In terms of my theorising a good deal had happened during my protracted if somewhat threadbare tenure at Surrey University. One way of encapsulating this is by reference to a concept that I began to deploy to characterise contemporary British society. Chairing a meeting of critical realists in the British Library, I once heard Maggie Archer decry such single-word summary characterisations (though I noted at the time that she herself refers to the ‘morphogenetic society’). But I had come to see the irresistibly sharp resonance of the ideas of fracturing and fractures in the era of financialised or rentier capitalism, hence my reference to a ‘fractured society’.
In fact, I wrote or edited several books as well as chapters and articles within a short timeframe. In 2017 Mark Carrigan, Tom Block and I published an edited volume bringing together a selection of Maggie’s writings entitled Structure, Culture and Agency: Selected Papers of Margaret Archer; my contribution was to write the Introduction, but Mark and Tom did the bulk of the labour. In 2018 I edited the seventh edition of Sociology as Applied to Medicine, the latest in the series and one which at the publisher’s request included material of global rather than just UK relevance; I also involved colleagues new to the enterprise, like Ewan Speed, Nick Fox and Deborah Lupton. I confess that I found it quite hard work nagging contributors and trying to impose a degree of uniformity of length, style, accessibility, referencing etc. In 2018 also I published a book that offered the fullest treatment of the fractured society: this was entitled Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account. This was followed in 2020 by A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders, and currently in press is A Critical Realist Theory of Sport, each of these later works making implicit and occasionally explicit use of the concept of the fractured society.
I have come over these years to describe the fractured society in terms of eight core properties. The first of these is environmental threat. A strong scientific consensus has emerged that the future of multiple species on planet Earth, including humans, is under threat from ‘climate change’, and that this change is down in substantial part to historic and contemporary human exploitation of the environment. We have become inhabitants of Ulrich Beck’s perspicuous Risk Society. Two historic ‘givens’, namely, the natural world and human nature, have been penetrated and reflexively shaped by our rapacious species; and this penetration has been exposed as beyond hazardous. My focus has been on the natural world rather than human nature, but it is worth pointing out that, in his Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas has highlighted the risks associated with genetic advances; and Stephen Hawking, in a posthumous study, has argued that artificial intelligence (AI) may constitute a significant threat in its own right: the human species, he projected, may not be recognisable as such within a century.
The term ‘Anthopocene’, denoting a putative geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s geology, climate and ecosystems, was coined in the 1980s and popularised in the noughties. It is a nomenclature that remains contested, but it has focused attention on the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the last 60 years especially, during which carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, habitat destruction, extinction and widescale natural resource extraction have presented as significant phenomena and major challenges. In A Critical Realist theory of Sport I discuss the implications of the Anthropocene for global sport, stressing that, as so often is the case, the most severe threats are already being faced by to poorest ex-colonial nations.
The second core property of the fractured society is the nomadic proletariat. Environmental threat is one motive for the upsurge in global migration, others being political or military conflict, absolute or relative poverty, and a desire to join family and kin. No fewer than one in 110 people worldwide are presently ‘displaced’. While Beck understandably wrote of the ‘boomerang effect’ of contemporary mega-risks, as with environmental change it is invariably the poorest in the poorest nations who are most and most rapidly impacted. It is a current scandal in Britain that successive Conservative Home Secretaries – notably, Theresa May, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – have openly promoted racist policies, not only against members of ethnic minorities but, more recently, against refugees and even asylum seekers, hoping to profit from stirring the pot of public emotions against the background of political austerity and the cost of living crisis. With wars raging throughout the globe, fuelled by the selling of ever more vindictive armaments, and extending to the very edge of Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the numbers comprising the nomadic proletariat might be expected to rise significantly, and sooner rather than later.
The third property is the new inequality. I have noted and offered a partial explanation for this phenomenon in previous sketches on the GBH, but a brief revisit is in order. Escalating levels of material inequality are a documented and recognised function of the transition from welfare state to rentier capitalism in countries like Britain. In a global context, Oxfam noted that in 2020 the world’s 2,153 billionaires had more wealth than the 4.6 billion people comprising 60% of the world’s population. This is a staggering statistic. As I write, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has just confirmed that in Britain wealth has grown rapidly compared with earnings since the 2008 financial crisis, driven by a surge in house prices and financial assets like stocks and shares at a time of flatlining progress for average wages. As the next sketch will show in some detail, this pattern of wealth inequality in relation to income inequality was exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2022 ‘cost of living crisis’, dramatically deepened by the ill-fated Conservative regime of Liz Truss and ‘truss-economics’, has brought things to something of a head even as I sit at my laptop typing this.
