zambia from 1968 to 1972.
Instead of giving up on sociology, I decided I didn’t have an adequate grasp of its intricacies and its underlying theory. I left Zambia for the PhD program at the University of Chicago. There I discovered that the material I was expected to learn and absorb, what I call professional sociology, was more concerned with preserving rather than changing the status quo – or changing it only to keep it the same. So my third lesson concerned the umbilical cord connecting professional sociology to ideology, its complacent adjustment to ubiquitous exploitation, domination, and dispossession. I was not the only one to be disappointed. I became part of a rising generation that advanced a critical sociology, critical of the world but also of the reigning professional sociology.
That was the 1970s, when critical sociology was gaining adherents in many universities, not just in the US but across the globe. After graduating from Chicago, through an unlikely succession of events, I landed in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. There the struggle between insurgent graduate students and divided faculty had been particularly intense. After six tumultuous years I survived a tenure battle by the skin of my teeth. During the 1980s, now with the security of tenure, I sought to contribute to an emergent Marxist research program that led me to explore the meaning and possibilities of socialism in Hungary and then in the Soviet Union. I had hardly begun research in the Soviet Union when it collapsed, turning into a crony capitalism that sought to wipe out its “communist” past. Witnessing the inevitable dénouement, what I would call involution, I felt helpless and ineffectual. My fourth lesson was the marginality of sociology to ongoing debates.
Disillusioned with my research, facing a backlash against Marxism, I was in retreat when my journey took an unexpected turn. It was 1996. Desperate for a new chair, my colleagues promoted me from departmental pariah to department head. From there I became head of the American Sociological Association and then head of the International Sociological Association. I had become a professional sociologist par excellence. I used these platforms to once again project the idea of public sociology.
Now I saw more clearly how public sociology depended on the three other knowledges – professional, policy and critical – if it was to create a conversation between sociologists and publics concerning the devastation of society. Drawing on my experiences in Russia I advanced theories of what has come to be known as neoliberalism, what I call third-wave marketization, how the world has been subjected to a destructive commodification of labor, nature, money, and knowledge. I searched for counter-tendencies, counter-movements that might avert the catastrophes that lay around the corner. I sought to understand how the commodification of knowledge was degrading the university – a vital source of alternative futures. With a better sense of the context and a more focused vision of what might be changed, I claimed to better understand the possibilities of public sociology – both its production and its reception. An evangelist for public sociology, I determined that teaching was my own immediate contribution to public sociology.
This is how I now make sense of my successive experiences as a sociologist, but those experiences emerged through a quite concrete research journey. If I began my initiation in 1967 in India, studying university education, for the next thirty-five years I became an intermittent worker – a “participant observer” of industry in Zambia, the US, Hungary, and Russia. My training as an anthropologist in Zambia led me to study others by joining them in their lives, that is, in their space and in their time. It meant that I became an unskilled worker in factories, helping to produce (and sometimes ruin) engines, gear boxes, steel, and furniture – my incompetence being an embarrassment and often a danger to myself and my fellow workers. I traced the lived experience on the shop floor to the wider political, economic, and social realms. I demonstrated how my experience in the Zambian mining industry expressed the transition to postcolonialism, how my experience in the Chicago branch of Allis-Chalmers reflected the physiognomy of advanced capitalism, how my experience in the auto industry and steel industries of Hungary carried the dynamics of state socialism, and how my experience in rubber and furniture plants in the Soviet Union was shaped by the demise of state socialism and the transition to capitalism. My professional life was enlivened by a continuing struggle to defend the legitimacy of such an extension from micro-processes to macro-forces, but such an extension is the necessary foundation of any public sociology, for turning those personal troubles into public issues.
Since beginning this critical memoir five years ago I have lost my close friend Erik Olin Wright. He was a constant companion in the reconstruction of Marxism, what we were to call sociological Marxism. Technically, we were sociologists, rooted in the sociology departments that recruited us in 1976 – he at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and I at the University of California, Berkeley. Undeniably our professional commitments made us sociologists, but we were Marxist sociologists committed to the advance of sociological Marxism, a Marxism that restored the social in socialism. We had set out to supplant sociology, showing that Marxist science was superior to sociology. Over time we diluted our grandiose schemes but without ever losing our commitment to Marxism.
