Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century 9781784412227, 9781784412234

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MEDIATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY Series Editor: Harry F. Dahms Recent Volumes: Volume 12:

1992, Edited by Ben Agger

Volume 13:

1993, Edited by Ben Agger

Volume 14:

1994, Edited by Ben Agger

Supplement 1:

Recent Developments in the Theory of Social Structure, 1994, Edited by J. David Knottnerus and Christopher Prendergast

Volume 15:

1995, Edited by Ben Agger

Volume 16:

1996, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 17:

1997, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 18:

1998, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 19:

1999, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 20:

2000, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 21:

Bringing Capitalism Back for Critique by Social Theory, 2001, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 22:

Critical Theory: Diverse Objects, Diverse Subjects, 2003, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 23:

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge, 2005, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Volume 24:

Globalization between the Cold War and Neo-Imperialism, 2006, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann and Harry F. Dahms

Volume 25:

No Social Science without Critical Theory, 2008, Edited by Harry F. Dahms

Volume 26:

Nature, Knowledge and Negation, 2009, Edited by Harry F. Dahms

Volume 27:

Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes, 2010, Edited by Harry F. Dahms and Lawrence Hazelrigg

Volume 28:

The Vitality of Critical Theory, 2011, Edited by Harry F. Dahms

Volume 29:

The Diversity of Social Theories, 2011, Edited by Harry F. Dahms

Volume 30:

Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process, 2012, Edited by Harry F. Dahms and Lawrence Hazelrigg

Volume 31:

Social Theories of History and Histories of Social Theory, 2013, Edited by Harry F. Dahms

CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 32

MEDIATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY EDITED BY

HARRY F. DAHMS Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

United Kingdom North America India Malaysia China

Japan

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2014 Copyright r 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78441-223-4 ISSN: 0278-1204 (Series)

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

vii

EDITORIAL BOARD

ix

INTRODUCTION

xi

PART I: SOCIAL THEORIES EXPERIENCE, PROBLEMS OF SCALE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERCEPTION Lawrence Hazelrigg DIGITAL FAIRGROUND THE VIRTUALIZATION OF HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF “BECOMING A PATIENT” AS A PROBLEM OF POLITICAL ONTOLOGY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Alexander I. Stingl

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PART II: SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES SOCIAL CONSERVATISM, DISTRACTORS, AND AUTHORITARIANISM: AXIOLOGICAL VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY Robert B. Smith SOCIOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION: MEDIATION OF OPPOSITES BY INTERPENETRATION Emanuel Smikun

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95

135

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CONTENTS

PART III: CRITICAL THEORIES THE BASE-SUPERSTRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY Michael J. Thompson

161

BRINGING THE CRITICAL BACK IN: TOWARD THE RESURRECTION OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Lauren Langman

195

PART IV: A DEBATE CONTINUED JOHN LEVI MARTIN’S THE EXPLANATION OF SOCIAL ACTION (2011) ACTION AND REACTION: RESPONSE TO BRADFORD John Levi Martin

231

EXPLAINING SOCIAL ACTION REVISITED: A REPLY TO JOHN LEVI MARTIN John Hamilton Bradford

259

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS John Hamilton Bradford

Department of Social Sciences, Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, MS, USA; Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University, MS, USA

Lawrence Hazelrigg

Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

Lauren Langman

Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

John Levi Martin

Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Emanuel Smikun

Explorers Institute, Salem State University, Salem, MA, USA

Robert B. Smith

Social Structural Research Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA

Alexander I. Stingl

Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Michael J. Thompson

Department of Political Science, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

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EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR Harry F. Dahms University of Tennessee (Sociology)

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Joel Crombez Nicholas Hauman Rhiannon Leebick Steven Panageotou

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Robert J. Antonio University of Kansas (Sociology)

Timothy Luke Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Political Science)

Lawrence Hazelrigg Florida State University (Sociology)

EDITORIAL BOARD Ben Agger University of Texas Arlington (Sociology and Anthropology)

Stanley Aronowitz City University of New York Graduate Center (Sociology)

Sarah Amsler University of Lincoln (Educational Research and Development)

Molefi Kete Asante Temple University (African-American Studies)

Kevin B. Anderson University of California, Santa Barbara (Sociology)

David Ashley University of Wyoming (Sociology) ix

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EDITORIAL BOARD

John Bradford Mississippi Valley State University (Sociology)

John O’Neill York University (Sociology)

Robin Celikates University of Amsterdam (Philosophy) Norman K. Denzin University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Sociology) Arnold Farr University of Kentucky (Philosophy) Nancy Fraser New School for Social Research (Political Science) Martha Gimenez University of Colorado (Sociology)

