Sociology and critique

The main question raised in this chapter is: how must a critical sociology rethink itself in a neoliberal age? Critical sociology appears to be strung between two incompatible demands from its own disciplinary norms, for objectivity and impartiality, on the one hand, and for knowledges that lay claim to their truthfulness and can arbitrate on distortions, on the other. There is wide range of views and responses on this divide. Michael Burawoy is convinced that critical sociology cannot be rescued. Sociology's disciplinary norms are allergic to the normative demands placed upon critique and without any ‘intrinsic normative valence’ of its own; sociology can have no pretensions to the role of arbiter on values and ‘can as well support Christian Fundamentalism as it can Liberation Sociology or Communitarianism’ (2005, pp. 8-9). Boltanski, by contrast, is not persuaded that ‘an orientation towards critique necessarily [has] the effect of corrupting the integrity of sociology and diverting it from its scientific project’ (2011, p. x). The chapter begins by discussing two radically different attempts, by Peter Wagner and Axel Honneth, to square the circle of critical sociology. I argue that neither approach manages to successfully find a way through the apparently competing claims on a critical sociology and that both offer unconvincing accounts of how sociology might best position itself as social critique in a neoliberal age. Turning to some insights gleaned from Agnes Heller, the final section attempts to dissolve the apparent tension by suggesting that sociology’s normative commitments are not at war with a social scientific epistemology that requires objective knowledge claims, rather they are implied by these distinctive epistemologies. I argue that sociology's struggle to redeem its integrity as a cultural practice with its own norms and objectives against the attacks of the neoliberal university is vital to its self-conscious contribution to critique in a neoliberal age.

Peter Wagner: sociology as a political project

Against Burawoy’s repudiation of the viability of a critical sociology, Peter Wagner proposes that critique is ‘an essential feature of the social sciences’ (2008, p. 60). Lamenting the loss of critical agendas in scientistic ‘modernist’ sociology as a failure, he calls upon sociology today to reconnect with classical sociology’s selfunderstanding of its political project (2001a, p. 18). Outlined first in A Sociology’ of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (1994) and further elaborated and refined in A History’ and Theory of the Social Sciences (2001a), Wagner's reconstruction of the core political, not merely scientific, project initiated by classical sociology has a clearly programmatic intention. Contemporary sociology needs to reflect upon this foundational political project, along with its acquired misformulations and betrayals, in order to place it on a new footing and so redeem it. Wagner begins by outlining the distinctive contributions that a newly self-conscious academic discipline made to critical investigations into mid-nineteenth-century modernity (2001a, p. 17). This post-liberal response was at once unwilling to completely move away from the tenets of bourgeois liberalism while rejecting its investment in ‘the quasi-automatic regulation of interest conflicts’ (2001a, p. 15). Classical sociology revolted against the methodological individualism of the economists and of an earlier generation of sociologists who had closed down insight into tensions between modernity’s twin commitments: to freedom and rational mastery. Acknowledging constant negotiations between modern aspirations to individual freedom and to rational self-determination, classical sociology grasped the endless complexity of modern experience and the plurality of modern institutions (2012, pp. 22-3). A new science of society, ‘often but not always labeled sociology’ (Wagner and Wittrock, 1991, p. 11), entwined an analytic/empirical and an emancipatory interest in its investigations of the problem of how individuals might live together in ways that are compatible with modern freedoms. Keeping faith with modernity’s ambiguous significations, classical sociology ‘had not completely given up on finding ways to reconcile the individual’s objective of realizing him/herself with the requirement for social cohesion, to a degree at least sufficient to guarantee the individual’s liberties’ (Wagner, 2001a, p. 21). In this sense, the works of Durkheim, Weber and Pareto appear as ‘the last great attempt to save the social theory implicit in the Enlightenment tradition by rephrasing it’ (2001a, p. 21). A social theory that is attentive to the ‘thousand ways’ that modern humans mix and intertwine (Durkheim cited in Wagner, 2001a, pp. 12-3) would challenge liberalism’s reliance on individual rationalist motivations as the quasi-automatic mechanism for social integration (2001a, p. 15). A response to both the methodological individualism of economic liberalism and a reaction against its presumptions that self-regulation and equilibration of economic interests would come without conscious political action, classical sociology remains a post, not anti, liberal undertaking (2001a, p. 12). Sociology’s more radical contestation of liberal principles as the grounds for a social cohesion that would tolerate ‘inequality, impoverishment and exclusion’ was still to come (2012, p. 37).

