Social Theory: A New Introduction 3030783235, 9783030783235

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SOCIAL THEORY A New Introduction

Mark Murphy

Social Theory

Mark Murphy

Social Theory A New Introduction

Mark Murphy University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-78323-5    ISBN 978-3-030-78324-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Carol Yepes / Getty Images. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Cristina

Preface

The book offers a ‘new’ introduction to social theory in a number of ways: first, I have adopted the position that social theory is a politicised field, and this aspect should be brought very much to the fore in our attempts to come to grips with the nuances, motivations and complex arguments put forth in social theory. Any efforts to portray the field as value-free or politically neutral are doomed to failure, and as a result, the political aspect needs to be acknowledged, appreciated and just as importantly understood. This objective is assisted by another key feature of the book, which is its organisation around key thematic areas, such as culture, the economy and the self. Thematic grouping can be more effective and engaging pedagogically than the standard approach of grouping chapters by schools of thought, as it helps readers grasp the significance of the issues and how they reflect current social challenges. Each chapter is used as a platform to compare and contrast competing approaches to different themes. The third key feature of the book is its underpinning pedagogical approach. The book connects to current social issues (austerity, conflict, identity, inequality) in order for the reader to better engage with the material ahead. It is also important to ensure that the reader is not left at their own unique starting point but encouraged to think more critically about issues such as power, identity and inequality. The book is designed to deliver the kind of text that readers can ‘dip’ in and out of, and in this regard it provides features such as boxes detailing key theorists and concepts. The features included are: • Key movements: More detail on key movements in social theory, such as postcolonialism and feminism, are distributed across the chapters in box form. • Key terms: As well as key concepts, there are a range of key terms outlined in boxes across the text, such as ‘Cartesianism’ and ‘dialectics’. • Questions: Each chapter details a set of relevant questions at the end. • Glossary: There is a glossary provided at the end of book (note that glossary items are identified in bold in the text). • Modernity and postmodernity: A section that summarises the main differences between modernity and postmodernity is included in Chap. 6.

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• Key theorists: Each chapter identifies and features in box form a key thinker in social theory—for example, Habermas in Chap. 3. • Key concepts: Each chapter highlights a key concept, such as ‘Embodiment’ in Chap. 10. • Social theory applied: This feature covers key applications of a social theory in the research literature, such as ‘The degradation of labour’ in Chap. 4. • Debates in social theory: Scattered across the chapters are a number of important debates that have occurred in the field, for example, the positivism debate, featuring Adorno and Popper (Chap. 8). • Suggested readings: A section on suggested readings is included at the end of each chapter, detailing relevant texts. • In Summary sections: Each chapter concludes with a section that briefly summarises each key issue detailed in the chapter. Glasgow, UK

Mark Murphy

Acknowledgements

In a field as dense and complex as social theory it always helps to seek out the opinions of others when it comes to decisions over the content, structure and style of an introductory text. This book benefited from the regular chapter readings undertaken by Cristina Costa, who was always happy to cast a comradely eye over the chapters. Constructing a text such as this can be a daunting exercise, so it was a major help to have someone ‘on site’ to provide support as well as useful direction. There are a number of other colleagues who also gave up their time to read sections of the book, including Ellen Vanderhoven, Tadeu Lunardi, Robert Aman, Ted Fleming, Sarah K, St John, Robert Allan and Ali Sameer. Alongside these, a range of anonymous reviewers commented on earlier drafts of the book, and I am grateful for their thorough and rigorous appraisal of the contents. A special mention must go to the staff at Palgrave Macmillan who have been supportive through the book’s development as well as being very patient and understanding. Thank you all.

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Contents

1

Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   1 What Is Social Theory?������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Organisation and Content of the Book������������������������������������������������������    2 Chapter Content ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 Reference ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5

Section I Understanding the State   7 2

The State ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   9 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 Freedom and the State��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 Elites and the State������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 The Capitalist State������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   14 The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate����������������������������������������������������������   15 Statification������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   17 The Welfare State as Crisis Management��������������������������������������������������   20 From the Dependent to the Postcolonial State������������������������������������������   21 Globalisation and the State������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 The Rise of the Neoliberal State����������������������������������������������������������������   26 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   28 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   30

3

Governance ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  33 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 Bureaucracy and Its Discontents����������������������������������������������������������������   34 The Totally Administered Society��������������������������������������������������������������   37 The Colonisation of the Lifeworld������������������������������������������������������������   40 New Public Management and the Governance Turn����������������������������������   42 Governance and Street Level Bureaucracy������������������������������������������������   45 The Social Pathologies of Juridification����������������������������������������������������   47 Governance, Risk and Blame��������������������������������������������������������������������   50 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   52 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54

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The Economy����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  57 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   57 Capital and the Commodification of Labour ��������������������������������������������   59 The Great Transformation��������������������������������������������������������������������������   64 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society������������������������������������������������������   66 The Labour Process and the Degradation of Work������������������������������������   68 Automation: The End of Work? ����������������������������������������������������������������   70 The Classed Nature of Economic Life������������������������������������������������������   72 The Gendered Nature of Economic Life����������������������������������������������������   74 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   79

5

Civil Society������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  81 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 State, Economy and Civil Society�������������������������������������������������������������   82 Civil Society and Class Struggle����������������������������������������������������������������   83 Civil Society and Radical Democracy ������������������������������������������������������   86 Assessing the Politics of Civil Society������������������������������������������������������   87 Uncivil Society������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 Social Movements: Old and New��������������������������������������������������������������   91 Social Movements in Times of Austerity��������������������������������������������������   92 On Subaltern Counter Publics��������������������������������������������������������������������   95 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   98 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  101

Section II Understanding the Social 103 6

Culture�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 105 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105 The Significance of Culture in Social Theory��������������������������������������������  106 The Culture Industry����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  107 Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn������������������������������������������������������  110 Education, Culture and Social Class����������������������������������������������������������  115 Culture and Orientalism����������������������������������������������������������������������������  118 Cultural Identity and Diaspora������������������������������������������������������������������  120 The Cultural Politics of the Subaltern��������������������������������������������������������  123 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  129

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Language���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 131 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 The Linguistic Turn in Social Theory��������������������������������������������������������  132 From Structuralism to Poststructuralism ��������������������������������������������������  134 Language and the Dialogic Imagination����������������������������������������������������  137 Discourse and Discursive Practices ����������������������������������������������������������  139 Language and Communication������������������������������������������������������������������  142

Contents

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The Symbolic Power of Language������������������������������������������������������������  145 The Hidden Curriculum of Language��������������������������������������������������������  147 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  152 8

Knowledge�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 155 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 Knowledge and Objectivity�����������������������������������������������������������������������  156 Adorno Versus Popper: The Positivism Debate ����������������������������������������  159 The Social Construction of Knowledge ����������������������������������������������������  160 Power and the Archaeology of Knowledge������������������������������������������������  163 Indigenous Knowledge and Postcolonial Theory��������������������������������������  166 The Politics of Academic Knowledge��������������������������������������������������������  168 The Politics of Academic Knowledge: Curriculum ������������������������������  169 The Politics of Academic Knowledge: Gatekeeping ����������������������������  171 The Politics of Academic Knowledge: The Public Intellectual ������������  173 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  176 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  178

Section III Understanding the Self and Selfhood 181 9

The Self ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 183 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 Anomie, Alienation and the Self����������������������������������������������������������������  184 Self and the Spirit of Capitalism����������������������������������������������������������������  185 Modernity, Postmodernity and Self-Identity����������������������������������������������  187 The Self as Relational��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  189 Self as Performance ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  192 Self as Subjectivation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  195 Self as Performativity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  201 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  203

10 Emotions ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  205 Psychoanalysis and Social Theory������������������������������������������������������������  206 Dissent and the Fromm-Marcuse Debate��������������������������������������������������  207 The Politics of Desire and the Capitalist Machine������������������������������������  210 Emotions and the ‘Shared Third’ ��������������������������������������������������������������  212 Social Theory and Respect������������������������������������������������������������������������  216 Social Theory and Shame��������������������������������������������������������������������������  219 Social Theory and Trust ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  221 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  224 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  226

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11 The Body ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 229 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 The Body as a Cultural Text����������������������������������������������������������������������  230 Throwing Like a Girl: Gender and the Body ��������������������������������������������  233 Habitus and Bourdieu��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  237 Elias and the Habitus ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  240 Bodies and Bio-power��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  241 The Body and Performativity��������������������������������������������������������������������  243 Sexuality and Queer Theory����������������������������������������������������������������������  245 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  248 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  250 12 Social Justice���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 253 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  253 Justice as Fairness��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  254 Justice as Capability����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  256 The Rawls-Habermas Debate��������������������������������������������������������������������  259 Theories of Justice: A Critique������������������������������������������������������������������  259 Debate: Recognition or Redistribution?����������������������������������������������������  261 Bringing Solidarity Back In ����������������������������������������������������������������������  262 Solidarity as a Work in Progress����������������������������������������������������������������  263 The Politics of Care ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  266 In Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  270 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  272 13 Conclusion�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 275 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  275 Further Reflections������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  276 Social Theory and Hybridisation ��������������������������������������������������������������  278 Hybridisation and the Art of Social Theory ����������������������������������������������  281 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  282 Glossary �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 283 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 287 Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 303

1

Introduction

What Is Social Theory? So far, the twenty-first century has witnessed a number of significant developments, including increased globalisation, accelerated technological advancement, massive shifts in migration across geographical locations and a highly uncertain and precarious economic climate. These sets of circumstances are joined by a politics of identity that affects many aspects of life, but is especially pronounced in the retreat from globalisation into the comfort of nationhood and ethnic solidarity. The implications of these developments for society require some form of analysis and explanation, a requirement that provides the core rationale for the development of social theory, an intellectual field of inquiry that has been generated in tandem with social, cultural and economic developments since the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, social theories are analytical frameworks or paradigms used to examine social phenomena. The term ‘social theory’ covers a range of key issues, such as societal change, power and control, the nature of social behaviour, gender and ethnicity, capital and social class, as well as theories of justice, solidarity and freedom. In contemporary social theory, certain core themes take precedence over others, themes such as the nature of social life, the relationship between self and society, the structure of social institutions and the role and possibility of social transformation. Alongside the existence of this broad range of issues, there is also a large number of what can be termed social theories (e.g., see the key movement boxes throughout the book). Prominent among those branded as social theorists are the likes of Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas. The influence of these theorists has extended well beyond their home disciplines and into the broader public sphere, combining the role of social theorist with that of public intellectual. Intellectualising the problems and issues of the day, they provide spaces within which researchers as well as others can adopt an intellectual stance to their subjects with some level of legitimation and credibility.

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It is also evident that their theories are delivered with political intent, whether it be Derrida’s deconstructive approach, the democratic theory of Habermas, the critical social science of Bourdieu or the archaeology and genealogies of Foucault. In this way, they can be viewed as heirs to the tradition of social philosophy, a tradition that stretches at least as far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Discourse on the origin of inequality (1755/2004). This tradition aimed to use philosophy to examine problems in society, an aim not too dissimilar to the social theories so popular today. It is not surprising, then, that a common thread in much contemporary social theory is a fascination, even obsession, with how the dynamics and forms of power play themselves out via institutions, linguistic traditions, texts, cultures and forms of selfhood. The focus on theories such as these for the purpose of this book is not to deny the existence or significance of other forms of theory. More psychologically oriented sets of ideas (such as the work of Jean Piaget) have been used extensively in academic research, although the research questions tend to be of a different type.

Organisation and Content of the Book In order to introduce and detail the scope of social theory, the book is structured around a set of chapters devoted to three core issues in social theory: • Section I: Understanding the state (The state, Governance, The economy, Civil society) • Section II: Understanding the social (Culture, Language, Knowledge) • Section III: Understanding the self and selfhood (Self, Emotions, The body) The final thematic chapter is devoted to social justice, an overarching theme of social theory that finds itself embedded in the other core themes. The conclusion also explores the concept of theory hybridisation and offers some useful advice for novice social theorists in their quest to make better sense of theory. The book takes advantage of other forms of pedagogical features such as boxes to highlight key thinkers/traditions. At the same time, it is important to address the beginnings of social theory also (e.g., Marx and Hegel) and to emphasise the importance of historical transformations (enlightenment, industrialisation, democratisation) as a backdrop to the development of social thought. While the discipline of sociology is inevitably well-covered in the book, the content is far from exclusively sociological. The interdisciplinary nature of much social theory requires a level of ‘undisciplining’, which is a particular focus of the book, as the discussions do not have to be framed by any particular disciplinary paradigm (e.g., structure and agency). At the same time, there is an acknowledgement of the important role sociology has played in the development of social theory, and the book’s opening set of chapters reflect this importance (e.g., in the focus on

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the state and the economy, and the emphasis placed on scholars such as Marx and Weber). This acknowledgement is vital to familiarise readers with the foundations of social theory before guiding them through the theories that have been generated across other disciplines in more recent years.

Chapter Content The book starts with a focus on the state in Chap. 2, a consistent theme in social theory since the time of Hegel who argued that the state was in the best position to fulfil the potential of the French Revolution and its desire for equality, freedom and solidarity. Hegel’s account is detailed in the chapter, followed by twentieth-century accounts of the state that deliver a more downbeat assessment of the state’s capacity to deliver justice. These include the work of C. Wright Mills on the economic power elite, theories of the capitalist state as detailed by Nikos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband, which debate the relation between capital and the state, and Claus Offe’s critical analysis of the welfare state approach to democracy. The chapter includes a discussion of Foucault and his approach to ‘statification’ as well as a summary of dependency and postcolonial approaches to state theory. The chapter returns to the relationship between capital and the state by focusing on globalisation and the rise of neoliberalism. Theories of the state have often gone hand in hand with theories of governance, which is the subject of Chap. 3. Max Weber’s concept of the ‘iron cage’ has been a touchstone for much of the subsequent theory on governance, and Chap. 3 explores this development via some intellectual spin-offs. This includes how Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer took Weber’s iron cage to what they considered its logical conclusion—the ‘totally administered society’. The chapter examines how later incarnations of the Frankfurt school, in particular Habermas, adapted this idea and reshaped it into a theory of lifeworld colonisation. The chapter also takes a close look at the rise of new public management and its consequences for street-level bureaucracy, including juridification and risk avoidance. Foucault’s work on governmentality is also covered, providing a different view to the strong Weberian slant evident elsewhere in the chapter. Chapter 4 explores the relation between social theory and the economy, covering topics such as social class and the commodification of labour. These ideas, which have been central to social theory since the nineteenth century, have managed to keep their explanatory power in a globalised world. At the same time, such ideas have been reimagined in the context of changing historical circumstances and changing political demands for justice from social groups such as women and new types of twenty-first-century worker in the gig economy. To reflect this, the chapter includes a discussion of the economics of both class and gender. As well as the theory of Karl Marx, two alternative theories of capitalist development are also outlined: the great transformation (Karl Polanyi) and the post-industrial society (Daniel Bell).

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Chapter 5 introduces the social sector known as civil society (sometimes known as the third sector), the voluntary social sphere that sits between the state and the economy and is the home for numerous struggles for justice and the social movements engaged in these struggles. This chapter explores the significance of these social movements while also emphasising the role of the public sphere, the vital debating chamber of civil society made famous by Habermas in his book The structural transformation of the public sphere (1989). This chapter explores the meaning of the public sphere in the digital age, while also examining the ways in which changing economic conditions have reshaped the organisation and fabric of social movements in the twenty-first century. The focus of the book shifts towards more social concerns in Chap. 6 with the topic of culture. Although a subject of interest in classical social theory, for example in the work of Emile Durkheim, studies of culture came more to the fore in the twentieth century via theorists who saw culture as both a tool of domination and resistance. The work of Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony are covered here, alongside the downbeat assessment of popular culture delivered by Theodor Adorno. The relation between culture and class is detailed, while the second half of the chapter is devoted to some important postcolonial offshoots of cultural studies (Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak). The study of language has become a key area of interest in modern social theory, and this is the focus of Chap. 7. The interest in language is shared across many of the major social theorists, including Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu and Foucault, a fact that testifies to the enormous significance of the ‘linguistic turn’ undertaken by social theory in the twentieth century. The chapter includes important examples of this turn, including: Derrida’s method of deconstruction and theory of différance; Bourdieu’s analysis of the symbolic power of language and its effects on social class relations; Habermas’ search for universal foundations for critical theory via formal pragmatics; and Foucault’s highly influential concept of discourse. Also detailed in the chapter is the significance of language in studies of schooling and inequality via the work of Basil Bernstein. Closely associated with studies of language is the concept of knowledge, another central focus in modern social theory and the subject of Chap. 8. The chapter begins with a study of Karl Mannheim, whose early twentieth-century concerns over the objectivity of knowledge are mirrored in contemporary debates over the meaning of truth and the value of evidence and facts. His ideas influenced the positivism debate in the 1960s, as well as the arguments put forward by Berger and Luckmann in their influential text The social construction of reality. Since the 1960s other ideas have come to the fore, including Foucault’s analysis of the relation between knowledge and power, the situatedness of knowledge (Donna Haraway) as well as the theory of indigenous knowledge. These are all covered in Chap. 8 which also incorporates a special section on the politics of academic knowledge. The book then takes a turn into matters of the self, the subject of Chap. 9. The chapter provides an overview of social theory and the self since the time of Durkheim and Marx, whose work on concepts such as anomie, alienation and modernisation have been joined in more recent times by a focus on reflexivity and relationality in

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theories of the self. The chapter details this turn, covering the work of Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman. Important debates over the self in relation to class, race and gender are incorporated into the chapter with a particular focus on how relations of power impact conceptions of selfhood. Chapter 10 examines the subject of emotions, which is closely tied to studies of self and selfhood in the social theory canon. Emotions is another theme that has risen to prominence in social theory in more recent times, with theorists arguing that emotional life, which is often construed as a private concern, is a valid subject of intellectual inquiry from a social perspective. While authors such as Marx and Georg Simmel engaged in different ways with emotions, contemporary theorists such as Axel Honneth and Jessica Benjamin have adopted a much more concerted effort to study the relation between emotions and the social world. Their contributions are included here, as well as the important influence of psychoanalysis on social theory in the twentieth century. Also covered are case studies of specific emotions that have attracted considerable interest from social theorists: respect, shame and trust. Alongside the self and emotions, the body has become a focal point for social analysis and is the focus of Chap. 11. A concern with the body has been present in social theory for some time, for example in the work of Mary Douglas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who are both introduced in this chapter. In the digital age it is difficult to escape body politics in its various guises such as fat shaming and heated debates over female body representation and sexual identity. The way these debates have manifested themselves in social theory is covered in this chapter via the work of theorists such as Foucault (bio-politics), Iris-Marion Young (gender and physical space) and Judith Butler (the body and heteronormativity). Also included are two different takes on the concept of habitus from Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. The final thematic chapter in the book, Chap. 12, is devoted to the topic of social justice. A topic at the heart of social theory, concerns over fairness, equality and rights are never too far away from socio-theoretical analysis, generating much discussion in the literature. This chapter includes a summary of key theories of justice including the work of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. As an alternative to social justice theories, the chapter includes a section on care ethics developed by feminist thinkers such as Carol Gilligan, as well as a section on the related topic of social solidarity as represented in the work of Richard Rorty.

Reference Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press.

Section I Understanding the State

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The State

Introduction One of the major events of the twenty-first century was the 2008 global financial crisis, an event with damaging and lasting effects on states across the world. Numerous states were blindsided by the ‘crisis’ and found themselves caught in a combination of excessive debt and hugely reduced income. For many this meant a cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund; since 2008, there have been over 40 state bailouts, including those in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Greece, Mexico and Morocco, the price for state bailouts the imposition of capitalist orthodoxy. The effects are still experienced today and are behind a more general spread of precarity and austerity (through the proliferation of zero-hours contracts, the loosening and even dismantling of workers’ rights and environmental protections) as a policy response to the calamitous effects of the recession on public expenditure. The state, as an entity, seems to be facing a never-ending crisis. This crisis of the state has been received differently depending on the receiver– advocates of neoliberalism (see key term box) see the state as an inconvenient obstacle to the efficiency of marketisation and privatisation and hence a weakened state is a step in the right direction. Also evident post-2008 is a surge in nationalist sentiment, with populist movements viewing the state as a place to shelter from the global economic storm—see the rise of populist leaders Jar Bolsanaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. This dual conception of the state, as both a problem and a solution, is mirrored in social theory, which is why the state is a key concept in the field and one of the most contested. Questions of sovereignty, nationhood and territory (core issues in Political Science) take something of a back seat in social theory, where instead the role of the state in relation to the social and in particular social justice takes centre stage. The content of this chapter reflects this intellectual hinterland, beginning with a summary of Hegel and his theory of the state, in which the debate took a distinct

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social-theoretical turn around the concept of freedom. This is followed by an overview of a number of interrelated theoretical developments, including the power elite, the capitalist state and the welfare state, all of which to some extent position the state alongside and in conjunction with the process of capitalist modernisation. The chapter includes a discussion of Foucault and his approach to statification as well as a summary of dependency and postcolonial approaches to state theory. The chapter returns to the relationship between capital and the state by focusing on globalisation and the rise of neoliberalism. Specifically the chapter is organised around the following themes: • The state as the home of freedom (Hegel) • Alternative theories of the state: the elitist state (Mills); the capitalist state (Miliband-Poulantzas) and the welfare state (Offe) • Postmodern and postcolonial theories of the state • Globalisation, neoliberalism and the state

Freedom and the State A sensible starting point in a discussion of social theory and the state is the work of Georg Wilhelm Hegel (see Key Theorist Box). Hegel, is, according to Weil (1998: 76), ‘the philosopher of the modern state’. This is no mean achievement given the number of authors that could potentially lay claim to such a position. But Hegel stands out in the context of social theory for a number of reasons. His influence is evident in the way in which his core ideas have formed interconnected conceptual threads running through social theory until the present day. Hegel’s formidable body of work helps connect current concerns over social justice, freedom and reason with the heady days of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, his ideas resonating with the present; the spectres of Hegel ‘still haunt us’ (Bartelson 2001: 42). Modern social theory is still haunted by Hegel precisely because theory is still enamoured with the concept of the state and being citizens of which makes it impossible to escape from the Hegelian legacy. This citizenship aspect sets Hegel apart—it gives him a social component lacking in other appraisals of the state. What was it about the state that resonated with Hegel? For him, the state represented the fulfilment of the ideals of the Enlightenment, ideals that centred on liberty (freedom), equality and solidarity. This explains Hegel’s fascination with the French Revolution and its aftermath, and also helps explain why his ideas on the state have endured. And yet it should also be noted that Hegel was no flagwaver for the French Revolution. Hegel was deeply ambiguous about the events of 1798, worried about the after-effects of the revolution and the reign of terror it unleashed. Social progress for Hegel was not the inevitable outcome of revolutions and was more wary of initiatives ‘from below’ and the attendant

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‘irrational’, ‘barbarous’ mass movements and expected ‘nothing good to come of them at the political level’ (Kouvelakis 2003: 44). Revolutionary fervour did not appeal to Hegel, but it was not just the violence that concerned him; it was also if not more so the conception of freedom that drove this violence, a problematic conception he lays squarely at the feet of the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Hegel considered Rousseau to represent a narrow conception of freedom, one that dissolves the state into the sphere of exchanges between contracting property holders. This for Hegel was an atomistic, isolated and inherently restricted concept of freedom, which, judging by numerous passages in his famous text Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991) infuriated Hegel. This is because the state represents for Hegel a novel and moral formation that is greater than the sum of its parts, not just a collection of isolated individuals. He believed that Rousseau’s contractual idea of freedom, famously outlined in The Social contract (Rousseau 2003[1762]), overlooked the social element to freedom. It made no sense to Hegel to split the notion of freedom into atomised singular units of free individuals, each with their own social contract. Hegel had a chilling word he used in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to sum up what he felt was the inevitable outcome of this form of freedom——death, or specifically, ‘death that has no inner depth or fulfilment; … the coldest, shallowest of deaths, with no more significance than cleaving a cabbage head or swallowing a gulp of water’ (Hegel 1977: 360). Revolutionary violence, according to Hegel, was the fanatical form which had been adopted by Rousseau’s abstract idea of absolute freedom, when in practice ‘it confronted institutions incompatible with its own self-­ realization’ (Wokler 1998: 44). Hegel’s take on the state and freedom was quite different, describing freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in another’. Freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in another’ summarises his response to the problem of freedom classically formulated by Rousseau: namely, how is it that a person can be autonomous or self-determining despite their inevitable dependence on others? (Baynes 2002: 1). Hegel refers to this conception of freedom as ‘absolute freedom’, in contrast to relative, partial or dependent forms, or ‘concrete freedom’, in contrast to abstract or formal notions of freedom that were popular at the time. Importantly for Hegel, membership of a community is necessary for individual freedom to flourish. The state provided the highest form of this community while also demanding a commitment to ethical life, or sittlichkeit. Hegel’s theory of freedom was therefore an intersubjective one, as well as a contextualised conception, and far removed from what he considered the common-sense understanding of freedom as ‘being able to do as one wants’ (Philosophy of Right §15).

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Key Theorist: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Germany, Hegel was a master thinker, a ‘panlogicist’ according to Jacques Lacan, and a major influence on numerous social theorists including Lacan but also Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, George Herbet Mead and Herbert Marcuse. As Singer (2001) puts it, ‘with perhaps the exception of Marx, no philosopher of the nineteenth or twentieth century has had as great an impact on the world as Hegel’. His influence stems from his capacity as a ‘systematic’ thinker, able to expertly combine ideas from a range of disciplines and philosophical approaches to develop a grand theory. Core elements of his theory include conceptions of freedom, reason, self-­ consciousness and recognition, which have endured to this day, and can be witnessed in their influence on contemporary thinkers such as Jessica Benjamin, Judith Butler, Axel Honneth and Slavoj Žižek. His major works include the Phenomenology of Spirit (sometimes referred to as Phenomenology of Mind), which is his account of the evolution of human consciousness, and where he explains in detail his concept of Geist/Spirit (1977[1807]); the Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy (2015a[1831]), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (2015b[1817]), a summary of his entire philosophical system, and the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991), an outline of his political philosophy (including that of the state), published in 1820. One of Hegel’s most influential ideas is that of Geist, a German word that is normally translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ in English versions. Broadly speaking, Hegel uses the term to refer to the collective consciousness of society, as opposed to individual private forms of awareness. This dimension has similarities to Emile Durkheim’s later notion of collective consciousness and is not dissimilar to the more modern conception of culture. During his life Hegel was unafraid to be controversial and to take on the ideas of prominent thinkers of the time—for example, he was a prominent critic of the philosopher Emmanuel Kant. His politics also caused consternation, some commentators then (and now) portraying Hegel to be a nationalistic apologist for the Prussian State of the early nineteenth century. Hegel’s work can be claimed and interpreted in various ways, illustrated by the fact that elements of both the political left and right have championed/condemned Hegel at various points since his death. He himself during his life dramatically changed his opinions, for example when it came to Kant and Rousseau, both of whom he had admired in his early work but later significantly disagreed with (as is evident in his account of freedom). His impact after his death in 1831 can be seen in the establishment of the Young Hegelians, a group of German intellectuals who dedicated themselves to continuing his legacy. One of the young Hegelians was a young Karl Marx who later developed his own take on Hegel’s legacy (see Chap. 4).

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Elites and the State While Hegel baulked at the over-zealous righteousness of French revolutionaries and their struggle for justice, he viewed the revolution as the birthplace of the state in its greatest form—a home for freedom to flourish, the freedom to be at home with oneself in another. But with the passage of history this romantic conception of the state has at times become difficult to defend or even envisage. The ideal of Hegel’s state of freedom, according to numerous commentators, is sorely tested by elites, by corruption, and by the power of money. C. Wright Mills, who already had written a number of sociological texts and would later write The Sociological Imagination (1959), published his book The Power Elite in 1956 in the context of a conservative America which took as a given the rightness of pluralism and state-protected democracy. But instead of a society built on the principles of separation of powers, freedom and equality, Mills painted a wholly different picture—a society run by a self-interested and self-serving cabal, made up of interconnected members of the political, economic and military elite. For Mills, the elite called the shots, controlling central pillars of American life, including family, schools and church: Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call. And the symbols of all these lesser institutions are used to legitimate the power and the decisions of the big three. (Mills 1956: 6)

This undermining of the great American dream was a result of the concentration of power in the hands of a relatively small number of people (these are outlined in some detail in Mill’s book). Those in top positions in government, for example, the Secretaries of State and Defence, had close associations with CEOs and other senior members of top US corporations. This analysis of American life contradicted not only the prevailing self-perception of the United States as a bastion of democracy, but also the notion that it represented a classless society. Most of the members of this elite, according to Mills, were from the very comfortable upper third of the income and occupational groups. They graduated from the same Ivy League universities, such as Harvard and Princeton, and joined the same clubs and societies. They represented in effect an American high society version of the old school tie. This power elite has risen to prominence in a country whose power structure in the 1920s revolved around what Mills calls ‘local society’ partly at least because of a power vacuum when it came to international matters. This international dimension became much more significant during and after the Second World War: Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and traditions for the handling of international problems. Such formal democratic

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mechanics as had arisen in the century and a half of national development prior to 1941, had not been extended to the American handling of international affairs. It is, in considerable part, in this vacuum that the power elite has grown. (Mills 1956: 274–275)

The international dimension to elites is just as significant in the twenty-first century, if not more so according to authors like Leslie Sklair, who argues that the most important power elite today is what he calls the ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC), which includes the directors of transnational corporations who identify more with each other than with their compatriots. Sklair argues that the economic interests of TCC members are increasingly globally linked rather than exclusively local and national in origin (Sklair 2000).

The Capitalist State Mill’s approach focused on the way the state served particular interests and not the universal citizen interests so desired by Hegel. This tendency to favouritism and elitism has been a long-running issue of interest to social theory, particularly when it comes to capitalism. One corner of social theory has devoted itself doggedly to the question of this relationship between the state and capitalism. Much of this debate is inspired by the work of Karl Marx and falls within the strand of social theory normally referred to as Neo-Marxism. The debate continues today in journals such as Capital and Class and the Radical Journal of Political Economy, but had its heyday in the 1970s with what has become known as the Miliband-Poulantzas debate. This had its roots in earlier debates and ideas, including those of Mills’, but also one of the foremost neo-Marxists of his time, the French sociologist Louis Althusser. The starting point was the critique of what has been called ‘orthodox’ Marxism which supposedly posits a rigid functionalist view of the state as determined by the economic forces of production—that is, the state as an epiphenomenon of the economy. The theory developed by Althusser rejected economic determinism, instead arguing for the relative autonomy of the state from the economy—a significant departure from ‘orthodox’ Marxism. He was able to do this because of his adherence to a form of structuralist thinking, an approach to structuralism that puts centre stage the structures of a given social formation. By social formation, Althusser was referring to society as a totality, including every aspect of society and not just a single mode of production that could only form part of the whole. Such structures included not only the economy but also the political-judiciary system and ideology (Althusser 2005). Each of these structures was governed by their own set of rules and their own reality. These structures, although derived from Marx’s concept of the mode of production, differed in the sense that any one of them ‘can be the structure in dominance’ in a particular mode of production (Carnoy 1984: 90), and were not just by-products of the economic structure. So, depending on the given social form of life, any of these could be dominant, not just the economic.

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This was an important mission for Althusser—he wanted to ‘rescue’ what he considered the true Marx from such humanist interpretations. Althusser arguably also had a much more developed theory of how state power works than other theorists, as evidenced in his most famous essay (and one of the most wellknown in social theory) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 1971). Published originally in a collection called Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, the essay was concerned with identifying the ways in which the state exercises its power, Althusser identifying two key elements in this regard. One was the ‘repressive state apparatus’ comprised of the police, army and the law courts, and the other was the ‘ideological state apparatus’—comprised of the educational system, media, religious and cultural institutions. What made the essay famous was the latter focus, Althusser branding supposedly civil and democratic institutions such as schools as instruments of ideological state repression. The following quote from the essay positions the school as the dominant ideological apparatus: It takes children from every class at infant school age, and then for years, the years at which the child is most vulnerable; squeezed between the family state apparatus and the educational state apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civics instruction). (Althusser 1971)

Althusser’s rebranding of ideology as a form of social reproduction allows comparison not only with Marx but also with the work of Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony as manufactured consent (see Chap. 3).

The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate The Miliband–Poulantzas debate unfolded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, via the much-admired New Left Review journal—a magnet for those who were grappling with the events of 1968 while still exhibiting sympathy for Marxist approaches to social issues. It was the ideal home for this debate to unfold, a classic case of two juxtaposed positions on a significant and theoretical issue of the day. The significance of the debate lay in its theoretical implications as well as its practical consequences for Marxist revolutionary struggle. This period after all saw the continuing Cold War saga cement itself via the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the capitalist-­ communist proxy wars of Vietnam, Rhodesia, Chad and Sudan (among numerous others) and the communist insurgencies taking place in countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, revolts that were often tied to nationalist movements for independence. So there was much at stake when it came to assessing the capitalist nature of the liberal democratic state, not least the desire of many European socialists to distance themselves from the terrors of Stalinist Marxism.

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The debate was between two sets of ideas, embodied in the figures of two prominent left intellectuals: Ralph Miliband, a British sociologist, and Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek-French sociologist heavily influenced by Althusser. Miliband had published a book in 1969, The State in Capitalist Society, where he outlined what is sometimes referred to as the ‘instrumentalist’ theory of the capitalist state—or what Marinetto (2007: 21) calls the ‘proxy’ approach. Dedicated to C. Wright Mills, the book made the case for defining the state as effectively a capitalist patsy: The state in these class societies is primarily and inevitably the guardian and protector of the economic interests which are dominant in them – its ‘real’ purpose is to ensure their continued predominance, not to prevent it. (Miliband 1969: 22)

Put simply, the role of the state is to serve the interest of capitalists. This role is made possible by the crossover between members of the political and economic classes (much evidence for which is detailed in the book). Miliband’s book was reviewed in New Left Review by Poulantzas, and in the review, he sets out his own structural theory of the state. Broadly following Althusser, Poulantzas argues that the state is ‘objectively’ capitalist—what he meant by this is that the state ‘can serve no purpose other than preserving the capitalist mode of production’. The fact that the political and economic classes are one and the same is entirely coincidental in his theoretical approach: the state serves capitalism regardless: The relation between the bourgeois class and the state is an objective relation. This means that if the function of the state in a determinate social formation and the interests of the dominant class coincide, it is by reason of the system itself: the direct participation of members of the ruling class in the state apparatus is not the cause but the effect…. (Poulantzas 1969: 73)

In a response to Poulantzas’s criticisms published the following year, Miliband counters that Poulantzas’s position represents a form of super-determinism, which effectively favours theoretical obscurantism over practical forms of political struggle: The political danger of structural super-determinism would seem to me to be obvious. For if the state elite is as totally imprisoned in objective structures as is suggested, it follows that there is really no difference between a state ruled, say, by bourgeois constitutionalists, whether conservative or social-democrat, and one ruled by, say, Fascists. It was the same approach which led the Comintern in its ‘class against class’ period fatally to under-­estimate what the victory of the Nazis would mean for the German working-class movement. This is an ultra-left deviation which is also not uncommon today; and it is the obverse of a right deviation which assumes that changes in government, for instance the election of a social-­democratic government, accompanied by some changes in the personnel of the state system, are sufficient to impart an entirely new character to the nature and role of the state. Both are deviations, and both are dangerous. (Miliband 1970: 58)

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Although of its time, this debate has echoes of both earlier elite assessments of the state such as Mills and more recent and seemingly persistent populist views of the state as owned and controlled by big business (a recurrent theme in popular discourse). An interesting corollary to the debates on the capitalist state can be found in the theories of state capitalism, a term that has been around since the nineteenth century but still has relevance to today’s politics. One social theorist who focused on the topic was Frederick Pollock, one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His essay, State capitalism: Its possibilities and limitations, was published in 1941, during the Second World War and at the height of Nazi power. So he had his reasons for being concerned with this version of statism. In the article (Pollock 1989[1941]: 9), he outlines key aspects of state capitalism including a replacement of the controlling functions of the market relating to production and consumption, by a set of direct controls mandated by the state apparatus; and state steering of the traditional market function of regulating and coordinating supply and demand. In state capitalist societies the state has a much greater say over the mobility of goods and labour, as well as aligning production with consumption. China can be judged a version of state capitalism as can Brazil and South Africa which also embody elements of the approach. See also Singapore and Middle East states like Dubai. State-backed companies are dominant in both the Russian and Chinese stock markets, while the top ten oil and gas firms internationally are all state-owned.

Statification It is important to include Michel Foucault’s take on the state, given how different it is to the prevailing approach to state theory. This difference is itself a reflection of the difference between his thought and the Marxist-inspired theories fashionable during the time he started writing about the state (1960s). Foucault was careful to distance himself from any orthodoxy to which he might find his concepts connected: ‘I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist’ (Foucault 1988: 22). Foucault was interested in the state and the exercise of political power, not because he was concerned about its role in taming, accommodating or overthrowing capitalism, but rather because of his desire to develop a more general theory of power. For him, power does not transmit itself through the workings of economic production and class domination but rather through people’s experience of interacting with social institutions over and above the state apparatus. Foucault’s positioning of the state in this way is fuelled by his desire to displace the state from political theory and incorporate a ‘more diffuse, random and unintentional view of political power’ (Marinetto 2007, 40). Through his lectures at the

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Collège de France, he provided a deeply revised notion of the state. He broke the monopoly on power once enjoyed by state theory, instead arguing that power should be explored via ‘its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own tactics’ (Foucault 1980: 98–9). Power worked through the practices associated with family life, civil society, schools, prisons and numerous other sites, and not just the apparatus of the state. In this way Foucault offers a decentralised theory of politics in which the power of the state ‘is an effect of both social and self-imposed forms of regulation’ (Sawyer 2015: 136). In his own famous words, ‘we need to cut off the King’s head’ of state-centric notions of power (Foucault 1980). By adopting this approach to the state, Foucault opened a path to thinking about how different modes of power became ‘statified’ (or not) over time: It is certain that the state in our contemporary societies is not just one of the forms or one of the sites – be it the most important – for the exercise of power, but in a certain way all the other types of power relations refer to it. (Foucault 1982: 793)

But Foucault continues, ‘this is not because they are derived from it. It is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control’ (Foucault 1982: 793), a process he refers to elsewhere as ‘statification’ (see Foucault 2008: 77). The influence of Foucault’s approach to the state has been widespread—see the social theory applied box below for an example of how such ideas continue to inform studies of the state. Foucault is a helpful antidote to the overpowering view of the sovereign state, all powerful in its reach. Nevertheless, the concerns of the ‘statists’ cannot be easily dismissed: not everyone is convinced of Foucault’s approach to the state. Hence it has triggered a range of critiques across social theory. Habermas has made the claim that Foucault delivers a political dead end—a theory of the state without any opposing form of resistance, a claim also made by Poulantzas, who delivered a similar counter-argument in State, power, socialism (1978: 149). The ways in which the thought of Foucault has diverged so much from Marxist orientations meant that this debate was effectively conducted in competing languages, with Foucault uninterested in the language of ‘socialism’ and ‘social democracy’. Such rhetoric and political positionings were redundant in his theoretical apparatus. No wonder that Habermas had him branded as a neo-conservative (Habermas 1990). Indeed, Foucault had little to say in his published work about the perils of capitalism, a silence of sorts that provides the basis of some of the most sustained criticism: how do we understand state power, diffuse or not, outside the context of international political economy? This is a context that sees states not only competing with one another, according to some, but also doing the bidding of the capitalist market system—the visible hand of the state controlling the invisible hand of the market.

Statification

Social Theory Applied: Statification

Foucault’s work in general has proven to be a treasure trove for researchers seeking novel concepts that can be put to practical use in diverse contexts. Alongside his ideas such as discourse and bio-power, Foucault’s work on statification (often in conjunction with his work on governmentality (see Chap. 3) has been deployed in numerous analyses of political power. One of these is published in book form At the heart of the state: the moral world of institutions (Fassin 2015) which includes a collection of studies carried out in France that aims to reflect the morality of the state as practised in various agencies and services, such as the police, the court system, prison, social services and mental health facilities. With a noticeably strong Foucault influence, Fassin et  al. set their approach against what they consider traditional approaches to researching the state which tend to deploy ‘top-down’ macropolitical perspectives more concerned with structures, laws and functions. The contributors flesh out the ways in which sectors such as the legal profession often embody the ‘heart of the state’—so, for example, in relation to criminal justice, the work of law enforcement agencies is inscribed within a moral economy, rest on moral arguments, constructs moral communities, engages moral subjectivities, and provokes moral conflicts—all elements that are indispensable when considering how to make sense not only on what is standard practice in their interactions with their public, but also the forms of deviance like brutality or cruelty, racism or discrimination’. (Fassin 2015, 94)

As well as France, Foucault’s work on statification has been put to good use in a wide variety of geographical settings. Baker-Cristales’ work (2008), for example, uses the concept to understand the ways in which the state of El Salvador has dealt with the ‘transnational political struggles’ of their migrants and the non-governmental organisations that support them. These struggles, which once appeared to represent a form of alternative to the Salvadoran state (2008: 358), have instead been converted ‘into projects of incorporation whereby state actors and institutions recuperate their hold on people imagined to “belong” to the state.’ Death’s (2018) work on state gatekeeping practices in the case of the Niger Delta oil industry is something of a rejoinder to Baker-Cristale’s work. Employing a similar Foucauldian approach, Death argues that, on the one hand, the Nigerian state plays a significant role in controlling the region’s territorial sovereignty, both through ‘military counter-insurgency operations and in complex partnerships with corporate private security firms to police oil infrastructure’. However he also emphasises that state power is not monolithic in the region, its various tentacles unable to control the spread of resistance and environmental struggle that seeks to unstable and subvert the corruptive geopolitics of the vast oil industry-state complex of the Niger Delta.

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The Welfare State as Crisis Management The ideas of Foucault notwithstanding, much of the debate over the state in the late twentieth century continued to centre on its relation to economics, and especially capitalism. One strand of this approach focused on theories of the welfare state, a decidedly political invention of the twentieth century. Associated mainly with Western European countries such as Germany, United Kingdom and Sweden, welfare states are commonly based on redistributive policies, especially in regard to progressive tax and national social insurance systems. This is the case with the British welfare state, which was established at the end of the Second World War and welcomed with open arms by a society that had suffered major economic deprivation during the war. Its flagship programme, the National Health Service, exists to this day and still offers free health care at the point of delivery. The welfare state can be characterised as a form of political compromise between the laissez-faire capitalism of the United States and the rigid communism of the Soviet Union, a political entity that was generally seen as a serious threat to Western capitalism until its demise in 1989. The welfare state in the UK, for example, was established in the context of strong public and private-sector unions, and progressive systems for redistributing wealth were a clear reflection of both union power and concerns over the influence of socialist ideology (the red threat of Soviet bolshevism a powerful fear for decades). Some theorists have gone further and situated welfarism in the context of debates over the capitalist state. These include sociologists such as Claus Offe, who brought a distinctly German take to the issue, utilising theories of thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas to cast the welfare state as a mechanism of crisis management. According to Offe, the welfare state since the Second World War has attempted to manage the crisis tendencies of the capitalist system, a coordinating function central to its survival. The state can use the welfare apparatus to regulate and correct what Offe calls the processes of socialisation (a term borrowed from Marx) and capital accumulation. It seeks to assure the power of capital and the capacity to generate profit while at the same time alleviate the more destructive aspects of private enterprise on issues such as equality, community, mobility and solidarity: the capitalist state has the responsibility of compensating for the processes of socialization triggered by capital in such a way that neither a self-obstruction of market-regulated accumulation nor an abolition of the relationships of private appropriation of socialized production results. The state protects the capital relation from the social conditions it produces without being able to alter the status of this relationship as the dominant relationship. To do otherwise would sanction such mechanisms as the ‘investment strike’ which would make the therapy more harmful than the illness it was designed to cure. This precarious double function of the capitalist state continuously demands a combination of intervention and abstention from intervention, of ‘planning’ and ‘freedom’. (Offe 1984: 49–50)

Given its multifunctional nature, the welfare state was always placed in an awkward position, and its inevitable conflicting strategies constitute what Offe refers to as the contradictions of the welfare state, sowing the seeds of its own weakness in modern

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times. Offe argued that the welfare state in the 1970s was already ceasing to be a viable approach to capitalist crisis—according to him, the strategies used to manage crisis were themselves generating further crises, for example, in the production of permanent budget deficits as a result of public expenditure. The welfare state is certainly under severe pressure in the twenty-first century, both from the after-­ effects of the 2008 economic crisis and neoliberal ideology. The effects of austerity have had enormous impacts on public spending and budgets, while the idea of welfare itself is under attack from those who view such forms of collective care as a drag on competitiveness and efficiency.

From the Dependent to the Postcolonial State The welfare state is a model of statism peculiar to the prosperous nations of Western Europe, a model that has not become embedded elsewhere. This is especially true for the former colonies of Western Europe in regions such as Latin America, which have experienced a different historical trajectory to that of countries like the United Kingdom and Germany. Many of these countries have been mired in economic stagnation or in some cases serious financial difficulty, with the notion of a social safety net a distant ideal in countries such as Bolivia, El Salvador and Venezuela. Social theory has sought to understand the reasons behind such disparities in economic development, with one theory standing out in this regard. Dependency theory was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, especially among researchers keen to apply versions of Marxist political economy in a more global context. The theory held that states internationally could be divided into ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ states, the former poor and underdeveloped while the latter were rich in resources. These states were dependent on one another in terms of their status as a result of their integration into the ‘world system’. Resources and wealth flowed in one direction due to asymmetrical power relations between states. Given the issues already explored in this chapter, it was somewhat inevitable that dependency theory would become prominent at this historical juncture, especially given the fact that it was preceded by an approach to development called modernisation theory. This theory, which took shape after the devastation of the Second World War, saw a need for international development in states (particularly those in the South) that had failed to develop economically. Modernisation theory reflected a deficit model of development, with the blame for underdevelopment in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere placed squarely on the shoulders of factors such as cultural values, skill shortage, lack of infrastructure and technology. Western-style capitalism was deemed the most appropriate form of development, and underdevelopment could be alleviated via investment, technology transfer and so on. Where the West led, the rest followed, at least in theory. Dependency theory rejected this view, instead arguing that underdevelopment is a result of Western exploitation of labour and resources in the developing world. It also rejects the idea that underdeveloped countries are mere primitive versions of

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developed countries and have yet to make the leap from traditional to modern. Instead, these countries have unique features and structures of their own. There have been numerous versions of Dependency theory developed over the years, including that of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who later went on to become the President of Brazil. As with many other proponents of dependency theory, Cardoso’s approach has strong roots in Marxist modes of analysis. In Dependency & Development in Latin America (1979), Cardoso and his collaborator Enzo Faletto adopt a dialectical approach to development, emphasising the socio-political nature of the economic relations of production, ‘thus following the 19th century tradition of treating economy as political economy’ (Cardoso and Faletto 1979: ix). At the same time, they are keen not to fall into the trap of delivering a mechanistic conception of history and labelling internal forces purely as side-effects of internal capital accumulation. They included in their analysis ‘social struggles and the particular relations (economic, social, and political) that give momentum to specific dominated societies’ (xv) and conceived the relationship between external and internal forces as forming a complex whole whose structural links are not based on mere external forms of exploitation and coercion, but are rooted in coincidences of interests between local dominant classes and international ones, and, on the other side, are challenged by local dominated groups and classes. (1979: p. xvi)

This desire to foreground the importance of internal politics (in which they assert the political role of the local middle classes) was a powerful antidote to much of the simplistic thinking about state relations prevalent at the time. It also offered fresh ways of exploring practical routes to sustainable state-level development in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico. Their theory allowed for the possibility of development and social progress, especially  in countries in which domestic ownership of industry was substantial—in principle, autonomous development was possible, a notion that contradicted the often pessimistic and narrow views of dependency that had become almost a dogma among development thinkers. Given the countries that were considered dependent or peripheral—those in Latin America, Asia and Africa—it can be a challenge to separate theories of dependency and dependent development from the reality and experience of colonialism. Colonialism, a vast power nexus which saw European nations carve up the rest of the world in order to supply themselves with priceless resources, cheap labour and territory, has had a long and lasting impact on the viability of postcolonial nation states. National liberation movements, for all their efforts, have struggled to shake off the legacy of colonial times. It is noteworthy that so many of the states used as case studies in dependency theory are postcolonial states that have since become ‘dependent’ in different ways and at different times on their previous masters. This relationship has been the subject of some commentary in postcolonial circles; David Slater in his book Geopolitics and the Postcolonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Slater 2004) argues that the core issues identified in the 1960s and 1970s by dependency theorists are still relevant decades on, offering a significant step in

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the direction of an alternative geopolitical understanding which helped to realise the potential of a postcolonial approach. Talk of colonialism and postcolonialism inevitably brings up issues to do not only with imperialism documented in the history books but also with what some commentators see as a current form of economic imperialism. In her book Globalisation and the postcolonial world, Ankie Hoogvelt (1998) explores the ways in which globalisation has created a tiered world with core and periphery nations competing for scarce resources. For her, the postcolonial is a description of new social formations resulting from the meeting of globalisation and the aftermath of colonialism. She outlines four versions of this marriage of historical events—the failed states of sub-Saharan Africa with its attendant anarchy and civil collapse; fundamentalist Islamic states yielding a combination of anti-development ideology and a rejection of civil society; The East Asian version of state capitalism as a bulwark against the unpredictable forces of globalisation and the states of Latin America with their penchant for experimentation (for instance with neoliberalism) and resistance again colonising forces.

Globalisation and the State It is understandable that the 1970s saw Cardoso writing about dependent development and Offe writing about a crisis affecting welfare states, as this is the decade that witnessed the spread of economic globalisation. Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic transformation in the world order, one that has seen the rise of both multinational corporations (MNCs) and deregulated international finance that are able to traverse national borders almost at will. The extent of this shift at a qualitative level—that is, how much of a fundamental difference does it represent—is a point of some debate (and will be returned to in Chap. 4 on the economy). But it is not difficult to see how such a development can unhinge the capacity of states to govern and maintain order, as well as manage the national economy, create growth and distribute wealth and employment. But with the rise of these forms of hypermobile capital, this capacity to govern has been placed under severe pressure. Economic globalisation places the state in the challenging situation of planning an economic environment in the context of an uncertain future—one in which international capital can often usually have the upper hand. The usual levers of state governance when it comes to economic management such as taxation policy become less effective in the face of shifting economic units that are all too eager to locate to countries with reduced corporation tax. States are thus put in the awkward position of effectively trading economic sovereignty for jobs. It is because of dilemmas such as this that numerous contemporary authors proclaim the end of the nation state, a conception of statism that has a surprisingly long history. Charles Kindleberger in 1969 argued that the nation state ‘is just about through as an economic unit’ (1969: 207). It is interesting to note the year of Kindleberger’s proclamation, 1969, as this was close to the development of economic globalisation. There is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that the

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hypermobility of international capital constitutes an existential threat to the nation state. This is a significant issue when it comes to global political economy, but suffice to say that it is not a simple case of a rampant economic form of globalisation— this varies and diverges depending on geography and power. It should also be pointed that the actions of governments have ‘created many of the basic conditions within which movement towards greater globalization has taken place’ (Jones (2000: 4). It is unwise to characterise the state as a passive player in world affairs. When it comes to the question of the nation state and its decline, there are other issues to contend with and not just economic ones; it also has an important political dimension and raises questions about power and control, authority and legitimacy in a globalised world. Much of the debate around globalisation revolves around questions of boundaries—boundaries when it comes to nation, sovereignty, control, legitimacy, identity. When it comes to these core issues of political and social life, globalisation has the power to both enhance these and also to destabilise. What it does mean is that the state rests on uneasy foundations, leaving it open to conflicting interpretations. This is all too evident when for example the issue of migration is introduced into the discussion. Such conflicts have implications for various aspects of how the state is understood, not least how one understands the question of nationhood. In particular, it has consequences for what Benedict Anderson called the ‘imagined community’ of nationhood (see Key Concept Box). As Anderson puts it, a nation ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. Members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity—a strong and durable force based on collective solidarity. Anderson in a later edition of his famous book remarks that he does not consider globalisation as a serious threat to national identity, although there are others who suggest otherwise, who argue instead that the fantasy of particular nationhoods is forced to confront the reality of competing definitions of nationalism in an interconnected world. For example, Arjun Appadurai (1990) suggests that, in an increasingly globalised world, it becomes more difficult to sustain and foster national identity. Porous boundaries, the ease of international travel, the rise of digital media and to some extent the forces of economic globalisation, have all contributed to a lessening in significance of the nation, or so authors such as Appadurai assert. But this globalisation effect can work both ways: see for example the spread of new and vigorous nationalist movements across the world. Populist movements, both left and right, can be better understood within this context of economic globalisation, with citizens in numerous countries pitching up behind protectionist policies aimed at taming rampant capitalism. These movements embody a sense that shelter must be sought behind the barricades of a strong nation state. These contradictory effects can be witnessed in their most ironic form in the context of the European Union (EU). Originally established as an impressive project designed to both heal harmful ancient European hatreds and develop a competitive regional political economy, the EU has since the turn of the twenty-first century been plagued by new forms of virulent nationalism. Arguably, the greatest thorn in

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the side of the EU, one that strikes right at the heart of the European project, is the refusal of the nation-state to fully bow to its demands. The great ambition of the EU, to advance towards a post-national future of an ever-greater union, is threatened by its own member states, who rather than diminish in significance, are threatening to multiply. This threat is not just down to the usual suspects, the ones that have threatened to separate for some time (Scotland, e.g., and Catalonia) or who have actually left the EU (the UK via Brexit). There are significant movements in many other regions towards separatism, including Flanders, Lombardy, Veneto, Bavaria and South Tyrol, all of which have prominent separatist or regionalist movements. At a political level, this wave of separatism is a tragedy for the European project. One of the original reasons behind the establishment of the EU in the 1950s (then the EEC) was the desire to minimise the significance of statism—politically, legally and economically, but just as importantly culturally (it should not be overlooked that the EU developed in the shadow of a world war started between European nation states, with the consequent desire to bring France and Germany, in particular, closer together). But just when Europe desperately needs to pursue an agenda of further integration, to reduce the significance of statism, statism decides to rear its problematic head. This is a terrible irony on a grand European scale, meaning that the gap between the real and ideal of the European project has never been greater.

Key Concept: Imagined Communities

The phrase ‘imagined community’ has taken on a life of its own in recent years but can be traced back to the publication in 1983 of the book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised and extended, Anderson 1991). Written by Benedict Anderson, it explores the ways in which nationalism and nationalist movements led to the creation of nations or, as the title puts it, imagined communities. The emphasis in the book is on the invention of nationalism, not as a political ideology akin to Marxism or fascism, but rather as a socially constructed artefact based on cherished ideas and sentiments about community solidarity and belonging. There was nothing inevitable about the rise of nationalism according to Anderson; its origins lay in the migration of Europeans to the Americas, in particular Creoles who had never been to the ‘motherland’ yet felt a deep connection to their ancestral home (in a time when travel was difficult at best). The rise of nationalism in Europe was a response to the imagined nationalism in the European diaspora, and the book argues that this then spread via colonialism to Asia and Africa. The grand irony of the book is that what in the end defeated colonialism and colonial power was itself an invention of Europe via the back door—a set of independence movements with a nationalist imagined community at their core. The book itself is wide ranging and international in both outlook and evidence. There are plenty of case studies from across the globe that build on the example of Creole culture in America. What is also of worth in the book is the (continued)

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argument about the power of shared media in the construction of national identities. Although in other ways critical of Marx’s legacy, Anderson is at his most Marxist in his account of the power of print capital and its powerful effects on identity and solidarity. There are also echoes of Hegel in Anderson’s conception of nationhood as national sovereignty as a result of people’s desire for freedom—a freedom that is to be realised and symbolised by a sovereign state. Anderson’s conception of nationhood has been enormously influential but not without its detractors. Subaltern scholars such as Partha Chatterjee (1993) argue that Anderson misunderstands the nature of colonial societies, asserting the existence of sovereign territory before the arrival of colonialism. This indigenous imagined sovereign community or what Chatterjee calls the ‘spiritual domain’ (as opposed to the material domain) represents the beginnings of nationalism. Other critics have pointed to the lack of analysis of Arab forms of nationalism that arguably predated Anderson’s focus on the European diaspora.

Key Term: Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is an ideology of privatisation, marketisation and ‘small statism’ that first became established through the writings of thinkers such as Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) in the early to mid-twentieth century. Friedman and Hayek viewed markets, competition and consumerism as pathways to prosperity and freedom, and argued that the modern nation state with its tendencies towards interventionism and ­protectionism creates cultures of economic dependency among citizens. This neoliberal stance was explicitly targeted at restricting the scope and influence of the state, a stance that has since been implemented globally in the shape of dismantled welfare states, the decentralising of power and the expansion of global economic corporations, alongside the more general championing of private-sector values over those of the public sector in many countries.

The Rise of the Neoliberal State Globalisation has also witnessed the spread of a powerful ideology across the globe, neoliberalism. Modern neoliberalism, the bête noire of protest movements such as Occupy and Podemos, is often associated with the works of twentieth-century economists such as Friedrich Hayek (1983) and Milton Friedman (1962) and can be distinguished from earlier versions of classic economic liberalism, for example as laid out in the work of Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776/1993),

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Smith outlined the blueprint for modern-day capitalism, viewing in the invisible hand of the market a route to both prosperity and individual salvation. The market mechanism provided a lever for society to prosper and also a replacement for the inefficient social market model and corrupt mercantilist economic policies (essentially an early protectionist version of state capitalism) that were prevalent in the nineteenth century, particularly in Europe. This proposal of a free-market route to national prosperity was revolutionary for its time and needed to be actively constructed in order for it to be embedded in nations. Here the state had a major role to play in intervening in existing economic activity to create the stage on which the invisible hand could work its magic (see for a useful account of this, Michael Perelman in his book The Invention of Capitalism, Perelman 2000). Although sometimes caricatured as a proponent of laissez-faire economics, Smith was in fact far removed from this stereotype and was as concerned about effective state management and regulation and social inequality as he was about wealth creation. The state had an important role to play in economics, which was a reasonable position to take from someone schooled in political economy. This is a decidedly different position to that adopted by proponents of neoliberalism, an ideology of laissez-faire privatisation and marketisation that manifests itself in a set of political practices designed to reduce the role and size of the state. These practices include a smaller welfare state; diffuse regimes of power; a focus on outcomes rather than rules and the valorisation of private-sector values. Economic variants of neoliberal ideologies such as monetarism and supply-side economics have long been advocated by international elites, and famously made their way into official government policy, first in countries such as the USA and the UK in the 1980s, and subsequently in other nations like Australia, Canada, Korea and Japan. This shift in economic orthodoxy has inevitably resulted in reduced governmental regulation. This spread of neoliberalism resonates with ideas stemming from dependency and postcolonial theory, as its practices have found a home not only in the world of international financial markets, but also in agencies that are committed to capitalism as a world economy—in particular, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their Structural Adjustment Programmes have long been their policy levers of choice in relation to impoverished third world economies but have also increasingly been applied in updated form in first-world states—see, for example, the 2009 bailouts of countries such as Greece and Ireland. Debt crises provide the open door through which the IMF is only too ready to step through: first in the 1970s and recently after the 2008 crisis, they have been in a strong position to persuade countries to implement specific policies as only then would they be eligible for loans. Via this mechanism they can pursue a neoliberal agenda, including radical reductions in government spending, cuts in wages or severely constraining a country’s ability to reduce inflation and make exports more competitive, a liberalisation of imports to make industry more efficient, and a devaluing of the local currency relative to hard currencies like the dollar to make exports more competitive. A path through the state needs to be the cleared for the market to prosper.

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With the proliferation of indebted nations since 2008, the IMF has been in a strong position to help foster a neoliberal agenda on a global scale. The rise of ‘austerity programmes’ has helped to reshape the power and function of the state in the global era (Ranis et al. 2006). It is not too difficult therefore to understand why anti-­ neoliberal social movements have become so prominent: trickle down supply-side economics combined with a weak welfare net does little to assuage the fears and concerns of those facing uncertain futures and precarious employment opportunities. The backlash against neoliberalism (while it storms on regardless) is a reflection of how far the state as an entity has distanced itself from the powerful paternalist state envisioned by Hegel, with the ideology of small/weak statism offering a much narrower version of freedom than the collectivist approach he envisaged. As evidenced in this chapter, it also reflects the complicated relationship that exists between states and capitalism, a tense relationship of which Hegel himself was only too aware of. As was Adam Smith, whose theories of the market were a major influence on Hegel (Henderson and Davis 1991). Hegel’s notion of freedom included market freedom for the then-growing bourgeoisie, but this expansive conception of freedom could never quite reconcile itself with the inequality attributed to an unfettered marketplace. This unresolved dialectic between, on the one hand, the pursuit of freedom and, on the other, the promotion of social justice paved the way for Hegel’s greatest student and fiercest critic, Karl Marx, who put forward a different interpretation of economic freedom—to be outlined in Chap. 4.

In Summary Freedom and the State  Hegel had a major influence on subsequent theories of the state due to his conception of the relation between the state and freedom. For Hegel, it was not sufficient that the state be the protector of the freedoms of individual citizens. This approach according to Hegel was too negative and too limited a conception of democracy. Instead he positioned the state as the ideal sphere within human solidarity and personal freedom could find common ground. This conception is reflected in his definition of freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in another’. Elites and the State  In the twentieth century, C. Wright Mills, based on his analysis of the USA, delivered a much more jaundiced view of the state and its capacity to provide a home for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Instead of a home for freedom to flourish, Mills perceived the state to be a home where corruption, cronyism and self-serving elites could thrive and expand their influence at the expense of ordinary citizens. The Capitalist State  The twentieth century also saw a heated debate take place in social theory around the extent to which the modern state is a capitalist one. This reflects the concerns of Mills while also building on the work of Karl Marx. Marx

In Summary

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was the main influence on this debate, as manifested in the Miliband/Poultantzas series of exchanges which were published in the journal New Left Review. Statification  Michel Foucault delivered quite a different analysis of the state from Marx and neo-Marxists—he saw these theories as overemphasising the role of the state when it came to the workings of power. He argued that other institutions such as the family, schools and medical facilities, were also significant conduits of disciplinary power. This approach to power allowed Foucault to develop a decentralised theory of politics. Contradictions of the Welfare State  A return to Marxist questions of political economy came in the shape of the German sociologist Claus Offe. His focus was on a specific style of state—the welfare state—that established itself in European states in the twentieth century, a style that, for Offe, was increasingly struggling as the twentieth century progressed. This was because its capacity to manage the crisis tendencies of capitalism, a core function of the welfare state, was being undermined by its inability to alleviate the social conditions produced by these crises. Dependent Development and the Postcolonial State  Other theories of the state emerged from the 1970s that provided a challenge to Western-dominated approaches. These included the theory of dependent development, which held that states could be separated into ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ states depending on their position in the global economy. According to the theory, resources and wealth tend to be unequally distributed as a result of this dependency, which itself was a reflection of asymmetrical power relations. Many of the states used as case studies in dependency theory are postcolonial states that have since become ‘dependent’ in different ways and at different times on their previous masters. Globalisation and the State  Economic globalisation has dramatically impacted the role of the state as a protector of citizens. This is reflected in the dependant and postcolonial theories, as well as being increasingly evident in the mounting pressure placed on the welfare states of the West. In the twenty-first century, debates have wavered between positons that proclaim the decline of state power in the face of globalisation, and arguments that view the rise of nationalist populism as a retreat to nation-state protectionism in the face of hostile global forces. Impact of Neoliberalism  Alongside globalisation, the state is under severe pressure from the seemingly unstoppable forces of neoliberalism, an ideology of privatisation and marketisation designed to shrink the size and power of the state. This ideology has become embedded in the policies of numerous states across the world, leaving populations ever more susceptible to the powerful but unstable forces of economic globalisation.

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Questions Is the Miliband-Poulantzas debate still relevant in the twenty-first century? What do you think Hegel would have to say about the rise of nation-state forms of populist politics? Is globalisation, as Appadurai suggests, a threat to national identity? Suggested Further Readings Marinetto, M. (2007). Social Theory, the State and Modern Society: The State in Contemporary Social Thought. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press. A succinct account of how the state has been portrayed in modern social theory. Includes an account of different approaches to state theory, including the gendered state, the decentred state and the post-structural state. Barrow. C. (2017). Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate after Globalization. New York: State University of New York Press. A timely revisiting of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate in the context of what the author calls the ‘new imperialism’ of twenty-first-century globalisation. As well as exploring the relevance of the debate for current events, the book also deals with some of the finer points of Marxist state theory. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A concise history of neoliberalism as well as a powerful assessment of its questionable effects on equality and justice across the world. Stenner, D. (2019). Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Post-Colonial State. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Delivers an important counterpoint to theories of postcolonialism that emphasise dependency and Western hegemony. Provides a compelling assessment of anti-­ colonial forces and their use of international networks to achieve independence in Morocco.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised and extended ed.). Verso Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press. Althusser, L. (2005). For Marx. Verso. Appadurai, A. (1990[2001]). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In S. Seidman & J. Alexander (Eds.), The New Social Theory Reader (pp. 253–265). Routledge. Baker-Cristales, B. (2008). Magical Pursuits: Legitimacy and Representation in a Transnational Political Field. American Anthropologist, 110(3), 349–359. Bartelson, J. (2001). The Critique of the State. Cambridge University Press. Baynes, K. (2002). Freedom and Recognition in Hegel and Habermas. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 28(1), 1–17. Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and Development in Latin America (M. Urquidi, Trans.). University of California Press. Carnoy, M. (1984). The State and Political Theory. Princeton University Press.

References

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Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton University Press. Death, C. (2018). Gatekeeping practices in global environmental politics: African biopolitics and oil assemblages in Nigeria. Third World Thematics: ATWQ Journal, 3(3), 419-438. Fassin, D. (2015). At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions. Pluto Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (C. Gordon, et al., Trans.). Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Foucault, M. (1988). Critical Theory/Intellectual History (An Interview with Michel Foucault by Gérard Raulet). In L.  D. Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984 (A. Sheridan and others, Trans.). Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press. Habermas, J. (1990). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (New ed.). Polity Press. Hayek, F. (1983). The Road to Serfdom. Routledge. Hegel, G. (1977[1807]). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. (1991). Elements of a Philosophy of Right. Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. (2015a[1831]). The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. (2015b[1817]). Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Cambridge University Press. Henderson, J., & Davis, J. (1991). Adam Smith’s Influence on Hegel’s Philosophical Writings. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 13(2), 184–204. Hoogvelt, A. (1998). Globalisation and the Postcolonial World. The New Political Economy of Development. Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, R. (2000). The World Turned Upside Down? Globalisation and the Future of the State. Manchester University Press. Kindleberger, C. (1969). American Business Abroad. Yale University Press. Kouvelakis, S. (2003). Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx. Verso Press. Marinetto, M. (2007). Social Theory, the State and Modern Society: The State in Contemporary Social Thought. Open University Press. Miliband, R. (1969). The State in Capitalist Society. Quartet Books. Miliband, R. (1970). The Capitalist State: Reply to Nicos Poulantzas. New Left Review, 1(59), 53–60. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. Hutchinson. Perelman, M. (2000). The Invention of Capitalism. Duke University Press. Pollock, F. (1941/1989). State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations. In S.  Bronner & D. Kellner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Routledge. Poulantzas. (1978). State, Power, Socialism. New Left Books. Poulantzas, N. (1969). The Problem of the Capitalist State. New Left Review, 1(58), 67–78. Ranis, G., Vreeland, J. R., & Kosack, A. (2006). Globalization and the Nation State: The Impact of the IMF and the World Bank. Routledge. Rousseau, J. J. (2003[1762]). The Social Contract. Penguin. Sawyer, S. (2015). Foucault and the State. The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 36(1), 135–164. Singer, P. (2001). Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Sklair, L. (2000). The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell. Slater, D. (2004). Geopolitics and the Postcolonial: Rethinking North-South Relations. Wiley-Blackwell. Smith, A. (1776/1993). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Hackett Publishing Co Weil, E. (1998). Hegel and the State (M. Cohen, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press Wokler, R. (1998). Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror. Political Theory, 26(1), 33–55.

3

Governance

Introduction ‘Good governance’ is a term that has gained considerable currency at a global level, defined by the Council of Europe as ‘the responsible conduct of public affairs and management of public resources’. Good governance is manifested in political traits such as ethical conduct, responsiveness and accountability, openness and transparency, competence, efficiency, effectiveness and innovation. Based on these traits, states and elected officials are to varying degrees judged by their citizens, alongside their capacity to deliver adequate services, provide a satisfactory quality of life while protecting them from corruption and repression. At the street level, the level at which people live their lives, good governance is not just an abstract ideal. There are many issues of direct relevance to citizens that speak to the capacity to govern effectively, from the most basic services such as refuse collections, road maintenance, transportation, housing, planning and environmental protection, to the ‘red flag’ issues of hospital waiting times, law and order, school places, pensions and social security benefits. These are real concerns for people, and the ability of the political class to deliver on these issues is a litmus test of its legitimacy to govern. This is especially  the case when these services involve the most vulnerable in society, such as the sick, the elderly, the unemployed and those on the margins. At its most basic level, good governance involves strong solidarity between the governors and the governed, a bond that guarantees an adequate level of justice so that people can be free to live lives of their choosing. This bond of solidarity, however, has all too often been found to be a weak one, with states failing to deliver services that meet people’s requirements—this has become even more apparent in the time of Covid, where government responses to the pandemic have often been found to be severely lacking in effectiveness as well as care. This has a number of causes, chief among them the complex bureaucracies of state administration. Modern bureaucracies, while necessary, have become impersonal and divorced from people’s lives, while also creating stifling regimes of red tape that can impede the functioning of social life. Unsurprisingly, this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_3

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discontent has been a theme in social theory ever since the work of Max Weber who famously characterised modernity as an ‘iron cage’ of endless bureaucratisation, a cage that was far removed from any reasonable definition of good governance. Weber’s iron cage has been a touchstone for much of the subsequent theory on governance, and this current chapter explores this development via a number of intellectual spin-offs. This includes how Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer took Weber’s iron cage to what they considered its logical conclusion—the ‘totally administered society’. This chapter examines how later incarnations of the Frankfurt School, in particular Jürgen Habermas, took this idea and reshaped it into a theory of lifeworld colonisation. The chapter also takes a close look at the rise of managerialism and its consequences for street-level bureaucracy, juridification and risk avoidance. Foucault’s work on governmentality is also covered, providing a different view to the strong Weberian slant evident elsewhere in the chapter. This chapter is structured to cover the following topics specifically: • Weber on bureaucracy and its discontents • Two responses to Weber: Adorno and Horkheimer (totally administered world), and Habermas (colonisation of the lifeworld) • The rise of new public management and its consequences for street-level ­bureaucracy, juridification and risk avoidance • An alternative theory of governance—governmentality (Foucault)

Key Term: Iron Cage

Weber first talked about the ‘iron cage’ in his book The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (see Chap. 9). Iron cage is a translation of the phrase stahlhartes Gehäuse, a literal translation of which is ‘housing hard as steel’. It was Talcott Parson’s who devised the English phrase ‘iron cage’ in his translation of Weber’s book. The housing or cage was a by-product of the Protestant ethic that created a belief system to underpin the spread of capitalist modernisation. This belief system resulted in values such as efficiency and calculation that themselves produced modern systems of bureaucracy, effectively outliving their roots in ascetic Calvinist theology. According to Weber, this by-­ product of religion became an iron cage, imprisoning modern society into bureaucratic systems of governance that diminish people’s capacity for freedom.

Bureaucracy and Its Discontents The tension between democracy and bureaucratic governance has long been a focus of attention of academics in Sociology, Political Science and Economics, but is especially prevalent in the field of Public Administration. This is an academic field

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heavily influenced by the work of Max Weber, whose analyses of organisational rationality and forms of management and control remain important touchstones in studies of bureaucracy. Weber believed that bureaucracy was a necessary component of any modern democracy, as it underpinned a strong state (a condition he was very much in favour of), as well as providing a viable structure for the development of capitalist enterprise. The rationality of efficiency and organisation offered by bureaucratic modes of government ensures that the potential for economic and social progress is maximised. The characteristics of bureaucracy such as office hierarchy, rigid rules and norms, precision, accuracy, clarity—these all made vital contributions to the hyper efficiency required in twentieth-century political and economic life. But such progress comes at a high price in the form of domination, as ­bureaucracy and centralised control often go hand in hand. According to Weber, every domination expresses itself and functions though administration. Every a­ dministration, on the other hand, needs domination, because it is always necessary that some powers of command be in the hands of somebody. (Weber 1954, 109)

When it came to bureaucratic governance, Weber was caught in a bind; he valued and saw the need for systems of substantive rationality, that is, in efficient systems that allow for prediction and calculation of outcomes, and for their institutionalisation in state bureaucracies. These he saw as essential to managing the complexity of modern societies. Weber considered formal rationality as ‘superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline and in its reliability’ (Weber 1968: 337). But he also saw this as the ‘curse of modernity’: the valorisation of efficiency and calculability sucked much of the freedom and meaning out of social life and left society in what he poetically referred to as the ‘polar night of icy darkness’ (Weber 2001, 123). This characterisation was starkly apparent in Weber’s analysis of the German university system. While concerned about the bureaucratisation of German higher education, Weber acknowledged that the university was swayed by the broader context of societal rationalisation. Weber’s bleak outlook reflected his belief that institutions such as universities could not maintain their unique value orientation in the face of increasing rationalisation. As Weber put it, the ‘ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, either into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate personal relationships between individuals’ (Weber 2004, 30). This corrosion of university ethos was one example of a broader process of social fragmentation, a process Weber argued resulted in both a loss of meaning and a loss of freedom, the latter of which Weber attributes to the former. According to Weber, the roots of the loss of meaning lay in disenchantment with religious explanations of the world. Weber argued that the Protestant work ethic (see Chap. 9), distilled in the Calvinist doctrine of a calling, provided a platform upon which capitalism could flourish in the West. However, this very success ushered in a disenchantment with religious worldviews, allowing the flourishing of a diverse set of value systems

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autonomous from one another (such as law, culture, the market). This also meant that the meaning giving unity of these religious worldviews lost its legitimacy, thereby falling apart. As a result, these distinct spheres of life drift ‘into the tensions with one another which remain hidden in the originally naïve relation to the external world’ (Weber 1958, 328). According to Weber, the value rationality generated by the Protestant ethic could not hold its ground faced with the expansion of state administration and the capitalist market system. The laws governing markets and the widening of state power through bureaucratisation helped to expand these spheres of activity, and as a result, saw formal rationality become pre-dominant. Weber depicts a paradox in this process of societal rationalisation. Hand in hand with the development of the highest form of societal rationalisation—bureaucracy—comes the loss of freedom that arises when this highly formalised system of administration detaches itself from everyday life, experience and values. In summary, the loss of freedom entails the subjugation of individuals under the bureaucratisation of organisations central to the economy and the state: the iron cage. These bureaucratic organisations comprise the systems through which purposive-­rational action embeds itself in society. This process of bureaucratisation provides the key to understanding both societal rationalisation and the accompanying loss of freedom. The key issue for Weber, then, is the shift from a form of rationality grounded in values to one without roots. The bureaucratisation of administrative activities means that political decisions concerning the public and public services—about resources, taxation, budgets, planning and distribution—have to be secured separately from public values. The function of coordinating and deliberating is assumed by the organisations themselves. This ‘liberating’ of subjectivity from a grounding in formal rationality is at the heart of Weber’s juxtaposition of ‘specialists without spirit’ and ‘sensualists without heart’ (Weber 2010[1905]: 182). The loss of freedom, therefore, derives from the inability of individuals to orient themselves to values due to the domination of means-ends rationality. Once the ‘rug’ of value rationality has been pulled, people are stuck on a never-ending carousel of instrumentalism, effectively doomed to live in a bureaucratically regulated world.

Key Movement: Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

Established by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1932, the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, included  scholars such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and  Franz Neumann. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, the Institute sought to update Marxist ideas in order to make sense of social, political and economic developments of the early twentieth century. ‘Critical theory’, although now used to refer to a much wider spread of social theories, was originally used as code to disguise the Institute’s Marxist leanings after their exile in America in the 1930s, an (continued)

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exile prompted by the rise of fascism in their home country (the school moved from Frankfurt to Columbia University in New York in 1934). As well as its basis in Marxist historical materialism, the Frankfurt School set itself against the dominance of positivism in much social science research, which had a tendency to emphasise empirical data at the expense of theory work. The Frankfurt School viewed theory as an essential tool in social science research, which reflected their stance against notions of value-free science that attached itself to positivist approaches to research, a debate that took centre stage in the positivism dispute in the 1960s (see Chap. 8) but which has never really disappeared. This stance was highlighted in Horkheimer’s paper ‘traditional and critical theory’, where he outlined not just the critique of positivism but also the underlying philosophy of the School: that research should be geared towards movements for social change and human emancipation. It adopted a decidedly normative approach to research which was highly unusual for the time and arguably still is. Decidedly interdisciplinary in nature, the School’s research agenda sought to traverse disciplinary boundaries so as to break new conceptual ground. Its research projects (see, e.g., Adorno et  al.’s study of totalitarianism, 1950) drew on insights from fields such as Anthropology, History, Philosophy, Sociology and Political Economy. Numerous fields of study were explored across its membership, including popular culture, the relation between the psyche and society, literature, industrial society and technology, bureaucracy and rationality. The work of the School lives on¸ primarily via second- and third-­generation critical theorists such as Habermas and  Axel Honneth. The latter’s more recent work has stayed faithful to the roots of critical theory, with its grounding in Hegel as well as the interdisciplinary focus he has deployed in relation to issues such as recognition and freedom (see Chap. 10).

