The temptation to dismiss people who act against their own interests as ‘stupid’ should be resisted. How often did we hear that working-class ‘northerners’ who voted Brexit, or for an Old Etonian charlatan as PM, were ‘beyond stupid’ and deserved their inevitable punishment? Of course there exists a long history of sociologists trying to explain ‘deviant’ working-class Tory voters. Well, I have a view that might not be especially popular even amongst colleagues in my discipline. It can be divided into linked theses.
The first rests on a distinction between knowledge and ideology. I hold to this classical sociological distinction notwithstanding its fading appeal and the current propensity to regard all claims to knowledge as ideological. For me, an ideology is a worldview that reflects the particular vested interests of its proponents. Many discourses of course comprise a mix of ingredients, that is, of redeemable and irredeemable knowledge claims. But sociology for me remains a scientific project – understood as provisional, nuanced and fallible – one of its key commitments being to ‘expose’ ideology. As I’ve often argued, after Jurgen Habermas. the sociological project is a necessarily reconstructed or ‘born-again’ progeny of the Enlightenment. While it is ‘professional sociology’ that does the basic groundwork here, it is the primary task of ‘policy’ ‘public’ and ‘action sociology’ to follow up by applying, disseminating and making knowledge count.
The second thesis links sociology and education. In a previous life I used to teach philosophy of education to PGCE students. I still recall Richard Peters’ textbook definition of education as ‘intrinsically worthwhile’. And who but an ideologist could contest the notion that sociology – a science of society – could be anything other than a handmaiden of and fuel for education? It seems axiomatic to me that understanding in as scientific manner as possible the genesis and workings of the social phenomena that constitute a society is, or should be, part and parcel of a person’s intellectual equipment. If it wasn’t for sociology’s facility for exposing the ideologies of the powerful it should surely be a core part of any credible national curriculum.
These two theses might attract a liberal following, for all that many liberals adhere strictly, and erroneously in my view, to a wholly individualistic orientation to social phenomena and to society. My third thesis is to postulate an affinity between sociology and socialism, or more precisely perhaps, between sociology and the original Marxian notion of communism (now being rediscovered and polished up by French philosophers and theorists). I can hear fellow sociologists tut-tutting at this point, if they have read this far that is. So what is the gist of this third thesis and how might it be defended?
I have to be brief here because I have blogged often on the way I see sociology. To my mind it is, to stick with Habermas’ terminology, necessarily oriented to lifeworld rationalisation (or de-colonisation). In other words, the seemingly utopian ideal speech situation, on which the promise of attaining a rational consensus on how we organise our affairs is premised, provides the logical impulse for myriad forms of deliberative democracy (all of them well beyond the capitalist parliamentary democracy that we currently have in the UK, long since exposed for what it is by Miliband). The crucial point here is that strategic action has to be answerable – in a meaningful sense – to the people in whose interests it purports to act, be they a territorial grouping or, for example, people-cum-patients seeking treatment or care. It seems apparent to me that any form of deliberative democracy can only have traction within a socialist/communist social formation, where resources are shared (as Marx said, on the basis of need).
I am not being naïve here. Of course human sociality is complex, dynamic and has long been characterised by coercive strategic domination (and since the long sixteenth century, by exploitation). But in my terms there is a unity that binds sociology, education and socialism/communism. It is an abstract or philosophical unity as I have paraphrased it here to be sure; but it may also ground Gramsci’s optimism of the will.