Wagner’s reconstruction of sociology's formative political project complicates a familiar history of the social sciences that had aligned it with the autonomizing trajectories of modern cultural spheres. This narrative records an increasing selfconsciousness about the specificity of social scientific objectivity (Wagner and Wittrock, 1991, p. 3). On this one-dimensional account, the disciplinary institutionalization of the social sciences in the academy is seen to reward their epistemological and methodological maturation. Convinced that things have been more complex, Wagner notes losses as well as gains as sociology becomes caught within a ‘scientific institutional’ dilemma set for it as it straggles for a place within the research-orientated universities (2001a, p. 18). On the one hand, demands for ‘sci-entification' did liberate sociological research from subordination to traditional political interests. However, a science of society ‘removed from practice’ had no defence against the demands that a transformed state would make upon it for technical assistance with its ‘reflexive monitoring' (2001a, p. 19). In negotiating its scientific institutional dilemma, sociology was delivered to new political institutional constraints as it competed with classical political economy to respond to a ‘rather undoubted need for state promotion of the economy’ (2001a, p. 19). From being ‘a practical philosophy trying to understand the condition of humankind, sociology had turned into a “policy science” in search of solutions to social policy problems' (Wagner and Wittrock, 1991, pp. 12-3 and Wagner, 2012, p. 65).

Wagner does not offer a uniform narrative of decline and failure. Conceding something to the story of a second breakthrough of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, he notes the re-emergence of essentially hermeneutical and critical approaches to social science against the dominance of the ‘instrumental objectiv-ist, empirical ones’ (2001a, p. 24). On the whole, though, he thinks that the discipline has failed to keep faith with the political project of the classical tradition and its unsteady revival in the late 1960s can only be put down to an assimilation of the positive intellectual climate of the times (2001a, p. 24). This responsiveness to Zeitgeists is, Wagner observes, no substitute for a self-conscious revival of sociology as a political project. He has in mind a contemporary sociology that would reunite with the political self-understandings of the classical period while refashioning this in response to subsequent failures. The economic and political configuration that Wagner calls modernity’s second crisis has brought with it opportunities for this self-conscious reappropriation of sociology’s political project.

By the early 1980s, sociologies of modernity that emphasized the basically smooth development of societal configurations once they had embarked upon a course of modernization were in trouble (Wagner, 1999, p. 349, 2001b, pp. 1-2, 2012, pp. 65-6). Such accounts straggled to cope with,

on the one hand, the weakening of the external boundaries of social entities, mostly now discussed as ‘globalization’ and ‘the decline of the welfare state’ and, on the other hand, the dissolution of the internal structures, discussed as ‘individualization’ under the conditions of ‘risk society’.

(Wagner, 2001b: p. 2, 2012, pp. 66-7)

The interventionist state had ‘rested on the assumption that there is a common interest in the national collective that has its specific legitimacy and needs a particular organisation’ (Wagner, 1994, p. 128). The 1980s saw the culmination of a ‘gradual disappearance of the coherence of national productive systems’ and with this the rising confidence of a postmodern challenge to modernist social science and its a priori assumptions of ‘the intelligibility of the social world, of the coherence of social practices and of the rationality of action’ (1994, p. 126 andp. 151).

Referring to all this as the second crisis of modernity, Wagner draws attention to a many-sided break with ‘the social conventions that had characterized the model of organized modernity’ (1994, p. 151).

Confronted with this heightened awareness of modern contingencies, Wagner urges sociologists to embrace the challenge without losing sight of their unique disciplinary project. Working with the contingency of all social phenomena must be the new a priori of social research. Wagner argues for ‘the contingency of community and selfhood as assumptions for a current study of the condition of modernity’. In opposition to Richard Rorty, he ‘maintains the possibility of social science’ and argues ‘for analyzing the specific shapes that community and selfhood actually take and may possibly take under the present conditions’ (1994, p. 153). A de-politicized, behaviourist construction of sociology that seeks to uncover the quasi-automatic mechanisms of a fixed social coherence is out of touch with our realities and with the temperament unleashed by modernity’s current crisis. Reconnecting with classical sociology's grasp of the political problem of social coherence in modem societies, sociology today needs to reflect upon the network of solidarities that offer the practical conditions of, and the institutional supports to, our quest for self-determined autonomy. Concretely, this coherence rests on the civic activism that underpins and reproduces democratic welfare states.