Erik moved from a scientific Marxism focused on “class analysis” to a critical Marxism focused on “real utopias,” discovering the rudiments of socialist principles in the interstices and dynamics of capitalism. He scoured the globe for such concrete manifestations of an alternative world, collaborating with activists and practitioners to connect these different experiments and struggles. He became a public sociologist. He will, perhaps, be best remembered for his last two books, both appearing posthumously. The first is a manifesto for real utopias, How To Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century (2019) – a popular version of his magnum opus, Envisioning Real Utopias (2010). The manifesto was instantly translated into thirteen languages, a reflection of his enormous influence not just in academia but among activists fighting for a better world. The second book, Stardust to Stardust (2020), is an extraordinary daily journal of reflections on living and dying. It begins in April 2018 when Erik was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, and ends nine months later with his death. Always one to live for the future, Erik showed us how to sustain optimism in the face of both personal and human extinctions. The book radiates utopianism not just in theory but also in practice: it relates how he turned life around him – family, neighborhood, school, department, and hospital – into a real utopia. His spirit guides this memoir, continuing the explorations that we began together – the tensions between utopia and anti-utopia.
Although I have acknowledged my teachers many times before, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge them once again. In their different ways Jaap van Velsen, who died in 1990, Adam Przeworski, and Bill Wilson made indelible imprints on me and my intellectual outlook. But I have had so many other teachers, too. My friends from South Africa, especially Eddie Webster, Luli Callinicos, and Harold Wolpe, who died in 1996, continually reminded me that another world exists, one of hope and struggle. My Hungarian and Russian escapades would not have been possible were it not for friends, colleagues, and collaborators, especially Iván Szelényi, János Lukács, Zsuzsa Hunyadi, Pavel Krotov, Tatyana Lytkina, Svetlana Yaroshenko, Volodya Ilyin, and Marina Ilyina, who inducted me into the byzantine world of socialism and postsocialism. Elsewhere, thanks to Shen Yuan who guided me through China, to Ruy Braga for introducing me to Brazil, to Nazanin Shahrokni for giving me an unforgettable glimpse of Iran, to Sari Hanafi who showed me so many different sides of Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, and to Mona Abaza for walking me through Cairo’s urban life during and after the Arab Spring. In England and in Wales, Huw Beynon has been a close friend, ever since we met to discuss industrial ethnography in a dark Chicago bar in 1975. I’m grateful to so many others in so many countries who have helped me understand how sociology contributes to making a better world.
The influence of students, both undergraduates and graduate students, has been deep, incalculable, and irreversible, not just in educating me but in making me, as I like to think, a better person. One former student, Laleh Behbehanian, now a brilliant teacher in Berkeley’s sociology department, became the driving force behind this project. She became my coach. Her enthusiasm helped to dilute my skepticism concerning the value of my sociological account of my sociological life. She read the manuscript three times; each time her detailed comments sent me scurrying back to revise the manuscript. I was getting a dose of my own medicine. After the fourth iteration I couldn’t bear to give it to her again. Enough already!
Besides, I was exhausting the patience of my editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, who had first approached me to write a short introduction to sociology. I originally agreed in the hope that I could write something for the undergraduates I had been teaching for 40 years. I owed them so much. It soon became apparent I was incapable of such an introduction. Instead I developed a reflection on my own trajectory through the four sociologies I had elaborated as president of the American Sociological Association in 2004 – the matrix of policy, public, critical, and professional sociologists. Unhappy with the drafts I sent him, I would have junked the whole enterprise were it not for the generous comments of two anonymous reviewers, as well as encouraging suggestions from Pascal himself who read it not once but twice. They had found value in my reflections, so I continued in what seemed to me a Sisyphean task. I also benefited from the suggestions of Chris Muller on Chapter 10 and of Chris Newfield on Chapter 15. With Tyler Leeds’s meticulous corrections and pointed suggestions, I was able to push the manuscript over the hill and into the abyss below. Ann Klefstad’s careful editing delivered the final touch.