Paul Paolucci Eastern Kentucky University (Sociology) Moishe Postone University of Chicago (History) Lawrence Scaff Wayne State University (Political Science) Steven Seidman State University of New York at Albany (Sociology)

Boulder

Robert Goldman Lewis and Clark College (Sociology and Anthropology) Mark Gottdiener State University of New York at Buffalo (Sociology) Douglas Kellner University of California Angeles (Philosophy)

Eric R. Lybeck Cambridge University (Sociology)

Los

Lauren Langman Loyola University (Sociology)

Helmut Staubmann Leopold Franzens University, Innsbruck (Sociology) Alexander Stoner Salisbury University (Sociology) Stephen Turner The University of South Florida (Philosophy) Christine Williams The University of Texas at Austin (Sociology)

INTRODUCTION How best to conceive of society, social life or social structure? How to grasp the specific realities these concepts denote today? For the most part, social scientists acknowledge, explicitly or at least implicitly, that such concepts de facto refer to the aggregate of a multiplicity of social, political, cultural, and economic conditions and processes which prevail and occur simultaneously, and represent constellations which at different levels of observation and analysis are distinguished by differences in orientation, organization, and degree. On the one hand, it is not possible to capture the complexities, contingencies, and tensions at work within, between and across these conditions and processes in a manner that could even begin to correspond with what might be framed as doing justice to their “nature,” “essence,” or “defining features,” respectively, and especially the plurality of possible forms overall. On the other hand, related efforts at descriptive and analytical characterization are necessary, both with regard to individual processes, the links that tie them together even when diverse forces are trying to drive them apart. This applies especially to their compounded form, to identify patterns of societal change that no doubt exist in ways that shape the circumstances of our existence in society, our social existence, and our sociality, and which in the absence of determined, rigorous and focused scrutiny tend to elude our attention, even (and, in terms of specific research agendas, perhaps in particular) among social scientists. Still, applying scrutiny to the range of simultaneously occurring conditions and processes has been and must remain the stated purpose of social research and the ultimate (though by no means exclusive) responsibility of social scientists and social theorists. Indeed, the possibility of pertinent insights about society, social life, and social structure is likely to depend on our willingness to embrace both purpose and responsibility as we are approaching what looks more and more like (and what increasingly appears to be recognized, or at least framed, as) an unprecedented precipice for human civilization: whether to make the effort to confront, and to overcome the “dark(er) side” of western modernity assuming that doing so will continue to be a matter of “objective possibility” (which is far from xi

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certain, if it ever was) and how to do so, from the local to the national, regional, and planetary scale.1 One common strategy for how to grasp the nature of the “social” during and for a particular time-period (including what used to be referred to as a “stage of development,” when the assumption of progress was still widespread, whether legitimately so or not) is to work with and through or even to construct snapshots of the social world, or any of its aspects. We then could treat the latter as phenomena that ought to be understood either on their own terms, or as symptomatic and indicative of the level of complexity, the degree of contingency, and the type of contradictions inherent to the “social” we must endeavor to access and “master” in social research (as distinguished from the political, the economic, the cultural, etc.). Such snapshots appear differently, of course, depending on specific spatial and temporal circumstances, that is, the concrete contexts in and the particular angle from which social reality is being observed, described, analyzed, and ultimately theorized. To do so effectively has been a key challenge for social researchers since the inception of social theory in the modern era.2 Yet what is the status, precisely, of those snapshots? What do the snapshots represent, even if related, purported findings and discoveries about prevailing modes of sociality, respectively, appear to be valid not just for short periods of time, but for the better part of an era? What if they appear to apply not just to one particular society, but an entire genus of society, such as industrial, post-industrial, or post-liberal capitalist society?3 Should we study social life and its varied manifestations on the assumption that the purpose of social theory is to illuminate the dominant and largely stable features of the social world that we inhabit? Or, should we focus instead on the instabilities and the vicissitudes that shape the circumstances of our lives, our actions, our pursuit of success and meaning (both individually and collectively), as the more relevant and more crucial aspects of modern societal conditions? Either way, it is not possible to provide one definite and sufficiently satisfying answer to these questions. Rather, we may be well advised to focus our attention on tensions between levels of social reality, such as examining the dynamic interplay between “stable” features in and across modern societies, and the vast array of more or less fluid and “unstable” patterns, practices, forms of organization, and types of action. This interplay between stability and instability is what social scientists in general ought to, and sociologists in particular must recognize as the terrain whose analysis is our charge. At the same time we must recognize that this is the most promising reference frame for accessing and tracking the perpetual conflict between progress and regression, possibilities