The Totally Administered Society This concern with dominating rationalities was a theme enthusiastically taken up by members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, particularly in the works of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1944]/1972) who argue that twentieth-­ century modernisation has ushered in a ‘totally administered’ world. This world was one in which citizens suffer a loss of freedom at the hand of a merciless means-­ end rationality—the iron cage metaphor unsurprisingly being central to the early Frankfurt School’s despair. Adorno and Horkheimer provided a response of sorts to Weber famous metaphor, detailing in The dialectic of enlightenment, a wholly negative interpretation of the development of modern Western society and the problems

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associated with it. Their response was also a product of its age, an age that saw the rise of Marxist ideology alongside the development of fascist movements across Europe. According to the theory of Karl Marx, the contradictions that exist between the forces and relations of production in capitalist societies would eventually lead to their downfall. Certain events occurred in the early twentieth century that dampened these revolutionary expectations, events that were significant in the development of Adorno and Horkheimer’s version of the iron cage. These included the unsatisfactory nature of Soviet-style revolutionary socialism, the collapse of other versions of revolutionary socialism in the West, and the relative success of consumerism as a form of capitalist modernisation; these were the historical developments that Adorno and Horkheimer attempted to work through theoretically in the early 1940s. They were left with the question: why had societal modernisation not unleashed revolutionary fervour? Why was it the case that, far from stoking resistance to capitalism, modernisation seemed to further entice people into the world of markets and commodities? In the face of overwhelming evidence, Adorno and Horkheimer are forced to dismantle the connection between the Marxist assumption that increasing commodification of labour would lead to revolution. Their diagnosis of the times, particularly their focus on the rise of fascism and the development of mass culture, amounted to a view of humanity as one that had succumbed to commodification. Whatever possibilities of resistance that lay deep in the subjective nature of human beings and which resisted domination had surrendered to the relentless force of modernisation. Adorno and Horkheimer are adamant that ‘social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’ (1972: xiii). But at the same time, they believe ‘that the notion of this very way of thinking … already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today’ (ibid). Reason itself they argued had become commodified, evident in the way people engaged with the external world. It is these subject-object relations that characterise the nature of ‘instrumental  rationality’, a type of reason that is of major significance to their pessimistic analysis of twentieth-century life. The need of the subject to preserve itself in the face of external nature leads it not only to objectify nature, but also, as a by-product of modernisation, to objectify itself, to master its own inner subjectivity. This forms the basis of the dialectic of enlightenment according to Adorno and Horkheimer, a dialectic summarised in the following paragraph: As soon as man cut off his consciousness of himself as nature, all the ends for which he keeps himself alive - social progress, the heightening of all his natural and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself - are nullified; the enthronement of means as ends, which in late capitalism has taken on the character of open madness, is already perceptible in the primordial history of subjectivity. Man’s domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is virtually always the destruction of the subject in whose service it takes place. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972, 54)

Their analysis inevitably results in a view of reason as a tool of domination, one that leads to an oppressive de-naturing of self in the name of self-preservation. The pessimistic outlook of Adorno and Horkheimer was understandable in a world in

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which scientific reason was used both to justify Nazi war crimes and to deliver greater military efficiency. The evidence against reason as an emancipatory tool was all too evident. Yet, for all its downsides, reason had also provided Adorno and Horkheimer with the intellectual tools via which to unmask the dialectic of enlightenment, and to deliver a complex and elaborate analysis of commodification and the culture industry. If reason was so commodified and stripped of its emancipatory potential, how was it possible, then, for them to lift the veil on this debasement of enlightenment ideals?

Key Theorist: Jürgen Habermas (1929–)

Born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Jürgen Habermas grew up between the two world wars, witnessing first-hand the rise of Hitler and Nazi ideology. This left a lasting impression on him, the German susceptibility to fascism alongside the trauma of war convincing Habermas that the future must be a democratic one. During his university studies he became politically active in associations such as the anti-nuclear movement, and also later engaged with the student protests of the 1960s. He had a more conflicted relationship with the latter, at one stage using the term ‘left fascism’ to berate the more extreme end of the student movement in Germany (see his book Toward a rational society for more detail on this, Habermas 1971). This activism extended into the realm of public intellectualism, Habermas becoming one of the fiercest critics of the German political class. Alongside this, he pursued a career in academia and in 1964, he succeeded Max Horkheimer as Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, becoming the leading light of the second generation of Critical Theory. Although currently officially retired, Habermas is still intensely active as a public intellectual, and is still publishing major academic texts, including Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too a History of Philosophy) (Habermas 2019). Habermas’ impact on intellectual debates in social theory is immense. Through major works such as Theory and practice (1974), The structural transformation of the public sphere (1989), The theory of communicative action (1984, 1987) and Between facts and norms (1996), his influence on ideas in sociology, political science, philosophy and law has been considerable. His ideas on deliberative democracy and discourse ethics have spawned seemingly endless debates in democratic and communication theory, while his concept of the public sphere, first developed in the 1960s, still garners serious attention in modern studies of civil society, social movements and mass media (see Chap. 5). A consistent theme in his work has been the role of law in supporting and fostering effective democratic societies, a theme at its most pronounced in (continued)

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Between facts and norms. For Habermas, all intellectual roads lead him back to the question of democracy, a passion that underpins his most cherished political project, The European Union (EU). Although unafraid to take the EU to task for its limitations, as evident in his scathing critiques of the migrant crisis and the economic fallout of the 2008 recession, Habermas views the EU as a project that can deliver a post-national form of solidarity, one that can transcend the questionable qualities of nationalism and national forms of identity. According to Habermas, The EU can help Europeans transcend regional differences in culture, language and sentiment, creating a novel shared European identity that can stem the tide of any future fascist ideology. The EU can overcome ‘The long shadow cast by nationalism’ (Habermas 2012: 47) to create a ‘solidarity among strangers’, easing the transition to a post-national democracy ‘based on the mutual recognition of the differences between strong and proud national cultures’ (Habermas 2001: 21).

The Colonisation of the Lifeworld The conclusions of both Weber and the early Frankfurt School were pessimistic ones. Habermas endeavoured to reconstruct their ideas to provide a more satisfactory account of twentieth-century modernisation. This re-structuring was based on two grounds: first, Weber emphasised the idea of purposive rationality to the exclusion of other forms of rationality, according to Habermas; and second, he did not differentiate sufficiently between action theory and system theory. To counter the first problem, Habermas proposes the introduction of the concept of communicative rationality ‘tailored to the lifeworld concept of society and to the developmental perspective of lifeworld structures’ (Habermas 1987, 305). This concept formed a key component of his shift to a philosophy of language (see Chap. 7 for more on Habermas’ linguistic turn). In relation to the second problem he identified in Weber’s explanation, Habermas proposes a two-level concept of society, which allows for both an action-theoretic and a systems-theoretic analysis of the process of societal rationalisation. He introduces the concepts of the lifeworld—denoting the background consensus of everyday lives, the collection of taken-for-granted definitions and understandings of the world that provide coherence and direction to people’s lives—and the system—that aspect of society where political and market imperatives take precedence; that is, the state administrative apparatus (steered by power) and the economy (steered by money). This two-level concept of society allows Habermas to examine the ways in which the activities of the system impact the quite different activities that occur in the context of the lifeworld.

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Habermas deployed this new theory to tackle the core issue at the heart of Weber’s theory—bureaucratisation. According to Weber, bureaucratisation signified the institutionalisation of purposive-rational action. Habermas, however, argues that bureaucratisation ‘should be regarded as the sign of a new level of system differentiation’ (1987: 307). It is the anchoring of the steering mechanisms of the economy and the state—money and power, respectively—in the structures of the lifeworld that signifies bureaucratisation for Habermas. Because the media of money and power function independently of language, they are not tied to the communicative structures of the lifeworld, which are dependent on language as the means to reaching understanding. As a result, these media allow the uncoupling of formally organised domains of action from the structures of the lifeworld, which in turn unleash their functionalist reason of system maintenance onto the lifeworld structures. Habermas refers to this pathological side-effect of societal rationalisation as the colonisation of the lifeworld. According to Habermas, it is only when the economic and political system, via the media of money and power, attempt to reify the practices of the lifeworld that pathologies arise. Only domains of action that fulfil economic and political functions can be converted over to steering media. The latter fails to work in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialisation; they cannot replace the action-coordinating mechanism of these functions. Unlike the material reproduction of the lifeworld, its symbolic reproduction cannot be transposed onto foundations of system integration without pathological side-effects. (Habermas 1987, 322–323)

The capacity to act communicatively is under threat from systemic imperatives, which, via the media of money and power, reify those structures of the lifeworld that are based on communicative action. Habermas (1987: 326) terms this reification of everyday communicative practice a ‘one-sided rationalisation’, a restricted rationality ushered in by the process of capitalist modernisation, a process with origins in the increasing role played by power and money as motivating factors in social organisation, factors that increasingly ‘penetrate into the core domains of the lifeworld’ (1987: 327). Weber equated capitalist modernisation and its pathological side-effects with the process of rationalisation in general. Habermas (1987: 330) argues, however, that the process of rationalisation, as identified in the secularisation of worldviews and complex societal organisation, does not have ‘unavoidable side-effects per se’. By adopting this stance, Habermas takes a much different route from not just Weber, but also from Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno. Rationalisation, according to Habermas, is not inherently problematic. The process of capitalist modernisation, however, has utilised one type of rationality, namely purposive-rationality, at the expense of a rationality based on an orientation to mutual understanding. In the ­following quote, Habermas clarifies this thesis, and at the same time distinguishes his theory of capitalist modernisation and his theory of rationalisation:

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It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into domains of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action. (Habermas 1987: 330)

With his reformulation of Weber’s theory, then, Habermas liberates reason from the pessimism of previous analyses of bureaucracy. Bureaucratic regimes, whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, do not necessarily lead to a loss of freedom or meaning; rather, these occur only when the state or the market overstep their boundaries and cause damage to the functioning of the lifeworld. For Habermas, efficiency and rational calculation are not in themselves a source of colonisation—but they cannot be positioned as the only relevant form of rationality in social organisation. Understanding the limits of instrumental rationality should be a core task of social theory, not its elimination.

Key Term: New Public Management

Often used interchangeably with the term ‘managerialism’, new public ­management, or NPM for short, is a strategy for public service delivery that emphasises the benefits of private-sector methods for delivery of public services, such as competition, marketisation, consumerism and, in some cases, privatisation as well as a much stronger focus on the measurement of outcomes. It has embedded itself in numerous states such as the UK and New Zealand since the 1980s and has been adopted at least in part by many other countries since.

New Public Management and the Governance Turn Since Habermas developed his colonisation thesis, a different form of political ­governance became entrenched in many Western states. New public management, or NPM for short, became a popular, even dominant, way to assess the changes that were imposed on the public sector in many countries in the late twentieth century (Hood and Dixon 2016). As a governance approach, NPM was new precisely because it viewed public services as a poor relation to the private marketised sphere, a sphere where notions of efficiency and economy were paramount. It borrowed a great deal of its managerial philosophy from the operations of the market, especially the relation at the heart of modern economies, that between producer and consumer. Traditional values of public sector planning were substituted with a supposedly more efficient ‘business-like’ approach to management—an approach that set great store by performance management, target-setting and output measurement, competition and consumer choice, marketisation, contractualism and privatisation.

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New public management brought with it a change in the style of public sector governance. Often termed the ‘new governance’, the style shift to ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes 1996) became an increasingly prominent way to manage public services in more decentralised regimes, employing techniques of arm’s length steering to achieve public sector reforms. According to numerous commentators, this governance shift has come at a substantial cost, as the emphasis on accountability mechanisms to ensure compliance and surveillance has reduced governance to a ‘technology of mistrust’ (Rose 1999: 154). This is joined by concerns over the impact of this technology on policy outcomes: there is an ever-­widening list of unintended consequences of accountability, the cumulative evidence pointing to the inherently flawed nature of this approach to public service delivery. This is a significant issue for the public sector, as the complex and multifaceted bureaucracy surrounding accountability in particular has altered the landscape of public sector governance since its development in the last several decades (Murphy 2010). In particular, the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms—audit, inspection, performance indicators and evaluation—has opened up the public sector to ever greater scrutiny. These professions are under increasing pressure to evidence accountability to the public and the public purse, with for example doctors and nurses subject to a heightened level of surveillance, regulation and bureaucratic scrutiny. There is a constant demand for legitimation and justification from the political sphere in the form of highly visible accountability mechanisms, with mounting levels of paperwork required to account for their professional capacity, judgement and competence. This trend towards ever-increasing accountability is part of a broader agenda of regulation in relation to public sector reform initiatives. But like all reform initiatives, this level of surveillance has itself been subject to scrutiny from researchers, who detail the consequences of such accountability-led reform. The evidence suggests that this bureaucratic mode of governance has questionable impacts on the efficacy of public services, and overall tend to support Meier and O’Toole’s (2006) assertion that a tension exists between bureaucracy and democracy. The consequences of NPM such as those described by Gregory (2007)—micromanagement, risk avoidance, impression management and so on—could be seen as the latest fallacy in the unbreakable bond between bureaucratic forms of government and its discontents. The distance and also divide between policy and practice has possibly never been greater which suggests that modern forms of governance create as many questions as they answer. It is difficult not to agree with Gregory when he states that ‘the greater the belief in precision and certainty in matters of government and governance, the more perverse the consequences that flow from it’ (Gregory 2007: 243). From a Weberian perspective, unintended consequences of bureaucracy are to be expected; he coined the term ‘iron cage’ to signify a system that somehow managed to combine rational means with irrational results (Gregory 2007: 231). Habermas’ colonisation thesis also speaks to the downsides of the new governance, and his ideas have been put to good use in sectors such as environmental planning. A good example of this is provided by Kiisel (2017) who focuses on the planning process in Estonia and its effects on the lifeworld. In particular she explores the different

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linguistic practices of the lifeworld and the system, and the capacity of the latter to provide participants with unconstrained and unified conditions of interaction. Kiisel applies Habermas’ ideas in the analysis of environmental planning processes to criticise them for their incremental nature. According to Kiisel, the growth of incrementality is an administrative practice of planners attempting to respond to the needs of system legitimation and instrumental rationality. However, her analysis of planning in Estonia illustrates that the incremental growth of the prescriptions in planning debates may be deceptive and reflected only at the linguistic level of planning documents. Linguistic utterances in planning processes and documents that reflect the construction of legitimacy may not have a say in real life planning practice: people play linguistic games that legitimate planning dialogues per se but not their actual outcomes regarding the natural environment. In this way, system requirements tend to distort the communicative interactions between public administration and participants in the lifeworld—those who are directly affected by these planning processes in the first place.

Key Concept: Governmentality

Chapter 2 examined Foucault’s belief that ‘we need to cut off the King’s head’ of state-centric notions of power (Foucault 1980a). He did this through his notion of statification but his desire to decentre the state was especially pronounced in the development of the concept of governmentality. Foucault developed the concept of governmentality in the latter part of his career. It is a key theme in his lectures at the Collège de France, in which he defines governmentality as the ‘art of government’. Part of his objective with dethroning the state from the centre of power analysis was to account for the dispersal of power across different institutional sites, and the way in which these institutions exercised ‘the conduct of conduct’. His concern and a key theme of his work was the ways in which institutions, including the state, exercise their authority and control over individuals. This concern over power and its consequences for personal conduct and freedom strongly echoes the sentiments expressed in The dialectic of enlightenment, and the parallels with the early Frankfurt School are striking at times. Although not normally thought of in the same conceptual bracket, The Frankfurt School’s desire to understand the pathologies of modernisation in order to change them finds a close parallel in Foucault’s normative interpretation of societal ills. This is evident in the following quote which has a strong political dimension: It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them. (Foucault 1974: 171)

(continued)

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The technology of this power he referred to as dispotif, or the apparatuses of security. These include ‘discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, policy decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault 1980b: 194). Foucault clarifies that the network between these different elements constitutes the apparatus or dispotif—what is interesting from the perspective of governance is that this network is uneven and uncoordinated which makes tackling and confronting the apparatus a challenging task.

Governance and Street Level Bureaucracy While the work of Habermas has found favour in analyses of public sector regimes, caution should be exercised when applying the abstract theory of colonisation to specific workplace contexts and specific policy reforms. Not all pathologies in governance can be explained away by recourse to specific theories designed to explain other contexts and situations. Habermas’ focus on the welfare state compromise and the crisis of legitimation paved the way for a critique of capitalist modernisation, not necessarily a critique of regulatory governance. This is a significant point, as it identifies something of a blind spot in Habermas’ conceptual apparatus. A more sustained analysis of modern governance would entail an examination of bureaucracy as mediated by professionals—by those who engage with the public and deliver services. This would inevitably require a close look at bureaucratic and regulatory governance at the level of the ‘street’—as highlighted by Michael Lipsky in his famous text Street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980). Working at the level of the street, the argument goes, allows professionals such as nurses, police officers and social workers to ‘make policy’ through their capacity to exercise judgement and use discretion when dealing with end users. No bureaucratic regime can be that all-encompassing where the activities of professionals can be so regulated that their role as policy filters can be overridden. Like Habermas, Lipsky emphasises the intersubjective dimension of social life, a dimension that Lipsky saw as core to the work of street-level bureaucrats. According to him, the ‘essence of street level bureaucracy is that they require people to make decisions about other people’ (Lipsky 1980, 161). Working at the level of the street allows professionals to ‘make policy’ through their capacity to exercise judgement and use discretion when dealing with the public. Lipsky’s original notion acknowledged this function as a way of understanding how front-line professionals are active in policy formation. Incorporating bureaucracy at the level of the ‘street’ into theoretical analysis offers a powerful antidote to top-down approaches to understanding forms of government regulation and control. It also offers an intellectual space from which to explore how workers manipulate official policy in the

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context of their relationships with the public—an aspect ignored by Habermas. While Lipsky was clearly aware that street-level bureaucrats operated within the context of significant external constraints, their position at the level of the street secured them a position of influence: Within these constraints they have broad discretion with respect to the utilization of resources (by definition). In the application of resources to the job they confront the uncertainty that stems from the conflicting or ambiguous goals [set by legislators and administrators] that unevenly guide their work. They also confront the additional uncertainties that arise from difficulties measuring and evaluating work performances. … Thus the picture of the street-level bureaucrat is one of considerable responsibility in allocating social values. (Lipsky 2010/1980, 81—new edition)

This capacity for judgement and discretion, however, should be viewed through the prism of new governance and its associated bureaucracies, which according to research is in danger of undermining this capacity. The changes to bureaucratic modes of organisation are scrutinised in Bernardo Zacka’s study When the State Meets the Street: public service and moral agency (2017). Zacka explores the ways in which what he calls the ‘moral lives’ of street-level bureaucrats—the front-line social and welfare workers, police officers and educators—are realigned and reconstituted in the face of increased regulatory frameworks. Combining insights from Lipsky and Weber alongside his original ethnographic fieldwork (he worked as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty agency), Zacka argues that front-line workers are faced with ‘impossible situations’ (2017: 200) with competing claims to their authority and expertise weaving their way into procedures, regulations, protocols but also into forms of tacit knowledge and professional practice, altering the DNA of front-line services. This has pathological side effects which help corrode the moral integrity of public services. Teachers, for example, become indifferent or hostile to their students in the face of competing demands and what appear as affronts to their professional integrity. When faced with bureaucratic pressures, street-level bureaucrats are effectively forced to continually adopt reductive and unsatisfactory conceptions of their own professional responsibilities, ‘each by itself pathological in the face of a complex, messy reality’. Zacka talks of impossible situations as a kind of ‘performative self-­contradiction’ (2017: 227), one that street-level bureaucrats find themselves in when attempting to reconcile their own sense of professional identity and worth in the face of contradictory demands—the impossibility arises when professionals such as teachers struggle to retain their moral identity and integrity ‘while continuing to systematically and consciously perform actions that are contrary to it’ (227–228). He summarises it thus: You cannot expect me, as a teacher, to keep doing what I need to do to meet the ­accountability requirements. As a teacher, (according to how I understand this term and myself), it is impossible for me to do so. Of course, I, as an individual, could still perform the actions that you require of me. But I would effectively no longer be a teacher in my own eyes. What I cannot do is hold on to the identity and to the actions at the same time. (Quoted in Zacka 2017: 228)

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As well as the works of Weber and Lipsky, Zacka utilises Hegel’s understanding of tragedy (Hegel 1975), specifically that notion he attributed to Sophocles and his plays on Oedipus. Here, Hegel saw tragedy in the way in which Oedipus was forced to take personal responsibility for actions that contradicted his own sense of self, his own moral integrity (the murder of his father, the marriage to his mother). It is also not difficult to see parallels between these impossible situations and Weber’s warning about the iron cage, with street-level bureaucrats taking on the role of specialist without spirit. This breakdown of moral agency at the front-line has significant implications for state legitimacy. The front-line of public services, where state- and street-level forms of bureaucracy meet, represents government’s human face to ordinary citizens, and is a significant indicator of the state’s duty of care and of its moral guardianship. The state’s capacity to protect its citizens finds its litmus test in this moral integrity. Front-line services are also important from a conceptual point of view as they offer a street-level approach to understanding bureaucracy, governance and democratic life, a ground-up approach that illustrates how fluid and complex governance is in the lives of both professional services and those ordinary citizens who avail of them. The concerns raised by Zacka point to the importance of bringing the ­professional level into the analytical framework. They also point to shortcomings in Habermas’ conceptual apparatus and the incapacity of the colonisation thesis to incorporate professional experience into the theory of system-level steering. This suggests that the dual methodological approach favoured by Habermas works only in certain ­circumstances—and needs some adjustment to deliver a more accurate ­representation of governance. After all, the scrutiny and the debate that has evolved around issues such as accountability is to a great extent a product of boundary disputes—who gets to make professional decisions, where does judgement and discretion lie and to what extent should it be deployed in settings such as the police and social services? Regulatory oversight asks questions of professional and sectoral autonomy but must also grapple with the consequences of this oversight as well as the myriad ways in which policy can be manipulated at the level of the street.

The Social Pathologies of Juridification The introduction of the street-level into the analytical framework surrounding ­governance has the added value of highlighting the highly regulated nature of ­professional life in institutions such as schools and hospitals, and the existence of other regulatory mechanisms that act in tandem alongside the overbearing stateeconomy apparatus. One of these highlighted in the literature is the role of law (Murphy and Skillen 2018), and in particular its role in the spread of juridification. There are a number of definitions of juridification, but for the purpose of this ­chapter, juridification is defined as the tendency of both formal law and sets of legal ­expectations to expand their domain of influence. This signifies that in public

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matters, the ‘weight of the judiciary’ (MacNair 2011: 78) is never far from the action, hovering over institutional practices and professional relations. Axel Honneth, in his book, Freedom’s right: the social foundations of ­democratic life (Honneth 2014) engages with this legal expansion, one that he sees as damaging the fabric of social freedom. He takes aim at the pathologies of legal freedom, pathologies that revolve around the assorted tensions between communicative and instrumental forms of action: What has been always regarded as one of the downsides of increasing legal codification is the fact that the juridification of communicative areas of life subtly compels subjects, both the directly and the indirectly affected, to take up an objectifying stance toward their highly individuated interaction. (Honneth 2014: 90)

In order to illustrate the pathologies of juridification, Honneth refers to the plot of the 1979 movie Kramer versus Kramer, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. This is a particularly insightful reference, as it offers a useful way of ­explaining the damaging effects of juridification: The plot … represents the decisive diagnostic medium. Only at this narrative level does the film illustrate the process through which individuals are transformed into mere ‘character masks’ of the law. This transformation becomes particularly striking when Ted Kramer learns that his now separated wife has changed her mind and decided to fight for legal custody of their child after all. At this point, the husband, as if steered by an invisible hand, begins to calculate all his daily actions in terms of how they will affect the decision of the judge. After he is fired from his job, he takes a much lower-paid job just so that he can prove his ability to provide for his child by finding steady work; during the divorce proceedings, he perceives his son’s freak playground accident merely as having a negative effect on his own demands for custody. In fact, his entire interaction with his son increasingly becomes a public demonstration of parental care, love and affection, causing not only the male protagonist, but also the viewer to doubt whether his actions are an expression of true feelings rather than mere displays of good behaviour that can stand up in court. (Honneth 2014: 90–91)

The opportunity offered by the law in the form of negative freedom, according to Honneth, can easily turn ‘into a style of life’. In the case of Ted Kramer, the point at which legal opportunity turns into legal constraint occurs when the communicative experience of his lifeworld is gravely threatened by the workings of the legal profession. And hence the pathologies of legal freedom—what law gives in one hand it takes away in the other. The evidence base suggests that Honneth is right to be concerned. Juridification is a growing factor in areas such as health and social care, but it is also prevalent in numerous other fields of activity, such as sport, the armed forces and the leisure industry. This suggests that Schuck is correct when he compares law to the metaphorical fog in Dicken’s Bleak house (Schuck 2000: 419), as law ‘seeps silently into each nook and cranny of our lives, gradually regulating all social behaviour and relationships’. It is wise to be concerned about the presence of juridification and the increasing role of law more generally. This is because there are limits on what law can achieve

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in a regulatory and a judicial sense. These limits are partly determined by the crowded field of regulatory oversight as well as other sources of legitimation, such as culture, which often have consequences for the efficacy of law in the public sector. The context of law matters, the creeping nature of juridification finding itself confronting other forms of public sector regulation. Apart from the consequences outlined above, there has been something of a more general backlash against the growing presence of juridification, particularly in the United States, which has famously fed a powerful litigation culture and a sense that law is the first rather than the last resort when it comes to atoning for the sins of professional malpractice, consumer dissatisfaction and personal grievance. Numerous authors have criticised the growing presence of legal forms of accountability in the USA, what Hirschl calls the ‘Juristocracy’ (2004), viewing the power of lawyers and lawsuit culture as the nemesis of personal freedom. Alongside this considerable backlash, it is important to highlight here the use of law as a check on unfettered professional power, particularly in the public sector. Juridification, especially in the shape of individual legal rights, can act as protection against institutional and professional insularity and self-serving actions. This is particularly important, given that social law in the shape of social policy, and the governance of numerous social problems has ‘largely been left to “professionals” or “experts”’ (Magnussen and Banasiak 2013: 237). This can then be viewed as an upside of juridification in that it strengthens forms of publicness; juridification of social policy thus provides individuals with the necessary resource base to act. On top of that, law has been the midwife of numerous victories for social justice over the years. Numerous social movements and pressure groups have viewed legal regulation as a core tool in the struggle for social transformation on various fronts, viewing in law guarantees and protections of civil liberties such as freedom of expression, protection from gender-based violence, rights such as freedom of sexual identity and religious tolerance. Arguably juridification was at its most fervent when it came to protection of worker’s rights and consumer protections in the economic sphere. Nevertheless, there is a substantial difference between the kinds of grassroots collective forms of mobilisation, with a common aim of social justice, and the increasing highly individualised and, in some cases, consumerist form of juridification at work in education. The cumulative effect of the cases mentioned here is not to strengthen civil society but instead is in danger of corroding it.

Social Theory Applied: Governmentality

Foucault’s ideas on governance have been put to good use in many diverse contexts. Hook (2007) uses the example of the racist Apartheid state in South Africa to illustrate the complex nature of power at work through the lens of governmentality. He argues that the domination through apartheid delivered itself via a network of different racisms made possible by the officially sanctioned apartheid state. Governmentality produces a highly complex set of (continued)

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associations and interconnections comprised of both interpersonal and structural elements ‘which then came to be played out across multiple, institutional, discursive and psychological levels’ (Hook 2007: 242). The relations between these different parts of the web, while interconnected, relied on each other and for interpersonal relations to reflect the imperative of the state apparatus. The power of the apartheid state was in fact so all-encompassing that it sowed the seeds for its own destruction—it sacrificed the indeterminacy of governmentality and with it the flexibility of power, and instead provide a totalising form of state power which made itself in the end a highly visible target of resistance. In their book, Governing the present (2008), Miller and Rose bring the idea of governmentality to life in the context of what they call the ‘psy’ disciplines—the applied versions of psychology and psychoanalysis in the form of human resource departments, occupational psychologists and family therapists. They chart in particular the role of psy disciplines in guiding the conduct of workers, providing a history of this guidance in the twentieth century, moving from Taylorist forms of control (see Chap. 4) through to more modern twenty-first-century concerns over workers’ mental health and aptitude. The shift over time facilitated the formation of human resource departments (alternatively human relations), laying the foundations for a further recasting of workers as pursuers of self-worth and meaning through their work. This historical genealogy provides an excellent backdrop to their analysis of the current conception of workers across numerous forms of workplace as the ‘enterprising self’ or the ‘entrepreneurial self’—worker identities that can sit comfortably in a neoliberal (see key term, Chap. 2) landscape.

Governance, Risk and Blame Ulrich Beck takes a more global perspective on governance, arguing that, while it made sense for early modern social theory to frame debates over governance around the nation state, globalisation has made such thinking obsolete, ‘the shared territorial definition of modern society’ of Marx, Durkheim and Marx, unable to offer a satisfactory framework for the analysis of social problems (Beck 2000: 24). He also believes that the historical era of industrial modernisation has expired, and in its place has come a more divided and conflicted realm of the ‘social’ than put forward by earlier social theorists. He calls this reflexive modernisation and argues that contemporary society is caught between industrial, or simple modernisation, and advanced modernity—reflexive modernisation. This forces people to carefully consider the various consequences of what Beck has termed the risk society (a topic returned to in Chap. 9 on the self).

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This reflexivity on the part of individuals, however, has to cope with a dysfunctional system that, according to Beck, avoids taking responsibility for system-issues: a ‘system of organised irresponsibility’, a self-created dead end where ‘culpability is passed off onto individuals and thus collectively denied’ (Elliott 2009: 289). Denial of culpability is deeply embedded within modern institutions, according to Beck. This analysis of risk lends itself well to a deeper understanding of how risk impacts the workings of government and public policy. There is a substantial body of evidence which indicates that much of modern governance is dedicated to managing risk at a political and institutional level. Risk avoidance, in particular, is a common line of enquiry in academic research, especially as a reaction about new forms of governance that look to identify the existence of risk. Alongside this more established concern over risk avoidance, Hood (2011) argues that blame avoidance should also be a focus of enquiry when it comes to the consequences of a risk society. Hood argues that ‘blame risk’ is a prevalent mode of operation across government and political life—the avoidance of blame ‘shapes the conduct of officeholders, the architecture of organisations, and their operating routines and policies’ (Hood 2011: 4). So much so that a set of strategies have been developed to counteract this blame risk which include presentational, agency and policy strategies. These can effectively be characterised as spin doctoring, scapegoating and protocoling, respectively—different strategies are used depending on the type of blame being avoided. All strategies are prevalent in modern governance to varying degrees. Spin ­doctoring is now a core strategy of political office across the globe, which sees ­­governments attempt to ‘bury bad news’, ‘change the narrative’ and ‘shift the agenda’ in their efforts to avoid blame. The strategy of scapegoating—of ­individuals, agencies and external bodies such as the market and even other countries—has been deployed countless times by elected officials who wish to divert attention from their own culpability. The final category of policy strategies is interesting from a ­governance perspective in that these can be found embedded in the bureaucratic apparatus itself. What Hood calls ‘protocolisation’ (2011: 95), or ‘playing it by the rules’ (e.g., ‘best practice’ guidelines), while in one way satisfy standard b­ ureaucratic concerns over prediction and efficiency, can also ‘be a way of limiting blame for the faulty exercise of discretion’ (ibid). Protocolisation is a risk strategy designed to reduce the opportunity for blame to be apportioned due to ‘arbitrariness, f­ avouritism, corruption, double standards, or poor personal judgement’ (ibid). Aside from the questionable results it may have in reducing professional misconduct or incompetence, protocolisation has the unfortunate consequence of contributing to the dreaded red tape of governing. The tick-box culture has been all too documented in research on fields such as criminal justice and health, becoming an enormous weight that helps to stifle innovation while also, in some cases, reducing efficiency. It can also have damaging effects on professional discretion, which as discussed earlier in this chapter, is a vital part of the machinery of governing. As Hood suggests, protocolisation has spread in sectors where the risk of blame is high, such as criminal justice, health and child protection. High blame risk comes with such territory, sectors which are geared towards the care of other people. The

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‘formalising of procedures for risk assessment’ has become commonplace in these domains, either to limit blame and potential liability or to apportion blame to those who did not follow protocols. But this strategy of blame avoidance has the unfortunate effect of laying the groundwork for juridification, as protocols and procedures can easily provide ammunition for legal teams eager to unearth incompetence and malpractice. While not as obvious as spin doctoring and scapegoating, the spread of protocolisation is a key part of the machinery of modern governance. This world of blame avoidance is now embedded in political governance ­structures and arguably on the rise in a world of 24-hour news and digital media. From a certain vantage point, this political strategy speaks to the concerns of Weber and the corrosive governance of the iron cage. This vantage point is one in which elected officials seek to gain authority and legitimacy through procedures of ­transparency, accountability and answerability. But these procedures themselves become entangled in a web of surveillance that can potentially detract from all too important activity of good governance, shifting attention away from the substance of democracy, welfare, justice and care.

In Summary Bureaucracy and its Discontents  The tension between democracy and ­bureaucratic governance has long been a focus of social theorists, particularly in the work of Max Weber. The German sociologist believed that a strong bureaucracy was a necessary component of any modern democracy, as it offered a centralised mechanism for managing social complexity. But Weber also feared that an over-reliance on this mechanism of governance could lead to an ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratisation, leading to a reduction in freedom and meaning in modern life. The Totally Administered World  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, early ­figureheads of the Frankfurt School of Critical theory, engaged with similar ideas to those of Weber in their book The Dialectic of enlightenment. Weber’s fear of the iron cage became, in the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, a ‘totally administered’ world, a world in which citizens lose their freedoms at the hands of an unrelenting means-end rationality—a more extreme and despairing version of Weber’s iron cage. Lifeworld Colonisation  Jürgen Habermas developed a theory of bureaucracy and its discontents that was heavily dependent on both Weber and Adorno/Horkheimer, but was also distinctly different from both. Bureaucratisation as a form of governance in modern societies, for Habermas, was not necessarily a problem in itself; it is more the case that the pathologies of modern governance lie in the overreach of bureaucratisation, in its tendency to colonise aspects of human life such as socialisation that cannot be bureaucratised without negative consequences.

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New Public Management  The face of bureaucratic regimes has altered ­dramatically in the twenty-first century, as governments have made a shift towards what has been termed ‘new public management’. A central pillar of the ‘new’ governance, or ­governing without governance, NPM has introduced marketisation and competition, as well as techniques of ‘steering at a distance’ to manage public services in more decentralised regimes. This new ‘arm’s length’ governance has come at a substantial cost, with the emphasis on compliance and surveillance in public services being blamed for heightened inefficiencies, and increased levels of risk avoidance and impression management. Street-Level Bureaucracy  A different approach to modern governance is provided by Michael Lipsky’s notion of street-level bureaucracy, which offers a window into the relation between state-level bureaucracy and those who have to administer it— front-line professionals such as teachers, social workers and police officers. Working at the level of the street, according to Lipsky, provides these professionals with the opportunity to exercise discretion and ‘make policy’ when dealing with end users. This ability, however, has been questioned in the wake of the rise of new public management, which has dramatically increased levels of scrutiny and surveillance. Juridification and Its Consequences  Alongside new public management, street-­ level bureaucrats also have to contend with the presence of juridification in their professional lives, a term used to account for the expansion of legal discourse into sectors such as health and welfare. This legal expansion, and with it the threat of litigation as well as the fear of non-compliance, can have pathological consequences for society, in that it can negatively impact on social relations as well as the legitimacy and authority of public services. Governance, Risk and Blame  Another development with worrying consequences for good governance is the rise of the blame game as a way to reduce and avoid risk in political affairs. Hood’s work on blame avoidance highlights the prevalence of various strategies to shift blame and avoid responsibility, including spin doctoring, scapegoating and protocolisation. Protocolisation is especially troublesome as it encourages the spread of ‘tick box’ culture, stifling innovation while also opening the door for further juridification. Questions To what extent is Weber’s notion of the ‘iron cage’ still relevant today? Can you think of examples of juridification? If so, what do these cases tell us about the role of law in society? Hood argues that the avoidance of blame is a prevalent form of modern ­governance— is he correct?

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Suggested Readings Levi-Faur, D. (ed.) (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A comprehensive overview of issues and debates in governance studies, including a focus on the role of the state, economic and risk governance, and governance and complexity. Includes a section that focuses on theories of governance. Murphy, M. (2017). Habermas and Social Research: Between Theory and Method. Oxon: Routledge. Gathers together a set of case studies that apply Habermas’ core ideas on c­ olonisation, deliberation and communicative interactions in contemporary research contexts. Cases covered include social movements, environmental policy, urban planning, alternative medicine, migration and schools. Douglas, B. (2018). The Iron Cage Revisited: Max Weber in the Neoliberal Era. New York: Routledge. Explores the relevance of Weber’s iron cage thesis for the current era of ­neoliberalism. Topics covered include the crisis of democracy, the rise in populism, the ubiquity of new technology and the spread of fatalist and instrumental attitudes and lifestyles. Dibben, P., G. Wood and I. Roper (eds) (2004). Contesting Public Sector Reforms: Critical Perspectives, International Debates. Basingstoke: Macmillan. A set of essays exploring the ramifications for public sector governance of new public management and neoliberal ideology in countries such as China, Mexico, New Zealand and South Africa.

References Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1972[1944]). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum. Adorno, T., et al. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Norton Beck, U. (2000). What Is Globalisation? Polity Press. Elliott, A. (2009). Contemporary Social Theory. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1974). Human Nature: Justice Versus Power. In E. Fons (Ed.), Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (pp. 135–197). Souvenir Press. Foucault, M. (1980a). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (C. Gordon, et al., Trans.). Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1980b). The Confessions of the Flesh. In C.  Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77. Pantheon. Gregory, R. (2007). New Public Management and the Ghost of Max Weber: Exorcised or Still Haunting? In T. Christensen & P. Laegreid (Eds.), Transcending New Public Management: The Transformation of Public Sector Reforms (pp. 221–243). Ashgate. Habermas, J. (1971). Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1974). Theory and Practice (J. Viertel, Trans.). Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press.

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Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2001). The Post-national constellation: Political essays. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2012). The crisis of the European Union: a response (trans C. Cronin). Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2019). Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie [This Too a History of Philosophy]. Suhrkamp Verlag. Hegel, G. (1975). Hegel on Tragedy. Harper and Row. Hirschl, R. (2004). Towards Juristocracy. Harvard University Press. Honneth, A. (2014). Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Polity Press. Hood, C. (2011). The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government. Princeton University Press. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2016). Not What It Said on the Tin? Reflections on Three Decades of UK Public Management Reform. Financial Accountability & Management, 32(4), 0267–4424. Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Palgrave. Kiisel, M. (2017). Habermas and the Role of Linguistic Interaction in Environmental Planning. In M. Murphy (Ed.), Habermas and Social Research: Between Theory and Method (pp. 190–205). Routledge. Lipsky, M. (2010/1980). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (2nd edition). Russell Sage Foundation. Macnair, M. (2011). Free Association Versus Juridification. Critique, 39(1), 53–82. Magnussen, A., & Banasiak, A. (2013). Juridification: Disrupting the Relationship Between Law and Politics? European Law Journal, 19(3), 325–339. Meier, K., & O’Toole, L. (2006). Bureaucracy in a Modern State: A Governance Perspective. Johns Hopkins University Press. Murphy, M. (2010). Forms of Rationality and Public Sector Reform: Habermas and Education in the Context of Social Policy. In M. Murphy & T. Fleming (Eds.), Habermas, Critical Theory and Education. Routledge. Murphy, M., & Skillen, P. (2018). Exposure to the Law: Accountability and Its Impact on Street Level Bureaucracy. Social Policy and Society., 17(1), 35–46. Rhodes, R. (1996). The New Governance: Governing Without Government. Political Studies, 44(4), 652–667. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge. Schuck, P. (2000). The Limits of Law: Essays on Democratic Governance. Westview Press. Weber, M. (1954). Economy and Society. Free Press. Weber, M. (1958). Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions. In H.  Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber (pp. 323–359). Kegan Paul. Weber, M. (1968). Economy and Society (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Bedminster Press. Weber, M. (2004). Science as a Vocation. In D.  Owen & T.  Strong (Eds.), Vocation Lectures (pp. 32–94). Hackett Publishing. Weber, M. (2001[1905]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge. Zacka, B. (2017). When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency. Harvard University Press.

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The Economy

Introduction The economic crisis of 2008 may have had its roots in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco in the United States, but its consequences were felt rapidly across the globe. The effects of unchecked greed and disastrous financial planning left no region untouched, as economic turmoil descended on states and wreaked havoc on the lives of unsuspecting citizens. The speed of the spread caught everyone by surprise, including the vast majority of academic economists and financial analysts, few of whom foresaw the devastation lurking around the corner. The effects of the crisis are still felt decades later, with many national economies in various states of repair and rebuilding after a long period of financial austerity. Given the effects of the crisis on employment, wages, social security and the welfare state, it is not surprising that the general public took a much stronger interest in the workings of capital and international finance. This interest helped propel Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty 2014) to the top of the bestseller list in the United States and many other countries. And no wonder, as Piketty casts a critical eye over the state of international capitalism. He hones in on the ways in which capitalism creates inequalities and argues that inequality itself is a central feature of capitalism rather than an unfortunate by-product. His historical data, representing 200 years of capitalism, illustrates some troubling tendencies at the heart of capitalism, including the tendency to wage stagnation and the tendency to ever-­ growing inequality. In the face of these tendencies, Piketty seeks salvation in the interventionist state, one capable of reining in the more egregious aspects of capitalist market dynamics. Even though Piketty’s analysis seems to cast a fresh light on the troubles of capitalism, this analysis of capital and its pathologies are nothing new, as social theory has long been fascinated by the capitalist economy and its discontents. It is a specific and central theme in the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883) (Grundrisse, 1993[1839]; Capital, 1962), but it is also  a  major concern in the work of  other social theorists such as Emile Durkheim (The division of labour in society, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_4

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1984[1893]) and Max Weber (Economy and society, 1954; The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, 2010[1905]). This level of interest from early sociology in economics makes sense, given the fallout resulting from industrialisation and the rise of capitalism. This interest was always likely to diverge from that of the discipline of economics, however, as broadly speaking social theory does not focus on the internal working of economics and associated mechanisms such as production, consumption and exchange. Instead it places more emphasis on the effects of the economic sphere on issues such as the division of labour and social stratification. This emphasis is evident in more contemporary accounts of the economy in social theory, and this chapter will explore these in detail, through the prism of social class, labour and commodification. These ideas have managed to keep their explanatory power in a globalised world. At the same time, such terms have been reimagined in the context of changing historical circumstances and changing political demands for justice from sectors of society such as women and workers. This chapter explores the reception of economics in social theory, and is structured to cover the following topics specifically: • Marx and the theory of commodification • Two alternative theories of capitalist development: the great transformation and the post-industrial society • A focus on economic production: labour deskilling and automation • A discussion of the classed and gendered nature of economic life

Key Movement: Marxism

Marx himself reputedly said that he was not a Marxist, but his work nevertheless has spawned its own theoretical movement, one that has real-world effects in the shape of various communist and socialist movements across the globe. The relation between theory and practice has never been stronger and the influence has not abated—arguably as a result of the 2008 crisis, austerity and the onslaught of neoliberal agendas (see key term box, Chap. 2), Marxism has taken on new meanings in the twenty-first century. The prime force behind the movement is Marx’s theory of historical materialism, which, when summarised in his words, ‘man makes the world, but not of his own choosing’, illustrates what is at the heart of this theory—an approach that situates social concerns over justice in the context of broader historical transformations. In Marx’s own work, economic transformations, for example, capitalism, generated the context within which social institutions such as law, media, education and culture established themselves. Marx’s focus on capitalism and its contradictions remains the focus of Marxist theory, so phenomena such as global capital mobility, the power and reach of international finance, commodification and marketisation, economic inequality (continued)

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between the rich and the poor, as well as the changing nature of social classes—all share conceptual space in a rich vein of scholarly work as exhibited in journals such as Capital and Class. While the various strands of Marxist theory share a strong focus on capitalism, there are also strong divisions between aspects of the movement, in particular what is often called orthodox (or scientific) Marxism and other variants that have been defined as neo-Marxism. While the former emphasises the structural workings of capital markets and the ‘laws’ of history that govern them, the latter tends to look to other mediating factors such as language, culture and psyche as ways to understand the relation between structural change and the class inequalities evident in modern societies. Pierre Bourdieu is often cited as an example of this latter approach (see key theorist box, Chap. 11).

Capital and the Commodification of Labour Marx was both fascinated and repelled by the transformative rise of capitalism in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. He was fascinated by the creativity, innovation and efficiency of the market, but also repelled by the destruction and wreckage it left in its wake; traditional ways of life were ripped apart in the thrust towards mass production of commodities. His time in England made him aware of the tendency of capital to turn people into things, into commodities to be bought and sold for labour. Alienation (see key concept box), a concept borrowed from Hegel, stayed with him and became a core concept via which he could get to grips with commodification and its effects. The development of his ideas was shaped by this industrial transformation, but also the counter-movement in the shape of the burgeoning struggle for labour rights, especially in England and France, which developed as a result of the new social relations of capitalist production. It was not just England and France, however, that gained Marx’s attention—the anti-colonial struggles of countries such as Ireland and India also fascinated Marx, an indication of his broader concerns with the question of justice and liberty. His focus on capitalism was not due to a dry dispassionate interest in the workings of markets and commodities; his empirical analysis of capital as set out in three volumes of Capital stemmed from a normative concern over the social fallout of marketisation and commodification, especially for those compelled to work as labourers to ensure their own survival. This fallout spurred his enduring interest in social class formation, and in the 1840s and 1850s Marx started to put together a theory of social change grounded in class struggle. The German Ideology (co-written with Engels 1970[1846]) saw Marx put forward a social theory that incorporated the dynamics of capitalist modernisation as well as their effects on the social realm. For Marx, class struggles

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became the motor of history, intimately entwined with the development of the capitalist mode of production. But Marx took the study of capitalism to a new and advanced level in his analytical approach, one that offers a dual perspective on capitalism and its impact on society. He managed to combine both the position of observer and that of participant, of structure and agency into his analysis, which offered the basis for both an explanation of the workings of capitalism and its effects. This dual analysis was made possible by his analysis of the commodity form. In capitalism as a mode of production, good and services are produced as commodities, that is, for sale on an open market as opposed to immediate consumption. At the same time, labour power also takes the form of a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Capitalist economies depend on this labour commodity form for flexibility and efficiency, and for profit, and Marx saw this commodification of labour power as the distinguishing characteristic of capitalism. The incessant desire to accumulate profits is the raison d’être of capitalism, but, according to Marx, profits are gained at the expense of labour. In order to explain this, it is important to clarify the nature of commodities and the value associated with them, from a Marxist analysis. According to this view, the value of a commodity has three components: (a) the machinery that went into making it (or more precisely, the depreciation of this machinery from use); (b) the raw material used to make it and (c) the labour power that it took to produce the commodity. The machinery and the raw materials are considered constant capital, while the labour power is considered to be variable capital. It is only this variable capital of labour power that produces surplus value, as the other two remain constant. Basically, machinery and raw materials get paid for, their price determined by the value associated with them on the market. Capitalists, however, can exploit labour in such a way that part of the labour given by the worker goes unpaid. Without this unpaid labour, there can be no surplus value, and therefore no profit. Exploitation surfaced via the surplus value extracted from labour power, which is the added value only accrued from labour, other aspects of the production process remaining constant. Marx and Marxists consequently see the struggle between capital and labour as a struggle over justice and freedom, not a matter of simple exchange. Capitalists want to extract as much labour value out of their workers and employ numerous tactics to do this—aggressive management, application of technologies, organisational restructuring, downward pressure on wages, to name several. Marx saw the problem at hand to be the commodification of this labour power, a process in which the labour power of the worker became transformed into an abstract thing, for the purposes of exploitation. As a result of this theory of social transformation and capitalist production, Marx positioned class conflict as the engine of change, this conflict itself generated via contradictions embedded in the tensions between forces and relations of production. According to Marx, the rationalisation of society begins with developments at the systemic level (the forces of production, which include raw materials, science, technology, institutions), which then trigger off developments at the socio-cultural level (i.e., the relations of production—the organisation of society via the division of labour, the rule of law). But while capitalism was supremely dynamic and efficient

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at profit-making and surplus-value extraction, it also suffered according to Marx from serious flaws, fatal in his mind. According to Marx, the contradictions that exist between the forces and relations of production in capitalist societies would eventually lead to their downfall. From a theoretical point of view, especially one that aims to study the social, Marx’s analysis of capital has much to commend it. Via his analysis of the double character of the commodity, Marx developed a theory of value that enabled him to both narrate the development of capitalist society from a structural perspective and also view it from the historical perspective of those who were participants in the process of production and commodification. His theory of value became a route via which analysis could determine the ways in which the social structure interacted with and related to members of those societies, via the market-regulated appropriation of labour power. This allowed him to construct theoretical frameworks that connected history and social transformation—or what David Lockwood (1964) referred to as social and system integration. This dualism also allows him, for example, to develop his thesis concerning the forces and relations of production. One key strength in his account is the fact that the connection between systems and action theory via the theory of value is imbued with a critical intent. Marx not only wanted to explain the process of societal transformation, but also aimed to uncover the labour exploitation that provides the rationale for the economic system. Marx was in a good position to mount a challenge against the inexorable rise of capitalism because he starts from the perspective of a world which is undergoing rapid destruction, in particular an England changing beyond recognition in the nineteenth century. Because he begins with this perspective, Marx is able to provide both an analysis of structural demands and their effects on the conditions of people’s everyday lives. At the same, Marx can be accused of naivety in his assumption that the economy could and should be embedded within the lifeworld of citizens. Marx hoped for reconciliation, of a synthesis between lifeworld and the economic system which, at some later date, would bring the systemic imperatives of capitalism back into the horizon of people’s everyday lifeworlds. This view itself is difficult to reconcile with the mass of evidence that suggests modern societies, whatever their class structure, are highly complex entities which could not function without a high degree of structural differentiation. His changing conception of alienation is another weakness in his overall theory. Marx moved between two notions of alienation in his early and later work. Marx had no basis for critique if he was not able to identify those fundamental aspects of human life that had been destroyed in the name of capitalist modernisation. But neither the notion of alienation as some form of dysfunctional version of humanity (early Marx), nor alienation as the result of commodification (later Marx), can on their own provide sufficient criteria by which to identify the pathological consequences of capitalist modernisation in contemporary societies.

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Key Concept: Alienation

According to Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977[1807]), alienation resulting from objectification was part of the tragedy of human existence, but Marx took this idea and applied it in the context of capitalist dynamics. Marx was not especially concerned with processes of objectification per se; it was only when it reflected states of exploitation that it gained new meaning for Marx. Capitalism helped introduce a divorce between the labour that workers produced and its value to them—capitalism was supremely efficient at extracting labour for the benefit of the rich capitalist class at the expense of workers. This process, one at the very heart of the capitalist economy, meant that labour becomes alien to the labourer, an independent objective entity that turns against its producer and act as an oppressive force on their lives. This was deeply problematic for Marx as he viewed labour as key to human life. Labour was an essential activity that allowed people to take control of their environment and to produce what they required. Increasing of liberating them, however, the commodification of labour ensured that workers were enslaved; lives of despair and misery became commonplace, with freedom only being on offer outside the confines of the working day. This notion was a key theme in Marx’s early writings but stayed with him throughout his writing career, although it manifested itself in later work in quite different ways. In the Grundrisse (1993[1839]) and Capital (1962), the concept of alienation took on a more relational turn. Marx becoming more concerned with how processes of commodification helped to create unhealthy distance between members of a community, causing considerable damage to the community itself, as well as divorcing workers from the value of the labour they produced. For example, in Capital, Marx writes: We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its growing concentration. This grows the power of capital, the alienation of the conditions of social production personified in the capitalist from the real producers. Capital … becomes an alienated independent social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and an as object that is the capitalist’s source of power. (Marx 1962: 259)

In Max’s later writings such as Capital, alienation took on a more empirical form that reflected his growing analysis of the forces and relations of production. Here, the transformation of labour power into the commodity form produced alienated labour, a seemingly natural state of affairs which is in fact a result of the mystification of social relations resulting from the exploitation of labour power. He made the key distinction between exchange and use value of labour, the former referring to the value of labour that could receive a price on the open market and the latter referring to labour conducted for the purpose of basic human needs. It was the expansion of the former that capitalism excelled at, but this also led to the loss of control on the part of workers over their own labour—a form of alienation now constituted as fetishisation and reification.

The Great Transformation

Key Theorist: Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) came from a relatively privileged background in Prussia, going on to achieve a degree from the University of Berlin and a PhD from the University of Jena (he achieved this at the age of 23). He was all set for a glittering career in academia, yet embarked on a distinctly different path, which ultimately delayed his academic recognition but also at the same time made him one of the most influential social theorists of all time. He instead combined work as a journalist with his passion for political activism, becoming a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. A good example of this is found in the collection Ireland and the Irish question  (Marx and Engels, 1972), which brings together the various papers and letters written by Marx about Ireland alongside his erstwhile partner, Frederick Engels. What became his lifelong passion was social transformation, and in particular the rise of capitalism as a peculiarly modern mode of social organisation. He developed over time a theory of historical materialism to account for this transformation, situating the capitalist transformation of Europe and the world as one of the great historical shifts, which brought huge changes in the organisation of social, cultural and political life. Importantly, Marx viewed these shifts as generating entirely new ways of organising human labour, what he called ‘modes of production’. The movement from feudal to capitalist modes of production, from a system of surplus production based on the exploitation of peasants by feudal lords to one of commodity production and the exploitation of labour power, became the main focus of his analysis in his work, including the volumes of Capital. This shift in production itself saw the conflict between worker and capitalist become the engine of social change. It was this kind of in-depth analysis that has seen Marx considered to this day as one of the great social theorists. Marx did not only write about political and economic issues, and his interests were broad. As a theorist of modernity, he was interested in the role of religion in social affairs—see his famous denunciation of religion as the ‘opium of the people’. This quote, originally from his 1843 work Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx, 1843), was written in the context of sweeping industrialisation, a process accompanied by a brutal shift into a world of factories, production lines and heavy machinery. For Marx, organised religion offered a way to kill the pain and sedate the stress of experiencing capitalism at its worst—a new system suffering the mighty birth pangs of its infancy. Marx was not blind to the emotional power of religion, even as he denounced its role as a patsy to capital. He understood that religious forms of meaning and expression were a source of solace to the masses. They were also in his opinion a source of false consciousness, a false consciousness in the shape of a ‘vale of tears of which religion is the halo’. The ‘vale of tears’ metaphor was a brilliant way of describing the attraction that religion offered to people and its hold on their emotional lives.

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The Great Transformation Marx’s theory finds an echo in the twentieth-century ideas of Karl Polanyi, who saw in the rise of capitalism the seeds of social destruction. His book The great transformation (2001[1944]) was originally published in 1944. It was relatively influential at the time but fell out of favour in the second half of the twentieth century, with theorists tending to prefer more Marxist or even postmodern accounts of capitalism and its discontents. This changed with the onset of neoliberalism in the later part of the twentieth century, with further interest in his work generated by the global economic crisis of 2008. Polanyi’s ideas on economic crises and their social consequences resonate with those who view neoliberalism as a corrosive force across the world. The ‘great transformation’ of the title refers to the shift to a market economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He used this shift to help explain a number of developments, including the rise of fascism and socialism, as well as the social-­ democratic impulse of the American New Deal in the early twentieth century. As with Marx’s previous analysis of capitalism, this was no dry, detached historical description, as Polanyi delivered a trenchant critique of unfettered capitalism and its dire consequences for society. The book was written in the context of two world wars and the great depression of the 1930s, in which Polanyi saw the utter failure of a brand of capitalism and laissez-faire economics. His ire, in particular, was directed at the unleashing of the self-regulating market economy in Western Europe between 1830 and 1930, what Walker calls ‘absolute capitalism’ (Walker 2013: 1662). This transformation had consequences and created enormous social crises at a societal level that led to what Polanyi calls the ‘double movement’. This referred to both uber-capitalism and its commodification of everything as well as the counter-­ movement that it unleashed, a set of protectionist policies and agendas culminating in welfare statism, trade unionism and social democracy. These policies were a reflection on the part of societies that market philosophy had overstepped its mark and needed to be reined in, that the state needs to protect its citizens from uncontrollable global economic forces. In this way, Polanyi stipulated a direct connection between the marketisation of the global economy and nation-state forms of protectionism: ‘To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment … would result in the demolition of society’ (Polanyi 2001[1944]: 76). The book represents a twentieth-century historical take on capitalism, the market economy and the state that neatly encapsulates the key themes that thread through this text and are at the heart of social theory: freedom, justice and solidarity. Polanyi was all too aware that these ideals were interconnected, their fragile interdependence threatened by the great transformation. In this regard, there are parallels to be drawn between Polanyi and another theorist who wrote of a ‘great transformation’—Ferdinand Tönnies. In Tönnies’ case the transformation took place in forms of solidarity with the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft as a result of modernisation (1887) (see key term box, Chap. 9). Whether or not Polanyi adopted the

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phrase from Tönnies, his theory of political economy was deeply influenced by the description the German sociologist gave to a rapidly changing society (Dale 2008). The unity of Gemeinschaft, for example, can be witnessed in the counter-­movement, while the disintegrating tendencies of the self-regulating market can be characterised as Gesellschaft, the counter-movement a reaction to the dis-embedding of the market from society. There are also strong parallels in the deployment of the term ‘fictitious’ (Dale 2008: 504). Tönnies characterises a society based on Gesellschaft, as a ‘fictitious totality’, as a sphere of human relations in which individuals are permanently alienated from one another. Polanyi in a similar vein argues that the core ingredient of a market run amok is its production of fictitious commodities, which he states are a key driver of the counter-movement. It might be the case that Polanyi diluted the radicalism of The great transformation, in particular its Marxist influences, for an Anglo-American readership that was wary of a class-based analysis and the communist implications of this (Walker 2013: 1662). Polanyi went to some trouble to reject Marx’s theory of class and class struggle as the engine of change. His focus is much more on the devastating effect of markets and commodification on solidarity and forms of social integration, not on class conflict and the exploitation at the centre of the capitalist-proletariat relationship. It was the failure of laissez-faire economics, of unbridled capitalism, that led to the counter-revolutions from both the left and right in the forms of socialism and fascism, respectively. It resulted in the New Deal and the establishment of the welfare state while also unleashing nationalist tendencies across the world. The revolt against the ‘absolute market’ was a reaction to the devastation wreaked by the reduction of society to pure market logic. Such a system was doomed to fail in Polanyi’s view. As well as delivering a critique of unbridled capitalism, Polanyi argued that protectionism came with its own unwanted consequences, with measures such as tariffs and union monopolies magnifying the contradictions of the market economy. The subsequent trade restrictions, for example, tended to have negative effects on employment levels. As such the potential social gains of the double movement were to some extent negated by its economic disadvantages. He also argued that the attempts at re-embedding the global economy at the state level in the early twentieth century were unsuccessful, and led to the outcomes outlined above, constituting what he called the ‘perverse effects’ of protectionism. There are some inconsistencies and contradictions across the book, which may or may not be attributable to his own intellectual relationship with Marx and Marxist thought (Block 2003). What is noticeable is that Polanyi uses similar concepts and similar language in places to Marx, which according to Block reflects his early immersion in Marx’s work. What is glaring, however, is that this critique does without the central concept to Marx: class. Given the historical juncture in which Polanyi wrote his text, this reluctance all too likely stemmed in part from his fear of an all-­ out conflict between capitalist and workers. If this is the case, the aversion to Marx stemmed from an all too common simplistic take on Marx and class analysis. Class for Marx was a much more complicated affair than the famous distinction between

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bourgeoisie and proletariat (Swingewood 2000). This distinction has become famous possibly because of its use in The Communist Manifesto, in which he and Engels wrote that capitalism ‘has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat’ (Marx and Engels 2008[1848]: 34–5). This binary distinction, while understandable in a polemical text, did not reflect Marx’s much more nuanced understanding of social class.

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society Another ‘great transformation’ of the economy arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. At this time, Western nations began to experience fundamental changes in their economies, such as massive shifts in their industrial base, workforce composition and consequent impacts on tax revenues and welfare state expenditure. This shift was described in Daniel Bell’s book The coming of post-industrial society (1973), in which he identified the key aspects of the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society: the move towards automation, the growth in services, the importance placed on information, the development of a global economy and a widening gap between the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’. Key to these changes and the broader transformation that has swept aside industrialised societies is the role of knowledge in the formation of the new social order. The post-industrial society is at one and the same time the ‘knowledge society’, with the ‘learning society’ and the ‘information society’ alternative labels for the same enterprise. As Kumar (1978: 224) put it, ‘knowledge power’ has overtaken ‘labour-power’ as the engine of economic growth. The development of this need for information and the information society requires the parallel development of a stock of knowledge. This thesis regarding a post-industrial society would not hold such powerful sway over social theorists were it not for its sub-thesis, the rise of technology. In Daniel Bell’s famous account, for example, computer technology was the driver of change, constituting the third technological revolution and ushered in a post-industrial society that was simultaneously an information society. Knowledge and information became the focus point of post-industrial life (Bell 1973: 467). Bell argued that new technologies were ushering in a society distinct from its predecessors. It is their requirements in terms of labour power and human capital that produces a transformation in societies’ institutional structures. There is no doubting the importance of the new technologies that were coming to the fore in the 1970s. Microelectronics, information technology, automation and biotechnology were (and still are) in constant demand by many different industrial sectors. It is this characteristic, their ability to be used in different parts of industry and to rapidly transform those industries, which is probably their defining trait. In particular, the semiconductor (for instance, the microchip) lies at the heart of this high-technology

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revolution. Semiconductors have been normalised in society, taken for granted in the modern high-technology world. These days, post-industrialisation is a more or less taken-for-granted assumption concerning modern economies. Deindustrialisation is taken as fact, given the relative decline of manufacturing in the production of wealth since the 1970s and the advent of a global economy. On the surface, a belief in a post-industrial order looks justifiable. It is indisputable that in certain countries manufacturing has declined. There is evidence in many nations’ economies, where the traditional industries of steel, coal and others are reduced to a comparatively small size. Commentary on this topic, however, sometimes makes the mistake of conflating manufacturing industry with all forms of industry. Although one industry has declined in relative importance, this does not mean that society has necessarily become post-industrial. Ernest Mandel, who characterises the same global period as ‘late capitalism’, argues that the transformational shift in the 1970s, far from representing a ‘post-­ industrial society’, has resulted in societies becoming more industrial (Mandel 1975, 191). This is a plausible argument, given that the defining characteristics of industrialisation, including mechanisation, rationalisation and specialisation, did not disappear, but rather encroached on areas hitherto unexplored by industry. While numerous commentators have noticed the decline in manufacturing industries, they have not witnessed the concomitant developments of industries in areas not considered industrial prior to the 1970s: the fashion industry, the service industry, the banking industry, the finance industry, the music industry, the film industry, the entertainment industry and so on. All these areas are now referred to as industrialised. The decline in one form of industry has not ushered forth a decline in the process of industrialisation. Post-industrial society can arguably be characterised as a speeded-up process of capitalist modernisation, complete with its side effects. It could be viewed as the latest example of capitalism trying to manage its contradictions. Rather than ushering in a ‘post-economic’ society, post-industrial society could be understood as strengthening the grip of economics over other dimensions of life. Certainly, changes have occurred in the economic structure of modern society. However, the question remains as to the extent to which these can be branded as quantitative changes, rather than qualitative. The changes may be due to the fact that society has become more industrialised, rather than making a qualitative leap into a post-­ industrial society. An additional note of caution should be added here regarding the almost fetish-­ like approach to technology. The very real advances in technological change should not blind theories of economics to the still significant pull of capitalist dynamics which should not  be conflated with technological transformations. The common view of new technologies as omnipresent and all-powerful is a mystification of technology: viewing technology as a non-human-generated activity is to invest it with powers that in fact belong to the social realm.

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Key Term: Dialectics

Prior to Hegel, dialectics was associated with Plato’s dialogic approach, which saw his character engage in dialogue with his audience, presenting a series of back-and-forth oppositional philosophical points of view. This dialectical method is designed to move the debate forward, from fairly rudimentary philosophical positions to more sophisticated and evolved ones. In Hegel’s version of dialectics, or what Hegel sometimes referred to as ‘speculative mode of cognition’, the element of evolution remains but the focus becomes much more on the contradiction between sets of ideas as opposed to people, and these contradictions then framing the relation between them. This relation has often been portrayed as one between three aspects—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—although Hegel never actually employed these terms, preferring instead the phrase ‘Abstract-Negative-Concrete’. The most well-known example of Hegel’s dialectic is represented in his story of the master-slave relationship (sometimes referred to as ‘Lordship and Bondage’) as detailed in the Phenomenology of Spirit  (1977[1807]). This story recounts the dialectic interplay between the two parties in a relationship, the master and the slave, and illustrates how the fluid and interconnected nature of this relationship creates contradictions and tensions between them and ultimately transformation. Key to this dialectical interplay is the master’s need for recognition, for acknowledgement of his status as the master, from the slave. This desire contradicts the fact that the slave, through working for the master, starts to develop recognition of their own unequal standing and their exploitation. So, instead of offering the kind of unquestioned recognition desired by the master, the slave questions the validity of the relationship. This dialectical tension results in what Hegel calls a struggle to the death for the master and slave. Hegel’s notion of dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx who developed his own concept of dialectical materialism. This was a theory that, among other things, viewed internal contradictions in historical developments such as capitalism as the driver of social change—Marx believed that the contradictions inherent to capitalist forms of social organisation created the seeds of its own destruction, which would inevitably result in class warfare and revolution.

The Labour Process and the Degradation of Work One positive outcome of the analysis of post-industrial society, automation and technological change, has been a much deeper interest in working life, especially the processes that underpin employment and what these mean for the quality of work experience and job satisfaction. One Marxist-inspired theorist who helped kick-start this focus was Harry Braverman, who published his book Labour and

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monopoly capital in 1974 and thereby launched the research field known as the labour process. Subtitled The degradation of work in the 20th Century, the book also launched the ‘deskilling debate’ which still echoes today in various guises. In his research, Braverman broke with the conventions of the sociology of work and situated his analysis in the context of a capitalist machinery which made workers dependent on the whims of employers, and which made employers slaves to the market and its even more arbitrary set of whims. Eschewing the previous disregard for the minutae of everyday working lives in offices, factories  and  shop floors, which were often considered irrelevant to studies of career and employment, Braverman turned his sights to the labour process itself, defined by Braverman as the ‘the separation of the work of production into its constituent elements’ (Braverman 1974: 75). As well as this, he sought to locate in the workplace the mechanisms via which class inequality reproduced itself. This focus on labour processes was significant for two reasons: first, it allowed a way of assessing the interplay of various factors such as role design and technology; and second, it helped bring to the fore the ever-increasing significance of management in the US economy. Following Marx, Braverman viewed capitalism as on a mission to commodify everything, to extract ever last drop of surplus value it could. He saw this at work in the labour process. He utilised the work of Frederick Taylor to help comprehend the scientific management at work—that is, how management found ways to ‘separate the conception of a task from the execution of the task, thereby transferring knowledge and power to management’ (Wardell et al. 1999: 5). Management had a range of mechanisms via which they could deliver this separation of design and implementation (the advent of new technologies hastened this separation): changes to work rules and conditions attached to wage rates, but also the greater degree of direct supervision of employees. This could be seen as an early version of what would now be termed micro-management—this kind of management led to a degradation and devaluing of work for millions. It accomplished this degradation via persistent efforts to reduce worker autonomy over their labour, as well as a process of deskilling through efforts to reduce and even eliminate worker discretion and judgement when it came to their own labour. According to Braverman, new technologies are incorporated into the labour process to deepen this deskilling while also helping to stifle wage demands. The process of reducing work to simple repetitive tasks, with high levels of managerial control, represents an efficiency gain for capital and a mechanism of risk reduction. But it also has the effect of contributing to high levels of worker dissatisfaction and levels of alienation in modern workplaces. Since the publication of Braverman’s work, there have been numerous studies done on deskilling and worker dissatisfaction (see Social theory Applied box). In the twenty-first century, this alienation has spread to different sectors of work. Others have pointed to what they consider significant changes to the workplace since the 1980s, often referred to as post-Taylorist forms of management and post-­ Fordist forms of production. New paradigms have emerged that emphasised processes such as lean production and flexible specialisation as opposed to the kinds of highly controlled processes studied by Braverman. Flatter structures and a

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de-­hierarchized workplace have to some extent replaced the command and control management system of earlier times. Others have criticised his ideas on deskilling: for example, his focus on the loss of skills denies the potential production of new on-the-job skills made possible by new technology; an over-romantic appreciation of the craft worker; an over-­ emphasis on objective work processes at the expense of a more rounded conception of worker subjectivity; a similar over-appreciation of managerial effectiveness and an inability to examine system inefficiency (Wardell et al. 1999: 6); an unwillingness to view capitalist modes of production as creative and capable of producing different systems in the future (Burris 1999).

Automation: The End of Work? Deskilling, while still very much an ongoing concern, has been superseded to some extent by a persistent and pervasive panic over automation and its potentially precarious effects on the labour market. This panic has fuelled a degree of technophobia, a fear of digital technology, while also helping to strengthen the case for public policy agendas such as the universal wage (which has been trialled in some European countries already). There have been warnings before of such a fate—the 1990s, for example, saw the publication of Jeremy Rifkin’s The end of work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (Rifkin 1996). The topic has not escaped the field of social theory either, with Marx for example commenting on automation and labour at some length. It is worth considering the contributions of previous analyses of automation, purely to gain some perspective on talk of austerity, precarity and the internet of things. One analysis that stands out is that of the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism (1975) provides a different take on the contradictions of capitalism. Not for Mandel the usual focus on automation and its negative effects on consumerism (i.e., no workers to buy goods). He provides a rather different reason why full automation is incompatible with capitalism. Mandel’s basic argument (1975: 207) is that capitalism is incompatible with full automation ‘because this no longer allows the creation of surplus-value or valorization of capital’. This statement, of course, contradicts the common belief that, in this electronic age, the use of automated processes of production in all areas of life will eventually lead to the total elimination of labour from the production process, that is, the end of work. According to Mandel, the process of automation itself is only the outward appearance of what is the essence of the problem, and that is the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system itself. The logic of this analysis can be clarified by beginning with the necessary point of departure for the whole of the capitalist system—the need to increase the average rate of profit. In the era of late capitalism, surplus profits cannot be realised any longer through regional or international differences in productivity. This is essentially because of generalised automation in all regions and nations, which disallows competitive advantages for a region or nation based on similar automated processes of production. As Mandel (1975:

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192) points out, this role is ‘now assumed by such differences between sectors and enterprises’, for example, differences between the textile industry and the iron industry. In order to increase profits, therefore, there is a pressure to speed up technological innovation, that is, the pressure on firms to build better ‘mouse-traps’ in order to compete effectively and get an advantage over competitors. Mandel (p. 195) refers to the surplus profits derived from these innovations as technological rents. He clarifies their significance for the realisation of profits as follows: Technological rents are surplus-profits derived from a monopolization of technical progress, i.e., from discoveries and inventions which lower the cost-price of commodities but cannot (at least in the medium run) become generalized throughout a given branch of production and applied by all competitors, because of the structure of monopoly capital itself: difficulties of entry, size of minimum investment, control of patents, cartel arrangements, and so on. (Mandel 1975: 192)

The significance of these technological innovations for the era of late capitalism is not the fact that they increase profits for firms, but how they help to increase these profits. It is because of this that there is an incessant need on the part of capitalists to keep wages at a minimum. If this cannot be done, then there is the ‘inevitable appearance … of attempts to replace living labor power by machines on a vast scale’ (1975: 151). Increasing automation is a consequence of this need to realise profits, and this fact is more than evident in today’s economy, as more and more living labour is eliminated from the processes of production. It would appear from this analysis that the process of automation is one in which capital would strive to forever increase, but it is here that we see the fundamental contradiction of this period of late capitalism. This contradiction relates not to the process of automation per se, but to its increasing generalisation and universalisation across all spheres and sectors of production. On page 198, Mandel states that the ‘proportion between partial automation and total automation is a crucial problem of the third technological revolution’. In realms of production that are only partially automated, surplus value continues to be produced. In realms of production that are fully automated, however, surplus value hardly continues to be produced at all. The total profit appropriated by firms engaged in these realms is taken from the remaining non- or semi-automated branches. In these latter branches, therefore, there arises severe pressure for substantial measures of rationalisation and intensification of production at least partially to bridge the growing differences in levels of productivity separating them from automated branches, since otherwise, they stand to lose an increasing portion of the mass of surplus value produced by their workers to more productive competitors. Hence the phenomena, so characteristic of the twenty-first century, of companies squeezing further surplus labour out of their employers through mechanisms of surveillance and micro-management. The replacement of living labour power by ‘dead’ automated labour on a mass scale inevitably means a reduction in surplus value. If, across the board in a particular realm of production, there are no labourers to whom labour power can go unpaid, then the competitors in this realm are forced into a

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situation where none of them can achieve an advantage on the other—that part of the value of the commodity which is variable is no longer there. And because the other parts are constant, they cannot be manipulated to achieve more value on the market. Mandel’s analysis and conclusions, that automation finds its limits in the breaks imposed on surplus value extraction, do not veer away from basic Marxist assumptions regarding the inherent contradictions of capitalism. As a result, one needs to assess the relative benefits of Marxist thought regarding the question of automation in order to gauge the utility of such an analysis. That said, Mandel’s theory offers food for thought in a modern context that tends to view technological transformation as the main or only driver of economic change. The internal dynamics of capitalism are overlooked at the expense of a deeper analysis of its function in society.

The Classed Nature of Economic Life Marx and Marxists such as Braverman and Mandel do not have the last word on social class. Neither do they have the first word, its categorical function going back to its Latin roots classis, which was then introduced to classify people based on voting rights. Its modern socio-theoretical variant, to be fair, is very much couched in terms of economic classifications (a-la Marx), based on people’s position vis-à-vis the division of labour. Class not only carries with it an ‘objective’ relation but also a community of people with similar status and position in hierarchy. Regardless of pecking order, class constitutes a position, and with position comes classification, sorting, privilege and inevitably judgement. Class in the twenty-first century is a social relation of relevance to numerous concerns of social theory—self, culture, knowledge, language. By itself it could act as an exemplar case study via which a study of social theory could be comprehensively carried out. But arguably its main significance for social theory comes back to questions of equality and social justice, particularly economic justice. This is illustrated by the fact that membership of an occupational grouping is habitually used in research settings as a proxy for sorting people into socio-economic classes. This inevitably brings with it tensions and struggles over forms of status and privilege. And this is where a focus on solidarity is necessary to understand forms of social organisation, not just the solidarity within social classes (e.g., what constitutes being working class) but also the solidarity or lack of it between classes. All too often, there erupt forms of class antagonism (riots in the UK in 2011, Gilet Jaunes in France in 2018) that seemingly represent a pressure cooker waiting to erupt. Since the Second World War, the lid has been kept on this pressure cooker via a web of policies and strategies, most notably the development of the welfare state, or what Habermas calls the ‘class compromise’ of the twentieth century. But just as significant is another mechanism, one that should be seen as a key pressure valve in class inequality—meritocracy. From a system perspective, one can marvel at how

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Western democracies have managed to deal with the issue of class inequality through the ideology of meritocracy. The possibility of mobility through the social classes based on merit (hard work, achievement, application of talent) has meant that highly stratified occupational systems have stayed relatively stable over time. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that social immobility is at least as much of a phenomenon as mobility—inequalities in forms of social mobility across classes ‘are deeply embedded’ (Atkinson 2015: 118). This is also a key theme in Piketty’s book. Those in lower-skilled and non-manual positions, the working class, have shown consistent levels of low social mobility in many countries, trends that have remained fairly constant over decades regardless of the vast number of redistributive policies designed to improve mobility in various ways. Why is this the case? Side-stepping theories of intelligence and other individualised conceptions of social mobility, social theory has concentrated on issues of power and domination, especially in relation to culture, language and knowledge (see Chaps. 6, 7 and 8). These issues will be returned to in later chapters, but of more immediate relevance to this chapter is the changing nature of social classes and how these are accounted for. Debates over the constitution of the working class have been taking place for decades, brought into focus via the work of André Gorz. Deliberately provocative, Gorz’s book Farewell to the working class: an essay in post-industrial socialism, published in 1980, was a call to move away from what Gorz believed to be the stranglehold of Marxist thought over analysis of capitalism, labour and social stratification. His thesis was that a new class has sprung from the ashes of the old working class, a non-class of the neo-proletariat which looked nothing like the idealised ‘historical subject’ of the working class. In so doing, Gorz attacked a sacred cow of Marxism, that the industrial proletariat would be the engine of change and overthrow capitalism. Gorz painted a very different picture of labour in the late twentieth century, one in which society has moved into a post-industrial phase, and with this new phase, radically altered the shape of social classes and the kinds of labour demanded by capital: this traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belong to the post-industrial neo proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-­ time employment. (Gorz 1980: 69)

The arguments found in the book find echoes in debates taking place in the twenty-­first century. One of these relates to Gorz’ understanding of the neo-proletariat, what Gorz (p. 68) calls the ‘non-class’, a combination of un- and underemployed. This has striking parallels with the work of Guy Standing and his theory of the Precariat. In his book The precariat: The new dangerous class (2011), Standing argues that a new class of people has been established, the members of which lead economically precarious lives. They find themselves in insecure and low-paid positions, on zero-hour contracts, in low-wage employment with little benefits and little chance of progression. Standing argues that the development of this new class is one

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of the main reasons behind Occupy and other similar movements. It is a global phenomenon which, while lacking the class identity of the proletariat, shares a set of characteristics such as lack of permanence, short-termism and instability. They are considered dangerous because they sow the seeds for a ‘politics of inferno’, in which a growing sense of anger caused by economic insecurity and anxiety results in increasing support for populist politics, both left and right. Along with the sacred cow of the working-class proletariat, Gorz also finds echoes of his ideas in current attacks on the limits of capitalist growth. Gorz took to task a core tenet of Marxist theory—notably that the forces of capitalist production will create the ‘social preconditions for the establishment of socialism’. As someone committed to environmental change, Gorz saw this focus on production as part of the problem, and considered this aspect of Marx to be regressive, any move towards socialism ‘profoundly tainted’ by its origins in the forces of production. This agenda for him was not compatible with a vision of an equitable and free society: ‘should a socialist society be established, they will have to be entirely remoulded’ (Gorz 1980: 15). Gorz, it should be acknowledged, was no cheerleader for capitalism as he viewed it as a social system unfit for modern forms of organisation. He, like Marx, saw capitalism as riddled with internal contradictions. But in a similar fashion to members of the Frankfurt School (see key movement box, Chap. 3)  such as Max Horkheimer, he believed capitalism has been able to live with its own internal contradictions, and ‘has become able to accommodate its dysfunctions, even drawing renewed strength from this state of affairs’ (Gorz 1980:14). Building a movement for change, based on either of these contradictions or a mythical notion of the working class, was for Gorz a futile effort in a post-industrial world. Nevertheless, there is evidence that, in the twenty-first century, working-class identity is very much alive and refusing to say farewell. The work of Selina Todd, for example, offers a different history to that of Gorz. Her book The people: the rise and fall of the working class (Todd 2014), contrary to its title, offers a rejoinder to the idea that class-based identities have become more fluid and fragmented. In her study she found that 60 per cent of people in the UK identify as working class. She argues that they are well aware of their structural position and that identifying as working class has not lost its power as a self-understanding of economic power in society.