Wagner welcomes the fragile signs of emergent sociological research that has ‘started by questioning the accounts of a well-ordered society’, including sociology’s own a priori categories of ‘nation state and class’ (2001a, p. 153). This heralds a new research agenda that ‘takes all objections to the social sciences seriously’ yet still insists on the ‘possibility of maintaining the project, even under considerably changed assumptions’ (2001, p. 155). Contemporary sociology of modernity must negotiate the ‘basic openness of modernity’ by placing itself in an interpretive relationship to ‘the creation of communities ... chosen by the acting human beings themselves’ (2001a, p. 157). This commitment requires sociology to constitute itself as anti-liberalism, as a break from the ‘fallacies of self-sustained individualist liberalism’ (2001a, p. 159). Replacing liberal typologies with reflections on the personal and collective strivings of empirical individuals as they pursue their needs for self-realizing autonomy, sociology is to bring into focus the ambiguous, limiting and enabling role of modern institutions (1994, p. 22). As Wagner sees it,

a sociology of modernity needs to go beyond studying the multitude of existing social practices towards identifying the specificities of the institutions of Western societies. The task is to see which of their characteristics causes them to be built and maintained, how they structure life, give opportunities and impose constraints on action.

(1994, p. 22)

Reflecting on the multiplicity of ways in which living human beings reproduce and transform their institutional contexts as they go about securing the conditions of their freedoms, today sociology embarks on an explicitly critical project.

It confronts a 'modernization offensive from above' that uses ‘the existing powerdifferential to create enabling institutions in which others will participate’ with a countering 'modernization offensive from below' that moves to ‘defend groups who are the objects of modernizations from above against the constraints and exclusions effected by those modernizations’ (1994, p. 25). This critical posture does not compromise sociology’s disciplinary integrity by introducing any ideological commitments of its own. Rather, a repoliticized self-understanding takes its bearings from classical sociology’s project of negotiating necessary tensions between modernity’s constitutive commitments to individual freedom and to rationally mastered futures. Repudiating repressive attempts to close down this dynamic ambiguity at modernity’s heart, sociology is to resist normative closures and to commit itself only to ‘an idea of politics as open, creative human action’ (2001a, p. 159). Wagner’s program reflects on coherencies that are forged ‘from the actual relations of association and their—potential or real—plurality, diversity and even incompatibility’ (2001a, p. 159). Sociology’s political project affirms the truth that

there is a collectivity of human beings, forming a ‘society’ by virtue of the fact that they share common understandings about what is important in their lives (identities) and that they have ways to determine how they regulate their lives in common (rules of the polity).

(2001a, p. 147)

Modernity’s second crisis exposed the fallacies of a scientistic conviction about necessary social coherence. Grasping the significance of crisis as a challenge to its own modernist orthodoxies and as an opportunity for critical self-renewal, contemporary sociology might begin to shake off its ideological inheritances. Wagner gestures towards ‘world sociology of modernity’ (2012, p. 150). Sociology is to jettison the Eurocentric presumptions that had reduced the modern to a singular history whose effects has been ‘diffused across the world’ (p. 160). Conceding something of the timeline of this ‘diffusion’ model, Wagner repudiates its centrifugal thematic. The ‘moment of 1800’ is not ‘the beginning of the diffusion of European modernity but rather the onset of parallel processes of world-making, inspired by the modern imaginary but pursued under conditions of considerable power differentials’ (p. 163). Wagner hopes to liberate sociology from its parochial European orientations while holding onto a unifying project that reflects upon the multiplicity of ways and contexts in which people across the globe respond to the second crisis in organized modernity by building anew respecifications ‘of the social bond with a political view’ (p. 170).

Wagner’s account of the tasks that confront a contemporary sociology of modernity sets it up for an explicit break from liberal doctrines and draws up a challenge to neoliberalism’s mix of continuities and discontinuities with liberalism. Sociology is to join with neoliberalism in repudiating the ‘fallacies of self-sustained individualist liberalism’ (2001a, p. 159). However, whereas the sociologist’s diagnosis of liberal fallacies proposes a competing meaning

Sociology’ and critique 25 of autonomy, neoliberalism wants to make the liberal version work better as it extends its individualist logic to all other domains. As noted, Wagner calls upon sociology to respond to second crisis by repudiating liberalism’s misplaced confidence in the quasi-automatic reproduction of the social world. Reflecting upon the coherencies that are forged as we try and build the conditions of our autonomy, sociology is set to unseat dichotomies between the self and the collective. By contrast, neoliberalism does not oppose liberalism with any substantive version of autonomy, it merely responds to liberalism’s idealization of self-sustained individualism as an overburdening of the private self. Bolantski and Chiapello point out that neoliberalism offers to ‘coach’ individuals in the entrepreneurial aptitudes and resilient dispositions of the autonomous personality (2005, p. 97). While Wagner calls upon sociology to join with neoliberalism in contemplating the failures of liberalism's efforts to carve out a free space for the self-fashioning private individual, there are to be no substantive collaborations with neoliberalism’s interest in rehabilitating and refashioning liberal autonomy according to its own purposes.

