Public Sociology

Michael Burawoy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509519187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part One
Theory 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.

The entry of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) into the sociological canon is especially important not only because he centered race in his analysis, not only because he had a global and historical vision, not only because he embarked from lived experience, not only because he was acutely aware of his own place in the world he studied, but also because he uniquely represented all four types of sociology. He circulated restlessly between academic and public worlds, and though he made great contributions to professional knowledge, he never lost sight of the critical sociology that drove it. His research led him to policy advocacy and an array of public interventions that made him unique among sociologists of the twentieth century. He was the greatest public sociologist of the twentieth century. Of all the sociologists, Du Bois was the most sensitive to the antagonistic interdependence among professional, policy, public, and critical sociologies, themselves suspended between utopian imagination and anti-utopian science. He becomes, therefore, the inspiration for a renewal of sociology that is in danger of losing its bearings in the welter of neoliberalism and the centrifugal forces at work within the division of disciplinary labor.

1
Theory
Utopia and Anti-Utopia

As a science sociology is unusual in that it refuses to forget its founders. How is it that we continue to draw inspiration from three European men – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – from the nineteenth century? From the standpoint of the present they have their inevitable blind spots: a limited focus on questions of race and gender; an often naïve belief in science; and a Eurocentric outlook on the world. They were very much a product of their era and its assumptions.

Indeed, Raewyn Connell (1997) has argued that these so-called classical sociologists had a limited vision of their own times and were arbitrarily chosen after World War II to represent the canon. Upon their shoulders rests the edifice of modern sociology, thereby eclipsing the contributions of a myriad social thinkers from outside Europe. Whereas sister-disciplines like anthropology, economics, and political science have reduced their founders to mere historical interest, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim hang on as obligatory but also inspirational reference points for sociology. Prominent contemporaries, Pierre Bourdieu or Jürgen Habermas, built their social theory on the basis of the same founding figures, implicitly in the case of the first and explicitly in the case of the second. Attempts at building alternative foundations, such as James Coleman’s rational choice theory, never made much headway or gained many adherents.

There is, however, one candidate with irrefutable credentials, around whom it is possible to reconstruct the canon – W. E. B. Du Bois. An African American born ten years after Durkheim and four years after Weber, he is of their generation but outlived them by nearly half a century. Educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois pioneered urban sociology at Atlanta University before launching into a public career as a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), editor of The Crisis magazine, and organizer of Pan-Africanism. In 1934 he returned to Atlanta University to complete his extraordinary history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As he became ever more hostile to the US state that persecuted him, he moved further leftwards, endorsing the socialist vision represented by the Soviet Union and “Communist” China, and ending his life in newly independent Ghana. As a novelist and poet (Du Bois 1911, 1928) he gave sociological theory a uniquely utopian twist that imagined the transcendence of racial and gender domination as well as class exploitation, an optimism always qualified by an anti-utopian science that tragically spelled out the limits of social transformation.

Changing the canon is not simply a matter of adding him to or replacing Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. A canon is always more than the sum of its parts. It refers to a configuration of relations among its members. Du Bois’s historically rooted, engaged sociology calls for a reconfiguration of the canon, foregrounding its public and critical dimensions, advancing the duality of utopian imagination and anti-utopian science. I start with the continuing significance of the relations among Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, before pointing to a new canon that incorporates Du Bois’s publicly engaged and historically embedded sociology.

The Canon That Was

In whatever ways they may be seen as a product of their times, the founders also rose above their times to speak to the abiding problems of modern society. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are exemplary not only for their insights into the social world, not only for the methods they used to explore that world, but also for the distinctive way they upheld a science rooted in values. Each managed to establish social constraints – that is, they were anti-utopian, opposing the optimism that anything was possible – but at the same time, they sought to bring the world under human guidance, opposing the pessimistic view that what exists is natural and inevitable. Their sociology was many things, not least a dialogue between its utopian and anti-utopian impulses.

Durkheim’s utopia, first spelled out in his 1893 dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society, was one in which every individual would find their niche in the division of labor. They would feel at one with the world they inhabited through their mutual interdependence and their contribution to the end product, what he called organic solidarity. This would only be possible in a society that offered unimpeded equality of opportunity so that everyone has the chance to assume an occupation best suited to their specific talents and abilities. The realization of such a society – a meritocracy – would, however, require radical change: the elimination of unmerited advantages associated with the “forced” division of labor in which individuals find themselves in positions for which they are ill-suited. Eliminating the forced division of labor required the end of the inheritance of wealth, but we know today that in addition to economic wealth, cultural wealth (family upbringing, primary socialization) is no less important in determining where in society we end up. To replace the forced division of labor with a meritocracy would require transforming our educational system so as to cancel the abiding effects of social inequalities based on race, class, and gender. Affirmative action aims to counteract such inherited inequalities, while such projects as the Harlem Children’s Zone attempt the equalization of opportunities from an early age.

Already a radical project, Durkheim’s organic solidarity went even further. Believing that integration into society required not just equality of opportunity, he proposed the elimination of unjustified inequalities of power. Workers, he said, would only feel part of the workplace if they were on the same footing as their employer, that is, if they did not fear arbitrary firing, if their boss could not lord it over them. This would call for state regulation of employment relations, as well as state guarantees of minimal existence in the face of unemployment. Employers would have to organize the cooperation of their workers without wielding the threat of dismissal. And if employers were to go out of business, workers and their families would not become destitute but would still obtain a basic standard of living. Thus, today Durkheim might be an advocate of universal basic income – an income unconditionally distributed to all adults that would enable them to subsist. One could envision Durkheim upholding the principles of social democracy that have been approximated in Scandinavian countries. Arguably, Durkheim’s vision proposed more than a century ago is both more necessary and more remote today in a world of crushing inequalities of wealth and power and mounting precarity.

Durkheim had a broader vision, a form of guild socialism with the occupational associational as its elemental form. While he advanced the idea of a regulatory state to minimize unjust inequality, he argued that occupational corporations would organize production and inherit property, supplanting the family as the basic unit of society. Durkheim’s utopian “normal” division of labor emerged from his anti-utopian analysis of the actually existing “abnormal forms” that impose external constraints on human action. The abnormal forms included not only the forced division of labor rooted in the unjustified and unequal distribution of resources, but also the anomic division of labor in which rapid social change gives rise to states of disorientation (normlessness) and a third abnormal form in which the different parts of society are badly coordinated.

Karl Marx, who never knew Durkheim, would have brought his own anti-utopianism to bear on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: The Promise of Sociology
• Part One: Theory and Practice
• 1. Theory: Utopia and Anti-Utopia
• 2. Practice: The (Di)vision of Sociological Labor
• 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
• 9. Manufacturing Consent
• 10. Racial Capitalism
• Part Five: Professional Sociology
• 11. Advancing a Research Program
• 12. Painting Socialism
• 13. The Great Involution
• Part Six: Real Utopias
• 14. Third-Wave Marketization
• 15. Whither the Public University?
• 16. Living Theory
• Conclusion: Biography Meets History
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement