three - Sociology as a science/technology of freedom

Summary

It was Michael Burawoy who almost two decades ago alerted us all that sociology was losing its link to the public arena…Following his hint, I suggested then that the extant academic sociology groomed and honed to serve managerial reason was singularly unfit to properly service the emergence of a radically different public composed of individuals burdened now with functions abandoned and ‘subsidiarised’ down the line in the course of the on-going ‘managerial revolution mark two’; and that a thorough re-adjustment of sociology (of its agenda and problematics, strategic goals, language) is for it now, literally, a life-or-death matter. What was and still is called for is a fully and truly watershed change of its status and character from a science/technology of un-freedom to the science/technology of freedom: admittedly a highly demanding endeavour – yet one capable of opening up to sociology an unprecedentedly vast public and set an equally unprecedented public demand for its services.

At all times of its two-centuries long history sociology focused on the aspects of human condition deriving from the fact of being a ‘social animal’ – living in society, in the company of others, interacting with others, and so on: ‘sociality’ of humans is and cannot but be for sociologists that ‘difference that made its difference’ of other humanities. Long before C Wright Mills, Albion Small, one of the pioneers of sociology in the US, pointed out that sociology was born of the desire to improve society – the tacit premise being Aristotle’s proposition that ‘good life’ is conceivable solely inside a good polis and that only beasts or angels can live outside a polis. Want to do something about the quality of human life? Then start from doing something about the quality of society which shapes humans, while being shaped by them. There was, so to speak, a sort of ‘elective affinity’ between such an understanding of the services sociology was bent on rendering and promising to render, and the ‘managerial reason’ of the time, bent on determining desirable human actions by manipulating their probability of being chosen – through manipulating the setting in which the actions are to be designed, undertaken, conducted and seen through; a manipulation calculated to limit, narrow down and best of all eliminate altogether the actors’ choice…