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and impediments, along many different axes, that patterns our lives, and our work as social researchers and social theorists. Yet, how to do so productively? The need to situate such snapshots historically, culturally, politically and geographically, necessitates a degree of willingness to engage with other social scientists, especially researchers from other fields; yet, collaboration between and across disciplines never looked upon favorably to begin with is less and less compatible with administrative priorities at universities, and with regard to funding opportunities for research. The situation is comparable to the requisite yet neglected time-horizon that should inform the social sciences generally, and sociology, in particular, with clear and present implications for social theory. Perhaps the charge of the social sciences should be conceived of not so much in terms of studying the present nor simply to appreciate the gravity the past keeps exerting upon the present, as a necessary precondition for studying the latter. Instead, it may be more productive to explicitly access the field of tensions between the present and the past in order to scrutinize the present states of affairs and the particular constellation of “facts” and “norms” that the decreasingly reliable stability of modern societies hinges upon as both impediments to and opportunities for efforts to actualize the kinds of futures that social, political, cultural, and economic conditions have been representing as possibilities. Then, we might find ourselves, and our efforts as social researchers and social theorists, situated within a horizon that reaches from a past we prefer to regard as having been left behind (for better or worse), via a present that is burdened by both the past and the present’s own endemic restrictions and limitations, to the prospect of a future, or futures, in which the past’s burdens either have been lifted, jettisoned, or indeed overcome. Whether this horizon as it informs our labor is realistic may be immaterial; what matters is whether we can sustain within this horizon the requisite degree of comfort that is necessary for us, individually and especially collaboratively, to face related tensions and the paradoxical, contradictory, and unsettling vicissitudes as which they manifest themselves in concrete circumstances, so as to sustain concern with and commitment to the modes of research of the real in social life, which we would abandon at our peril. One theoretically oriented strategy to confront an entire range of related concerns has existed for some time, to be sure, and it is centered on the idea and the concept of mediation. Though the concept, as well as related interest, has been alternating between conspicuous prominence and perceived irrelevance, and has risen and waned over the course of the last

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two centuries, more or less, it has remained with us, as a means of choice, first, to try to verbalize, and then to pursue systematically, the challenge that studying societal forms in the modern era inevitably presents to us (that is, modern society in its multifarious forms). This challenge is best conceived of as the study of a set of ongoing processes of perpetual constitution and reconstitution. In addition, the subjects of study social researchers and social theorists, as well as social actors in a much wider sense eminently are integral to (and functions of) the processes of constitution and reconstitution that characterize the modern condition. In his most recent work, his “Anthropology of the Moderns,” Latour (2014) makes ample use of the concept, to encourage us the Moderns to look into the proverbial mirror, as he employs mediation as one of the tools to try to get across to us as those whose identities are structured and shaped by the specific configurations and histories of modern society, without being able to fully acknowledge, not to mention appreciate, this fact just how deep the connections are between the “mode of existence” essential to modern society, and the conditions and experiences of our lives: We still have to be able to explain [the] continuing distance between theory and practice. Why is it so hard to follow experience? The gap is too large to be attributed simply to the customary distance between the intricacies of daily life and the limits of vocabulary. Among the Moderns, this gap has become a major contradiction, one that accounts simultaneously, moreover, for their energy, their enthusiasm, and their complete opacity. We cannot do their anthropology if we settle for speaking of illusion or false consciousness in this regard. Why have they put themselves in the untenable position of defending values without giving themselves the means to defend them? Why have they cast doubt on the mediations necessary for the institution of their values? (Latour, 2014, pp. 152 153)4

Latour’s attempt is directed at presenting a cogent perspective whose intended audience includes decision makers in the European Union who confront dilemmas related to the need to attain a sufficiently high level of critical self-reflexivity regarding the nature of modernity and of the proverbial Moderns who have never been fully modern (Latour, 1993) to be able to communicate and engage constructively (with) those who are neither products, nor parts of the support structure of modern societies. His goal is to relay the importance of a new kind of diplomacy that is informed by social theory, to an audience of non-theorists. Latour does not cite explicitly most the traditions of thought and the key texts that inform his perspective, nor does he include what would have been an expansive list of references and apparatus of notes. Still, it is apparent that Latour’s