William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” yet still the past is understood differently with time. Even in the last five years my views have evolved in unexpected ways. It could not be otherwise as I struggled to complete this little book in the midst of COVID-19 – a mounting health and economic crisis – not to mention police atrocities, insurgent movements on left and right, and Trumpian megalomania. From the perspective of Oakland, California, it looks like the planet will never be the same again. The pandemic has exposed the deepening inequalities and suffering that sociologists have been studying for decades. But COVID-19 has not just exposed those inequalities, it has amplified them. This should be a time when sociology comes into its own, as the crisis compels everyone to adopt a sociological vision; sociology shows us how capitalism can be defenseless against the accumulating crises it nurtures. But the state response, the social protest against anti-Black policing, the successful struggle against Trumpism, and the strategies of human coping have opened up new possibilities, new imaginations of what the world could be like, should be like, has to be like, if it is to contain global pandemics, climate change, and racial injustice. Sociology’s utopian mission remains making those possibilities real, an endeavour that also depends on recognizing what an uphill struggle that will be. But, as Erik Wright used to say, optimistically, “Where there’s a way there’s a will.”
IntroductionThe Promise of Sociology
It was 1967. I was sitting in Christ’s College Library, very depressed. I was a grammar school boy who didn’t belong in such a citadel of learning. I resented Cambridge – its spires and its gardens, its rituals and its gowns, its dons and its curfews, all things passed down from time immemorial. I resented the mathematics I was there to study, so removed from the world beyond. The place, the subject, the atmosphere all seemed so irrelevant, so meaningless.
And there on the desk, next to me, appeared a book called Suicide. That must be for me, I thought – a recipe for a way out of my misery. I picked it up and started reading. It was a strange tome written by some Frenchman called Émile Durkheim. As far as I could tell this turgid text made an astonishing claim: suicide – that most individual of acts, committed in a state of desperation – was a product of something beyond the individual, namely, the social relations one inhabits.
Rates of suicide, the propensity to commit suicide, Durkheim (1897) showed, varied with the group or society to which one belonged. Social relations that encourage excessive individualism lead to egoistic suicide. So Protestants, he claimed, are more likely to commit suicide than Catholics, men more than women. Group relations that demand exacting conformity, as in military units or in societies with strict moral codes, can cause altruistic suicide, the opposite of egoistic suicide. States of moral confusion – when life loses its meaning, when people experience rapid social mobility, or when society is in crisis – lead to anomic suicide. So, there it was, I was suffering from anomie. Ironically, Suicide healed my depression far better than any pill or even psychotherapy. Far from offering a road to ending my life, Suicide would inspire a lifelong commitment to sociology. This was sociotherapy based on socioanalysis.
To know that what we do is limited by forces outside our immediate control can be paralyzing but it can also be strangely liberating, as the pressures on the self are redirected to the world beyond, a world we share with others. As Karl Marx, another sociologist, once wrote: we make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing. This is the defining question of sociology: How do human beings make their worlds under external constraints? Sociology discovers what those constraints are, but not only that. In addition, sociology studies how those constraints may be changed to expand the realm of possibilities.
Sociology excavates the often-repressed desire for a different world, a better world, and explores the conditions of and obstacles to its realization. Sociology is caught between the possible and the impossible: between the utopian imagination reaching beyond the constraints on human action and the anti-utopian science that reveals their existence and power. By “anti-utopian” I don’t mean “dystopian,” which refers to an undesirable or “bad” society, but the limits on the realization of a “good” society.