Wagner observes that the efficacy of neoliberalism’s reinstatement of liberal individualism means that ‘a certain interpretation of these ideas [of autonomy] prevails over others’. While the ‘reduction of autonomy’ is intrinsic to ‘the workings of capitalism’, neoliberalism contrives to erode all alternative meanings in its bid to conflate capitalism with modernity itself (2001b, p. 24). Neoliberalism does not seek to minimize the significance of ‘autonomy’; it wants to monopolize it. The problem with autonomy in our time is not

its absence or weakness in general as many theorists claim. The problem is the weakness of its connection to anything that resembles a common project or even a common world. The weakening of that connection limits the range of possible meanings of autonomy. Notions of autonomy that focus on society and on self-determination in common with others are marginalized or excluded.

(2001b, p. 20)

Sociology is to confront this strategy of exclusions and forgetting by bringing to the fore meanings of autonomy that, shot through with investments in rationally self-determined futures, entwine ‘individual identities in social contexts of others’ (2001a, p. 146).

However, is this reminder of excluded idealizations of autonomy sufficient to sustain the efficacy of sociology’s critique of neoliberalism? Here we need to revisit earlier remarks about the grip of neoliberal ideological strategies that block scrutiny of its intended conflation of capitalism and modernity. Karl Polanyi makes the point that economic liberalism sought to close down debate about the consequences of the market system by affirming its liberation of a natural human disposition to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 8). By contrast, neoliberalism undertakes to resignify and redescribe all competing constructions of modern freedoms in a bid to close down debate. Interpreting Foucault’s views forus, Thomas Lemke describes neoliberalism as a ‘political project that endeavours to create a social reality that it suggests already exists’ (2001, p. 203). There are to be no traces of exclusions that might interrogate the ‘no choice’ and ‘no costs’ realism of a fatalistic neoliberal mood. Even ‘possible meanings of autonomy’ that are linked to building common projects find doubles in neoliberal resignifications. We noted before that Sennett is disturbed at neoliberal recycling of idealizations of his radical youth. The New Left critique of authoritarian and bureaucratic forms of organization now reappears in the legitimating discourses in neoliberal workplaces that demand self-directed engagement and many-sided creative energies from work ‘teams' (Sennett, 2006). Fraser’s account of difficulties in delineating the agendas of second-wave feminism from the new spirit of neoliberalism illustrates a general problem facing critique (2009, p. 110). Targeting, amongst other things, the gender prejudices that were built into the institutions of bureaucratic capitalism, it turned out that second-wave feminism lent unknowing support to neoliberal policies that, in winding back these regimes, also stripped protections that welfare states had offered to women. ‘Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era’ (2009, p. 108). Even the resistant language of a ‘modernisation from below’ can become entangled in neoliberalism’s drive against the bureaucratic protections of a ‘modernisation from above’.

Critique is unable to gain much traction in a neoliberal age if it is limited to reminding us of marginalized or excluded freedoms. The challenge is to diagnose the distortions and cultural losses that are involved as neoliberalism undertakes its redescriptions and reinventions of these ideals in capitalist-friendly terms. Meanings have to be defended against misrepresentations. Such diagnostic and arbitrating functions seem to be in tension with sociology’s scientific purposes and norms. Underlining its hostility to ideological closures, we noted that Burawoy observes that sociology can assume no ‘intrinsic normative valence’ and Wagner also defends sociology’s integrity from ‘normatively minded' commentators (2012, p. 37). It appears that neoliberalism forces requirements on critique that strain sociology’s disciplinary commitments and so we might need to look beyond the disciplinary purposes set by sociology to determine its contribution to ideology critique of neoliberalism. With this in mind, we turn to Homieth's proposal to revitalize sociology’s particular contribution to an interdisciplinary critical theory. Honneth assigns a vital role to sociology in the reinvigoration of an interdisciplinary critical theory. However, I will argue that here again the contribution of sociology to critique encounters disciplinary norms of objectivity as a roadblock to critique’s diagnostic, evaluative functions. Sociology finally relinquishes the normative challenges of critique to a speculative social philosophy.