Introduction

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“inquiry” in the French original, enqueˆte, a term which in Europe frequently is used for inquiries of a public, official sort (as in a “parliamentary commission of inquiry”) draws on a broad range of sources, including especially the works of such process philosophers and theorists as A. N. Whitehead, William James, and Gilles Deleuze. The perspectives of each of these theorists are highly compatible with the idea of mediation. Put simply, in the absence of a mindset that is willing to consider and employ mediation (and its corollary, dialectics) as an indispensable tool in any effort to illuminate society, social life, and social structure in the modern age in general, and particularly in the context of the twenty-first century, the forces shaping and sustaining the world of the Moderns either categorically will remain out of reach, or be unavoidably truncated in ways that corrupt all resulting efforts at understanding.5 One theorist whose project in important ways anticipated at least some aspects of Latour’s investigation is Theodor W. Adorno, although his influence (or that of his tradition, critical theory) is not explicitly acknowledged, or even alluded to (e.g., Latour, 2014, p. 288). Especially Adorno’s ideation of the need to do justice to any object of study, as a necessary precondition for being able to appreciate the object’s degree and kind of importance in social life (positively and/or negatively), and to begin to understand it on its own terms, is consonant with Latour’s agenda. Theoretically speaking, the practice of truly “doing justice” (to individuals, “other” people in general, an object or phenomenon, or “nature”), as outlined by Adorno especially in Adorno ([1966] 1973), is not consistent with the tendency in modern society (qua modern capitalism) to assimilate anything it encounters to its own logic. By implication, the prospect of such a practice becoming ubiquitous in human civilization represents one illustration of the utopian moment in Adorno’s version of critical theory.6 Latour’s contention that Moderns must first recognize (in the sense of perceive and value) both the possibility and the actuality of alternative modes of existence, both historically and as represented by non-modern cultures, before being able to start the process of constructively and creatively engaging with non-Moderns, is consonant with Adorno’s ideation. Yet the vanishing point of Latour’s inquiry neither is explicitly (or intentionally) critical, nor does it parallel poststructuralist or postmodernist critiques of modern society. Rather, his point is that the Moderns first must be able to confront and appreciate fully the historical and cultural distinctiveness of their achievements before being in the position to constructively engage with non-Moderns who may or may not represent materially modes of existence that have been, are, or have become alien to the reality of the Moderns.

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In allusion to Hegel, who introduced the concept into philosophical discourse, Adorno appropriated and reconfigured mediation (Vermittlung) to “claim that experience has a structure which allows the dynamic interaction of subject and object” (O’Connor, 2004, p. 18): The object’s priority means … that the object is independent of the subject in the sense that it has properties that are independent of the individual subject who is attempting to understand the object: it is an irreducible particular. Subjectivity by itself cannot account for the different possibilities of experience. To deny priority of the object that is, to deny the mediated subject-object structure of experience is to deprive oneself of the condition that makes any knowledge claim possible. The very notion of experience requires it. However, the reification of experience suppresses this idea. By means of this transcendental strategy Adorno attempts to demonstrate the irrationality of the reified version of experience (O’Connor, 2004, pp. 58 59).

Adorno was concerned above all with how modern society demands that individuals accommodate themselves within a reified social world whose first functional requirement is that individuals in their everyday lives, as par for the course, reify themselves and each other. By contrast, Latour is concerned with relaying to readers how Moderns exist on the basis of and through “an amalgam between two modes” of existence reproduction and reference “that everything should have encouraged them to distinguish carefully. The most common name for this amalgam is ‘material world’, or more simply, ‘matter’” (Latour, 2014, p. 98), that is, how what Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) have referred to as “WEIRD people” (inhabitants of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies) typically are oblivious to the fact that the fullness of human experience should comprise an array of modes of existence.7 In his later works, Adorno returned to the concept of mediation repeatedly, especially in Adorno ([1966] 1973); for present purposes, his use of the concept in his presidential lecture to the German Society of Sociology in 1968 will be more directly illustrative of the sense in which it is being referred to in the title of this volume. In his intervention into the discussion of the time regarding the question of whether “late capitalism” or “industrial society” represents the sociologically more descriptively accurate concept and analytically powerful tool for further research in the social sciences, Adorno ([1968] 2003, p. 115) referred to Marx, noting that during the nineteenth century, it was possible for Marx to produce his “quasisystematic theory” of capitalism through “determinate negation” of the “developed system of liberal economics [that] was available to him.” In a manner that sounds strangely contemporary, Adorno continued,

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In the meantime, the market economy has become so full of holes as to rule out any such confrontation. The irrational nature of contemporary society inhibits a rational account of it in the realm of theory. The possibility that the steering of economic processes might be transferred to the political powers does indeed follow from the dynamics of the deductive system, but also tends towards an objective irrationality. It is this … that can help explain why we have had no convincing objective theory of society for so long. On this interpretation, this failure is the expression, not of the critical progress of the scientific spirit, but of an enforced resignation. The failure to produce a theory of society runs parallel to the resignation of society itself. (Adorno, [1968] 2003, p. 116).

