Public Sociology. Michael Burawoy
a revolutionary break with communism (shock therapy) or an evolutionary movement built through the creation of new supportive institutions. From where I was, in the factory, all I could see was the post-Soviet economy’s self-destructive involution. The realm of exchange was flourishing but it came at the cost of production – out of the planned economy arose barter, mafia, and banks eating away at industry and agriculture. A few were making enormous gains, while the vast majority sank into precarity. Utopian thinking – mine as well as theirs – was dashed, once again, on unseen rocks.
With no factories to work in, I followed the fate of my fellow workers as they wrestled with what I called “primitive disaccumulation,” the wanton destruction of the Soviet economy. This widespread faith in market fundamentalism – as though capitalism would spring spontaneously from the ruins of communism, as though there was a market road to a market economy – required a shift of critical perspective from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi, taking Marxism in new directions. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), a classic treatise on the dangers of overextending the market, reconstructed The Communist Manifesto for the twentieth century, shifting the focus of attention from production to exchange, from exploitation to commodification, from the state to society, from class struggle to the counter-movement. In its account of market ideology as well as market reality, Polanyi’s theory fitted the transition from socialism to capitalism far better than Marx. But it was a depressing scene, with people struggling for survival and with no better future in sight.
My sociology seemed irrelevant, impotent, but it was given new energy from the place I least expected. Part Six opens with the strange circumstances that led to my ascent up the professional ladder, into the leadership of national and international sociological associations. From that perch I returned to the quest for public sociology, inspired by the work of my colleagues and students at Berkeley, but also drawn to the committed sociology of South Africa driven by the fight against apartheid. I now understood that the advance of public sociology required an understanding of the world it sought to engage as well as the conditions of knowledge production.
The post-Soviet transition – not a “great transformation” but a “great involution” – accelerated “neoliberalism,” deepening what I call third-wave marketization that has left no part of the world untouched. What I experienced in Russia during the 1990s was an exaggerated, pathological form of anarchic capitalism, dominated by finance, that has spread across the world. State socialism as the actually existing alternative to capitalism had dissolved, and with it the utopian variants it harbored. It now became necessary to search for socialist alternatives within the interstices of capitalism.
With a Polanyian lens I could see how third-wave marketization threatened human existence, and, at the same time, paralyzed liberal democracy, giving rise to right-wing and left-wing populisms as well as to authoritarian regimes. The counter-movements to first- and second-wave marketization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed their own utopias, but the counter-movement to third-wave marketization seemed bereft of a utopian dimension, in large part because of the discrediting of the idea of socialism. One task for sociology today is to advance such utopian visions.
But is sociology capable of such visions? To answer that question, I turn to the conditions for the production of knowledge, not least the university, which is itself not exempt from the invading forces of capitalism. Third-wave marketization enters the university through the commodification of the production and dissemination of knowledge, which sets in motion a succession of crises: fiscal crisis, governance crisis, identity crisis, and legitimation crisis. If there was any doubt, this transformation of the university is the living demonstration that we are part of the world we study. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to hold on to notions of sociology assembled from outside the world it studies. The university can no longer be conceived of as an ivory tower. It has become a battleground between still unrealized utopias and dystopias. Its public moment has to be recovered by expanded access but also accountability. Within the crevices of the capitalist university, there are still spaces of emancipation, teaching being one of the most important. In constituting students as a public, sociology turns itself into its own real utopia.
Note
1 1 In her elaboration of the utopian method, Ruth Levitas (2013) refers to a similar troika: ontological desire, archeological critique, and architectural design. I use archeology in a different way, stressing the excavation of real utopias.
Part One Theory and Practice
In contemporary sociology’s self-conception, three figures play an especially important foundational or canonical role: Karl Marx (1818–1883), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920). In the beginning, toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, these three figures were not recognized as founders. The idea of founding figures came much later, after World War II, based on the two dense volumes of The Structure of Social Action (1937). They were written by Talcott Parsons, the towering Harvard academic who sought to consolidate sociology around four historic figures – Durkheim, Weber, Marshall, and Pareto. In Parsons’ original view they independently converged on a “voluntaristic” theory of social action and a consensual view of society. In his 1949 Presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Parsons (1950) leaves Marshall and Pareto behind to give pride of place to Durkheim and Weber. In the turbulent 1960s, and against Parsons’ protests, Karl Marx was added to the pantheon.
Marx was an independent thinker outside the academic world, engaged in politics as well as with political economists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Durkheim was more centrally placed in the academic world, fighting for a place for the newly created discipline of sociology, especially against psychology. Weber was also deeply involved in university life in Germany and fought for sociology as a new approach to social science from his professorship in political economy.
They each carved out a vision of sociology resting on a set of philosophical assumptions about its object – society or the social. They each proposed a methodology for studying society, often rooted in a broad vision of history, leading to exemplary empirical research that has inspired legions of scholars to follow in their path. But, most important, their theories were rooted in a set of values – freedom, equality, solidarity – that guided what we might call a normative or moral science. Each scientific program wrestles with the question of how those values might be realized – that is the utopian side – and how their realization is obstructed – that is the anti-utopian side. These questions drove a theory of society’s permanence and continuity as well as a theory of history, of the future and, thus, of social change. These are the attributes that make Marx, Weber, and Durkheim canonical, necessary attributes for a body of scholarship to enter the pantheon of sociology.
The rare breadth, depth, and vision of canonical figures derive from the battles they fought to have their theories accepted. They had to engage with and borrow from, but also distinguish themselves from, neighboring fields of thought. Once the discipline of sociology was established, those pressures subsided, specialization took off, and the founders could be shed. They were the ladders that got us to the roof; once on the roof, the ladders could be cast aside. But it turns out that the ladders were pillars, too, and without them the roof began to sag. Losing touch with its founders weakens the distinctiveness of sociology as a moral science; it loses sight of itself as a historical actor; it abandons its soul.
If the first chapter of Part One concerns the theoretical foundations of our discipline, the second concerns the practical development of an internal division of labor. As it competed for a place in the academic field, so it advanced as a professional knowledge made up of scientific research programs intended for fellow sociologists who together control entry into the discipline. It, therefore, developed its own disciplinary institutions – academic journals, professional association, textbooks, defining problems with paradigmatic research