Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:19:37.659Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Postmodernism and Protest: Recovering the Sociological Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Joel Handler's presidential address to the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association examines the intellectual debates that animate recent studies of social change. This talk is his attempt to understand and question these studies of transformative politics which, Handler claims, are deeply influenced by a turn toward postmodernism. After ruminating over the postmodernist argument and its broader intellectual currents as well as its impact on studies of what he calls “protest from below” (e.g., Ewick & Silbey 1992; White 1990), he compares this work to earlier, more structurally informed approaches (e.g., Genovese 1974; Stack 1974; Piven & Cloward 1977). Handler believes that this earlier work remains more persuasive. Because the work of the 1970s is firmly rooted in an analysis of politics and economy that forms the basis for a theory of progressive social change, he concludes that it is more compelling, provocative, and socially meaningful. Handler is skeptical about the current research that is influenced by strains of postmodernism, although he does not seem to advocate a wholesale return to the earlier, social-structural approach. Thus, he does not take the difficult step of outlining a more useful and progressive analytical and political strategy.

Type
Comments on Presidential Address
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We would like to thank Wolf Hegdebrand for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References

Ashley, Richard (1988) “Geopolitics, Supplemetary Criticism: A Reply to Professors Roy and Walker,” 13 (1) Alternatives 88.Google Scholar
Ashley, Richard, & Walker, R. B. J. (1990) “Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies,” 34 International Studies Q. 259.Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Blumberg, Abraham S. (1967) Criminal Justice. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.Google Scholar
Collins, Randall (1989) “Sociology: Proscience or Antiscience?” 54 American Sociological Rev. 124.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan (1992) “Conformity, Contestation, and Assistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness,” 26 New England Law Rev. 73.Google Scholar
Freidson, Eliot (1980) Doctoring Together: A Study of Professional Social Control. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D. (1974) Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Liebow, Elliot (1967) Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. London: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Piven, Frances Fox, & Cloward, Richard A. (1979) Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Rubin, Lillian B. (1976) Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rubin, Lillian B. (1983) Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan (1992) “Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law,” 17 Law & Social Inquiry 39.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (1992) “‘In Another Kind of Wood’: Michel Foucault and Socioloegal Studies,” 17 Law & Social Inquiry 49.Google Scholar
Stack, Carol B. (1974) All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
White, Lucie (1990) “Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G.,” 38 Buffalo Law Rev. 1.Google Scholar