The Gendered Nature of Economic Life One feminist critique of the labour process literature, a criticism also aimed generally at Marxism, is the denial of gender and its significance in debates over the meaning and content of ‘labour’. Marxism and feminism have never been easy bedfellows—Atkinson (2015: 85) rightly views the union of as ‘tempestuous’. Feminist accounts of labour, in particular, have proven a conceptual and political thorn in the

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side for those committed to a wholly Marxist view of capitalist exploitation, such as that put forward by Engels in the Origins of private property, family and the state (1990). In this account, gendered relations of power, subordination and patriarchal forms of social organisation were a consequence of capitalist commodification and social stratification. Engels as well as Marx in various writings tied the struggles of women to those of workers in general. Their position as carers in the bourgeois nuclear family helped to support capitalism and its desire for capital accumulation and surplus value. A Marxist feminist take would argue that traditional women’s work in the home—unpaid and undervalued—was an important component of profit accumulation. As a result of this theorising came an alignment, a strategic alliance, between feminists and socialists, sharing a collective cause to fight the capitalist division of labour. Other forms of feminist thought have critiqued this strictly Marxist take on labour, highlighting the specifically gendered ways in which work has been organised. Domestic labour, for example, has traditionally been carried out by women across numerous types of society, labour that is considered both low-status (cleaning, cooking) and relegated to the caring domain (child-rearing). This dual aspect of women’s work found itself mirrored in the non-domestic sphere in the twentieth century, as women came to enter the workforce in large numbers across Western nations. Women find themselves over-represented in certain occupations—low-­ level and low-status work such as secretarial, administrative and service-oriented positions. While women increasingly occupied professional positions in the latter half of the twentieth century, these tended to be in the ‘caring’ professions—education, health and social care. Such a development has given rise to a phenomenon known as ‘feminisation’, a development evident in fields such as primary/elementary school teaching where staff are predominantly female. And while it is the case that employment and occupations have become more diverse since then, gendered forms of employment remain remarkably robust in sectors such as engineering and computing which are predominantly male. The furore that erupted in 2017 over wage differentials between men and women within and across professions strongly indicates that gender and patriarchy are forces to be reckoned with and deserve to be explored in further detail. As the twenty-first century has progressed, the old alliance between Marxism and feminism has declined significantly in favour of a culturally oriented feminism and one that seeks to remove itself from an economically driven analysis of male domination. The struggle has increasingly shifted onto a conflict between men and women, over patriarchal modes of organisation. The intersection between sex and class and how these reinforce each other has been replaced with a more fluid and less fixed conception of intersectionality (see key term box, Chap. 12), one that looks to examine how different forms of exploitation enable one another without one occupying a privileged position in the hierarchy of significance.

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Social Theory Applied: Deskilling and the Degradation of Work

The publication of Braverman’s Labour and monopoly capital in the 1970s had such an immediate impact that the term ‘Bravermania’ was used to describe its effects on labour studies (Smith 2015). His influence, especially via the notion of deskilling and the degradation of work, has been present ever since, evident in various publications that have assessed his legacy at different historical junctures (Smith 1994, 2015; Sallaz 2014). Over 40  years later, Braverman’s work is still being applied in many contexts: aside from the field of labour process theory, of which he is considered the originator, these ideas are central concepts in fields such as critical management studies. His influence lives on, with deskilling a focal point of influence and debate. But the applications of Braverman’s work have deviated to some extent from his more classically Marxist approach, with studies exploring issues such as precarity, labour mobility as well as engaging in debates over the relation between labour, the body and spatiality. In terms of industries and workplaces, the focus has also shifted, with newer industries such as the creative sector being explored as well as more recent organisational forms such as call centres. Much of this research has a strong international dimension, reflecting the globalisation of the world economy since Braverman’s time. Newsome et al.’s (2015) edited collection Putting Labour in its Place: Labour Process Analysis and Global Value Chains takes labour process theory and puts it to work in the context of globalisation and the global south, in counties such as India, Singapore and Malaysia. The studies included in the collection endeavour to map the ever-changing world of global manufacturing and global value chains as they manifest themselves in sectors such as call centres and the garment industry. Alongside applications of the deskilling thesis in blue-collar employment, Braverman’s ideas have also been used in studies of white-collar work. Carey’s work on the white-collar proletariat (Carey 2007: 95) is a useful example of this. His study of the changing nature of social work employment suggests that deskilling is not an exclusively factory-floor phenomenon, and that professional employment can also suffer from workplace degradation. In his study this manifested itself as ‘surreptitious deskilling’ in which the learning of ‘new and sometimes elaborate skills, often learnt quickly “on the job” or in training, lead in practice to new forms of deskilling’ (Carey 2007: 95). He illustrates this argument by reference to information technology and its increasing use in sectors such as social work. While it is the case that employees gain new technology skills as support for their roles, these skills are then employed in the execution of more mundane and time-consuming tasks ‘such as constructing care plans, contracts and assessments’ on the computer. This is usually on top of hand-written assessments in face-to-face meetings with clients. Thus, while new knowledge and skills may have been gained by the social worker, ‘further deskilling and work intensification has emerged through the duplication of established procedures’ (Carey: 2007: 07).

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In Summary Commodification  Central to Marx’s critique of capitalism was his theory of labour commodification. According to Marx, capitalism was adept at turning labour power into a commodity, transforming this power into an abstract entity that could be calculated into company profit margins. This commodification for Marx was a key focus of a struggle between capitalist and worker, with capitalists employing numerous tactics to extract labour value, including aggressive management, application of technologies, organisational restructuring and downward pressure on wages. The Great Transformation  Originally published in l944, Karl Polanyi’s book The great transformation detailed the spread and growth of marketisation in the world economies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As well as describing this transformation, the book was highly critical of this version of uber-capitalism and its damaging effects on social cohesion and social inequality. Some commentators see parallels between the great transformation and contemporary concerns over economic neoliberalisation and its consequences. Post-Industrial Society  In his book The coming of the post-industrial society, Daniel Bell gave a name to what has come to be seen as another great economic transformation in the second half of the twentieth century. The phrase ‘post-­ industrial’ refers to a number of parallel developments, such as increased automation, the growth in services, the replacement of labour power with knowledge power, the development of a (truly) global economy, and a widening gap between the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’. The Degradation of Work  Taking his cue from Marx and the critique of labour commodification, Harry Braverman focused his research on the micro-politics of the workplace labour process and the resulting degradation of modern work. The workplace accomplished this degradation through practices designed to reduce worker autonomy and discretionary power when it came to their own labour. According to Braverman, these managerial practices resulted in a high level of deskilling and subsequent labour exploitation. Automation and Capitalism  The issue of automation and its potentially precarious effects on the labour market has become a real concern to many national economies. But Ernest Mandel provides quite a different analysis of automation compared to those who prophesise the end of work. In his book Late Capitalism, he argued that full automation is in fact incompatible with capitalism. According to Mandel, this is because the replacement of living labour power by ‘dead’ automated labour inevitably means a reduction in surplus value. This is a significant problem for capitalist enterprises as this reduces their level of competitive advantage with one another.

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The Significance of Social Class  Since Marx, social theory has placed a special focus on the constitution of the working class and its position as the product of social inequality as well as the vanguard of social transformation. In the work of André Gorz, this focus took a sharp turn, as he argued that the working class as detailed by Marxists no longer existed. For Gorz, the second half of the twentieth century saw a new class develop in place of the traditional working class, a non-­ class of the neo-proletariat which departed significantly from the idealised ‘historical subject’ of the working class. The Precariat  Gorz’s argument finds a strong parallel in the twenty-first century in the theory of the precariat, as developed by Guy Standing. Standing argues that the age of neoliberalism has created a new class of people, the precariat. Just as with Gorz’s neo-proletariat, members of the precariat comprise a sizeable chunk of the workforce, finding themselves underemployed in insecure and low-paid positions, on zero-hour contracts with little in the ways of benefits and opportunities for progression. Standing refers to these as the ‘dangerous’ class, as they have little to lose in an unstable and insecure world economy. Gendered Labour  Feminist theory has exposed the lack of gender analysis in theories of labour such as those provided by Braverman and other Marxist-inspired scholars. For feminists, gender is a central component to many aspects of the labour process, for example in the domestic sphere, where low-status activities such as cleaning, cooking and child-rearing are considered women’s work. Gender is also a significant component in the division of wider labour processes, as can be witnessed in the workforce composition in sectors such as teaching and nursing (mostly female) as compared to engineering and computing (mostly male). Questions Is neoliberal ideology in danger, as Polanyi put it, of ‘demolishing’ society? In what ways can working life be considered precarious? How significant is gender in the modern experience of work? Suggested Readings Losurdo, D. (2018). Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. London: Palgrave. A historical account of class struggle which divorces ‘class’ from its Marxist economic definition, using the notion of class to deliver a comprehensive theory of social conflict. Dale, G. (2010). Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market. Cambridge: Polity Press. A comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas across his publishing career, including a detailed analysis of The great transformation and its relevance to

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twenty-first-century neoliberal economics, alongside an overview of Polanyi’s writings on Christian Socialism. Chakravarti, L.Z (2019). Made in Egypt: Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor. New York: Berghahn Books. An ethnographic account of factory work in Egypt, which details both the impact of globalisation on the Egyptian economy and illuminating the stratified and highly gendered nature of work on the modern shop floor. Lysandrou. P. (2018). Commodity: The Global Commodity System in the 21st Century. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Builds on Marx’s analysis of the commodity and extends it into the twenty-first century, arguing that the global expansion of the commodity system was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis.

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Polanyi. (2001[1944]). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press. Rifkin, J. (1996). The End of Work: Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-­ Market Era. Warner Books. Sallaz, J. (2014). Labor and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Rereading Braverman Today. Employee Responsibility and Rights Journal, 26, 299–311. Smith, C. (2015). Continuity and Changing Labor Process Analysis Forty Years After Labor and Monopoly Capital. Labor Studies Journal, 40(3), 222–242. Smith, V. (1994). Braverman’s Legacy. The Labour Process Tradition at 20. Work and Occupations, 21(4), 403–421. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury. Swingewood, A. (2000). A Short History of Sociological Thought (3rd ed.). Palgrave. Todd, S. (2014). The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class. John Murray Publishers. Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, reproduced in J.  Harris (Ed.). (2012). Community and Civil Society. Cambridge University Press. Walker, R. (2013). Commentary. [on Polanyi] Environment and Planning A, 45, 1662–1670. Wardell, M., Steiger, T., & Meiksins, P. (1999). Rethinking the Labour Process. SUNY Press. Weber, M. (1954). Economy and Society. Free Press. Weber, M. (2010[1905]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxford University Press/Routledge.

5

Civil Society

Introduction Individual and collective life histories are shaped by a range of structural factors, two of the most powerful being the state and the economy. Political and market imperatives exert considerable influence over people’s opportunities, social mobility, employment and security. This is especially apparent when witnessed from a global perspective, which highlights all too well the massive disparities in life chances gifted to those born in the right country and in favourable economic conditions. In contrast, citizens and consumers in countries mired in incompetent political governance and economic mismanagement are at a major disadvantage from the perspective of economic and political justice. The power of the state and the economy, however, is checked by a significant third sphere in the shape of civil society, a sphere of social activity, political agitation and economic resistance that acts as a prime site for struggles over justice, recognition and representation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries civil society housed numerous protest movements that have threatened to bring nation state democracies to the point of collapse. The labour movement took the interests of exploited workers, corralled then into organised form and confronted the political classes with their demands. The 1960s saw the civil rights movement bring the issue of racism and race equality to the forefront of US political life while the 1970s witnessed the struggles over women’s rights, sexuality, peace and environment shake the establishment and question taken-for-granted notions of equality and progress. In the twenty-first century, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, the French Gilets Jaunes and the Spanish Indignados have all played their part in social struggles. This struggle over rights, equality, freedom and justice takes place in organisations and associations that constitute civil society, a key terrain for argumentation, dissent and social transformation. This chapter explores the significance of these struggles while also highlighting the role of the public sphere, a vital component of civil society made famous by  Jürgen Habermas in his book The structural

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_5

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transformation of the public sphere (1989a). The public sphere is the site of opinion formation and deliberation and is central to the function of civil society, acting as a bulwark against centralised forms of power and oppression, while also fulfilling the tenets of democracy itself—representation and participation. This chapter explores the meaning of the public sphere for notions of justice and freedom, while also examining the ways in which changing economic conditions have reshaped social movements in the twenty-first century. The chapter is organised around the following areas: • • • • •

A comparison between early and modern conceptions of civil society The politics of civil society: socialism, radical democracy and uncivil society Old and new social movements Social movements and austerity The public sphere and subaltern counter publics

State, Economy and Civil Society Conceptions of civil society can be traced back to Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero. Its importance to social theory, however, starts with the work of Hegel whose ideas situated civil society in the context of the state and the economy. Hegel’s account of the conflict caused by economic divisions and how it was to be resolved set him apart from his predecessors (e.g., key members of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson). As was the case with his theory of the state (see Chap. 2), Hegel developed his conception of civil society in the context of the French revolution and the industrial revolution. While the French revolution symbolised for Hegel the political realisation of freedom, the industrial revolution helped create extremes of poverty and wealth. Alongside these developments was the growth of a sector of private individuals distinct from both the state and the family. The development of this sphere of social conflict became the impetus behind Hegel’s positing of a third dimension—civil society. Significantly, Hegel viewed this sphere as a mediator, a sphere ‘which intervenes between the family and the state’ (Hegel 1967: 266), while at the same time presupposing the existence of the state. While the state, then, exists outside civil society, the economy, on the other hand, resides within this new sphere of social activity. This acknowledgement of the centrality of economic activity in modern society was evident in Hegel’s use of the phrase bürgerliche gesellchaft—a German phrase that denotes both civil and bourgeois society. In this way, he attaches two distinctive features of this new realm of social relations—first, that these relations are socio-­ economic rather than political, and second, civil society is a sphere of atomised self-seeking individuals, that is, bourgeois. ‘Individuals in their capacity as burghers in this state are private persons whose end is their own interest’ (Hegel 1967: 124). In attaching these features to this new sphere, Hegel recognised the capitalist nature

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of civil society, a nature in which poverty and alienation are embedded. Hegel considered poverty to be a general and inevitable consequence of civil society, unless it is governed by a higher power, the state. ‘Civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both’ (Hegel 1967: 123). For Hegel, the process of capitalist modernisation was the cause of this physical and ethical degradation, a development that, on the one hand, created vast quantities of wealth, while on the other, produced a class of people unable to benefit from the freedoms of civil society. This connection between civil society and inequality is at the heart of the modern debate concerning the role of civil society. Hegel, although he identified this problem of structural inequality in civil society, could provide no real concrete solution. This was due to the fact that his own analysis produced a considerable dilemma: while he acknowledged poverty to be a structural by-product of civil society, the intervention of the state in economic matters could quite easily destroy the moral and economic freedoms that were also a result of civil society.

Civil Society and Class Struggle This dilemma—poverty and inequality or greater state control—forms the basis of much of the subsequent debate that has taken place around civil society (Murphy 2001). The great heir and critic of Hegel was Karl Marx, whose political philosophy was largely directed towards providing a solution to the problem posed by Hegel. He argued that one way to resolve the apparently irresolvable was to turn Hegel’s conception of civil society and its relation to the state on its head. For Marx, it is not the state that regulates and determines civil society, but the other way round: civil society is the regulator of the state. Civil society is the sphere of class struggle and as a consequence generates the ideological manifestations of this struggle, chief of which is the state. The primary position that Marx gave to civil society contrasts sharply with Hegel’s account of the civil society/state relationship: civil society does not pre-suppose the state; the state pre-supposes civil society, a distinction illustrated in its most famous form via Marx’s base/superstructure conception of capitalist society: Civil society, as such, only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the state and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name. (Marx and Engels 1970: 57)

For Marx, it is not enough for the state to regulate civil society through law in order to alleviate its structural inequalities a-la Hegel. Civil society does not find its ethical component in the state; rather, it finds its legitimation. The solution to the class-­based inequality in civil society is not one of an appeal to the state for regulation but, instead, the solution comes in the form of taking control of the state itself.

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As the state provides the legal justification for production and commerce in civil society, it is necessary to seize this power in order to transform civil society. This reconfiguring of Hegel’s thought is one of the most important intellectual developments of modern times: the ramifications of Marx’s theory of civil society can be witnessed throughout the twentieth century as socialist revolutions spread across the world, building versions of the worker’s republic in place of the bourgeois state. That said, it was not only Karl Marx who inspired radical socialist movements in the twentieth century—this position is shared with another influential social theorist and political activist, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci [see Key Theorist box] provided a different twist on civil society to that of Marx or Hegel. He reversed Marx’s base/superstructure model, as he places civil society, not in the base, but in the superstructure. The crucial implication of this re-configuring of the political map is that, while the economy is housed, a-la Marx, in the base, it does not form part of civil society. There are two other conceptual differences between Marx and Gramsci. First, unlike Marx, for whom civil society is synonymous with economic society, Gramsci distinguishes civil society from both economic and political society, thus adopting a three-part, rather than two-part analytical framework: state-­ economy-­ civil society. Second, while Marx identified civil society with the economy, Gramsci, by placing the economy outside civil society, associates it with a sphere of voluntary association. He recognised the power of new types of association housed in civil society, such as churches, unions, political parties, cultural institutions, sports, leisure and hobby clubs, special interest groups and neighbourhood associations. While both Marx and Gramsci viewed civil society as the focal point for revolutionary action, their different interpretations over what constitutes civil society had implications for political practice. It is at the point of production—the struggles between capital and labour—that Marx believed revolutionary action should be primarily waged. For Gramsci, it is the system of corporations—unions, educational and cultural institutions, voluntary associations—that provided the possibility of a counter-hegemonic revolutionary force. As he puts it (1971: 233), the superstructures of civil society ‘are like the trench systems of modern warfare’. This difference in content can lead to different political strategies. The Marxist-Leninist variant (a strategy that resulted in the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions in the twentieth century) used the method of a closely knit disciplined vanguard party that would directly attack the forces of production. In Gramsci’s version, the process of revolutionary struggle was generated through the mobilisation of the grassroots and their subsequent organisation. Regardless of their theoretical differences, fundamental to both Marx and Gramsci is the belief that civil society is intimately connected to capitalism. Capitalism needs to be transformed in order to rid society of its class divisions. Marx believed that the state had to be overthrown in order to do this, while Gramsci believed in widening civil society until it ‘swallowed’ the state, but the end goal, in both cases, was the same: the overthrow of the capitalist order.

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Key Theorist: Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891  in Sardinia, Italy. His beginnings were inauspicious: his father was jailed for corruption which meant that the young Antonio left school to take up work to help feed the family. He also had to cope with a disability as he was left hunchbacked after an accident. Nevertheless, he managed to get into the University of Turin to study literature and linguistics, but his burgeoning career as a left-wing journalist ensured that he never got to complete his degree. His lack of formal qualifications is astonishing given the level of intellectual capacity evident in the Prison Notebooks, his famous set of papers and discussions published after his death. His stay in prison, a result of the Fascist Mussolini government who imprisoned him on fabricated charges concerning a political assassination, must go down as one of the most productive in history as he managed to produce 3000 pages of material covering a wide range of issues in political economy and social theory. But this was no ordinary set of writings; their originality can be seen in their continuing influence on political and social theory up to the present day. His involvement in political and left-wing journalism was no mere affectation on his part: Italy was undergoing major upheaval during his lifetime, with the simultaneous rise of socialist, communist and fascist movements all vying for ideological supremacy in a context of industrialisation, growing inequality and social unrest. Capitalism’s supreme capacity to sidestep revolution and to appeal to the European working class became a central theme of his work at this time. How was it that the contradictions of capitalism did not produce a revolutionary proletariat who were willing to throw off their chains and create a new order? This was as much a practical question as a theoretical one—as a committed socialist and leader of the Communist part in Italy the interest was obvious but this question was central to a key problem in social theory—how to understand the relation between structure and agency. Gramsci was no fan of the ‘scientific’ Marxism that had sprung up in parts of Europe, a type of Marxist thought that offered a fairly rigid and unbending view of social transformation. He was intent on offering up a different understanding of social change than one based on rigid positivist notions of laws and motion. The lack of a theory of agency spurred him to seek a reconstructed Marxism, one that saw revolution in the superstructure. To answer this question, Gramsci devised the notion of hegemony (see key concept box, Chap. 6)—a description of the power of social structures to manufacture democratic consent without the aid of fascist politics. This cultural analysis of social change became particularly influential in the field of cultural studies, as evident in the work of Stuart Hall (see Chap. 6). Gramsci’s concepts more generally have impacted understandings of intellectual life, the state and the possibilities of culture as a revolutionary tool. Gramsci also provides a touchstone for work in critical pedagogy, in community development and in various forms of social activism.

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Civil Society and Radical Democracy Gramsci’s tripartite conception of civil society has had a lasting influence on social theory, for example in the work of Habermas, who adopted Gramsci’s conception to take account of social transformations in the late twentieth century. Habermas defines civil society as that composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organisations and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private-public spheres, distil and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere. (Habermas 1996: 367)

Habermas views this conception of civil society as a vital component of ‘wholly new historical constellations’ (1996: 366). He is referring to a number of important late-twentieth-century developments, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the decline of the welfare state in the West. As a consequence of these developments, theorists such as Habermas and others sought to develop new objectives for the socialist left, which took the shape of protecting civil society and its beneficial qualities against both the market economy and political interference. Two characteristics can be said to embody this strand of radical politics: first, it is believed that Marxist theory did not succeed in explaining the continuing stability of capitalist systems; and second, Habermas rejects the belief that the working class can act as a revolutionary vanguard for social change. The political form of this theory takes the shape of civil society, a sphere of association and activism that can help protect the lifeworld against the colonising forces of the state and the market (see Chap. 3). In the face of these colonising forces, Habermas argues that civil society has a vital role to play in ensuring that the communicative functions of the lifeworld are upheld and defended. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, authors who have appropriated Habermas’ analysis in developing a post-Marxist approach, present a succinct case for civil society: ‘the project of a democratic civil society … is obviously one of de-colonizing the lifeworld’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 455). In their re-formulation of the task to be achieved by civil society, Cohen and Arato provide an explicit critique of the Marxian appropriation of Hegel’s civil society. According to them, Marx, by viewing civil society as the sphere of class struggle and exploitation, adopted too narrow a definition of civil society from Hegel, the system of needs only. Cohen and Arato, on the other hand, value the ‘great importance of a two-sided understanding’ of Hegelian civil society (1992: 96). The two sides to this understanding are sittlichkeit, or ethical life, and antisittlichkeit, its opposite. Antisittlichkeit comes in the shape of the system of needs—the economy—that Marx saw as synonymous with civil society. The system of corporations, however, provide sittlichkeit, and in so doing, provide the potential for furthering democratic practices in civil society: Unlike the Marxian conception … Hegel’s theory of civil society doesn’t stop at the system of needs. On the contrary, Hegel’s most important insight with regard to civil society is his recognition that it involves the principle of voluntary association, and, with it, new forms

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of solidarity, egalitarian participation, membership, and ethical life. It is precisely the function of the associations of civil society (corporations, estates) to provide a context in which new forms of solidarity, collective identity, and common interest can emerge. Their most important function is to mitigate the centrifugal tendencies of the system of needs, bind individuals together in a common purpose, and temper the egoism of self-interest. (Cohen and Arato 1992: 628–29)

While there are numerous similarities, the radical democratic take on civil society differs from that of Gramsci in some important respects. Gramsci viewed the problem of modern society to be one of class exploitation and the role of civil society was to develop organisations to eventually take over the state, and hence ‘declass’ society. For Habermas, the problem concerns the colonisation of ethical life by functional imperatives, and the role of civil society is to ‘de-colonise’ this ethical life in order to preserve the potential for democratic practices. This difference clearly sets Habermas apart from the traditional goals of socialism. For Habermas, the state, civil society and economy all embody their own distinct sets of functional imperatives, and any attempt at conflating one sphere with another would constitute a grave mistake. ‘In no way does [civil society] occupy the position of a macro-­ subject supposed to bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it’ (Habermas 1996: 372). For Habermas, civil society embodies the concept of self-limitation, a correcting mechanism seen as vital in order to avoid any return to social re-embedding. ‘Democratic movements emerging from civil society must give up holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society, aspirations that also undergirded Marxist ideas of social revolution’ (1996: 372). Self-limitation refers to the limits that must be placed on the radicalising of democracy, particularly in relation to the market, which, in contrast to Marxist takes on civil society, is to retain its autonomy. Habermas argues that this self-limiting characteristic of civil society is less a weakness and more of a strength. It allows for citizen mobilisation at the most appropriate times and allows critically engaged publics to assess the extent to which democracy retains a useful degree of compatibility with shifting forms of economic organisation—it allows civil society to keep the state and the market in check without being subsumed by their demands, and vice versa. These two distinct notions of civil society, that of Marxist and Post-Marxist, have their origins in divergent perceptions of the relationships between the political and economic spheres. Any truly effective appraisal, therefore, of their relative value to current discussions regarding the politics of civil society would by necessity have to deal with the question that has haunted governments the world over: to what extent should the market be controlled by the state?

Assessing the Politics of Civil Society Marx has his critics. Femia (2001: 131) argues that the Marxist tradition ‘must take part of the blame’ regarding current confusion over what constitutes civil society. Commentators such as Taylor (1990) and Gellner (1994) have taken Marx to task

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for what they argue is a debasing of the complex and more sophisticated analytical model of civil society provided by Hegel. A more fundamental critique is provided by Kaviraj (2001: 301), who believes that the building blocks of Marxian political economy—base/superstructure—constitute a major stumbling block to developing a model of civil society that takes seriously a more nuanced account of the state and its relation to civil society. In particular, the reduction of political relations to the realm of epiphenomena precludes any understanding of the state’s equality agenda as anything other than illusory. And while Gramsci may have at least added more complexity to the model of civil society, in particular by focusing on the system of corporations and taking the economy out of civil society, his account has also been subject to much criticism. There are logical inconsistencies in Gramsci’s interpretation of civil society as he provided at least three interpretations of the relationship between civil and political society. In one section of The Prison Notebooks, the state is contrasted with civil society (1971: 12); in another paragraph, he states that ‘in actual reality civil society and the state are one and the same thing’ (1971: 160); while in another section of his notebooks, the state is said to comprise both political society and civil society (1971: 160). What of Habermasian-inspired takes on civil society? Significantly, Habermas has rejected traditional Marxian political economy and the attendant revolutionary outcomes as outdated and hopelessly romantic. There does, however, appear to be something of a contradiction in Habermas’ take on the self-limiting nature of civil society in relation to economic democracy. Habermas has argued, for instance, that, in relation to the debates over the future of the welfare state, the intention behind a reconstruction of the welfare state at the EU level should be to ‘tame the capitalist economic system’ (Habermas 1996: 410). According to Ingram (2000: 289), Habermas maintains that ‘capitalism conflicts with genuine liberalism’. While significant question marks remain over traditional Marxist accounts of civil society, it needs to be asked whether Habermas has proposed too narrow a scope for radical democracy. Regardless of the relative merits of a Marxist and post-Marxist slants on civil society, both explore the significance of civil society to political and economic democracy. This dual significance offers a different dimension to debates over the importance of civil society in combating perceived social injustices. This incorporation of the modern conception(s) of civil society places economic imperatives, and attendant questions over market inequalities, alongside issues of identity.

Uncivil Society Both sides of the above debate over civil society agree that further democratisation of society is a key outcome. The dominance of this viewpoint, at least in social theory, makes it sometimes easy to ignore the other side of civil society, what John Keane calls ‘uncivil society’ (Keane 1998). Keane argues that proponents of civil society must come to terms with the concept of uncivil society, especially the

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troubling relationship between civil society and violence. He makes the case that while violence is often the antithesis of civil society, it is also the case that ‘every known form of civil society tends to produce this same violent antithesis’ (Keane 1998: 141). According to Keane, this tendency to operate as ‘a peaceful haven of incivility’ (ibid, 141) is endemic to highly developed forms of civil society: these forms are in fact dominated by incivility, which can take the shape of basic rudeness as well as forms of organised violence. Unfortunately, this dystopian view of civil society resonates with the often-brutal experience of interactions via the digital public sphere—that technologically enabled online debating chamber comprised of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the vast number of comment sections on newspaper websites, magazines and journals. Those who wish to engage with reasoned commentary and seek out useful information also have to wade through a barrage of sarcasm, low-­ grade insult and uninformed polemic. At its worst, the digital public sphere can appear fuelled by a combination of hateful contempt and open hostility to those who represent alternative viewpoints. Those in less powerful social positions, those who embody alternative lifestyles, all have to take extra care when engaging in debate. This apparent corruption of the promise of online technologies and the opportunities they provide for reasoned debate, limitless knowledge and the democratic distribution of knowledge will not surprise some social theorists who have questioned the equation of civil society with equality, reason and democracy. Theorists, such as Elias and Michel Foucault, point to the tenuous links that supposedly civilising nations have with civil behaviour. This is especially the case when it comes to the state and its monopoly of the use of violence. Another prominent social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, takes it a stage further, arguing that ‘holocaust-­style phenomena must be recognised as legitimate outcomes of [the] civilising tendency, and its constant potential’ (Bauman 1989). He makes this argument in Modernity and the holocaust, where he also claims that ‘modern civility is the ally of barbarity’. A variant of this argument is delivered by Chambers and Kopstein’s (2001) more prosaic take on ‘bad civil society’. In their study they mention the Nazi party in the context of civil society, a connection more fully explored in Fred Powell’s book The politics of civil society: big society and small government (Powell 2007). The section on the Nazification of charity illustrates how important a functioning civil society is to modern democracies, but also just how fragile and open to abuse it can be in the context of political and ideological pressure. According to Powell, the Nazis needed to take over civil society to ensure the success of their ideology, an ideology that in less extreme times would be banished to the margins of civil discourse. In order to achieve this aim, the Nazis turned the communicative and associative power of civil society into a vehicle for communitarian totalitarianism. A key driver of this process of co-optation was what Powell calls the ‘nazification of charity’, a process that had major implications for civil society, given the significance of voluntarism and charitable organisations. The Nazis gradually subsumed German charitable organisations into their own Nazi People’s Welfare Association (NSV), absorbing smaller charities such as self-help groups for the

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blind, deaf, dumb, and distressed gentlefolk, forcing a merger with the German League for Voluntary Welfare, and ensuring that the German Red Cross became part of the fold by persuading them to include Nazis in key positions. By 1939, over 12 million Germans had enrolled in the NSV, meaning that the nazification of charity was highly successful. This nazification extended to the application of strong-arm tactics to volunteering and fundraising, with fear and extortion becoming defining elements of their take on charity. The Nazis effectively compulsified voluntarism through, for example, mass propaganda such as posters on buses and trams with statements such as ‘I am a member of the NSV—are you?’ Charitable donations were deducted at source from workers’ wages among numerous other manipulations. Although, of course, nazification provides an extreme example, it is nevertheless one that is concerning to those who view civil society as some kind of benign associational panacea. As is so often the case with ideas borrowed from elsewhere, the power of civil society depends on those who wield it—the uncivil side of civil society oftentimes trumping its more palatable version.

Key Movement: Functionalism

There have been different varieties of functionalist theory over the years, but the most significant were the structural functionalism of American sociologists Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and Robert Merton (1910–2003). A post-­ Second World War movement, structural functionalism saw the development of highly generalised and abstract theoretical positions to explain how society works, and was heavily influenced by the ideas of Emile Durkheim in particular. Durkheim stressed the significance of society as the producer of norms that are shared collectively across social groups. His work on religion, the division of labour as well as his theory of suicide, all point to the social foundations of individual and group beliefs, attitudes and achievement. Influenced by Durkheim (as well as Weber) in the sense that society can be deemed as much more than the sum of its individuals, Talcott Parsons produced a general systems theory that could help explain social behaviour and brought together the realm of social structure and that of human agency. Parson’s core concern was the possibility of social order, which reflected his role as a professional sociologist. He developed a theory of functionalism that identified four prerequisites for all functioning societies, and in this sense, he was strongly universalist believing that one overarching theory could be adapted to take account of societal differences across nations and regions. These four prerequisites are known as AGIL which referred to Adaptation (the economic function of society), Goal attainment (political function), Integration (those aspects that bind the system together) and Latent pattern maintenance (the conversion of social and individual values into one another). (continued)

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This system provides an indication of the highly abstract nature of Parson’s work, also reflected in concepts such as ‘unit act’, ‘action frames of references’ and ‘pattern variables’. The ‘grand theory’ approach was designed to offer a conceptual schema through which studies of social behaviour could generate research hypotheses and gather empirical data on a wide array of social phenomena. This approach mirrors to some extent general theories found in the natural sciences, for example, that of Charles Darwin whose general theory of evolution provides a template through which scientists can comprehend the development of natural species. This approach made him hugely influential at the time but fell out of favour as the twentieth century progressed. The inability, for example, of his theory to account for conflict and social change was viewed by some as a fatal flaw of a theory designed to explain order—conflict theory came to be a more favoured approach in sociology as the influence of Marx and others came to the fore.

Social Movements: Old and New The debate over the politics of civil society, as complex as it is, only makes practical sense when understood alongside its key component parts, in particular social movements. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of what are now referred to as ‘old’ social movements—the interconnected labour and socialist movements that provided a grassroots response to rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth century. These had a set of materialist objectives related to class position and coalesced mainly around trade unions, but also in many cases an organised labour/workers party. Brought together with sets of common interests, working side by side in the same factories and living in the same tenements, members of the working class found their political representation as well as strong bonds of solidarity in the trenches of civil society. While it can be easy to forget the power of unions in contemporary contexts, the organisation and power of these associations, realised in their politicised weaponry of strikes and votes, made these movements a force to be reckoned with. Their work in civil society, of protest, debate, organising, agitating and advocating, resulted in numerous employment practices that modern workers take for granted—the five-day week, right to benefits, holidays, work breaks, and most importantly, a livable and appropriate wage—a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. These movements have diminished in influence since their heyday in the twentieth century, and although unions are still with us, social movements based on class have seen their pole position in civil society overtaken by a newer set of social movements, which are much less interested in class and economic concerns (issues

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like wages and workplace protection), and instead are more concerned with social and cultural concerns around, for example, the environment, peace, and the rights of women, people of colour, gays, lesbians and transgender people. Rights, values, norms and identities become the battlegrounds, taking politics in civil society away from the shop floor. It is often the case that these new social movements, which sprung up in the 1960s, are associated with the parallel rise of the post-industrial society. Such a view situates these new movements as a direct consequence of the shift from a highly industrialised form of relation to one in which the service sector becomes the dominant productive force and source of employment—see Daniel Bell’s classic thesis laid out in his book The coming of the post-industrial society [discussed in Chap. 4]. With this shift comes new forms of relation both to modes of production and between workers: a diversification of work categories and sources of employment. Effectively, the production of services replaced the production of goods as the main economic activity in post-industrial societies. This shift has not escaped the attention of social theory, with a number of researchers, including Habermas, putting forth different arguments as to why such movements have become the dominant oppositional force. Habermas devoted some of his major work The theory of communicative action to casting the peace and environmental movements as defensive campaigns as opposed to offensive ones like the labour movement. With the labour movement, Habermas’ argument goes, the aim was to make gains in terms of wages, living standards and quality of work— however, this offensive nature has changed with the onset of late capitalist modernisation and its resulting pathologies. Specifically, he characterises such movements as defensive in the face of the colonisation of the lifeworld by the imperatives of state and market. They are a reaction against the overbearing and intrusive nature of politics and economics into everyday life and their tendency to overpower communicative forms of social life.

Social Movements in Times of Austerity Although the debate over old and new social movements still warrants attention, recent events, specifically the 2008 global recession, have necessitated a shift in understandings of social movements, their origins and objectives. The aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis brought uncertainty and precarity to millions across the world. Some populations were inevitably affected more than others, and while richer countries such as the UK and the US have managed to weather the storm of unemployment and bankruptcy and avoid widespread revolts, others witnessed a backlash against the politics of austerity. The poorer nations of Southern Europe saw the rise of popular revolts against the decline in living standards, lack of opportunities and employment. The Indignados movement in Spain and the Aganaktismenoi movement in Greece took to the streets, their activism fuelled by resentment against the austere economic policies ushered in by national governments (Gerbaudo 2017: 38).

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But these anti-austerity movements were not just a Southern European phenomenon: post-2008 saw massive protests in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Russia and Venezuela. These protests show how interconnected the global economy is— see, for example, Venezuela’s economic crisis which stemmed from China’s stalled economic output, which later resulted in the rise of Movimiento Estudiantil as a core oppositional movement to the government, an ongoing struggle to this day. Social movement scholars like Donatella della Porta have set their sights on these recent anti-austerity movements and associated popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. She argues that these movements and the people they represent marked a shift away from the classed nature of both old and new movements. Instead of the working or middle classes taking up wars of their own position, it is what she calls the ‘losers of globalisation’—or what Guy Standing has called the Precariat (see Chap. 4), that have occupied the front-line of social action. Neither especially working nor middle class in origin, the protests incorporated people from different socio-­ economic backgrounds, united by their ‘feeling of having been unjustly treated’ (Della Porta 2015: 214). Della Porta lays the cause of these movements squarely at the feet of neoliberalism—a second ‘great transformation’ imposing free-market principles over policies of social protection. Marketisation and privatisation have seen public policies work in the interests of multinational corporations and international finance. The debt crises resulting from this second great transformation saw the rise of inequality across capitalist countries: weaker European economies were hit particularly hard in this regard, as they had to cope with their peripheral status compounded by an inability to adopt protectionist economic policies or any other form of policy that contradicted neoliberal orthodoxy. This has led to a growing ‘precarization’ of society through unemployment and underemployment (especially of youth), declining wages, loss of social protection and a shrinking welfare state. Identity and class politics merge in these new movements—anti-austerity protestors question the hyper-individualisation and selfishness of neoliberal societies, and make a case for increased welfare and state protection. Identifying themselves as the moral majority—the 99 per cent—anti-austerity activists put forward a ‘moral discourse that called for the reinstatement of welfare protections’ while also challenging systemic injustices. Della Porta argues that these movements cannot be understood through the lens of other social theories such as that proposed by Habermas, particularly his theory of legitimation crisis. In his book of the same name (Habermas 1976), Habermas theorises that legitimation crises arose from states overreaching their boundaries. In a similar fashion to Claus Offe, Habermas argues that the more responsibility states assume over welfare services as well as consumption, the greater the chance that crises of social integration will occur in the lifeworld—consequently if the state cannot manage the side effects of capitalist modernisation, it therefore ends up paying a price, and the ‘price for this failure is withdrawal of legitimation’ (Habermas 1976, 69). Austerity however has ushered in an era in which the theory of the overreaching state no longer applies. The ‘mid-century compromise’—that is, the welfare state

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and the gains won by unions have been eroded, resulting in a state that does not have the authority or the power to overreach itself. So instead of a crisis of legitimation, what is occurring in neoliberal societies is a ‘crisis of responsibility’ (Della Porta 2015: 119). Today’s legitimacy crisis is not the result of market regulation but is instead the result of market deregulation and its restrictive effects on civic, political and social rights. The social movements are a response to the ‘an abdication of responsibility’ on the part of the state in the face of privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation—political competency has been stripped away from the state, leaving only mistrust and suspicion to fuel the anger that drives these social movements. As well as analysing leftist movements, Della Porta has examined the rise of right and far-right movements (Caiani and della Porta 2018). These are significant movements in their own right and their strength and presence can be witnessed via the rise of nationalism and anti-immigrant pro-protectionist agendas across the world. Can a crisis of responsibility be used to theorise and explain the growth in popularity of the Tea Party in the United States, 5 Star in Italy, Front National in France, Nippon Kaigi in Japan?

Key Concept: The Public Sphere

As well as the home of numerous social movements, voluntary and non-­ governmental organisations, civil society is also home to the public sphere, a conception of public space developed by Habermas in his classic text The structural transformation of the public sphere (1989a/[1962]). Designed to account for the rise of a critical reasoning public in countries such as England in the eighteenth century, Habermas traced the development of this sphere from its original role as a mouthpiece for the state to its transformation into a public debating chamber set against the interests of states. Greek in origin, conceptions of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ and of the public sphere received a new lease of life with the growth of the modern state and of civil society alongside it. Habermas defined the public sphere thus: The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason (offentliches Rasonnement). (1989a: 27)

As a mediator between society and the state, the public sphere for Habermas is a crucial element of a properly functioning democracy. It is the bearer of public opinion ‘that principle of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time (continued)

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has made possible the democratic control of state activities’ (Habermas 1989b: 136). Keeping the state in check was aided by the development of new print media such as newspapers: as Habermas details in the Structural transformation ..., the English state in the seventeenth century attempted to assert its control over its publics via publications such as the Gazette of London, but as these developed, the space for opinion formation, dissemination and critique grew through reviews and letter pages. Also important were meeting spaces such as the coffee houses of London and the salons of Paris, which expanded the interest and influence of aesthetic pursuits such as literature, influencing in particular the forms of public rationality that helped to generate political dissent. For all its positive qualities in the formation of democratic governance, Habermas was at the same time pessimistic about its continuing strength: ‘For about a century the social foundations of this sphere have been caught up in a process of decomposition’ (1989a: 4) … while its scope is expanding significantly, its function has become progressively insignificant’. In his later work (1996), he once again adopted a positive outlook on the public sphere, focusing on its deliberative democratic function for social movements in civil society (see discussion below).

On Subaltern Counter Publics Another aspect that should be acknowledged in this debate is the importance of subaltern politics in relation to civil society and social movements. The term subaltern was used by Gramsci to describe those groups that are excluded from a society’s established institutions and thus denied the means by which people have a voice in their society. From these beginnings, the term has been adopted by other approaches, especially in the field of postcolonial studies, and has been used to explore issues of power and politics in relations to topics such as gender. Nancy Fraser (1990) adapted the notion of the subaltern to characterise the alternative discursive spaces occupied by subordinated social groups more generally, such as women, workers, peoples of colour, and gays and lesbians. She calls these spaces ‘subaltern counter publics’ as they represent parallel discursive entities ‘where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser 1990: 67). She considers the late-twentieth-­ century U.S. feminist subaltern counter public as an exemplary form of parallel space which through its activities acted as a bulwark against patriarchal hegemony.

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These activities included the production of journals, the establishment of feminist bookstores and publishing companies, the proliferation of forms of association and networking via film distribution, lecture series, academic programmes, conferences and festivals. Fraser argues that this specific form of public sphere has allowed feminist women to invent different terms for describing their social reality, including ‘sexism’, ‘the double shift’, ‘sexual harassment’, and ‘marital, date, and acquaintance rape’. Armed with these forms of counter language, women were able to reduce the level of their subjugation and disadvantage in official public spheres (Fraser 1990: 67). Fraser acknowledges that such counter publics are not always of the progressive kind or indeed pro-democracy—the word she uses is ‘virtuous’ and she suggests that counter publics can be ‘explicitly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian’. There are numerous examples of these, including the anti-abortion movement, campaigns for the reintroduction of the death penalty and the large and vocal pro-gun lobby in the United States. These can all be classified as counter publics that aim to transform public opinion to more adequately reflect their specific interests (Gibson et al. 2011: 4). The fact that these counter publics exist should not be viewed as a deficiency of democracy, however, or used to question the function of civil society—no one ideology has a monopoly on the right to be heard, voice opinion or pursue an agenda. What it does help to do is foreground the politics of the public sphere and the important but troubled relationship between civil discourse and political influence. While Fraser delivered a feminist critique of Habermas’ rigid split between the public and the private—a critique of the private sphere that has been put to good use in analyses of the value of domestic labour and ‘women’s work’ [see Chap. 4]—she also helped to extend the notion of the public sphere by pluralising and classifying it. She makes a distinction between weak and strong publics: a strong public is one where not only discussion takes place, but also decisions are made. Weak publics are publics which discuss issues, but which have little chance of influencing decision-making. The ability to access decision-making processes may occur through having access to the states’ decision-making bodies or being able to bring pressure to bear on them. This weak/strong distinction has consequences for the purpose of the public sphere and civil society more generally, particularly when it comes to the issue of the balance between freedom and justice. Fraser reiterates the basic conception of civil society as a separate sphere from the state, an ‘informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state’ (Fraser 1990: 75). But she argues that this extra-governmental character is both a strength and a weakness when it comes to publics. Although, on the one hand, a sharp separation between civil society and the state ‘confers an aura of independence, autonomy, and legitimacy on the “public opinion” generated in it’, it deprives publics of an effective influence on decision-making. She views parliamentary

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sovereignty as a form of a strong public, in that they embody both opinion formation and decision-making functions. But this form of direct democracy has its own issues and there are question marks over the extent to which powers should be separated and cordoned off. In particular, the degree of separation has consequences for accountability and the extent to which political and civil society should retain whatever relative autonomy they have left. It could be the case that the stronger the public, the less opportunity it creates for the generation of unfettered discourse. The danger with such levels of strength and influence lies in its tendency to conflate political and civil demands, which could end up undermining the purpose of civil society in the first place. It is useful at this stage to bring Habermas back into the discussion, as his changing ideas on civil society, social movements and the public sphere can help to clarify their relationship in the context of the subaltern. Habermas had earlier positioned social movements in the Theory of communicative action (1987) as defensively oriented, as aiming to defend the lifeworld from the overreach of the state and the market. By the time he published Between facts and norms in 1996, his thinking has changed to some degree, as he positioned social movements within civil society as crucial instigators of transformative social change at particular historical junctures. They can operate like this because of the relation between the public sphere and civil society, the latter’s associational infrastructure anchoring ‘the communication structures’ of the former (Habermas 1996: 366). Civil society offers a stable foundation so that communication can flow from civil society to the political sphere, while also offering the opportunity for social movements to emerge. The public sphere in this configuration acts as ‘relay for anarchic communication flows among plural citizens’ (Haysom 2012:187). This capacity generates communicative power outside the regulatory oversight of the system, providing systems of government with an extra-parliamentary check on their power as well as opportunities for social movement actors to make policy: At critical moments of accelerated history [i.e., brought on by some sort of crisis] these actors get the chance to reverse the normal circuits of communication in the political system and the public sphere (i.e., the normal circumstances whereby initiative comes from within and communication is dominated by the administrative system itself). In this way then can shift the entire system’s mode of problem solving. (Habermas 1996: 381)

The public sphere in this regard then operates for subaltern counter publics as the communicative vehicle via which they debate strategy and ideas while also making themselves heard. As Haysom points out, this is a long way from Habermas’ worries over direct democracy and the spectre of ‘left fascism’. Instead, conflict, even civil disobedience, can help to connect the two spheres—political and public— together, and thereby strengthening the democratic fabric of society more generally.

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Social Theory Applied: The Public Sphere

The public sphere is one of Habermas’ most influential concepts, generating debate across an impressive set of subject areas in both the humanities and social sciences. An excellent entry point into these debates is provided by Benchimol and Maley’s collection Spheres of influence (2007), which offers a broad examination of the public sphere from a cultural and historical perspective. The set of diverse essays engage critically with Habermas’ original work, acknowledging its immense value to the fields of literary and cultural studies, while also delving into some of its historical blind spots. The collection includes case studies of the impact of changes to the printing industry on the scope of the public sphere in the early modern period; changes in conventions governing speech and their implications for communicative activity in the public sphere, as well as studies of the relation between the public sphere and radical social movements. These are joined by essays that assess the value of Habermas’ ideas from a postcolonial and postmodern perspective. One of these essays is by Nancy Fraser, who has elsewhere updated the idea of the public sphere for a globalised transnational world (see Nash 2014, for her contribution and a set of responses). Prior to this, Fraser was a vocal critic of Habermas and his avoidance of gender in his analysis of the public sphere—she illustrated how the modern public sphere depended on highly gendered conceptions of the public and private spheres (Fraser 1989). This gendered take on the public sphere is a good example of the diverse ways the public sphere has found itself the subject of research applications across disciplines. Gender and the public sphere, for example, has been the subject of scrutiny in the context of the Arab Spring that took place in countries such as Tunisia. In their article on shifting gender politics in Tunisia, Charrad and Zarrugh (2014) argue that the Arab Spring (the Jasmine revolution in the Tunisian case) helped facilitate a new form of politics, politics from below as opposed to the business-as-usual politics from above. This new politics takes the shape of a newly invigorated public sphere in which women’s associations have played a crucial role. What the authors term a ‘new public sphere’ illustrates the importance of national context and culture in shaping discourse but it also suggests that public spheres can be generated in quite different contexts to that originally envisaged by Habermas—in this case in a country in which civil society associations were limited in their actions by regulatory mechanisms imposed on them by the Tunisian state.

In Summary Civil Society and Inequality  Much of the contemporary debates concerning civil society and inequality can be traced back to Hegel, whose ideas developed in the context of the French and industrial revolutions. Hegel identified a troubling

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problem of structural inequality in the developing civil society in countries such as France and Germany, yet he was concerned that the hard-won economic freedom provided by civil society would be sacrificed in the name of equality. For Hegel, there was a real danger that state intervention in economic matters could undermine the moral and economic freedoms that were also a product of civil society. Marx and Civil Society  Hegel’s ideas were a major influence on Karl Marx, who was also troubled by the rampant inequality in civil society. In order to circumvent Hegel’s concern over the loss of freedom, Marx radically altered Hegel’s conception of civil society and its relation to the state. For Marx, instead of regulating civil society, it was in fact the reverse: civil society is the regulator of the state. This radical re-working paved the way for Marx’s subsequent ideas on socialism and proletarian politics. Gramsci and Class Struggle  Someone else who has made a significant contribution to the civil society debate is Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci built on the works of Marx and Hegel while also deviating significantly away from their analysis. He removed the economy from civil society and, as a result, proposed a state-economy-­ civil society model that is still in favour today. His civil society was comprised of a ‘system of corporations’—voluntary associations such as unions, churches, cultural institutions and so on, that for him were the site of revolutionary change and social struggle. Civil Society and Radical Democracy  Habermas adapted Gramsci’s tri-partite social analysis of society to provide a less revolutionary and more radical democratic view of civil society. Struggle in civil society for Habermas should aim to ensure that the communicative potential of the lifeworld is protected from the colonising tendencies of the state and the market. For Habermas, the central problem of civil society is not one of class inequality but rather the damage done to ethical life by the desire for power and money: civil society is effectively positioned as the defender of democratic practices in modern complex societies. Uncivil Society  John Keane argues that theories of civil society tend to overlook the uncivil nature of social life and have neglected to critically examine the disturbing connection between the practices of civil society and a tendency towards violence. Keane argues that this violent tendency is more common in highly developed forms of civil society and that forms of incivility, such as basic rudeness as well as organised violence, is a dominant characteristic of modern civil society. Old and New Social Movements  ‘Old’ social movements, based around class and socialist politics, have declined in importance since their heyday in the twentieth century, and a new set of social movements have since come to the fore, which are not based in class politics, but instead are organised around a much broader set of issues such as the environment, peace, women’s rights, people of colour, gays, lesbians and transgender people.

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Social Movements and Austerity  The twenty-first century has resulted in a shift in understandings of social movements. Scholars such as Donatella della Porta argue that movements such as Occupy represent a distinctly different agenda and population to that of both old and new movements. These new movements represent what she calls the ‘losers of globalisation’, who have taken to the barricades of civil society to protest the impact of neoliberal policies across the globe. Subaltern Counter Publics  Nancy Fraser uses the notion of the ‘subaltern’ to describe the alternative discursive spaces inhabited by subordinated social groups, such as women, workers, peoples of colour, and gays and lesbians. A strong example of these counter publics is the late-twentieth-century U.S. feminist movement, whose various activities repelled the hegemonic force of patriarchy and misogyny. Questions Do you agree with della Porta’s theory that modern states are abdicating responsibility in the face of neoliberalism? How civil is the digital public sphere? Do social media platforms such as Twitter provide sufficient opportunities for rational debate to flourish? Think of an example of a counter public: how successful is it at ‘transforming public opinion’? Suggested Readings Desia, G. (ed.) (2013). The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity. London: Routledge. This collection of essays uses Habermas’ classic analysis of the development of the public sphere to explore the implications of new media technologies for human communication, public deliberation and critical reason. Topics include sex and sexuality, the rise of cybercommunities, internet piracy and the role of markets in cyberspace. Edwards, M. (2014). Civil Society (3rd edition). Cambridge: Polity Press. Examines the variations of civil society at a global level, while detailing the role of civil society and its voluntary associations in strengthening democracy, community and social justice. Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. (eds) (2014). The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (3rd edition). Wiley Blackwell. Organised around a series of questions (who joins movements, what do movements do, etc.), this Reader is a comprehensive overview of key issues and debates in social movement studies. Nash, K. (ed.) (2014). Transnationalising the Public Sphere: Nancy Fraser et al. Cambridge: polity. This collection includes Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas’ public sphere in an age of globalisation, as well as a specially commissioned set of essays that subject Fraser’s argument to further critique. Issues addressed include the value of Fraser’s own ideas of the counter public and the relevance of local politics in a global world.

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References Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Polity Press. Benchimol, A., & Maley, W. (Eds.). (2007). Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas. Peter Lang. Caiani, M., & della Porta, D. (2018). The Radical Right as Social Movement Organizations. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right. Oxford University Press. Chambers, S., & Kopstein, J. (2001). Bad Civil Society. Political Theory, 29(6), 837–865. Charrad, M., & Zarrugh, A. (2014). Equal or Complementary? Women in the New Tunisian Constitution After the Arab Spring. The Journal of North African Studies, 19(2), 230–243. Cohen, J., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil Society and Political Theory. MIT Press. Della Porta, D. (2015). Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis. Polity Press. Femia, J. (2001). Civil Society and the Marxist Tradition. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (pp. 131–146). Cambridge University Press. Fraser, N. (1989). What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender. In N. Fraser (Ed.), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (pp. 113–143). University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80. Gellner, E. (1994). Conditions of Liberty. Hamish Hamilton. Gerbaudo, P. (2017). The Indignant Citizen: Anti-austerity Movements in Southern Europe and the Anti-oligarchic Reclaiming of Citizenship. Social Movement Studies, 16(1), 36–50. Gibson, A., Lewando Hundt, G., & Blaxter, L. (2011). Weak and Strong Publics: Drawing on Nancy Fraser to Explore Parental Participation in Neonatal Networks. Health Expectations, 17, 104–115. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart. Habermas, J. (1976). Legitimation Crisis. Blackwell Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1989a). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1989b). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. In S. Bronner & D. Kellner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (pp. 136–142). Routledge. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Polity Press. Haysom, K. (2012). Civil Society and Social Movements. In B. Fultner (Ed.), Jurgen Habermas: Key Concepts (pp. 177–195). Acumen Press. Hegel, G. (1967). Philosophy of Right (Knox, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Ingram, D. (2000). Individual Freedom and Social Equality: Habermas’s Democratic Revolution in the Social Contractarian Justification of Law. In L. Hahn (Ed.), Perspectives on Habermas. Open Court. Kaviraj, S. (2001). In Search of Civil Society. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (pp. 287–323). Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. (1998). Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Polity Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970[1846]). The German Ideology, Part 1. International Publishers. Murphy, M. (2001). The Politics of Adult Education: State, Economy and Civil Society. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 20(5), 345–360. Nash, K. (Ed.). (2014). Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Nancy Fraser et al. Polity. Powell, F. (2007). The Politics of Civil Society: Big Society and Small Government. Policy Press. Taylor, C. (1990). Modes of Civil Society. Public Culture, 3(1), 95–118.

Section II Understanding the Social

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Culture

Introduction The politicisation of culture was one of the striking developments of the second half of the twentieth century, a development that saw different sets of values, beliefs and attitudes pitted against one another over issues such as sex, religion, family, ethnicity and lifestyle. This is a trend that has adopted new forms in the twenty-first century, the new cultural politics joining forces with the politics of identity to create political flashpoints over issues such as cultural appropriation. This potent cocktail of cultural tensions has made its presence felt in the digital public sphere and presents an even more powerful narrative when combined with the politics of class, race and gender. This is especially the case in the United States, which is no stranger to cultural politics. Indeed, the term ‘culture wars’ has established itself as a way to describe the deep divisions in American society, a division primarily between the forces of religious conservatism and liberal secularism and manifested in numerous struggles over abortion, affirmative action, gender and sexuality. Andrew Hartman in his history of the culture wars (Hartman 2015) goes so far as to say it is a ‘war for the soul of America’. This is a description that rings true for those of us who have kept pace with American politics since the 1960s and born witness to the intensity of anger and resentment on both sides of the war. This political component of culture mirrors its reception in social theory, but its significance has not always been readily apparent, rising and falling in importance depending on academic fashion. Culture has assumed various mantles over the years, for example as a placeholder for collective consciousness (Durkheim), social order (Parsons) and modern identity (Giddens). Such a conception portrays culture as the social glue that keeps people and communities working together, the bond that helps prevent societies from falling apart. Durkheim in particular devoted much of his energy to exploring the regulatory nature of norms, via his sociology of religion, his take on the division of labour, his analysis of anomie and suicide and also his understandings of collective consciousness. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_6

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Its role as a mechanism for social order has also seen culture theorised in a much more negative light, most famously via Antonio Gramsci and his theory of hegemony, which characterises culture as a key instrument of social and political control. Culture, as well as maintaining social order, can also inhibit change, promote conformity and act as a source of social reproduction, economic inequality and imperialism. This chapter explores these takes on culture in social theory while highlighting some of its postcolonial offshoots. The chapter organisation is designed to introduce the reader to the following: • Developments in cultural theory (critical theory via Adorno, cultural studies and the cultural turn) • The relation between culture, education and social class • Postcolonialism and the study of culture (Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak).

The Significance of Culture in Social Theory Numerous disciplines make claims on the concept of culture, most notably Anthropology but also Sociology and Geography. Clifford Geertz produced in 1973, what is now considered to be one of the key texts in modern anthropology The interpretation of cultures (Geertz 1973), and his concept of ‘thick description’ is often found in the work of researchers who adopt an ethnographic approach to their work. This connection between Anthropology and culture has to some extent, been overshadowed by the fact that it now has a discipline devoted to it—cultural studies. Sociology also took a strong interest in culture, evident in some of the key attempts at developing a systematic understanding of human behaviour in the context of social systems. Talcott Parsons, a key proponent of ‘functionalist’ sociology (see Key movement box) and a major grand theorist of the twentieth century, engaged with culture to address the classic sociological question: how is social order possible? He set himself the task of developing a broad enough theory that could accommodate both a theory of human action and a theory of social systems. He aimed to explain the ways in which society (and a changing one at that) made it possible to accommodate the infinite sets of motivations, desires and behaviours of millions of people. As his ideas developed, he made a cultural turn, focusing on culture as a key mechanism via which human action and social systems interacted with one another. This disciplinary development is a logical offshoot of the argument made by cultural theorists who suggest that culture should not be regarded as an epiphenomenon but as a field in its own right, or at least as ‘relatively autonomous’ from other fields such as economy and society. This is the core argument of Jeffrey Alexander’s book The meaning of social life: a cultural sociology (2003), and there is much to commend it—so many intellectual constructs depend on some conception of culture whether implicit or explicit, and much conceptual work would find it difficult to sustain itself without reference to the placeholder of culture. Take the field of work

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as an example: research on work is a hotbed of cultural references such as organisational culture, workplace culture, professional culture. Discussions around workplace values and ethics tend to use culture as a shorthand to illustrate complexity and diversity as well as expressing a notion of ownership around these values. Culture is a dominant narrative in our attempts to understand the workings of society.

The Culture Industry Theodor Adorno has become associated with the term culture industry, although it was used first in the book he and Horkheimer published The Dialectic of enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972[1944])—he pursued this theme, however, in his own writings and built on the critique delivered in the book. This critique became ever more scathing over the years, his ire mostly focused on Hollywood and its mass production of film. In The culture industry: reconsidered 1989([1967]: 129), Adorno asserts that ‘the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms’. While he accepts that there was previously an element of commodification to cultural production, twentieth-century capitalism produced a ‘new and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products’. For Adorno, this was a wholesale assault on the autonomy of art as a cultural artefact, an autonomy that has the power to transform lives and resist domination: Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings, but it also simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honouring them. Insofar as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased. (Adorno ([1967]1989:129)

He also sees the new culture industry even in the productive sense as problematic and cautions that the term industry should not be taken literally. The increasing standardisation and rationalisation of marketing and distribution, ‘the incorporation of industrial forms of organisation even where nothing is manufactured’ (p. 130), represented for Adorno the immense wastefulness of the culture industry. In this work he was continuing a key theme of the early Frankfurt school, and was not alone in his attention to the effects of mass culture on populations; see also Max Horkheimer’s ‘Art and mass culture’ (1941) and Leo Lowenthal’s ‘Historical perspectives on popular culture’ (1989). Adorno reserved a special disdain for academics and intellectuals who put forth arguments as to the transformative and liberating potential of mass culture: he called these ‘servile intellectuals’ and viewed them as overly anxious to reconcile themselves with the phenomenon. Their desire to ‘take mass culture seriously’ and to avoid accusations of cultural snobbism was an act of bad faith according to Adorno: there is a deceptive glitter about the admonition to take it seriously. Because of its social role, disturbing questions about its quality, about truth or untruth, and about the aesthetic

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niveau of the culture industry’s emissions are repressed, or at least excluded from the so-­ called sociology of communications. The critic is accused of taking refuge in arrogant esoterica. (Adorno 1989: 131)

For Adorno, there is no saving grace to the culture industry—it is ‘anti-­ enlightenment’ and is a form of ‘mass deception’. He was no fan of popular music either, decrying genres such as jazz as faddish and debasing. It is for good reason that he is known as a cultural critic. He has also been branded for less good reasons as a cultural snob; but his disdain for ‘low-brow’ art was not a result of his need for distinction, but rather a natural consequence of his concern that the mass commodification of culture chokes the potential for human happiness and human freedom. Given his concerns, then, it may be safe to assume that the rise of the internet and social media would also be considered by Adorno a form of intellectual and spiritual debasement. It has certainly provided a route to even greater levels of commodification, one that offers a higher level of standardisation while also giving the impression of choice, freedom and individuality. This was a particular hobby horse for Adorno who (before the rise of the World Wide Web) viewed mass communication and entertainment as offering forms of pseudo-individuality (Adorno 1996). Such views have, maybe ironically, earned him the dubious honour of numerous online memes testifying to his pessimistic and haughty demeanour. The online world does also offer myriad opportunities for cultural creativity and the kind of freedom of expression and critical engagement that was important for Adorno. It may not match up to his high standards but there is no reason why the internet as a communicative mechanism cannot offer a vehicle via which challenging art can be produced and disseminated. That said, the internet in the twenty-first century illustrates the power of capitalism to commodify, to adapt itself to new technologies and new cultural developments and to use them to create economic value. A clear example of this is how the modern culture industry, including the realms of music, video, fashion and photography, have all become increasingly monetised via tie-ins with commercial brand advertising. While this was present to some extent in Adorno’s time, the extent of such cultural appropriation is astounding. It also makes the stars of modern mass culture extremely rich. But Adorno’s critique of mass culture was not shared by all those associated with the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), while staying true to the Marxist approach to the world, objected to any sharp distinction between high and low art, or between what Adorno called authentic art and mass culture. He adopted a more ambivalent attitude to cultural forms of commodification in his now-famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (Benjamin 1969[1935]). Through ‘mechanical reproduction’ (his term for commodification), Benjamin viewed a process of emancipation from the reverence and elitism attached to ‘authentic art’. Through mass production, art lost its aura and with it its ‘parasitical dependence on ritual’ (Benjamin 1969: 224). He saw this progressive quality particularly in film, a relatively new world of artistic expression in the 1930s, that offered ordinary people access to cultural forms that would otherwise be denied to them:

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Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. (Benjamin 1969: 236)

Films provided opportunities for cultural tourism that for Benjamin carried the potential to liberate and transform people’s lives. Modern film, shorn of aura and ritual, provided moviegoers with an escape route into foreign worlds and ways of being that undermined the taken-for-granted nature of their lifeworlds. The cinema could expand people’s horizons of possibility while also asking questions of their position and status in life, offering a visual and emotional escape route out of the hegemonic confines of dominant cultural norms. From the vantage point of the hyper commercialised culture industry of today, one could argue that both Adorno and Benjamin could amass sufficient evidence to support their respective claims of subjugation and liberation. Nevertheless, the immense choice on offer through streaming services does not necessarily result in greater cultural travel, but instead is just as likely to offer ever more opportunities for momentary escapism and a retreat from the ‘real’ politics of cultural identity.

Key Concept: Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci turned to culture in his quest to understand both the mechanisms of capitalist domination and the conditions for revolutionary practice. As detailed in The Prison notebooks (Gramsci 1971), Gramsci viewed the cultural sphere as the transmitter of the dominant ideas of the capitalist class, and conceptually as a mediating mechanism via which the structural workings of the capitalist system interacted with forms of agency and collective consciousness. Gramsci rejected the positivism of scientific Marxism and its view of a placid but always ready proletariat, waiting for history to inevitably unfold. For him, the concept of hegemony encompassed a voluntaristic conception of the proletariat, both in terms of being active in their own domination as well as holding the potential for overthrowing the chains of domination. The working class did not constitute a passive entity, cowered by the oppressive manipulations of the ruling class. His concept of hegemony has become established precisely because it rejected such a notion—hegemony for him denotes an active consensual involvement of the working class in their own oppression. Gramsci argued that this hegemonic ideology operated via the institutions of civil society such as education, religious unions and political parties. Hegemony also operated via the workings of intellectuals, whose cultural hold over the masses via civil society enabled their role as brokers of hegemonic consent. This form of power is much more fragile and contingent, allowing intellectual space for ideas to develop and contest each other. (continued)

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He wanted hegemony to stand in conceptual opposition to the prevailing reliance on the notion of the coercive and domineering state. He managed in one concept to combine both a theoretical analysis of social control with a political strategy for social transformation. It was possible in his theory for the working classes to put forward their own intellectuals, their own intellectual ideas to wage a cultural war of ideas—socialist strategy became about winning the hearts and minds of society through winning the battle of ideas. This cultural struggle would be seen as a counter-hegemonic movement, designed to see the proletariat turn its particular interests into universal values that could be accepted by civil society as their own. Present also in the Notebooks is a slightly different conception of hegemony, one which speaks more to the fragile nature of ideological rule. It points to the conditions through which counter-hegemony comes to the fore, and situates such struggle in changing historical circumstances such as wars, economic crises and mass migration; these events can disrupt the hegemonic consent and undermine the power of the ruling class. This was the conception of hegemony popularised in Laclau and Mouffes’ 1985 book Hegemony and socialist strategy. Their perspective on hegemony was one of conflict as well as consensus, a world in which ruling ideas never fully hold sway and face regular and sometimes violent attempts to undermine their authority. They used the notion of ‘suture’, the medical term for temporary stitching, to illustrate the often-precarious hold on power by those who rule.

Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn The work of Benjamin, especially his interest in popular culture, was an influence on the rise of the cultural studies field in the second half of the twentieth century. This interest found strong parallels in the work of Raymond Williams, whose book Culture and Society, published in 1958, put forward a critique of the elitist view of culture that held sway for so long in the United Kingdom (Williams 1958). This conception of culture as either high or low, with high being of value and the rest vulgar and primitive, was the target of William’s critique (like Pierre Bourdieu, Williams came from a modest background and went onto Cambridge to get an elite education). He argued instead that this was an arbitrary distinction designed to preserve privilege and position. At the same time he made the argument that culture was more than the discrete sphere designated as ‘culture’; he saw culture as representing social life more generally and made it more of an explanatory concept as opposed to a product or outcome. He saw culture as ‘ordinary’ ([1958]1989)—that is, as a description for everyday understanding. As well as being a socio-theoretical intervention, this assertion by Williams was also a politically charged argument.

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The pioneering work of Williams, alongside that of E.P. Thompson (see Thompson 1963), was a deep well of inspiration for the establishment of the famed Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Established in the mid-1960s by Richard Hoggart (who was also a key intellectual in the ordinary culture world—see The uses of literacy, 1957), the Centre would become world-famous for its studies of youth culture and ethnic groups in the UK, and for its ethnographic work that combined empirical studies with contemporary social theory such as that of semiotics and the structural Marxism of Louis  Althusser. It also employed the ideas of Gramsci and his notion of hegemony [see Key concept box], which was put to good use in the study of culture and resistance. For some, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony offered a method via which to grapple with the concept of agency, a way to consider forms of resistance to dominant narratives about identity (race, nation, class) in a world in which the capacity for freedom was heavily curtailed. These writings kept one eye on forms of resistance while simultaneously aiming to account for the effects of structure. A classic example of this is the book by Dick Hebdige (1979) Subculture: the meaning of style. In the book Hebdige gathers together a range of British youth subcultures that, through their style and fashion sense, represent a form of collective resistance to established norms, attitude and conventions. Each of these to varying degrees—Teds in the 1950s, Mods and Rockers in the 1960s, Punks in the 1970s—were the focus of a moral panic, prompting reactions of disgust and outrage against what was perceived as an affront to common decency. Youth were seen as disaffected and as rejecting the cultural values of their parents. They therefore represented a threat to the order of things at the time; looking back from the current vantage point, it is hard not to view this as a UK-based culture war, albeit without the religious overtones. This theme of sub-cultural resistance was put to even greater effect in the book Learning to labour: how working class kids get working-class jobs (Willis 1977). Written by Paul Willis and published in 1977, it had an immediate impact on cultural and education studies, and continues to this day to be a key touchstone in the sociology of education. As with Bourdieu, Willis targeted his ideas and research at the relationship between social class, educational achievement and employment: what were the mechanisms via which classes perpetuated themselves? How did such social class differentials exist in education and how did class immobility take such a stronghold in a supposed meritocratic society? Britain in the 1970s still had a strong labour movement, a heightened solidarity among working-class people and a fairly rigid division of labour, aided by a still existing manufacturing sector. But Willis was more concerned with the ways in which members of the working class constructed their own sense of class, how they imagined their future and how much stock they placed in the value of an education system that had been broadly comprehensive for the previous decade. In answering these questions he wanted to avoid either overly structural accounts of social position or individualistic accounts that psychologised educational achievement (common at the time). He turned to culture to address this question, which offered something of a middle ground between structure and agency; his ethnographic approach and Gramscian analysis allowed him both to capture the forms of

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resistance to teachers and education among members of the working class—‘lads’ as he called them, and also the manner in which they created, via their resistance, their own version of class reproduction. His conclusion was a somewhat depressing but logical one: that their oppositional stance to schooling had set them up to fail.

Modernity and Postmodernity

Modernity Modernity is a catch-all term used to describe the societal form that developed in Western Europe from the sixteenth onwards. This society differed significantly from its predecessor, medieval feudalism, the modern form of society extending its reach across the world in subsequent centuries. The nineteenth century witnessed what Polanyi calls The great transformation (see Chap. 4) embedding and establishing itself in social, cultural and institutional life. The distinction between the feudal or premodern society and its modern counterpart is a useful way to comprehend modernity and its meaning, as are the set of distinctions normally attached to the modern-premodern divide. Among these are the shift from feudalism to capitalism, from an economic system based on the dominance of the aristocracy over the peasantry to one based on the control of industrial production by capitalists, the introduction of a wage system and the development of an industrial proletariat. This was the main focus of Karl Marx. This shift to capitalism ushered in an epoch of ‘industrialism’ (Giddens 1991: 15), a society based on ‘social relations implied in the widespread use of material power and machinery in production processes’. Another major shift associated with modernity concerns forms of solidarity and social order. Different social theorists have put forward numerous ideas about this shift, but two are of note here. The first is that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or between community and society (see key term box, Chap. 9). This distinction, developed by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, is based on the idea that social order is no longer dependent on the importance of tight-knit communities but rather has transferred into an order based on collections of self-interested individuals. Another distinction based on solidarity is that put forward by Emile Durkheim between organic and mechanical solidarity—there is a similar theme at work here to that of Tönnies but this had more to do with the changing division of labour in premodern societies that was characterised by mechanical solidarity, where there were strong similarities between individuals. In organic solidarity, there was a much greater level of differentiation between individuals, now split into distinctive occupation groups which were reliant on one another. Another important way to characterise the split is by emphasising the form of rationality underpinning these different societies. This was a particular (continued)

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focus of Max Weber who identified a move from what he called substantive rationality—that is, a society based on values and ideals such as those promoted by religion, to a society based more on instrumental rationality—that is, action based on means-ends calculations, for example, about efficiency, profit and financial gain. Such distinctions were the focus of much social theory from what can be termed the classical period, and the general consensus was that these sets of transformations came with their own unique sets of problems. These opened up avenues for greater individual freedom while also recasting forms of solidarity that increase the risk of isolation and alienation. This great transformation brought both massive change and opportunity—Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (2008/1848) summarised the potential that could arise from such a development: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.

But it also, according to Marx, brought great exploitation, misery, alienation and commodification. This ambivalence towards modernity was shared by other theorists such as Weber who appreciated the value of instrumental rationality but bemoaned its consequences for forms of freedom and meaning in modern life. The gains of modernity had to be examined in the context of that which was lost in the transformation, a theme that has occupied social theorists ever since. There are also cultural elements of the great shift to modernity that need to be detailed. Modernity is also a ‘cultural and philosophical idea as well as being a statement about the nature of society more broadly’ (Delanty 1999: 2). One important aspect of this cultural shift is the rise of reflexivity, embedded in institutions, as a mechanism of social change (Giddens 1991: 20). This refers to ‘the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge’ (Giddens 1991: 20). This constant and never-ending questioning of conditions, truths, accepted norms and values, undermines certainty and creates a culture of doubt. This is an unsettling but peculiarly modern approach to institutional change which is reflected in Delanty’s idea that ‘to speak of modernity is thus to recognise the crisis of modernity’ (1999: 3). On the one hand, there is the spread of autonomy as a result of the cultural project of modernity, alongside the ‘progressive expansion of the discourses of creativity, reflectivity and discursivity to all spheres of life’ (Delanty 1999: 2), but on the other hand, modernity encourages fragmentation and, as a result, lays waste to its own cultural foundations. The critique of tradition, a cornerstone of modernity, has spread to a critique of modernity itself. No wonder then, (continued)

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that Giddens referred to modernity as ‘essentially a post-traditional order’ (Giddens 1991: 20). Postmodernity The term postmodern had been used in the early part of the twentieth century (Best and Kellner 1991) in relation to new forms of architecture or poetry. It was later in the century, in the 1960s and 1970s, that philosophical discussions of the postmodern as a radical break with the modern took off. In social theory circles, it is most often associated with French thought and French theorists. This development was influenced by the context within which France found itself, theories emerging that reflected the post-war transformation in French culture and society. It has a number of defining characteristics: Primacy is given to discourse theory: Society, from a postmodern perspective, can be comprehended via linguistic analysis. Tools such as those developed in semiotics—signs and signifiers—can be applied to get to grips with the construction of social practices. This is where postmodernism and poststructuralism overlap, as they both have produced conceptual analysis built on systems of signs, codes and discourses. Discourse, in particular, was part of the armoury which French postmodern theorists used to attack humanist philosophy and the cherished gold standard of enlightenment rationality. In postmodernism, everything was up for grabs, including universal values of truth, justice and solidarity. While Michel Foucault, a towering figure in social theory, categorised truth as a question of discourse and power, Jean-Francois Lyotard lauded the end of the grand narratives in a diverse world, a postmodern condition that made such narratives redundant and irrelevant. A rejection of totalising theories of change: this approach to reason, truth and universalism was not entirely new, with previous German thinkers such as  Friedrich Nietzsche and  Martin Heidegger having already taken to task accepted philosophical understandings of the world. But its popularity in the 1970s saw a much more concerted effort to displace grand theories of change, especially Marxism and this single-minded pursuit of theory-driven revolutionary change. These theories were not easily displaced, and the ensuing debates, often fractious and bad-tempered, still reverberate today and have left a somewhat bitter after taste. Jürgen Habermas, for example, called Foucault and Lyotard ‘neo-conservatives’, in his book The philosophical discourse of modernity (Habermas 1990). In turn, Habermas, as the supposed archetypal defender of modernity, also received his fair share of criticism. As opposition to the modern: Postmodernism emphasises playfulness over seriousness, emotion and passion over reason. It valorises forms of social and cultural transgression, scepticism (especially when it comes to universal (continued)

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values, forms of essentialism), and rejects rigid devotion to modern notions of progress and truth. Kellner (1988: 242) uses a very useful distinction between explosion and implosion to characterise the difference between the modern and the postmodern: Whereas modernity was characterised by the explosion of commodification, mechanisation, technology, exchange and the market, postmodern society is the site of an implosion of all boundaries, regions and distinctions between high and low culture, appearance and reality, and just about every other binary opposition maintained by traditional philosophy and social theory. (Kellner 1988: 242) Social theory itself undertook a radical new direction with postmodernism, away from totalising and transformative takes on social change, which has enormous consequences for Marxist and feminist theory in particular, but also those schools of thought influenced by Max Weber. This is understandable given that postmodernism rejected monolingual approaches to social problems, instead emphasising decentredness, complexity and fragmentation.