The fourth property is class and precarity. A facet of the new inequality is the emergence of an exclusive band of super-rich alongside growing poverty, with people in relative poverty slipping and sliding into absolute poverty, unable to feed and clothe their children and accruing significant personal and household debt just to keep their heads above water. Class relations are biting deeper into people’s lives even as the prospects of growing class consciousness seem to be diminishing. In Britain as elsewhere, precarity, or radical insecurity, stemming from changes in job markets (eg zero hours contracts) and in welfare provision (eg the parsimonious introduction of Universal Credit), is part and parcel of this dynamic. It is not lost on the power elite heading the state apparatus that people who are worried sick day-to-day trying to pay for food, clothing and heating are disinclined to combine with others to organise for change.
Fifth comes the property of post-national ‘othering’. While nation states remain important global actors, what have been termed post-national ‘imaginary communities’ have assumed a greater prominence than hitherto. This is especially salient in relation to the nomadic proletariat in general and to the new pattens of migration and asylum-seeking in particular. But these processes of othering go beyond racial and ethnic difference to encompass the long-term sick, the disabled and the under- and unemployed, against whom stigma has been ‘weaponised’ as a form of political and social control. I have addressed these issues in some detail in A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders.
Sixth comes gender dissolution. Capitalism has from its onset in the long sixteenth century been gendered as well as racialised and relations of class have utilised and exploited this. Obstinate patriarchal relations have retained their vibrancy in financialised or rentier capitalism. Repeated bouts of the ‘feminisation of poverty’ have been documented in Britain and globally. We have also seen a cultural and rights-based challenge to cis-defined binaries, sometimes under the rubric of a putative fourth wave of feminism. This is not the occasion to debate trans activism, but a few comments are in order. The challenge from some trans activists extends to an argument that sex, like gender, is socially constructed (ie not a biological given). This argument has gained considerable traction and prompted a no less determined response. My own view, which I cannot resist appending here (it’s my series of sketches after all), is that it is by no means coincidental that this oft-toxic debate has focused almost entirely on people ‘born male’ who want to ‘identity as’, to ‘be/become’, women. In other words, it can be recast as a symptom of patriarchy. While I fully support the right of these people to ‘perform womanhood’ and to live as women, I want to insist that biology (and real biological mechanisms) – and psychology (and real psychological mechanisms) for that matter – cannot simply be trumped by social fiat. More importantly in the present context, the trans dispute is indicative of an evolving practice of identity-formation reflective of a wave of cultural relativity.
The seventh property is precisely that of cultural disorientation. Once discussed under the no-longer fashionable rubric of postmodernism, it denotes a relativisation of culture functional for, but not determined by, the economics of rentier capitalism. It is perhaps best captured by Lyotard’s well-worn distinction between universal and petit narratives. The former reflects the European Enlightenment approach to understanding and responding to the natural and social worlds we inhabit and highlights narratives of ‘progress’ towards the good society. The latter arises out of the dissolution and subsequent abandonment of universal narratives and the uptake of less ambitious or partial narratives, a shift of orientation often lauded as a form of emancipation from constraining rather than enabling individual, group and societal perspectives. The result is a pick-and-mix resource of petit narratives affording an inexhaustible mosaic of ‘choices’ for personalised identity-formation, for what Tony Giddens has called ‘life politics’. It is this form of cultural disorientation that has in my view opened the door for the more uncompromising representatives of trans activism. A more general point is that cultural disorientation via relativisation, paradoxically, can make fundamentalisms more rather than less probable.
The final property in this series is disconnected fatalism. This is a step beyond cultural disorientation. It signals growing feelings of abandonment, bitterness, hopelessness and kindred aspects of vulnerability. It marks an unwitting sense of detachment from events, typically born of a feeling of impotence. In a paper published in Society, Health and Vulnerability in 2019 I discussed ten dimensions of vulnerability, each of which can be, and often is, associated with an individual’s sense of disconnected fatalism. They are: anomie; alienation; powerlessness; marginalisation; exclusion; stigmatisation; deviance; cultural imperialism; loneliness; and symbolic violence. Disconnected fatalism clusters and is most virulent among members of the working class, and perhaps most conspicuous among the under- and unemployed in the former mining and manufacturing communities of the midlands and the north.