There are three moments to utopian thinking. First, there is the simple desire for a better world, the originating impulse that impels us to become sociologists. We become sociologists not to become rich but to make a better world, whatever better might mean – more equal, more free, more cooperative. Second, those values form the basis of a systematic critique of society, the way the realization of values are systematically obstructed – how inequality, domination, egoism are reproduced by the social institutions we inhabit. This is the anti-utopian moment. Third, those same values can be molded into a vision of an alternative world. These alternatives are not blueprints; they are provisional, experimental, and tentative. In principle, they have nothing to do with totalitarianism and everything to do with emancipation. In this final moment the utopian imagination is not an abstract design but an elaboration, a one-sided elaboration of actually existing institutions, organizations, what Erik Wright called “real utopias,” what Max Weber called “ideal-types.” Suspended between their utopian aspirations and anti-utopian constraints, sociologists become archeologists excavating the world for emancipatory possibilities, now and in the past, here and there.1 The sociologist is impelled to discover the embryos of alternative worlds by an incessant lament directed at the existing world.
Given Cambridge’s insulation from the world beyond, it is not surprising that sociology never took root on such infertile soil. Other disciplines have thrived within such insulation: anthropology as the study of the colonial other as though it were a permanent fixture; economics as the fabrication of abstract models, removed from human experience; moral philosophy as the study of universal injunctions. They had long traditions in Cambridge. But sociology – this Johnny-come-lately discipline, flourishing in the red-brick universities at the time – was taboo. Sociology’s crass descent into abject lives threatened the sacred distance of scholarly endeavor. Sociology invites everyone – scholars, students, and lay-people – to reflect on the social world in which they dwell as a condition of comprehending the world in which others dwell. It compels the recognition, and takes as its principle assumption and challenge, that we are part of the world we study – participants in the world we observe or observers in the world in which we participate. We are not above the world; we are in the world. There’s no knowledge from nowhere.
Still, this poses a problem – how can we study the world as we participate in it? We need some stabilizing rudder that will guide us through the swamps of society. This brings us back to the discipline’s founding values. Sociology is a science that is built on moral commitment, on values that we hold deeply with others – freedom, reason, equality, solidarity. Different sociologists hold different values, but some value or set of values is necessary to stabilize our exploration of the world of which we are a part. This guided exploration, this science, seeks out the forces that obstruct the realization of what we value – forces that are hidden but, all the more certainly, govern our world. If everything were transparent to the actor, then there would be no science. We are in search of the invisible so as to make it visible – and thus more mutable – to ourselves and to others.
It is not enough to defend values in the abstract. A sociological approach to values is to discover them as embedded in institutions – institutions that incubate values as utopian imaginations that prefigure an alternative world. They might be the workplace free of alienation, the family free of domination, education free of inequality. The external forces we explore are the anti-utopian limits on the realization of those utopias. But these limits are not immoveable. As Max Weber writes in the epigraph to this book – the realization of the possible is through the pursuit of the impossible. Or to put it slightly differently, the pursuit of the impossible shifts the limits of the possible. To expand them we have to identify them and understand them. If we are not careful, however, the pursuit of the impossible can restrict as well expand those limits. Here lies the tragic moment of sociology – the way it maps the unintended consequences of utopian strivings. Without attention to the anti-utopian science, utopian strivings can, indeed, turn into dystopian nightmares.
It took me a few decades to come to these conclusions: to recognize the meaning of sociology as a value-based science, rooted in lived experience and focused on the tension between utopian and anti-utopian thinking. This book relates that process of discovery. It is not a novel, however. So it begins with my point of arrival. Part One begins by describing the utopian and anti-utopian tensions that lie at the heart of sociology as read through the conventional classics of sociology – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – but captured most clearly in the life and writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Feminists have made their own distinctive contributions.
The classics are also the founders of sociology because they had to carve out the distinctiveness of sociology as against other disciplines – psychology, economics, philosophy, history, and even theology – while at the same time drawing on them. Over the last century (and this is the subject of the second chapter), sociology has advanced as an academic discipline with its own division of labor, often trying to shed those founders either because they are obstacles to the progress of “value-free” science or because they are mired in the prejudices of their time. The classics are classics, however, because they transcend their time: they speak to the crises we face and are rooted in values we embrace. Their time is still our time.