Education, Culture and Social Class What the focus on ordinary culture managed to achieve was to deliver on Williams’ desire to connect culture to society. This culturalist work also paved the way for a more concerted focus on culture in social theory and in education studies. It also had much to say about knowledge—about the epistemological content of culture and its significance in the education field. This is evident in the work of the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu is a key, if not the key influence in the sociology of education, and he saw this field as an important field of practice in both the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of power (Swartz 1997: 190). His interest in social inequality led him to the institution of schooling—he was intrigued by the dogged persistence of intergenerational privilege and the seemingly unbreakable connection between social class, achievement and mobility. Why did working-class children time and again end up in manual labour jobs, graduate without significant educational qualifications and end up where their parents did? Rather than look to structural explanations or interactional aspects, Bourdieu aimed instead to investigate how cultural resources, particularly those made available via schooling such as credentials, mechanisms of selection and cognitive classifications, came to operate as gatekeepers of power and privilege. In his classic and much-quoted text, Cultural reproduction and social reproduction, Bourdieu argued that the aim of the sociologist should be to assess the extent to which education reproduced social inequality and, in particular, forms of inequality associated with social class differentials (Bourdieu 1973). This cultural understanding of education and its significance to social class mobility was built on his earlier book The Inheritors: French students and their relation to culture (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964[1979]). In The Inheritors, Bourdieu

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and Passeron identify a contradiction at the heart of the French formal schooling system, in that a meritocratic education on its own can do little to overcome the tremendous advantages already accrued by students who effectively inherit substantial amounts of economic, social and cultural capitals through their familial associations (Murphy and Costa 2016b: 4). This inheritance provides some students with a major competitive advantage in relation to individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, as they benefit from a cultural set of skills and attitudes that are already embedded in the French education system. Bourdieu built on the ideas expressed in this paper and with Passeron published Reproduction in education, society and culture (1977), a publication which has set the tone for much culturally oriented educational research since. The key conclusion from this book was that, far from being a driver of social meritocracy, education instead acted as the mechanism of reproduction—of transferring the privilege of the parent’s generation. Education, even comprehensive schooling, did little to level the playing field; if anything, it made the chances of social mobility even tougher. This disconnect between social mobility and meritocratic education became a recurring theme in Bourdieu’s work, a theme mostly evident through his concept of cultural capital. For Bourdieu, cultural capital is comprised of a set of cultural assets such as education, speech style and attitudes that, just like economic assets, can be utilised as forms of wealth. The legacy of cultural capital bestowed by families on their offspring—the values and attitudes they bring with them to school—shape their approach to schooling as well as their educational expectations and academic achievements. In this way, culture acts to strengthen the relationship between educational outcomes and social class, acting as a key factor in reproducing social inequality. Bourdieu expanded on this relation between culture and class by developing his notion of habitus (see Chap. 11)—the dispositions individuals acquire throughout their life experience and which help shape their orientations towards practices such as education and work. Alongside capital, habitus reinforces the reproduction of social practices and social authority, through providing individuals with a class-­ based sense of distinction and identity that infers either a sense of belonging, of a ‘feel for the game’, or alternatively a sense of being a ‘fish out of water’. Culture capital habitus operate as part of the hidden structures of social categorisation, making attempts at social equality through agendas such as educational reform, an almost impossible task. This connection between education and cultural reproduction stayed with Bourdieu throughout his career, and can be seen in Distinction (1984), Homo academicus (1988) and The state nobility: elite schools in the field of power (1996). Bourdieu’s theories have had considerable influence in educational sociology research, particularly in the United Kingdom, and are especially prevalent in studies of social class, social inequality and social mobility (Reay et al. 2005; Grenfell and James 1998; Murphy and Costa 2016a).

Culture and Orientalism

Social Theory Applied: Cultural Capital

Cultural capital is one of Bourdieu’s most deployed concepts, especially in education research. This is evident internationally: for example, cultural capital is a popular concept in China through which to understand educational inequalities and the rural/urban split (Mu et al. 2018). It has also proven popular as a component of a hybrid approach to theory: there are strong examples of researchers using cultural capital alongside other concepts, for example Rampersad (2016) employed cultural capital in conjunction with the concept of racialised facilitative capital to better understand the underachievement of Afro Caribbean boys. Rampersad argues that when it comes to the intersection of race and class, the impact of cultural capital should be assessed via the ‘psychic landscapes of pigmentocracy’. Apart from education, cultural capital has been deployed in a wide range of studies, from musical taste (Tanner et  al. 2008), the publishing industry (Wright 2005) and gender and the family (Silva 2005). Its applications are highly diverse although at the same time its significance in relation to studies of social class and social stratification has never disappeared (Gunn 2005). Its continued relevance in the twenty-first century, for example, as evident in the Great British class survey of 2017 testifies to this. All these studies suggest that the ‘cultural turn’, for so long a significant corrective to overly structural understandings of power and inequality, still has value. That said, the concept has also created much-heated debate over the years regarding its definition and its utility, which is to be expected. Questions remain regarding its relation to other forms of capital such as social and symbolic, as well as its position vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s other core concepts of habitus and field. The utility of the concept has been continually tested in the literature in order to gauge its continued relevance as a reliable and dynamic concept in educational research. Barone’s work (Barone 2006) is a good example of this. He explored the significance of cultural capital in educational settings, in particular the relation between social origins and student achievement. Using data from the Project for International Student Assessment on 25 nations (PISA), Barone’s findings suggest that cultural capital provides a ‘relevant, but far from exhaustive, account of schooling inequalities’. He argues that, in order to elaborate a more satisfactory explanation, two more factors need to be taken into account: occupational aspirations and economic resources. He also discusses whether these mentioned factors can be integrated into a coherent theoretical framework to achieve a better understanding of educational inequalities. Cultural capital, while important, is only one of a number of significant variables that impact educational and social inequality.

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Culture and Orientalism So far, this chapter has explored the relation between conceptions of culture and social class, a relation that was at the epicentre of the turn to cultural understandings of society in social theory. Another crucial element to this turn was the relation between culture and race, a relation that came to dominate the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies (see key movement box). The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said 2003[1978]) was an important touchstone in the field of postcolonial cultural studies. Said argued that, combined with the ‘West’, Orientalism, comprised of cultural artefacts, discourse and representations, signify ‘supreme fictions’ which lack sufficient grounding in reality (Said 2003: xii). This fictional quality of orientalism, however, does not prevent the othering of the Middle East, of the Arab and Muslim world, an othering that is a product of human struggle to control and manipulate the meaning and value attached to specific world cultures and identities. According to Said, this backdrop to orientalism indicates the historically situated nature of this form of injustice: My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, our “Orient” becomes “ours” to possess and direct. (Said 2003: xiv)

For Said, Orientalism represents a subtle form of prejudice and discrimination against Arab-Islamic peoples that is based on a set of fictitious conceptions. Part of the issue with Orientalism is the internalisation of the Oriental within the Arab population. In this regard, Said saw academics as part of the problem, viewing Oriental Studies as an extension of Western imperialism. The aim of these studies was the deification of Western European culture at the expense of the Orient. Orientalism provided a kind of intellectual justification and legitimation of the continuing subjugation of Arab and Muslim cultures. These cultural representations became a form of domination for Said, an oppressive force dressed up as disinterested scholarly pursuit of knowledge. Conveniently, the Orient encompassed several characteristics—irrational, emotional, disorganised, inefficient and weak—which provided a foil to the ways in which Western intellectuals presented themselves, an assumed set of cultural strengths that required the other to fulfil its subaltern function. This he categorised as cultural imperialism which carried as much power as economic or military imperialism. Said’s preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism speaks of the ways in which imperialist attitudes and conceptions of the East helped pave the way for the Iraq wars, and for warmongering in the Middle East more generally. This was because prevalent and persistent discourses of backwardness, exoticness, alienhood and foreignness, all contribute to a sense of ‘Arab threat and the Muslim menace’ (2003: xv), made even more powerful when cast alongside and in opposition to discourses of freedom and Western ‘values’.

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Said’s ideas on othering and representation bear the stamp of Foucault, whose influence is evident in Orientalism. Foucault’s analysis of discourse and knowledge/ power is a powerful presence, as is Gramsci and hegemony. Derrida’s work on deconstruction (see Chap. 7) is also influential. This influence makes sense at this historical distance, especially the poststructural decentring of the subject and the critique of Western modes of thought that accompanied this decentring. But this poststructural analysis was tempered by Said’s attachment to humanist thinking: he saw Orientalism as part of an enlightenment desire for emancipation and social justice—he was less coy about this aspect of his drive and philosophy, not feeling the need to distance himself from humanism which for Foucault was a particular bone of contention. That said he was ‘greatly indebted’ to the work of Foucault (Said 2003: 23). Unlike Foucault, Said was keen to assert the role of specific authors in the more general discourse around Orientalism; he believed that their work had real material effects over time. The move from textual ‘apprehension, formulation, or definition of the orient to the putting of all this into practice in the orient did take place’ (Said 2003:23). Here we must be very clear – Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specific human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an intractable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. And Orientalism, in its post Eighteenth-century form could never revise itself. (Said 2003: 96)

The themes of Orientalism were continued in his essay collection Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993). In the collection, Said examined a number of literary classics and authors, such as Jane Austen—he believed that a deep understanding of the workings of imperialism can be gained by exploring such cultural products and artefacts. The power to narrate the world and everyday existence via such artefacts was a key aspect of both culture and imperialism, as they offered tools for cultural hegemony and the ability to prevent other narratives from taking hold. He points to the fact that while imperialism proper ended in many countries after the Second World War, it still exerted an enormous cultural influence via the soft power of culture. Some classics of contemporary literature are put under the microscope by Said, including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Said acknowledges the ‘complicated and rich narrative’ of the former (1993: 24), yet he views in this book (later an influence on the movie Apocalypse Now), a version of the imperial attitude. Conrad’s ‘genius’ saw him and his characters in the book (Marlow and Kurtz) ahead of their time, according to Said, in the sense that what they characterised as ‘the darkness’ was invested with autonomy and its own agency. Yet they and Conrad himself were unable to view the non-European world as anything other than a darkness, as opposed to a force of resistance and a

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collective struggle for autonomy. Conrad himself and so many others were products of their time, slaves to their privileged experience and cultural prejudice: Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European dominance. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them. (Said 1993: 34)

Said took his role as public intellectual seriously, viewing his pluri-cultural life as obligating him to take on such a role. During his life, he positioned himself in public debates and in that regard, it is not a surprise that Said’s ideas and his trenchant criticism of Western scholars and literature experienced a backlash, being accused among other things of bias, selectivity and a desire to paint all Oriental scholars as racist and imperialist. He has been accused of supporting ‘cultural relativism’ (see Gandhi 2019, chapter 4) and a denier of objectivity in even limited forms. These critiques, however, pale in comparison to the towering influence on literary studies and criticism, postcolonial theory  and cultural studies.

Cultural Identity and Diaspora Said had a special influence on the ideas of Stuart Hall (1932–2014), one of the main drivers of the field of cultural studies in the late twentieth century. Barrett states that ‘Stuart Hall has had more than a profound influence on cultural studies, he virtually is cultural studies’ (Barrett (2008: 302). Hall’s influence on social theory is profound,  his analysis of culture, to some extent, compensating for the lack of cultural analysis in the works of people like Marx and Weber. His version of the cultural turn brought to the fore issues of migration and diaspora as well as the power of mass media and communications as part of people’s everyday lives and cultural understandings. In this regard, he foresaw the current global scenario that testifies to the impact of migration and mass media on cultural identities. Hall developed a theory of cultural identity and its relation to the diasporic experience. He argued that there are two key approaches to identity regarding the colonial and diasporic experience. One refers to a shared collective culture, a oneness that helps to overcome the trauma of colonialism experienced by colonised peoples. This view played a crucial role in ‘all the post-colonial struggles which have so profoundly reshaped our world’ (Hall 1997: 51). People are propelled by the discovery of ‘hidden histories’ of cultural identities buried and oppressed by colonial forces, for example the histories of the Caribbean people. These hidden histories provide coherence, sameness, as well as a uniqueness, and together they offer a source of resistance to those who wish to impose their own alien identity on the colonised. The second form of cultural identity is much more based on difference, on a culture that is not a comforting fixed essence and recognises that coherence is imaginary and imposed by colonialism. This understanding of cultural identity accepts

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difference and heterogeneity as central to cultural identity, a stance that is inevitably more troubling than some romantic notion of a fixed, stable and homogenous core. While Hall understood the power of the first form, the uncovering of hidden histories as a precursor to some form of postcolonial consciousness, he believes that it panders to the old ‘imperialising’ and homogenising imposed identity. Instead, for Hall, there can be no ‘return to the beginning’. The motherland of identity and diasporic identities are better defined by hybridity, by a ‘necessary heterogeneity and diversity’—by difference (1997: 58). Hall points to Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (see Chap. 2) to help illuminate the significance of this approach. Hybrid identity reflects Anderson’s conception of community identities, in which identities are not characterised by authenticity but rather by the ‘style in which they are imagined’ (Hall 1997: 58). Hall saw the second form as an important force to be reckoned with. Writing in relation to the Caribbean experience, Hall argues that We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity’, without acknowledging its other side—the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s ‘uniqueness’. (Hall 1997: 52)

Hall saw exaggerated statements of continuity and homogeneity as a colonial trap, a cultural residue which also helped to obliterate histories. Drawing on the works of Said and his critique of Orientalism, Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge as well as Franz Fanon’s portrayal of the colonising experience in Black skin, white masks (Fanon 1986), Hall argues that this form of cultural identity ‘cripples and deforms’ (1997: 53). Viewing cultural identity through this prism allows for an assessment of the lasting and damaging legacy of the colonial experience. It was a legacy that for Hall produced a Caribbean version of Orientalism, which construed the Caribbean folk as ‘other’ by the dominant modes of Western knowledge and through the workings of racialised discourse, a-la Foucault. But the real sting in this construction was provided by Fanon’s re-writing of Du Bois’ double consciousness (see Chap. 9)—the way in which such crippled and deformed notions of self and culture became internalised ‘by the power of inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm’ (Hall 1997: 52). These cultural identities bring with them a politics of identity, one which offers no fixed point of origin but rather establishes cultural identities as offshoots of myth and fantasy. In order to grapple with the concept of difference in cultural identity, Hall draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and his concept of différance (see Chap. 7) to help him avoid the perils of otherness. Différance offers a bridge between two different French verbs, to differ and to defer. Differ shades into defer, which results in meaning that  is always deferred, thanks to the endless workings of signification. This conception provides Hall with a way to view cultural difference as unstable and unfixed, and to consider meaning as continually displaced and up for grabs. There is ‘always something left over’ (Hall 1997: 55) in the interplay between signifier and signified. For Hall, this is a way to come to grips with the intricacies of Caribbean cultural identities, a field of symbolic practice and experience that engages with at

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least three ‘presences’—Présence Africaine, Présence Européenne and Présence Americain. Hall engages with these presences in his efforts to describe a diasporic identity that is characterised by heterogeneity, diversity and hybridity: ‘diasporic identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (1997: 58); Hall points to black cultural forms (e.g., rap and hip hop) and their appropriation of elements of dominant Western culture and resituates them in their own jargon and language of the new. Such cultural forms are de-centred, destabilising and subversive and in the end have no need for fixity and cultural certainty. He utilises the works of Foucault and Said more generally when it comes to his analysis of the constitution of modernity. In a paper entitled ‘The West and the rest: discourse and power’ (Hall 1992), both the notions of orientalism and discourse (see Chap. 7) are put to work dissecting the ways in which the West’s modern conception of itself was produced relationally in terms of its difference from the colonial ‘other’. Self-understandings that elevated the Western nations in their own eyes, such as ‘developed, industrialised, urbanised, capitalist, secular, and modern’, were utterly dependent on the way they characterised the non-West as the opposite. Western nations viewed those they had conquered as inferior and as such, they offered an ideal foil via which to self-aggrandise about their own advanced stage of development: one conception depends on the other.

Key Movement: Postcolonialism

Postcolonial studies, a strand of social theory that developed in the late twentieth century, was a response to the lasting effects of colonialism on colonised peoples across the world. These effects have been devastating, the European powers of the seventeenth century destroying languages, cultures, economies as well as conducting brutal violence upon subjugated peoples. The study of these effects adopted various forms and foci—the study of language, identity, culture, the body, knowledge. These core themes have tended to replace the previous focus on economic exploitation, a mainstay of Marxist-inspired analysis of colonialism and its aftermath—Marx, alongside Engels, concentrated on the economic impact of capitalist production methods on the colonies. This shift in focus itself was aided by the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist strands of thought, with the ideas of Foucault and Derrida helping to generate a novel vocabulary to assess the postcolonial condition. Studies of text and discourse, as well as culture and identity, became the central concerns of theorists grappling with the lingering aftermath of colonial power. Inspired by the works of Edward Said and the publication of Orientalism, Postcolonial theory was also indebted to the ideas of Franz Fanon, whose Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2001[1961]) had a major influence on theoretical approaches to the colonised world. A psychiatrist by training, Fanon (continued)

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examined the psychic consequences of colonial domination and the dehumanising effects of subjugation at the hands of European domination. His emphasis on these consequences shone a light on the complex reality of identities and cultures produced via the distorting lens of colonialism, paving the way for critiques of Western ideas of reason and progress. Much of the original thrust of Postcolonialism emanated from the humanities disciplines, especially history and literary studies. The historical implications of a postcolonial stance identify silences and omissions in academic analyses of colonial societies that tend to favour dominant narratives of Europeanness and otherness, while literary studies gave birth to a postcolonial approach to literature that sought to unmask the power relations behind the depiction of colonial identity and culture in much European literature. Postcolonial theory shares a similar stance and set of objectives as other so-­ called new humanities subjects such as women’s studies and gay/lesbian studies that began to appear in many Western university syllabi, each aiming to develop new areas of research and theory through the identification of what Foucault called ‘subjugated knowledges’ and in doing so aimed to question the veracity of established knowledge systems in the university. Authors such as Said and Spivak argue that academic theory can also often be a form of colonialism, either through the creation of the other (Orientalism) or via the dominance of Western knowledge forms in postcolonial thinking itself (hegemony, subaltern).

The Cultural Politics of the Subaltern Another concept of central relevance to postcolonial studies of culture is the subaltern. As detailed in Chap. 5, the term subaltern was used by Gramsci to describe those groups that are excluded from a society’s established institutions and thus denied the means by which people have a voice in their society. This term has become a guiding concept in postcolonial studies as a way to describe the effects of Western cultural hegemony, as well as the efforts to resist hegemonic domination and establish a new cultural politics from below as envisioned by Gramsci. The term subaltern, however, has experienced a mixed reception in postcolonial studies. Can the subaltern speak?, a paper published by Gayatri Spivak in 1988, has since become a cornerstone of postcolonial and cultural theory. In this paper she confronted the postcolonial studies world by questioning whether the adoption of Western terminology such as the subaltern is another example of colonialism in the guise of academic intellectualism. Attempts to interpret and conceptualise the lives of subaltern groups bring numerous challenges which can only be understood as products of a colonial context.

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She starts in her famous paper by considering the dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze in Intellectuals and power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (Foucault 1977). Foucault and Deleuze spend much of this paper delivering a critique of the ‘sovereign subject’, but Spivak takes them to task for employing phrases loaded with meaning when it comes to subjects from the nonWestern world, phrases that in their delivery are one-dimensional, for example, ‘A Maoist’ and ‘the workers’ struggle’. In these phrases, Spivak sees a strange set of exceptions to Foucault and Deleuze’s avowed dedication to heterogeneity and the ‘other’. In particular, Spivak criticises Deleuze for his blanket-like application of Marxist politics to postcolonial societies, given their troubled and subjugated relationship to the forces of international capital: The invocation of the workers’ struggle is baleful in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism: the subject-production of worker and unemployed within nation state ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from ‘humanistic’ training in consumerism; and the large-scale presence of paracapitalist labor as well as the heterogeneous structural status of agriculture in the Periphery. (Spivak 1988: 67)

She also castigates Deleuze for the ways in which he believes theory can be applied across heterogeneous and geographically distinct cultural contexts. According to Deleuze, ‘A theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier’ (in Foucault 1977: 208, cited in Spivak 1988: 70). This is particularly problematic for Spivak as it implies a neat and simple connection between theory and practice and comes with an assumption that ‘Western’ theory can be deployed in the East without consequences. Spivak builds on Said’s analysis of the Orient, by questioning both the role of the intellectual in speaking for the subaltern, and their abdication of responsibility in the face of third-world and postcolonial politics. She defends Said from critics that castigate him for emphasising the role of intellectuals in speaking truth to power, instead seeing value in Said’s valorisation of ‘the critic’s institutional responsibility’ (Spivak 1988: 75). Spivak (1988:76) also extends Foucault’s analysis of the power-knowledge relationship into the world of postcolonial knowledge production and uses this to confront Western intellectuals who engaged in ‘epistemic violence’. This violence she describes as ‘the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’. She argues that Foucault’s analysis of the use of expert knowledge to regulate and discipline in the European eighteenth century could also be used to characterise the condition of the subaltern in the face of Western intellectual hegemony. She suggests that this condition should be considered ‘subjugated knowledge’, quoting Foucault who describes this form as ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated’ (Foucault 1980: 82). While Spivak is wary of appropriating Western theoretical constructs like the subaltern in postcolonial analysis, this has not prevented her from using such terms in her own work, often in very positive ways—for example, she has stated that her book An aesthetic education in the era of globalisation (Spivak 2012: 435) is ‘driven

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by the notion of subalternity’. Indeed, postcolonial studies of the Indian state, from which Spivak originates, are often heavily indebted to the concept of the subaltern. This is at least partly because India is a fascinating case study when it comes to social movements and the struggle for social justice. Recently it has provided a national context for the rise of what Nilsen and Roy (2015) call ‘new’ subaltern politics. These new politics, which incorporate everyday forms of collective resistance, rights-based campaigns, as well as in some cases armed revolutionary insurrections, all speak to the desire of Indian people to confront ingrained forms of power and injustice. Such struggles, according to Nilsen and Roy, also provide a set of case studies via which to interrogate the conceptual legacy of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern. This reinvigorated Indian civil society is significant, given the history of the country, a state born in 1960 backed by a tidal wave of resistance against British colonialism and a desire for political and economic independence. The successful struggle for autonomy necessitated at the time the construction of nationhood, of an Indian identity, in order to deliver a collective movement strong enough to legitimise itself in the face of colonial hegemony. This in turn required a form of solidarity between often competing movements—a form of demobilising and sacrificing of particular objectives for what was sold as a broader goal. The effects of this push for unity and counter-hegemony could only last so long in the Indian postcolonial state, and dissent, antagonism and struggle have led to ‘a protracted unravelling of the Nehruvian nation-building project from the late 1960s until the present’ (Nilsen and Roy 2015: 1). Movements that had been required to effectively ‘bite their lip’ for the cause of independence had played major roles in that struggle for independence, but yet their concerns were still valid—the imagined community of Indian nationhood could only hold sway for so long. Subaltern groups (the urban poor, farming and fishing communities) have emerged to ‘engage in complex processes of negotiation, contestation, and struggle over the future form, direction, and meaning of democracy and development, redistribution and recognition, and—ultimately – the very edifice upon which the Indian state rests’ (Nilsen and Roy 2015: 1). These struggles include the re-emergence of Maoism as a major movement in what is called India’s ‘red corridor’ and the continuing revolts against land acquisition and displacement. This example of Indian social movements illustrates the breadth and complexity of activity that takes place under the umbrella term of ‘cultural politics’. These struggles over land and economic distribution in places such as West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh may seem far removed from concerns over sexual orientation and lifestyle. Nevertheless, these more class-based concerns also incorporate strong cultural elements, elements which suggest that the oft-mentioned divide between class and identity politics rests on unstable foundations. This interplay between class and culture highlights the importance of exploring the interplay between different categories of social analysis, as well as being careful not to conflate them—a critical perspective shared by postcolonial thinkers such as Spivak.

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Key Theorist: Gayatri Spivak

Born in Calcutta in 1942, Gayatri Spivak is a pivotal figure in the field of postcolonial studies, but she also has a strong allegiance to feminist theory, poststructuralism as well as Marx. Her work is aimed at highlighting injustices of race, class and gender, and of positioning these injustices alongside the lingering and damaging effects of colonialism. Her work covers a wide range of issues, but chief among these is the issue of cultural representation, as evident in her essay can the subaltern speak, a hugely influential text that helped to shape the field of postcolonial studies. Her books, including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), speak to her eclectic approach to theory and theorising, as well as to the enduring themes of her work, such as the subaltern, deconstruction, exclusion, Eurocentrism and the power of education. Spivak’s work draws on numerous intellectual traditions, including the field of poststructuralism. Spivak saw in Derrida’s deconstruction a tool via which the buried prejudices of Western intellectual thought could be brought out into the open. In fact, Spivak was an important factor in the establishment of Derrida as a theorist in the United States and elsewhere—her lengthy preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (which she also translated from French into English when she was in her early 20s) helped introduce his ideas to the academic community. She is the co-founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She became  a prominent member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, a group of scholars focusing on the experience of postcolonial societies. Alongside her academic career, she has established schools for illiterate children in her native India and views this kind of activism as a way to support the subaltern while also pushing back against the new logics of neoliberal economic imperialism. For Spivak, colonial structures of knowledge and representation are evident in transnational forces of economic imperialism, and in the modernist logics applied via discourses of sustainable development. Applied in the third world, this discourse is a continuation in her mind of colonial–era politics but in a different guise: The phrase ‘sustainable development’ has entered the discourse of all the bodies that manage globality …. The general ideology of global development is racist paternalism (and alas, increasingly sororalism); its general economics capital-intensive investment; its broad politics the silencing of resistance and of the subaltern as the rhetoric of their protest is constantly appropriated. (Spivak 1999: 371–373)

Sustainable development is one example among many buzz words (e.g., see also ‘democracy promotion’) that Spivak viewed as the discursive wing of transnational neoliberal forces determined to marketise and commodify those parts of the global South not already colonised by free-market ideology. These discourses wreak violence on the subaltern and weaken their resistance to the hegemony of neo-colonial reason (Dutta 2009).

In Summary

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In Summary The Culture Industry  Theodor Adorno was one of the fiercest critics of the developing culture industry in the West in the twentieth century. He viewed this development as an unwanted commercialisation and exploitation of art as a cultural artefact, undermining the power of art forms such as music to inspire resistance to broader forces of exploitation. Adorno also criticised intellectuals who sought to elevate mass culture as a source of liberation. Cultural Studies  The study of culture as a representation of social life became a subject area in its own right in the second half of the twentieth century. Influenced by the likes of Raymond Williams and E.P Thompson, the field of cultural studies explored the ways in which everyday concerns and interests such as music, fashion, entertainment and sport reflected broader issues of identity, belonging and community. This was a decisive move away from more prevailing elitist views of culture and helped introduce a much stronger engagement with the power of race, class and gender in social research. Hegemony and Culture  Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony has become established as one of the key concepts in social theory because it rejects the deterministic notion that structural forces impose culture from above; rather than a passive player in political power games, the working class were actively involved in their own domination by the ruling class. The manufacturing of this consensus was made possible by a hegemonic ideology generated and maintained through institutions such as education, religion, unions and political parties. Schooling, Culture and Inequality  The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu established a critical sociology of education that took seriously both social class and culture as factors in the reproduction of inequality. From an early stage in his career, he set his sights on the education system as a site through which these factors intersected. According to Bourdieu, education was no driver of social meritocracy, but instead acted as a mechanism of reproduction which helps transfer the privileges of the parent’s generation to their children, hence perpetuating social inequality. Culture and Orientalism  In his book Orientalism, Edward Said delivered a powerful attack on writers and scholars whose work collectively produced a fictitious account of Arab and Muslim cultures. He viewed fields such as Oriental studies as an extension of Western imperialism, producing through various cultural forms an othering of non-Western worlds. This othering and the presentation of the non-West in negative terms (e.g., as disorganised and irrational) was a form of cultural oppression and marginalisation. Culture and the Postcolonial Diaspora  Stuart Hall was another postcolonial writer who cast a critical eye over representations of cultural identity. In Hall’s case the focus was on the construction of diasporic identities, especially of those that

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purported to be fixed and stable versions of particular racial and national identities. He viewed this tendency to homogenise and simplify what were previously complex histories and cultural differences, for example in the case of the Caribbean personality, as the product of colonialism, a cultural residue from the past that ‘cripples and deforms’ the multifaceted nature of identity. Culture and the Subaltern  The politics of cultural representation looms large in the work of Gayatri Spivak, another key figure in postcolonial studies. Her essay Can the sub-altern speak? takes issue with Western scholars and the way in which their particular theoretical and historical approaches are conveniently cast as universally applicable, even in postcolonial contexts significantly different from their own. Her analysis builds on the work of Said by questioning Western scholarly authority as well as their engagement in what she calls ‘epistemic violence’. Questions When it comes to the culture industry and mass media, who do you find yourself agreeing with more: Adorno or Benjamin? Why? How significant is someone’s cultural background to their educational achievement? What is the impact of colonialism on a nation’s cultural identity? Suggested Further Readings Alexander, J. (2003). The Meaning of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Uses historical events such as the Holocaust and Watergate to detail how the ‘cultural structures’ of myth and narrative help to shape social practices and institutions. Gandhi, L. (2019) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2nd edition). New York: Columbia University Press. A wide-ranging introduction to postcolonial theory that examines its benefits and drawbacks in relation to topics such as nationalism, feminism, culture and diaspora. Barron, L. (2013). Social Theory in Popular Culture. London: Palgrave. A text that explores the relevance of social theory for popular culture. Ideas from theorists such as Weber, Simmel, Saussure and Adorno are applied to issues including celebrity culture, film, pop music and reality TV. Favor, J.M. (1999). Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke University Press. Builds on a case study of Harlem Renaissance fiction writers to examine the contested nature of Africa-American identity and culture, arguing that ‘authentic blackness’ is a kind of performative discourse that denies the possibility of cultural multiplicities to African Americans.

References

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References Adorno, T. (1989[1967]). The Culture Industry Reconsidered. In S. Bronner & D. Kellner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (pp. 128–135). New York: Routledge. Adorno, T. (1996). The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge. Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1972[1944]). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum. Alexander, J. (2003). The Meaning of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford University Press. Barone, C. (2006). Cultural Capital, Ambition and the Explanation of Inequalities in Learning Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis. Sociology, 40(6), 1039–1058. Barrett, M. (2008). Stuart Hall. In R.  Stones (Ed.), Key Sociological Thinkers (2nd ed., pp. 293–310). Palgrave. Benjamin, W. (1969[1935]). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Guildford Press. Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. In R.  Brown (Ed.), Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change (pp. 71–111). Tavistock. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Algeria 1960. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1964[1979]). The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. University of Chicago Press. Delanty, G. (1999). Social Theory in a Changing World: Conceptions of Modernity. Polity. Dutta, M. (2009). Theorising Resistance: Applying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Public Relations. In Ø. Ihlen, B. van Ruler, & M. Fredricksson (Eds.), Public Relations and Social Theory: Key Figures and Concepts (pp. 278–299). Routledge. Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press. Fanon, F. (2001[1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1977). Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon, Trans., pp. 205–217). Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Two Lectures. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (C. Gordon, et al., Trans., pp. 78–108). Pantheon. Gandhi, L. (2019). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart. Grenfell, M., & James, D. (1998). Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory. Routledge. Gunn, S. (2005). Translating Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and the English Middle Class in Historical Perspective. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 49–64. Habermas, J. (1990). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (New ed.). Polity Press. Hall, S. (1992). The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. In S.  Hall & B.  Gieben (Eds.), Formations of Modernity. Polity Press. Hall, S. (1997). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In K. Woodward (Ed.), Identity and Difference (pp. 51–59). Sage. Hartman, A. (2015). A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture. Methuen. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. Chatto and Windus. Horkheimer, M. (1941). Art and Mass Culture. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9(2), 290–304.

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Kellner, D. (1988). Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems. Theory, Culture and Society, 5(2–3), 239–270. Lowenthal, L. (1989). Historical Perspectives on Popular Culture. In S.  Bronner & D.  Kellner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (pp. 184–198). Routledge. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2008[1848]). The Communist Manifesto. Workers Educational Association. Mu, G. M., Dooley, K., & Luke, A. (Eds.). (2018). Bourdieu and Chinese Education: Inequality, Competition and Change. Routledge. Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (2016a). Theory as Method in Research: On Bourdieu, Education and Society. Routledge. Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (2016b). Introduction: Bourdieu and Education Research. In M. Murphy & C.  Costa (Eds.), Theory as Method in Research: On Bourdieu, Education and Society (pp. 1–13). Routledge. Nilsen, A.  G., & Roy, S. (2015). New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India. Oxford University Press. Rampersad, R. (2016). Operationalising Bourdieu: Interrogating Intersectionality and the Underachievement of Primary Level Afro-Trinidadian Boys. In M. Murphy & C. Costa (Eds.), Theory as Method in Research: On Bourdieu, Education and Society (pp. 65–82). Routledge. Reay, D., David, M., & Ball, S. (2005). Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education. Trentham Books. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. Verso. Said, E. (2003[1978]). Orientalism. Penguin. Silva, E. (2005). Gender, Home and Family in Cultural Capital Theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 83–103. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). Macmillan. Spivak, G. (1993). Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge. Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Routledge. Spivak, G. (2012). An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation. Harvard University Press. Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. The University of Chicago Press. Tanner, J., Ashbridge, M., & Wortley, S. (2008). Our Favourite Melodies: Musical Consumption and Teenage Lifestyles. The British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 117–143. Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Victor Gollancz. Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. Chatto and Windus. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Saxon House. Wright, D. (2005). Mediating Production and Consumption: Cultural Capital and ‘Cultural Workers’. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 105–121.

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Introduction The social significance of language is manifested in a number of ways: its key function as a tool of communication grants language privileged access to forms of coercion and domination, as well as resistance to this domination. What strikes here is the dual purpose of language—it can be used very effectively to advance knowledge, make reasoned arguments and right historic wrongs, for example via the power of hashtags to fuel social movements (#metoo, #Black Lives Matter). While this is part of the power of language, language is also used to manipulate public opinion, as well as to demonise and isolate groups of people. The contemporary use of terms such as ‘snowflake’ and ‘gammon’ harnesses the power of language to exclude and vilify opponents and can be surprisingly effective at shutting down debate and over-simplifying what amount to complex social questions. History is littered with examples of words being used to demonise and isolate that make these generational wars on social media pale in comparison—see the use of the  term ‘cockroaches’ in Rwanda in the 1990s which incited one of the worst genocides in modern history. Language is also key to the work of social theory. Social theory itself would struggle to express itself without the explanatory power of language. Language not only allows for the communication of theory, but also creates and shapes its conceptual architecture. Language also assists theory to traverse disciplinary boundaries and thus to widen the explanatory scope of the field; theory is very good at borrowing from other disciplines, for example, ‘the genealogy of morals’ (Nietzsche 2008[1887]), ‘the archaeology of knowledge’ (Foucault 1972) and the ‘cartographies of diaspora’ (Brah 1996). In social theory the interest in language has surfaced in various ways: the politics of language is the site via which Jacques Derrida has had the most profound impact on social theory. His poststructural take on difference and deconstruction has been taken up by many as a representation of a politics of discourse. Deconstruction can be viewed as a critical technique via which linguistic sources of exclusion, power © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_7

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and marginalisation can be made visible. Habermas theorised language as the method via which intersubjective communication can occur (bringing together a complex web of speech act theory and linguistics to frame his argument), while Foucault critiqued this communicative take on language, instead preferring to view language in the form of discourse as a way to govern, discipline and make particular claims on the truth. Bourdieu also highlighted the power of language to create distinction as well as capital, particularly when it came to social class. To flesh out these different debates in the field of language and social theory, the chapter is organised around the following themes: • Language and the linguistic turn • Examples of the linguistic turn: deconstruction (Derrida); the dialogic imagination (Bakhtin); discourse (Foucault); communicative action (Habermas) and symbolic power (Bourdieu) • Language and its significance in schooling

The Linguistic Turn in Social Theory The power embedded in the use of language has not gone unnoticed in the social theory field, and the twentieth century witnessed an impressive ‘linguistic turn’ which reflected the increasing awareness of such power. There are several influences on this turn that should be mentioned: one is Hans-Georg Gadamer and his text Truth and method (2013[1959]). The influence of Gadamer’s ideas on the linguistic turn is enormous, especially his argument that knowledge and understanding are dependent on language. His philosophical hermeneutics is built on the premise that ‘all understanding is linguistic in character’ (Gadamer 2006: 14), language acting as a mediator of conversations between people—the ‘middle ground’ via which people reach an understanding between one another (Gadamer 1959). This linguistic role is significant as it governs people’s capacity to understand and interpret the world:  language acts as a vessel through which the collective accumulation and transfer of historical experience are made possible. Another significant influence on the linguistic turn in social theory is the work of George Herbert Mead (1934). Mead’s concept of the ‘generalised other’, as well as his intersubjectivist take on mind, self and society, relies heavily on linguistic structures—systems of symbols and signs—as without them meaningful forms of interaction and relation would be impossible to establish. The ability to dialogue with others and with one’s own self via language is a vital tool for the development of selfhood (which testifies to the influence of American Pragmatism on his work, see Key movement box). As Mead put it, ‘the self is ‘linguistically mediated’. Other key influences on the social theory of language include the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). His concepts of ordinary language and language games had a profound effect on the philosophy of language by drawing attention to the social contexts with which language is generated and deployed. J.L. Austin’s (1911–1960) concept of speech acts, that language represents a set of actions (see

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key concept box), is another influence which was built on the ordinary language movement that Wittgenstein was associated with. The Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin (1895–1975) is another thinker who, through concepts such as heteroglossia and dialogism, drew attention to the value-laden nature of language. His work, once discovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s, went on to have an important impact on numerous disciplines such as literary criticism, semiotics and history. Key Movement: Pragmatism

The United States has provided a unique contribution to the field of social theory in the shape of Pragmatism. From the late nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, Pragmatism was a major influence on American thought, spurred on by the writings of William James (1842–1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914). Its influence on social theory is evident in the work of scholars such as Mead as well as later theorists like Jürgen Habermas, Cornell West and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism was a reaction also against the Cartesian tradition that originated in the West (see key term box, Chap. 11), a philosophical tradition that emphasised individual consciousness and the spectator view of knowledge. The strict distinction between subject and object at the centre of the Cartesian worldview was replaced with a much interactive and intersubjective (see key term box, Chap. 9)  view of knowledge and knowledge production. More generally, pragmatism was a reaction to European philosophy that ignored the importance of social practices and social relations in the shaping of knowledge and values. Since its early days, especially in the work of Peirce, the pragmatist tradition valued the role of science and appreciated its potential contribution to philosophical analysis. This is evident in Peirce’s understanding of the pragmatic method, which he says is focused on ‘what practical considerations might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of on intellectual conception’ (Peirce, in Hartshone et  al. 1933–58: 9), a definition that effectively equated philosophical enquiry with scientific experimental methodology. But Peirce adopted a decidedly value-laden conception of science, proposing a highly normative stance towards scientific method that had the effect of rooting scientific reason in ethical considerations, which was a world away from the fashionable stance of neutral, detached observer. In this way, he aimed to shift philosophy away from stale arguments about idealism and materialism, subject and object, and instead position philosophical inquiry in practical reality. Alongside this, Pragmatism questions core tenets of the philosophical tradition, including the definition of truth, the status of science, the relation between subject and object, and the role of knowledge in understanding and perception. Pragmatism prioritises experience over fixed principles, preferring action over abstraction in an effort to move away from absolute ways of (continued)

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thinking about the world to one based on contingency and indeterminacy— the search for philosophical foundations and intellectual certainty were eschewed in favour of engagement with the world and a concrete embeddedness in practical reality. The ‘truth’ of an idea, value or object could only be ascertained through its successful application, its effects. Inquiry, according to John Dewey (1859–1952), was the method via which truth could be verified. John Dewey is a key figure in American pragmatism building on the work of earlier thinkers while highlighting the more political implications of the philosophy.

From Structuralism to Poststructuralism A key influence on modern social theory and a major jumping-off point for poststructuralism is the theory of structural linguistics. This theory, developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in the late nineteenth century, proposed a structural view of the way in which individuals navigate social life. Saussure, based on his study of Indo-European languages, argued that both language and the signs that govern social life require a social rather than individual understanding. According to Saussure, people are born into an already existing world of language and signs, a structure which effectively schools people in the ways of the world—language is impossible to avoid. Language as the guiding mechanism of learning and communication acts as the set of structural rules and tools for thought and behaviour. Our individual speech patterns, what Saussure called parole, derive from a more general system of language (langue), and in effect, language ties us to the external world while also being deeply implicated in the constitution of self. His concept of the ‘arbitrary nature of the sign’ reflects the deeply social nature of language and is an important aspect of his general theory. What he meant by arbitrary was the way in which words, such as ‘wife’, ‘pink’ and ‘house’, are assigned to objects, in a completely random and arbitrary manner, that is, without any internal logic. This basic fact led him to conclude that the relations between objects and words are socially constructed and are dependent on the historical context within which we exist. How then to understand this relation? Saussure devised a theory of difference to comprehend the mechanism via which this relation operates. This difference functions as a mediator between what he called ‘signifiers’ and ‘signified’, the combination of which at any given moment constitute meaning. Signifiers refer to text, sounds and images, while the signified is whatever the signifier refers to—that is, the mental picture in our minds of what the object constitutes. Together they are the ‘linguistic sign’ all of which are embedded in a structure of difference. What difference means here is relational—the linguistic sign and its effectiveness is dependent

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on the difference attached to objects—so ‘night’ is meaningful only because it is contrasted with ‘day’. Otherwise, these linguistic signs, according to Saussure, make no sense and lack meaning. As he famously put it (Saussure 1959: 120), ‘in language, there are only differences’. Jacques Derrida summoned a radical break from structuralist thought, undergoing a major shift away from any notion of structure at all. His approach is to radically shake up conditions of meaning. His work in the late 1960s, published as Of Grammatology (1976), Speech and phenomena (1973) and Writing and difference (1978), put forward his method of deconstruction, a method now often  misconstrued and used to represent  critical theory  more generally. The method was not what is sometimes assumed an endless source of relativism and nihilism. Derrida intended for deconstruction to be an interrogator of textual logic, to push the boundaries of Western philosophy so that ideas can be reconstructed. His critique of signification which lies at the centre of structuralist thought allowed him to take on cherished beliefs in Western philosophy such as the primacy of speech over language, of the spoken word over text. Deconstruction is designed to poke holes in texts, to question their right to idealism, truth and certainty and to bring forth that is absent in the presence of other things. In Writing and difference (1978), Derrida states that language is not a system for representing the world as words ‘can only ever signify themselves’. Signs work in a self-perpetuating loop. In a break from the ideas of Saussure, for whom (as noted above) meaning in language is a product of difference, Derrida argues that there is no inevitable symbiotic relationship between signifier (e.g., a word) and signified (meaning): signifiers can relate to numerous forms of signified. This is because the signifier can represent numerous meanings rather than a singular meaning for the receiver. This is what Derrida means by différance, a word he has deliberately constructed and misspelt from the French word difference, to characterise the ‘act of deferring’ meaning and signification. Writing is a communicative form which mediates and defers meaning. He rejects the notion that speech occupies a privileged place over writing due to its authenticity, immediacy and assumed originality. For Derrida, the written word is not a mere representation of speech, which constitutes the logocentrism at the heart of Western philosophy—the written word and writing allows for interrogation of space and deferring of meaning, bypassing dualisms such as self/other. At one point he called différance ‘the instituted trace’ (Derrida. 1976: 2), a way of understanding how the meaning of words undergoes numerous and infinite transformations, additions and alterations as it weaves through its endless relations with other words. Other concepts leave their mark, their trace, on words as they are encountered and this, in turn, has multiple effects on the process of signification. This is why writing for Derrida is the more accurate reflection of language than speech, as writing is much less rigid than speech and can work with a number of realities simultaneously. The temporal aspect of words and language is a crucial component to Derrida’s poststructural thinking, the movement of words and their meanings across time undermining the notion that the relation between signifier and signified are fixed.

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Derrida insists that they do not ‘belong to the temporal moment of the present’ (Baugh 1997: 128), and that such a chain of signification is impossible. For Derrida, to defer is: to resort, consciously or unconsciously, to the temporal and temporalizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfilment of a ‘desire’ or ‘will’ or carries desire or will out in a way that annuls or tempers their effect. (Derrida 1973: 136)

This movement means that meaning is restless and lacks stability and permanence. Terms, words, concepts are all at the mercy of ‘the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier’, a process in which each signified concept itself ‘always signifies again and differs’ in turn (Derrida 1978: 25). There is a process of ‘indefinite becoming-­other’ (Baugh 1997: 128) in relation to an Other that is itself a novel and unstable object.

Key Concept: Speech Acts

The concept of speech acts was a central component of the ordinary language movement, a movement that focused on language in everyday use that emanated from Oxford University and the work of Wittgenstein, and later authors such as J.L. Austin (1911–1960) and John Searle (1932–). Austin’s work is especially important in the field of social theory as he built on the ideas of ordinary language by emphasising both the social nature of language and its effects. In the 1950s, Austin gave a series of lectures, the William James Lectures at Harvard, and these were later published after his death in a book entitled How to Do Things with Words. The influence of the Movement is clear in the book, with Austin stating that ‘many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts…’ (Austin 1962: 1). Austin’s work has arguably had the biggest influence in social theory, although John Searle built on Austin’s work to produce further elaborate versions of the theory. Although the theory is a key part of often arcane debates in the philosophy of language, the linguistic turn paved the way for a more welcome reception to Austin’s work in social theory—the concept of speech act has had enormous impact on social theory and the linguistic turn more generally, including the works of Habermas and Butler. Its impact is also evident elsewhere in other disciplines such as psychology, law and literary studies. The concept of speech act marks a significant departure from traditional understandings of language and linguistics; its focus is not on either grammatical structure or on the role of language as a mediator of meaning, but rather on language as a set of actions. This is what Austin was referring to in the title How to do things with words. Words to Austin not only deliver information or describe reality but are also used to carry out actions. This focus on action expanded the scope of language considerably, providing it with other (continued)

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functions. This focus also helped illuminate the normative underpinnings of language as practiced by individuals, shining a light on the intentional and evaluative nature of language. The theory emphasises that speech utterances have a different meaning to the user as well as the receiver other than its meaning according to the language. Austin more generally opened up a new terrain of understanding the meaning of language—this meaning is derived from a number of sources, including linguistic conventions associated with words/sentences, the context of speech as well as the intentions of speaker in performing the speech act. Speech acts embody all these aspects. Austin classified these acts into three different categories, Locutionary (the act of speech), Illocutionary (the intention behind the speech) and Perlocutionary (the desired effect), with the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary later becoming core to Habermas’ theory of communication (see below).

Language and the Dialogic Imagination Another counterpoint to Saussure’s structural linguistics came via the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and linguist who also made an important contribution to literary studies through works such as Rabelais and his world (Bakhtin (2009[1965]) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984[1929]). He lived under the shadow of Stalinism, feeling the full force of the authoritarian state when he was exiled to Kazakhstan during one of Stalin’s purges, and it was only in the 1960s that his work reached a wider audience. He wrote across disciplines, especially philosophy and literature, and he often uses his work on the latter to ‘test’ his ideas of the former. In that sense he was strongly interdisciplinary, a key reason behind the take up of his ideas in diverse fields such as sociology, semiotics, psychology and anthropology. His collected works on language The dialogic imagination (Bakhtin 1981) show that Bakhtin disagreed with Saussure’s approach to language in some fundamental respects. A key target of his criticism was the closed system of language put forward by structuralism—that language formed a system of meanings cut off from the rest of the world. Instead, Bakhtin saw language as situated in its social and political context, a context that interrupts the system of signs and signifiers so important to Saussure’s work. The use of language, according to Bakhtin, is socially specific, and as a result, Saussure’s ideas remain too abstract, too objective and lacking grounding in ordinary language use. Bakhtin uses the notion of ‘utterance’ to illustrate the everyday and contextualised aspect of language which for him is missing from Saussure’s linguistics.

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This conception of language is decidedly different from that of Saussure who emphasises the power of langue, the system of language that shapes and frames the parole, people’s speech patterns or utterances. While Saussure argued that the system allowed for an infinity of utterances, Bakhtin believes that such a view does not reflect the ever-evolving complexity of spoken language as used in specific situations and historical moments: while utterances rely on previously established sets of meanings, this is a more particular and historically grounded ‘system’ of meaning, one that is less universal and more shaped by community, culture and social class. Bakhtin approaches language ‘not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated’ (Bakhtin 1981: 354). There exist patterns of meaning and understanding via which people can make sense of each other but these patterns are dynamic and constantly evolving over time. No utterance exists in isolation and language itself is a value-laden enterprise. There is no single meaning to be had but instead a multiplicity of contested meanings. This approach to language and critique of structural linguistics formed the basis of one of Bakhtin’s most important concepts—that of dialogism. Dialogism was created by Bakhtin as an alternative to monologism, a view that posits an utterance as representing one singular meaning or logic—meanings that have a monopoly on the truth. This singularity of meaning is emphasised in Saussure’s work according to Bakhtin, at the expense of a dialogical approach, which regards utterances as having multiple meanings at any one time. He defined this as ‘the necessary relation of any utterance to other utterances’. Contrasting with monologism, dialogism is a reflection of the shifting nature of language in textual use, which at any one time, contains traces of other texts that have existed previously—this interconnection allows us to comprehend the meaning of utterances. A dialogical approach to utterances, and language more generally, creates space for dialogue, for debate and for questioning which creates space in turn for a multiplicity of voices and interpretations. Language and utterances are not static entities fixed in time but rather are products of forms of communicative discourse. As Bakhtin puts it, Dialogism continues towards an answer. The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction. (Bakhtin 1981: 280)

There is a strong element of duality and its impact on words in Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism: words can include the intentions of both speaker and listener as well as meanings construed from both past and present utterances: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially-specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it—it does not approach the object from the sidelines. (Bakhtin 1981: 276)

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Another key concept in his work is that of heteroglossia, which builds on his analysis of dialogism. The term is contrasted with monoglossia, and Bakhtin argues that everyday speech is naturally heteroglossic, as opposed to authoritarian approaches that demand a monoglossic style and a dominant language to be practised by all. In such scenarios, monoglossism encourages stable and fixed relations between words and their meanings, leading to impoverished and rigid discourse in which the dialogic imagination is repressed. Language in its lived form is naturally heteroglossic: Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present . . . These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’. (Bakhtin 1981: 291)

Key Term: Hermeneutics

Closely associated with the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Hermeneutic philosophy is dedicated to the act of exploring the conditions of human understanding. According to Gadamer and others, the act of understanding is one of interpretation of an event, idea or activity as it is situated in a specific context that is meaningful to individuals. Interpretation of one’s experience is a practical act, according to Gadamer, an act mediated via the prism of a person’s life experience. Any action can only be properly understood within the context from which it originates, as the context provides the meaning behind the act (or statement, belief, etc.). The influence of Gadamerian Hermeneutics can be witnessed in the works of Anthony Giddens and Habermas and is often associated with interpretivist approaches to research methodology.

Discourse and Discursive Practices Another social theorist often characterised as poststructuralist is Foucault. While there are parallels between the work of Foucault and structuralism, particularly given that Foucault sees language as crucial to his interpretation of society, he deviates from structural thinking by referring to systems of knowledge and power as language-like systems in their own right: what he calls discourses. These discourses, these regimes of truth, are the mechanisms via which we know the world. Discourses are forms of power in that they tend to exercise control over the way people understand their environment and their experiences. Such an approach is light years away from the knowing Cartesian subject of Descartes and its various offshoots such as existentialism.

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His conception of language is remarkably different from traditional understandings—that is, the spoken written word in languages such as English and Spanish. Foucault’s discourse acts like language and adopts the same functions in terms of how they structure our thinking and knowledge systems. The way in which he applied this discourse theory of language and power had major implications for the way in which social theory positions agency, identity and the body. For Foucault, discourses are our identity, our subjectivity, our agency, in the sense that they shape the ways of knowing that inform our self—Foucault’s phrase ‘discursive practices’ is intended to identify the ways in which discourses manifest themselves in everyday life, as agency. This way of knowing is for Foucault an unremarkable and ordinary part of development, as ordinary as language development. The acquisition of these discourses is as common as the ways in which we learn how to speak in our native language. This is a departure from the typical study of language and discourse: typically in the study of language, discourse is used to frame the analysis of speech patterns and dialects. In Foucault’s approach, discourse has less of a linguistic orientation and more of a regulatory function—for Foucault, conceptions of truth and morality are created through the operations of discourse. Discourses are mechanisms via which social order is maintained and controlled, as they constitute knowledge and subjectivity. They control the flow of information through regulating ‘what can be said and thought, but also about who can speak, when, and with what authority’ (Pitsoe and Letseka 2013: 24). Discourses and discursive practices for Foucault are central to the workings of power in modern society. Foucault is clear that relations of power are dependent on the functioning of these discourses: In any society there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. (Foucault 1980, 93)

Far from being a purely textual or linguistic analysis of power, Foucault’s concept of discourse has a strong materialist orientation, a significant component that should not be overlooked in our understandings of discursive practices. In his writings on the subject, especially The order of discourse (1981), Foucault is at pains to establish a connection between the material and the discursive. As Hook puts it (2007: 129), discourse ‘facilitates and endorses the emergence of certain relations of material power, just as it justified these effects after the fact’. It is also the case that, in Foucault’s conceptualisation, material sources of power act to facilitate and privilege certain forms of discourse over others. At the same time, Foucault feels no need to provide a comprehensive structural account of why such discourses occur and eschews any concerns with creating counter discourses to offset the damage of the normalising discourse around sexuality crime, education and health. As Wandel (2001: 380) puts it, Foucault refuses ‘to

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defer to deeper secrets, truer truths’, while at the same time resolving to ‘bombard the power of the Same with the difference of the Other’: For the moment, and as far ahead as I can see, my discourse … is avoiding the ground on which it can still find support. It is a discourse about discourses: but it is not trying to find in them a hidden law, a concealed origin that it only remains to free … It is trying to deploy a dispersion that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a scattering that is not related to absolute axes of reference; it is trying to operate a decentring that leaves no privilege to any center. The role of such a discourse is not to rediscover, in the depths of things said, at the very place in which they are silent, the moment of their birth …. On the contrary, its task is to make differences … . (Foucault 1973: 205–6)

This change, in fact, marked a shift in his work and a departure from his earlier concerns, or as Wandel puts it (2001: 380) ‘the language of the archaeologist is replaced with the refusal of the genealogist’. One question that tends to arise in relation to the enveloping nature of discourse is: is there any mechanism of escape from the discursive world? Given that Foucault emphasises the embodied habitual nature of discourse, it seems unlikely. Yet Hook poses a useful question in this regard (2007: 16), when he asks whether or not physical/human activity could act as a counter to the effects of discourse. He suggests that ‘we should try to track activity not merely as “following after” discourse, as strictly limited to the significances afforded it by social thought, but as itself a resource of though and indeed, by extension, means of the refutation of more solidly anchored discursive practices’ (Hook 2007: 137). This suggestion is useful given that to some extent Foucault identified such a form of counter-resistance, for example in the History of Sexuality, where he claims that ‘the point of leverage for the counterattack against the apparatus of sexuality must not be sex as desire, but bodies and pleasure’ (Foucault 1978: 158).

Key Theorist: Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault is one of the towering figures in social theory, having a major impact on the field since the 1970s. One of the reasons for this is the interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, quality of his work. He is certainly difficult to pigeonhole—he has resisted such attempts to classify his work, famously stating at one point ‘I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist’. By not belonging to any specific camp, Foucault’s ideas have been able to exert a huge influence on a wide range of issues and research fields. This is because his work covers so much ground, which includes sexuality, mental illness, crime and incarceration. This breadth of understanding and interpretation is well represented in debates over the state, governance, language, knowledge and the body. Throughout his writings, Foucault was keen to critically interrogate some of the most cherished values of the enlightenment, holding up the ideals of truth, justice and reason to intense scrutiny via studies of modern practices of (continued)

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governance. That said, he was far from the anti-enlightenment figure he is sometimes portrayed as. The paper ‘What is enlightenment?’ (Foucault 1984) perfectly illustrates how complex Foucault’s thinking on modernity was. Here he connects the enlightenment to modernity and situates his own archaeology of knowledge and genealogy of power within this connection. In this paper, Foucault gives a qualified reading of both the enlightenment and modernity. Foucault sees much positive value in the enlightenment. Rather than discussing modernity as an event or an historical epoch, he views, or prefers to view it, as ‘an attitude’ (p. 39). Foucault understood the attitude of modernity as both an awareness of historical belonging and the need to go beyond this limitation. It is this double character of the attitude of modernity that Foucault sees mirrored in his own theoretical and methodological framework. This becomes clearer where he discusses his genealogy and archaeology. According to him, (pp.  45–46), what the attitude of modernity has done is to open up the world of critique: Criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. (Foucault 1984: 45–46)

His method, the archaeology of knowledge, sets itself the task of outlining the lack of freedom present in history. His theory, the genealogy of power, sets itself the task of outlining the possibilities of going past these limitations. Although this is a crude formulation, it does highlight the extent to which Foucault is connected to the attitude of modernity, its dual nature of being both an awareness of limitations and the possibilities of going beyond them.

Language and Communication Habermas was also an enthusiastic adopter of the linguistic turn, but for different reasons as compared to Derrida and Foucault. Habermas turned to language in pursuit of some kind of firm grounding, a basis on which he could develop a critical theory of society fit for the late twentieth century; Habermas saw this as vital in the shift away from a theoretical reliance on Marx. To facilitate this critique, he needed what he considered an adequate theoretical position—as Antonio and Kellner (1992, 282) puts it, a vantage point ‘from which to attack the threats to rationality, pluralism and democracy’. He turned to language for this grounding, which meant a decisive shift away from the notion of the monological self in isolated interaction with other isolated

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selves, to a focus on the intersubjective dimension of self-development and social interaction. This turn to a linguistic intersubjectivity allows Habermas to ground his theory in what he called a Universal or Formal Pragmatics that applied to everyone. The construction of a universal pragmatics delivered to Habermas a theory of communicative competence—that is, of people’s ability to communicate that can be applied universally. By engaging in the act of linguistic communication, speakers commit themselves to the conditions that facilitate the possibility of rational discourse, a set of conditions that Habermas calls discourse ethics. Conceptions of language became the basis upon which Habermas sought to redefine the Frankfurt School of critical theory (see key movement box, Chap. 3) and its efforts to establish a theoretical basis for transformative practice. Rejecting the idea put forward by previous critical theorists that reason and instrumental rationality are one and the same thing, there is another form of reason, communicative reason, that is grounded in people’s capacity to communicate via language. Language offers an orientation towards mutual understanding, an orientation Habermas terms communicative action. People have to justify themselves implicitly or explicitly based on the truth claims they put forward to the receiver. Habermas believes that this orientation is grounded in the fabric of language itself. For his conceptual apparatus Habermas borrows strongly from speech act theory as developed by Charles Pierce and J.L. Austin, in particular Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (Austin 1962) (see key concept box). An illocutionary act refers to the action taken by a speaker in saying what is said. According to Habermas (1984: 154), with an illocutionary act, the speaker ‘performs an action in saying something; the illocutionary role establishes the mode of a sentence employed as a statement, promise, command, avowal, or the like’. Perlocutionary acts, on the other hand, refer to the effect on the hearer that the speaker wishes to achieve. By engaging in perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the receiver. Importantly in Habermas’ formulation the latter presuppose the former: Perlocutionary effects can be achieved by way of speech acts only if the speech acts are incorporated as means into actions oriented to success. Perlocutionary acts are an indication of the integration of speech acts into contexts of strategic interaction. (Habermas 1984: 292)

Communicative action, that is, action-oriented towards reaching understanding, can be explained only in connection with illocutionary acts. As Habermas puts it (1984: 295), Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims, with their mediating acts of communication. On the other hand, I regard as linguistically mediated strategic action those interactions in which at least one of the participants wants with his speech acts to produce perlocutionary effects on his opposite number.

This was an important distinction for Habermas as it allowed him to ground his theory of communicative action in a universal pragmatics, which consequently allowed him to make a case against the pathologies of modernisation which undermined this form of communication as shared understanding.

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Habermas’ ideas on language and communication have found favour in various fields, including education—Robert Young, for example, who viewed the theory as a valuable mechanism for exploring the democratic nature of schooling. He values the theory of communicative action precisely because it provides ‘a normative concept by which to critically look at the classroom activities’ (Young 1992: 156). According to Young, if the ideal pedagogical speech situation is as defined above, it is only speech acts which are illocutionary (and not perlocutionary) that can be defined as ‘educational’ rather than ‘indoctrinatory’. He used this linguistic turn of Habermas to make the claim that ‘all arguments in the classroom situation … ought to be made in a communicative way: if they do not follow this rule, they are not educational’ (Young 1992: 157). Others have taken time to identify what can be considered serious flaws in his conceptual apparatus. One criticism relates to Habermas’ core distinction between speech acts, particularly the notion that illocutionary acts are primary and perlocutionary are derivative. Question marks remain over whether this distinction mirrors the communicative/strategic distinction Habermas insists is the case. Culler suggests that ‘many illocutionary acts seem primarily designed to produce certain effects rather than to bring about understanding’ (Culler 1985: 136). Another problematic aspect of this distinction is the dependent relation between the two kinds of acts: In Habermas’ view the comprehension of utterances is prior to and independent of comprehending purposive activity. But much speech act theory posits a dependent relation between the two—that is, the understanding of sentences is dependent on the understanding of sentences as they perform in action. And this is a major issue for Habermas’ linguistic turn: If he cannot show that language in strategic action is somehow derivative from and dependent on language in communicative action that presupposes an ideal communicative situation …. appeal to the norms that subtend consensual speech situations would just be a case of choosing values that one preferred rather than relying on values inevitably implied by linguistic communication. (Culler 1985: 137)

There have been other numerous criticisms of Habermas’ communication theory and his adoption of the linguistic turn. Poststructuralism is one particular theoretical approach which has seriously questioned his conception of unforced communication. Spivak, for example, argues that the possibility of communication free from the shackles of politics is an illusion. For her, communication cannot be separated from relations of power—dialogue free from politics cannot exist: It is not a situation that ever comes into being – there is no such thing. The desire for neutrality and dialogue, even as it should not be repressed, must always mark its own failure … the idea of neutral dialogue is an idea which denies history, denies structure, denies the positioning of subjects. (Spivak 1990: 72)

For her, communication free from distortion only distorts the relations between communicative practices and unequal power relations, a position decidedly different to that of Habermas.

The Symbolic Power of Language

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The Symbolic Power of Language Like Derrida, Bourdieu deviated from Saussure’s structural linguistics, also viewing the relation between langue and parole as too rigid and formalistic a view of everyday language use. Saussure’s distinction is, according to Bourdieu, ‘at the root of the inability of structuralism to think the relation between two entities other than as the model and its execution’ (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 142). Bourdieu aimed instead to develop a theory of language that was deeply rooted in social practices as opposed to one that depended on the existence of a fixed linguistic community governed by universal laws of language and communication: [T]his scholarly bracketing neutralises the functions implied in the ordinary use of language. Language, according to Saussure … is treated as an instrument of intellection and an object of analysis, a dead language, a self-contained system completely severed from its real uses and denuded from its practical and political functions. (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 141)

In this way, Bourdieu can be regarded as anti-structuralist (or even poststructuralist) and uninterested in grammarian approaches to linguistics. Language for Bourdieu is a medium via which power makes itself felt in everyday practice. Linguistic relations ‘are always relations of symbolic power through which relations of force between the speakers and their respective groups are actualised in a transfigured form’ (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 142) (see also Chap. 11). That said, he believed that language helped shape the values attached to ideas, expressions and utterances—language helps ‘make the world’ (Webb et al. 2002). But he also asserted the politics of language over and above questions of syntax and structure—that language is the result of a struggle over the meaning of words. This is why he saw the separation of linguistics and sociology as damaging to both disciplines given how much they could learn from one another. To overcome this separation, Bourdieu established his own brand of sociolinguistics, firmly placing the emphasis on the social aspect of the equation. According to him, in order to understand ‘what goes on in verbal communication’ (ibid, 143), the social power relations framing the linguistic exchange need to be brought into the analysis. Bourdieu exemplifies this conception of language via the ‘strategy of condescension’, a strategy he referred to in a number of his publications. It is best exemplified in his description of the power plays at work in relation between White and African Americans in the United States. In this case, according to Bourdieu The dominated speaks a broken language … and his linguistic capital is more or less completely devalued, be it in school, at work or in social encounters with the dominant …. Every linguistic interaction between whites and blacks is constrained by the encompassing relation between their respective appropriations of English, and by the power imbalance which sustains it and gives the arbitrary imposition of middle-class ‘white’ English its air of naturalness. (ibid, 143)

One style of language—the dominant or the dominated—depends on the other for its existence—they exist only in relation to one another: ‘There is no other

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definition of the legitimate language other than that it is a refusal of the dominated language’ (Bourdieu 1990: 154). Bourdieu was interested in both the production and reception of language (Jenkins 2002: 154). Because of this, Bourdieu focused on both the linguistic habitus—the disposition towards language use and the competency to use it effectively—as well as the value of this linguistic habitus in the social marketplace (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 142). It is the relation between these, between the habitus and the market, which produces the language or linguistic utterances. There is an exchange value to language use, a value that Bourdieu positions in the marketplace of linguistic exchange: In other words, utterances are not only (save in exceptional circumstances) signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (Bourdieu 1991:66)

The signs of wealth and authority communicated via a person’s language use are converted into linguistic capital in the marketplace. In Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu explains some of the linguistic strategies that are deployed in market exchanges and describes how these are impacted when ‘one rises in the social order’. One of these is the self-censorship (1991: 84) people deploy in their style of speaking, which alters dramatically alongside elevation in the social ranks: in the company of higher rank, the style ‘tends to exclude the casualness, the laxness or the licence which we allow ourselves in other circumstances, when we are ‘among our own kind’ (ibid). This censorship employs the strategy of ‘euphemisation’, a strategy of polite and nuanced speaking that requires increased technical mastery in higher social orders. ‘Hedging’ is another linguistic strategy that is a practical requirement in bourgeois language use—phrases such as ‘sort of’, ‘pretty much’, ‘rather’, ‘strictly speaking’, ‘technically’, ‘regular’, ‘par excellence’ and so on (ibid, 85). This linguistic politics, for Bourdieu, was especially powerful in the education system. The language of school helps to ‘consecrate’ (1991: 60) the culture of the middle classes, compounding the disadvantaged position of the working class. The language of schooling is a form of symbolic violence, one in which the linguistic style of the working class, itself set in opposition to the dominant style (or what Bourdieu often refers to as legitimate) (colloquial, common, ‘natural’ virile, earthy), is devalued in the linguistic marketplace: The educational market is strictly dominated by the linguistic products of the dominant class and tends to sanction the pre-existing differences in capital …. those least inclined and least able to accept and adopt the language of school are also those exposed for the shortest time to this language and to educational monitoring, correction and sanction. (Bourdieu 1991: 62)

Bourdieu placed a high level of significance on language in schooling, to such an extent that he argued that the ‘sociology of language is logically inseparable from a sociology of education’ (ibid).

The Hidden Curriculum of Language

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The Hidden Curriculum of Language The concept of the ‘hidden curriculum’ has been a mainstay in the sociology of schooling for decades and indicates the dangers that lie ahead for pupils who need to engage with the unwritten and unofficial curriculum that makes schools operate and function. The ‘new’ sociology of education that was greatly influenced by Bourdieu and others (Apple 1982; Giroux 1983) viewed the hidden and opaque aspects of schooling as creating and recreating social inequalities, and as a result, undermining the official line about schools as meritocratic institutions and facilitators of social mobility. Talk of this hidden curriculum centres mainly on the ways in which culture and/or knowledge operates as the conduits of power, as vessels for maintaining the vice-like grip on advantages and privilege stockpiled by the middle classes: schools, far from level-playing fields for the aspiring working class, conspires to restrict, delay and obstruct class mobility that might damage their competitive position. One theorist who was also part of this critique of the hidden curriculum was Basil Bernstein, but his approach was decidedly linguistic in nature. In his influential work of the 1970s, Bernstein, a British sociologist, sought to uncover what Meighan and Walker (2007) call the ‘hidden curriculum of language’ at work in British schools, a hidden curriculum that both managed to stay invisible while also ensuring the sub-ordinate position of working-class pupils. Bernstein’s theory is an important part of the debate as it highlights the key role of language in schools and social inequality—and it remains this way which is something of a concern given the significance of language in schooling. Beginning his work in the 1950s, he engaged from the start with a classic question in the sociology of education: why is it that educational outcomes are so class based? Why is it that there is a consistent difference in terms of educational attainment as well as other key indicators such as low progression, early school leaving and school exclusion? Why does class seem to matter so much in the classroom? In response to these questions, he developed a theory about class-based outcomes that centred on language and communication. Specifically he argued that relational groupings such as social classes and the family generate modes of communication relevant to their groupings. These act as systems of orientation and enculturation among the groups, impacting their development of linguistic competencies. Importantly, Bernstein viewed social classes as key groupings that provide their own systems, systems that can be situated on a continuum, a continuum that has restricted codes at one end (RC) and elaborated codes (EC) at the other. These types of codes reflect either particularistic (RC) or universalistic (EC) sets of characteristics that operate as systems of meaning and regulate the communication modes of different types of family. Alongside this, he developed a theory of families as either positional or person-orientated—the former referred to the families in which role ascription took prominence, that is, where decisions about matters depended on the formal role of family members (son, father, and so on), while the latter refers to role achievement in which decisions rest on individual’s characteristics.

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Class comes into the equation via the mechanism of language, and specifically speech forms and their distinctiveness in each social grouping and their reflection of family type. Due to the social relations resulting from their cultural positioning, working-class families tend to develop positional role systems—this then means that they also tend towards forms of communication that rely on the restricted code and hence have little need for linguistic elaboration. This in itself is not necessarily a problem but it becomes one in Bernstein’s argument, once school enters the equation, as the mode of communication favoured by schools does not resemble that of their home environment, leaving working-class children at a distinct disadvantage. The code at school is alien to the working-class child and effectively acts as a form of class-based exclusion—the school is ‘concerned with making explicit and elaborating through language, principles and operations’ (Bernstein 1977). The codes of schooling work much better for children from middle-class families, as they correspond to the codes that govern their family life and as such, the cards are stacked in their favour. The sequencing rules of educational institutions, the pacing of this transmission (the rate of expected acquisition), its future relevance and its immediate irrelevance are, to say the least, based upon performance rules which the middle-class embryonically possesses. Class regulates the elaborated codes of education and the family. (Bernstein 1977)

This theory was adopted by sociologists of education in the 1970s who were eager to identify a ‘smoking gun’, a variable in the patchwork of schooling that could explain the consistent underperformance of working-class children. It was also quite radical at the time as it identified an inequity that operated between the lines of formal schooling processes, one that was difficult to isolate but nevertheless powerful in its effects. The ideas of scholars such as Bernstein appealed especially to more critical sociologists of education who studied schooling through the lens of social class. For working-class pupils, it offered a concrete analysis of schooling: that schools did not ‘speak’ their language. This analysis of the class-based nature of schooling, at least from a linguistic perspective, has moved to the margins of education studies more recently, with more critical researchers preferring, instead, to focus on issues of race and gender. This should not overshadow Bernstein’s contribution: that class and family matter; that the language of schooling needs to be taken into account and that schools do not exist in a social vacuum—it is not possible to take class out of the classroom. Part of the reason why his ideas have become marginalised is that they have received some criticisms over the years, for example over his assumptions regarding the relation between language and thought. One set of especially stinging criticisms takes on his analysis of schooling as necessarily employing elaborated codes. In summarising these critiques, Meighan and Walker (2007: 180) suggest that Bernstein’s description of restricted codes—lack of discretion, sharp divisions in authority between pupils and teachers, an institutional context that discourages questioning—in fact, resemble more the reality of schooling that the codes attached to the notion of elaboration.

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Social Theory Applied: Deconstruction

Derrida’s concept of deconstruction has proven enormously influential in fields such as postcolonialism (see Chap. 6), literary criticism, queer theory and some aspects of feminist theory. Although it should be noted that Derrida explicitly said ‘deconstruction is not a method’ (1988: 3), it has still proven useful in research contexts. Winter (2013) provides a strong example of putting deconstruction to work in her analysis of the development of a school curriculum for students in England. She was keen to illustrate the ways in which forms of knowledge had been bracketed in the geography curriculum, via which she wanted her students to ‘think other-wise’ about what might be considered ordinary places. In her case it was Whitby, the English coastal town, famous for several reasons but one of them because of Dracula—the team wanted to think about curriculum and teaching differently away from standards and requirements of the national curriculum and to open up space for critical reflection. Winter identifies three key tenets underpinning deconstructive methodology: that linguistic meanings are insecure and elusive; that epistemological foundations are there to be disrupted and unauthorised—this offers the reader an opportunity to ‘see behind’ the epistemological assumptions and intentions and third, that deconstruction, as Derrida himself put it ‘is justice’ (Derrida 1992:15). As Winter (2013: 186) argues, ‘the responsibility for justice rests on the act of bringing fresh eyes to a problem, on drawing on a unique and responsible interpretation of the problem in order to reinstitute and reinvent what was and what could be’. This approach allowed her in her research to illustrate that education offers an alternative, ‘an-other way’. This purpose allows education the privilege of considering the possibilities in what is impossible (Winter 2013: 186). What is interesting about Winter’s approach, and which connects it to numerous others who have adopted Derrida in their work, is its explicitly political nature and its commitment to justice. Her work includes a critique of the English education system, a critique that adopts deconstruction to highlight the inadequacies of education reform and of education governance. The overbearing concern over performativity demonstrates, ‘by its instrumentalism and emphasis on outcomes of improved examination grades and increased subject recruitment, the kinds of constraints that limit the scope for interventionalism and the incoming of the other’ (Winter 2013: 194).

In Summary The Linguistic Turn  Language has made a significant impression on the field of social theory, with numerous theorists undertaking a ‘linguistic turn’ in their work. This turn, undertaken by theorists as diverse as Jean-François Lyotard,

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Jacques  Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, reflects the importance they placed on language as a key determinant of people’s self-understanding as well as their knowledge of the world. There are a number of key thinkers who influenced this turn, in particular Hans Gadamer, George Herbert Mead and Ferdinand  de Saussure. Language and Différance  In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida rose to prominence as an intellectual who transformed the field of language studies through an original analysis of language and its relation to meaning. Derrida’s starting point for this analysis was a sharp break with the work of Saussure and structuralist thought. His rupture of the relation between signifier and signified opened up a world of numerous meanings, a world in which the meaning of words could be subject to endless transformations. Derrida invented the word différance to characterise this ‘act of deferring’ meaning and signification. The Dialogic Imagination  The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin developed the concept of dialogism as an alternative to monological approaches to language, which believe that speech utterances represent one specific meaning. The dialogical approach for Bakhtin was a more accurate description of language as used in everyday encounters as it portrays linguistic utterances as incorporating multiple meanings in communicative interactions. Language and Communication  Language plays a vital role in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, a role that allowed him to focus on the intersubjective dimension of self-development and social interaction. Linguistic communication provided him with a basis for his theories of universal pragmatics and discourse ethics, key building blocks in his critical theory of society that sought to locate the pathologies of capitalist modernisation in damaged lifeworlds. Language and Discourse  Foucault is another theorist who took something of a linguistic turn, as evident in his concept of discourse. Rather than being a language in their own right, discourses for Foucault are language-like systems that regulate our knowledge and understanding. Discourses represent what Foucault calls regimes of truth, as they exercise power over the ways in which people interpret the world and their position in it. The Symbolic Power of Language  Pierre Bourdieu’s work on language emphasises its symbolic power over standard concerns with grammar: for him language had a political aspect to it that derived from the social struggle over meaning. Bourdieu’s sociolinguistic approach places centre stage the social context of language use, insisting that verbal communication between people can only be examined from the perspective of the power relations that frame such forms of linguistic exchange.

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The Hidden Curriculum  The concept of the ‘hidden curriculum’ has been used by a number of authors to explore the impact of schools and schooling on levels of inequality. One of the main contributors to this study was Basil Bernstein, who developed a linguistic theory of the hidden curriculum of schooling. He argued that the hidden language of British schools actively works against working-class children. It does so because the mode of communication favoured by schools does not resemble that of their family and local community, which as a consequence means working class are left disadvantaged in terms of their learning experience and educational outcomes. The language of school is alien to the working-class child and effectively acts as a form of class-based exclusion. Questions Have you experienced language as a tool of power in your own life? How did this manifest itself? Identify some powerful discourses at work in your own society—how are these established and sustained? Does the ‘language’ of school act as ‘a form of class-based exclusion’? Suggested Readings Hirschkop, K (2019). Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A historical overview of the various linguistic turns in twentieth European thought, which argues that the combined efforts of authors such as Saussure, Bakhtin and Gramsci constituted an intellectual event in its own right, one that had great bearing on the direction of twentieth-century social theory. Simpson, P., Mayr, A. and Statham, S. (2018). Language and Power (2nd edition). London: Routledge. Explores some key topics in the study of language and power, including the relation between language, race and gender, the role of language in law, politics and the discourse of ‘post-truth’. Torfing, J. (1999). New Theories of Discourse C: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford: Blackwell. Adapts the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as well as the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, to re-examine contested areas such as nationalism, the mass media and the welfare state in the name of a radical plural democracy. Ahmad, J. (2018). The BBC, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Discursive Construction of Terrorism: Representing Al-Qaeda. London: Palgrave. Examines the role of British media in creating narratives around Islam, terror and security threats, employing the ideas of Foucault to position Al-Qaeda as a post-9-11 discursive phenomenon.

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References Antonio, R., & Kellner, D. (1992). Communication, Modernity and Democracy in Habermas and Dewey. Symbolic Interaction, 15(3), 227–297. Apple, M. (1982). Education and Power. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Austin, J. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (C. Emerson, Trans., M. Holquist, Ed.). University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984[1929]). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (C. Emerson, Trans). University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (2009[1929]). Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press. Baugh, B. (1997). Making the Difference: Deleuze’s Difference and Derrida’s Différance. Social Semiotics, 7(2), 127–146. Bernstein, B. (1977). Class, Codes and Control (Vol. 3). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. University of Chicago Press. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge. Culler, J. (1985). Communicative Competence and Normative Force. New German Critique (Spring/Summer), 133–144. Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (D. Allison & N. Garver, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Routledge. Derrida, J. (1988). Letter to a Japanese Friend (D. Wood & A. Benjamin, Trans.). In D. Wood & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Derrida and Différance (pp. 1–5). Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1992). Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’. In D.  Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, & D. G. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (pp. 4–67). Routledge. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Random House. Foucault, M. (1978). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980). Two Lectures. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (C. Gordon, et al., Trans., pp. 78–108). Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse. In R.  Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structural Anthology (pp. 48–78). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (1984). What Is Enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Pantheon. Gadamer, H. (2006). Language and Understanding (1970). Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1), 13–27. Gadamer, H. (2013[1959]). Truth and Method. Bloomsbury. Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education. Bergin and Garvey. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press. Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., & Burks, A. W. (1933–58). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard University Press Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Palgrave. Jenkins, R. (2002). Pierre Bourdieu (Rev. ed.). Routledge. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago University Press. Meighan, R., & Walker, C. (2007). A Sociology of Educating (4th ed.). Continuum Press. Nietzsche, F. (2008[1887]). On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford University Press. Pitsoe, V., & Letseka, M. (2013). Foucault’s Discourse and Power: Implications for Instructionist Classroom Management. Open Journal of Philosophy, 3(1), 23–28.