This series of properties of the fractured society is not intended to be exhaustive, nor am I able in this sketch to do them justice. But I do want to claim that each reflects a deeply concerning crack or fissure in the fabric of British society, and that taken together they warrant describing contemporary British society as fractured. But what I have also attempted to do in publications and blogs in recent years is take a few tentative steps towards explaining the fracturing process. This has led to the commending of a quintet of causal or generative mechanisms. Each is articulated in the form of a dynamic.
The first is the class/command dynamic, which has been introduced and addressed previously. Critically, this dynamic underpinned the GBH. To reiterate, I have argued that a reinvigorated dynamic of class and command (or state) relations has been decisive for the emergence and consolidation of financialised or rentier capitalism. With regard to class, it is that fraction of the 1% – in fact, less than 0.1% – of the British population, that is, those I have called ‘capital monopolists’, that is of pivotal importance. The capital monopolists constitute a hard core of the capitalist executive. They comprise those rentiers, financiers and major stakeholders and CEOs of transnational corporations whose ever more concentrated ownership of capital enables them to buy ever more influence from the power elite atop the complex and tentacled apparatus of the state to shift policy in their favour. To repeat the now familiar formula: capital buys power to make policy in its interests. It seems to me that this thesis, which I elaborated in relation to changing patterns of health and longevity back in the 1990s, is becoming commonplace even in medical sociology and social epidemiology (for which I take no credit). A final point here is that, as has been documented in the USA, it is increasingly the case that capital monopolists and their immediate allies are in government. Witness the undemocratic and ‘eccentric’ emergence of Rishi Sunak as the UK Prime Minister in 2022.
The second dynamic has also seen the light of day in earlier sketches. This is the stigma/deviance dynamic, which focuses of the weaponising of stigma, or the ‘heaping of blame on shame’. People who have conventionally been shamed are now routinely face the further calumny of being blamed for their shame. The logical endpoint is ‘abjection’. Abjection, the ideal attribution on the part of a state seeking oppressive compliance, is the unequivocal product of a calculated political strategy (which is in turn a product of the class/command dynamic). If people can be blamed for their shameful difference, even if not rendered fully abject, then they can more readily be scapegoated or abandoned by the state, in the process opening the door wide for cutting tax-funded welfare expenditure.
The third dynamic is the insider/outside dynamic. The insider-outsider binary has been omnipresent in sociology (in remembrance of Wittgenstein’s polar opposites argument, there can be no insiders without outsiders). Recalling Durkheim and the American structural-functionalist school, outsiders (the abnormal) have an important social function in that they allow for the possibility of insiders (the normal) celebrating their mainstream status and inclusivity. In rentier capitalism a racialised coalescing of this binary/dynamic has fuelled support for a reactionary, alt-right and proto-fascist populist politics. This recasting of the dynamic has further skewed the already command relations of the state (ie May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy and the ‘Windrush scandal’, and Patel and Braverman’s crude racialised othering implicit in the detaining of refugees and asylum-seekers indefinitely in appalling conditions, and in sending as many of those surviving crossing the British Channel in small boats as possible to Rwanda on one-way tickets).
A fourth dynamic is the party/populist dynamic. Once stable political alignments are being undermined by both the intrusion or ‘overlay’ of cultural issues and by populist politics. It currently seems that the ‘hegemonic bloc’ of progressive individualism is withering on the vine; that we have entered an interregnum; and, as Nancy Fraser has suggested, a contest is now raging between a ‘reactionary’ versus ‘progressive populism’. There is a toing and froing of trends. Corbyn came and went in the UK, and Bernie Sanders nearly came and has almost gone in the USA. I suggested in 2020 a paper in the Australian journal, Health Services Review, that Britain is succumbing to a period of state authoritarianism, though an important rider is that it is a state authoritarianism largely in hock to capital monopolists.
The last of the quintet made its first appearance in my latest book, A Critical Realist Theory of Sport, but warrants inclusion here. I called it the elite/mass dynamic. This is not just a predictable product of growing class power and/or the populist impulse, but rather captures the growing distance between those involved in (proximal) elite governance, that is, those who run national and local institutions and bodies, and the (distal) mass of the public who comprise a largely detached, remote, disenfranchised and increasingly virtual other. An argument made with reference to sport has a wider purchase. The relations between elites and the mass have become hyper-rationalised (in Weberian terms), commodified (in Marxian terms) and, to cite Ritzer once more, McDonaldised. For all the nominal-cum-token representation of members of the working class, women and people from racial/ethnic and other minorities, unaccountable elite governance is now the norm.
