The second half of 2003 also saw the first two issues of Social Theory and Health, a journal with Paul Higgs and I at UCL as the principal active editors and old friend Dick Levinson as our third and less active American editor (in truth he was doing us a favour by squeezing us into… Read More »
I have always been a ‘Sussex man’. In part this identity was formed around a schoolboy support of Sussex CCC. The county team in the Dexter-Parks era used to play two matches in Worthing. Three memories from these festivals pop into my mind: fast-medium pacer Ian Thompson taking all 10 wickets; a run out, with… Read More »
I have been reading Patrick Baert’s excellent study, The Existential Moment, which charts Sartre’s rise to intellectual status and fame in mid-1940s France and concludes with a more general sociological account of intellectuals. In Chapter Three Baert rehearses Sartre’s analysis of ‘collaborationist intellectuals’ in the aftermath of WW2. What was it to collaborate under German… Read More »
February 15, 2003, is a day that will enter the history books. It saw coordinated global protests against the imminent Iraq War in 600+ cities. Experts in social movements have described it as the largest protest event in human history. Estimates of participants worldwide range from 8 to 11 million: Rome saw around 3 million,… Read More »
I have elsewhere added two further types of sociology to Burawoy’s quartet. I have also suggested that each of his four and my two might be associated with a particular type of sociologist and of reasoning. Thus: professional sociology is associated with the scholar and cumulative theory; policy sociology with the reformer and utilitarian theory;… Read More »
Well, who would have thought it? So much ‘reform’ crammed into post-1970s financial capitalism and rationalized by neoliberal ideology! The institutions and conventions of postwar welfare capitalism – familiar to a declining proportion of the UK population – have been sabotaged by a fraction of the Occupy movement’s 1%, call them what you will: governing… Read More »
Where to start and end with Michel Foucault, a true innovator? This blog is another toe dipped into the water. Foucault, let’s recognize at the outset, rejected the notion that history unfolds in a linear and unidirectional fashion. In what I will here insist we should call his ‘grand narrative’ at the end of grand… Read More »
I have delivered a number of blogs characterizing my view of sociology. I have in particular maintained that it is part and parcel of what Habermas called lifeworld rationalization (in other words, that it is rationally and morally allied to representing and projecting justice and solidarity into the public sphere). I have argued too that… Read More »
I have always been an admirer of the subtle, no-nonsense Weberian sociology of John Goldthorpe. Now he has written a volume on sociology ‘as a population science’ that leads me to reflect on the apparently narrowing gap between his notion of sociology and that promulgated by critical realists like me. He would, I suspect, be… Read More »
The Power Elite Since the publication of C Wright Mills (1956) seminal The Power Elite times have changed: the elite-versus-mass industrial society of the USA in the 1950s differs in many ways from post-industrial Britain in the second decade of the 21st century. There have been several mentions of Mills’ text during the present era… Read More »