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Saussure, F. (1959). Course in General Linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Philosophical Library New York. Spivak, G. (1990). The Post-Colonial Critic. In S.  Harasym (Ed.), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (pp. 59–66). Routledge. Wandel, T. (2001). The Power of Discourse: Michel Foucault and Critical Theory. Cultural Values, 5(3), 368–382. Webb, J., Schirato, T., & Danaher, G. (2002). Understanding Bourdieu. Sage. Winter, C. (2013). ‘Derrida Applied’: Derrida Meets Dracula in the Geography Classroom. In M. Murphy (Ed.), Social Theory and Education Research: Understanding Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas and Derrida (pp. 184–199). Routledge. Young, R. (1992). Critical Theory and Classroom Talk. Multilingual Matters.

8

Knowledge

Introduction The publication of Daniel Bell’s The coming of post-industrial society in the early 1970s (Bell, 1973) accurately predicted that knowledge and information would become increasingly significant to modern societies in their shift away from manufacturing and industrialisation. The ownership of knowledge would replace ownership of the means of production and become a key factor in social stratification, social mobility and workplace organisation. There is ample evidence to suggest that Bell’s prophecy came true, especially in the West where manufacturing has been replaced by a service industry powered by data. But even Bell would be surprised by the extent to which knowledge has become central to modern lives, and not just in relation to work, employment and social stratification. While it is true that knowledge is a tool of distinction, of social mobility and status, it is also a major tool of exclusion, a powerful mechanism via which society can elevate one group over another, using knowledge to marginalise and alienate. This ensures that questions surrounding the legitimacy and authority of knowledges are highly visible in contemporary debates over social justice. There is another element to this also, which is tied to long-running concerns over the veracity of scientific objectivity. In the twenty-first century, this has spilt over into a more general suspicion of professional knowledge cultures and their claims to neutrality and detachment, a development captured in phrases such as the ‘death of expertise’, ‘post-truth society’ and even the now-ubiquitous reference to disagreeable evidence-­ based analysis as ‘fake news’. To some extent, these debates over knowledge in the public sphere are playing catch up with those in social theory. Although issues of epistemology are central to the work of social science and the academy generally, when associated with issues of power and representation, they have occupied a central place in socio-theoretical thought. Of particular prominence in contemporary debates are theorists such as Michel Foucault, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Donna Haraway, Boaventura © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_8

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de Sousa Santos and Norbert Elias. The ideas developed by these theorists owe a major debt to earlier analyses of knowledge generated by Karl Mannheim and Theodor Adorno, inheriting a similar critical disposition towards claims of scientific objectivity and political detachment. They also shared a deep concern over the troubled relation between power and knowledge, and in various ways aim to comprehend how domination and oppression can be located in regimes of truth—what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge is deemed important? This chapter considers these various contributions to the theory of knowledge, with the last part of this chapter dedicated to exploring these contributions in the context of current debates over the politics of academic knowledge. This chapter is organised around three main areas: • Debates over knowledge and objectivity (Mannheim and the positivist debate) • Some critical offshoots of this objectivity debate, including the social construction of knowledge and the archaeology/postmodern critiques of knowledge, as well as more explicit critiques of positivism/scientism—situated knowledge and indigenous knowledge • A focus on the politics of academic knowledge, consisting of three parts— knowledge and the curriculum, knowledge and academic gatekeeping, and knowledge and intellectuals.

Knowledge and Objectivity A key concern in social theory has been the extent to which a person’s knowledge of the world can be separated from their own personal experiences—how truly objective can a person be when it comes to making judgements about issues such as, for example, class, race and gender? The influence of subjective experience is a significant question to explore, given its importance to issues such as ‘truth’ ‘facts’ and consequently questions of justice. This importance has been widely acknowledged in social theory, especially in the work of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), often considered the founder of the sub-field of the sociology of knowledge. In his work, Mannheim veered more towards the subjectivist view of knowledge, arguing that all intellectual positions were effective forms of ideology, as bounded to particular social positions and locations. There was a political aspect to Mannheim’s argument: he hoped that this conception of knowledge as necessarily one-sided would act as a counterbalance to the prevailing tendency of the time (the 1920s), especially of politicians, to cast their opponents as ideologues while liberating themselves of such accusations. This political point-scoring provided the opening section to his most famous book, Ideology and utopia (Mannheim 1936). This book caused a major stir in Germany at the time, constituting what Meja (2015) calls the ‘sociology of knowledge’ dispute. This dispute consisted of the publication of over 30 major responses to the book. Authors of the responses included such thinkers as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, a roll call of contemporary intellectuals which testifies to the significance of the dispute in academic circles. This significance lay in the fact that a systematic study of knowledge could potentially, at least in the mind of Mannheim, stymy the rise of

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reactionary and irrational political responses to changing social conditions of the early twentieth century. Mannheim believed that the sociology of knowledge could play an important role in political life by illustrating that everyone’s beliefs were dependent on their social conditions, thereby ‘introducing reason into politics’ (Meja 2015). A key influence on Ideology and utopia was the work of Karl Marx who, most notably in The German ideology, classified sets of beliefs and attitudes as intimately tied to one’s class position—the ideology of the working class according to Marx was a product of their position vis-à-vis the means of production (see Chap. 4). Mannheim was keen to extend Marxist conceptions of ideology and establish a more generalised conception of belief systems, one in which social conditions such as class and family background determined one’s ideological outlook. There was in effect no privileged position from which one (e.g., social scientists) could divorce their ideas from the set of key influences on their lives. This influence can be seen in the process of knowledge formation. According to Mannheim, knowledge is pre-dated by one’s experience: Every act of knowledge is a secondary act, a form of intellectual interpretation filtered through the various factors that impact our lives. An act of knowledge is a specific kind of existential relation to the object and founds a specific communion, a specific unity between subject and object … knowledge does not begin with conceptualisation, which is only a late, mostly analytic phase with reference to a condition where one already has that which is ‘to be known’. This having is thus the extended concept of knowledge in relation to which conceptual determination is only something secondary and not at all the place of origin for the constitution of the object. (Mannheim 1982[1922]: 187)

Conceptual terminology such as capitalism and the proletariat are examples of secondary acts as they represent and reflect the historical and political struggles of the time. At the same time, Mannheim believed in the idea of truth, to the extent at least that it could be delivered by ‘socially-unattached’ intellectuals. These ‘free-­floating’ intellectuals comprised the intellectual elite that could see through the fog of ideology and help to chart ways forward to some form of future utopia. In Mannheim’s words, the intellectual acted as the ‘watchman in what otherwise would be a pitch-­ black night’ (Mannheim 1936: 143), who could work on behalf of the intellectual interests of the people and advocate on their behalf. These intellectuals had a special relationship with knowledge, a capacity to synthesise ideas that protected against forms of relativism. This approach to truth underpins his sociology of knowledge. Nevertheless, his take on truth was historically grounded and he was careful to avoid any grand absolutist claims on behalf of truth. In an early paper, Mannheim argued that ‘truth in a perspective sense means that within one historical constellation only one perspective conclusion can be correct’ (Mannheim 1924: 292–93). He saw different claims on the truth as based on schemas of understanding with varying degrees of ‘cognitive value’, with each schema offering only a partial truth, while still ‘correct within its own field’ (Mannheim 1924: 292–93). This conception later became central to Ideology and utopia, in which he stated that it can be determined the extent to which ‘all ideas current are really valid in a given situation’ (1936: 94). A theory could be

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considered incorrect when it neglected new realities that challenged its own veracity, instead relying on the absolute certainty of ideological perspectives that were ‘no longer vital’ (Mannheim 1936: 95–96). It is possible to ‘attribute objectively to a specific period the consciousness appropriate to that period’ (Goldman 1994: 271), while also identifying that consciousness which was historically invalid. Mannheim’s work went on to have a major impact on American sociology, especially the work of Robert Merton. His influence was less pronounced in the European field of social theory, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, when he was seen to deliver a watered-down Marxism in some quarters. His argument that intellectuals, rather than the proletariat, are the vanguard of scientific knowledge did not sit comfortably with theorists whose intellectual work was tied up with critiques of capitalist modernisation and its alternatives. It is also the case that the study of ideology also fell out of favour with the retreating influence of Marxism and the rise of postmodern thought in the 1970s. An emphasis on the power of discourse, as well as the social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann (see later in this chapter), came to dominate theoretical ground once covered by ‘ideology’. There was another key reason why studies of ideology, and the work of Mannheim in particular, became sidelined. As Kumar (2006) points out, so much of the discussion of discourse and social construction since the 1960s was underpinned by a suspicion of theories that sought to uncover the ‘truth’—a rejection of grand narratives, objectivity and reason became the order of the day. This in turn led to a deep suspicion of studies of ideology, which so often concerned themselves with separating the ‘real’ from appearance and for highlighting the effects of ideology which supposedly cloaked objective forms of social struggles in subjective distortions.

Key Term: Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a philosophical school of thought that has its origins in the works of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), works which later influenced sociologists such as Alfred Schutz (1899–1959). Phenomenology is the study of phenomena from the perspective of the perceiver, underpinned by a belief that the meaning of the phenomenon in question is dependent on the meaning ascribed to it by those witnessing the phenomenon. This approach has implications for social cohesion in the sense that collectives must have shared meanings of the same phenomenon, a collective interpretation of common-sense knowledge filtered through language. Alfred Schutz had a particular interest in the ways in which individual and collective understandings of the world merged—how is mutual understanding possible in the first place? He approached this question from the standpoint of ordinary everyday life, what he called the ‘natural standpoint’. Schutz developed the notion of the lifeworld in order to grapple with the collectively and intersubjectively shared understandings of the world, a concept that had a major influence on Berger and Luckman as well as Habermas.

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Adorno Versus Popper: The Positivism Debate Mannheim had died by the time the Positivmusstreit or Positivism Dispute had begun in Germany, in 1961. But his intellectual interests were strongly reflected in the dispute, especially his interest in truth, objectivity and the workings of ideology in the production of ideas. Officially the debate lasted a decade but in reality it has never really finished. At the time the key protagonists in the debate were Theodor Adorno, a key figure in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and Karl Popper, who was the focus of much of the arguments against Positivism, even though he was not strictly a positivist. Popper gave the opening address at the Tübingen conference of the German Sociological Association in October 1961, delivering a set of 27 theses and requesting a response from Adorno. What the debate boiled down to was the nature of knowing and how this impacted the objectivity of scientific method. Popper was careful to distance himself from the stereotype of the detached objective value-free researcher—he accepted that the motives and actions governing research are value-laden, personal and subjective. Value judgements were central to a scientist’s worldview. At the same time he argued that scientific objectivity was not dependent on the objectivity of the scientist: he viewed the existence of what he called the critical tradition of peer review and the existence of the scientific community, who were free to criticise and refine each other’s work and arguments, as the guarantor of objectivity. This was one of the key reasons why he defended open societies as they offered the favourable context within which communities of criticism could flourish (see his book The open society and its enemies, Popper 1945). Popper was adamant that he was not a positivist, and instead was a critical rationalist, a position supported by numerous publications that he wrote. It was also to some extent supported by Adorno who notes in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology that Popper’s theory is ‘more flexible than normal positivism’ (Adorno 1976a: 65). An examination of his own work certainly supports the claim. For example in one of his most important works The logic of scientific discovery (Popper 1959), he took to task one of the key principles of logical positivism, the verification principle, and instead replaced it with his own principle of falsification, effectively injecting a degree of doubt into claims of truth and falsehood. Truth and the veracity of knowledge, for Popper, were ‘provisional and liable to change’ (Jeffries 2016: 337). What one can say with some accuracy is that Popper believed in scientific progress and the positive value it delivered to society: as he put it: ‘no problems without knowledge, no knowledge without ignorance’ (Popper 1976: 104). More generally, Popper believed in the authority of science as a standard-bearer for the search for truth and social progress, and this is where Adorno vociferously disagreed. Adorno said that objectivity established via peer review-led objectivity, so revered by Popper, did not exist and that neutral investigations into the social world were impossible. But their disagreement pointed to a much more fundamental difference in their approaches: while Popper defended the world of science and mutual criticism as well as the open society based on free discussion, Adorno viewed the discipline of positivism as well as sociology as supporting an unequal

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and exploitative capitalist economy, under the guise of ‘science’ and ‘objectivity’. In the end, the series of exchanges between them were unable to untangle the political from the scientific, to separate knowledge from its social bearings. The debate took place at an interesting juncture in European social theory, at a time when the ideas of the Frankfurt School were re-imported from exile after the Second World War (Keuth 2015: 157). While in the immediate post-war years the philosophy of science as engaged with by the Vienna Circle garnered more attention and esteem in academic circles, this situation changes somewhat as the 1950s progressed as the work of those associated with the Frankfurt School came to the fore, its focus on progressive politics and its critique of capitalist modernisation finding favour among intellectual circles. The Tubingen conference debate was a result of the seeming juxtaposition between the two approaches to the position of science and academic knowledge in society. What Popper and Adorno both shared was an intellectual position which stood against the ideological scepticism of Mannheim, but in different ways. For Adorno, Mannheim’s argument that all knowledge was ‘standpoint bounded’ did not suffice as a guard against radical subjectivism; hence it did not offer a useful defence against those who sought to undermine any claims to truth, which Adorno saw as undermining political projects for justice (Lichtblau 2015: 119; Adorno 1976b[1962]). For Popper, it was Mannheim’s promotion of the free-floating intellectual class as the vanguard of progress and justice that drew his ire, which made sense, gave his strict separation of scientific objectivity from that of individual scientists.

The Social Construction of Knowledge While officially ending in the 1960s, the issues raised by Mannheim and discussed in the positivism debate lived on in numerous publications including the influential book by  Peter Berger and  Thomas Luckmann The social construction of reality (1966), which has itself become a significant ‘treatise in the sociology of knowledge’ as its subtitle stated. The book helped spawn an intellectual movement known as social constructionism, but what they mean by social construction has been open to question (Vera 2016). Social construction is a term in regular use in academic circles, when for example referring to issues such as race and gender. But this is often at odds with the meanings associated with the term as outlined in the book. The now common usage of the term refers to a view of aspects of reality (e.g., gender) as constructs that exist in the minds of individuals only. This was not the focus of Berger and Luckmann’s book at all: their concern was with common-sense knowledge—how people constructed reality based on their everyday experiences: What remains sociologically essential is the recognition that all symbolic universes and all legitimations are human products; their existence has its base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no empirical status apart from these lives. (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 128)

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The book put forward an argument that defended a particular sociological position against other approaches to knowledge and reality; the authors were acutely aware of Manheim’s contribution as well as the positivism debate. They viewed their ‘humanistic’ sociology as offering a viable alternative to highly politicised versions of sociology as well as overly scientific approaches to sociological inquiry. They took seriously conceptions of both objective reality, of social ‘facts’ as well as subjective experience and interpretation. They explicitly sought to weave a path between these two poles; ‘society does indeed possess objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 18). Their key concern and what they believed to be the task for a sociology of knowledge was: ‘how is it possible that subjective meaning become objective facticities’? They emphasise the importance of thinking dialectically in terms of knowledge and reality, of moving between subjective and objective conceptions—one of the strengths of the book is that it makes space for a bridge to be built connecting subjectivism and objectivism. Their use of the word ‘social’ was designed to move forward debates over knowledge; Berger and Luckmann were keen to acknowledge the collective dimension of knowledge construction, which is why they include a strong focus on socialisation processes as well as forms of social interaction in everyday life. Reality is shared among groups, as an intersubjective (see key term box, Chap. 9) endeavour: This intersubjectivity sharply differentiates everyday life from other realities of which I am conscious ... I cannot exist in everyday life without continually interacting and communicating with others. (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 23)

This reasoning is what lies behind their use of the world social, and not what is sometimes viewed as a substitute for subjective or relative opinion. The meaning of ‘construction’ also reflects this desire to place knowledge production in the centre of everyday social activity. They position this collective production of knowledge as vital to the maintenance of society more generally, and this is what they view as their key contribution to the sociology of knowledge: Knowledge […] is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society. It ‘programs’ the channels in which externalization produces an objective world. It objectifies this world through language and the cognitive apparatus based on language, that is, it orders it into objects to be apprehended as reality. It is internalized again as objectively valid truth in the course of socialization. Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality. (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 62)

Society for them is an objective reality, but they also eschewed Adorno’s dismissal of the possibilities of value-free inquiry. Not all interpretations are equal in their interpretation. Knowledge has a dual purpose when it comes to reality, as it codifies what constitutes reality as well as ensuring that conceptions of reality are maintained. Although the ideas expressed in the book find strong echoes in subsequent developments in theory, these same ideas have been criticised on a number of grounds.

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One key criticism is the accusation that a power vacuum exists in the book, a position taken by Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s issue is specifically with the phenomenological underpinnings of their theory, especially the work of Schutz. Such approaches ensure that ‘the symbolic field of power are condemned to obscurity’ (Bourdieu 1991: 276–277). Bourdieu treads a similar path in that he aimed to overcome the problems of the structure/agency divide. But he considered his own theory as one that aimed to conceptualise how forces of domination make their way into the taken-for-granted structures of the lifeworld, to better understand how power impacts the capacity for thought in the first place. Bourdieu argued that the construction of knowledge cannot be divorced from the workings of power as the two are intertwined. For him, such theories overlook the ways in which subjectified dispositions incorporate hierarchies of power, ‘since they were constituted dependent on objectively established concrete expressions of power’ (Dreher 2016: 62). Effectively Berger and Luckmann had no recourse to a conception such as habitus (see Chap. 11 on the Body) via which to bridge the divide while also offering a way in which to capture the power of power.

Social Theory Applied: The Social Construction of Reality

Berger and Luckmann’s ground-breaking work The social construction of reality, published in the 1960s has continued to wield influence well into the twenty-first century. An excellent guide to this influence is provided by Pfadenhauer and Knoblauch’s edited collection Social Constructivism as Paradigm?: The Legacy of The Social Construction of Reality (Pfadenhauer and Knoblauch 2020). The book offers an appraisal of the seminal text on its 50th anniversary. It includes analyses of the theoretical work behind The Social construction … as well as its reception upon its publication, while also examining more recent developments in social constructionism, particularly in relation to issues of discourse and communication. It also includes some illuminating case studies of the theory of social construction in practice—see especially Steet’s chapter on the built environment ‘The reality of material objectivations: on dwelling as a mode of internalisation’. Other texts have used Berger and Luckman’s work as a jumping-off point for their own adaptions of the ideas presented in the original work. Elder-­ Vass, for example, in his book The Reality of Social Construction (Elder-Vass 2013) puts forward a realist version of social constructionism, using Berger and Luckmann as a bridge via which to connect realists and social constructionists. These approaches are often (unreasonably) juxtaposed with one another, but Elder-Vass makes a strong case for their compatibility through an analysis of the role of language and culture in the construction of (social) reality. Other authors have situated Berger and Luckmann’s work in the world of modern digital communications and argue that the digital world offers a very different kind of social construction. This is the argument put forward by (continued)

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Couldry and Hepp in The Mediated Construction of Reality: Society, Culture, Mediatization (2016) in which they develop a different theory about the way in which social reality is constructed. While sympathetic to the original aims of Berger and Luckmann, Couldry and Hepp argue that the claims made in the original text have insufficient explanatory power in a world increasingly shaped by technology-based communication media. They draw on the works of scholars such as Norbert Elias and Alfred Schutz to develop a theory of ‘deep mediatization’ that can help explain the changing nature of communication and its impact on social constructions of reality. The themes of communication and digitisation are also found in Knoblauch’s book The Communicative Construction of Reality (Knoblauch 2019), which argues that the social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann needs transforming to reflect the significance of communicative action as a key tool of social construction. Knoblauch seeks to adapt the original ideas to make space for a theory of communicative action that he believes deserves pride of place in analyses of how people construct social reality, especially in an era which sees the emergence of what Knoblauch calls ‘the communication society’.

Power and the Archaeology of Knowledge The link between knowledge and power, a key concern for Adorno but arguably overlooked in the works of Berger and Luckmann, once again became a focal point via the work of Foucault. Foucault developed in his early work an archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 2001[1966]), based on a historical analysis of the relation between knowledge and power. This archaeology uncovered a succession of distinct ‘epistemes’, or systems of knowledge based on particular periods of history, where one form of knowledge dominated specific historical periods. These epistemes exert total control over the period, so that people can only comprehend the world in ways determined by the episteme; the boundaries established by the episteme also acts as horizons of acceptable and legitimate forms of knowing. Power is allocated to those who control these epistemes, the ownership over the production of knowledge and meaning giving groups real social power and allowing them to control and manipulate other groups based on their specific interests. Through this analysis of epistemes, Foucault countered claims that history involved a steady transition towards ever-greater objectivity. As well as uncovering these epistemes via his archaeology of knowledge, Foucault also endeavoured to study specific knowledge forms as constituted and institutionalised in scientific disciplines, such as medicine, criminology and psychiatry. Foucault identified the way in which disciplines create sets of discourses around those they wish to study, such

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as patients and criminals. These new capacities allowed the scientific disciplines to cast people as healthy, normal or deviant—power and knowledge coalesced around the capacity to exercise moral judgement over others who were in their care. One example of this can be found in the field of sexuality; the first volume of Foucault’s History of sexuality was titled ‘the will to knowledge’ (Foucault 1978). Here Foucault argued that there was a prevailing will to knowledge about sexuality during the Victorian era of the nineteenth century. Sexuality was considered a dangerous arena, particular when it came to the poor, and therefore knowledge of sex was carefully controlled. Institutions of the state and the sciences, as well as literature, exhibited this will to knowledge. The control of knowledge production ensures that the mythology of scientific objectivity and humanity could endure, a mythology that was based on arbitrary concepts of objectivity, truth and progress, but instead was ‘dressed up as universal facts’ (Rabinow 1984: 4). Another excellent example of the coalescing of power and knowledge is illustrated in his work on prisons, most notably in Discipline and punish (Foucault 1977b). This is where power-knowledge as a two-sided concept was introduced. Prisons use the knowledge they have of individuals as well as the discourse of truth around criminality and behaviour, to deliver disciplinary practices which regulate the bodies of prisoners. Powerful knowledge becomes encoded into techniques of objectification and also individualisation. Foucault argues that this disciplinary practice originated in the Panopticon, which itself originated with Jeremy Bentham’s proposal for an institutional framework that could transform the minds of prisoners. The panoptical prison had a circular structure and a tall tower which allowed for full surveillance of prisoners. This meant that there was no respite from the panoptical gaze of the warden and the prison. Foucault adopted this notion more generally to identify disciplinary practices at work across a set of institutions, asking at one point, ‘is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ (Foucault 1977a). This type of surveillance was reinforced by another type that spoke to the power-­ knowledge dyad. This related to the highly personalised knowledge base kept on file in the prisons by the institutions and professionals such as case workers and social workers. In this way, power is imposed through the production of personalised knowledge systems that became institutionalised in administrative bureaucracies and forms of surveillance, regardless of whether or not the site is a prison or a hospital. Schools also represented this form of knowledge, with Foucault suggesting that any system of education is a ‘political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledges and powers which they carry’ (Foucault 1981: 64). Foucault moved on from this archaeological method to a genealogy of knowledge in his later work, and in doing so moved from a form of structural analysis to a much more poststructural understanding; this is the juncture where sources of power for Foucault become heterogeneous and random. It is also the point where he adopts a much more politicised, even insurrectional approach to knowledge. In a College de France lecture from 1976, Foucault talked about an ‘insurrection of

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subjugated knowledges’ (1980, 82). These were ways of knowing that challenge disciplinary and scientific ways of knowing. Genealogies are designed to identify these counter-knowledges, and ‘aim to fight the power effects of any discourse that attain the status of “science”’ (Hook 2007: 140). Subjugated knowledges were generated from those who did not fit the narrative of reason—gays and lesbians, women, the mentally ill and so on. Foucault’s ideas have made an undeniable impact on the study of knowledge, yet have also raised some concerns. One issue that has been highlighted is the way in which his archaeology tends to valorise discourse over practice (e.g., institutions), leading some to suggest that Foucault took a one-sided view (Best and Kellner 1991: 69). This is an example of Foucault’s tendency to one-sideness in his analyses—see his later genealogical preference for domination over resistance (Best and Kellner 1991: 69) and his decidedly one-sided view of reason and rationality (Fraser 1989: 32). Fraser makes a point that Foucault was sometimes blind to the work of other social theorists when it came to theories of power and rationality, for example, Weber: Foucault writes as though he were oblivious to the existence of the whole body of Weberian social theory with its careful distinctions between such notions as authority, force, violence, domination, and legitimation. (Fraser 1989: 32)

A more general criticism of Foucault relates to his unwillingness to pin down definitions of power, and this has left him open to accusations of inexactness and conceptual looseness. Such a criticism, while understandable, should be considered alongside the breadth of understanding that Foucault has brought to the study of knowledge, and an element of impreciseness is maybe to be expected and to some extent forgiven.

Key Concept: Situated Knowledge

Positivism has borne the brunt of much criticism over the decades since the official end of the positivism debate, with one particularly stinging attack coming from Donna Haraway (1988). Haraway deployed ideas from feminist poststructuralist theory to critically interrogate the cherished notion of value-­ free science as well as the disinterested pursuit of truth. Scientific knowledge was out of bounds when it came to feminist epistemologies, Haraway argued, but at the same time, she desired ‘some enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reducible to power moves and agonistic, high-status games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist arrogance’ (1988: 581). Her answer to the question was to posit a form of what she called ‘feminist objectivity’ in the shape of situated knowledges. In her article ‘Situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988), she used the term ‘god trick’ to capture what she believes to be the self-proclaimed omniscient status of scientists. While hostile to forms of scientific knowledge, which Haraway views as particular takes on the world masquerading as universal truths, she is also wary of (continued)

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descending into relativistic accounts of experience, which she also believes does the work of the powerful as it is another ‘god trick’. Haraway put forward a theory of situated knowledge as an alternative to relativism, defining it as ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’ (1988: 584). This arrival at an analysis of situated knowledge came via Haraway’s more general reflections on epistemology. These reflections offered something of a parallel with the issues tackled by Berger and Luckmann, as Haraway also felt constrained intellectually by the polarising opposition of objectivity and subjectivity, both of which did not provide an adequate grounding for a more expansive political vision for feminism: I think my problem, and ‘our’ problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (Haraway 1988: 579)

Scientific truths for her are dependent on context and situation, and the capacity to make rational knowledge claims is facilitated by ‘partiality and not universality’ (1988: 589). In this way, Haraway aims to reclaim a version of objectivity, rather than a total dismissal of it—to take it away from what to her was arrogant scientism. In later work she went on to provide examples of such partiality in the sciences, for example, in the male-dominated world of English seventeenth-century science, from which a series of experiments resulted in a clear comparison being drawn between masculinity/activity and femininity/passivity, a distinction still with us today (Haraway 1997).

Indigenous Knowledge and Postcolonial Theory Another critique of scientific objectivist approaches to knowledge comes in the shape of indigenous knowledge. This form of knowledge, sometimes referred to as traditional knowledge, tends to be contrasted with formal scientific knowledge and is commonly used to refer to local community-based forms of knowing that depend on the locality, region and the generations of people who have lived there. The term itself, which also is commonly used to refer to specific communities, has strong roots in Development Studies, particularly studies in the field of African Agriculture. It was used to represent the kinds of technical knowledge of the land from the

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perspectives of local tribes who worked with the land for generations. It subsequently became a commonly used term in the discipline of Anthropology. Discourse around indigeneity became more politicised in the 1990s, when the term became used as a way to position local customs and ways of operating against what were considered Eurocentric, colonising, global tendencies. One major advocate of this political approach to indigenous knowledges is Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1940–), whose analysis of these knowledges is embedded in an explicitly radical approach to the global South. In Epistemologies of the South (2014), de Sousa Santos makes the claim that ‘conventional human rights thinking lacks the theoretical and analytical tools to position itself’ in relation to the political activism of indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples in Latin America for example. He offers a route out of ineffectual relativisms in the face of epistemological diversity, by proposing what he terms ‘the ecology of knowledges’. This aims to create a new kind of relation: a pragmatic relation, between scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge, it consists of granting ‘equality of opportunity’ to the different kinds of knowledge involved in ever broader epistemological arguments with a view to maximising their respective contributions toward building ‘another possible world’ that is to say, a more just and democratic society, as well as one more balanced in its relations with nature. (de Sousa Santos 2016: 190)

De Sousa Santos’ vision for knowledges is to construct a ‘radical co-presence’ (2016: 90); he argues that claims to truth can be made by different knowledge forms, yet any hierarchy between knowledges is ‘context-dependent’ and lacking universal legitimacy. The contingent nature of knowledge is vital to support the efforts of political activists in their efforts to resist global capitalism. In particular, he emphasises the importance of local and contextualised non-scientific knowledge as a counterpoint to the sometimes devastating application of scientific knowledge. This is necessary to aid the struggle for global cognitive justice and to end the epistemicide resulting from global Northern epistemological hegemony. This epistemicide is a result of the imposition of Western ways of thinking in the non-Western world as a result of colonialism and economic imperialism which itself ‘resulted in a massive waste of social experience and, particularly, in the massive destruction of ways of knowing that did not fit the dominant epistemological canon’ (2014: 238). There is a highly pragmatic aspect to de Sousa Santos’ promotion of Southern epistemologies which complement the conceptual development at the heart of his theory. The principle of precaution he says is necessary, for example, to decide on which knowledge provides the most effective solution to social problems. He elaborates on some of these themes in his later book The end of the cognitive empire (2018), one of the issues raises being the importance of embodied senses in the shaping of knowledge. He borrows here from Merleau Ponty’s anti-Cartesian conception of the senses (see Chap. 10 of this book) (2018: 171), an embodiment that represents a major departure from the Western emphasis on epistemological detachment. This to him is a form of ‘deep seeing’ that reflects the character of Southern epistemology. He also refers to ‘deep listening’ which is at odds with the Western preference for speaking and writing.

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There is much food for thought in de Sousa’s Santos argument. It is a powerful one, especially when its sights are set on a critique of Western science and its domination of the globe. The argument is, however, less successful, when it comes to identifying non-Western ways of knowing. The focus on the senses and experience aside, it is a challenge to gather together forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are not just an opposition to ‘scientific’ thought. These are mostly implicit, but for the notion of epistemicide to be as effective as it could, such Southern approaches to knowledge, especially theories of knowledge, would benefit by explication and further definition. Nevertheless, the work of de Sousa Santos is hugely beneficial in illustrating the role of the subaltern in knowledge production. Social theory at its best is often driven by a subaltern perspective, one that allows a different lens through which to explore power. This is most likely because it bears witness to power, its production as well as its effects, from its own privileged position—viewing the contraptions of power from a position of detachment as well as participant. The subaltern effectively offers a dual-perspectivist methodology. At the same time, it is sensible to be careful about the subaltern and the privilege it offers; the dominant also have a privileged view, a stock of powerful knowledge, of those below them. But this may be the essential point that De Sousa Santos is making when he argues for the end of the ‘cognitive empire’. While De Sousa Santos is a powerful advocate of indigenous knowledge, important questions have been raised about its use, what Morrow (2010: 69) calls ‘abuses’ of the concept of indigenous knowledge. Chief among these is the charge of essentialism, of a concept of indigeneity as a pure unsullied source of knowledge unpolluted by outsider culture. This conception ignores the evidence from Anthropological studies which highlight the historically creative interplay between ‘modern’ and traditional forms of knowledge, between the local and the global. It is also important to question attempts to essentialise and homogenise ‘Western’ forms of knowledge and classify such a diverse field as representing  a positivistic scientific stance only. Morrow takes to task what he terms simplistic calls for a return to indigenous knowledge as a bulwark against Westernisation, as well as the notion that all modernisation efforts are the product of outside interference and neocolonial thinking. Concerns remain about the extent to which the potential of this form of knowledge can be realised in a fast-moving technological environment—is it a form of nostalgia and sentimentalism masquerading as radicalism, something similar to the Luddites of the nineteenth century  who witnessed  traditional ways of knowing being made redundant by industrialisation?

The Politics of Academic Knowledge The theory and practice of knowledge connect in the most vivid of ways in heated debates over the university and its value to society. In particular, the politics of knowledge is a key point of contention when it comes to assessing the contribution

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of the academy to issues of social justice and equity. Universities and academics are under the political spotlight more than ever, their role as knowledge producers and disseminators in the era of the knowledge society guaranteeing them a privileged but exposed position. Contemporary analyses of the university reflect this political position, while also reflecting the historical legacy of debates over objectivity, truth and social progress. This dual significance in relation to knowledge can be witnessed in three key areas: the curriculum, academic gatekeeping and debates over the future of the public intellectual.

The Politics of Academic Knowledge: Curriculum Educational curriculum has on numerous occasions acted as a lightning rod for activists who view course syllabi as a generator of inequality. Course syllabi, those seemingly mundane and functional institutional artefacts, have come under increased scrutiny for their valued-laden, ideologically biased forms of knowledge construction—the why is my curriculum white movement which started in the UK being a good example. Interest in the politics of curriculum can be traced back at least to the 1960s, with academic knowledge production a key bone of contention in the student movements that were active in countries such as the UK, the US and France. Social theorists were not immune from this agitation. In the late 1960s, Theodor Adorno was himself the subject of a student revolt, when his sociology course at the University of Frankfurt was taken over in a desperate attempt by students to instigate institutional reform. A leaflet distributed by the students criticised the University for delivering an approach to sociology ‘that allows no space for the students to organise their own studies’ (cited in Jeffries 2016: 345). In the same pamphlet, they took the university to task for producing degrees that in their eyes made them complicit in an authoritarian state. The value of university degrees was also an issue in the more famous 1968 student revolts in France. This saw a nationwide student protest over, among other things, dissatisfaction with the French university sector. This did not escape the attention of social theory, which in the 1960s was becoming more eager to scrutinise the politics of knowledge in their own workplace. Reflecting back on the protests in his book Homo Academicus (1988), Bourdieu argued that the crisis of 1968 was caused in large part by humanities and social sciences students and their disenchantment with higher education knowledge. According to Bourdieu, they believed their courses were not fit for the purpose of making them employable in respectable jobs with good career opportunities; that the structure of the curriculum and the kinds of knowledge seen as valuable by the French elite did not equip them adequately for modern professional life in the twentieth century. Bourdieu’s analysis employed his concepts of habitus, field and capital to good effect. Homo Academicus proposed a structural history of May 1968, resulting from the ‘unfolding drama of frustrated expectations that stemmed from the central role

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that educational credentials have come to play in French society’ (Swartz 1997: 214). At the same time, Bourdieu can be taken to task for positing this changing role as mainly due to internal institutional structures. As Swartz argued, there was a major transformation in French higher education in the 1960s, a form of massification visible also in other countries. Broader societal issues were affecting student  expectations as well as the institution and the forms of knowledge they valorised. Instead of viewing such protests as isolated historical examples, these events should be considered as cases of a much wider questioning of academic knowledge, less as exceptions and more as representative of broader opinion about the place of universities in public life. They also testify to the problematic nature of disciplinarity in the academy, particularly in cases where rigid disciplinary knowledge bases can be viewed as self-serving and out-of-touch in a world used to technologies such as Google and Wikipedia. This is not to ignore the fact that the likes of Google and Wikipedia can act as knowledge gatekeepers in their own right, and their forms of knowledge brokerage come with strings attached. But such concerns do not negate the questions they raise about the sometimes myopic tendencies of academic knowledge production. The year 1968 was not just a year that spawned student protests over curriculum; it was also a key date in the development of postmodern critiques of the politics of academic knowledge, one that has cast a significant shadow over the status and authority of academic work ever since. A key figure in this development is Jean-­ Francois Lyotard, especially his book The post-modern condition: a report on knowledge (Lyotard 1984). Originally published in 1979 as a commissioned report for the Canadian government on the status of higher education, the book had an immediate impact on the English-speaking world. Lyotard shared much in common intellectually with Foucault, making similar statements and asking roughly similar questions, see for example ‘knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?’ (Lyotard 1984: 9–10). He argues that the postmodern era and the technological era have created problems for the manner in which society legitimates forms of knowledge, and with a particular focus on the university. Education is driven by the performativity principle in order to legitimise itself, but this principle acts to ‘subordinate the institutions of higher learning to the existing powers’ (Lyotard 1984: 50). Lyotard believes that universities have lost whatever autonomy they might have had—he uses the term postmodern to characterise the condition of knowledge in ‘the most highly developed societies’. The book offers a succinct critique of modern forms of academic knowledge, suggesting that postmodern knowledge is anti-metanarrative and anti-­foundationalist which he contrasts to modern knowledge which is pro-both of these; modern knowledge appeals to ‘metanarrative to legitimate foundationalist claims’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 165). These metanarratives include the likes of ‘narrative of progress and emancipation, the dialectics of history or spirit, or the inscription of meaning and truth’. Modern science is an example par excellence of modernist epistemology, appealing to reason, truth and progress as a collective bulwark against ignorance,

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blind faith and primitive beliefs. It is against such totalling narratives that Lyotard pits the postmodern, defined as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Echoing Foucault’s stance towards schools, Lyotard views scientism as the heart of the modern university as exclusionary and homogenising.

The Politics of Academic Knowledge: Gatekeeping Debates over the curriculum tend to revolve around the perceived value of the knowledge produced in the academy. The current calls to decolonise the university are a continuation of this debate (see Bhambra et al. 2018 in the suggested further reading). Alongside this, there is another important discussion about the knowledge producers themselves: in Lyotard’s words, who decides what knowledge is? Concerns have been raised about the classed, gendered and racialised compositions of the academic profession, and about how the profession itself acts as a gatekeeper to exclude academics from underrepresented groups (Bhambra, et al. 2018). Social theory has itself faced such criticisms. While the field of social theory has often shone a light on the relation between power and knowledge and the ways in which certain forms of knowledge are valorised over others, it is also not immune from such constructions itself. Its Eurocentrism has been the subject of debate (Raewyn Connell’s book Southern theory: the global dynamics of knowledge in social science (2007) is a useful rejoinder to the overly Western take on social theory). There have been critiques over the hidden histories of social theory, particularly in relation to gender and race. A good example of this is delivered by Aldon Morris in his book The Scholar denied: WEB Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology (Morris 2015). Morris questions the motives of the founding fathers of American sociology and their marginalising of Du Bois’ ground-breaking work on the African American experience. Du Bois and his contribution to the development of sociology was effectively rendered invisible in the determination to assign status and authority to his white counterparts, most notably Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago. Morris makes a convincing case that Du Bois, although a respected figure in the field of social theory, never received the credit he deserved, and ended up being written out of a narrative around Park and his acolytes. This was no coincidence either, no benign oversight on the part of liberal sociologists: according to Morris, Park portrayed African Americans as an inferior race in his work, using terms such as ‘primitives’, ‘aliens’ and ‘savages’ to categorise them. He also had attitudes towards the history of slavery that were questionable at best. Morris argues that Park deliberately ignored Du Bois’ scholarship, even though it related directly to his own work and that of his colleagues: Park is often considered the founding father of studies of race in American sociology. But even though Du Bois was a ‘name’ internationally by the early 1920s (for works such as The Souls of Black folk, published in 1903—see the account of ‘double consciousness’ in Chap. 9), he was ignored completely when it came to inclusion in the Introduction to the science of sociology, a major work at the time. There are numerous other examples of the marginalising of Du Bois by Park and other colleagues, including

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the works of Thomas and Znaniecki and their book on the Polish Peasant, which covered very similar themes to Du Bois’ Philadelphia negro. They both cover forms of internal migration from a sociological perspective, and the ways in which rural migrants adapt to the life and culture of cities. Yet, they never referenced the seminal work of Du Bois, even though it had been published two decades earlier. This omission is highly questionable, given that first, Thomas was acutely aware of The Philadelphia negro (having quoted it at length in another article), and second, Thomas and Znaniecki argued their work was ground-breaking and without precedent. This erasure of Du Bois resulted in his banishment to the margins of American sociology, which in turn had real effects on him, including exclusion from networks and journal editorships. So while Du Bois was at the forefront of public scholarship in the field of sociology, he inhabited a different sphere from his white colleagues in the field of social science. He was subject to racist practices that impacted his reputation but also contributed to a skewed history of academic knowledge in sociology.

Key Theorist: Norbert Elias (1897–1990)

Norbert Elias came to prominence in the field of social theory relatively late in life—this was partly because his key work was not translated into English until the 1960s. Even then, it took time for his work to occupy a more appropriate role in the social theory canon. Nevertheless, this fact should not detract from the enormous contribution Elias has made to social theory, offering a viable and innovative alternative to other forms of relational social theory such as the works of Foucault and Bourdieu. In describing his contribution to social theory, he has shifted between two terms—‘figurational’ in his earlier work and later preferring the term ‘process sociology’. He believed it was fruitful to think of the processes of social life and the ways in which individuals came together to form ‘figurations’. This way of looking at theory and the social realm gave Elias a way to transcend the structure/agency debate which he deemed unhelpful in understanding the reality of social life. In his book What is Sociology? (Elias 1978), Elias set forth his relational take on social theory and emphasised the importance of relationships as a key source of ‘personal’ characteristics and abilities such as speaking and acting. He was explicit about the role of social change in encouraging him to pursue a career in sociology—the ‘crisis and transformation of Western civilisation’ as he put it in the introduction to his most famous book The civilising process (2000: xiv original 1939). Elias himself was a witness to the crisis— he served as a soldier in the First World War, and later became an exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His mother was murdered in Auschwitz so his personal experience of the crisis of civilisation was both harrowing and fundamental to his own theoretical concerns. The events of the early twentieth (continued)

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century gave him considerable pause for thought, and made him question what this ‘civilisation’ ‘really amounted to’. Elias offers a unique take on the ways in which people adapt to the social world and at the same time adopt beliefs and values that made them ‘civilised’, adopting the mannerisms and value systems of the social milieu to which they belong. Elias in The civilising process went to great lengths to remove certain factors out of the equation, such as religion, health and medicine. Instead he posited a relation between social and self-constraint and argued that the way in which the West developed—from a society in which the threat of violence was ever present to one that had ‘tamed’ this threat via state monopolisation—provided a platform in which individuals who could embody civilised modes of behaviour and possessed self-constraint became favoured and self-­ constraint became the norm—and in Elias’ view almost automatic and unconscious. His take on this is historical, developmental, relational and processual but also one in which agents are active participants as opposed to unwilling facilitators of an ulterior agenda.

The Politics of Academic Knowledge: The Public Intellectual The preceding sections on the politics of the academy suggest that knowledge can be used very effectively to exclude and marginalise, and that institutional and professional practices contribute significantly to this weaponing of knowledge. This is an important point to make, but it should also be understood that knowledge can be used to empower and transform lives and society. The university has an important role to play in this regard, no more so in the guise of the academic as public intellectual, a role that provides an important link between the institutions of academies and the wider world. This role has not gone unnoticed in social theory discussion, a key question being asked: what does the future hold for the academic as public intellectual? The public intellectual has traditionally been represented in the shape of singular, charismatic individuals who embody authority and legitimacy in their analysis of social pathologies (Posner 2003). The key detail here relates to their highly individualised nature: although public intellectuals may speak to a broader shared consensus among specific pockets of activists and scholars, much of their power derives from the distinction and reputation they embody and project to the world. These have often been men such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Said, but there have been women also such as Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Germaine Greer and more recently Martha Nussbaum who have assumed the mantle of public intellectualism, using their considerable prestige and academic expertise to engage a broader public across a wide range of social issues It should also not be surprising that those at the forefront of social theory, such as Michel Foucault,

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Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu have been only too willing to take on this mantle, with for example Habermas publicly bemoaning the response of the European Union state to the migration crisis of 2016. While these more recent advocates of public intellectual engagement still carry the flag, they represent an apparently dying breed of academic. The modern university has sometimes been blamed for this malaise—its desire to professionalise and micro-manage the professoriate viewed as a nail in the coffin of the traditional wide-ranging intellectual unafraid to speak truth to power (Murphy and Costa 2019). This has been the thrust of critiques put forth by scholars who see institutional governance aligned with a cultural anti-intellectualism as the source of the malaise. The modern use of metrics and measurements has created a set of academics less interested in public engagement and more concerned with their CVs. The increased level of accountability and regulation of academic work has put paid to the desire to take political and critical stances on the issues of the day, and has blunted the strength of intellectual ideas to penetrate the mainstream (Jacoby 2000). Edward Said, a prominent intellectual in his own right, expressed similar sentiments in his Reith Lectures from 1993 (Said 1996), arguing that the limits placed on academic autonomy would leave intellectuals exposed in vulnerable positions. His solution to this was to urge intellectuals to carve out spheres of independence and autonomy from such forms of regulation and surveillance. This has proved difficult in the current epoch, with conflicting demands for impact, relevance and public engagement sitting side by side the need to enhance an institution’s scholarly reputation and prestige. These demands do not always coalesce, and offer a variation on Bourdieu’s distinction between academic and symbolic capital. While in Homo Academicus (1988), Bourdieu used this distinction to denote the institutional career ethos (academic capital) and the wider reputation and influence (symbolic capital); the modern variant offers more of a contradiction: while universities want their staff to engage with the public and create impact, they also expect (and often demand) academics to publish in high-impact journals, most of which are inaccessible to members of the public and often need to be written to appeal directly to fellow niche specialists. The retreat to disciplinarity and the comfort of academic jargonese is another culprit, which may hinder the role of intellectuals and their production in the academy. Elias questioned the ways in which academic disciplines selfishly monopolised knowledge for their own gain through overly complicated theoretical language. He was suspicious of theories which were ‘couched in a particularly difficult language’, developed through a desire to attract the ‘academic prestige attached to theories which are difficult to understand and which can exclude the non-initiated from access to the field’ (Elias, interviewed by Peter Ludes 2005: 226). Elias outlined some of the gatekeeping techniques (such as limiting the number of student places, journal editor machinations over book reviews), providing a useful and insightful analysis of the politics at play in knowledge production. It also offers a useful reminder that intellectuals have contributed to their own demise—a short-­ sighted pursuit of status and power coming at the expense of a richer more dynamic public sphere.

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As well as Bourdieu and Elias, other theorists such as Foucault and Bauman have entered the debate over the future of the public intellectual. Foucault made a distinction between the ‘universal’ and the ‘specific intellectual’ (Foucault 1984: 68). Since the Second World War, Foucault believes a new kind of intellectual has emerged, one that more and more has taken the place of the universal intellectual, acknowledged as having the ‘right of speaking of master of truth and justice’ (1984: 67). This person took on the mantle of spokesperson of the universal, as the embodiment of a more general social conscience. Foucault sees this type of intellectual tied strongly to Marxism and the proletariat. But since this time, a more specific intellectual has emerged, one that speaks to less universal and more localised concerns. These are positioned within specific sectors, ‘at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family, and sexual relations)’ (1984: 68). These intellectuals engaged in resistance to particular truths and discourses that impacted their everyday lives—their specific concerns reflect ‘the general functioning of an apparatus of truth’ (1984: 73). Elsewhere he argues that these specific intellectuals also speak to the concerns of the proletariat because they work against the same set of adversaries—‘the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the property speculators, etc.’ (1984: 68). Bauman has also weighed in on the question and future of public intellectualism. He argued that postmodernity posed significant questions for intellectuals. In his article ‘Is there a postmodern sociology?’ (Bauman 1988), he argues that postmodernity effectively ‘outed’ intellectuals, and made them a focus of research and inquiry in their own right. Its critique of knowledge, truth and grand narratives made the work of intellectuals more precarious than previously, leading to a state of postmodern anxiety, their authority and moral judgement placed under the microscope. Postmodernism has resulted in a ‘status crisis’ for intellectuals, its status undermined in three ways (Bauman 1988: 219–224): the denigration of Western intellectuals as ethnocentric as well as naïve notions of progress, truth and taste viewed through a Western lens; the reduction in the legitimacy of intellectual life as it has detached itself from the work of nation-building and thirdly the loss of knowledge gatekeeper capacity in the shift towards a mass and diffuse popular culture. These sets of challenges identified by Bauman and others, alongside the other questions raised about academic knowledge, paint a somewhat bleak picture when it comes to future interconnections between academia and public intellectualism. The university also has to contend with a wide range of competing demands regarding economic development, labour markets and social mobility, none of which can be classed as straightforward (Murphy 2020). Nevertheless, the university is best placed to offer a form of public intellectualism that can help counter modern trends of widespread disinformation tactics, proliferating conspiracy theories and even worse, a troubling undercurrent of irrational thought entering the public sphere. Just like the previous century, the twenty-first century is witnessing a politicisation of knowledge, which, if left to its own devices, could create major problems for democratic life—the university, for all its own problems, is still the main social institution that can offer valuable resistance to these trends. It can also offer a viable

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institutional home for the ‘unattached’ intellectual so cherished by Mannheim in the early part of the twentieth century; in the twenty-first century, free-floating intellectualism may be an unaffordable luxury.

In Summary Knowledge and Objectivity  Karl Mannheim was a key figure in the development of the sociology of knowledge, to which his book Ideology and utopia was a major contribution. One of his key arguments is that a person’s knowledge was always informed by their social position and cultural experiences. For him, all intellectual positions are forms of ideology as it is difficult to separate intellectual interpretation from situations and events under observation. The Positivism Debate  The positivism debate that took place in the early 1960s in Germany saw protagonists such as Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno revisit some of Mannheim’s ideas, this time specifically in relation to the philosophy of science, epistemology and methodology. The key issue at stake, the nature of objective knowledge, saw Popper and Adorno adopt decidedly oppositional views. While Popper believed that scientific objectivity was possible, Adorno countered by arguing that such objectivity did not exist and that value-neutral science was an illusion. Social Construction of Knowledge  Berger and Luckmann’s hugely influential book The Social construction of reality emphasised the collective ‘social’ dimension of knowledge construction. Reality is produced and interpreted via collective groupings, as an intersubjective ‘social’ endeavour. Berge and Luckmann viewed their constructivist approach to sociology as offering a viable alternative to highly politicised versions of sociology as well as overly scientific approaches to sociological inquiry. They take seriously conceptions of both objective reality, of social ‘facts’ as well as subjective experience and interpretation, and sought to weave a path between these two poles. The Archaeology of Knowledge  Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge provides powerful insights into the relation between power and knowledge, and how historically knowledge systems or ‘epistemes’ came to dominate specific historical periods. In these periods, these knowledge systems exerted power over people by defining the horizons of comprehension—of acceptable and legitimate forms of knowing. Consequently, those who control these systems of knowledge are in a position to exert power over populations. Situated Knowledge  In similar fashion to Berger and Luckmann, Donna Haraway wished to develop a theory of knowledge that avoided the pitfalls of scientific claims to objectivity, particularly in the shape of positivism, as well as relativistic approaches to epistemology, The result was her theory of situated knowledge, a concept that sought to claim a partial objectivity, but one that is situated in specific

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situations and locations. These reliable accounts of knowledge she argued were especially important to feminist ways of knowing and experience. Indigenous Knowledge  The term indigenous knowledge is used to signify forms of knowledge that are local and community based as opposed to universalised and highly abstract scientific knowledge. The term became popular via the field of Development Studies and has since then become a politicised tool in the struggle against the power of Westernised, Eurocentric, epistemes that are viewed as mechanisms of colonisation. Knowledge and Curriculum  The political nature of knowledge is most evident in the context of educational curriculum, which has been the focus of attention for political activists who view course syllabi as a mechanism of injustice. This was highlighted in the culture chapter (Chap. 6)  in relation to social class, but more recently, issues of gender and race have come to prominence. The ‘why is my curriculum white?’ campaign is an  example  of this, as it questions the Eurocentric nature of much educational curricula in countries such as the United Kingdom. Knowledge and Academic Gatekeeping  Aldon Morris in his book, The Scholar denied: WEB Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology, delivers a compelling historical account of curriculum whitening, in this case the marginalising of the work of W.E.B Du Bois in the canon of sociology. Du Bois was a key intellectual in American sociology, but his contribution to the field and the subsequent respect and recognition he was due were denied to him because of his race. Instead, other white academics working in similar fields (including the study of race) rose to prominence while Du Bois’ scholarship was accorded lower status in twentieth American sociology. Knowledge and Intellectuals  Another way in which the politics of knowledge has impacted the academy is in relation to the status of the public intellectual. A number of commentators, including Edward Said, have decried the declining visibility of the public intellectual, and have laid the blame at the feet of, among other factors, the modern university and its micro-managing of academic life. Such pressures, as well as other factors such as the monopolisation of knowledge by academic disciplines, have denied the modern public sphere a vibrant intellectual culture while also reducing the capacity of the university to influence public discourse. Questions Is it possible for science (natural and social) to be completely objective in their study of nature and society? Following Foucault, is it sensible to question the authority of scientific and professional knowledge? Do our educational institutions need to be ‘de-colonised’?

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Suggested Readings Melzer, A., Weinberger, J. and M. Zinman (eds) (2003). THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. A strong collection of essays exploring the status of public intellectuals and their changing function in society, with the book divided between sections exploring the theory and practice of public intellectualism. Includes an essay by Martha Nussbaum (see Chap. 12 of this book) on ‘public philosophy and international feminism’. Lybeck, E. (2019) NORBERT ELIAS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION. London: Bloomsbury. An introduction and critical overview of the work of Norbert Elias and its various applications in the field of education—includes discussion of topics such as gaming and establishment-outsider relations and monopoly mechanisms in the context of a processual sociology of education. Bhambra, G.  K., D.  Gebrial and K.  Nişancıoğlu (eds) (2018) Decolonising the University, London: Pluto Press. A selection of essays by students, activists and academics exploring ideas and strategies for decolonising the modern university, while also taking a critical look at the legacy of Western colonialism in university life. Steinmetz, G. (ed.) (2005). The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Durham: North Carolina: Duke University Press. Delivers an overview and critical analysis of positivism in its numerous guises as well as alternative epistemological approaches to methodology, including Marxism and poststructuralism.

References Adorno, T. (1976a). Introduction. In T. W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et al. (Eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (G. Adey & D. Frisby, Trans., pp. 1–67). Heinemann. Adorno, T. (1976b[1962]). On the Logic of the Social Sciences. In T.  W. Adorno, H.  Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et al. (Eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (G. Adey & D. Frisby, Trans., pp. 105–122). Heinemann. Bauman, Z. (1988). Is There a Postmodern Sociology? Theory, Culture and Society, 5(2–3), 217–237. Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Basic Books. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Guildford Press. Bhambra, G.  K., Gebrial, D., & Nişancıoğlu, K. (Eds.). (2018). Decolonising the University. Pluto Press. Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Polity.

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De Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge. De Sousa Santos, B. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire. Duke University Press. Dreher, J. (2016). The Social Construction of Power: Reflections Beyond Berger/Luckmann and Bourdieu. Cultural Sociology, 10(1), 53–68. Elder-Vass, D. (2013). The Reality of Social Construction. Cambridge University Press. Elias, N. (1978[1970]). What Is Sociology? Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1977a). Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon, Trans., pp. 205–217). Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1977b). Discipline and Punish. Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1978). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and Power. In Power Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Pantheon Press. Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse. In R.  Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structural Anthology (pp. 48–78). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (1984). Truth and Power. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2001[1966]). The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Goldman, H. (1994). From Social Theory to Sociology of Knowledge and Back: Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Intellectual Knowledge Production. Sociological Theory, 12(3), 266–278. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge. Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Palgrave. Jacoby, R. (2000). The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. Basic Books. Jeffries, S. (2016). Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Verso. Keuth, H. (2015). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology: A Scientific or a Political Controversy? Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(2), 154–169. Knoblauch, H. (2019). The Communicative Construction of Reality. Routledge. Kumar, K. (2006). Ideology and Sociology: Reflections on Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 169–181. Lichtblau, K. (2015). Adorno’s Position in the Positivism Dispute: A Historical Perspective. Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(2), 115–121. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Mannheim, K. (1924). Historismus. In K. Wolff (Ed.), Wissenssoziologie: Auswahl aus dem werk (pp. 246–307). Luchterhand. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (L. Wirth & E. Shils, Trans.). Harcourt, Brace & World. Mannheim, K. (1982[1922–24]). Structures of Thinking. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Meja, V. (2015). Sociology of Knowledge. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed., Vol. 13, pp. 111–118). Elsevier. Morris, A. (2015). The Scholar Denied: W.E.B Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. University of California Press. Morrow, R. (2010). Habermas, Eurocentrism and Education: The Indigenous Knowledge Debate. In M. Murphy & T. Fleming (Eds.), Habermas, Critical Theory and Education. Routledge. Murphy, M. (2020). Governing Universities: Power, Prestige and Performance. In M.  Murphy, C. Burke, C. Costa, & R. Raaper (Eds.), Social Theory and the Politics of Higher Education: Critical Perspectives on Institutional Research (pp. 17–26). Bloomsbury. Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (2019). Digital Scholarship, Higher Education and the Future of the Public Intellectual. Futures, 111, 205–212.

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Pfadenhauer, M., & Knoblauch, H. (2020). Social Constructivism as Paradigm?: The Legacy of The Social Construction of Reality. Routledge Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson and Company. Popper, K. (1976). The Logic of the Social Sciences. In T. W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, et  al. (Eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (G.  Adey & D.  Frisby, Trans., pp. 87–104). Heinemann. Posner, R. A. (2003). Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Harvard University Press. Rabinow, P. (1984). Introduction. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 3–27). University of Minnesota press. Said, E. (1996). Representations of the Intellectual. Reith Lectures. Vintage Books. Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. The University of Chicago Press. Vera, H. (2016). Rebuilding a Classic: The Social Construction of Reality at 50. Cultural Sociology, 10(1), 3–20.

Section III Understanding the Self and Selfhood

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Introduction It is easy to overlook how common the word ‘self’ is in everyday language. Its varied use as a prefix provides an impressive list—self-worth, self-promotion, self-­ reliance, self-belief and also less positive attributions, for example, self-absorbed, self-loathing, self-pity. As well as these various descriptive uses for specific traits, ‘self’ tends to be used as a phrase to denote a wide set of entities, such as personality, identity, character, even consciousness. In this way, the ‘self’ has become a form of linguistic shorthand to express the meaning of entities that have so far eluded precise definition. These diverse uses are an accurate reflection of the conflicted understandings of the self, especially as a social entity. They also reflect the highly judgemental assessments that are placed on the self by oneself and by others. Far from being a private and hidden entity, the self is part and parcel of the social realm and shaped by social relations. The social pressure brought to bear on a person’s self-worth, and the ways in which they present themselves and perform in various roles, has ensured a high level of attention from the field of social theory. This relationship between self and society is at the heart of numerous strands in socio-theoretical thought, the debate being not so much about the existence of such a relationship, but rather to what extent does the external world of cultural norms, economic forces and political practices impinge on subjectivity? The influence of this external world on the self has been a persistent theme since the works of Durkheim and Marx, whose respective ideas on anomie and alienation were a reaction to the influence of rapid industrialisation and social transformation on selfhood. Since then, theorists have explored the influence of factors such as marketisation and globalisation, and the way in which these processes have generated fragmented and restless selves in a world of risk and uncertainty. Alongside these processes, theorists have examined the impact of long-standing social divisions such as class, race and gender on the formation of self, while drawing on the

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deep well of more general theories that draw on relational, performative and subjectified conceptions of selfhood formation. This chapter will explore these various conceptions of the self, and explain how such conceptions matter  in current intellectual debates. Specifically, this chapter is organised around the following themes: • • • •

Early conceptions of the self and identity (Durkheim, Marx, Weber) Modern/postmodern conceptions (Giddens, Bauman) The relational turn in self and identity theory Alternative theories of the self: the performative self (Goffman, Butler); the subjectivied self (Foucault)

Key Term: Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft

The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his influential work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887; Community and Society) argued that capitalist modernisation in Western Europe had seismic effects on the fabric of social life. Rural peasants and agrarian societies relied on Gemeinschaft, a sense of community built on strong bonds of family, kinship and religion. But the shift to modern forms of social life, with a complex division of labour, advanced social stratification and a valorisation of reason and calculation, ushered in a shift to a less cohesive and more alienated set of social relations (gessellschaft).

Anomie, Alienation and the Self A persistent theme in early sociological thought was loss—loss of community, loss of tradition. For Weber, this loss took the form of a loss of freedom and a loss of meaning, but for Durkheim, it meant a loss of community, an estrangement from others in the pursuit of individual achievement and ambition. Anomie as a form of social disintegration was a product of a loss of solidarity, or more precisely a move from one form of relation to another—what Durkheim called ‘mechanical’ solidarity to another ‘organic’ form of solidarity. As he detailed in the Division of labour in society (1893/1984), mechanical solidarity is a solidarity framed by similarity and is exhibited by more primitive societies, where strength and community are formed by the subsumption of individual values to those of the group. Organic solidarity on the other hand is a product of more developed societies which require a division of labour. Here solidarity requires differentiation rather than sameness; in order to function and fulfil its complex needs, society depends on this difference. Anomie is a consequence of such difference overreaching itself, where people feel disconnected from society because ‘the shared norms that bind people to each other have eroded’ (May, 2013: 17). Durkheim’s theory of anomie was put to good use in his analysis of the causes of suicide—he argued in his book On Suicide (1897/2006), that the greater the prevalence of anomie, the higher risk factor associated with a nation’s level of suicide in

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its population. Durkheim was effectively laying the blame for suicide at the feet of society, which was a marked shift from prevailing approaches to suicide which viewed it as a personal weakness and a source of individual shame. Countries such as Greece and Mexico with stronger social bonds had a lower degree of suicide as a proportion of the population. Such an understanding of suicide is commonplace in today’s discussion of mental health issues—it is rare to come across a discussion of suicide prevention without a mention of traits that Durkheim would characterise as anomie. Marx was also concerned with loss, his concept of alienation designed to identify the loss of a sense of self experienced by workers in the new world of capitalist industry (see Chap. 4 on the economy for more on this topic). The shift from traditional forms of labour where workers owned their ‘means of production’—their own tools to carry out the labour (e.g., on farms and in craft making), to industrialisation, resulted in the means of production being handed over to owners of capital and away from labourers themselves. This dramatic transformation, combined with the introduction of a wage/monetary economy, meant that workers became divorced from the fruits of their own labour—they became alienated from that which provided them with a strong sense of self. This was a theme he developed in his earlier writings—the Economic and philosophical manuscripts (Paris manuscripts) of 1844 (Marx, 1959) and also The German ideology with Engels (Marx and Engels, 1970[1846]). The competitive nature of capitalism also meant that individuals became alienated from one another—a theme developed in a different way by Durkheim but also Weber.

Self and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber’s theory of the development of capitalism in the West was most famously outlined in his book The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber, 2010[1905]). His approach to the topic differed substantially from that of Marx, whose focus was more on historical forces and the workings of political economy. While these were also of interest to Weber, he concentrated on the role individuals played in its development. According to Weber, the development and survival of capitalism depended on its attraction to individuals, to their value systems and what they considered meaningful action (Bagge Luustsen, 2017: 23). It is important to be careful when assessing this position, called ‘methodological individualism’—Weber did not characterise society as the sum of individual actions, or attempt to reduce structures to personal belief systems and the ways in which people made sense of the world. He wanted to discover the mechanisms via which structural changes embedded themselves in the culture and practices of those who experienced its effects. In particular he was interested in the process of rationalisation peculiar to the West, which was the culmination of forms of scientific and economic development. What was it about countries in Europe that capitalism took hold there? In his analysis he emphasises the role of religion as a sacred source of

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values and system of meaning that in the case of protestant puritanism, especially Calvinism, found its profane parallel in the attitudes and behaviour required by a functioning capitalism system. In its specific set of beliefs, Calvinism provides an answer to the question that Weber had posed himself about the relationship between capitalism and the West, and it is here where his methodological individualism proves its worth as an explanatory device. Calvinists followed the doctrine of John Calvin, who decreed that people’s chance of salvation, of entering the kingdom of heaven after death, was predestined and decided at birth. This doctrine of predestination ensured that Calvinists endure the torture of what Weber called ‘salvation anxiety’. They could never be sure that they had been ‘chosen’; however, because they also believed that those who prospered were self-evidently deemed worthy of salvation (as God would not allow the unworthy to prosper in earthly life), they dedicated themselves to forms of productivity and efficiency, that is, the famed work ethic, which is still to this day considered a prerequisite for success in capitalist America: God helps those who help themselves. Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it. But this creation cannot, as in Catholicism, consist in a gradual accumulation of individual good works to one’s credit, but rather in a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternate, chosen or damned. (Weber, 2010[1905]: 115)

Capitalism required religion and piggybacked on its significance in people’s lives as a moral regulator and a source of spiritual guidance. Capitalism in itself had no mechanism via which it could attach itself to value systems that were deemed worthy of consideration as a life worth living. A sense of self grounded in religious values provided an invaluable form of legitimation and justification for capitalist enterprise, for the work ethic and, most importantly, for the pursuit of profit. The accumulation of wealth in individual, private hands received the green light, and as such became the engine of capitalist development in countries such as England and the United States. Combined with this was a dedication to the ascetic life—that is, a form of life which forbids ostentatious spending and visible forms of extravagance. The fruits of work were invested back into the production process in the pursuit of greater efficiency and productivity. Work and accumulation became an end in itself. This paved the way for the success of rational forms of capitalism, which for Weber signified the spirit of modern capitalism. This spirit encapsulated values such as moderation, sober calculation, the postponement of consumption (which represented an important distinction between rational and adventure capitalism in Weber’s view), a strong future orientation and above all else an ethic of hard work and industriousness. Weber, therefore, proposed a strong connection between the self, society and capitalism, a connection that, on the one hand, benefited capitalism, while on the other, would lead to damaging consequences for selfhood. The concluding pages of the Protestant ethic … include one of his most quoted passages, which reflects his concern about the rationalising effects of a capitalist system on individuals:

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The puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when ascetism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition¸ with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised fuel is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for eternal goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint ‘like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber, 2010[1905]: 181)

Weber was wise to be concerned about the iron cage and its effects, which when combined are arguably too great a sacrifice compared to the supposed benefits of ascetic selfhood (see Chap. 3 for more on the iron cage).

Modernity, Postmodernity and Self-Identity The focus on self and society in the works of Durkheim, Marx and Weber once again became a core focus of concern in the era of twentieth-century globalisation. Whether working with postmodern or late modern conceptualisations, a range of theorists have entered the debate over the impact of social transformations on self and identity. What unites them is a view of the globalised world as fragmented, uncertain, chaotic and disconcerting for individual selves. It is how people cope or even thrive in such circumstances that have become the focus of widely different views. Anthony Giddens (1991) sees the process of modernisation as destabilising individual identity just as it had previously done with social formations of class and labour. The self becomes, by necessity, a reflexive self in order to cope with the uncertainty and anxiety of modern life and its arbitrary associations and rootlessness. The liberation of social roles, traditions and obligations brings with it a set of other threats and challenges—a fear of failure and arbitrary judgement for example. The freedom to be ‘whoever you want to be’ has its downsides and can result in a sense of dislocation and lack of fulfilment (Giddens, 1991). Nevertheless, Giddens views these developments in a positive light, seeing this liberation from tradition and obligation as a platform for transformation and human flourishing. But others are not so convinced; Ulrich Beck, for example, suggests that the ‘do-it-yourself’ form of individual biography can have diverse effects depending on one’s social position. This DIY form of identity can often seem especially precarious and hazardous for those with less resources at their disposal, which can be limiting in a world of performative and institutionalised individualism (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). This lack of definition and its precarious consequences is echoed in the work of Zygmunt Bauman (2000). For Bauman, much of what underpins a reliable sense of self has been either discarded or made unreliable. Liquid modernity conspires ‘against distant goals, life-long projects, lasting commitments, eternal alliances, immutable identities’ (Bauman, 2001: 51).

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Bauman and Beck are similar in the sense that they see self-identity as a risky project in a world of deregulated and hyper-mobile capital. The marketisation of everything has encroached on the realm of the self, forcing the act of self-creation to constantly react to and interact with the forces of fast fashion, multi-media and ever-loosening forms of association and affiliation with disparate groups. This leads to many people falling between the cracks of individualisation and reflexivity, confronted with fears of ‘being left behind’ (Bauman, 2005: 2): The restlessness and fragility of goals affects us all, unskilled and skilled, uneducated and educated, work-shy and hard-working alike. There is little or nothing we can do to ‘bind the future’ through following diligently the current standards. (Bauman, 2009: 6)

This fragmentation of identity has differentiated effects dependent on gender, social class and race, but it also has repercussions and implications for activities that are considered marginal and extreme in modern societies. The uncertainty produced by liquid modernity has been used by some to help explain the impetus to embrace the certainty provided by extremist groups,  groups that seek simple solutions in blaming migrants, globalisation, other religions, Western values. Membership of such groups offers a sense of community, belonging and common values and, most importantly, a solid identity with its associated sense of self-worth and pride. The ‘constant temptation’ according to Bauman (2009: 10) is for what he calls the ‘lonely identity builder’ to ‘dissolve personal fears in the “might of numbers”’. Combined with an impervious analysis of social ills and a common identified enemy, identification with extremism offers a potent antidote to the challenges to the self that are created by modern anxieties. These forms of analysis illustrate the dangers at the core of fragmentation. That said, competing claims on selfhood can be viewed as a positive aspect of late modernity; forms of national, group, religious and class identity are compelled to share the same space, a form of shared sovereignty that can potentially help undermine the monopoly of extreme and counter-productive forms of self-identification. At the same time, complexity and diversity are not a solution to often-simplistic takes on the world; witness for example the endless vitriol against migrants and immigration more generally in many societies. Migrants are deemed a threat not just (supposedly) to jobs, resources, health and education services, and also to what some commentators like to euphemistically call national ‘ways of life’—of a shared set of values, identity and belonging. It is arguably these sets of concerns that paved the way for the enormous backlash against migrants seen in countries such as the United States, the UK and Sweden, fuelled by a xenophobic fear of being ‘overrun with foreigners’. The detailed statistics that are freely available about the impact of migration, as well as the debunking of myths regarding the ‘scrounging’ foreigner, seem powerless when faced with the need to maintain strong bonds of identity and selfhood. But it is not just Western societies that have exhibited this level of xenophobia— its existence is evident in all societal formations. At its most extreme, xenophobic reactions to competing identities result in appalling levels of violence against those

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considered other: history is awash with examples of disidentification, for example the horrors of the Indian Pakistan war, the genocide against Kurds, the Rwanda genocide. This is the dark side of self-identity in the shadow of which current concerns over xenophobia pale in comparison.

The Self as Relational This dark side of selfhood is most apparent in people’s perceptions of their self in comparisons and interaction with other selves—how one sees oneself in relation to others—a relational aspect of self strongly evident in the theories of the late modern and postmodern self. This theme of the self as a relational entity has stayed the course in contemporary social theory, shedding new light on aspects of the self that are often considered private. Take shyness: shyness is a common form of social anxiety, a complex combination of the fear of others and dramaturgical stress. It is much more common that given credit for—for example, some studies suggest that about half of Americans consider themselves shy (with nearly as many saying they experience shyness in certain situations). Given the absence of shyness census figures, self-diagnosis should be viewed as a reasonable indicator of prevalence, regardless of phenomenon. To understand shyness as a purely personal character trait is to overlook the power of social interaction, of one’s relations with others, as a force in itself. One author who understood the power of this relational world was R.D.  Laing, especially in works such as Knots (Laing, 1970). He understood the process of social interaction, whether it be meeting people in the pub, in the street, or in work, as one framed by confusion and uncertainty. Social encounters are regulated by the fact that no one individual controls the encounter, and that the outcomes of such events are unpredictable and risky. There may be envy for those who seem to have a natural ability to engage socially with poise and confidence, but these individuals are few and far between, relatively speaking, rather than the norm. In this sense, shyness is pervasive and should be considered as part of the human condition, rather than some kind of unfortunate affliction. Some people suffer from shyness more than others, but the principle remains the same. The intensity of the anxiety, confusion and uncertainty are more developed, but the distinction is one of quantity, rather than quality, of experience. Using Laing’s work to develop a sociology of shyness, Scott and Thorpe explain that instead of ‘failing to pull their weight’ in social interactions, those with high levels of shyness ‘are in fact highly committed to the idea of sustaining interaction but simply feel ill-equipped to do so’ (Scott and Thorpe, 2006: 348). The view of shyness as rudeness in some social situations is a classic case of this misunderstanding—as explained by Etta, one of the participants in their study: By standoffishness I mean that people have seen me as not wanting to chat to them, when in reality I have been feeling too inferior to think anyone would choose to talk to me, that they were doing so out of pity. For example, when I travelled by bus, I’d avoid sitting near

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anyone I knew might start a conversation and the whole bus could listen in. One particular lady with a loud voice shouted one day at me, down the length of the bus, “Who do you think you are tossing your head at? You think you are too good to sit near me”. I was mortified, as all I’d done was scuttle past her, pretending not to see her!

A person’s expectation of the expectation of others, what Laing called ‘my-­ perception-­of-your-perception-of-me’, is an integral part to the rhythms of our daily lives, and unavoidable. Such ideas did not originate with Laing. There were important precursors to Laing’s knotty intersubjective (see key term box, Chap. 9) take on the self, most notably Charles Cooley. His concept of the ‘looking glass self’, introduced in 1902 (Cooley, 1964), emphasised the significance of a person’s perceptions of other perceptions of themselves. This convoluted understanding of self and personal identity was summarised in his phrase ‘I’m not what I think I am, I’m not what you think I am, I’m what I think you think I am’. Cooley’s take on the self positioned him squarely in the symbolic interactionist tradition (see key movement box), which also included the work of George Herbert Mead, who arguably took Cooley’s ideas down a more socio-theoretical path. Mind self and society (Mead, 1934) was first published posthumously in 1934 as a collection of his tutorial notes. It is a book that sees Mead still taught on both psychology and sociology courses as his ideas straddle both disciplines and sees him positioned in the field of social psychology. Mead has become synonymous with a relational view of the self: a self that is developed in the context of significant others. Heavily influenced by the work of Hegel, Mead argued that the self should not be studied in isolation from others but should instead be understood as a product of intersubjective recognition. Individuals develop their sense of selves in their relationships with others and therefore notions like identity make little sense outside of this relational context. The distinction between I and me reflects Mead’s inner/outer dichotomy—the ‘I’ reflects the early stages of developing an inner self, a self produced in the context of family life in which the child grows up confronting the judgement of others. As the child grows, socialisation becomes more significant and a more social ‘me’ develops. This creates a generalised other in the mind of the person—an aggregated version of social norms and values which help steer the self in terms of social standards. Mind, self and society was effectively dedicated to illustrating that a person’s sense of themselves, their identity, was formed via the internalisation of norms and values of the groups in which they are members. These norms and values, ways of being and thinking, are ‘fused’ into the person’s sense of self (Manning and Smith, 2009: 44). Like other thinkers of the time, and evidencing the influence of developmental psychology, Mead argued that children develop via stages. The shift from a play stage to the game stage is especially important for the child as they move from adopting the role of ‘significant other’ such as parents in the play stage to adopting and playing a much more abstract role in the shape of the ‘generalised other’ (such as police officers, soldiers, cowboys). This concept of the generalised other has echoes of Durkheim’s collective consciousness as well as Hegel’s Geist (see Chap. 2). It has also helped to galvanise a

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new generation of social theorists, especially those who are keen to examine the relational world of selfhood—see the discussion in Chap. 10 of the ‘shared third’ by Jessica Benjamin and Axel Honneth’s intersubjective take on respect and recognition. Mead is especially important in Honneth’s work. As Honneth states (1995: 71), ‘nowhere is the idea that human subjects owe their identity to the experience of intersubjective recognition more thoroughly developed on the basis of naturalistic presuppositions than in the social psychology of George Herbert Mead’. Mead’s work was deeply embedded in the work of German philosophers such as Hegel. At times the similarities between his ideas and those of Hegel are striking. As well as the emphasis on intersubjective recognition, Mead shared with Hegel a deep ambivalence towards the French Revolution and its consequences. He considered the revolution ‘a test case for the possibility of rapid, fundamental social change’ (Manning and Smith, 2009: 43). His taste for liberal progressivism in realised form was tempered, like Hegel, with the terror unleashed by revolutionary fervour. He saw in his own theory of the self a form of social psychology that could underpin a political order in the United States, one that offered an inclusive approach to democratic life. In this way he echoed Hegel’s account of freedom as ‘being home with oneself in another’, couched in a relation view of the self as inescapably tied to other people (see discussion in Chap. 2).

Key Concept: Double Consciousness

W.E.B Du Bois, an American sociologist, devoted his academic career to the lives and experiences of African Americans in the highly racist and segregated United States. He referred to the social barrier of racial segregation in the United States as ‘the veil’. This represents a serious challenge to African Americans and their desire to fulfil their ideals and objectives. But it also managed to seep into their sense of self, leading to what Du Bois referred to as ‘double consciousness’: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-­ conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. (Du Bois, [1903]2007)

Du Bois’ understanding of the self, as evidenced in the phrase ‘looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ shared conceptual space with other theorists of the self, such as Cooley and Mead. One’s sense of self in Du Bois’ understanding was shaped through connection and interaction with others, its portrayal on the social stage necessarily having a performative aspect. But there was an important difference between other theorists of the self and the (continued)

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ideas of Du Bois. Du Bois was specifically concerned about the ways in which African Americans sought to make sense of themselves and their own ‘strivings’ in a hostile and racist environment, an environment tainted with the legacy of slavery. African Americans had to endure the experience of, as Du Bois puts it, ‘being an outcast and stranger in mine own house’ (pp. 10–11). Their minority and subordinate status (or subaltern status as Gramsci would have it) ensure that they had an estranged relation to the wider polity of which they were a part (Meer, 2018). This double consciousness also provided a source of potential liberation for the souls of black folk, according to Du Bois. This dual sense of self and perception of the world allowed African Americans a unique position from which to perceive the implications of freedom for them and for society more generally, in a manner unobtainable to white Americans. ‘We who are dark can see America in a way that other Americans cannot’ (Du Bois, 1971: 416). Du Bois terms this ‘a second sight’, a capacity to view racial prejudice and exclusion from the perspective of the excluded, a vantage point that made the gap between democracy and racism all too stark and obvious. Double consciousness included the potential for social transformation in its own degradation (Meer, 2018), an idea not too dissimilar to Marx and understandings of class consciousness.