Part Two turns to the point of departure, starting where so many of us begin – with policy sociology’s naïve view that social problems have technical solutions. I went to India in the earnest belief that the question as to which language should be the medium of instruction in Indian universities could be solved by what today would be called a field experiment. I came away understanding that wider political and economic context interests were the major contributors to any solution. I thought that integrating Black and white pay scales in the copper industry of postcolonial Zambia was a mathematical problem, but I quickly learned that the supposedly neutral job evaluation scheme I constructed already contained within it a solution defined by the preexisting racial order. I had entered the realm of policy sociology driven by utopian desire but without anti-utopian science.
Part Three, therefore, recognizes the limits to social change, leading me to public sociology and the hope that stimulating public debate and the exercise of collective rationality could shift those limits. Thus, television and print media disseminated the results of our study of the persistence of the color bar in the Zambian copper mines. Yet dissemination was not enough. Even though the study engendered public debate, the multinational corporation was able to deploy the results in its own interests. Casting one’s findings into the public sphere that is populated by powerful actors can have unexpected and unintended consequences – often unfavorable consequences. Thus, I turned from this traditional, mediated public sociology, to what I call an organic public sociology – an intimate, organic connection between sociologists and their constituency. I worked with students at the University of Zambia to collectively contest government policies. But this, too, was diverted into a losing political battle. In another continent – Latin America – these interventions might be called participant action research, which had its own fateful consequences, including the disappearance of sociology.
Despairing, I realized I simply understood too little of the forces shaping the outcomes of these public interventions – the unintended consequences of intentional action. Part Four follows my path as a graduate student to the University of Chicago, one of the historic heartlands of sociology. I was very disappointed by what was on offer – a parochial and self-referential vision of sociology. I took up arms against this professional sociology in critiques of extant theories of race, of development, and then of work – theories that served racial domination, neocolonialism, and capitalist profit. I turned against those reigning theories and their comforting illusions: that racism would simply evaporate through assimilation; that Third World countries released from colonialism would take off into modernity; that pretending to treat workers as human beings would get them to work harder. When the illusions proved to be just that, illusions, the temptation was to blame the victims – pathologized people of color, tradition-oriented colonized, lazy workers. Instead I drew on an anti-utopian Marxist research program to interrogate the class character of racial orders, the reproduction of cheap labor power through migration, and what I called “the politics of production.” I remain committed to participant observation, studying the factory I worked in, challenging the objectivity of the removed scholar, and gaining insight into the subjectivity of industrial labor. At the end of this part I bring together the ideas of the preceding chapters to assess one important sociological framework for studying race as it applied to South Africa. Together these four chapters in Part Four comprise critical sociology – a critique of the world but also of professional sociology as it was then.
Part Five describes my own trajectory into professional sociology. It opens with a series of flukes that landed me a position at Berkeley. This was as radical a department of sociology as you could find in the US, but it was still driven by the imperatives of the discipline. To survive I had to develop a research program – both a methodology and a theory – that could advance Marxism within professional sociology. What was at stake was not only the advance of a Marxist science, not only my own survival, but also securing jobs for my students. To establish some sort of legitimacy for Marxism I had to respond to mainstream critics of my research. Among other things, they were skeptical of the generality of my claims based on the study of a single factory. They doubted that my experiences in my Chicago factory were a function of capitalism rather than modern industrialism. I responded by developing the “extended case method” but also turning, once again, to working in factories, this time in socialist Hungary. There I identified their specifically socialist organization of labor, their specifically socialist production politics, and how they harbored a real utopia of democratic socialism. There were similarities between socialist and capitalist production, but there were also fundamental differences.
History took an unexpected turn. In 1989, while I was working away in the Lenin Steel Works (LKM), then the biggest and oldest steel mill in Hungary, state socialism crumbled. The democratic socialism I had envisioned from within the furnaces of LKM was never a serious contender; instead state socialism gave way to a destructive capitalism. That transition was not what I had come to Hungary to study. So I migrated to the still-standing high command of state socialism, to become a worker in the Soviet Union. But not for long. It was 1991 and the Soviet Union was itself in flux, about to sink into an extortionate merchant capitalism. From their lofty perch the Western economists were debating whether the transition to capitalism should be a revolutionary break with communism (shock therapy) or an evolutionary movement built through the creation of new supportive institutions. From where I was, in the factory, all I could see was the post-Soviet economy’s self-destructive involution. The realm of exchange was flourishing but it came at the cost of production – out of the planned economy arose barter, mafia, and banks eating away at industry and agriculture. A few were making enormous gains, while the vast majority sank into precarity. Utopian thinking – mine as well as theirs – was dashed, once again, on unseen rocks.