It needs to be stressed that these summary accounts of today’s societal fractures and the generative mechanisms that have played a causal role in delivering and enlarging them are a precis of more considered prices in publications and blogs. Nor, even in the latter, is too much being claimed on their behalf. I will append a few comments by way of elaborating on this confession. It has long been a personal project to promote what some have called ‘big sociology’, namely, engagement with the classical sociological concerns with social order and social change, or, in general terms, macro-phenomena. I tried to show in a previous sketch, using the broad-reach sociology of Habermas, how micro-phenomena like conversations between foodbank users and staff can only be fully grasped and explained by reference to rentier capitalism’s growing inequalities. So my ‘bias’ in writing of the fractured society and some of the mechanisms that have contributed to it has been in favour of macro-sociology. I make no apology for this, but it needs to be factored in.
Given this bias, if that is an appropriate word, my focus has unsurprisingly been on social structural mechanisms. Much of what I have said on culture and agency has been somewhat tangential, though later sketches will contain more on both. I will venture a few points of clarification and elaboration at this juncture. They concern the interface between structure and culture, and the distinctive causal role of class relations as opposed to those of gender, race, and so on.
Andrew Sayer has commented on both these topics with his customary eloquence in his The Moral Significance of Class, published in 2005, and his Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, published a decade later. In the second of these he writes:
Neoliberals – New Labour for example – can appear quite progressive about gender, race, sexuality, disability and condemn those who discriminate against people on these grounds. Unsurprisingly, the elephant in the room is economic inequalities or class difference. Though it never admits it, neoliberalism is a political-economic movement that seeks to legitimate widening economic inequalities and defend rentier interests above all others. Rentiers live off others regardless of their gender, race, sexuality and so on.’
This is an argument I have repeatedly made myself. It does nothing to diminish the salience of gender and race; but it does insist that social class and class relations remain the prepotent causal or generative mechanism for understanding and explaining capitalist systems. This holds despite the fact that class divisions succeeded those of gender and race historically. Class relations have in fact typically taken advantage of pre-existing gender and race relations, although, as Mike Savage shows in his The Return of Ineauality, published in 2021, there are important variations by time and place.
Another distinction Sayer makes is consistent with one of my own. In The Moral Significance of Class, he contrasts what he calls ‘identity-neutral mechanisms’ with ‘identity-sensitive mechanisms’. Capitalism he contends, is not dependent on identity, and for him one of the great disappointments of contemporary research on inequalities has been ‘a tendency to invert the former neglect of identity-sensitive cultural influences by denying the co-presence of identity-neutral mechanisms.’ This confers more precision on my regular differentiation of ‘objective’ (identity-neutral) versus ‘subjective’(identity-sensitive) concepts of class, which I have deployed to assert that while objective class relations have grown in relevance and explanatory power in post-1970 financialised or rentier capitalism, subjective class relations have diminished in salience and explanatory power for identity-formation in the wake of the relativisation of culture. In other words, class has come to exercise more influence over people’s material wellbeing even as it has provided less fuel for who they think they are and how they fit into society. It is a fundamental mistake for sociologists to allow the latter to swamp the former: we must beware reducing structural to cultural relations here. I would add that nor should we conflate structural and cultural relations, as happened for example with the LSE/BBC Great British Class Survey. Just as Archer has rightly insisted on an analytic distinction between structure and agency, allowing for the study of how they impact on each other, so we need to maintain an analytic distinction between structure and culture for the same reason.
Building on this, it is not that people no longer recognise and acknowledge their class location – on the contrary, they remain very aware of this – but rather that contemporary society has provided a telling and fragmented ‘cultural overlay’ that often serves to distract them. The pieces in this cultural jigsaw have become ever more distracting and bewildering even as they afford a plethora of resources for identity-formations in the guise of come-hither petit narratives. It is in this context that notions like ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, ‘wokeness’ and the like have gained traction. It is not that this cultural shift, once more or less accurately represented by the outmoded 1960s phrase ‘postmodern culture’, is somehow reducible to, or explicable in terms of, the structural shift in class relations reflected in my class/command dynamic. What I would suggest, however, is that the turn in cultural relations is functional for our class-based oligarchic or plutocratic regime. I once in a blog planted the notion, tongue in cheek, that our relativised culture might be seen, after the philosopher of science, Lakatos, as a kind of protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that serves to protect or deflect attacks on the hard core of neoliberal ideology.