Self as Performance The ideas of Erving Goffman predated the discourse of fragmentation and bracketed self so prevalent in current discussions of self and identity. His classic work The presentation of self in everyday life was published in 1959 and has subsequently had a major influence on the field of symbolic interaction studies as well as the wider field of self and identity research. The timing helped—its focus on dramaturgy in social interaction in the late 1950s appealed equally to the prevailing processes of consumerism and individualisation. It represented a shift away from conventional static notions of agency to a more knowing and calculated modern self, its concern with impression management speaking loudly to the burgeoning American middle class and those who studied it. In the book Goffman appropriated the terminology of theatre to put forward a dramaturgical understanding of the self, one in which the self is tasked with performing in social life as a strategy for managing the impressions one leaves on others. This performance takes place on the social stage, with scripts, roles and props all ready to hand to assist the performing self in its efforts to navigate social interaction while importantly, also saving face.

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The focus on presentation and performance reflects Goffman’s intellectual split between public and private versions of the self—he argued that the public self protects the private one but they are one and the same thing. This has left him open to criticism from those who view the Goffman self as a cynical performer using charm and social skills to manipulate—a social form of narcissism. His work chimes with the current fascination with social media and people’s presentation of self in the virtual world of digital technology. Numerous studies have been done on the ways in which people perform on social media and find solace in a world in which they can pretend to be someone else. This has troubling aspects also, given the ways in which social media allows people to put impression management aside and wilfully set out to present ignorant, argumentative, caustic and bullying versions of themselves. The fact that the virtual hides the physical self seems to set people free from the shackles of their public superego, so long as they can remain anonymous—this points to the power of technology as a tool of identity but also the persistent significance of social norms as regulator of human behaviour. This truism points to the importance of the visual in Goffman’s work—technology in these encounters acts like an invisible cloak under which people can prowl the internet looking for victims of their trolling activity. It also points to the significance of the non-visual—the invisible codes of social conduct that Goffman believed, following Durkheim, governed social behaviour. They also act as constraints against offensive, abnormal and uncivil behaviour—the hidden basis for governing everyday social interaction. Goffman believed that social rules were ambiguous and loosely defined but were still a powerful arbiter of people’s behaviour and attitudes. Sight, then, is a key regulatory sense of social behaviour, without which people would find it a challenge to calibrate their behaviour in the presence of others. This points to the interactive and intersubjective dimensions of Goffman’s work, but it is not just physical senses that mediate this hidden syntax: Goffman also emphasises relational senses, and in particular, the importance of trust. Here, impression management is a collective endeavour and tact is used as an important corrective to soften the loss of face experienced by others in social situations (see more on trust in Chap. 10). It is also embarrassing when members of the group or people one encounters are not familiar with the ‘script’ that is normally used to govern interaction. Goffman’s ideas on performance are at their most powerful when he discusses the ‘arts of impression management’. One of these arts is what he calls ‘dramaturgical discipline’ (1959: 210). The description of this art illustrates Goffman’s view of the performing self as a knowing one, a self that is constantly vigilant in warding off unseemly public behaviours. The possession of dramaturgical discipline means that an individual ‘remembers his part and does not commit unmeant gestures or faux pas in performing it’. He provides an illuminating example of this when he talks about teasing (p. 211). He characterises teasing as a form of initiation ritual in group dynamics, to help tease out the extent to which a person can ‘take a joke’ and can be relied on to manage their impressions as part of the group, that is, can ‘sustain a friendly manner while perhaps not feeling it’. Their capacity to engage in dramaturgical discipline in this way has serious implications for their social acceptance:

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‘When an individual passes such a test of expression-control … he can therefore venture forth as a player who can trust himself and be trusted by others’ (Goffman, 1959: 211). This form of impression management, alongside others such as dramaturgical loyalty and ‘circumspection’, paints a picture of a relational world in which the self is under constant pressure to comply and fit in with social etiquette attitudes and behaviours. The presentation of self … still stands today as a classic in its field and is taught in most social psychology courses. This is because the core issues Goffman was so keen to promote resonate with those fascinated by social behaviour. The constant pressure to perform that was so prevalent in post-war America still rings true today, anxieties over the public fragmentation of self a constant in early twenty-first-­ century life. The fact that Goffman’s work was a product of its time ensures that the book has its drawbacks as well as its benefits. Chief among these drawbacks is its tendency to operate as a function of binary opposites—structure and agency; artifice and authenticity; public and private. Possibly its greatest deficiency is to suggest performativity as a purely public phenomenon. If anything, the implicit message of the book is that ‘performance’ is not just a form of public drama; it is also a private process. Far from being authentic, no ‘face’ is safe from the imperative of performance. His thinking on the social construction of self developed in his later work, in books such a Stigma (1964) and Asylums (1961), with his conceptualisation moving away from the dramaturgical analysis employed in his earlier book. Here he became more interested in how forms of exclusion are used to regulate social behaviour. In Stigma, Goffman studied those whose identity is considered ‘spoiled’ and who are then considered a threat to the hidden rules of social interaction. In a similar vein to Mead’s I/me distinction, Goffman distinguishes between a ‘virtual’ and an ‘actual’ social identity—the greater the disparity between them, the greater degree of stigma attached to them.

Key Movement: Symbolic Interactionism

G.H. Mead’s ideas on the relation between self and society was a key influence on Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) who devised the approach known as symbolic interactionism to help merge the social psychology of Mead with the ethnographic approach that had come to prominence in American sociology in the early twentieth century. The concern with interactionism—the ways in which people engage one another in intersubjective communication, performance and exchange—was allied to a focus on the meanings associated with these interactions. It was also a response to the perceived deficiencies of other theories popular at the time across the social sciences, specifically the behaviourism of psychologist BF.  Skinner and the functionalist approach of prominent (continued)

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sociologist Talcott Parsons. Both approaches for Blumer left little room for creative meaning-making at the social level of humans in interaction with one another. Symbolic interactionism rejected the highly abstract theories that valorised structure, systems and patterns at the expense of human agency, context and communication, viewing macro theories as a poor predictor of human behaviour. It is often characterised as an action theory due to the emphasis on the micro-level of society, a level in which the interpretation of (inter)actions have considerable ramifications for the receiver. Meanings here are not fixed or immutable—instead, they are indeterminate and continually negotiated depending on the situation and the actors involved. In this way, it parallels to some degree the ideas generated in anthropology—this shared philosophy is reflected in the take up of symbolic interactionism in studies of sub-cultures during the twentieth century. Another important element of symbolic interactionist theory is the performance aspect of human interactive behaviour. While humans create meaning through interpretation, they also do it through active role-playing, where the management of impressions and interpretations acts as a key method of control over interactive situations, especially the ways in which people perceive oneself. The main contributor to this approach is Erving Goffman, whose dramaturgical approach to social life positioned humans as stage actors who took advantage of stage props—deportment, possessions, clothes, dialect and diction—to manipulate the symbolic interaction of everyday life.

Self as Subjectivation While there was a (often implicit) political and ethical component to Goffman’s ideas about the self and relationality, this component came much more to the fore in Michel Foucault’s contribution to theories of selfhood. Foucault used the concept of subjectivation as a way to comprehend the construction of the subject through disciplinary practices. Such an understanding was a cornerstone of Foucault’s theorisation of power and its deployment via institutions of governance—a theorisation that emerged gradually alongside his own intellectual development. A focus on the ‘self’ had been present from the beginning of his academic career, with for example a concern over technologies of the self evident in his doctoral thesis (1976). In Foucault’s later studies of health and sexuality, a key question became: how are self-­ perceptions of supposedly personal issues like mental health, sexuality and delinquency regulated and bureaucratised from the outside—that is, via mechanisms of institutional control?

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This question becomes the driving force in the shift from Foucault’s archaeology to genealogy. This shift saw Foucault move from examining the fictitious nature of the subject, to a concern with detailing the material context of subject construction alongside its political consequences. This shift also saw Foucault make more explicit connections between subjectivation and power, using the concept to illuminate his theory of how new technologies of power emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Importantly, this concept of subjectivation offered him a position from which to critique the prevailing view on the political left of how power operated—as that ‘which abstracts, which negates the body, represses, supresses’ (Foucault, 1984: 66). Instead, according to him, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a form of power come into being that exercised itself through social production and social service, becoming more a matter of obtaining productive service from individuals. The consequence was that a ‘real and effective “incorporation” of power was necessary, in the sense that power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of social behaviour’ (Foucault, 1984: 66). Power in this conceptualisation works, not through destruction and repression but through production and incorporation—that is, through a process of control which sees the institutions of health, education, justice and morality exercise their disciplinary practices via the ‘docile bodies’ of subjects (Foucault, 1977a: 135). The best means of maintaining obedience and control over subjects (pupils, patients, prisoners, etc.) via disciplinary technologies is if these subjects ‘become self-implementing systems, functions of a subject’s reflexive relation to self’ (Hook, 2007). This notion of selfhood as subjectivation is a particular focus in works such as Discipline and Punish (1977b) and The History of Sexuality (1978) finding further clarification in his writings on panopticism  (see Chap. 3). Central to Foucault’s discussion of panopticism and power is the way in which subjects, encouraged to engage in the observation of the self, become their own panopticon. Taking on the duty of self-surveillance results in external monitoring, becoming ‘permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action’ (1977a: 201). This conception of subject construction and the operation of power has had considerable influence in subsequent decades, particularly in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze elaborated on the concept, arguing that subjectivation has little to do with people, but instead it refers to the process of ‘individuation’, that is, a process of coming into being. According to Deleuze, there is no subject, just the production of a mode of existence (1988). Further influence can also be witnessed in the work of theorists such as Judith Butler. The legacy of the concept lives on most strongly, however, in the dramatically altered discourses surrounding conceptions of power that can be found in modern social theory, which have lost the sense of rigidity and one dimensionalism pursued by some strands of Marxism and mainstream political science.

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Key Term: Intersubjectivity

The concept of intersubjectivity is of central importance in theoretical debates about the self, language and the body. While there are various definitions in existence, a common position of intersubjectivity is that the self is not an isolated nomadic self, but rather an interconnected one, formed in the context of human relations that are ‘always already’ present (Crossley, 1996: 14), situated prior to the formation of selfhood. For many theorists, language is a key building block of this relatedness. The notion of the intersubjective self is often pitted against Descarte’s Cartesian approach to the self (‘I think therefore I am’) (see Chap. 11), which places primacy on individual subjectivities interacting with an external world. The concept of intersubjectivity can be found in the works of Habermas (theories of communication), Honneth (recognition), Mead (the significant other), as well as Hegel (the master and slave dialectic).

Self as Performativity Foucault’s ideas represented a shift away from Goffman’s dramaturgical self, but future Foucauldian-inspired theories of the self did not entirely abandon the concern over self and performance. Goffman’s ideas find an unusual bedfellow in the theories of Judith Butler. In her 1993 work, Bodies that matter, Butler makes the case for selves created through performativity—the process by which discursive practices construct and regulate selves. The ‘girling of the girl’ (Butler, 1993: 232) starts at an early stage of life, when the child is called ‘she’. After this the family, community as well as various institutions go to work in repeating the construction and performance of gender and reinforce its ‘facticity’. Performativity, Butler argues, ‘must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler, 1993: 2). Self-identity is imposed through repetition, internalised and subsequently performed by the individual. Gender is something that people do, as opposed to are, and it is no surprise that she quotes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line ‘one is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one’ (Butler, 1990: 8; De Beauvoir, 1974[1949]). Butler’s book, Gender trouble, was targeted primarily at feminists and the feminist movement, and was an attempt to move away from what she considered misrepresentative conceptions of ‘woman’ and womanhood as a unified category of analysis. In the book, she argues that there are limits to feminist identity politics because of the power of identification itself to exclude and marginalise: The premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. (Butler, 1990: 4)

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She borrows heavily from Foucault in her analysis, particularly his understanding of the effect of productive power on the constitution of bodies. She argues that poststructuralism offers the most effective basis for a politically oriented social theory, as it offers the tools by which to expand conceptions of being female and what it means to be a woman. These categories of identity, far from being natural, ‘are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’ (Butler, 1990: viii–ix). Her critique goes well past previous feminist attempts to undermine essentialist accounts of women, which aimed to avoid this by making a strict separation between biological sex and socially constructed forms of gender. She argues that this misses the point and, in fact, biological accounts of sex are also socially constructed. This is what made Gender Trouble so troubling and also so influential in subsequent debates. Like Goffman, Butler draws on notions of dramaturgical performance to better understand the gendering of bodies and behaviour. The theatre metaphor is important in Butler’s work in terms of understanding gender performance, but her analysis deviates from that of Goffman in that ‘dominant discourses and gender norms provide both the conditions and limitations of those very processes that create and cement gender’ (Bagge Lauststen, 2017: 185). Society provides the screenplay and stage instructions via which individual performances are directed. Thus, Butler argues that there is a politics of bodies that is deeply interwoven into the fabric of social life and one that starts before people are even born. This may sound like an inescapable prison of norms and performativity, yet Butler argues that alongside this performativity, there is a process of ‘resignification’, the reconstruction of discursive meanings, and one which can lead to subverted and radicalised notions of identity. She uses the example of ‘queer’ in Bodies that matter to illustrate how a term that once was wholly derogatory has been re-appropriated as a positive form of identity.

Key Theorist: Judith Butler (1956–)

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Judith Butler gained her academic training in philosophy and literature studies in institutions such as Yale and Heidelberg. She came to prominence in academic circles via her early books, especially Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993)—both of these have become a significant influence on the fields of gender and sexuality studies. A key reason for this is that Butler’s work has disrupted taken-for-granted notions of women and womanhood, which she views as part of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (1990), and in doing so has single-handedly overturned (continued)

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accepted discourse on the meaning and construction of gender. Her ideas on gender and sex broke new ground conceptually, providing a highly innovative and thoughtful alternative to third-wave feminism’s rigid acceptance of gender divisions. She is an exemplar social theorist in that she engages with ideas in diverse fields such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, literature and cultural studies, while also becoming a major influence in these fields. Her work is deeply indebted to the ideas of other theorists, Foucault and Derrida for example, but she has also immersed herself in contemporary debates in feminist and gender studies, building on the arguments of authors such as Adrienne Rich and her writings on compulsive heterosexuality (Rich, 1980). Butler is a key theory hybridiser, as she utilises the work of Foucault, Derrida, Austin, Hegel, Julia Kristeva and others. She is highly skilled at adapting their ideas to create wholly new conceptualisations—see for example her use of Austin’s conception of performatives which directly impacted her understanding of gender performance. Austin argued in his book How to do things with words (1962) that linguistic declarations can perform actions, and one of these actions is making ‘real’ the objects they put names on (see Chap. 7). The influence of Austin is readily apparent in her argument that performativity is ‘the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed’ (Butler, 1996, 112). In following and updating Austin’s idea in relation to gender, Butler suggests that gender categories like male and female are social constructed through forms of discourse. Butler’s account of performativity has been enormously influential in debates about gender, but also power, domination and subversion. Butler is at pains to avoid some of the pitfalls in the debates over structure and agency (Bagge Laustsen, 2017: 186). Her constructivist approach is an effort to steer a conceptual path through these parameters, to navigate space for the subject in dominant discourses: As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the individual, as some post-structuralist displacements of the subject would contend. (Butler, 1988: 526)

Alongside her academic career, she is also a prominent public intellectual who has been involved in lesbian and gay rights activism, as well as the Occupy movement. She has also engaged with the debates sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Social Theory Applied: Impression Management

Goffman’s theories of society and human interaction have been a mainstay in social theory since the publication of the Presentation of self in everyday life. His relational and deeply intersubjective take on social performance has found favour with successive generations eager to explore the ways in which self and identity are shaped by human interaction. There are some useful texts that outline Goffman’s theory of self-presentation and dramaturgy and their various applications. Shulman (2016) provides an overview of the relevance of The presentation of self … in contemporary society, while Scott (2015) takes advantage of Goffman’s ideas on dramaturgy and public relations to examine how people negotiate their identity in modern life. Both volumes illustrate the relevance of his concepts and his broad overarching theory of interaction orders to situations such as the workplace and popular culture. They also show that Goffman’s ground-breaking ideas have stayed relevant in contemporary times. In fact, they have been given a new lease of life with the rise of the internet and social media. A mini-industry of researchers has adopted Goffman as a way to understand how the online world both shapes and reflects issues of selfhood in human relations. A good example of this is Bullingham and Vasconcelos’s (2013) study of ten online identities in various contexts (bloggers, second life participants) which illustrates how people manage their impressions in public virtual spaces by editing aspects of their virtual identity. Regardless of whether the ‘front stage’ is a physical or virtual one, people ‘deliberately chose to project a given identity’. Their analysis, embedded in Goffman’s work on self-presentation, shows that the online sphere, with its considerable potential for self-editing, provides especially fruitful terrain via which to further engage with Goffman’s ideas and to tease out conceptual and explanatory possibilities. One fruitful sub-field of online performance is online dating. Ward (2017) conducted a set of interviews with Tinder users in the Netherlands to explore how they engaged in impression management in a highly visual and pressured environment. Goffman’s ideas, according to Ward, are an ideal framework through which to explore the uses of Tinder, a highly popular dating app which provides the user with a unique stage on which to perform whatever version of themselves they wish to portray. The focus of Ward’s study was on the user’s self-presentation in the early stages of impression management on Tinder, and via this focus she was able to explore the extent to which individuals were actively involved in managing their impressions online. It turns out that users were acutely aware of the need to perform and used the technology to calibrate their performance. Users ‘conduct profile experiments to see how change to their self-presentation may improve their approval from others on the app’. They were adept at gauging the performative power of different profile choices and would ‘alter their profiles in order to experiment with how reactions vary’ (Ward, 2017: 1654).

In Summary

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In Summary Anomie, Alienation and the Self  Loss of self was a recurring and significant theme in early sociological thought. Durkheim, for example, viewed in capitalist modernisation a form of separation between the individual and society, a form of social disintegration he termed anomie. This loss of social solidarity was echoed in the work of Karl Marx, who blamed capitalism for a rise in what he called alienation, a growing disconnect between a person’s sense of self and their productive capacities in the shape of paid work. Self and the Spirit of Capitalism  In his seminal text, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Max Weber argued that religion created a type of selfhood that became the breeding ground for the spread of capitalist culture in Western nations. The Calvinist doctrine of the calling laid the groundwork for a strong work ethic in Protestant countries, an ethic that was well suited to capitalist values such as maximising efficiency and economic returns. In this way, Weber made a strong case for the significance of selfhood in societal transformation. Du Bois and Double Consciousness  Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness, central to his book The souls of black folk, provided a conflicted view of self and identity as produced and shaped through the practices of racism in modern America. Racism generated a split self among African Americans, a two-sided self that represented both freedom and repression in the one self-understanding. This conflicted view of self became a major influence on thinkers such as Franz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Modernity, Postmodernity and Self-identity  Theories of modernity and postmodernity agree that globalisation raises a set of challenges for self-identity in a society increasingly fragmented and individualised. This general agreement aside, there are also key differences in their approaches—for example, Anthony Giddens viewed this fragmented self as a form of liberation, while Zygmunt Bauman on the other hand adopted a much more pessimistic attitude to the postmodern self, a world of isolation and loneliness. The Self as Relational  One strand of social theory has argued that the self is a relational entity, that is, that individuals develop their sense of selves in their relationships with other people, not outside these relationships. The work of Hegel has been key to this strand of thinking, as evident in his influence on theorists such as George Herbert Mead and Axel Honneth. Self as Performance  The notion of the self as performed became a dominant conception with the publication of Erving Goffman’s classic text The presentation of self in everyday life in 1959. The book put forward a view of self-presentation as impression management, designed to wield control over how others perceive oneself. The book adopted a dramaturgical approach to the self as a relational entity, with Goffman employing the language of theatre to illustrate the staged nature of social interaction.

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Self as Subjectivation  Like Goffman, Michel Foucault approached the self from the perspective of social practices. Unlike Goffman, however, Foucault was unconcerned with the symbolic interactions between people. Instead, his emphasis was much more on the disciplinary practice of institutions such as prisons, hospitals and schools, and how these practices shaped the self-understandings of people. This notion of subjectivation allowed Foucault to characterise power as a productive force in people’s lives, as opposed to a destructive and repressive mechanism of control. Self as Performativity  Judith Butler’s work has parallels with Goffman’s concern over performance, but the stronger influence is that of Foucault and his analysis of power and its effects on the self. She saw gendered identities as products of repetitive discourses—gender is performed, something that people do, as opposed to are. Questions How much of our presentation of self is a ‘performance’? Do you agree with Butler that gender is something people ‘do’, as opposed to ‘are’? In what sense can the ‘second sight’ of Du Bois’ double consciousness be socially transformative? Suggested Readings Burkitt, I. (2008). Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society (2nd edition). London: Sage. Offers an in-depth overview and analysis of the social nature of the self. It utilises a wide variety of social theories to examine the various ways in which the social realm weaves its way into the fabric of our supposedly private selves. Abbott, O. (2020). The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice. London: Palgrave. Examines the importance of the relational self in the creation of morality and moral decision-making, from a relational sociology perspective. Föllmer, M. (2015). Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Draws on insights from Simmel, Luhmann and Beck to examine the relation between self, individualism and society through successive twentieth-century political regimes in Berlin, Germany. Rose, N. (2010). Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Provides a Foucauldian-inspired critical history of the role of ‘psy’ disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy in the creation of the modern self, and the ways in which these disciplines have laid the foundations for modern forms of governmentality.

References

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References Austin, J. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon. Bagge Laustsen, C. (2017). Gender, Body and Identity: Butler and Haraway. In C. Bagge Laustsen, L. Larsen, M. Wullum Nielsen, T. Ravn, & M. P. Sørensen (Eds.), Social Theory: A Textbook (pp. 179–197). Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity. Bauman, Z. (2001). The Individualised Society. Wiley. Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2009). Identity in the Globalising World. In A. Elliott & P. du Gay (Eds.), Identity in Question (pp. 1–12). Sage. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualisation: Institutionalised Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. Sage. Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. (2013). ‘The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities. Journal of Information Science, 39(1), 101–112. Butler, J. (1988). Performative and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 419–531. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge. Butler, J. (1996). Gender as Performance. In P. Osborne (Ed.), A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (pp. 109–125). Routledge. Cooley, C. (1964[1902]). Human Nature and Social Order. Schocken Books. Crossley, N. (1996). Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. Sage De Beauvoir, S. (1974[1949]). The Second Sex. Vintage Books. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Continuum. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1971). Does the Negro Need Separate Schools? In J. Lester (Ed.), The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (pp. 408–418). Random House. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007[1903]). The Souls of Black Folk (H. L. Gates, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1984[1893]). The Division of Labour in Society. Simon and Shuster. Durkheim, E. (2006[1897]). On Suicide. Penguin Foucault, M. (1976). Mental Illness and Psychology. University of California Press. Foucault, M. (1977a). Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon, Trans., pp. 205–217). Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1977b). Discipline and Punish. Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1978). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). Penguin. Foucault, M. (1984). Truth and Power. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. Penguin. Goffman, E. (1964). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice Hall. Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Polity Press. Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Palgrave. Laing, R. D. (1970). Knots. Tavistock. Manning, P., & Smith, G. (2009). Symbolic Interactionism. In A.  Elliott (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Social Theory (pp. 37–55). Routledge. Marx, K. (1959). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Progress Publishers. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970[1846]). The German Ideology, Part 1. International Publishers. May, V. (2013). Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World. Palgrave. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago University Press.

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Meer, N. (2018). W. E. B. Du Bois, Double Consciousness and the ‘Spirit’ of Recognition. The Sociological Review, 1–16 (online first). Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs, 5(4), 631–660. Scott, S. (2015). Negotiating Identity: Symbolic Interactionist Approaches to Social Identity. Polity. Scott, S., & Thorpe, C. (2006). The Sociological Imagination of R. D. Laing. Sociological Theory, 24(4), 331–352. Shulman, D. (2016). The Presentation of Self in Contemporary Social Life. Sage. Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, reproduced in J.  Harris (Ed.). (2012). Community and Civil Society. Cambridge University Press. Ward, J. (2017). What Are You Doing on Tinder? Impression Management on a Matchmaking Mobile App. Information, Communication & Society, 20(11), 1644–1659. Weber, M. (2010[1905]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxford University Press/Routledge.

Emotions

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Introduction The modern age is often portrayed as the age of anxiety. Recurrent and persistent feelings of anxiousness are a reaction to a world shaped by unstable personal identities, often shallow and fleeting relationships and precarious labour markets (especially for the young). The advent of social media has also brought with it a barrage of anxiety-inducing demands on our sense of emotional well-being. It is no coincidence that emotional health, for so long a poor relation to physical health in public policy, has become a major concern for many people. Alongside anxiety, modern media has also magnified the importance of other facets of emotional life, making emotions such as sadness, despair and loneliness a common and compelling feature of public discourse. Public discourse is also often riven with more unsavoury emotions, such as anger and hate—expressions of contempt and disdain directed towards specific targets such as racial and ethnic minorities an all too common feature of contemporary existence. It is difficult to disregard the existence of these emotions, however unpalatable these are. But it is also difficult to ignore the highly socialised nature of emotional life, and the ways in which emotions such as shame and mistrust find themselves at the centre of social transformation and social struggle. Far from being a purely private matter, the life of emotions is increasingly a public matter of some concern. As a consequence, its interest in the world of social theory has also increased, and contemporary theorising of the social world and its effects often has a strong emotional component. This is true especially in the works of theorists such as Axel Honneth and Jessica Benjamin, who have undertaken a decidedly relational turn in their analysis of the social significance of emotional life. That said, emotions have been an established topic in social theory for a considerable time, an aspect that is visible in the works of Marx, Durkheim as well as others such as George Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies. Its importance was elevated via the psychoanalytic influence on the Frankfurt School, and since then has cemented itself in various ways in critical analyses of capitalism and neoliberalism. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_10

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The organisation of this chapter reflects this important historical lineage while also providing an overview of some more recent developments in the theory of emotions. The chapter is structured to cover the following topics specifically: • The influence of psychoanalysis on social theory • Examples of this influence in the works of the Frankfurt School, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Jessica Benjamin • Examples of emotions in social theory: Respect, shame and trust

Psychoanalysis and Social Theory Classical social theory was no stranger to the emotional domain, with the effects of social change on alienation and anomie a central concern to Marx and Durkheim, respectively. However, the twentieth century saw this interest in emotional life take a different turn, particularly in the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (see Key Movement Box, Chap. 3). They were interested in emotions not so much as products or outcomes of social transformation but rather their role as actual drivers of this transformation. This focus was itself a product of historical circumstances, as the Frankfurt School’s research agenda became shaped by forces impacting early twentieth-century European democracies. This was a context of increasing totalitarianism, demagoguery, irrational populism and high levels of economic inequality. This fed the Frankfurt School’s desire to better understand the reasons why people seemingly willingly submitted to fascist ideologies as well as pathological forms of capitalism. This desire resulted in a search for theories that could offer greater insight into individual’s inner emotional lives, and because of this, they sought out the potential embedded in the field of psychoanalysis. The key figure in this field was Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in whose theories of drives, passions and the unconscious paved the way for much stronger connections to be made between seemingly personal emotional experiences and the external forces that helped to shape them. Psychoanalytic approaches offered the right kind of conceptual analysis to explain both forms of surrender and resistance to capitalism, and the Frankfurt School were interested in both of these aspects. Members of the Frankfurt School employed the ideas of Freud in their analysis of the rise of fascism and fascist outlooks. This took the form of a study into The authoritarian personality (Adorno et al., 1950), which offered an analysis of why people submitted to authority and the lack of revolutionary impulse among the population. Adorno separately produced an article entitled ‘Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda’ (Adorno, 1982). This built on the previous work in The authoritarian personality, but in this case he used Freud as a way to understand the power of fascist language and fascist polemic: how did it hold so much sway over people and their emotional reactions? What is striking reading this is its relevance to contemporary events and the way in which far-right populist leaders use

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similar discursive tactics. For Adorno, Freud sets a template for fascist emotions in his analysis of group psychology and the role of the ego, particularly when it comes to the group aspect. Aggressive emotions, which have been socially repressed, find an explosive outlet in the shape of the fascist. According to Adorno, this helps the group bond while also producing a sense of emotional well-being. The fascist uses techniques such as identification and personalisation to gain power and trust: One of the basic devices of personalised fascist propaganda is the concept of the ‘great little man’, a person who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is just one of the folks, a plain red-blooded American. (Adorno, 1982: 127)

Fascists also wield emotional power through providing simplistic solutions to complex problems (such as distinctions between good and evil) as well as preying on what amount to real fears but are often irrational in content. The manipulation of collective paranoia feeds this fear, often producing an ‘imaginary enemy upon which one’s own aggressive and immoral traits are projected’ (Kellner, 1989: 119). Another member of the Frankfurt School who took seriously the social role of emotions was Eric Fromm. In a short article entitled ‘Pychoanalysis and sociology’ (1989), Fromm summarised why the Frankfurt School were so keen to engage with the psychoanalytic world. According to him, It is necessary to investigate what role the instinctual and the unconscious play in the organisation and development of society and in individual social facts, and to what extent the changes in mankind’s psychological structure, in the sense of a growing ego-organisation and thus a rational ability to cope with the instinctual and natural, is a sociologically relevant factor. (Fromm, 1989: 38)

The influence of psychoanalysis on social theory did not end with the Frankfurt School. What is sometimes overlooked in the literature is the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on other socio-theoretical endeavours, such as the works of Foucault, Bourdieu and Parsons.

Dissent and the Fromm-Marcuse Debate Lawrence Friedman’s 2013 biography of Erich Fromm ‘The lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s prophet’ is a good place to start if unfamiliar with Fromm’s work. It is an excellent reminder of his contribution and the impact of his publications, such as Escape from freedom (1941) and The sane society (1955) during his lifespan. It is good to be reminded: Fromm achieved considerable fame as a public intellectual of some repute, having already served his time contributing to the interdisciplinary character of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. While his later works sold in the millions and are important in their own right, his early essays such as ‘The state as educator’ (1930) and ‘Politics and psychoanalysis’ (1931) are arguably just as significant and show a thinker willing to traverse disciplinary boundaries without fear

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of censure. Friedman is also right to emphasise the value of Fromm’s contribution to the German Worker Study of the 1930s, amongst other key publications of the Frankfurt School. Friedman’s book is strong when illustrating Fromm’s development as a public intellectual, especially during his time living in the United States. One section in this regard that stands out details the now somewhat forgotten series of exchanges between Fromm and Herbert Marcuse in Dissent magazine between 1955 and 1956. Another alumnus of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was also starting to build a name for himself as a public intellectual in some influential circles, having recently published Eros and civilisation (Marcuse, 1955). It was one of the chapters from this book that, in modified form, found itself at the centre of the Dissent debate between Fromm and Marcuse. This chapter, ‘a critique of neo-Freudian revisionism’, essentially laid into Fromm’s ideas and resulted in a ‘caustic and uncivil debate’ according to Friedman (2013: 193) that ‘grew into one of the most intriguing exchanges in postwar intellectual history’. This debate, which to some might appear obscure and even irrelevant in today’s intellectual climate (although it is not difficult to see echoes in contemporary social theory), revolved around the place of Freud’s ideas in theories of contemporary social transformation—or more accurately, the place of specific readings of Freud in these debates. Freud was a significant figure in early Frankfurt school theorising—Adorno and Horkheimer were keen on him, as were others on the left in the 1930s (Freudian theory was particularly fashionable at the time). In essence, Marcuse attacked Fromm for not being Freudian enough—for de-­ emphasising the importance of instinctual drives when it came to the possibilities of social transformation: The playing down of the biological level, the mutilation of the instinct theory, makes the personality definable in terms of objective cultural values divorced from the repressive ground which denies their realisation. In order to present these values as freedom and fulfilment, they have to be expurgated from the material of which they are made. (Marcuse, cited in Friedman, 2013: 193)

This critique sparked a series of exchanges between the pair, resulting in what critics at the time decided was a result for Marcuse—that he had ‘bested’ Fromm (Friedman, 2013: 196). This may or may not have been the case, but a more significant issue is what the Dissent debate says about the rise of these (neo)Marxist public intellectuals. While Friedman acknowledges the damage done to Fromm’s reputation in ‘important intellectual circles’ and did much to make him a ‘forgotten intellectual’ in those same circles, it did little to dent his popularity among the reading public, his general influence expanding in the 1950s thereafter. Bested or not, Fromm’s books subsequently sold in the millions, underscoring, as Friedman puts it ‘a gap between academic and popular discourse’ (p. 197). This discursive gap, it could be argued, is precisely what public intellectuals are supposed to bridge—that is their function. In this case, what could be characterised as intellectual monism or even faddism had no real bearing on this gap, instead resulting in important intellectual debates being reduced to insults over who was the

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‘true’ Freudian. It turns out that the public, eager to read about freedom, human potential and democracy, did not care about such squabbles among the left. Key Movement: Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism is a catch-all term to describe a body of theorists and ideas that broke with the theory of structuralism as put forward by Saussure (see Chap. 7). Although a term generated in US academic circles (particularly in literary studies), the main figures in poststructuralist thought were French, which reflects the French origins of structuralism. Authors such as Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984), while each unique, shared a common desire to move on from what they viewed as the straitjacket of signs and signifiers—the language of structuralism. Derrida’s method of deconstruction, for example (see Chap. 7) was designed to offer a rigorous critique of structuralist thought and devoted much energy to upending the cherished connection between signifier and signified. For Derrida and other poststructuralists, this connection was the residue of the modernist notion that all objects possessed a ‘pure’ or unique essence, which are to be uncovered by the power of language to represent them. Derrida rejected this notion, instead arguing that no real essence existed as the only knowledge one could have about an object was through the language deployed to name it. This is what Derrida means when he said ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida, 1976, 160)—a radical take on language and representation that broke decisively with structuralist analysis. Poststructuralism, therefore, has a special interest in language, but it also has a strong concern with the politics of knowledge, meaning and subjectivity. As a theoretical approach it confronts the Enlightenment and its championing of the pursuit of knowledge, arguing instead that social theory should be more interested in the contested nature of knowledge and the role of language and power in deciding what counts as useful knowledge. Poststructuralist thinkers also express a desire to de-centre the self and to consider the human subject as a fictional construct. Linked to this is a belief that the relation between intention and perception when it comes to meaning is not a simple one-way process. Poststructuralism is often associated with a certain kind of politics, that which celebrates difference. The student protests of 1968 are often considered a key event that saw the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism take place. Since that time, the theory has had a major influence on the field of postcolonial studies (see Chap. 6), including the works of authors such as Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak—this influence reflects the close ties between poststructuralism and the politics of representation. Also associated with the movement are theorists such as Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), Judith Butler (1956–) and Julia Kristeva (1941–).

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The Politics of Desire and the Capitalist Machine Another significant offshoot of this psychoanalytic thread in social theory can be found in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose works, like that of the Frankfurt School, placed heavy emphasis on emotion, in their case the emotion of desire, as a driver of social change. They shared other characteristics with the Frankfurt School: while their specific concern was no so much with official fascism but the production of fascist subjectivities under capitalism, they shared with Adorno and Horkheimer a common disgust with the fascist mentality and its effects. All were deeply concerned with fascism and capitalism, and the times they lived through offered real cause for concern in this regard. For both sets of thinkers, the Marxist emphasis on class struggle and the faith placed in the proletariat did not compute with contemporary reality. Neither was the faith in reason as a liberator of humanity an effective response in the face of fascist ideology. That said, while having some common intellectual interests (Marx and Freud), these sets of intellectuals were the product of different parts of the twentieth century: as Germans Adorno and Horkheimer experienced the terror of Nazism, while the French Deleuze and Guattari experienced the liberating world of the 1960s as well as the game-changer that was Paris 1968. This context was a major factor in the latter’s postmodern take on emotional life under capitalism: for Deleuze and Guattari, emotions have revolutionary potential as they offer the basis for an alternative subjectivity to replace the capitalist commodified self. The key emotion for them is desire. Desire ‘is revolutionary in its essence’ is how they portray it in their influential book Anti Oedipus (1983). According to Deleuze and Guattari, desire and society operate as each other’s nemesis, and as a result, society (or ‘socius’) aims to ‘code desire, to control and repress it as it offers a threat to established order’. They call this process of control ‘territorialisation’. Best and Kellner summarise their definition of desire ‘as a free-flowing physical energy that establishes random, fragment and multiple connections with material flows and partial objects’ (Best & Kellner 1991: 87). The force of reason attempts to cage this desire, but in so doing damages its creative power. This is why their book is called Anti-Oedipus, as it is an attack on the psychoanalytic profession that seeks to capture and frame desire in terms of representation and to make it fit within theories of Oedipus and the family. The book offers an account of how desire has been managed and organised in different historical configurations, with their specific focus on the capitalist epoch. Like Marx, they view history through a lens of continuity and stages, while also aiming for a general theory of society that can privilege desire at the centre of social organisation, while also aiming to analyse capitalist commodification and its consequences.

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According to them, under capitalism, a liberation of desire takes place alongside the liberation of markets, goods and labour, but at the same time, a subjugation of desire occurs through commodification but also through modern institutions such as the state, law and the family. Capitalism, while liberating in one sense, uses its apparatus to re-channel desire into uncreative areas that inhibited its impulses. In this regard their ideas are strikingly similar to the work of Herbert Marcuse who in his book One dimensional man (Marcuse, 1964) critiqued capitalism for its ‘repressive desublimation’ of desire. In order for desire to liberate itself, it needs to engage with a process they refer to as the schizophrenic process. They use the term schizophrenia in a different way to current usage, as a potentially transformative state that can flourish in highly commodified societies. The ‘schizo-subject’ according to them has real subversive potential, a subversiveness that can offer an alternative to the institutionalised nature of psychoanalysis, the conformist nature of capitalist society, and the ways in which people repress their desires. This schizo subject in effect becomes Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary subject, the power of desire capable of dismantling capitalism and its emotionally repressive apparatus. For them it is a case of fighting fire with fire, or in this case, desire with desire: Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilising flows. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 293)

Deleuze and Guattari, then, deliver a highly politicised theory of revolutionary transformation, one that sets them apart from their postmodern counterparts, while also distancing them from ‘orthodox’ Marxist accounts of commodification and liberation. As well as the work of Marcuse, there are also strong parallels with Adorno and Horkheimer’s valorisation of mimesis as the subverter of commodification. The similarities with Foucault’s ideas about subjectivity are also not difficult to discern. Indeed, Foucault wrote the introduction to Anti-Oedipus in which he highlights the book’s concern with the growth of fascism. It made sense then to prioritise a politics of desire as a revolutionary force. This theoretical stance is bound to present challenges, however, and one of these relates to the transformative and liberating potential of revolutionary desire—to what extent is this any different to fascist forms of desire? This desire as embodied in the schizo subject leaves much to be ‘desired’ when it comes to imagining a post-­ capitalist future, one in which a level of stability and social order will need to be institutionalised for society to function effectively. From this perspective, some of their highly abstract conceptualisations can come across as over-elaborated and dramatic, possibly as a result of their loss of faith in the proletariat and the despair with communism and the Communist Party—a sort of historical parallel to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Key Term: Structure and Agency

The debate over structure and agency has been of central importance to the discipline of sociology, in much the same way that the question of nature versus nurture has framed debates in psychology. The debate boils down to the basic question: to what extent do social structures—which can be social class, gender, social mores, religion, the market, the state—or agency—the ability of individuals (whether independently or collectively) to make autonomous choices and act on them—explain social phenomena such as crime, education achievement, wealth distribution, work stratification and so on. The debate between these two opposite poles tend to frame much of the discussion of classical social theory (Durkheim, Weber, Marx). The later generation of social theorists such as Habermas and Bourdieu aim to transcend this dichotomy through, respectively, intersubjective theories of language and communication and a relational approach to culture, knowledge and language.

Emotions and the ‘Shared Third’ The connection between psychoanalysis, social theory and emotions is also a major theme in the work of Jessica Benjamin (1946–), whose ideas incorporate a much stronger gendered component than do Deleuze and Guattari. A prominent psychoanalyst and feminist, Benjamin has developed a psychoanalytically informed social theory that has proven both durable and influential. Her work is strongly interdisciplinary, weaving elements of feminist and critical theory with concepts derived from psychoanalysis. Her work is indebted to Hegel: this is evident in her efforts to undermine a patriarchal understanding of freedom, a one-person subjective account of freedom that aims to assert the self over others. This gendered aspect of freedom is important in her arguments in her 1988 book The Bonds of Love, particularly her assertion that emotional relationships between genders and subject formation are dependent on ‘the psychic structure in which one person plays subject and the other must serve as his object’ (Benjamin, 1988: 7). This critique is strongly Hegelian, his analysis of the master-slave dialectic (see key term box, Chap. 4) and intersubjective conception of freedom (see Chap. 2), acting as a springboard for her two-person concept of freedom, one which breaks the domination and repression at the heart of patriarchal forms of subjectivity. Benjamin argues that this notion of freedom helps no one, neither the woman nor the man. The objectification of the woman ensures that the man is left without an external source of recognition, one that can help them recognise their subjectivity. This results in a corroded sense of freedom, as the ‘conflation between subjectivity and objectivity means that this is a subject unable to know either’ (Yeatman, 2015: 8). Like other theorists such as Habermas, her target is the Cartesian self (see key term box, Chap. 11), an approach that has helped underpin domineering forms of relations between people and helped keep patriarchal modes of organisation intact. She blames it also for acting as a barrier to bridging the gap between individual and

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societal transformation, helping to hide the power of shared emotional experiences in fostering a sense of collective (in)justice. In the context of women’s rights, for example, an intersubjective account of freedom illustrates a way forward, one that resonates with heightened demands for equal rights: The conception of equal subjects has begun to seem intellectually plausible only because women’s demand for equality has achieved real social force. This material change makes the intersubjective vision appear as more than a utopian abstraction; it makes it seem a legitimate opponent of the traditional logic, of subject and object. (Benjamin, 1988: 221)

Because she aims at the bridge between individual and social change, she also bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and politics and, as such, offers much in the way of comparison. Her conception of freedom as intersubjectivity, however, reflects much more the positions of the later generation of the Frankfurt School, Habermas and Honneth, and their strongly intersubjectivist take on modernity and its pathologies. Honneth indeed has used Benjamin’s ideas in the development of his own overarching concept of recognition (see later in this chapter). But while sharing a Hegelian take on human relations, her analysis is much more grounded in psychoanalysis, which has led her to her ground-breaking take on the shared third. The shared third, for her, is the space within which freedom can flourish. The third is the ‘vantage point’ external to two subjects (Benjamin, 2004: 15) via which people can recognise themselves in another. This idea stemms from her work in therapeutic encounters. The therapeutic encounter provides a third space in which the interaction between the therapist and the patient can help resolve whatever trauma the patient is experiencing; the third offers a safe space in which the patient becomes free to consider their own subjectivity in a more expansive way. The act of witnessing offered by the therapist and their capacity to relate, recognise and respect the experiences and fragility of the patient offers a test case of intersubjective approaches to freedom: When we acknowledge to the patient the felt experience of having created the original injury we are in effect inviting the abandoned, shamed and wounded part to become more vocal. We thus avoid repeating the part where the original abuser or bystander adult denied the child’s reality. (Benjamin, 2009: 444)

She makes a strong argument about asserting the psychological in understandings of social transformation: Repairing the world and restoring the Third require a psychological understanding, too often spurned by philosophical and political theory, of the effects of collective trauma and what it means to overcome splitting and dissociation in relation to harming and suffering, power and helplessness, humiliation and indignity. (Benjamin, 2017: 246)

She also makes an important point that the functions of the Third, ‘representing a lawful world in which more than one can live’ (2017: 247), need to be institutionalised in order to realise the promise of intersubjective freedom. Without this, ‘we will continue to struggle against persecutory anxieties attached to the fear that Only one can live’.

Key Concept: Emotional Labour

In 1983 the sociologist Arlie Hochschild published her classic text The Managed Heart. The book has since become a classic of sociology as it illuminates the social significance of emotional life, and particularly the ways in which emotions are connected to issues of political economy. Her study is based on interviews with air stewardesses who were trained to effectively manage their emotions when dealing with others, their training ensuring that certain emotions would be minimised including anger and resentment while accentuating others such as generosity and positivity. Hochschild terms this ‘emotional labour’ which for the workers became so habitual that these manufactured emotions took on a more genuine quality over time. Hochschild situates such work in the broader context of the service economy, in which relational aspects of labour take precedence over task-based ones (Steinberg & Figart, 1999: 9). The service economy seeks to extract value from the ability of workers to manage their emotions in their interactions with their customers—emotions become a prized commodity. Influenced by theorists such as C. Wright Mills (see Chap. 2), who had previously discussed how people internalise forces of domination, Hochschild makes explicit comparisons between the experiences of the air stewardesses and the human cost of alienated labour explored in detail by Karl Marx in Capital (see Chap. 4). She finds common ground in both, but instead of the exploitation and alienation of physical labour, Hochschild talks of emotional labour and the ways in which modern workers and their interactions, self-­presentation and public performance are managed via their training and management. What Hochschild demonstrates is the damage such emotional labour causes service workers: they spoke of feeling empty and separate from their true selves. Her book also demonstrates the capitalist reach of commodification where the value of basic human emotions could be extracted to provide a more personable form of consumer service. It is not unusual to come across airlines that to this day look to gain competitive advantage by claiming their flight crew offer a more friendly service than their rivals. It was no different in the days when the book was produced, a context that Hochschild uses to frame the work of the air stewardesses: Like firms in other industries, airline companies are ranked according to the quality of service their personnel offer. Egon Ronay’s yearly Lucas Guide offers such a ranking; besides being sold in airports and drugstores and reported in newspapers, it is cited in management memoranda and passed down to those who train and supervise flight attendants. Because it influences consumers, airline companies use it in setting their criteria for successful job performance by a flight attendant. (Hochschild, [1983]2004: 6)

This kind of commodified emotional labour, where ‘the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance that departures and arrivals will be on time’ (Hochschild, [1983]2004: 4), is of immense significance to the airline company in terms of its financial benefit. But it also represents a form of deskilling a-la Harry Braverman (see Chap. 4) (which she acknowledges on page 119)—she argues that the loss of worker control over the work process, and the deskilling of work and devaluing of workers that come with it, also applies to emotional labour.

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Key Theorist: Axel Honneth (1949–)

Through publications such as Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory (Honneth, 2007), and Freedom’s right: the social foundations of democratic life (2014), the work of Axel Honneth has gained prominence in sociology, political science and philosophy. At one stage a student of Jürgen Habermas, he shares with his former teacher a commitment to continuing and updating the core activity of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, namely to develop coherent theoretical analyses of modern sources of conflict that can be appropriated by those engaged in social change. The current interest in Honneth’s work revolves primarily around his contribution to this version of social science and social philosophy. This takes the form of a theory of recognition, a comprehensive approach to re-connecting the micro and macro, structure and  agency levels of social thought. His ideas on recognition find strong parallels in the work of other prominent theorists such as Charles Taylor (1995) and Nancy Fraser (2000) (see Chap. 12). In summary, recognition theorists argue that the drive towards personal autonomy and self-realisation can only be achieved intersubjectively—through the process of recognition from significant others. This shift away from the Cartesian tradition in philosophy allows Honneth to explore traditional Frankfurt School themes like individual freedom within a relational context, leading him to develop an elaborate theory of social justice and conflict. Most importantly, it provides him with a normative grounding upon which to build a distinctive version of critical theory, one which connects everyday human concerns about identity and respect to broader struggles over exclusion and injustice. Honneth’s theoretical approach to social problems is a continuation of the traditional approach of Critical Theory, not least his commitment to illuminating people’s everyday lived experiences. Alongside this grounding in critical theory, Honneth has also been explicit in his association with the tradition of social philosophy, the tradition that stretches at least as far back as Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau and his Discourse on the origin of inequality. Honneth considers his recognition theory as aligned with the quest to re-invigorate the tradition of using philosophy to examine problems in society. He argues that critical theory should engage in diagnosing societal developments that can be viewed as ‘processes of decline, distortion, or even as “social pathologies”’ (Honneth, 2007: 25). There are a number of other significant aspects to Honneth’s work, and how it attempts to respond and build upon recent developments in philosophy, politics and social science. For one, he bridges the gap between what has come to be known as ‘recognition politics’ (Zurn, 2005: 89)—identity politics and multiculturalism—and what used to be known as political economy—the kinds of ideas generated by neo-Marxists and continued more recently in debates on neoliberalism. Another innovative approach taken by Honneth is his boundary-defying connections between the psychological and the sociological realms, both in terms of discipline boundaries and traditional gulfs between sets of ideas.

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Social Theory and Respect Benjamin’s work on the shared third illustrates the importance of relationality and relational emotions in how people interact and deal with one another. One of the more forceful relational emotions is respect. As a relational emotion, being respected by one’s peers and colleagues carries real value and brings with it a sense of belonging and worth that is difficult to define but nonetheless a prized commodity. Respect can have a significant bearing on one’s quality of life, impacting not only a person’s sense of self but also their status and reputation, careers and social lives. To be respected by others not only impacts a person’s economic value, it contributes to their emotional health and wellbeing. On the other hand, the experience of disrespect can have devastating consequences on people’s experiences, often accompanied by feelings of hurt, humiliation, anger as well as shame. Its significant and unwelcome presence in the family, work and community is reflected in popular culture but only became a focus of attention in social theory relatively recently. This is due to the work of Axel Honneth (see key theorist box), who via his overarching theory of recognition, has positioned respect as a major focus of social theory. Like Habermas, Axel Honneth has moved away from the isolated notion of the self. Honneth places much less emphasis on reason and rationality than Habermas, however, and more on the emotional aspects of social interaction. According to him, the variables that underpin social interaction cannot be fully understood. if they are defined solely in terms of the linguistic conditions of reaching understanding free from domination; rather, we must consider above all the fact that social recognition constitutes the normative expectations connected with our entering into communicative relationships. (Honneth, 2007: 71)

Honneth considers the emotional domain as both a core component of relational life and a worthy point of enquiry for social theory. According to Honneth, the emotional domain acts as the ‘missing psychological link’ (1995: 135), between experience of disrespect and the struggle for recognition. For him, the motivational function ‘can be performed by negative emotional reactions, such as being ashamed and enraged, feeling hurt or indignant. These comprise the psychological symptoms on the basis of which one can realize that one is being illegitimately denied social recognition’ (Honneth, 1995: 136). The key societal problem, according to Honneth, is the experience of various forms of disrespect, based on forms of mis-recognition—the term ‘disrespect’ importantly signifying the ‘denial of recognition’ for Honneth (1995: 131). His conception of recognition is designed to offer a theoretical ground from which to formulate a set of general principles of modern societies. According to him, his theory of recognition offers the best way to do this ‘as it established a link between the social causes of widespread feelings of injustice and the normative objectives of emancipatory movements’ (Honneth, in Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 113). A useful example of this is provided by Honneth in his account of domestic labour, and the way in which the disrespect afforded women in the home provides the basis for a more widespread struggle for recognition:

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From a historical viewpoint, the fact that child rearing and housework are not yet valued as equally worthy and necessary types of social labour can only be explained by pointing out the low self-esteem granted them in the context of a culture determined by male values. From a psychological viewpoint, this means that with the traditional distribution of roles, women have had few chances to receive the amount of social respect necessary to ensure a positive self-conception. (Honneth, 2007: 76)

By acknowledging the emotional domain and its significance to a relational analysis of social processes, Honneth legitimises researchers that take the intersubjective domain as their starting point. Although Habermas’ communicative action is very much a ‘relational’ theory of capitalist modernisation (see Chap. 3)), Honneth’s emphasis on recognition specifically places relationships at the centre of social inquiry, helping to shift what were previously considered ‘private’ (or at least individual) matters into a public arena. Most importantly, Honneth’s work suggests that interpersonal relationships, theoretically speaking, are a force to be reckoned with, and the intersubjective domain should not be underestimated nor reduced to questions of class or other ‘objective’ relations. With his theory of recognition, Honneth’s critical theory takes a turn to psychoanalysis, as such making a decisive move away from Habermas’ focus on language. Like the first generation of Critical Theory, Honneth seeks a psychoanalytic conception of the self, one that can account for the emotional responses of individuals to their social existence. It provides Critical Theory with ‘a concept of the human being that is as realistic and close to the phenomena as possible’ (Honneth, 2012: 195). Psychoanalysis offers a route into people’s ‘unconscious, non-rational attachments’ (ibid), and hence a route into the experiential and emotional side of human existence, the ways in which people both interpret and respond to life events, including family, work and their dealings with public and private institutions. There have been detractors, most notably in the worlds of social philosophy, critical and feminist theory. Lois McNay, in her book Against recognition (2008), critiques Honneth on the grounds that his ‘relational’ view of self-formation and social conflict precludes more structural understandings of power. While not against notions of recognition per se, she argues that the work of Pierre Bourdieu (see Chap. 11) offers a more effective sociology of power relations, compared to Honneth’s theory. Another related criticism focuses on what some view as Honneth’s ‘psychologization’ of social pathologies. Key among his critics in this regard is Nancy Fraser (in Fraser and Honneth, 2003), who argues that this approach leads to: a reduction of oppression to individual attitudes; an over-dependence on empirical information drawn from subjective perceptions and an over-reliance on what she considers to be inherently sectarian perceptions of self-realisation (Thompson, 2006: 31–39). In defence of Honneth, theoretical engagement between psychology and sociology (among other social science disciplines) was actively encouraged in earlier generations of Critical Theory, an inter-disciplinary approach manifested in works such as The authoritarian personality and One dimensional man. As Thompson puts it (2006: 40), the use of psychological theories is not a problem in itself, but rather ‘unreliable’ psychological theories.

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Social Theory Applied: Recognition Theory as Social Research

Since Honneth’s work started to attract attention in the late 1990s, there have been numerous applications of his work on recognition and respect. Honneth’s theory, for example, has been applied in childhood studies, specifically in relation to children’s participation. Thomas (2012) argues that the concept of recognition is very useful to understanding the world of children, with the caveat that the theory comes with an ‘inherent bias against children’s agency, sociality and citizenship’. Another example of research on recognition is O’Neill et  al.’s (2012) edited collection, which uses recognition theory to investigate the dynamics of social conflict as played out in fields such as marriage, religion, crime, immigration and ethno-nationalism in Northern Ireland. A guiding theme throughout the book is that intersubjective recognition and the lack of it is a core source of conflict in modern societies, an approach to conflict that is often overlooked in other theories. Relations of recognition, according to Smith, are a ‘crucial dimension of social reproduction and historical change’ (Smith, 2012: 89). Smith takes this variable and puts it to work in the world of work. Workplace recognition is a highly charged test case for such an explanatory approach— one that values the challenges of work relationships between staff as much as it does the more traditional focus on vertical axes of power between staff and management. The workplace is also the focus of Anna’s study of everyday intercultural recognition (Anna, 2018), which examines the ‘dynamics of difference’ in everyday mundane encounters, influenced by the intersubjectivity of symbolic interactionists such as Goffman and Mead as well as Honneth. She argues (2012: 242) that struggles for economic redistribution among Pacific Islanders in Australia are best interpreted within the experience of social disrespect, workplace (mis)recognition having major consequences for one’s sense of self-respect and sense of worth in the community. The inter-relation between class and ethnicity at play in Anna’s work offers a powerful perspective on the damage that a lack of recognition and respect can do to people. Similar themes are at work in a special edition of the journal Distinktion entitled ‘Recognition, social invisibility and disrespect’ (Carleheden et  al., 2012). The nature of social invisibility, a topic often ignored in intellectual circles, has achieved some level of visibility for itself in academic research. Much of this is a result of Honneth’s work on recognition, whose ideas are brought to bear in a range of empirical fields in the special edition, such as the sociology of work, education and pedagogy, critical weight studies and political science. A strong case is built for social invisibility as a phenomenon to be taken seriously: To make people disappear by refusing to take notice of them, by demonstratively seeing through them, is a form of disrespect to be distinguished from outright disrespect in the form of being the object of stigmatizing and devaluating attitudes, gestures, or actions. (Carleheden et al., 2012: 2)

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Social Theory and Shame While respect as a relational emotion is a more recent topic in social theory, other emotions have occupied a similar position in the field for considerably longer. Shame, for example, has been on the radar of social theory for a long time, and has been the focus of attention of thinkers such as Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. What Elias calls ‘the civilising process’ (Elias, 1982) relies heavily on the emotional strength of shame to exert control over individuals. In particular it relies on shame over the body and bodily functions, over sexuality and undesirable emotions such as aggression as well as the desire for ‘civilised’ manners to flourish. Shame in turn is dependent on the body, not only in terms of basic functions as above but also due to its potential to derail the civilising process and the kinds of self-constraint needed for someone to be considered civilised. The importance of shame to the civilising process was for Elias on the same level as rationalisation in Western societies. As he put it, ‘no less characteristic of a civilizing process than “rationalization” is the peculiar moulding of the drive economy that we call “shame” and “repugnance” or “embarrassment”’ (Elias, 1982: 292). The civilising process effectively buries shame underground, decreasing society’s threshold level for shame, while also making it more prominent as a form of social control (Scheff, 2000: 89). Shame as a control mechanism is evident in the changing norms governing table manners and dining etiquette, as well as various facets of bodily representation, such as body functions and emotional expression. In Elias’s telling of the civilising process, shame and especially the fear of shame is a highly effective regulator of moral discipline. Other notable theoretical engagements with shame include Erving Goffman’s work on stigma and performativity (see Chap. 9) and the cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas, who explored the relations between the body and shame (see Chap. 11). This interest in shame from a socio-theoretical standpoint has spread to studies of social class, which has witnessed a more general ‘emotional turn’ as a way to better understand class and its effects on people’s lives. A strong theme in this turn has been on uncovering the ‘hidden injuries of class’ as identified in Sennett and Cobb’s ground-breaking book of the same name (1973). Their study illustrates the subtle but hurtful ways in which classed experiences expose people, especially those from less advantaged backgrounds, to intense and persistent feelings of shame. This is evident in their account of schooling where working-class pupils are subject to neglect and disrespect. Apart from the chosen few, boys in class act as though they were serving time, as though schoolwork and classes had become something to wait out, a blank space in their lives they hope to survive. (Sennett and Cobb, 1973: 82–83)

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For these students, the classed nature of the education system subjects them to a world of emotional pain, where everyday school life ‘means running a gauntlet of shame and embarrassment every day’ (Scheff, 2000: 91). This interest in the emotional impacts of class has now become a consistent theme in the research literature. Authors such as Loveday (2016), Reay (2005) and Skeggs (1997) have pointed to the emotional consequences of classed experience, and in particular shame. These all emphasise how shame (as well as other emotions such as pride and anger) is at the centre of classed identities, going so far as to argue for emotions like shame as ‘classed’ processes (Skeggs, 1997). Savage in Social class in the 21st century (2015) alludes to how emotions such as shame are part of the working-class world and are key to forms of class subjugation (Savage, 2015: 335). The detail of this interplay between shame and social class is worthy of further attention. For example, Reay (2005: 923) refers to the type of shame that working-­ class students in higher education have to contend with. These students had to live with the potential ‘shame of over-reaching and failing’, of not being good enough, thereby confirming some of their worst fears of their position in the world. This fear of shame that ‘haunts working-class relationships to education’ (Reay: 2005: 923) can only be a time-consuming and energy-draining activity that detracts from the more positive engagements with the education system. This focus on the interrelation between class and emotional life is a key development in modern social theory as it seeks to uncover the pathologies of classed existence in the supposedly private and personal sphere of classed subjects. Nevertheless, with such a development, there is the danger of a form of sociological reductionism overshadowing this interdisciplinary endeavour. There has been a tendency in the theory on social class to reduce emotions such as shame, but also others such as humiliation and pride, to sociological factors ‘rather than analysed in their own right as relatively autonomous from the social’ (Vogler, 2000, 21). Some of the reason for this tendency may be traced back to the work of Rom Harré (1986), who, argued that ‘emotions exist only through reciprocal exchanges in social encounters’ (Clarke, 2003: 145). However, if emotions such as shame are the effects of class positioning (or other forms of power differential, such as race and gender), then it is difficult to understand shame outside of these contexts: there is a denial of the potential for shame as existing prior to class divisions/cultural positioning. As Sayer put it (2005: 950), feelings associated with class such as envy, resentment, compassion, contempt, shame, pride, deference and condescension are evaluative responses to particular properties of class inequalities and relations. They are influenced but not predetermined by position within the social field.

If it is accepted that the capacity for shame exists outside the dimensions of class, then the specific dimensions of shame should be accounted for. Like respect, much of the evidence strongly indicates that shame is a relational process—that is, it exists only in relation to others. If class is not the only context for emotions such as

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shame, it must then be acknowledged that such emotions are relational in more ways than one; they are, for example, interpersonal as well as tied to social position. A similar point is made by Sayer (2005: 950), who argues that all one-sided explanations of the power of emotions (such as discourse or culture) are ‘radically incomplete’. So, while shame offers a strong example of an emotion that social theory can constructively engage with, especially from a relational perspective, it also offers a reminder that theory should tread carefully when dealing with such a complex field as emotions and emotional experiences: it is best to embrace the complexity rather than search for convenient theoretical solutions.

Social Theory and Trust Alongside respect and shame, trust is another relational emotion of significance to social theory and has been a topic of interest since Georg Simmel (1858–1918). This long-standing focus on trust was driven by a sociological interest in the question of social solidarity and the capacity of society to organise and manage itself. In the discipline of sociology, trust is seen as ‘co-extensive with the very existence of a social and political order’ (Misztal, 1992: 7). This importance was illustrated brilliantly by Simmel in his classic text The Philosophy of Money ([1900]1978). Money gained its power and significance according to Simmel through trust: ‘money transaction would collapse without trust’ (Simmel, [1900]1978: 178–79); money needs trust to do its exchange work for it—it requires people to trust that other people, including those in government and the banking sector, will honour the exchange value symbolised by the money transaction. There is a significant interpersonal aspect in trust. Trust in other people is for Simmel as important a factor as trust in abstract concepts like money or institutions such as the church: Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong as or stronger than rational proof or personal observation. (Simmel, 1978: 179)

Simmel is a good example of how the discipline of sociology has sought out the sphere of trust and acknowledged its contribution to, for example, studies of social integration and socialisation. This interest acknowledges the fact that trust is part of the basic ‘operating system’ of society which, if tampered with, can damage the social order as well as its capacity to manage itself. As a consequence, trust is invested with a considerable degree of power, as evident in social institutions such as religion, politics, health and education. These institutions are able to maintain positions of authority and respect due to the levels of trust they command from people. This relation between institutional power and trust becomes only too clear once a breakdown in trust occurs, a breakdown that can very quickly corrode whatever

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legitimacy was invested in the institution. This was apparent for example in the declining levels of public trust in banks and the banking sector since the 2008 economic crash, which saw greed, corruption and mismanagement fuel a disastrous financial firestorm on a global level. It is also evident in the swift fall from grace of the Catholic Church and its hegemonic sway over the citizens of the Republic of Ireland, a country that up until the 1990s saw high levels of church attendance and a default deference to institutional authority. Since a series of abuse scandals involving priests made headline news in the 1990s, alongside horrifying stories of child neglect and the long-standing shaming of ‘unmarried mothers’, the ‘moral monopoly’ of the Catholic Church (Inglis, 1998) and its influence over culture and attitudes has been in freefall. This collapse of religious hegemony is starkly evident in the passing of laws first of all allowing divorce, and since then same-sex marriage as well as abortion. All of these rights would have been unthinkable in the 1980s, which illustrates among other things that the relation between power and trust is a very fragile one. The situation in Ireland was not helped by institutional hubris, by the sense that the Church’s power was all-encompassing. As well as the factors mentioned above, trust at a local level was gradually, if silently, eroded by the regrettable decision of the Church to move abusive priests to other parishes as if the crimes never occurred. This grave abuse of trust helped to produce in turn a culture of mistrust among the population, creating a sense of suspicion which gradually eroded Church authority and legitimacy. An institution that once wielded its power in every facet of Irish society has now become a shadow of its former self (Mulholland, 2019). This theme of trust as a mechanism of social order was a key element of the work of another social theorist, Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). In the 1960s Luhmann produced his book Trust (much later translated into English), and trust became an interconnected theme in much of his later work. His interest in trust stemmed from his desire to comprehend the ways in which society continues to function under ever-increasing levels of complexity. Trust, according to Luhmann, is an essential component in a system geared towards complexity, as it works to reduce this social complexity by increasing the ‘tolerance of uncertainty’ (Luhmann, 1979: 150). The importance of trust can be seen in his later writing on autopoietic systems. Here Luhmann makes the claim that modern society is comprised of a differentiation of interaction and society. The increasing differentiation of society and interaction that developed in the twentieth century demands that relations between people—the interaction level—be stable and of a moral character. But because modern society had moved on from a reliance on interpersonal forms of trust evident in smaller traditional societies, what is needed is a ‘system of trust’ (Misztal, 1992, 10). In Trust, Luhmann makes some insightful arguments about the relation between trust and forms of risk, and what the future may hold for this relation, a prediction that in the twenty-first century looks increasingly prophetic. Luhmann argues that trust and risk are interrelated: ‘trust is based on a circular relation between risk and action, both being complementary requirements’ (Luhmann, 2000: 101). This connection becomes ever more significant in a society increasingly characterised by, among other things, the ‘replacement of danger by risk’ (Luhmann, 2000: 106). Luhmann was concerned about this shift to a society based on risk and its effects on

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trust, precisely because risk-taking requires trust. But this shift to risk brings with it a troubling consequence, as ‘we are likely to enter sooner or later into the vicious circle of not risking trust, losing possibilities of rational action, losing confidence in the system, and so on being that much less prepared to risk trust at all’ (Luhmann, 2000: 106). This avoidance of trust has become evident in relation to public sector professionals, a development that offers supports for Luhmann’s thesis. It is evident that trust in public service professions in countries such as the UK has been in decline (Baxter, 2016). This mistrust has resulted in lower levels of trust invested in institutions such as hospitals, care homes and schools. This trust avoidance is reflected in the high level of regulatory scrutiny of the public sector, which itself is a consequence of how low levels of trust in institutions and professions attract the classification of ‘high risk’. This has produced a breeding ground for juridification to creep in (see Chap. 3), and what juridification does in this context is to magnify the bond between trust and risk (Murphy, 2020). Trust itself becomes an increasingly risky activity when faced with the potential threat of litigation, as well as financial and reputational damage that would ensue. This is what Luhmann was referring to with the phrase ‘the vicious circle of not risking trust’, with trust avoidance resulting in public sector professionals and the public ‘losing possibilities of rational action, losing confidence in the system, and so on being that much less prepared to risk trust at all’ (Luhmann, 2000: 106). Luhmann suggests that this form of risk avoidance is a ‘new type of anxiety’ about the future, an anxiety fuelled by growing suspicion and mistrust between the public and those that are employed to serve them. This situation is exacerbated by the ubiquitous nature of the ‘blame game’ (see Chap. 3) in public life, a game that seeks to cover the tracks of those in power (through spin doctoring and scapegoating in particular) but also has the unfortunate consequence of creating more opportunities for this new type of anxiety to take hold in public service. Consequences such as these illuminate the importance of emotional life for sectors such as governance, work and social relations, an importance that has all too easily been overlooked or at best marginalised in discussions over social change. When one explores issues such as trust, shame and respect more deeply, this importance becomes more apparent, their embeddedness in social practices more obvious. In the context of a worldwide pandemic like Covid 19 for example, these relational emotions are never too far from the surface when it comes to discussions of appropriate policy responses alongside agreed standards of social behaviour. This suggests that further critical engagement should take place in relation to emotional life and the way in which emotions can act as both drivers of, and reactors to, social transformation.

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In Summary Psychoanalysis and Social Theory  A recurring influence on twentieth-century social theory was the field of psychoanalysis. This was especially the case with the Frankfurt School, members of which took the ideas of Sigmund Freud and applied them to an analysis of capitalist commodification and its discontents. Freud’s revolutionary theories of drives, passions and the unconscious—elements of the self which guided so much emotional content—allowed theorists such as Herbert Marcuse to explore people’s responses to political movements such as fascism as well as capitalist forms of exploitation. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate  The debate, which took place in the magazine Dissent, between 1955 and 1956 revolved around the place of Freud’s ideas in theories of contemporary social transformation and the struggle for revolutionary struggle. Marcuse attacked Eric Fromm for de-emphasising the importance of instinctual drives—a cornerstone of Freud’s thought—as a source of radical change. This historical spat over the legacy of Freud and the place of emotions in social theory illustrates the high significance attached to particular theoretical conceptions of social practices and also the highly politicised nature of these conceptions. The Politics of Desire and the Capitalist Machine  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that desire and society operate as each other’s nemesis, and as a result, society aims to repress desire as it represents a serious threat to social order. Under capitalism, desire is re-channelled into areas that suppress its creative impulses. At the same time, what they call the schizo subject can harness the revolutionary potential of pent-up desire, and provide a radical undermining of the capitalist machine. The Shared Third  Borrowing ideas from psychoanalysis as well as the works of Hegel, Jessica Benjamin developed the concept of the ‘shared third’. This is the intersubjective emotional space through which two individuals can recognise themselves in each other. Its importance for social theory rests on the mode of freedom and justice that Benjamin develops from the shared third, arguing that the shared third is where freedom can flourish. The Significance of Respect  Axel Honneth’s work on respect has been an important development in the field of Critical Theory. While Habermas viewed the key pathology of capitalist modernisation as the distortion of communication, Honneth instead argues that it is the emotional consequences of exploitation and subordination, specifically in the form of dis-respect, which represents the modern form of social injustice. According to Honneth, the denial of recognition which results from the existence of disrespect points to the intersubjective domain as a force to be reckoned with in people’s lives.

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Social Theory and Shame  Emotions have taken on greater significance in studies of social class and its effects. The emotion of shame, in particular, has attracted the attention of numerous researchers in his field, who wish to take account of the pathological side effects of living in a class-based society. Studies of the working class suggest that feelings of shame act as a key hidden injury of classed identities. Social Theory and Trust  Trust is another relational emotion that has featured heavily in the social theory of emotions since the time of Georg Simmel. Authors such as Niklas Luhmann have taken seriously the significance of trust as a mechanism of social integration, communication and stratification. The breakdown in trust can have serious consequences for social life, as evident in the increasing levels of suspicion and delegitimation of front-line professionals in sectors such as health and social care. Questions Honneth argues that the experience of disrespect is the key societal problem. Is there sufficient evidence to support this claim, in your opinion? Arlie Hochschild developed the notion of ‘emotional labour’: Can you think of examples of emotional labour which could be considered unjust? Does society function, following Luhmann, on a system of trust? Provide detail of the existence of trust and its function in society. Further Reading Burkitt, I. (2014). Emotions and Social Relations. London: Sage. An intersubjective account of emotions and their social embeddedness, which engages with subjects such as the body, labour and reason to make a case for emotions as patterns of relationship between self and others and between self and world. Zurn, C. (2015). Axel Honneth (Key Contemporary Thinkers). Cambridge: Polity Press. A detailed account of the main themes in the work of Axel Honneth, including individual and social struggles for recognition, the diagnosis of social pathologies and the relation between freedom and recognition, Also includes a thoughtful analysis of the Fraser-Honneth debate over recognition and redistribution (see Chap. 12). Sztompka, P. (2008). Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Presents an argument in favour of trust, ‘a soft variable’, as a key component of modern societies. Relates the theory to empirical analyses drawn from the experience of post-Soviet societies in Eastern Europe. Guru, G. (ed.) (2009). Humiliation: Claims and Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An edited collection providing a comparative perspective on different experiences of humiliation, often considered a close cousin of shame, in the state of India. Experiences include the humiliation of workers in the Bombay textile strike and caste-based humiliation.

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References Adorno, T. (1982). Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda. In A.  Arato & E. Gebhardt (Eds.), The Frankfurt School Reader. Continuum. Adorno, T., et al. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Norton. Anna, B. (2018). Honneth and Everyday Intercultural (Mis)recognition: Work, Marginalisation and Integration. Palgrave. Baxter, J. (2016). School Governance: Policy, Politics and Practices. Policy Press. Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love. Pantheon Books. Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73, 5–47. Benjamin, J. (2009). Psychoanalytic Controversies: A Relational Psychoanalysis Perspective on the Necessity of Acknowledging Failure in Order to Restore the Facilitating and Containing Features of the Intersubjective Relationship (the Shared Third). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 441–450. Benjamin, J. (2017). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Routledge. Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Guildford Press. Carleheden, M., Heidegren, C.-G., & Willig, R. (2012). Recognition, Social Invisibility, and Disrespect. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13(1), 1–3. Clarke, S. (2003). Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Interpretation of Emotion. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(2), 145–163. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti Oedipus. University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. Elias, N. (1982[1939]). The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Blackwell. Fraser, N. (2000). Rethinking Recognition. New Left Review, 3, 107–120. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Verso. Friedman, L. (2013). The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet. Columbia University Press. Fromm, E. (1989). Pychoanalysis and Sociology. In S.  Bronner & D.  Kellner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (pp. 37–39). Routledge. Harré, R. (Ed.). (1986). The Social Construction of Emotions. Bail Blackwell. Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. University of California Press. Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2012). The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2014). Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Polity Press. Inglis, T. (1998). Moral Monopoly: Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. University College Dublin Press. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. John Hopkins University Press. Loveday, V. (2016). Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education. Sociology, 50(6), 1140–1155. Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and Power. Wiley. Luhmann, N. (2000). Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp.  94–107). University of Oxford Press. Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilisation. Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. Beacon Press. McNay, L. (2008). Against Recognition. Polity Press.

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Misztal, B. (1992). The Notion of Trust in Social Theory. Policy, Organisation and Society, 5(1), 6–15. Mulholland, P. (2019). Love’s Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland. Peter Lang. Murphy, M. (2020). Taking Education to Account? The Limits of Law in Institutional and Professional Practice. Journal of Education Policy (Online first). O’Neill, S., & Smith, N. (Eds.). (2012). Recognition Theory as Social Research. Palgrave. Reay, D. (2005). Beyond Consciousness? The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. Sociology, 39(5), 911–928. Reay, D., David, M., & Ball, S. (2005). Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education. Trentham Books. Savage, M. (2015). Social Class in the 21st Century. Pelican Books. Sayer, A. (2005). Class, Moral Worth and Recognition. Sociology, 39(5), 947–963. Scheff, T. (2000). Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory. Sociological Theory, 18(1), 84–99. Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. (1973). The Hidden Injuries of Class. W. W. Norton & Company. Simmel, G. (1978[1900]). The Philosophy of Money. Routledge. Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. Sage. Smith, N. (2012). Work as a Sphere of Norms, Paradoxes and Ideologies of Recognition. In S. O’Neill & N. Smith (Eds.), Recognition Theory as Social Research (pp. 87–108). Palgrave. Steinberg, R., & Figart, D. (1999). Emotional Labor Since the Managed Heart. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 56, 8–26. Taylor, C. (1995). The Politics of Recognition. In C.  Taylor (Ed.), Philosophical Arguments. Harvard University Press. Thomas, N. (2012). Love, Rights and Solidarity: Studying Children’s Participation Using Honneth’s Theory of Recognition. Childhood, 19(4), 453–466. Thompson, S. (2006). The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. Polity Press. Vogler, C. (2000). Social Identity and Emotion: The Meaning of Psychoanalysis and Sociology. The Sociological Review, 48(1), 19–42. Yeatman, A. (2015). A Two-Person Conception of Freedom: The Significance of Jessica Benjamin’s Idea of Intersubjectivity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(1), 3–23. Zurn, C. (2005). Recognition, Redistribution, and Democracy: Dilemmas of Honneth’s Critical Social Theory. European Journal of Philosophy, 13(1), 89–126.

The Body

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Introduction The highly visualised experience of modern society brings with it an overwhelming focus on the human body in social life. The advent of television, cinema and photography in the twentieth century was one thing, but the internet and associated media technologies have made it a real challenge to escape the social gaze in the twenty-first century. More than ever before, the body has become commercialised and commodified, and the body is subject to intense scrutiny and surveillance. Partly as a result, the body has become a key site of political struggle. This new body politics has taken different forms: struggles over the representation of the female body; judgements over body size and shape, heated debates over health, food consumption and the dieting industry; racialised assumptions regarding the bodies of people of colour; resistance to gendered norms and heteronormativity; and the rights of trans people. Alongside this, and partly as a consequence of it, the body has recently become a core focus of social theory and has been welcomed as a useful counterpoint to ‘natural’ and biologically essentialist views of bodies. This focus has historical precedents, especially in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who developed his idea of the body-subject to counter the received wisdom of Cartesianism (see key term box). Since then, social theorists have endeavoured to explore how the body in various ways is shaped by external social forces. At the forefront of this work is Michel Foucault’s theory of bio-politics, focusing on the ways in which bodies become labelled and marginalised—for example, ‘disabled’, ‘abnormal’ and so on. The body is also of central concern to Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias’ concepts of habitus and is a key political battleground in the work of various feminist authors, including Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young, who to some extent build on the ground-breaking work of Simone de Beauvoir in her ground-breaking book The second sex. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to some of these debates; it is structured to cover the following topics specifically: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_11

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• Mary Douglas’ work on the body from an anthropological perspective • Foucault’s more disciplinary approach to bodies and bio-power • Two separate approaches to the concept of Habitus (Bourdieu and Elias) placed side by side for comparison purposes • Key theories on the politics of the body: gender (Butler) and sexuality (queer theory)

The Body as a Cultural Text A key influence on theories of the body is the discipline of Anthropology. Anthropology focuses on the body as much as it did on culture, especially via the work of Mary Douglas (1921–2007), who cast the body as a form of cultural text, a representation and reflection of wider societal norms and concerns. Her work on the caste system in India influenced her thinking in this regard—the body as a representation of bounded systems came from these studies. The caste in Douglas’ study would police and regulate the functions and aesthetic of the body as a tool in its efforts to maintain its boundaries between castes, which were often quite strict. The boundaries of the body ‘can represent any boundaries which are threatened and precarious’ (Douglas, 1966: 115). In this world, items such as food, body products and clothes, all came to take on added significance as the body is held up as a site of signification for social practices more generally. Following Emile Durkheim, Douglas viewed the distinction between the sacred and the profane as a core component of societies and universal to all religions. This distinction revolved around ideas, values and objects that are considered worthy of respect and protection, and those objects, ideas and values that represented a danger to these worthy ‘sacred’ artefacts—the latter needing careful management. With the secularisation of society, religious ceremonies lost their function as the regulator of this distinction, the body and associated beliefs replacing it in the twentieth century. In Douglas’ words, the scared and the profane have become translated into notions of purity and danger, or between the clean and pure and the dirty and polluted. The body according to Douglas has become the focal point of this distinction, the dirty and polluted aspects of bodies constituting ‘matter-out-of-place’ which civilised societies need protection from. Taboos become generated to manage and patrol the boundaries between these bodily forms and processes (Douglas, 1966). From this perspective, one can see how such understandings have impacted contemporary approaches to the body. Witness for example the responses to the spread of HIV in the 1980s. A stark distinction was made in much of the reporting between those who had contracted HIV via blood transfusions, such as haemophiliacs, and those who contacted it via sex or drug use. The bodies of the former were treated as pure while the bodies of the latter were seen as polluted, ones that required intense scrutiny and regulation. This could be viewed as a way that society reacts to perceived threats (in this case, contamination), but it can also be viewed as a form of moral policing, of separating the deserving from the undeserving. The taboos about homosexuality, gay sex and hard drug use meant that HIV sufferers were viewed as profane or polluting persons who developed ‘some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone’ (Douglas, 1970: 4).