With no factories to work in, I followed the fate of my fellow workers as they wrestled with what I called “primitive disaccumulation,” the wanton destruction of the Soviet economy. This widespread faith in market fundamentalism – as though capitalism would spring spontaneously from the ruins of communism, as though there was a market road to a market economy – required a shift of critical perspective from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi, taking Marxism in new directions. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), a classic treatise on the dangers of overextending the market, reconstructed The Communist Manifesto for the twentieth century, shifting the focus of attention from production to exchange, from exploitation to commodification, from the state to society, from class struggle to the counter-movement. In its account of market ideology as well as market reality, Polanyi’s theory fitted the transition from socialism to capitalism far better than Marx. But it was a depressing scene, with people struggling for survival and with no better future in sight.
My sociology seemed irrelevant, impotent, but it was given new energy from the place I least expected. Part Six opens with the strange circumstances that led to my ascent up the professional ladder, into the leadership of national and international sociological associations. From that perch I returned to the quest for public sociology, inspired by the work of my colleagues and students at Berkeley, but also drawn to the committed sociology of South Africa driven by the fight against apartheid. I now understood that the advance of public sociology required an understanding of the world it sought to engage as well as the conditions of knowledge production.
The post-Soviet transition – not a “great transformation” but a “great involution” – accelerated “neoliberalism,” deepening what I call third-wave marketization that has left no part of the world untouched. What I experienced in Russia during the 1990s was an exaggerated, pathological form of anarchic capitalism, dominated by finance, that has spread across the world. State socialism as the actually existing alternative to capitalism had dissolved, and with it the utopian variants it harbored. It now became necessary to search for socialist alternatives within the interstices of capitalism.
With a Polanyian lens I could see how third-wave marketization threatened human existence, and, at the same time, paralyzed liberal democracy, giving rise to right-wing and left-wing populisms as well as to authoritarian regimes. The counter-movements to first- and second-wave marketization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed their own utopias, but the counter-movement to third-wave marketization seemed bereft of a utopian dimension, in large part because of the discrediting of the idea of socialism. One task for sociology today is to advance such utopian visions.
But is sociology capable of such visions? To answer that question, I turn to the conditions for the production of knowledge, not least the university, which is itself not exempt from the invading forces of capitalism. Third-wave marketization enters the university through the commodification of the production and dissemination of knowledge, which sets in motion a succession of crises: fiscal crisis, governance crisis, identity crisis, and legitimation crisis. If there was any doubt, this transformation of the university is the living demonstration that we are part of the world we study. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to hold on to notions of sociology assembled from outside the world it studies. The university can no longer be conceived of as an ivory tower. It has become a battleground between still unrealized utopias and dystopias. Its public moment has to be recovered by expanded access but also accountability. Within the crevices of the capitalist university, there are still spaces of emancipation, teaching being one of the most important. In constituting students as a public, sociology turns itself into its own real utopia.
Note
1
In her elaboration of the utopian method, Ruth Levitas (2013) refers to a similar troika: ontological desire, archeological critique, and architectural design. I use archeology in a different way, stressing the excavation of real utopias.
Part OneTheory and Practice
In contemporary sociology’s self-conception, three figures play an especially important foundational or canonical role: Karl Marx (1818–1883), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920). In the beginning, toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, these three figures were not recognized as founders. The idea of founding figures came much later, after World War II, based on the two dense volumes of The Structure of Social Action (1937). They were written by Talcott Parsons, the towering Harvard academic who sought to consolidate sociology around four historic figures – Durkheim, Weber, Marshall, and Pareto. In Parsons’ original view they independently converged on a “voluntaristic” theory of social action and a consensual view of society. In his 1949 Presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Parsons (1950) leaves Marshall and Pareto behind to give pride of place to Durkheim and Weber. In the turbulent 1960s, and against Parsons’ protests, Karl Marx was added to the pantheon.
Marx was an independent thinker outside the academic world, engaged in politics as well as with political economists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Durkheim was more centrally placed in the academic world, fighting for a place for the newly created discipline of sociology, especially against psychology. Weber was also deeply involved in university life in Germany and fought for sociology as a new approach to social science from his professorship in political economy.
They each carved out a vision of sociology resting on a set of philosophical assumptions about its object – society or the social. They each proposed a methodology for studying society, often rooted in a broad vision of history, leading to exemplary empirical research that has inspired legions of scholars to follow in their path. But, most important, their theories were rooted in a set of values – freedom, equality, solidarity – that guided what we might call a normative or moral science. Each scientific program wrestles with the question of how those values might be realized – that is the utopian side – and how their realization is obstructed – that is the anti-utopian side. These questions drove a theory of society’s permanence and continuity as well as a theory of history, of the future and, thus, of social change. These are the attributes that make Marx, Weber, and Durkheim canonical, necessary attributes for a body of scholarship to enter the pantheon of sociology.
The rare breadth, depth, and vision of canonical figures derive from the battles they fought to have their theories accepted. They had to engage with and borrow from, but also distinguish themselves from, neighboring fields of thought. Once the discipline of sociology was established, those pressures subsided, specialization took off, and the founders could be shed. They were the ladders that got us to the roof; once on the roof, the ladders could be cast aside. But it turns out that the ladders were pillars, too, and without them the roof began to sag. Losing touch with its founders weakens the distinctiveness of sociology as a moral science; it loses sight of itself as a historical actor; it abandons its soul.
If the first chapter of Part One concerns the theoretical foundations of our discipline, the second concerns the practical development of an internal division of labor. As it competed for a place in the academic field, so it advanced as a professional knowledge made up of scientific research programs intended for fellow sociologists who together control entry into the discipline. It, therefore, developed its own disciplinary institutions – academic journals, professional association, textbooks, defining problems with paradigmatic research exemplars, university curricula, and examinations. Professional knowledge justified itself not simply as an esoteric knowledge, but also one capable of addressing social problems, what we can call policy knowledge, offering its service to clients: corporations, governments, schools, churches. As policy knowledge sold itself to specific clients, so there developed a public knowledge that cultivated discussion and debate in the public sphere about the general direction of society and the values that underpin it. Finally, like any other discipline, professional sociology became an arena of contestation. The established research programs come to be challenged by rising generations, who developed critical knowledge that calls into question the fundamental assumptions of consecrated professional knowledge. These distinctions, of course, can inform the development of the division of knowledge-practices within any discipline, but here I confine myself to sociology.
Marx, Weber, and Durkheim offer much in the way of guidance and inspiration and their theories have continuing relevance to the problems we face today, but here I want to stress the way they remind us that a flourishing sociology depends upon all four types of knowledge. With specialization, the different knowledges fly apart, lose touch with one another, and the discipline loses its impetus. As professional and policy knowledge come to dominate and even expel critical and public knowledge, sociology suffers a double amnesia. Individually we lose sight of the original motivation to become sociologists and collectively we lose sight of the values that inspired sociology’s origins. As the policy moment finds the going tough in a hostile environment, all that remains is professional sociology, which itself then fragments into multiple disconnected research projects. The conceptualization of public sociology seeks to restore the contradictory unity of all four sociologies, recognizing that they sit uneasily together in relations of antagonistic interdependence. Only in this way can we return to the utopian and anti-utopian project that lies at the foundation of our discipline. This is especially important today when the original diagnoses of modernity – anomie, rationalization, alienation, domination, inequality – are coming home to roost, and when utopian thinking is losing credibility. Public sociology inspires the renewal of our discipline.