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The perceived threat of HIV-infected bodies was compounded by the importance placed on bodily orifices as a site of body policing. Orifices and the bodily fluid/ substances associated with them (blood, semen, urine, faeces) are extremely difficult to police and regulate and therefore represent dangerous parts of the body for modern society. These are ‘matter out of place’ and as such, constitute pollutants to social life and the civilised order of things. The blood-semen association of HIVinfested homosexual bodies made these especially dangerous and threatening to the moral boundaries of heterosexual life. The example of HIV illustrates how Douglas’ work also speaks to broader social distinctions and inequalities such as gay/straight, and how the body is used to enforce these norms. Another useful example of this is menstruation. Female menstruation has been a topic in the feminist literature for quite some time and for good reason, given how the female body and its orifices have been held up to scrutiny and been subject to social taboos. While the level and strength of taboo differs from country to country, social discomfort over menstruation has proven remarkably resilient in the face of modernity. This cannot be simply due to the level of additional care required to manage it at a basic bodily level; Douglas’ purity and danger distinction ring true when it comes to the modern unease and shame that so often accompanies discourse over menstruation. Cleanliness and hygiene are often juxtaposed with menstruating women, blood still being viewed as a social pollutant and a taboo that society treats as a threat. The issue of menstruation, however, arguably pales in comparison to the polluting nature of the overweight and obese body. This is especially the case in relation to the female body, which since Susie Orbach’s book, Fat is a feminist issue (Orbach, 1978), has been conceptualised as subject to the powerful forces of patriarchy. The decades that have passed since the publication of this book have seen a confirmation that women’s bodies and their eating habits provoke policing behaviour and a determination to clearly demarcate between the pure and polluted body form. This is joined by an associated diet and health industry eager to feed off this demarcation, a combined professional/commercial desire to lay claim to the ‘ideal’ type of body shape and food consumption. While there have been persistent critiques of fat shaming since Orbach’s time, the twenty-first century has witnessed if anything an exacerbation of this policing function. Douglas’ take on the body as cultural text is never more prescient when faced with the onslaught of bodily perfection as delivered via social media as well as traditional forms of mass communication such as TV and film. Worryingly, this has been cited as a key reason in the rise of mental health problems and eating disorders among young girls, the force of social pressure and the shame of exclusion increasingly fuelled by a seemingly inescapable virtual network of body police. Another key aspect of this policing is conducted by peers, a regulatory force made increasingly visible through online media. Control over idealised body shapes, diet and healthy lifestyles is certainly impacted by professional and commercial interests (and here again one witnesses the rise of celebrity culture as a force in people’s lives, for good or bad), but there is also a strong interpersonal component that should be considered when accounting for the force of shame and the sense of danger. Fat shaming, for example, while socially evident, is also a malign presence in people’s own personal lives, with families and network of friends and associates often reinforcing the purity/danger distinction.

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This interpersonal or intersubjective (see key term box, Chap. 9) input into body policing is one aspect of Douglas’s anthropological work that could be further elaborated: in what ways does culture intersect with human relations in the work of body and other forms of policing? Another aspect that deserves further consideration is the reaches of such policing. The twenty-first century has seen a visceral backlash against the control of women’s bodies: a strong but dispersed social movement has sprung up which has seriously questioned both the veracity and the effects of the anti-obesity agenda. This is joined by sustained efforts to curb excessive commercial advertising that targets women and their appearance. This backlash, aided by the virtual public sphere of social media, suggests that the admittedly powerful forces of culture have their limits. Key Concept: Embodiment

To understand what embodiment means, it is useful to contrast it with disembodied approaches to theorising. Such an approach was common in classical forms of social theory, which adopted some of the assumptions underpinning Cartesianism. Cartesianism posits a strict mind/body dichotomy, while valorising the mind as the mark of humanity (and distinguishing it from other animal forms). Descarte’s famous dictum ‘I think therefore I am’ represents Cartesianism in brief: the body is secondary when it comes to engaging and thinking about the world. The mind is all-powerful and is the mechanism via which we engage with the external world, not the body. This way of viewing the rational thinking person and the ways in which external forces impact it, inevitably results in the body being overlooked at best, or at worst ignored completely. It is not quite the case that classical social theory abandoned the body to the logic of Descartes; rather the body was as Shilling (1997) puts it, as ‘absent presence’ (to use the jargon of psychoanalysis). While under-­theorised and unacknowledged as a force in its own right, the body was part and parcel of the ideas developed by Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Since that time, the body has grown in status as a theoretical site of interest (see the works of Elias, Bourdieu, Butler, Foucault and others), which is a welcome development and helped save its study from the over-reach of neuroscience and biological determinism. The study of the body has shaken off this ‘absent presence’ tag and has branched off into two distinct but overlapping approaches. The first approach studies the body as an object of social control, one which is subject to disciplinary practices—Foucault and Elias’s work falls more into this category. The second approach is embodiment, which is less concerned with this objectification of the body and rejects the mind over body approach favoured by Cartesianism. The way in which society and biology interact to shape the body is crucial to the concept of embodiment. Embodiment represents a common concern with how the bodily bases of people’s actions and interactions are socially constructed in different ways. This view presupposes that conventional views of the body as ‘simply biological’ are inaccurate, and suggests instead that a satisfactory analysis of human embodiment requires an appreciation of how our fleshly physicality is moulded by social as well as ‘natural’ processes. (Shilling, 1997: 65)

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Embodiment is used to denote the body as a socially structured site, one in which physicality has been socialised in various ways. This is a distinct turn away from Cartesianism with its rigid split between subject and object, cognitive thought and physical sense. This notion of embodiment has found favour in many aspects of social theory, for example in postcolonial writing —authors such as Franz Fanon show how depictions of black sexuality as heightened virility were a colonialist construction to justify slavery. This went hand in hand with the depiction of Africans as primitive and prone to violence and incorporated a view of basic human activities such as sex as less than civilised.

Throwing Like a Girl: Gender and the Body Alongside Anthropology, Phenomenology (see key term box, Chap 8) has proven a key influence on theories of the body. A key influence on the turn to embodiment is the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), whose phenomenological approach to the study of perception was a rejection of the Cartesian conception of the body. He positioned his own work against the Cartesian model which considered the individual self as a subject spectating on an external objective world. For MerleauPonty the embodied nature of perceptions means that individuals engage with and reflect on the world through their bodies (Merleau-Ponty. 2001[1962]). Humans are ‘beings in the world’, not outside the world looking in via an externally privileged gaze. People make sense of the world through their senses, and not just their visual sense: people engage practically with their external contexts and develop purpose and direction for their actions as a result. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is best explained via his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that human consciousness is ‘for-itself’ and unburdened by the body. The existential free-floating idea of consciousness as expressed by Sartre ignored the role of the body in rooting consciousness in the world (Morrison, 2009: 498). MerleauPonty uses the example of climbing in the Alps to illustrate this: while the mind may make assumptions about how easy or otherwise navigating the Alps might be, this becomes an irrelevance when faced with the physical demands on the body—thoughts of freedom are constrained by their own embodiment. There is a ‘co-penetration that exists between subject and world’ that cannot be denied (Moya, 2014: 1). The phenomenological theory of Merleau-Ponty is a major influence on Iris Marion Young’s most famous idea (Young, 1980). Her paper Throwing like a girl illustrates this phenomenological influence through her focus on bodily practices. She details the extent to which bodily functions represent forms of gender socialisation. On top of that, she is keen to stress that these bodily practices represent not just socialisation but a form of injustice; boys and men are able to embrace forms of ‘subjectivity, autonomy and creativity’ that remain out of bounds for girls and women (Young, 1980: 144). In this paper she details research showing remarkable differences between boys and girls when it comes to the activity of throwing. Previous research in this field of study has positioned biology as the main determinant of this difference—that

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approaches to throwing are a result of genetic differences between the sexes, as they are evident at a young age. Young disagrees with this theory, instead arguing that such differences are the result of processes of embodiment, and throwing is just one small example of this process. Girls, through engaging with patriarchy, learn how to walk like a girl, how to tilt their heads like a girl, how to stand and sit like a girl, how to gesture like a girl. They learn to associate timidity and fragility with femininity. Boys on the other hand are taught to be more open, more spatially confident, more active in their approach to the external world and less reactive. Young acknowledges the influence of Simone De Beauvoir on her analysis while also offering a critical account of her ideas. According to Young, De Beauvoir fails to give a place to the status and orientation of the woman’s body as relating to its surroundings in living action. When de Beauvoir does talk about the woman’s bodily being and her physical relation to her surroundings, she tends to focus on the more evident facts of a woman’s physiology. She discusses how women experience the body as a burden, how the hormonal and physiological changes the body undergoes at puberty, during menstruation and pregnancy, are felt to be fearful and mysterious, and claims that these phenomena weigh down the woman’s existence by tying her to nature, immanence, and the requirements of the species at the expense of her own individuality. (Young, 1980: 139)

Young’s critique is based on De Beauvoir’s inability to fully comprehend the learnt spatial conditions for women’s existence. She wants to counteract this position by engaging with issues of ‘feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space’ (ibid). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, she argues that, when it comes to spatial comportment, ‘women lives her body as object as well as subject’ (1980: 153). Here we see the intersection between feminist theory and phenomenology. The objectification of women in patriarchal society is guaranteed through the dominance of the male gaze: ‘She gazes at it in the mirror, worries about how it looks to others, prunes it, shapes it, molds and decorates it’ (1980: 154). This internalisation of objectification puts the brakes on actively engaging with the world in the way men do, and stalls the desire to pursue the world and space and produces a degree of hesitancy and reactivity: Women tend not to open their bodies in their everyday movements, but tend to sit, stand, and walk with their limbs close to or enclosed around them. I also observed that women tend not to reach, stretch, bend, lean, or stride to the full limits of their physical capacities, even when doing so would better accomplish a task or motion. The space, that is, which is physically available to the feminine body is frequently of greater radius than the space which she uses and inhabits. (Young, 1980: 149)

Towards the end of Throwing … she also makes the claim that these learnt habits are not just the result of discourses of femininity and ways that girls should behave, but also a logical response to the possibility of their space being invaded by men in particular with unwanted touches and, in the worst cases, rape. This stranger danger conception of spatiality and intersubjectivity warrants further analysis, especially given the heightened awareness about unwanted advances in the post #metoo era. It suggests that the spatial component of patriarchy is not just discursive in terms of generating feminine and masculine concepts of gender but also material in its effects. It is also useful to remember that ‘Throwing like a girl’ is a phrase also used to demean boys, to question their masculinity and to undermine their status as members

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of the pack. The policing of masculinity also operates at a spatial level—gender is a highly regulated spatial activity regardless of role. This is evident in the ways in which boys walk, talk, dress and engage with the world, and also how they regulate each other in what is considered appropriate physical behaviour (see for more detail on this, Cornwall et al.’s collection Masculinities under neoliberalism, 2016). But it would be an injustice to suggest that the spatial and objectifying pressures fall equally on the shoulders of both boys/men and girl/women—fat shaming, for example, tends to be directed towards females much more than males, and the pressures on girls to look a certain way are all too apparent across both traditional and social media. Appearance matters much more in the lives of girls that it does for boys, and is still a significant force in their worlds as it provides access to status, prestige, acceptance and belonging to a greater extent that it does for boys. Young’s words still ring true: Women in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified. As lived bodies we are not open and unambiguous transcendences which move out to master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions and projections. (Young, 1980: 152)

Written in 1980, Young’s ground-breaking work speaks to real concerns in the twenty-first century—with a growing acceptance that even ceding to rigid and restrictive spatial gender norms and being ‘feminine’ has done little to, for example, stop attacks on women and the encroachment of their public and private space (no wonder that there has been a backlash against manspreaders and mansplainers). Her analysis rings true decades later and in a context removed from the debates over second-wave feminism. There is arguably a lack of a strong empirical evidence base from which to make these claims, which does not negate her analysis but rather suggests a need for further investigation of spatiality and embodiment. Key Term: Cartesianism

Cartesianism is an umbrella term that encompassed the philosophical and scientific ideas of René Descartes (1596–1650), the seventeenth-century French philosopher. Descartes was a major influence on subsequent philosophical thought as well as the fields of mathematics and scientific method; but his influence in social theory relates to two specific aspects of his thinking: the first is his strict separation of mind from the physical body (a stance commonly known as mind/body dualism), with the body viewed as of secondary significance in terms of a person’s engagement with and knowledge of the external world. This view has been the subject of critique from theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty who see the physical body as a crucial vehicle via which people make sense of their experience and social environment (see the key concept box on embodiment in  this chapter). The second aspect of Cartesianism of interest to social theory is the emphasis on the individual self/subject as engaging with the external world and its objects in isolation from other selves. This nomadic conception of self has been the source of criticism from relational theorists of the self, such as Axel Honneth, who instead view the self as the product of intersubjective interactions between people.

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Key Movement: Feminism

As with Marxism, there are a variety of feminist theories in existence, including liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, radical feminism and postmodern feminist theory. It is unfortunate that the banner of feminism often hides significant differences between them as well as tending to obscure the rich theoretical diversity delivered by feminist theories. In this book, for example, feminist theory is represented by such distinct thinkers as Iris Marion Young, Donna Haraway, Nancy Fraser and Mary Douglas, their range of interests and contributions making them difficult to pigeonhole. That said, they all shared certain core values and concerns, in particular the role of patriarchy and misogyny in the oppression of women, as well as outlining practical approaches to achieving justice for girls and women. Their approach to these issues is highly dependent on the broader political thrust of the strand of feminism—liberal feminism, for example, sometimes referred to as first-wave feminism, fought for equal rights and the social mobility of women within the existing Western capitalist framework. This was challenged by other developments, most notably socialist feminism, which tied the plight of women to the oppression of workers more generally and saw patriarchy as an offshoot of economic exploitation. This approach was itself challenged by a more radical brand that saw gender divisions between men and women as the key injustice in society. Since then, a third wave of feminism has become a vocal and influential presence in debates over gender and equality. This wave has developed since the late twentieth century partly as a consequence of postmodern theory. Theorists such as Judith Butler have made deeply problematic notions of ‘girl’ and ‘woman’, casting doubt on the efforts of previous generations to claim rights and justice for the female half of the population. The equation of feminism and the biological female became a bone of contention and still is, as evident in the often-fraught debates over transgender activism and its place in feminist struggle. Feminist theory, to some extent similar to postcolonial studies, has examined the subaltern status of women and womanhood and used this position to deliver highly innovative forms of social theory. Authors such as Iris Marion Young and Arlie Hochschild have enriched the conceptual field through connections made between the body, culture, language, emotions and wider structural concerns over sexism, power and inequality. The focus on the production of female subjectivity has proven a rich source of inspiration for theorists who are concerned with lasting social transformation.

Habitus and Bourdieu

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Habitus is a key part of Pierre Bourdieu’s mission to explain social action without resorting to either subjectivism or objectivism—that is, without falling prey to either the notion that society is a collection of individual realities, or that people’s actions and attitudes are determined by external factors such as the state, economy and religion. These tendencies are often presented as structure versus agency (see key term box, Chap. 10) in sociological thinking; Bourdieu preferring his own brand of relational theory in his efforts to understand human behaviour and its relation to the social realm. Bourdieu provides a number of slightly different definitions of habitus across his published work. A reasonably straightforward one is provided in his book Algeria, 1960 (Bourdieu, 1977: vii) in which habitus is described as ‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions which function as the generative basis of structured, objectively unified practices’. Habitus is comprised of the durable and transferable values and dispositions that individuals generate in their development. These dispositions provide a grounding through which people engage with the external world, a grounding that is shaped by interactions with their cultural and familial contexts. By positioning the individual and their interaction with the world in this way, Bourdieu aimed to transcend structure and agency debates. Habitus has a strong embodied component, as it is the product of the various ways in which people navigate and respond to the physical world. The embodied nature of habitus became more prominent in Bourdieu’s work over time (Swartz, 1997: 107), although this was already clearly evident in his early anthropological work—there is a corporeal element to the internalisation of objective structures that sits alongside the intellectual element. Bourdieu’s analysis of the ways in which people can be like ‘fish out of water’ reflects this embodiment: a person’s way of knowing and making sense of the world and their place in it is intimately tied up with their own physical presence. Feelings of belonging, comfort and familiarity when someone is in a place they know well, can easily turn to sensations of awkwardness, discomfort, even danger, when they enter unfamiliar territory. Habitus is a key idea for Bourdieu for a number of reasons, but high among these is its role in knowledge formation: one’s knowledge of the external world, as well as knowledge of self, is always filtered through the habitus: it acts as a translator of information, providing a lens through which knowledge and experience can be interpreted and made sensible. But because the habitus is a product of personal experience, individuals are ‘naturally’ predisposed towards certain attitudes, values and experiences. The habitus provides individuals with a ‘feel for the game’ in specific contexts, contexts which allows individuals to feel more like ‘fish in water’. As the saying goes, habitus makes a ‘virtue out of necessity’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 54) reconfiguring the social construction of self and the body as natural processes.

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Habitus ‘brackets’ and bounds a person’s rationality, allowing people to make sense of the world and importantly, their place in it. One of the reasons why the concept of habitus has proven so popular in studies of social class is precisely because of this aspect, of how people know, and come to know, their place in the world. The classed nature of habitus was of central significance to Bourdieu himself and has gone on to influence numerous others. This is because social class, especially through the cultural lens of Bourdieu, is itself a filter of the habitus, providing a powerful form of socialisation. Social class seeps into the lives of families, friends and communities, the preferred values and dispositions encountered as part of ordinary everyday life. The embodied nature of habitus is especially apparent in Bourdieu’s analysis of classed experiences in relation to aspects such as taste and deportment—his analysis of the French class structure in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) provides a fascinating insight into the highly embodied differences between social groups. The classed nature of habitus has also generated a great deal of debate, even controversy. This has revolved around the role of class in determining one’s habitus and the extent to which people can transcend their learnt habitus. Bourdieu, probably unfairly, has been accused of a rigid and unbending assessment of social class and socialisation. It is true that an individual’s early formative experiences, which Bourdieu classifies as primary or generic habitus, ‘tend to ensure its own constancy and its defence against change’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 60). But Bourdieu developed the notion of secondary habitus, a dispositional scheme that is generated in a person’s later years through interaction with institutions such as school and work. This secondary habitus can have the effect of altering a person’s dispositions, encouraging some level of modification and adaptation to the world (Costa and Murphy, 2015). This is significant, as people make decisions on what they know and what they have learnt. People ‘shape their aspirations according to concrete indices of the accessible and inaccessible, of what is and is not “for us”’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 64). Habitus can be impacted by the broadening of horizons encouraged by life experiences; in this way, one can speak of a ‘push and pull’ aspect to habitus that sits alongside its durability. The concept of habitus has become one of the most influential in the field of social theory, utilised in a wide varied of applied work (see the Social Theory Applied box) but also in the work of other prominent social theorists. Judith Butler, for example, is a fan of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, seeing strong links between her work on performativity and the embodied nature of habitus. She believes that speech acts should be conceptualised as ‘acts that come from the body that are performed, as social performances that are part of the domain of the habitus’ (Butler, interview with Gane, 2004: 58).

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Key Theorist: Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

Born in 1930, Pierre Bourdieu grew up in Deguin, a town in the Southwest of France. He came from a modest background, but was an academically talented student who enrolled at some of the most prestigious academic institutions in France. These included The École normale supérieure in Paris, an elite graduate school which also acts as a finishing school for the French intellectual class (other alumni include Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau Pointy and Jean-Paul Sartre). The difference between his origins and his education undoubtedly helped to shape Bourdieu’s lifelong interests in social class and culture and their impact on equality, social inclusion, distinction and difference. The influence of his work is evident across an impressive range of disciplines and fields of study, such as sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, organisational theory and philosophy. He is especially prominent in the field of education studies—Bourdieu’s ideas on educational reproduction and inequality are a touchstone for researchers exploring the effects of school organisation, curriculum and pedagogy on young people’s educational outcomes and career trajectories (see Chap. 6). His relational approach to social theory and methodology has had a much wider impact across the social sciences, reflecting his own wide range of interests, including language, the body, the state, gender, religion, literature and photography. His key concepts, habitus, capital and field, are designed to bridge the gap between ‘objective’ social structure and everyday practices and ‘subjective’ experiences. Bourdieu developed these crucial concepts to help identify ‘the logic of practice’, an enduring theme for Bourdieu in his efforts to overcome the limitations of both structuralism and cartesianism. Like other prominent social theorists such as Judith Butler and Jürgen Habermas, Bourdieu developed his complex and nuanced theory based on critiques and adaptations of other theories and concepts. The ideas present in books such as Pascalian meditations (Bourdieu, 2000) illustrate Bourdieu’s capacity to hybridise the ideas of others in order to generate new ways of understanding social practises. While theorists such as Marx, Wittgenstein, Austin and Pascal have played important roles in Bourdieu’s intellectual development, he adopts a critical approach to their work, using it in novel and often highly politicised ways. This is evident for example in the way in which Bourdieu dissects the social nature of Austin’s speech act theory (see Chap. 7). This eclectic style is also found in Bourdieu’s methodological approach, which has incorporated a variety of methods—ethnographic, visual, statistical— in his research design. These methods sit side by side and entangled with Bourdieu’s desire to theorise the social, an approach that reflects his commitment to a reflexive sociology that positions theory and method as inseparable in social science. Although Bourdieu rejected positivism and what he considered the naïve idea of value-neutral objectivity, he was also insistent that interpretive social science should be as rigorous as possible in its application of theory and method. Rigorous social science in his words should make explicit ‘the hypotheses and operations which make it possible’ (Bourdieu, 1971: 181).

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Elias and the Habitus Bourdieu has certainly occupied the limelight when it comes to habitus but he does not have a monopoly on the topic and its importance regarding the body, power and location. Nobert Elias also adopted habitus in his conceptual apparatus to a significant degree, especially in his book The Germans: power struggles and the development of habitus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Elias, 1996). In the book Elias argues that Germany and the national habitus should be viewed through geographical location and language, a location that represented a form of threat and aggression from neighbours that did not share their linguistic roots (Latin and Slavonic) (Smith, 2001: 54). This national habitus, or personality structure as Elias liked to refer to it, was also affected by other important factors, such as the long slow decline of the German empire, the relative (as opposed to France) dominance of the military and militarism in German life. These factors fed their way into the German personality, creating a Hobbesian view of the world, a view of ‘social life as a struggle of all against all’ (Elias, 1996: 112). It was also Elias’ view that the German habitus was overly reliant on external direction, on a rigid authoritarian structure in some shape or form. The state occupied this structure and kept Germans in an infantilised state. Combined, these factors provided ideal conditions for a de-civilising process to start to take over after the end of the First World War. Lacking a strong external authority figure, combined with post-war resentment and humiliation, alongside the still present valorisation of militarism, violence and ‘might as right’, the timing was ideal for Adolf Hitler to take power. He replaced in the national habitus the old establishment and came to be seen as the saviour of a German way of life—he embodied all the traits that constituted the national habitus. It is important to clarify what Elias meant by habitus, and it should also be noted that it is not too different from Bourdieu’s approach. This is understandable given they are both relational theorists but a major difference is that Elias underpins his habitus with a strong historical perspective. For Elias, personality structure, psychic make-up and habitus all relate to the same thing: sets of dispositions shared with members of the same social groups. But these dispositions change over time depending on which social figurations people belong to. This historical-sociological perspective on habitus has been put to good use in the research literature, for example in the work of Connolly on the Irish Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) (Connolly, 2016). Connolly argues that Elias’ approach is a much better fit for a study of historical processes than the better-known habitus of Bourdieu. His ‘fluid understanding of the habitus and its ongoing formation in the context of changing social interdependencies’ provide a more fitting conceptual apparatus in this regard (Connolly, 2016: 454). Connolly applied this version of habitus to the development of a professional bureaucracy —the GAA. He traces the pressures that developed over time to make the GAA more professionalised as opposed to its status as a voluntary organisation. This is analysed in the context of a politicised environment, the struggle for Irish independence against Britain, a struggle in which the GAA played a key role. Importantly, the shift to greater

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bureaucratisation and standardisation ran parallel with a more stable political environment, one which saw further shifts away from violence and extremism; Connolly charts the development of greater self-control among the GAA administrators, as well as the dramatic (over-time) shift towards professionalisation in an organisation, that held the principles of amateurism and volunteerism in high regard. In this sense, the GAA underwent a civilising process that gradually but dramatically transformed its organisation and guiding principles. Self-constraint became the norm in a world in which the desire for national stability had replaced the imperatives of freedom and justice. This represents a strong example of what Elias calls the ‘psychologisation’ of the habitus. What this idea illustrates more than anything else is the importance of a historical analysis to track transformation in the habitus. Connolly’s analysis opens the door to thinking further about how such an approach can engage with Bourdieu’s conception of habitus. Wilterdink (2017) has offered such a hybridised take on habitus in his analysis of the changing dynamics of inequality and the rise of nationalist populism. Once again adopting a historical-sociological perspective, Wilterdink’s focuses on the increase in socio-economic inequality since the 1980s in the Western world. Given this development, he asks a reasonable question: why has there not been a radicalisation of left-wing social class movements among those affected by inequality? Instead, one sees evidence of a highly visible shift towards the right and populist demagoguery in many Western countries. Wilterdink is correct to emphasise the parallels between Elias and Bourdieu, including their shared concern with inequality. As well as the analysis of class inequality, he argues that cultural or economic explanations of the rise of national populism do not represent sufficient explanatory power. Instead, one should view this rise as ‘a manifestation of habitus changes that are related to transformations in the class structure’ (2017: 36). These transformations are threefold: a gradual blurring of class boundaries, growing class inequalities as well as weakened forms of class identity. Class as a dispositional trait has become less significant since the 1980s; the rise of neoliberalism and competitive individualism has encouraged much stronger affiliation among lower-social economic groups with the rich; growing resentment and perceived weakening of position as compared to minority groups as well as antipathy towards the ‘elite’ that appeared to underpin this weakening. Globally induced mass immigration has added fuel to the fire and transformed the working-class habitus dramatically compared to its unified and solidarity-based version of the 1970s and before. These factors among others contribute to this group seeking solace in the nation state and national forms of solidarity, sowing the seeds for a native kind of nationalism that marks clear distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Bodies and Bio-power Foucault’s understanding of the body is distinct from the others discussed so far in this chapter by virtue of its focus on surveillance and institutional power. For him, the body was a site of direct control, something to be managed, surveilled, regulated

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and made docile to the prevailing powers that be. Domination is about the inscription of power relations on the body. This inscription is conducted by various groups of professionals the body comes into contact with, professionals such as teachers, doctors and the police, which in turns helps to produce the subjectified self, a source of control that does not need direct forms of power to enable it. Foucault aimed to examine the ways in which different power/knowledge regimes manipulated and regulated the body as an object through disciplinary techniques. He used different terms to denote different types of body regulation— ‘anatomo-politics’ to describe the regulation of individual bodies including their sexuality, while he used ‘bio-politics’ to refer to the regulation of bodies more generally (Hook 2007). The historical development of modernity brought these to life, and they became a central concern for Foucault in his efforts to understand the pressures brought to bear on everyday life. Modernity brought with it a need to manage the body, and consequently established a bureaucratisation of the body through various disciplinary practices. Discourses (see Chap. 7) of the body are central to the power of these practices and their creation of a bio-politics. This is evident in the treatment of the bodies of prisoners, school pupils and especially of patient bodies by the field of medicine: the medicalising of the body has been an ever-present feature of modernity. Medical expertise has replaced everyday common knowledge to govern human bodies. In Western societies, for example, it became rare for childbirth to occur at home in the twentieth century when this was the norm in the previous century. This shift brought with it a whole professional and technological apparatus, comprising doctors, nurses, midwifes, hospital beds, drugs and assorted medical equipment. In the same way, death has become medicalised, with the hospital the normal site of death. A whole industry has also developed around dying. It was not just physical illness that became medicalised: mental illness has also become codified, bureaucratised and institutionalised. Discourses around bodily health have made this possible, according to Foucault, alongside the development of institutions that facilitate the medicalisation process in ways that are now taken for granted. Discourses around what is considered healthy and unhealthy are so prevalent that it is difficult to escape them. And the difference between what is considered healthy and unhealthy, or normal and abnormal, depend on the legitimation afforded by professional specialists and institutions. Measurements and scientific criteria are deployed to make judgement and to categorise individuals and populations: Life in the asylum … permitted the birth of that delicate structure which would become the essential nucleus of madness—a structure that formed a kind of microcosm in which were symbolised the massive structures of Bourgeois society and its values: Family-Child relations, centred on the theme of parental authority; Transgression-Punishment relations, centred on the theme of immediate justice; Madness-Disorder relations, centred on the theme of social and moral order. It is from these that the physician derives his power to cure. And it is to the degree that the patient finds himself, by so many old links, already alienated in the doctor, within the doctor-patient couple, that the doctor has the almost miraculous power to cure him. (Foucault, 1984b: 162)

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Bodies, to use Foucault’s term, are ‘trained’ (1977b: 25), but trained by groups of professionals in their capacity as institutional labourers. This is where Foucault’s work developed a much more political focus: Just as these professionals cast judgements over those deemed insane, unwell, morally incompetent or intellectually feeble, so too does Foucault cast judgement on those professionals who have cast off people into institutional life: This training is not simply a matter of producing culturally acceptable ways in which men and women use their bodies in different cultures, but is also conducted with the explicit aim of producing ‘docile’ and ‘useful’ bodies. (Benson, 1997: 128)

Questions have been raised as to what extent Foucault achieves his aim of historicising the body; Shilling, for example, raises a question regarding the remarkable uniformity and consistency of Foucault’s approach to the body as an entity. He suggests that the capacity for embodiment may differ from one historical period to another (Shilling, 1997: 79). He also suggests that Foucault’s conception of the body is curiously disembodied, in that it becomes inscribed upon but lacks any agency as a material entity in interactions and in social life. Foucault makes highly generalised claims about the body and about the power of discourses to shape, train and inscribe the body, which is reasonable given the scope and quality of his analysis that he offers. He also suggests that discourses generate opposition, forms of counter discourse that can help create resistance to dominant narrratives about health, sexuality and deviance. But yet it is difficult to ascertain the mechanisms via which this occurs—given the stranglehold of dominant discourses, how is it possible for other discourses to break the hegemonic spell? As a result, discourse is in danger of becoming ‘an empty sociological category’ (Swingewood, 2000: 200).

The Body and Performativity Like Foucault, Judith Butler has made the politics of the body a core focus of her theory, especially as regards the gendered nature of this politics. She has made a significant contribution to the study of the body, emphatically rejecting the association of ‘woman’ with a woman’s body, with the female form. She has delivered a sustained critique of feminists’ desire to use ‘woman’ as a collective and coherent identity; this is because she considers the binary gender division and any associations of women with it to be deeply problematic. Any kind of normalising of identity categories, she believes results in objectified views of gender which are corralled into a ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 1999: 9). This reliance on the biological categories of man and woman means that the strict distinction between masculinity and femininity, and their association with man/woman are classified as natural and the norm. The result for Butler is heteronormativity, the belief that the ‘natural’ order of things is for men to desire women and vice-versa, means that non-heterosexual practices lose legitimacy and are reduced to forms of deviancy.

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It is important to grasp the key issue for Butler here: biology cannot simply be used as a classifier and a codifier of identity and action. Biology, she argues, is as value-laden as conceptions of society, and as open to interpretation: biological sex ‘is a gendered category’ (Butler, 1990: 10). Her work in Bodies that matter however attempted to clarify her position on the extent of which individuals have choice over their own gender—this was done through her theory of performativity, which allowed for both imposition and agency in people’s control over their own bodies and sexualities. Performativity is distinct from the notion of performance in that an individual performance relies on the existence of dominant gender norms and gender discourses that legitimise and justify certain types of performance. The dramaturgical element depends on both the theatrical script and its bodily interpretation. She draws a comparison with the legal system (Butler, 1993), a system which allows judges to make laws and rulings, only because the performance of judges depends on the legitimacy of law. This form of citation governs gender performativity—reinforces and legitimises it. For example, even something as basic as proclaiming ‘it’s a girl!’ when a child is born is part of this performativity. This form of identification and labelling gets continuously repeated in a person’s life, across multiple institutions such as the law, education, medicine, religion, as a way ‘to reinforce or contest this naturalised effect’ (Butler, 1993: 8).

Social Theory Applied: Habitus

There is a rich and ever-growing treasure trove of published work that has taken full advantage of the explanatory power of habitus as a theoretical concept. Hillier and Rooksby’s edited collection Habitus: A Sense of Place (2nd edition, 2005) brings together leading scholars across disciplines who, through the prism of habitus, explore the different ways in which spaces and places are conceptualised and inhabited, constructed, interpreted and used by different people. One example of this is Chantal Mouffe’s chapter ‘What kind of public space for a democratic habitus?’ The contributions illustrate the ways in which habitus has impacted ideas across fields such as anthropology, geography, political philosophy and urban planning. Habitus has also been the subject of discipline/subject-specific collections, for example, Vorderobermeier’s (2014) edited work Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies. The contributors worked with the notion that habitus is ‘a concept which upsets’, that is, ‘one with the potential to make a difference to research agendas’. Contributions include case studies that focus on specific translation tasks, such as translating Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Hamlet into Greek as well as discussions of habitus and its relevance to methodological and theoretical debates (included are chapters that, for example, examine the relation between Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, Bruno Latour’s concept of agency and John Dewey’s habits). (continued)

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Habitus is a key concept in the field of education and has received considerable attention in research studies exploring schooling, pedagogy and education attainment—it has become a key concept in the sub-field of the sociology of educational inequalities. Watkins and Noble’s (2013) Disposed to Learn Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus uses the concept to examine how student’s dispositions and their ethnicity (specifically students of Chinese, Pasifika and Anglo Australian background) impact their learning. They employ the notion of ‘scholarly habitus’, a set of embodied dispositions generated via school and family life, to explore the varied and multifaceted ways in which ‘culture’ intersects with questions of attainment as well as educational inclusion. Given its prominence, habitus provides a compelling example of how socio-theoretical concepts can be applied as methodological tools in social research settings. This is the theme of Costa and Murphy’s book Habitus and social research: the art of application (Costa and Murphy, 2015), which includes a set of case studies that seek to tease out the value and in particular the analytical power of habitus in explaining the relation between self and society. The list of case studies included in the book testifies to the wide-­ ranging relevance of habitus—the book includes studies of migration, graduate employment, youth crime, aspirations and transitions among other topics. The book as a whole reflects Bourdieu’s own desire to adopt a critically reflexive approach to theory application and research methodologies, and to carefully consider the ways in which theory and practice relate to one another.

Sexuality and Queer Theory Butler and Foucault share a strong interest in sexuality, which is one of the key reasons why they turned to the body as a source of injustice and domination. The politics of the body inevitably intersects with a politics of sexuality, an intersection that highlights the ways in which discourses and disciplinary practices can shape conceptions of sexual normality. Labelling non-heterosexual identities as abnormal and deviant was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and therefore relatively recent. The medical professional helped to classify and codify different sexual identities at this time, for example, homosexuality came to be viewed as a pathology in the medical world and was later viewed in the twentieth century as something that could be ‘cured’ (which is still a belief among some religious groups). Such approaches were confronted by the gay liberation movement which started in the United States in the 1960s. Gay rights were intimately tied to conceptions of identity and the body, but this focus on identity did not last long and queer theory questioned the reliance on gay identity as a political tool. ‘Queer’ became a term used by both theorists and activists to represent alternative ways of thinking about sexuality, the body and identity, taking a term that was long a source of anger and shame and re-­appropriating it for completely different purposes (which itself shows the power of discourse).

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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has created a version of queer theory that draws on the ways in which homosexuality is joined at the hip to heterosexual culture and identity: she is especially interested in how the latter depends on the former to sustain itself. In her book The epistemology of the closet (Sedgwick, 1990), she argues that the ‘closet’, out of which gays and lesbians ‘come out’, represents the underbelly of public sexuality and of approved forms of desire. Such critique is subversive as it undermines coherent and stable conceptions of self and identity and of the body. Queer theory is also much more than homo/heterosexuality as it encompasses non-­ binary, transexuality and numerous other transgressive ways of being, that confront what is considered simplistic but also convenient dualisms that structure sexual life and the body. One of the major influences on the development of queer theory was the work of Foucault especially his analysis of sex in the History of Sexuality. This was a topic to which he applied his genealogical method with some effect. He took on the repressive hypothesis formulated by Freud —that is, that biological sex drives, when faced with the normative demands of modern society, end up becoming repressed, which in turn leads to dysfunction and pathological attitudes to sex, sexuality and deviance. Rather, Foucault asserts that modern society creates new discourses around sex and sexuality, rather than repressing something that is already present. In the History of sexuality, Foucault is keen to stress this creative function of power and discourse and his genealogy provides ample evidence of this; he examined how discourses create new forms of sexuality and new ways of comprehending it. One of his most insightful analyses was of confessional approaches to sex and sexuality and how something as basic as sex is treated with such embarrassment and sensitivity as if it is a purely private matter. This is the tone in Volume 1 of History of sexuality: see, for example, his analysis in the chapter entitled ‘We “other Victorians”’. Here he suggests that the key question for him is not: why are we repressed? But instead: Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment … that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something to hide, to say it is something we silence? (Foucault, 1984a: 297)

Foucault was fascinated by the singling out of sexuality as a privileged place upon which power is exercised and discourses are drawn, given its ordinary function in species reproduction. How did sexuality become the privileged vessel for people’s deepest truths? (Foucault, 1977a: 154). His method uncovered a strong link between this discourse of confession and that of Christianity, as in Christian societies ‘sex has been the central object of examination, surveillance, avowal and transformation into discourse’ (ibid: 154). He develops this creative discourse after exploring some significant questions regarding the hypothesis of repression: ‘are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised?’ (Foucault, 1984a: 298). But his analysis of the last three centuries offers up something entirely different and also quite brilliant: in a section entitled ‘The incitement to discourse’, he argues that the

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amassed evidence points to a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ around sex. One of the many examples he used is that of secondary schools in the eighteenth century, for which sex ‘was a constant preoccupation’ (Ibid: 310). Far from being something that was repressed and had no effect on the school, sex was intimately tied up with the ‘internal discourse of the institution’: The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories, the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods—all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children. (Foucault, 1984a: 310)

This to Foucault was a far cry from ‘the ponderous silence’ one would expect if the repressive hypothesis was an accurate explanation of the attitudes towards sexuality. Instead, pedagogical institutions have ‘multiplied the forms of discourse on the subject’ (Ibid: 311). More generally, discourse can be viewed as a powerful way to comprehend the proliferation of ways of categorising sexuality: ‘homosexuality’ for example is a discourse, as are notions of deviancy attached to descriptions of nymphomania, fethishism, frigidity or even asexuality. While one cannot escape discourse, it is wise to question repression as a way to conceptualise modern notions of sex and sexuality. Another take on the relation between Foucault and queer theory is provided by Lynne Huffer in her intriguing book Mad for Foucault (Huffer, 2010), in which she makes a case for a rethinking of queer theory, this time from a different vantage point within Foucault’s body of work. She makes a strong claim that Foucault’s History of Madness, long neglected in queer theory, is as significant to the field as History of Sexuality. She makes this argument based on her belief that Foucault viewed sexuality as a tool of moral and political exclusion. She sees in the History of Madness the base for a ‘post-moral queer political ethic’ (2010: 34), one that takes seriously ‘Foucault’s critique of the structures of moral and rationalist exclusion through which sexual otherness is created and reproduced’ (Ibid: 35). By examining the workings of reason and its rendering of madness as unreason, she suggests that one can provide an adequate answer to Foucault’s question: ‘why have we made sexuality into a moral experience?’ She argues that the ethical dimension in the History of madness helps to offer a context from which to explore this question further. According to Huffer, the neglect of the book in the field of queer theory, and the focus on reason that it provides, deprives queer theory of the complexity of sexual experience, rendering it as a set of discourses. This ‘living, breathing world of eros’, as she calls it, cannot be found in psychoanalytical thinking, to which queer theory has turned precisely to capture this complexity, and instead needs to question wholesale the rational straightjacket upon which Freudian theory is based: In telling the story of madness in the classical age, Foucault is also telling a story about the production of non-normative sexualities, categories of abnormality that are, from the moment of division between reason and its others, included in the category of reason’s exclusions. The production of sexuality —like the production of unreason more broadly— is a story about the production of subjectivity through structures of moral exclusion. (Huffer, 2010: 40)

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This re-reading of Foucault’s classic text has the advantage of highlighting both the significance of morality in the governance of the body and the strong bond between reason and morality—a connection that, on reflection, sees Foucault sharing much conceptual space with Mary Douglas and the discipline of Anthropology more generally.

In Summary The Body as a Cultural Text  In her anthropological work, Mary Douglas paved the way for a much more socialised view of the body to take hold in social theory. Her work, for example on the Indian caste system, revealed the myriad ways in which the body was a representation of cultural values, of wider societal norms and concerns. This work opened up new avenues of exploration when it came to the body and power, including studies of how the body has become a privileged site of moral regulation and moral discipline. Throwing Like a Girl  Iris Marion Young’s interest in the body stemmed from her desire to examine the spatial conditions of women’s experience. For her, the body was a central site of patriarchal domination, as it occupied a space where women’s freedoms could be controlled. The title of her famous essay Throwing like a girl reflects this interest—she explores how boys and girls learn spatial awareness and body comportment in distinct ways that reflect highly gendered relations of power. Bourdieu and Habitus  One of Pierre Bourdieu’s most utilised concepts is that of Habitus. Broadly speaking, habitus can be defined as the evolving process through which individuals act, think, perceive and approach the world and their role in it. Collectively referred to as dispositions, these aspects represent people’s collated life experiences while also providing a rationale for subsequent decisions and practices. In Bourdieu’s view, a person’s habitus has a significant impact on their life experiences, in particular their educational outcomes and career trajectories. Elias and Habitus  Norbert Elias also adopted habitus in his conceptual apparatus when examining the German personality structure. While not dissimilar to Bourdieu’s approach, Elias was more concerned about the shared national sets of dispositions that made the German people more susceptible to militarism, authoritarianism, a ‘might is right’ worldview, and eventually the rise of Nazi ideology. Bio Power and Bio-politics  Foucault’s work on the body developed a more politicised focus compared to Douglas. For Foucault, the body is a site of direct control by powerful institutions such as medicine and education, institutions that produce ‘docile bodies’ through various disciplinary practices. While the body is a more direct site of regulatory policing as compared to Douglas’s conception, they share a compelling analysis of the body as a focus of moral arbitration as well as moral indignation.

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The Body and Performativity  The body was of central concern in the work of Judith Butler, as illustrated in her theory of performativity. Performativity refers to the ways in which someone’s identity is produced and shaped by discursive practices that help ‘name’ the identity (e.g., ‘girl’). There is a dramaturgical element at work that reiterates this naming over time, a performativity that depends on both the theatrical (social) script and its bodily interpretation. Sexuality and Queerness  Sex and sexuality were of major interest to Foucault, primarily because they are a privileged site of discursive power. He was fascinated by the fact that considerable effort was expended, not on repressing sex and sexuality, but rather on creating new discourses around these core aspects of human existence. These new discourses reflect Foucault’s theory that power works more effectively through producing discourses as opposed to repressing them; this for Foucault is an ideal mechanism of control as it had the ability to define the parameters of acceptable behaviour. Questions Identify ways in which society inscribes its values onto the body —do any of these cases of embodiment impact you in negative ways? Does gender play a role in shaping how society interacts with our bodies? Why is sex and sexuality such a focus of moral attention? Suggested Readings Howson, A. (2012). The Body in Society: An Introduction (2nd edition). Cambridge: Polity Press. Provides an in-depth introduction to the sociology of the body, exploring issues such as the civilised body, vulnerable bodies and the impact of consumer culture on the body. Costa, C, and M. Murphy (eds) (2015). Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research: The Art of Application. Palgrave. A collection of case studies that explore the research application of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus in various social contexts, such as migration, schooling, crime and the digital sphere. Young, H. (2010). Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Examines the embodied experienced of black life in America through a phenomenological and performance studies lens, using cases studies from fields such as theatre, photography and boxing to examine the highly racialised nature of black bodily representation. Oliver, M. and C.  Barnes (2012) The New Politics of Disablement (2nd edition). London: Palgrave. Outlines the key concepts in disability studies as well as exploring the impact of capitalism and ideology on representations of disability.

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References Benson, S. (1997). The Body, Health and Eating Disorders. In K. Woodward (Ed.), Identity and Difference (pp. 121–166). Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1971). Intellectual Field and Creative Project. In M. Young (Ed.), knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, (pp. 161–88). London: Collier-Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Algeria 1960. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1990a). The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990b). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Polity Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge. Connolly, J. (2016). Elias and Habitus: Explaining Bureaucratisation Processes in the Gaelic Athletic Association. Culture and Organization, 22(5), 452–475. Cornwall, A., Karioris, F., & Lindisfarne, N. (Eds.). (2016). Masculinities Under Neoliberalism. Zed Books. Costa, C., & Murphy, M. (Eds.). (2015). Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research: The Art of Application. Palgrave. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge. Douglas, M. (1970). Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Pantheon. Elias, N. (1996). The Germans. Polity. Foucault, M. (1977a). Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon, Trans., pp. 205–217). Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1977b). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, Counter-­ Memory, Practice (pp. 139–164). Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1984a). We Other “Victorians”. In P.  Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 292–300). Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1984b). The Birth of the Asylum. In P.  Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 141–167). University of Minnesota Press. Gane, N. (2004). Judith Butler: Reanimating the Social. In N. Gane (Ed.), The Future of Social Theory (pp. 47–76). Continuum. Hillier, J., & Rooksby, E. (Eds.). (2005). Habitus: A Sense of Place (2nd ed.). Routledge Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Palgrave. Huffer, L. (2010). Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2001[1962]). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. Morrison, K. (2009). Embodiment and Modernity: Ruskin, Stephen, Merleau-Ponty, and the Alps. Comparative Literature Studies, 46(3), 498–511. Moya, P. (2014). Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-Ponty. Frontiers in Human Neuro-­ science, 8, 1–3. Orbach, S. (1978). Fat Is a Feminist Issue. University of California Press. Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press. Shilling, C. (1997). The Body and Difference. In K.  Woodward (Ed.), Identity and Difference (pp. 63–107). Sage. Smith, D. (2001). Norbert Elias and Modern Social Theory. Sage. Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. The University of Chicago Press. Swingewood, A. (2000). A Short History of Sociological Thought (3rd ed.). Palgrave. Vorderobermeier, G. M. (Ed.). (2014). Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies. Rodopi Press.

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Watkins, M., & Noble, G. (2013). Disposed to Learn: Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus. Bloomsbury. Wilterdink, N. (2017). The Dynamics of Inequality and Habitus Formation. Elias, Bourdieu, and the Rise of Nationalist Populism. Historical Social Research, 42(4), 2–42. Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality. Human Studies, 3, 137–156.

Social Justice

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Introduction Struggles over social justice, in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, are multiple and inescapable. These struggles are the result of intense reaction to the experience of oppression, marginalisation and discrimination. Conflict is never far away from enactments of social justice, evident in the efforts of movements such as Black Lives Matter, the struggle for transgender acceptance and the dispersed but increasingly prominent anti-gentrification protests in global cities. The term social justice has since become commonplace, used as a way to demand specific rights that confront perceived wrongs. This ubiquity means that it suffers from a discernible vagueness in its catch-all character, morphing into a convenient phrase appropriated by often quite disparate collectives in the public sphere  (see Chap. 5). The good news is that the world can easily accommodate varied and sometimes conflicting definitions of social justice. This conflict over the meaning of social justice also makes sense when you look at the company it keeps. Concepts such as ‘fairness’, ‘equality’ and ‘rights’ are never too far away from discussions of justice in whatever form, and these are all concepts that have seen their fair share of disagreement over the years. These inter-connections and associated disagreements can be witnessed in a variety of approaches to social justice. Implied conceptions of justice can be found across the theoretical spectrum, but others who have explicitly devised theories of justice include Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. The question of justice has been a core concern of all these social theorists, who view this question as central to the objectives of theory-driven approaches to understanding society. Most importantly, they do not agree on what social justice means and have their own separate debates to prove it. This chapter details each of these, while comparing their relative contributions to the field. What all these different approaches illustrate is that ideas around social justice are there to be debated and argued over. There are also other approaches that critique social justice approaches as a category—see, for example, the arguments © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2_12

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around an ethics of care that have been developed by feminist thinkers such as Carol Gilligan. The chapter explores these areas with the following organisation: • The measurement of justice—comparing justice as fairness (Rawls) and justice as capability (Sen and Nussbaum) • Debating recognition and redistribution (Honneth and Fraser) • Bringing solidarity back in • An alternative to justice theory: the politics of care

Justice as Fairness The measurement of justice matters, and two theories have battled it out over who gets top billing in this regard—these are the resource-oriented approach as put forward by John Rawls and others, and the capability approach as conceptualised by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Both of these are ‘distributive’ in the sense that they characterise justice in terms of what people need and what they should be provided with. The similarities end there as their approaches have quite distinct understandings of needs. The debate started with the publication of John Rawls’ book, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. This was a hugely significant text at the time, as it engaged seriously with the issue of social justice that had long been overlooked in academic circles. This was partly due to the fact that, prior to the publication of A Theory of Justice, philosophies of justice were in thrall to the tenets of utilitarianism, a highly individualised and subjective approach to justice that placed personal preferences and demands at the heart of welfare and distribution policy. While sensitive to personal needs, utilitarianism deemed the pattern of welfare distribution as irrelevant, even if there was an unequal distribution of this welfare (Yilmaz, 2016: 232). This was deeply problematic for Rawls as he viewed the modern institutions of society, including political and economic ones, as containing ‘especially deep inequalities’ (Rawls, 1971: 7). These institutions have the tendency to cater to select societal sets, with an inequitable distribution of ‘basic social goods’ (such as liberty, opportunity, wealth and income). Rawls developed the ideas for A theory of justice during a time of economic growth and expanding opportunity in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, which witnessed a growing middle class but also a real concern with the perceived threat of communist expansion and the growing power of unionist politics. Rawls aimed to engage theories of justice with both of these aspects—how to develop a theory of equality of opportunity that not only benefited one sector of society while also ensuring that society more generally benefits from the fruits of its labour. Rawls was keen to make conceptual space for political pluralism as well as a collective understanding of opportunity. In order to generate such a theory, Rawls developed in A Theory of Justice and subsequent works these two principles of justice:

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• The Liberty Principle: establishes equal basic liberties for all citizens • The Difference principle: The Difference Principle regulates inequalities, only permitting inequalities that work to the advantage of the worst-off. Alongside these formal principles, there are two other facets of Rawl’s approach that are worth mentioning in the context of social theory. First of all, there is a strong implicit awareness of the importance of solidarity in Rawl’s conception of justice. For his vision of justice to be effective, the onus is on citizens to accept an ‘overlapping consensus’ while at the same time, taking care to de-prioritise their individual needs in the process of bargaining. Rawls argues that these personal needs must remain behind what he calls a ‘veil of ignorance’, as this will allow for the contract to be free from bias. All citizens are therefore in a good position to avail voluntarily of the distributive scheme, as it is designed to consider all persons equally without taking into account aspects such as personal preferences and previous histories. For Rawls, measuring justice based on the satisfaction of personal preferences is an unsatisfactory approach. Instead, he argues that what is needed is an objective set of means by which to measure the distribution of justice. An effective approach to social justice for Rawls is one that values the equitable distribution of resources, a distribution that is at the centre of his resource-based approach. His concept of primary goods is significant here, as social cooperation is dependent on free and equal individuals, who in order to exist need some ‘social’ primary goods. People require these goods as they are necessary for meeting a ‘wide range of ends that define a moral person’ (Yilmaz, 2016: 233). Rawls came to reconfigure his set of primary goods in the 2001 restatement of justice as fairness, his overarching theory of social justice (Rawls, 2001: 58–61). These reconfigured primary goods are: (a) The basic freedoms (of thought and conscience in particular). Rawls viewed these as prerequisites for the capacity to configure conceptions of the good (b) Freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, on which the pursuit of final ends is dependent (c) Powers of responsibility (d) Income and wealth, necessary to support the achievement of a wide range of ends and (e) The social bases of self-respect, a social good that provides a base for the self-­ worth of citizens. Another key feature of his approach is the institutionalised nature of distributive justice. There is a structural component to his conception of justice which sits above specific claims to morality and the good—these claims must be underwritten by a system of laws that determine the design and function of all the main social institutions, such as the legal and political systems, health, education and the economy.

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Justice as Capability Rawls’ ideas were highly influential through the latter half of the twentieth century, providing for a generation of political philosophers a ‘justification for social democracy, aimed at reducing inequality and fostering reciprocal relations between citizens’ (Forrester, 2019: 105). Nevertheless, the Rawlsian conception of justice has faced stiff competition, particularly in the shape of capability theory. The capability approach to justice was conceived as an alternative to Rawls’ emphasis on primary goods and distributive justice. Capability theorists reject his notion that primary goods are the main subject of distributive justice while also questioning his notion that the focus of distributive justice should be the basic structure of society. They argue instead that capability is a more effective metric of justice than Rawls’ primary goods, as it more adequately reflects what human beings desire in a socially distributive scheme. The approach was first proposed by economist Amartya Sen in his 1979 Tanner Lectures, (Sen, 1980). Here and in subsequent works he argues that human development should be measured in terms of substantive freedom, meaning ‘the range of options that are substantively available to a person’ (Yilmaz, 2016: 236). This perspective of justice as capability shifts the debate away from the distribution and provision of means to the kind of outcomes desired by people. In his 2009 book The idea of justice (Sen, 2009), Sen clarifies his critique of Rawls from this perspective. Sen argues that Rawls over emphasises the ideal conditions for justice but ignores the reality of societies which is immersed in challenging social problems. Sen believes that justice is best served by targeting the ‘conditions in which people are enabled to pursue and develop their own capabilities’ (Munger et al., 2016: 176). As Sen puts it (Sen, 2009: 233), the capability approach focuses on human life, and not just on some detached objects of convenience¸ such as incomes or commodities that a person may possess, which are often taken, especially in economic analysis, to be the main criteria of human success. Indeed it proposes a serious departure from concentrating on the means of living to the actual opportunities of living.

This updated definition and assessment of the capability approach still has Rawls in its sights. Although Sen offers a complex and nuanced assessment of Rawls’ ideas earlier in the 2009 book (indeed arguing at one stage that the shift from goods to capabilities could be incorporated within Rawl’s ‘foundational programme’ (2009: 66)), he argues that positioning social goods as the key metric for measuring distributional equity, a-la Rawls, is still a ‘mistake’ (Sen, 2009: 234): To understand that the means of satisfactory human living are not themselves the ends of good living helps to bring about a significant extension of the reach of the evaluative exercise. And the use of the capability perspective begins right there. (Sen, 2009: 234)

Martha Nussbaum built on the work of Sen and developed her own definition of capability. In reference to Sen, she defined capabilities as ‘what people are actually able to do and to be’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 33). She views this as crucial because answers to this question bring us ‘closer to understanding the barriers societies have

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erected against full justice’. The key difference between her approach and that of Sen’s is that she puts forward a specific list of ten capabilities (which she calls Central Human Capabilities). She sees these as important for a number of reasons, one being that they build on the notion that human dignity is paramount, and that lives are worthy of this dignity. She is quite clear that all are crucial to society and its quest for justice: ‘a society that neglects one of them to promote the others has shortchanged its citizens, and there is a failure of justice in the shortchanging’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 40). She has also been quite clear that they represent a ‘minimal conception’ of social justice (ibid). The ten include the following (for a fuller account, see pages 41–42 of Nussbaum, 2003): • Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. • Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter. • Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. • Emotions. Being able to have attachment to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us; to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. • Affiliation. Being able to live with and towards others; to recognise and show concern for other human beings; to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. These examples taken from the ten should give a strong indication of what Nussbaum means by capabilities, and they echo Sen’s critique of what he sees as the restrictive nature of Rawls’ approach to social justice. Social justice for the capability theorists is made real only when people are (for example) capable to move freely as they desire, to express a full range of emotions, in a sustained position to make autonomous decisions about who they share lives with, and so on. While for Nussbaum these and the other capabilities constitute a minimal conception of justice, this approach is evidently more expansive and broader than that put forward by Rawls—she makes a useful comparison (Nussbaum, 1992: 214) between what she calls a ‘thick vague’ theory of the good (building on Aristotle) and Rawls’ ‘thin theory of the good’. There is also a critique of the institutional focus of Rawls’ approach in both Sen and Nussbaum’s work. For them, institutionalised equality of opportunity only goes so far. This is because the principle of redistributive difference, which aims to maintain opportunity, offers little to those who suffer from severe physically or mental impairments, or who are burdened with caring responsibilities. That said, there is common ground between the two theories, and it is more the case that productive exchange exists between them rather than stark opposition. This is a fair assessment as they both operate within the parameters of liberal political philosophy. There have been productive attempts to take advantage of this exchange, for example in the work of Yilmaz (2016).

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Social Theory Applied: Capability

Since the work of Amartya Sen in the 1980s, capability theory has taken on a life of its own and has only grown in stature through the various publications of Martha Nussbaum. This is evident in the considerable body of work that has sought to explore the practical implications of what on paper at least can be quite an abstract endeavour. These explorations take two forms—those that adapt the theory to make an argument for its significance in a specific field, and those that explore its practical adaptations in research settings. Regarding the first type, Venkatapuram (2011) provides a strong example in his efforts to situate what he calls ‘health justice’ as a serious offshoot of the capability approach. Capability theory provides a solid philosophical basis from which he develops the argument that the capability to be healthy is as basic a moral entitlement as other fundamental human rights. As an excellent example of the second type, Ibrahim and Tiwari’s edited book, The Capability Approach: From Theory to Practice (2014), aims to illustrate how the capability approach can be ‘brought out of the realm of ideas’ to the ‘realm of policy and practice’. They see the importance in operationalising capability theory in this manner as it can help to counteract methodological approaches to studying well-being that focus on structural outcomes and policy measures, emphasising instead the role of human agency. Capability is useful in this regard because it positions human beings as the generators of social change and not just the objects of social research. It achieves this aim by situating capability in an international context and includes various case studies of capability theory in action, including studies of the lives of street children in Africa (Shand), women’s struggle against forced genital mutilation (FGM) in Upper Egypt (Ibrahim) and poverty and wealth reporting in Germany (Volkert). The case studies are used (in a final chapter) to explore the kind of challenges and lessons learnt from applying capability theory in such diverse situations, including challenges that arise from intensive grassroots mobilisations for social change. Capability theory is unsurprisingly a strong presence in development studies, the work of Sen, in particular, finding favour as a conceptual approach to understanding the issues faced by the global South. Clark et al.’s edited collection (2019) brings this connection to life by focusing squarely on participatory development. Studies included range from the role of disability policies in alleviating poverty in Afghanistan (Bakhshi and Trani), social justice and housing provision in Brazil (Frediani), participatory monitoring of development projects in the South Pacific (Schischka) to participatory development and disability rights in Palestine (Biggeri and Ciani). Alongside this, it presents a set of papers that examine the conceptual foundations of capability theory.

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The Rawls-Habermas Debate An interesting and thought-provoking parallel to this debate between Rawls and the capability theorists is that between Rawls and  Jürgen Habermas. Habermas has been engaging with Rawls’ work for some years, for example in his earlier work Legitimation crisis, but this interest only started to really come to the fore in the 1990s. In 1995 Habermas published the article ‘Reconciliation through the use of public reason: remarks on John Rawls’ Political liberalism’ (Habermas, 1995). This was effectively a review of Rawls’ book of the same name, but the content was a reflection of some important arguments Habermas had built up regarding Rawl’s conception of justice, especially in relation to the nature of Rawls’ political ideology, the separation of political and moral and other philosophical domains, and the lack of detail on the institutional production of law. This publication was followed by a number of others, including a formal ‘reply to Habermas’ on the part of Rawls (Rawls, 1995). The content of this debate is quite complex and multi-faceted but is expertly outlined and assessed in Finlayson’s book The Habermas-Rawls debate (Finlayson, 2019). Finlayson also expertly illustrates what they had in common—a deep and passionate concern for the foundations of legitimate democratic societies. While this concern with legitimacy took on different forms—for Habermas, an analysis of the moral and political foundations of legitimate law, and an examination of ‘reasonable’ political stability for Rawls—they both shared a commitment to the principles of democracy; their theories of justice were designed to establish a sustainable future for democratic life. Discussion of rights, liberties, redistribution and legitimation teases out the adequate and necessary conditions that underpin and support forms of democratic politics. These were matters of real urgency to both— in the case of Rawls it was how to deal with the post-war economic boom in the United States, while for Habermas the pressing concern was the maintenance of the post-war European welfare state compromise in the context of competing alternatives. Democracy as an unfinished project (to use Habermas’ phrase) was a very real enterprise for both of them, justice to some extent playing second fiddle to the grander aims of social integration and cohesion.

Theories of Justice: A Critique There are two important question marks that hang over these theories of justice. These relate to the institutional nature of justice (state and the law) and the relation between freedom and justice. In relation to the first, both view the institutions of state and the legal system as playing important roles in delivering justice. For example, the state looms large in Nussbaum’s capability theory, acting as a guarantor of rights which aim to develop the capabilities of all citizens. In the case of caregivers, for example (a significant focus of capability theory generally), the state should ideally provide a safety net for carers in such a way that their capabilities are facilitated, that is, the state becomes a ‘caregiver of last resort’ (Engster, 2004: 131). This

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is an elaborated conception of the state that echoes Hegel’s protective state (see Chap. 2) but also demands that the state take a more pro-active fostering role regarding care and development. Alongside this expanded conception of the state, however, come some awkward questions. Habermas himself has developed his colonisation of the lifeworld thesis (see Chap. 3)  partially out of a concern that the modern state is overstepping its boundaries and encroaching on activity that should be left to the functions of the lifeworld itself. He also developed a theory of juridification to cast doubt on the ever-increasing scope of law in social life. It is difficult not to assess the institutionalisation of justice, especially in the context of ever-greater demands for justice, as carrying potentially dangerous forms of overreach that can overshadow whatever gains made in pursuit of justice. Admittedly, seeking the legitimation of social struggles via the legal system is a key tactic of movements dedicated to social justice (see famous examples of case law in the United States such as Brown v Board of education 1954 regarding racial segregation in schools, and Roe v Wade on reproductive rights and abortion). But seeking recourse to law can have unwanted consequences too—a reliance on formal rationality can have negative effects on the power of substantive rationality, as posited by Weber (Capeheart & Milovanovic, 2007: 143) (see Chap. 3 for more discussion of these issues). To some extent this is linked to the second question mark over theories over justice, which relates to the role of justice in democratic societies. While sometimes forgotten, justice is joined by two other key tenets of democratic societies—freedom and solidarity. All three are significant elements of a healthy vibrant democracy, and while they are interconnected and overlap in various ways, they have distinct remits and are not designed to be reducible to each other. Yet this has not prevented justice from being portrayed as either the only democratic aim or the most important one, a situation not helped by the somewhat desperate clamour to claim the mantle of social justice champion. Key Concept: Epistemic Injustice

Chapter 8 provides an overview of the ways in which knowledge and the nature of knowing have been a persistent focus of social theorists such as Mannheim, Foucault and Haraway. It is only recently however that questions of knowledge have become explicitly connected to questions of justice, courtesy of the work of Miranda Fricker’s ground-breaking text Epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). In the book she identifies two core types of epistemic injustice—testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The former relates to the undermining of a person’s knowledge due to discrimination, a situation in which ‘someone is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge’ (Fricker, 2007: 7), while the latter refers to more collective gaps in knowledge that negatively impacts a person’s self-knowledge, a scenario ‘in which someone is wronged in their capacity as a subject of social understanding’. Fricker gives two cases as examples—one in which a black person’s statements are (continued)

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undermined by police because they are black (testimonial injustice) and another in which a woman experiences sexual harassment in a context that lacks the vocabulary of sexual harassment and violence against women (hermeneutical injustice). The concept has since been broadened out to include a more general set of discriminatory practices that have a core knowledge component. According to the editors of The Routledge Handbook of epistemic injustice (Kidd et  al., 2017: 1), the term incorporates practices that affect individual and group abilities to make meaning and produce knowledge, such as ‘exclusion and silencing; invisibility and inaudibility; having one’s meanings or contributions systematically distorted, misheard or misrepresented …’. The concept has become increasingly prominent in debates over justice, and has been part of discussions about free speech, media representation and professional expertise among others. Its prominence in these debates in the early twenty-first century is to some extent an offshoot of social theories that have applied a critical perspective to the question of knowledge, such as feminism, postcolonial theory and queer theory, alongside the more overt epistemological critiques at the heart of postmodern and poststructural analyses of society. It is also part of a growing conceptual apparatus in social theory that privileges ways of knowing in debates over power and domination—see for examples Spivak’s concern with epistemic violence (Chap. 6) and de Sousa Santos’ focus on epistemicide in decolonial struggles in the global South (Chap. 8). The value of the concept is evident not only in relation to contemporary debates mentioned above, but also as regards specific concerns in social theory. The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice provides a useful overview of these, which include the relation between epistemic injustice and ideology (Charles Mills); trust and distrust (Katherine Hawley); the law (Michael Sullivan) as well as debates over objectivity (Sally Haslanger) and political freedom (Susan Babbit).

Debate: Recognition or Redistribution? In 2003 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth published a book entitled Recognition or redistribution? which assembled a collection of back-and-forth intellectual exchanges between the two theorists. These helped crystallise some of the key aspects of contemporary debates regarding justice and the critical theory tradition. In the book’s introduction, Fraser suggests that claims for social justice fall into two types (in Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 7) with one set of claims based on the redistribution of wealth and resources—from rich to poor, from North to South, from capitalist to proletariat. This type of claim was the concern of old social movements of labour politics. What has come more to the fore in recent decades is a set of claims for social justice based on a politics of recognition—claims that support the need to

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respect difference and acknowledge different perspectives. This constitutes a move way from an approach to justice that is focused on equal rights to one that foregrounds a respect for difference. This debate is often couched in the language of class politics (redistribution) and identity politics (recognition). Nevertheless, it is important not to take this seemingly clear distinction at face value—one has elements of the other and the acknowledgement of the significance of both sets of claims, as Fraser points out, is essential in the fight for social justice more generally. In the book, Fraser and Honneth argue that global politics in the twenty-first century demands that we can acknowledge both of these claims for justice. It is impossible to ignore issues of recognition concerning religion, identity, sexuality, race, gender and  nationality, in a world in which these are all highly visible and contested political and social spaces. That said, the ‘old’ politics of redistribution, of financial inequality, social class, labour and work, are still present and ‘cannot be brushed aside’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 2). This is because the gap between rich and poor is growing in many countries, as neoliberal forces ‘weaken the governance structures that previously enable some redistribution among countries’ (ibid, 2). In the book, Honneth makes a strong case for the recognition side of the debate. He views recognition as the key moral category, with the desire for respect the overarching theme of modern society (see Chap. 10). He views the existence of disrespect as the key social pathology in modern life, and consequently, issues of redistribution are important but are secondary to this primary form of sociality. Honneth proposes what he calls a ‘normative monism’ of recognition: that distribution can be theorised, especially in the shape of Marxist class analysis, as a subset of claims for recognition. Fraser, on the other hand, suggests a ‘perspectivist dualist’ analysis which considers both forms of justice as equally important and also irreducible to one another.

Bringing Solidarity Back In The radical ideas of the Enlightenment paved the way for both the French and the American revolutions. This influence is symbolised in the famous call to arms ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’, a set of ideals which still resonate today. They certainly resonate in the field of social theory, the history of which is littered with efforts to deal with these ideals and the possibilities that they represent for society. In some ways this relationship between the ideals of the French Revolution and social theory tends to be overlooked in the quest to locate and uncover power and its diverse effects. It may be the case that the field has forgotten its roots—having moved so far from the context within the Revolution took place. History has a habit of shrouding connections like this in the mists of time, but this should not prevent us from acknowledging the influence of the past. That said, the normative triad of the revolution and its relation to social theory is not without its problems. The first problem is that there is a power imbalance among the three—liberty (freedom) and equality (justice) tend to get top billing in social theory. This may be because the two have, as Bouchard and Charbonneau put it, ‘universal appeal’ (2014: 532). Together they provide a heady mixture of ‘individual

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freedom to lead one’s life as one pleases, within a society where all have equal opportunity’. More recently in the twenty-first century, issues of equality have held much of the attention. Matters of justice have overshadowed issues of individual and social freedom that concerned so much of social theory in the twentieth century. This leaves fraternity, or solidarity, as the erstwhile poor cousin in the social theory canon. That said, it is easy to overlook its importance in various strands of social theory—concerns over solidarity have been foregrounded in a considerable amount of theory: see for example the more evident case of Durkheim on forms of solidarity, but also see the analysis put forward by Tönnies and the concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (Tönnies, 1887). It is also prominent in other theories, no more so than in Hegel’s conception of freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in another’ (see Chap. 2). When one takes a closer look at theories of self, culture, language, emotions and the body, it soon becomes apparent that the ideals attached to solidarity have not retreated but reveal themselves in debates over words, practices and strategies of affiliation and social exclusion. The relative lack of attention paid to solidarity may be due to the glare of the spotlight on liberty and justice, as concerns over the binds that tie people together retreat into the background. Just as likely a cause is its historical Cinderella status, as solidarity ‘came a poor third’ (Johnston, 1991: 491) to liberty and equality in the original democratic agenda. Fraternity as an ideal was of less interest to the philosophers of the Enlightenment who preceded the revolution, whose concerns revolved more about the ‘rights of man’ and who was entitled to those rights. Questions of solidarity sat awkwardly alongside debates over what were considered natural rights and, as a result, tended to be less amenable to forms of legal and statutory regulation. But regardless of the reason, solidarity is undoubtedly a central concern of social theory, and it is wise to ‘bring human solidarity back’ into the equation (Sachs, 2012). The second problem revolves around the relation between the three ideals. It would be naïve to think of the three as living in principled harmony, as there is a conflict at the heart of this triad that can be witnessed in some theoretical writings. For example, justice and liberty are not the most comfortable of bedfellows at the best of times, and it can often be the case that struggles for justice on behalf of one group necessitate the curtailing of freedoms for others. Hence, the conflict at the heart of so many social justice movements, which often flounder when faced with the freedom of others to own property, run companies and so on. This also applies to questions of solidarity which do not always take a back seat to either freedom or justice: witness for example the furore over the rights of migrants to move freely in many countries, the endless gentrification of major global cities and districts. So often, communities of people get pitched against one another in a struggle over freedom, justice or both.

Solidarity as a Work in Progress This tension between solidarity and justice became the focus of Richard Rorty’s work. In his book Contingency, Irony and solidarity (1989), Rorty delivers a concept of justice that borrows heavily from the philosophy of pragmatism (see key

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movement box, Chap. 9). For Rorty, attempts to reconcile the demands of freedom and those of solidarity, for example as proffered by Hegel’s ‘being at home with oneself in another’, are doomed to failure (see Chap. 2), and instead, efforts should be directed towards viewing these sets of demands as equally valid ‘yet forever incommensurable’ (Rorty, 1989: xv). Like postmodernism generally, Rorty avoids all forms of universal claims to justice. For him objective standards from which to measure justice are non-existent. Instead, he sees solidarity as a work in progress, one that does not have foundational criteria by which to base itself on. Solidarity does not need to rely on claims to some form of buried human empathy or kindness, and neither does it depend on the removal of prejudicial forms of human interaction (racism, xenophobia, sexism, disablism, transphobia, etc.). For Rorty, solidarity is a ‘goal to be achieved’, not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves. (Rorty, 1989: xvi)

According to Rorty, the achievement of this goal can be enabled by activities such as ethnography, novels, documentaries, even comic books. Fiction, for example, has a moral force that ‘gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us re-describe ourselves’. Alongside the power of novels, he also credits popular culture such as movies and TV as the ‘principal vehicles of moral change and progress’, taking a clearly positive stance to popular culture as compared to Adorno (and more like Benjamin, see Chap. 6). Rorty accepts that human solidarity is tribal, that sentiments such as ‘people like us’ and ‘our sort of people’ are part of the fabric of life. He does not dispute this and argues that people necessarily look for forms of similarity and dissimilarity among themselves. This is his starting point alongside a belief that people ‘have a moral obligation to feel a sense of solidarity with all other human beings’ (Rorty, 1989: 190). On this basis, his approach to solidarity is one which sees people extending their sense of ‘we’ to people whom ‘we have previously thought of as “they”’. Rorty’s conception of solidarity has no need for fixed conceptions of self of personhood. Rather, solidarity is the ‘ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of “us”’ (Rorty, 1989: 192). This processual theory of ever-greater solidarity, a form of radical democracy that seeks justice from the standpoint of the here and now, is also in need of some kind of normative understanding of justice. Rorty acknowledges this: he states that ‘there is such a thing as moral progress, and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity’. At the same time, he acknowledges the historically contingent nature of moral obligation, in effect making a virtue out of a necessity: We need to realize that a focus imaginarius is none the worse for being an invention rather than (as Kant thought it) a built-in feature of the human mind. The right way to take the slogan ‘We have obligations to human beings simply as such’ is as a means of reminding ourselves to keep trying to expand our sense of ‘us’ as far as we can. (Rorty, 1989: 196)

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Although Rorty is somewhat difficult to pin down, there is much to be commended in his argument for a historically dependent conception of human solidarity which aims to build on accumulated knowledge and to learn from the past. Another aspect of note in his argument is the idea that self-doubt carries a pedagogical component that can be collectively shared over time, self-doubt which has ‘gradually, over the last few centuries, been inculcated into inhabitants of the democratic states’ (Rorty, 1989: 198). This doubt is a form of critical reflexivity on one’s stock of empathy towards others, which can lead to further doubts about the capacity of modern care structures to deal with the ‘pain and humiliation’ of others, while also opening up opportunities to consider the alternatives. Rorty’s approach to solidarity on the surface is commendable, and one that mirrors everyday reality for people who often inhabit different ‘tribes’ and different sets of solidarities. Forms of ‘us and them’ solidarities are evident in friendship groups, associations and networks that tend to align along class, nation, political or religious lines, while tight bonds are also formed around specific interests such as sport, art, music and current affairs. These bonds of affiliation are to some extent cemented and strengthened by the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the difference an essential part of the solidarity in the first place. At the same time, there is something of a disconnect to other forms of everyday practice, including political practice, practices of inequality and power and practices of social movements. Nancy Fraser (1989) has been especially scathing of Rorty’s approach to solidarity in this regard, criticising it for lacking a real theory of change and social conflict. For her, Rorty puts forth a theory of the social which is passive and highly individualised, lacking the politics of struggles over cultural meaning, identity and position. Self-doubt as a vehicle for change and justice is insufficient and lacks empirical support when faced with the power of social movements to transform how we see others. She argues there is a need to consider the ‘agents of historical change to be social movements rather than extraordinary individuals’ (Fraser, 1989: 107).

Key Term: Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a way of understanding the numerous factors that create relations of power and privilege, by examining how categories such as race, class and gender combine and compound one another to establish modes of oppression over individuals. The significance of the term revolves around its emphasis on interconnectedness—that social categories such as social class do not exist in isolation but rather intersect with one another, in the process creating new forms of injustice. As an analytical approach, intersectionality has foundations in the social movements of the 1960s, a time in which the socialist movement was criticised for its lack of interest in issues of race, while the civil rights movement, as well as decolonial struggles, were taken to task for their ignorance of gender as a tool of discrimination. Since that time, the term has become commonplace in academic discussions across the humanities and social sciences disciplines, but has also influenced practice in fields such as education and the work of numerous grassroots and social movements across the world.

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The Politics of Care Fraser’s critique of Rorty aside, his focus on the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is a significant contribution to social theory and its efforts to get to grips with the struggle for justice. The affective ties between people (and lack of them) have real impact on these struggles—the bonds of solidarity that hold societies together are heavily dependent on the emotional capacities of people to consider the feelings and experiences of others. Chief among these capacities is care—the ability to consider the well-being of others. The importance of care has not gone unnoticed in the field of social justice, with theorists such as Nussbaum weaving a concern with care into their conceptual apparatus. Feminist theory (see key movement box, Chap. 11) more generally has highlighted its significance in the field of social policy (Noddings, 2002; Williams, 2001). This makes sense as the social dimension of care has wide implications for bonds of solidarity that hold societies together, a lack of care a conduit for social breakdown, disharmony, alienation, even violence. Holloway highlights the real significance of care for society: When whole groups fail to care, cultures of hate, retribution and vengeance can be created that reproduce the traumatic conditions of their own making. There is less chance of the kind of citizenly care that provides a bulwark against political corruption, unbridled market forces or religious fundamentalism. (Holloway, 2006: 2)

Feminist care ethics, in particular, has situated care at the centre of a moral theory of society. Carol Gilligan’s ground-breaking book In a different voice (Gilligan, 1982) laid the foundations for much of the subsequent debate around care ethics. Based on a critique of theories of moral development, particularly that of Lawrence Kohlberg, Gilligan argues that an ethic of care should be seen as just as important as an ethic of justice. Established as an alternative to an ethic of justice, which she considers a male preserve, Gilligan’s ethic of care is a feminine ethic based on her studies of boys and girls and their moral development. She came to this conclusion from studying the responses of boys and girls to questions about moral dilemmas: evident in the boys’ responses was an ethic of justice. This entailed a form of rationality that worked from the basis of abstract principles and concluded with a rule-­based solution, whereas an ethic of care could be witnessed in the girls’ responses, which were more communicative, less abstract and more situational in nature. This led her to assert that two different ethics could be viewed through the prism of individual moral development: one based on notions of equality (an ethic of justice), and the other formulated through factors such as attachment and human needs (an ethic of care). In essence, girls operate with a different moral compass to boys, according to Gilligan, and therefore could not be compared to boys: the world of girls is one of relatedness, of connectedness. Since then, people like Joan Tronto (2013) have made the case that care should be considered central to all human life and not be relegated to the private sphere or to women’s work. This conception of care is shared by a number of authors in the field of social policy. Nel Noddings, for example, in her book Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Noddings, 2002), states that care can provide a legitimate basis for social policy. Noddings bases her approach to caring social policies on her notion of ‘starting at home’. From this principle, she outlines a set of policy agendas that represent a functioning caring society. These include policies such as homes for the homeless as well

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as a series of measures geared towards school reform, which include parenting classes, lessons on child development, nutrition and basic household skills, Another key proponent of care ethics from a social policy perspective is Fiona Williams (2018), who supports care ethicists in their efforts to offer an alternative to prevailing conceptions of justice, an alternative that reconstitutes notions of justice, equality and reason through a relational lens. She supports their desire to valorise human interdependency and relationships as a secure grounding for tackling issues such as justice, human flourishing and sustainability. She advocates for a political ethic of care that ‘recognizes the everyday centrality of care for everyday life and work’ (Williams, 2018: 558). Care for Williams is a potentially global strategy that can provide a valuable counter-narrative to the hegemonic ideology of economic austerity and simplistic cost-benefit analysis: Economic logics crowd out the intrinsic value of good-quality care provision. Yet care is central to the global economy, its inequalities and its crises. Demanding an understanding of this means raising the social, economic and political value of care. It is here that a care-­ ethical approach is helpful. This starts from a critique of liberal notions of justice for their hyper-individualist focus on autonomy and rationality as the basis to moral reasoning, and its consequent devaluation of dependency, vulnerability and interdependency which attend care practices. (Williams, 2018: 557)

The concept of care has not gone uncontested, especially from a gender perspective, and debates have taken place since the 1970s that have challenged the notion that care work is women’s work (see Chap. 4). This was a theme explored by Wendy Holloway, whose work on the capacity to care takes on two common misconceptions—that a capacity to care is innate and that women are naturally more oriented towards relations of care. She makes the theoretical case for care as an activity that is embedded in intersubjective (see key term box, Chap. 9) relations: Capacities to care are psycho-social in the sense that they develop as part of self-­ development, which is intersubjective, and that the life histories of individuals during the course of this development are inextricably relational and also derive their meaning from their social setting. (Holloway, 2006: 6)

Through an approach that seeks to embed insights from psychoanalysis into social analyses (see Chap. 10 for more on psychoanalysis and emotions), Holloway makes the case that a capacity to care develops in the early years. She aims to avoid what she calls ‘sociological reductionism’ (Holloway, 2006: 6), and to counteract this, she focuses on parenting and the caring of children ‘because I regard families (in whatever shape and form) as the crucible caring relationships’. Holloway argues that other theories of care avoid the question: how does one develop (or not) the capacity to care? Because of this, they underestimate the role of family life in the development of care capacity. Holloway’s critical approach to care is designed to strengthen its case as a model for ethics, but there are other criticisms that have been generated outside the care ethics debate. One of these emanates from disability studies and the disability movement, which question the ways in which the recipients of care are cast ‘as dependent, passive and inert relative to caregivers’ (Phillips, 2007: 28). The word ‘care’ in some cases can carry negative connotations for those who see caring as a

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form of implied subordination, preferring instead less loaded terms such as ‘help’ and ‘assistance’. The results of this critique can be witnessed in changing terminology, which also reflects a broader movement around inclusion that aims to respect difference and accommodate the diverse needs of society. As discussed in Chap. 7, the language used to refer to other people, regardless of their status, comes with strings attached, and the language of care is no different. All too often, ‘care’ represents dependency and a form of powerlessness, which is out of step with contemporary critiques of medical approaches towards disability. Another critique of care ethics emanates from the care sector itself, the set of institutions and professional practices such as health and social services, nursing and care homes. All too often, these sectors have seen their contribution undermined and under-resourced by states that view such services as a burden on strained budgets and resources. A political ethic of care, while laudable, seems a long way from its realisation in the face of care management practices that valorise economic efficiency and institutional risk reduction over the quality of care on offer to vulnerable people. There is a crisis of care that is threatening to explode in many nation states as political legitimacy is scrutinised ever more closely in the face of staff shortages, hospital waiting lists and the sometimes extortionate cost of care. This is joined by another troubling aspect of the care sector, one that has shone a spotlight on the professionals that work there. Unfortunately in some cases, evidence exists of abuse and neglect on the part of these professionals, particularly in care homes which house some of the most vulnerable people in society. There are also instances of child abuse that have come to the fore in recent years in religious institutions, schools and youth organisations. The evidence also suggests that this is not a widespread phenomenon and does not reflect the working practices of most professionals. Yet these cases have real effects, not just on the individuals involved, but also on the more general practice of care at a political and social level. Cases of medical malpractice, professional abuse and institutional neglect help create the need for an apparatus of risk assessment and accountability that tends to weaken an already struggling welfare system. They also contribute to the phenomenon of legal overreach and the spread of juridified cultures in professional and institutional life (see the discussion of juridification in Chap. 3). Just as significant are their effects on the public, the taxpayers who see grounds to question the value of a social safety net and care system that is failing to deliver either safety or care to the most vulnerable people in society. In cases like these, it appears that there is some distance to be made up between care ethics as a theory and care ethics as a practice. That said, the onset of Covid 19 in 2020 and its unprecedented impact on national care systems has thrown into sharp relief the significance of care in relation to both social solidarity and social justice. In the face of such a health crisis, states were forced to ditch policies of austerity and marketisation and instead roll out strong welfare state agendas that sought to protect their citizens from economic harm. In the majority of countries, the safety and care of people (young and old) were put first, with businesses closed and workers furloughed at considerable expense. At the same time, the work of health and social care professionals was championed by the

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public like never before, while other ‘key’ but low-paid workers such as cleaners, taxi drivers and shop assistants were lauded for their efforts towards the greater good. Not since the Second World War has such a collective sense of shared solidarity, of a sense of reliance on others, been so evident. This reliance is deepened by the potent reality of a life-threatening and highly contagious pandemic, and by the troubling consequences for employment across many sectors and industries. But it is also a disease that discriminates—it preys on the frail and the vulnerable, while figures suggest that it disproportionately affects members of ethnic minority groups. The economic fallout is also destined to hurt the less-well off in society, as the low-­ paid and precariously employed bear the brunt of economic devastation. This new reality, the ‘new normal’ of mutual obligation, community and collectivism speaks directly to the central tenets of care ethics, which valorise interdependency and solidarity over the whims of a globalised market economy. It may be that its time has come, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the policies of neoliberalism are themselves built on very fragile foundations. It is too early to state this with any degree of certainty, but if Covid 19 has done anything it has stripped away the fallacy of the ‘natural’ laws of the market and created at least a deeper conversation about welfare and the politics of care in a mutually dependent world.

Key Theorist: Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser is a key figure in contemporary critical theory, whose work has explored the importance of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist analyses of social problems, particularly around issues such as participation, welfare, justice and radical democracy. She has carved a path through the field of social theory which has included critiques of postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. In her influential set of essays Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary theory (Fraser, 1989a), she also makes a strong case for hybridising the critical theory of the Frankfurt School with feminist critiques of labour, welfare and conceptions of the political. In books such as Justice interruptus (Fraser, 1997) and Recognition or redistribution? (Fraser and Honneth, 2003), Fraser aims to overcome what she considers a false dichotomy between cultural and economic claims on justice. She sees the distinction between identity and class-based politics as unhelpful and unwarranted, and argues that this distinction can be overcome via political struggles as much as theoretical work—she has embraced the philosophy of Marx as well as that of feminism. Like Marx, she views social theory as a way to illuminate social pathologies in order to develop mechanisms via which to transform them. Throughout her career she has defended the idea of the public sphere (see Chap. 5) while also being acutely aware of the injustices that already exist in terms of citizen engagement with the public sphere. One of her most famous (continued)

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papers, ‘What’s critical about critical theory?’ (Fraser, 1989b) delivers a well-­ honed critique of Habermas and his blindness to gender in his theoretical constructions of capitalist society. For example, she argues that the relations Habermas views as key to societal integration, such as consumer and citizen, are heavily gendered, as is the split between public and private that is central to his theory of the public sphere and social movements. These caveats aside, Fraser remains a champion of the public sphere as a space with which social change can be fermented and organised. She is especially keen on a trans-nationalised public sphere, one she argued for in an influential paper in 2007 (Fraser, 2007). This has received its own set of responses published in book form (Nash, 2014). These responses each critically engage with Fraser’s core argument that the notion of the public sphere needs to be reconstructed to reflect an increasingly globalised and neoliberalised world, one in which nation statebounded notions of publicness and citizenship are losing both normative and empirical grounds. She acknowledges at the same time the difficulties with such a reconstruction, when faced with among other things a postcolonial suspicion of Eurocentrism at the heart of the public sphere ideal. Nevertheless, she believes that a transnational public sphere offers great promise when faced with the shared social injustices at a global level (see the arguments in her book Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world, Fraser, 2009).

In Summary Justice as Fairness  Two opposing theories have come to the fore in discussions about how to conceive of and measure justice—the first is the resource-oriented approach, or what John Rawls refers to as justice as fairness. This argues that justice should be measured on the extent to which resources are distributed fairly across the population, reflecting Rawls’ position that equality of opportunity is insufficient to guarantee a fair society. Justice as Capability  This approach has been developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, who argue that Rawls’ theory is also insufficient as a metric of justice. Instead, they claim that the ability of people to realise their capabilities should be the standard approach to social justice, as capabilities (such as being able to have good health) are a more accurate reflection of human desire than purely economic justice. Recognition or Redistribution?  Contemporary debates over social justice are sometimes couched in the language of recognition and redistribution. This language reflects the agenda of different types of social movements—while ‘old’ social movements struggled for a more equitable distribution of wealth, especially between social classes, ‘new’ movements make claims to justice based on respect for

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difference (sexuality, race, (dis)ability). This debate is sometimes presented as a highly polarised split between class politics (redistribution) and identity (recognition) politics. Justice and Solidarity  Drawing on the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Richard Rorty explores the issue of social justice from the perspective of solidarity. His central concern is the ways in which people ‘tribalise’ both similarity and difference in their dealing with others, and the potential of transcending this ‘us and them’ attitude in the search for a wider solidarity. For Rorty, solidarity is a ‘goal to be achieved’, a process of understanding and mutual affiliation, that seeks this affiliation through a progressive expansion of the meaning and scope of ‘us’. The Politics of Care  Feminist care ethics has positioned care at the centre of a moral theory of society, a theory that emphasises both justice and solidarity as social norms. Authors such as Joan Tronto (2013) argue that, instead of being devolved to the private sphere or to women’s work, care should be viewed as an organising concept that informs all social activity. This approach to care ethics has been adopted in fields such as social policy, where scholars like Fiona Williams seek to embed care ethics in contemporary conceptions of social welfare. Questions How would you define social justice? What elements would you include in a definition and why? Are there any particular social justice movements you identify with, or value more than others? See if you can explain your reasoning for this. Should the concept of care be given a more prominent position in public policy? Suggested Readings Craig, G., Burchardt, T. and Gordon, D. (eds) (2008). Social Justice and Public Policy: Seeking Fairness in Diverse Societies. Bristol: Policy Press. An edited volume that employs theories of justice (recognition, redistribution, capability) in relation to policy concerns in the fields of family, children, social welfare, race, environment and aid. Forrester, K. (2019). In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Provides a historical account of the influence of Rawls on liberal political philosophy while also detailing the impact of twentieth-century political developments on Rawls’ changing conceptions of justice, welfare and equality. Phillips J. (2007). Care. Cambridge: Polity. A key concept book that addresses some of the main debates in the theory and practice of care, including racial, gendered and spatial aspects of care, as well as an introduction to professional debates in the care sector.

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Gilligan, C. (2011). Joining the Resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press. The author revisits some of the themes addressed in her classic text In a different voice (patriarchal power, moral development, identity) to further develop her approach to a feminist ethic of care.

References Bouchard, N., & Charbonneau, E. (2014). Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Administrative Theory and Praxis, 36(4), 532–538. Capeheart, L., & Milovanovic, D. (2007). Social Justice: Theories, Issues and Movements. Rutgers University Press. Clark, D., Biggeri, M., & Apsan Frediani, A. (Eds.). (2019). The Capability Approach, Empowerment and Participation: Concepts, Methods and Applications. Palgrave. Engster, D. (2004). Care Ethics and Natural Law Theory: Toward an Institutional Political Theory of Caring. The Journal of Politics, 66(1), 113–135. Finlayson, J. G. (2019). The Habermas-Rawls Debate. Columbia University Press. Forrester, K. (2019). In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. Princeton University Press. Fraser, N. (1989a). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (1989b). What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender. In N. Fraser (Ed.), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (pp. 113–143). University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. Routledge. Fraser, N. (2007). Transnationalising the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World. Theory, Culture and Society, 24(4), 7–30. Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Columbia University Press. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Verso. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1995). Reconciliation Through the Use of Public Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’ Political Liberalism. Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), 109–131. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Holloway, W. (2006). The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Intersubjectivity. Routledge. Ibrahim, S., & Tiwari, M. (Eds.). (2014). The Capability Approach: From Theory to Practice. Palgrave Macmillan. Johnston, H. (1991). Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Democratic Ideals and Educational Effects. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 12(4), 483–499. Kidd, I.  J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge. Munger, F., MacLeod, T., & Loomis, C. (2016). Social Change: Toward an Informed and Critical Understanding of Social Justice and the Capabilities Approach in Community Psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 57, 171–180. Nash, K. (Ed.). (2014). Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Nancy Fraser et al. Polity. Noddings, N. (2002). Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. University of California Press.

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Nussbaum, M. (1992). Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism. Political Theory, 20(2), 202–246. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Capabilities as Fundamental Freedoms: Sen and Social Justice. Feminist Economics, 9(2–3), 33–59. Phillips, J. (2007). Care. Polity Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1995). Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas. Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), 132–180. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Harvard University. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Sachs, A. (2012). Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Bringing Human Solidarity Back into the Rights Equation. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 4(3), 365–383. Sen, A. (1980). Equality of What? In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Vol. 1, pp. 197–220). Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, reproduced in J.  Harris (Ed.). (2012). Community and Civil Society. Cambridge University Press. Tronto, J. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York University Press. Venkatapuram, S. (2011). Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach. Polity Press. Williams, F. (2001). In and Beyond New Labour: Towards a New Political Ethic of Care. Critical Social Policy, 21(4), 467–493. Williams, F. (2018). Care: Intersections of Scales, Inequalities and Crises. Current Sociology, 66(4), 547–561. Yilmaz, E. (2016). Resources Versus Capabilities in Social Justice. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 28(2), 230–254.

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Introduction At this stage of the book it is hoped that the reader will have gained a strong sense of the scale of social theory. This book has covered an immense amount of intellectual ground, covering issues as diverse as language and labour, culture and class, shame and precarity, neoliberalism and epistemic injustice. It is hoped that the thematic structure of the book has assisted reader’s efforts to understand the vastness and complexity of ideas in the social theory world. These chapters have been designed to introduce the key areas of concern in social theory, to detail the significance of these areas and to outline the diversity of approaches to these topics. The emphasis throughout has been on the concepts as opposed to the school of thought/ theorist, so that the reader can more fully appreciate the importance of the topic to the long-standing concerns of social theory with power and control, democracy, freedom, solidarity, equality and justice. As the book’s subtitle states, this is an ‘introduction’ and is not offered as the last word on the subject of social theory; there are many other issues and debates in the field that are not covered here, as well as other social theorists. Space simply does not permit a comprehensive coverage of all this material. What it does offer is a solid grounding in the themes and concepts that have stayed at the heart of social theory—state, economy, governance and civil society as well as more contemporary interests around culture, knowledge, language, the self, emotions and the body. The reader can use the detail provided on these themes here to develop their knowledge and understanding of the field, as well as help them to more effectively relate theory to whatever form of social practice of interest to them. Provided in this chapter are some further reflections on the book’s content that can assist in building this knowledge base, as well as a section exploring the important role of hybridisation in the construction of current and future theory work—this aspect of theory building was touched upon at various points in the book and the conclusion is a good place to expand on this topic in more detail.

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Further Reflections Taking stock of the content of the book, a number of other themes make themselves felt—these include the continued relevance of social theory in the twenty-first century; the importance of the digital world; the relation between different themes; the importance of language and the significance of reason. This is not an exhaustive list, and the reader may have identified other additional themes of interest to social theoreticians. The continued relevance of social theory: There are persistent themes in social theory that are as relevant today as they were when they were first developed. For example, the experience so far of the twenty-first century strongly indicates that the nineteenth-century focus on economics in social theory was not just a one-off, a historical anomaly—if anything, the post-2008 world suggests that the economy deserves even greater theoretical scrutiny and critical engagement. This is especially true when it comes to issues of equality and economic justice. But it also speaks to concerns over solidarity, no more so than today when the uber-rich 1 per cent of the world’s population own 70 per cent of the wealth, as well as the power and influence that come with this. Marxist analysis in such circumstances has its place, and it would be unwise for future analysis to not heed his warnings; it is noteworthy that the work of Thomas Piketty is not a million miles away from Marx in his analysis of the problems facing twenty-first-century capitalism. What also needs to be considered is the power of history and technological change to render previous concepts of economic reality less secure. A striking consequence of the 2008 crisis is that it made people much more aware of the power of the global economy over their individual lives. Basic issues that affect their daily experiences and quality of life—cost of food, utilities and fuel, employment opportunities, interest rates, pensions, mortgages, funding of public services—these were all visibly impacted by the seismic shift in the economic world order. The crisis also brought home to people the realities of an interdependent world economy, one in which a crisis in one country can have dramatic implications for a citizen’s home country. Social theory and the digital: History and technology have coalesced in the twenty-first century in the shape of the digital technological revolution. The rise of the internet as an unstoppable global force has been remarkable and has brought serious ramifications for sectors such as retail, media and communications, journalism, education and the arts. This impact on the social world is arguably at its most evident in the shape of social media, which has provided a platform for virtual social interaction and communication at an unprecedented scale. This impact has not been without issues, as is apparent in this book. Social media and digital media, more generally, have had a massive impact on the digitisation of the public sphere, for better or for worse. As outlined in Chap. 5, forms of online communication are not without their problems, providing as much opportunity for the flourishing of an uncivil society as they do for democratic and reasoned debates. The perils of digital media also have ramifications for other core concerns in social theory—the power of language, the role of knowledge in democratic dialogue and

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decision-making, as well as highlighting the power of emotions in people’s judgements, communications and self-presentation. Social media, as a highly visual, immediate and invasive media, has also underlined the importance of social forces in the struggle over the politics of the human body. Interconnecting themes: It is often the case that social theorists address a number of the key themes in this book rather than focusing on just one. This reflects their conceptual interdisciplinarity—Bourdieu and Foucault are good examples of this. Many of the themes in this book interconnect and relate to one another in various ways; the theme of ‘emotions’ is a good example as several other themes have consequences for the emotional side of life. To take a few cases of this interconnection detailed in the book: the governance of risk has produced a form of risk management in which governments have played the ‘blame game’ and resorted to questionable practices such as scapegoating and spin doctoring, which themselves can have troubling impacts on emotions such as shame and trust; emotions are never too far from the surface in analyses of the economy, for example, the alienated worker in Marxist analyses of commodification, the degradation experienced by deskilled workers (Harry Braverman), the anger of the underemployed and underpaid precariat (Guy Standing), as well as the economic exploitation underpinning emotional labour (Arlie Hochschild). See also the emotional dimension of care ethics as an alternative to theories of justice, which aim to position emotional life at the centre of an equitable and fair society. The meaning of ‘social’ in social theory: Issues such as culture, language, knowledge, emotions and the body have all become serious and sustained fields of research interest in social theory in the twenty-first century. Based on the details described in this book, this expanding definition of social theory has little to do with intellectual colonisation but rather a by-product of persistent concerns with power, domination, control and social justice. For example, what might previously have been considered a primary domain of psychology—the self and emotions—have captured the attention of social theorists eager to expand their analysis of social relations and their effects on issues such as labour, social solidarity and gendered forms of inequality. A focus on long-standing fields such as race, class and gender alongside sexuality and disability has encouraged this expansionism, paralleling to some extent the way in which an interest in class migrated into an examination of culture. This desire to provide more adequate explanations for social phenomena helps to explain the remarkable interdisciplinary work that takes place in social theory—the field is constantly evolving and it achieves this by expanding its intellectual reach and vocabulary through interdisciplinarity. There are numerous examples across the book of such cross-fertilisation at work, with authors drawing on ideas generated, not just in sociology but also in psychology, history and anthropology. The theme of governance provides strong evidence of this, the study of modern governance systems incorporating novel ideas from broad research areas such as public administration (street-level bureaucracy), critical management studies (new public management, blame game) and legal studies (juridification) in order to more effectively grapple with changing forms of political management and power.

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The importance of language to social theory: Evident throughout the chapters is the power of language as a vehicle for theorising. This is because language creates intellectual space for ideas to take shape—for example, language in the basic form of adjectives is surprisingly efficient at clarity and conciseness. Language also helps theory overcome disciplinary boundaries and thus widen the explanatory scope of the field; words or phrases assume the role of concepts to unearth multifaceted meanings—theoretical concepts provide a ‘common language within which our progress in knowledge can take place’ (Guzzini, 2013, 537). The concepts produced by social theory represent a body of knowledge that helps extend the meaning of ordinary words to denote something more complex— this body of knowledge offers a form of critical literacy for researchers to work with as a core aspect of ‘doing’ research. As a critical research literacy, theory can equip researchers with research lenses that give research phenomena a perspective from which to ‘capture’ reality as well as vocabulary for researchers to express their understanding of it. The significance of reason: Reason is a recurring theme in the history of social theory and has found itself at the centre of some important ideas generated by Habermas, Bourdieu, Haraway, Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault, Butler, Lyotard and Derrida. While the debate over the possibilities and perils of reason has been key to the debate between modern and post-modern social theory, there are other facets to reason that should be highlighted as they have contemporary relevance. The first is the debate over objectivity as detailed in Chap. 8 on knowledge. The extent to which knowledge can be considered objective is a question about the possibility of reason itself, and so much of the theoretical debates—the positivism wars, the social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann, the caveats generated by situated, subjugated and indigenous knowledges—have all raised further questions about the viability of reason as a foundation for democratic life. On top of this, there is also the extent to which reason can easily be separated off from other important facets of life such as emotions and the body. Twenty-first-century concerns about the role of experts, the authority of science in decision-making and the legitimacy of independent evidence speak to the continuing importance of this debate over reason and its place in society, a debate that, if anything, has become more heated since the great positivism debate of the 1960s. This is also the case when it comes to the legitimacy of social theory itself as an explanatory frame, as it deals with concerns over academic gatekeeping and the place of public intellectualism. These concerns illustrate the fact that social theory and social theorising is not immune to the kind of social forces that it endeavours to examine.

Social Theory and Hybridisation The introduction to this book drew attention to the historical nature of social theory; social theory is a response to historical events, and historical forms of injustice. This should have become gradually apparent as the book sets out the various positions

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taken in relation to questions of culture, language and so on. Social theory does not dwell so much on what is the ‘correct type of culture’—it asks instead the extent to which culture has played a part in historical transformations. The raison d’être of social theory is to account for change and its effects. It therefore has less interest in identifying some kind of fixed historical juncture via which society can be judged; it accepts by the large that this is a thankless task and a waste of intellectual energy. But that said the lack of such a juncture has posed difficulties for social theory and has asked questions of its capacity to deliver effective forms of social critique. It is better off without it however as history sweeps all before it, and changing historical circumstances cannot accommodate absolute certainties and fixed positions. This is why social theory should be approached as subject to transformation; this goes also for the numerous conceptual apparatuses that have been painstakingly constructed by scholars to help them explain societal change and its consequences. At this stage readers may have their own favourites and are drawn to particular thinkers and ideas: this is understandable and means that the reader is no different to the theorists detailed in this book. At the same time, it is best not to let appreciation act as a substitute for a more measured analysis of favourite theorists. It is also best to remember that these theories and the theorists themselves are also products of historical circumstances and are not immune to change: they should not be viewed as unalterable and outside critique. No social theory can or should be considered in such a manner. Otherwise it will resemble a religion with strict moral codes—a brief glance at the twenty-first-century suggests that there is more than enough moral certainty out there already. The world can do with less and not more certainty. The same applies to social theorists themselves. Social theorists often feel the need to defend a particular position against threats posed by other theories, and their anxiety is understandable given that so much depends on the assumed legitimacy of their conceptual work, both from a political and professional perspective. But this is unnecessary. It is also illogical as their own theories are generally built on an already existing set of ideas and concepts, without which it would be impossible to generate new concepts. Take Habermas for example: his work is a shining example of what we can call hybridisation. His work, such as the Theory of Communicative Action, weaves together a dazzling combination of thinkers and ideas to construct his own analysis of modern pathologies. The same can be said for many other major theorists as evidenced throughout the book. Stuart Hall is another strong example of a hybridising theorist who was not afraid to move between very different paradigms; he utilised Marxist terminology and constructs in his earlier work but later drew much more from Foucault and Derrida. He made these intellectual shifts as his interest had changed to a more focused analysis on identity and postcolonialism. In his later life, he returned to an early interest in the visual arts, and this tipped over into an altered analysis of culture and its consequences—anthropological definitions of culture were replaced by an approach that placed signification at the core of cultural life. As part of the changing life experience he witnessed, cultures the world over provide aesthetic and artistic responses to a hegemonic form of Western neocolonialism, taking advantage of the world of media and communications to offer this resistance.

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So many classic concepts and texts would never have been generated and published if not for theory hybridisation. Iris Marion Young’s classic Throwing like a girl is the product of a phenomenological/feminist theoretical hybrid, which affords her the conceptual space to build on De Beauvoir’s critique of the second-class status of women, while also drawing heavily on the insights of Merleau-Ponty. In their book The social construction of reality, Berger and Luckmann delivered a strong example of a hybridised work, as it weaves ideas borrowed from Durkheim’s structuralism, Weber’s interpretivism, as well as borrowing heavily from Alfred Schutz and his concept of multiple realities (Schutz, 1945). George Herbert Mead’s concept ‘the significant other’ was a hybrid concept, built on ideas from literature, physics and evolutionary studies, as well as theories of American pragmatism and the work of German philosophers such as Hegel. The best theorists engage in this kind of conceptual interdisciplinarity, as a way to move debates forward and to untangle some previously knotty conceptual issues. It is incorrect therefore to think that these latest versions of hybrid theory are themselves immune to change and represent the final word on whatever topic they examine. It is more likely that they will stay with us for a long time but any efforts to preserve their purity are destined to fail or at best lead us down some suspect avenues. The experience of Marx and Marxist theory is a case in point—his ideas have become over time classified as young (early) and mature (old) Marx, the so-called scientific Marxism of the latter especially prone to zealous takes on the role of theory in transforming society. While there are some excellent examples of what can be termed ‘orthodox’ takes on applied Marx (see Mandel in Chap. 2 as one such example), much of the truly innovative approaches to Marx have come through engaging with his work in both a contextual and reconstructive way. Marx’s work offers so much (still untapped) conceptual potential that offers a superb and superior source of ideas but does not offer the last word on anything. Let us not forget that Marx would have found it extremely difficult to develop his own ideas without the assistance of ideas generated by Hegel especially but also philosophers like  Ludwig Feuerbach. His work on capital is a treasure trove of hybridised ideas, a conceptual tour de force that makes a mockery of attempts to purify Marx for political reasons. But, at the same time, it is important to consider the limits of such (hybrid) theorising. In my own collection on Habermas (Murphy, 2017), I talk about how Habermas values theory in a certain way. Habermas in fact has a surprisingly modest appreciation of theory and its significance. He once stated in an interview that ‘it’s good not to expect any more or anything different from theories than what they can achieve – and that’s little enough’ (Habermas, 1994, p. 100). This view of theory makes sense when Habermas is placed in his intellectual context. Since its inception in the 1930s, The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory committed itself to understand the relations between theory and practice, viewing theory as a mechanism to understand the world in order to change it. Their commitment to praxis resulted in a body of applied research that inspired the second generation of critical theorists, of which Habermas is the spearhead, to take the social theory-research method nexus seriously. Habermas himself has emphasised an applied and flexible

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approach to social theory ‘whose fruitfulness can be confirmed only in the ramifications of social and philosophical research’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 297). Habermas sees the real value of social theory in its capacity to illuminate forms of research practice. The power of social theory, which he likens to the ‘focusing power of a magnifying glass’ is realised in its application. Habermas views theory as one part of a bigger endeavour in terms of critical theory, of working towards practical solutions to complex societal problems—with his own theory playing an important but not the only role. His understanding of theory and its significance is therefore a qualified one—theorising the social is only one part of the equation.

Hybridisation and the Art of Social Theory Theory, therefore, needs to ‘test’ and reconstruct itself based on changing forms of social practice. It is important to remember this key element of theorising, and this itself tends to strengthen the case for hybridisation in social theorising rather than weaken it. On this point, Richard Swedberg has done the field of social theory a great service by drawing our attention to the art of doing social theory (Swedberg, 2014). According to Swedberg, in order to be successful at social theorising, you need to have ‘the capacity to look at reality from a social perspective’ (2014: 169). He also adds that knowing some social theory and having the ability to engage with it effectively, to ‘handle it well’ is also important: You may, for example, need to take a concept from one theory and combine it with a concept from another theory. You may want to eliminate some part of a theory and replace it with a new idea of your own, and so on.

This capacity to hybridise, he argues, means that you are less likely to end up as the kind of theory dilettante singled out by Max Weber in Science as a vocation (Weber, 2004: 271), one that lacks the capacity to draw on a range of sources for inspiration. This is where knowledge of social theory comes in, and it is a particular kind of knowledge, knowledge not just about the accumulation of ideas, concepts and theoretical approaches; rather it is about having a depth of understanding as to what the ‘social’ means. Swedberg provides a wonderful table which identifies some of the more common errors in dealing with social theory (2014: 189–90). These are indeed common but also avoidable. These include: • • • • •

A fixation on method and a consequent devaluing of theory An assumption that theory must always come after empirical research ‘shoehorning’ the theory to fit the data Theory ‘confirmation’: using findings to support a specific concept or theory Theory replication as an end in itself.

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Swedberg is correct to suggest that theorising (ability to and the process of) can be learnt. The capacity to be able to learn how to theorise also requires a large dose of imagination on the part of the theorist. Talk of imagination and social theory sends us back to the work of C. Wright Mills and his classic text The Sociological imagination (Mills, 1959). He put this imagination to good use in his book The Power Elite (see Chap. 2), but his description of what this imagination entails and how to achieve it has a strong hybridising element. For a start, Mills argues that the sense of imagination ‘is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable—say, a mess of ideas from German Philosophy and British economics’ (1959: 211). The mechanisms that Mills identifies as stimulators of this imagination also speak to hybridity as crucial to effective theorising, which include scrambling and mixing up notes, searching out comparable cases and seeking out the opposite of your own research subject (1959: 212). Swedberg builds on the work of Mills by providing some further avenues for exploring the creative social theory mind, which include free association and reverie. These are valuable ways of unearthing inspiration, and budding theorists would be wise to consider them more fully. They should also accept that the basic building blocks of theorising are other theories. Building up this body of knowledge about specific themes/topics, and the ways in which different theories have been constructed to help account for these, is a crucial element to the development of effective social theorists. This book should offer some assistance in building up this body of knowledge, as well as helping readers to adopt a critically reflexive stance towards the use of theory.

References Guzzini, S. (2013). The Ends of International Relations Theory: Stages of Reflexivity and Modes of Theorizing. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 521–541. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1994). ‘What theories can accomplish .. and what they can’t’. In J. Habermas (Ed.), The Past as Future (interviewed by M. Haller). Cambridge: Polity Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Murphy, M. (Ed.). (2017). Habermas and Social Research: Between Theory and Method. Routledge. Schutz, A. (1945). On Multiple Realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5(4), 533–576. Swedberg, R. (2014). The Art of Social Theory. Princeton University Press. Weber, M. (2004). Science as a Vocation. In D.  Owen & T.  Strong (Eds.), Vocation Lectures (pp. 32–94). Hackett Publishing.

Glossary

Anatomo politics  Foucault used the term anatamo-politics to describe the strategies used to maximise the utility of individual bodies through institutions such as work and education. Anomie  Made popular by Durkheim, anomie refers to a pervasive lack of purpose experienced by people resulting from a shift or breakdown in societal values and norms. Autopoietic systems Autopoietic systems are systems that can self-reproduce. Niklas Luhmann adapted the idea from the discipline of Biology in order to better understand social systems of the twentieth century. Base/superstructure  This is a distinction used by Marx to denote the core relation in the social structure of capitalist societies—the base comprised both the forces of production (material, resources) and the relation of production (between capitalist and labour) that stem from it. The superstructure is a product of the forces and relations and includes law, the state and culture. Bio politics  A term made popular by Foucault, bio-politics is the governance of populations through a set of disciplinary practices that focus on the body and its functions/significance, including reproduction, sexuality, race and ethnicity and mental and physical health. Bureaucracy  The term bureaucracy encompasses two aspects—a set of government officials that administer government services, and an administrative approach characterised by standardised procedures, rules and protocols and hierarchical organisation. Capability approach to justice  The capability approach is an approach to justice that measures the level of justice based on the ability of people to achieve what they are capable of. Collective consciousness  Collective consciousness (or ‘collective conscience’) is a term used by Emile Durkheim to portray the shared conception of morality and acceptable values in society. It acts as a form of social glue that strengthens social solidarity and a sense of shared community. Commodification  Core to Marxist analyses of capitalism, commodification refers to the process of converting things such as works of art, information and land into exchangeable goods that have economic value in a marketplace.

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Cultural appropriation  Cultural appropriation is the adoption of elements of a specific culture, usually a more marginalised community, by members of a dominant group. This can take the form of traditional dress (e.g., Native American headdress), dialect and music. Cultural capital Cultural capital is accrued cultural assets, such as education, speech style, deportment, manners and etiquette that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, can act as sources of wealth and privilege. Diaspora  Diaspora refers to a country, community or region’s human population that has been scattered across the globe, in places different from their place of origin. The reasons for the dispersal of populations such as Afro-­Caribbeans, Africans as well as Arabs can be due to poverty, unemployment, war and social strife. Epiphenomenon  In social science epiphenomenon is used to describe a secondary phenomenon deriving from a primary phenomenon, for example ‘poverty is an epiphenomenon of capitalism’. Epistemes  Foucault used the Greek word ‘epistemes’ to characterise the dominant knowledge systems of particular periods of history, where one form of knowledge dominated specific historical periods. He developed the notion in his book The order of things as a way to understand the hegemony of scientific knowledge production. Epistemicide  A term made popular by the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, epistemicide refers to the destruction of (usually) indigenous knowledges through the domination of non-indigenous knowledges, especially Western scientific reason. Epistemology  Epistemology is the study of knowledge; in research terms, epistemology refers to the researcher’s own conception of knowledge construction. Epistemological approaches put forward a theory of the nature of knowledge as well as the ways in which people know (ways of knowing) about their social reality. It is often characterised as having two main perspectives: positivism and interpretivism. Fetishisation  Marx used the term fetishisation to highlight the ‘phantom-­like’ quality associated with an object, where the labour value associated with producing the object is transformed into something with an intrinsic value once the object becomes a commodity. Field  Field, according to Bourdieu, is a social arena or sphere of activity (such as higher education) that, much like a game, is governed by specific sets of (often unwritten) rules and regulations and which in turn govern the position and power of individuals within the field’s networks. Formal pragmatics Sometimes referred to as Universal Pragmatics, Formal Pragmatics is the theory that developed from Habermas’ linguistic turn, the task of which is to identify the conditions via which mutual understanding between people can occur. Habitus  According to Bourdieu, habitus is the evolving sets of dispositions through which individuals make sense of the world and their role in it. These dispositions are shaped by people’s life experiences and provide a foundation for future decisions and practices.

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285

Hegemony  Hegemony refers to a form of all-encompassing dominance, whether economic, political, military, religious or cultural, that operates via the implied consent of the population (see also key concept box). Historical materialism  Historical materialism is a Marxist approach to the study of history which argues that the social and cultural organisation of society is a product of material economic forces—modes of production such as capitalism are the drivers of social change at specific points in history and it is the internal contradictions of such modes that create the seeds of their downfall. Lifeworld and system  Habermas used these terms to make distinctions between the everyday world people inhabit which is governed by shared communicative interactions (lifeworld) and the world of the state and the market which are governed by impersonal strategic actions (system). Massification  The word massification is used in relation to the expansion of higher education in countries such as the UK in the 1960s and beyond. Modes of production Normally associated with Marxist theory, modes of production refer to the way societies at different historical periods organise their production of goods and services. The term incorporates both the forces of production—the machinery, factories, land, business, as well as the relations of production—the different classes defined by their relation to the mode. Normative  Often contrasted with ‘empirical’, normative theory aims to make value statements about social phenomena, such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, functional and dysfunctional, in order to categorise and classify actions and behaviours. Occularcentrism  Occularcentrism is an approach to theory and knowledge that privileges sight and vision over other senses such as hearing. The term is often used to critique the Western philosophical equation of sight with reason, and the dominance of the written over the spoken word. Panopticon  Foucault used Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon, an allseeing central tower, as a metaphor to characterise the way in which societies discipline and control their citizens. Pathology  A term borrowed from the natural sciences, pathology in social theory refers to phenomena that stem from social activity and if left to grow can cause severe damage to the social order (e.g., disrespect in Axel Honneth’s recognition theory). Performativity  The term performativity is used by Judith Butler to explain how one’s gender identity, rather than a natural product of birth, is a product of socially sanctioned discursive practices that, for example, ‘girl the girl’. Primary and secondary habitus  According to Bourdieu, the primary habitus is generated in the early years of a persons’ life, but secondary habitus is a set of dispositions that develop later in life through a person’s engagement with experiences such as education and employment. The secondary habitus can impact the primary habitus by modifying a person’s sets of dispositions. Queer  Once meant to signify ‘strange’ or ‘odd’, queer has become an overarching term to classify sexualities that are neither heterosexual nor traditionally binary (male/female).

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Glossary

Reification  Reification is the transformation of an abstract entity into a physical thing. It is a term that became popular in Marxist circles to explain the process via which a person’s labour was converted into a product that could be bought and sold at market. Resource-oriented approach to justice  This approach measures the level of justice based on the extent to which an equitable distribution of resources has been achieved. Social constructionism  This is a view of knowledge as constructed by the interaction and relations between members of societies and communities. Social primary goods  According to John Rawls, in order to develop a sense of justice as well as a capacity to establish a conception of what is good, primary goods such as income, right and liberties are effectively pre-requisites for the development of these moral powers. Subjectivation  Subjectivation is the internalisation of social discourses which occurs when individuals adopt the dominant value systems of the day. Substantive /instrumental rationality This is a form of reason that revolves around the relation between means and ends—the more efficient the means are at achieving the desired ends (outcomes, products, results), the more rational it is portrayed as. In philosophical debates, this is often contrasted with value rationality, which classifies the ‘rightness’ of the ends, rather than the means used to achieve them. Surplus value  Surplus value is the difference (the surplus) between the actual cost of the labour expended on a product and its sale value. It is the basis for profit while also being the main source of labour exploitation—the surplus value is derived from the work of employees over and above the cost of their own work. The Other  The term ‘other’ represents the objectification, the ‘othering’ of a set of people as a form of group identification as well as social exclusion and domination. It is a term often associated with studies of gender and race that aim to uncover the power dynamics and their place in patriarchy and racial forms of social order. Thick description  A term devised by Clifford Geertz, ‘thick description’ is an approach to field research that provides a detailed account of a situation and its context. Geertz devised the method so that readers of research could more fully appreciate the cultural significance of the situation being studied. Utilitarianism  Associated with nineteenth-century thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian approach emphasises the maximisation of utility, in regards a specific end, such as happiness or health.

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Index

Numbers and Symbols 5 Star, 94 2008 recession, 40 #Metoo, 131, 234 A Abbott, O., 202 Accountability quality assurance mechanisms, 43 and regulation, 43, 174 Adorno, T., viii, 3, 4, 34, 36–39, 41, 52, 106–109, 127, 156, 159–161, 163, 169, 176, 206–208, 210, 211, 264, 278 Afghanistan, 9, 258 Africa, 21, 22, 258 sub-Saharan Africa, 23 African-American African-American culture, 128 Harlem Renaissance, 128 Aganaktismenoi movement, 92 Ahmad, J., 151 Alexander, J., 106 Alienation, 4, 59, 61, 62, 69, 83, 113, 183–185, 201, 206, 214, 266 Al Qaeda, 151 Althusser, L., 12, 14–16, 111 America, 13, 25, 36, 105, 186, 192, 194, 201 American New Deal, 64 Anatomo-politics (Foucault), 242 Anderson, B., 24–26, 121 Andhra Pradesh, 125 Anna, B., 218 Anomie, 4, 105, 183–185, 201, 206 Anthropology, 37, 106, 137, 167, 195, 219, 230, 233, 239, 244, 248, 277 Anti-gentrification, 253 Antonio, R., 142

Anxiety, 74, 175, 187–189, 194, 205, 213, 223, 279 age of, 205 Apocalypse Now, 119 Appadurai, A., 24 Apple, M., 147 Arab Spring, 98 Arato, A., 86, 87 Arendt, H., 156 Asia, 22, 25 Atkinson, W., 73, 74 Austen, J., 119 Austerity, vii, 9, 57, 58, 70, 82, 92–95, 100, 267, 268 Austin, J.L, 132, 136, 137, 143, 199, 239 Australia, 27, 218 Automation, 58, 66, 68, 70–72, 77 Autopoietic systems (Luhmann), 222 B Bagge Laustsen, C., 199 Baker-Cristales, B., 19 Bakhtin, M., 132, 133, 137–139, 150 Banasiak, A., 49 Barnes, C., 249 Barone, C., 117 Barron, L., 128 Barrow, C., 30 Bartelson, J., 10 Base/superstructure (Marx), 83, 84, 88 Bauman, Z., 5, 89, 175, 184, 187, 188, 201 Bavaria, 25 Baynes, K., 11 Beck, U., 50, 51, 187, 188 Beck-Gernsheim, E., 187 Bell. D., 3, 66, 77, 92, 155 Belonging, 25, 116, 127, 141, 142, 188, 216, 235, 237

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Murphy, Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78324-2

303

304 Benchimol, A., 98 Benjamin, J., 5, 12, 191, 205, 206, 212, 213, 216, 224, 264 Benjamin, W., 108–110 Benson, S., 243 Bentham, J., 164 Berger, P., 4, 155, 158, 160–163, 166, 176, 278, 280 Berlin, 63 Berlin Wall, 86 Bernstein. B., 4, 147, 148, 151 Best, S., 114, 165, 170, 210 Bhambra, G. K., 171 Biology, 232, 233, 244 Black Lives Matter, 81, 199, 253 Blame game (Hood), 53, 223, 277 Block, F., 65 Body and bio-politics, 229, 242 the black body, 249 body police, 231 body shapes, 231 civilised body, 219 and performativity, 243–245, 248–249 vulnerable bodies, 249 See also Docile bodies (Foucualt) Bolivia, 21 Bolsanaro, Jar, 9 Bourdieu, P., 1, 2, 4, 5, 59, 110, 111, 115–117, 127, 132, 145–147, 150, 162, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 207, 212, 217, 229, 230, 232, 237–241, 244, 245, 248, 277, 278 Boxing, 249 Braverman, H., 68, 69, 72, 76–78, 214, 277 Bravermania, 76 Brazil, 9, 17, 22, 93, 258 Brexit, 25 Bullingham, L., 200 Bureaucracy bureaucratisation of the body, 242 iron cage of, 34, 36, 43, 52 red tape, 33 street-level bureaucracy, 3, 34, 45–47, 53, 277 tick-box culture, 51, 53 Burkitt, I., 202, 225 Burris, B., 70 Butler, J., 1, 5, 12, 136, 174, 184, 196–199, 202, 209, 229, 230, 232, 236, 238, 239, 243–245, 249, 278

Index C Calvinism, 186 See also Protestant work ethic Camus, A., 119 Canada, 27 Capability approach, 254, 256, 258 Capitalism capitalist modernisation, 10, 34, 38, 41, 45, 59, 61, 67, 83, 92, 93, 150, 158, 160, 184, 201, 217, 224 capitalist state, 3, 10, 14–15 late capitalism, 38, 67, 70, 71 side-effects of capitalist modernisation, 41, 67, 93 social relations of capitalist production, 59 Cardoso, F.H., 22, 23 Care, 20, 21, 33, 47, 48, 51, 52, 75, 76, 89, 164, 187, 209, 223, 225, 231, 254, 255, 257, 260, 265–271 ethics, 5, 254, 266–269, 271, 272, 277 Carey, M, 76 Caribbean people, 120 Afro Caribbean boys, 117 Carleheden, M., 218 Carnoy, M., 14 Cartesianism, 229, 232, 233, 235, 239 cartesian subject, 139 Catalonia, 25 Catholic Church, 222 Catholicism, 186 moral monopoly of, 222 Chad, 15 Chakravarti, L.Z., 79 Chambers, S., 89 Chatterjee, P., 26 Children child abuse, 268 child birth, 242 child-rearing, 42, 78, 217 lessons on child development, 267 sexuality of children, 247 China, 17, 93, 117 Cinema film, 48, 67, 96, 107, 109, 231 video, 108 Citizenship, 10, 218, 270 Civilisation, 172, 173 Civilising process (Elias), 219, 241 Civil rights movement, 81, 265 Civil society communication structures of, 97 uncivil society, 82, 88–91, 99, 276

Index Clark, D., 258 Class domination, 17 hidden injuries of, 219, 225 struggle, 59, 65, 83–86, 99, 210 white-collar proletariat, 76 working-class, 16, 72–74, 78, 85, 86, 91, 109–112, 115, 124, 127, 146–148, 151, 157, 219, 220, 225, 241 Cobb, J., 219 Cohen, J., 86, 87 Collective consciousness (Durkheim), 12, 105, 190 Colonialism, 22, 23, 25, 26, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 167 colonial forces, 120 Colonisation of the lifeworld (Habermas), 3, 34, 40–42, 52, 92, 260 Commodities commodification, 3, 38, 39, 58–65, 75, 77, 107, 108, 113, 115, 210, 211, 214, 224, 277 global commodity system, 79 Communication, 39, 97, 108, 120, 131, 132, 134, 137, 142–145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 162, 163, 194, 195, 197, 212, 224, 225, 231, 276, 277, 279 Community, 11, 19, 20, 25, 26, 62, 72, 85, 105, 112, 121, 125–127, 138, 145, 151, 159, 166, 177, 184, 188, 197, 216, 218, 238, 263, 269 Conduct of conduct (Foucault), 44 Connell, R., 171 Connolly, J., 240, 241 Conrad, J., 119, 120 Consumerism, 26, 38, 42, 70, 124, 192 Cooley, C., 190, 191 Cornwall. A., 235 Costa, C., 116, 174, 238, 245 Counter-movement (Polanyi), 59, 64, 65 Covid 19, 223, 268, 269 Creole culture, 25 Criminality, 164 Critical management studies, 76, 277 Critical weight studies, 218 Culler, J., 144 Cultural capital (Bourdieu), 116, 117 Cultural studies, 4, 85, 98, 106, 110–115, 118, 120, 127, 199, 239 Culture celebrity culture, 231 cultural appropriation, 105, 108

305 cultural identity, 109, 120–123, 127 cultural tourism, 109 culture industry, 39, 107–110, 127 culture wars, 105, 111 mass culture, 38, 107, 108, 127 popular culture, 4, 37, 107, 110, 175, 200, 216, 264 See also Cultural capital (Bourdieu); Multiculturalism Curriculum, 147–149, 151, 156, 169–171, 177, 239 D Dale, G., 65 Davis, J., 28 De Beauvoir, S., 197, 229, 234, 280 De Saussure, F., 134, 135, 137, 138, 145, 150, 209 De Sousa Santos, B, 156, 167, 168, 261 Death, 11, 12, 19, 68, 85, 96, 136, 186, 242 Deconstruction, 4, 119, 126, 131, 132, 135, 149, 209 Deleuze, G., 124, 196, 206, 209–212, 224 Della Porta, D., 93, 94, 100 Democracy deliberative democracy, 39 direct democracy, 97 radical democracy, 82, 86–88, 99, 264, 269 Dependency theory, 21, 22, 29 Derrida, J., 1, 2, 4, 119, 121, 122, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 142, 145, 149, 150, 199, 209, 278, 279 Descarte, R., 139, 197, 232, 235 Desia, G., 100 Desire, 3, 15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 44, 60, 68, 75, 99, 106, 107, 115, 119, 120, 125, 136, 141, 144, 161, 174, 191, 206, 209–212, 219, 222, 224, 231, 234, 239, 241, 243, 245, 246, 248, 256, 257, 262, 267, 270, 277 Development studies, 166, 177, 258 Deviance, 19, 243, 246 Dewey. J., 134, 244 Dialectic of enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 37–39, 44, 52, 107, 211 Dialectics and Hegel, 28, 68, 197 and Marx, 28 Dialogic imagination (Bakhtin), 132, 137–139, 150

306 Diaspora, 25, 26, 120–123, 127–128, 131 diasporic experience, 120 Dibben, P., 54 Dieting industry, 229 Différance (Derrida), 4, 121, 135, 150 Digital media, 24, 52, 276 Discourse, 4, 17, 19, 39, 45, 53, 89, 93, 95–98, 113, 114, 118, 119, 121, 122, 126, 131, 132, 138–143, 150, 158, 162–165, 167, 175, 177, 192, 196–199, 202, 205, 208, 215, 221, 231, 234, 242–247, 249, 265, 269 Dispositions, 116, 146, 156, 162, 214, 237, 238, 240, 245, 248 embodied dispositions, 245 See also Habitus Dispotif (Foucault), 45 Dixon, R., 42 Docile bodies (Foucualt), 196, 248 Double consciousness (Du Bois), 121, 171, 191–192, 201 Douglas, B., 54 Douglas, M., 5, 219, 230–232, 236, 248 Dreher, J., 162 Du Bois, W.E.B., 121, 171, 172, 177, 191, 192, 201 Dubai, 17 Durkheim. E., 4, 12, 50, 57, 90, 105, 112, 183–185, 187, 190, 193, 201, 205, 206, 212, 230, 232, 263, 280 Dutta, M, 126 E Eastern Europe, 86, 225 Economics, 1, 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20–24, 26–29, 35, 36, 40–42, 49, 57, 58, 61, 63–67, 72–77, 81–84, 87, 88, 90–93, 99, 106, 108, 110, 112, 116–118, 122, 125, 126, 167, 175, 183, 185, 187, 201, 206, 216, 218, 222, 236, 241, 254, 256, 259, 267–270, 276, 277, 282 Education, 35, 49, 58, 75, 106, 109–112, 115–117, 124, 126, 127, 140, 144, 146–149, 164, 169, 170, 188, 196, 212, 218, 220, 221, 239, 244, 245, 248, 255, 260, 265, 276 curriculum, 147, 169, 170, 177, 239 See also Schools; Universities Edwards, M., 100 Egypt, 93, 119, 258 El Salvador, 19, 21 Elder-Vass, D., 162

Index Elias, N., 5, 89, 156, 163, 172–175, 219, 229, 230, 232, 240–241, 248 Elites, 3, 10, 13–14, 16, 17, 27, 28, 110, 157, 169, 239, 241 Embodiment, viii, 167, 175, 232–235, 237, 243, 249 Emotional labour (Hochschild), 214, 225, 277 Employment, 23, 28, 57, 65, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76, 81, 91, 92, 111, 155, 269, 276 graduate, 245 See also Labour Engels, F., 59, 63, 66, 75, 83, 113, 122, 185 Enlightenment, 2, 10, 28, 38, 39, 107, 114, 119, 141, 142, 209, 211, 262, 263 Environment, 23, 44, 62, 64, 81, 92, 99, 138, 139, 148, 162, 168, 192, 200, 235, 240, 241, 271 Environmental planning, 43, 44 Epiphenomenon, 14 Epistemicide (de Sousa Santos), 167, 168, 261 Epistemic injustice, 260–261, 275 Epistemic violence, 124, 128, 261 Epistemology, 155, 165–167, 170, 176, 246 See also Knowledge Equality, 3, 5, 10, 13, 20, 30, 72, 81, 88, 89, 99, 116, 213, 236, 239, 253, 262, 263, 266, 267, 271, 275, 276 of opportunity, 167, 254, 257, 270 See also Inequality Estonia, 43, 44 Ethnicity, 1, 105, 218, 245 ethnic minority groups, 205, 269 European Union (EU), 24, 25, 40, 88, 174 Existentialism, 139 F Facebook, 89 Faletto. E., 22 Family, 13, 15, 18, 29, 50, 75, 82, 85, 105, 116, 117, 147, 148, 151, 157, 175, 184, 190, 197, 210, 211, 216, 217, 231, 238, 245, 267, 271 parenting classes, 267 Fanon, F., 121, 122, 201, 233 Far-right movements, 94 Fascism fascist movements, 38, 85 Fascist Mussolini government, 85 left fascism, 39, 97 See also Far-right movements; Nazis Fashion, 67, 74, 93, 105, 108, 111, 127, 176, 188 Fassin, D., 19

Index Fat shaming, 5, 231, 235 See also Dieting industry Favor, J.M., 128 Femia, J., 87 Feminist theory, 78, 115, 126, 149, 217, 234, 236, 266 Ferguson, A., 82 Field (Bourdieu), 115–117, 162, 239 Figart, D., 214 Figurations (Elias), 172, 240 Film, 108 First World War, 172, 240 Flanders, 25 Föllmer, M., 202 Forrester, K., 256 Foucault, M., 1–5, 10, 17–20, 29, 34, 44, 45, 49, 89, 114, 119, 121–124, 131, 132, 139–142, 150, 155, 163–165, 170–173, 175–177, 184, 195–199, 202, 207, 209, 211, 219, 229, 230, 232, 239, 241–243, 245–249, 260, 269, 277–279 France, 18, 19, 25, 44, 59, 72, 94, 99, 114, 164, 169, 239, 240 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, 17, 37, 52, 143, 159, 206, 280 Fraser, N., 1, 5, 95, 96, 98, 100, 165, 215–217, 236, 253, 254, 261, 262, 265, 266, 269–270 Freedom, 1, 3, 10–13, 20, 26, 28, 34–38, 42, 44, 48, 49, 52, 60, 62, 64, 81–83, 96, 99, 108, 111, 113, 118, 120, 142, 166, 184, 187, 191, 192, 201, 207–209, 212, 213, 215, 224, 225, 233, 241, 248, 255, 256, 259–264, 275 French Revolution, 3, 10, 28, 82, 191, 262 Freud, S., 206–208, 210, 224, 246 Fricker, M., 260 Friedman, L., 207, 208 Friedman, M, 26 Fromm, E., 36, 207, 208, 224 Fromm-Marcuse debate, 207–209, 224 Front National, 94 Functionalism, 90–91 G Gadamer, H.G., 132, 139, 150 Gaelic Athletic Association, 240 Gandhi, L., 120 Gebrial, D., 178 Geertz, C., 106 Geist (Hegel), 12, 190

307 Gellner, E., 87 Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, 64, 184 Generalised other (Mead), 132, 190 Geography, 24, 106, 149, 244 Germany, 12, 20, 21, 25, 36, 39, 99, 156, 159, 172, 176, 240, 258 Giddens. A., 5, 105, 112–114, 139, 184, 187, 201 Gilets Jaunes, 72, 81 Gilligan, C., 5, 254, 266 Giroux, H., 147 Globalisation, 1, 3, 10, 23–26, 29, 50, 76, 93, 100, 183, 187, 188, 201 Global South, 76, 126, 167, 258, 261 Goffman, E., 184, 192–195, 197, 198, 200–202, 218, 219 Goldman, H., 158 Goodwin, J., 100 Gorz, A., 73, 74, 78 Governance good governance, 33, 34, 52, 53 new governance, 43, 46, 53 Government, 13, 16, 24, 27, 33, 35, 43–45, 47, 51, 53, 85, 87, 92, 93, 97, 170, 221, 277 Governmentality (Foucault), 3, 19, 34, 44, 49, 50 Gramsci, A., 4, 15, 84–88, 95, 99, 106, 109, 111, 119, 123, 125, 127, 192 Great British class survey, 117 Great transformation (Polanyi), 3, 58, 64–66, 77, 93, 113 Greece, 9, 27, 92, 185 Greer, G., 173 Gregory, R., 43 Grenfell, M., 116 Guattari, F., 206, 210–212, 224 Gunn, S., 117 Guru, G., 225 H Habermas, J., viii, 1–4, 18, 20, 34, 37, 39–47, 52, 72, 81, 86–88, 92–99, 114, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139, 142–144, 150, 158, 174, 197, 212, 213, 215–217, 224, 239, 259, 260, 270, 278–281 Habitus democratic habitus, 244 national habitus, 240 scholarly habitus, 245 secondary habitus, 238 Hall, S., 4, 85, 120–122, 127, 201, 209, 279

Index

308 Haraway, D., 4, 155, 165, 166, 176, 236, 260, 278 Harré, R., 220 Hartman, A., 105 Harvey, D., 30 Hayek, F., 26 Haysom, K., 97 Health justice, 258 mental, 19, 50, 185, 195, 231 Hebdige, D., 111 Hegel, G., 2, 3, 9–14, 26, 28, 37, 47, 59, 62, 68, 82–84, 86, 88, 98, 99, 190, 191, 197, 199, 201, 212, 224, 260, 263, 264, 280 Hegemony (Gramsci), 4, 15, 85, 106, 109–111, 119, 123, 127 Henderson, J., 28 Hermeneutics, 132, 139 Heteroglossia, 133, 139 Heteroglossic, 139 Heteronormativity, 5, 229, 243 Hillier, J., 244 Hirschkop, K., 151 Hirschl, R., 49 History, 13, 15, 18, 22, 23, 37, 38, 50, 59–61, 74, 81, 85, 97, 105, 109, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 131, 133, 142, 144, 163, 169–172, 189, 191, 208, 210, 255, 262, 267, 276–279 Hitler, Adolf, 39, 211, 240 HIV, 230, 231 Hochschild, A., 214, 236, 277 Hoggart, R., 111 Holloway, W., 266, 267 Holocaust, 89 Honneth, A., 5, 12, 37, 48, 191, 197, 201, 205, 213, 215–218, 224, 235, 253, 254, 261, 262, 269 Hood, C., 42, 51, 53 Hoogvelt, A., 23 Hook, D., 49, 50, 140, 141, 165, 196, 242 Horkheimer, M., 3, 34, 36–39, 41, 52, 74, 107, 156, 208, 210, 211, 278 Hospitals, 33, 47, 164, 175, 202, 223, 242, 268 See also Health Howard, P., 49 Howson, A., 249 Huffer, L., 247 Human rights, 167, 258 Humiliation, 213, 216, 220, 240, 264 caste-based humiliation, 225

I Ibrahim, S., 258 Identity politics, 125, 197, 215, 262 Ideology, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 25–29, 38–40, 73, 89, 96, 109, 124, 126, 127, 156–159, 176, 206, 210, 248, 259, 261, 267 Imagined community (Anderson), 24, 25, 121 Imperialism, 23, 106, 118–120, 126, 127, 167 Impression management (Goffman), 192, 193, 200, 201 India Indian Pakistan War, 189 red corridor, 125 Indigenous knowledge, 4, 156, 166–168, 177, 278 Indignados, 81, 92 Industrial Revolution deindustrialisation, 67 industrialisation, 2, 58, 63, 67, 85, 91, 155, 168, 183, 185 Inequality, vii, 4, 27, 57–59, 69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 83, 85, 88, 93, 98, 99, 106, 115–117, 127, 147, 151, 169, 206, 220, 231, 236, 239, 241, 245, 254–256, 262, 265, 267, 277 Inglis, T., 222 Ingram, D., 88 Injustice, 88, 93, 118, 125, 126, 177, 215, 216, 224, 233, 235, 236, 245, 261, 265, 269, 270, 278 testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, 260 See also Social justice Intellectuals free-floating, 157, 160, 176, 233 public intellectuals, 1, 39, 120, 169, 173–175, 177, 199, 207, 208 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9, 27, 28 Intersectionality, 75, 265 Intersubjectivity, 143, 161, 197, 213, 218, 234 Iraq, 119 wars, 118 Ireland, 27, 59, 63, 222 Iron cage (Weber), 3, 34, 37, 43, 47, 52, 187 Italy, 85, 94 J Jacoby, R., 174 James, D., 116 Japan, 27, 94 Jasper, J., 100 Jeffries, S., 159, 169

Index Johnson, Boris, 9 Jones, R., 24 Journalism, 85, 276 Juridification, 3, 34, 47–50, 52, 53, 223, 260, 268, 277 juridified cultures, 268 See also Law K Kaviraj, S., 88 Kazakhstan, 137 Keane, J., 88, 89, 99 Kellner, D., 114, 115, 142, 165, 170, 207, 210 Keuth, H., 160 Kiisel, M., 43, 44 Kindleberger, C., 23 Knowledge academic knowledge, 4, 156, 160, 168–176 common-sense knowledge, 158, 160 ecology of knowledges, 167 knowledge society, 66, 169 postmodern knowledge, 170 social construction of, 156, 160–163, 176 subjugated knowledges, 123, 124, 165 will to knowledge, 164 Kohlberg, L., 266 Kopstein. J., 89 Korea, 27 Kosofsky Sedgwick, E., 246 Kouvelakis, S., 11 Kristeva, J., 199, 209 Kumar, K., 66, 158 Kurds, 189 L Labour automated, 71, 77 commodification of, 3, 38, 58–63, 77 deskilling, 58, 69, 70, 76, 77, 214 domestic, 75, 96, 216 employment, 68, 69, 91, 111 exploitation, 61, 77 movement, 81, 92, 111 power, 60–63, 66, 71, 77 process, 68–70, 74, 76–78 See also Wages Laclau, E., 110 Laing, R.D., 189, 190 Language games, 132 hidden curriculum of language, 147–149

309 ordinary language movement, 132, 133, 136, 137 of schooling, 146, 148, 151 See also Linguistic turn Latin America, 21–23 Latour, B., 244 Law, 15, 19, 33, 36, 39, 45, 47–49, 58–60, 83, 85, 136, 141, 145, 211, 222, 244, 255, 259–261, 269 Lesbian and gay rights activism, 199 Letseka, M., 140 Levi-Faur, D., 54 Lichtblau, K., 160 Lifeworld, 3, 34, 40–44, 48, 52, 61, 86, 92, 93, 97, 99, 109, 150, 158, 162, 260 Linguistic turn, 4, 40, 132–134, 136, 142, 144, 149, 150 linguistic sign, 134, 135 Lipsky, M., 45–47, 53 Liquid modernity (Bauman), 187, 188 Literary criticism, 133, 149 literature, 74, 120, 133, 149 Lockwood, D., 61 Logocentrism, 135 Lombardy, 25 Lorde, A., 173 Losurdo, D., 78 Loveday, V., 220 Lowenthal, L., 36, 107 Luckmann, T., 155, 158, 160–163, 166, 176, 278, 280 Ludes, P., 174 Luhmann, N., 20, 222, 223, 225 Lybeck, E., 178 Lyotard, J.-F., 114, 149, 170, 171, 278 Lysandrou, P., 79 M MacNair, M., 48 Magnussen, A., 49 Malaysia, 15, 76 Maley, W., 98 Mandel, E., 67, 70–72, 77, 280 Mannheim, K., 4, 156–160, 176, 260 Manning, P., 190, 191 Manufacturing, 67, 76, 111, 127, 155 Maoism, 125 Marcuse, H., 12, 36, 156, 208, 211, 224 Marinetto, M., 16, 17 Market, 17, 18, 26–28, 36, 38, 40, 42, 51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 77, 81, 86–88, 92, 94, 97, 99, 115, 146, 175, 205, 211, 212, 266, 269

310 Marx, K., 2–5, 12, 14, 15, 20, 26, 28, 29, 36, 38, 41, 50, 57–66, 68–70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 99, 112, 113, 120, 122, 126, 142, 157, 183–185, 187, 192, 201, 205, 206, 210, 212, 214, 232, 239, 269, 276, 280 Marxism Marxist-Leninist, 84 neo-Marxism, 14, 59 post-Marxist, 86–88 Masculinities/masculinity, 166, 234, 235, 243 Matter-out-of-place (Douglas), 230, 231 May, V., 184 Mayr, A., 151 McNay, L., 217 Mead, G. H., 12, 132, 133, 150, 190, 191, 194, 197, 201, 218, 280 Means of production (Marx), 155, 157, 185 Medicine, 163, 173, 242, 244, 248 medical malpractice, 268 Meer, N., 192 Meier, K., 43 Meighan, R., 147, 148 Meja, V., 156, 157 Melzer, A., 178 Menstruation, 231, 234 Meritocratic, 111, 116, 147 Merleau-Ponty, M., 5, 167, 229, 233–235, 280 Mexico, 9, 22, 185 Middle East, 17, 118 Migrants, 19, 40, 172, 188, 263 xenophobic fear of, 188 Miliband, R., 3, 16, 29 Military, 13, 19, 39, 118, 240 Miller, P., 50 Mills, C. W., 3, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 28, 214, 261, 282 Misztal, B., 221, 222 Mobility, 17, 20, 58, 73, 76, 81, 115, 116, 147, 155, 175, 236 Modernisation theory, 21 Mods and Rockers, 111 Monoglossia, 139 Morality, 19, 140, 187, 196, 248, 255 Morocco, 9 Morris, A., 171, 177 Morrison, K., 233 Morrow. R., 168 Mouffe, C., 110, 244 Movimiento Estudiantil, 93 Mu, M., 117 Multiculturalism, 215

Index Multinational corporations (MNCs), 23, 93, 175 Munger, F., 256 Murphy, M., 43, 47, 83, 116, 174, 175, 223, 238, 245, 280 Music, 67, 108, 127, 265 taste, 117 Muslim culture, 118, 127 N Nash, K., 98, 270 National Health Service, 20 Nationhood nationalism, 24–26, 40, 94, 241 national sovereignty, 26 nation-state protectionism, 29 Nazis, 16, 17, 39, 89, 90, 248 nazification of charity, 89, 90 Neoliberalism, 3, 9, 10, 23, 26–29, 64, 78, 93, 205, 215, 241, 269, 275 Neuroscience, 232 New Left Review, 15, 16, 29 New public management (NPM), 3, 34, 42–45, 53, 277 Newsome, N., 76 New Zealand, 42 Nietzsche, F., 114, 131 Nigeria, 19 Niger Delta oil industry, 19 Nilsen, A., 125 Nippon Kaigi, 94 Nişancıoğlu, K., 178 Noble, G., 245 Noddings, N., 266 Northern Ireland, 218 Nussbaum, M., 5, 173, 253, 254, 256–259, 266, 270 O Occupy, 26, 74, 81, 100, 199 Offe, T., 3, 10, 20, 21, 23, 29, 93 Oliver, M., 249 O’Neill, S., 218 Oppression, 82, 109, 127, 156, 217, 236, 253, 265 Orbach, S., 231 Orientalism (Said), 118, 119, 121–123, 127 Oriental studies, 118, 127 Othering, 118, 119, 127 of Arab and Muslim world, 118 O’Toole, L., 43

Index P Pacific Islanders (Australia), 218 Pakistan, 189 Palestine, 258 Panopticon, 164, 196 panopticism, 196 Park, R.E., 171 Parole (Saussure), 134, 138, 145 Parsons, T., 90, 105, 106, 195, 207 Passeron, J., 115, 116 Patriarchy patriarchal culture, 235 patriarchal power, 75 Peirce, C.S., 133 Perelman, M., 27 Performance studies, 249 Performativity (Butler), 197–200, 202, 238, 243–245, 249 Peru, 22 Phenomenology, 158, 233, 234 Phillips, J., 267 Photography, 108, 229, 239 Pigmentocracy, 117 Piketty. T., 57, 73, 276 Pitsoe, V., 140 Polanyi. K., 3, 64, 65, 77, 112 Police officers, 45, 46, 53, 190 Political economy, 18, 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 65, 85, 88, 185, 214, 215 Political philosophy, 12, 83, 244, 257 Political science, 9, 39, 196, 215, 218 Pollock, F., 17 Popper, K., viii, 159–160, 176 Populist movements and nationalism, 9, 24 and protectionism, 24 Positivism the positivism debate, viii, 4, 159–161, 165, 176, 278 Tübingen conference, 159, 160 value-free science, 37, 165 Vienna Circle, 160 Posner, R.A., 173 Postcolonialism, 23, 106, 122–123, 149, 279 Post-industrial society, 3, 58, 66–68, 77, 92 Post-structuralism, 114, 126, 134–137, 144, 198, 209 Poulantzas, N., 3, 16, 18 Powell, F., 89 Power bio-power, 19, 230, 241–243, 248 institutional power, 241 Pragmatism, 132–134, 263, 280

311 Precariat, 73, 78, 93, 277 Prisons, 18, 19, 85, 164, 198, 202 Privatisation, 9, 26, 27, 29, 42, 93, 94 Professions professional abuse, 268 professional discretion, 51 street-level bureaucracy, 53 Project for International Student Assessment (PISA), 117 Proletariat, 66, 73, 74, 76, 85, 109, 110, 112, 157, 158, 175, 210, 211, 261 Protestant work ethic, 35 Psychiatry, 163 Psychoanalysis, 5, 50, 199, 206–207, 211–213, 217, 224, 232, 267 Psychology, 50, 136, 137, 190, 191, 194, 207, 212, 217, 277 Psycho-social, 267 Public administration, 34, 44, 277 Public sphere, 1, 4, 39, 81, 82, 86, 89, 94–98, 105, 155, 174, 175, 177, 232, 253, 269, 270, 276 digital, 89, 105 Publishing industry, 117 Punks, 111 Q Queer theory, 149, 230, 245–248, 261 R Rabinow, P., 164 Racism, 19, 49, 81, 192, 201, 264 Rampersad, R., 117 Ranis, G., 28 Rape, 96, 234 Rationality formal, 35, 36, 260 instrumental, 42, 44, 113, 143 purposive, 40, 41 Rawls, J., 5, 254–257, 259, 270 Reay, D., 116, 220 Recognition denial of, 216, 224 intersubjective, 190, 191, 215, 218 and social invisibility, 218 workplace, 218 See also Respect Reflexive modernisation, 50 Religion religious fundamentalism, 266 religious institutions, 13, 268 Research methodologies, 139, 245

312 Respect, 5, 46, 137, 177, 191, 206, 213, 215–221, 223, 224, 230, 262, 264, 268, 270 Revolutionary action communist revolutions, 15 radical socialist movements, 84 Rhodesia, 15 Rich, A., 199 Rifkin, J., 70 Risk blame risk, 50–53 risk avoidance, 3, 34, 43, 51, 53, 223 and street-level bureaucracy, 3, 34 Rooksby, E., 244 Roper, I., 54 Rorty, R., 5, 133, 263–266, 269, 271 Rose, N., 43, 50, 202 Roy, S., 125 Russell, B., 173 Russia, 93 Russian scholars, 133 Rwanda, 131, 189 S Said. E., 4, 106, 118–124, 127, 128, 173, 174, 177 Sallaz, J., 76 Sartre, J. P., 173, 233, 239 Savage, M., 220 Sawyer, S., 18 Sayer, A., 220, 221 Scheff, T., 219, 220 Schizo-subject (Deleuze and Guattari), 211, 224 Schools and inequality, 4, 115–117, 127, 147, 151 pedagogy and education attainment, 239, 245 school reform, 267 Schuck, P., 48 Schutz, A., 158, 162, 163, 280 Science scientific objectivity, 155, 156, 159, 160, 164, 176 scientific progress, 159 See also Positivism Scotland, 25 Scott, S., 189, 200 Scottish Enlightenment, 82 Self looking glass self, 190 as performance, 192–195, 197–201 performative self, 46, 184

Index as relational, 184, 189–192, 194, 201 as subjectivation, 195–197, 202 Semiotics, 111, 114, 133, 137, 166 Sen, A., 5, 253, 254, 256–258, 270 Sennett, R., 219 Sexism, 96, 236, 264 sexual harassment, 96, 261 Sexuality, 81, 105, 140, 141, 164, 195, 198, 219, 230, 233, 242–249, 262, 271, 277 Shame, 5, 185, 205, 206, 216, 219–221, 223, 225, 231, 245, 275, 277 Shared third (Benjamin), 191, 212–216, 224 Shilling, C., 232, 243 Shulman, D., 200 Shyness, 189 Silva, E., 117 Simmel, G., 5, 205, 221, 225 Simpson, P., 151 Singapore, 17, 76 Singer, P., 12 Skeggs, B., 220 Skillen, P., 47 Sklair, L., 14 Slater, D., 22 Smith, A., 26–28, 82 Smith, C., 76 Smith, D., 240 Smith, V., 76 Social and system integration, 61 Social care, 48, 75, 225, 268 homes, 268 Social etiquette, 194 Socialism, 18, 38, 64, 65, 74, 82, 86, 87, 99 Social justice distributive justice, 255, 256 injustice, 88, 93, 125, 126, 177, 215, 216, 224, 233, 235, 236, 245, 265, 269, 270, 278 Social movements and austerity, 82, 92–95 and civil society, 39, 91, 94, 95, 97 old and new, 82, 91–93, 99, 100 See also Populist movements Social reproduction, 15, 106, 115, 218 Sociology of education, 111, 115, 127, 146, 147, 245 functionalist, 106 of knowledge, 115, 156, 157, 160, 161, 176 process, 172 of work, 69, 218 Solidarity mechanical, 112, 184 organic, 112, 184

Index Sontag, S., 173 South Africa, 17, 49 Southern Europe, 92 South Pacific, 258 South Tyrol, 25 Spatiality, 76, 234, 235 Speech acts, 132, 136–137, 143, 144, 238, 239 style of speaking, 146 utterances, 137, 150 Spivak, G., 4, 106, 123–126, 128, 144, 209, 261 Stalinism, 137 Standing, G., 73, 78, 93, 277 Statham, S., 151 Steinberg, R., 214 Steinmetz, G., 178 Stenner, D., 30 Stigma, 194, 219 Stratification, 3, 10, 17–19, 29, 44, 58, 73, 75, 117, 155, 184, 212, 225 Structuralism, 14, 134–137, 139, 145, 209, 239, 280 Structure and agency, 2, 60, 85, 90, 111, 162, 172, 194, 199, 212, 237 Student protests, 39, 169, 170, 209 and curriculum, 170 Subaltern counter publics, 82, 95–98, 100 feminist subaltern counterpublic, 95 Subjectivity, 19, 36, 38, 70, 140, 166, 183, 209–213, 233, 236, 247 Sudan, 15 Suicide, 90, 105, 184, 185 Surplus value, 60, 61, 69–72, 75, 77, 124 Sustainability, 267 Swartz, D., 115, 170, 237 Swedberg, R., 281, 282 Sweden, 20, 188 Swingewood. A., 66, 243 Symbolic interactionist, 190, 195, 218 Symbolic violence (Bourdieu), 146 System of corporations (Gramsci), 84, 86, 88, 99 Sztompka, P., 225 T Taboos, 230, 231 Tanner. J., 117, 256 Taylor, C., 87, 215 Taylor, F., 69 Taylorism post-Taylorist, 69

313 Teachers, 46, 53, 112, 148, 215, 242 See also Professions; Schools Tea Party, 94 Technology digital, 70, 193, 276 semiconductors, 66, 67 technological rents, 71 Teds, 111 Television, 229 Thailand, 15 Theatre, 192, 198, 201, 249 Theory hybridisation, 2, 280 Southern theory, 171 Thick description (Geertz), 106 Thomas, N., 218 Thompson, E. P., 111, 127 Thompson, S., 217 Thorpe, C., 189 Tinder, 200 Tiwari, M., 258 Todd. S., 74 Tönnies, F., 64, 65, 112, 184, 205, 263 Torfing, J., 151 Tronto, J., 266, 271 Trump, Donald, 9 Trust, 5, 193, 194, 206, 207, 221–223, 225, 261, 277 mistrust, 43, 94, 205, 222, 223 Truth, 4, 107, 113–115, 124, 132–135, 138–141, 143, 150, 156–161, 164–167, 169, 170, 174, 175, 246 post-truth, 155 Tunisia, 93, 98 Turkey, 93 Twitter, 89 U Unions, 20, 25, 65, 74, 84, 91, 94, 99, 109, 127 United Kingdom (UK), 9, 20, 21, 25, 27, 42, 72, 74, 92, 110, 111, 116, 169, 188, 223 Universities and academics, 169, 173, 174, 177 degree, 169 V Vasconcelos, A., 200 Veneto, 25 Venezuela, 21, 22, 93 Venkatapuram, S., 258

Index

314 Vietnam, 15 Vogler, C., 220 Vorderobermeier, G.M., 244 W Wacquant, L., 145, 146 Wages, 27, 57, 60, 69–71, 75, 77, 90–93, 110, 112, 185 wage differentials between men and women, 75 Walker, C., 147, 148 Walker, R., 64, 65 Wandel, T., 140, 141 Ward, J., 200 Wardell. M., 69, 70 Watergate, 128 Watkins, M., 245 Webb, J., 145 Weber, M., 3, 34–37, 40–42, 46, 47, 52, 58, 90, 113, 115, 120, 165, 184–187, 201, 212, 232, 260, 278, 280, 281 Weil, E., 10 Weinberger, J., 178 Welfare decline of, 86 protections, 93 services, 93 state, 3, 10, 20–21, 23, 26, 27, 29, 45, 57, 65, 66, 72, 86, 88, 93, 259, 268 workers, 46 See also National Health Service West Bengal, 125 Western Europe, 21, 64, 112, 184 Why is my curriculum white movement, 169, 177 See also Curriculum

Williams, F., 266, 267, 271 Williams, R., 110, 111, 115, 127 Willis, P., 111 Wilterdink, N., 241 Winter, C., 149 Wittgenstein, L., 132, 133, 136, 239 Wokler, R., 11 Wood, G., 54 Work feminisation of, 75 micro-management of, 69, 71 scientific management of, 69 women’s work, 75, 78, 96, 266, 267, 271 See also Labour World Bank, 27 World War II, 13, 17, 20, 21, 72, 119, 160, 175, 269 Wright, D., 117 Y Yeatman, A., 212 Yilmaz, E., 254–257 Young, H., 249 Young, I. M., 5, 229, 233–236, 248, 280 Young, R., 144 Z Zacka, B., 46, 47 Zero-hour contracts, 73, 78 Zinman, M., 178 Žižek, S., 12 Zurn, C., 215