Put differently, the reason why there was no sufficiently convincing and powerful theory of modern society then, and why we still do not have such a theory now, despite the countless attempts to conceive and to provide one from many different corners, and in the context of many different theoretical traditions, may well be because we have not been asking the most pertinent kinds of questions. It may well be that we have been trying to put to work frameworks and tools whose utility has been declining as developments in political economy have been progressing and deepening. Along those lines, the reason for the lack of success in constructing, or even grounding effectively, a theory of modern society, could be the neglect of certain tools, categories, and frames that have been supplied throughout the history of social thought, especially frames and tools that are particularly well-suited for the development of a powerful and, inevitably, interor multidisciplinary theory of society of global civilization in the twenty-first century. The attention that has been paid in recent months to Thomas Piketty’s (rather misguidingly titled, if any allusion to Marx’s work is expected) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) may be symptomatic both of efforts in recent decades to theorize capital and capitalism effectively having been fraught with failure (including Piketty’s, to be sure though doing so was not his purpose to begin with), and of the increasingly undeniable need to conceive of such a theory in and for the present age. Criticizing the assumption in the social sciences that “the nature of society [follows] directly from the state of the forces of production [such as technological and organization developments, etc.; H.D.], independently of the social forces governing them,” Adorno went on to point out that It is astonishing how little is said about these conditions in established sociological circles, and how little they are analyzed. The best aspect of this argument which by no means needs be the best is simply forgotten. This is the emphasis on totality, to use Hegel’s term, the ether that permeates the whole of society. However, this ether is anything but ethereal; it is, rather, the ens realissimum [“the most real being”; H.D.].

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If it seems abstract, that is the fault not of fantastic, willful thinking, hostile to the facts, but of the exchange relation, the objective abstraction to which the social process of life is subject.… The impotence of the individual in the face of the totality is the drastic expression of the power of the exchange relation. (Adorno, [1968] 2003, p. 120)

Especially under conditions of globalization and neoliberalism, this warning should be heeded, as the commodification of all aspects of life, existence, and experience on Earth is continuing to progress at an accelerating rate. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to determine to what degree social research, and especially sociological research, is concerned with capturing social life in its many manifestations. That is, as phenomena in their own right, on their own terms, for their own sake, as opposed to phenomena that must be considered, even recognized, as influenced or shaped by economic, technological, and organizational processes that have few if any linkages to what rightfully may have been conceived of as intrinsically connected to the “social,” in a more less distant past.8 Finally, Adorno explicitly turned to the issue of mediation: The forces of production are mediated more and more by the relations of production [i.e., the structure of inequality with regard to the ownership of means of production; H.D.], so completely, perhaps, that the latter appear to be the essence; they have become second nature. … What would be required to distinguish between true needs and false ones is an insight into the structure of society as a whole, together with all its mediations. The fictitious element that deforms the gratification of all needs today is perceived unconsciously, but not questioned …. (Adorno, [1968] 2003, p. 121)

In terms of Adorno’s critical social theory, what would be required today is recognition of the need to distinguish between forms and formations of social life that are symptomatic of and express sociality, as opposed to forms and formations that express “the other” of sociality, in the age of transnational capitalism: of economics, corporations, and technology.9 Adorno concluded as follows: Everything is now one. The totality of the processes of mediation, which amounts in reality to the principle of exchange, has produced a second, deceptive immediacy. This enables people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and forget difference and conflict to repress it from consciousness. But this consciousness of society is illusion, because while it does justice to the process of technological and organizational standardization, it overlooks the fact that this standardization is not fully rational but remains subject to blind, irrational laws. No overall social subject exists. We could formulate this illusion by saying that all social phenomena are so completely mediated that even the element of mediation is distorted by its totalizing nature. It is no longer possible to adopt a vantage point outside the hurly-burly that would enable us to give the horror a name; we are forced to adopt its inconsistencies as our starting point. (Adorno, [1968] 2003, p. 124)

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In different ways, each essay in this volume constitutes a distinctive effort to confront the dilemmas twenty-first century conditions impose on our efforts as social theorists to theorize social life, society, social structures. The linkages between the levels of analysis corresponding with the latter require particular attention, as do the realities they may or may not (or no longer, if they ever did) denote, and the related (contingent, contradictory) condition of the individual in the totality of modern society. In the paper “Experience, Problems of Scale, and the Aesthetics of Perception,” Lawrence Hazelrigg examines classical formulations by neoKantian theorists regarding the link between “individual and society,” in order to set the stage for addressing the problem of scale and its treatment in twentieth-century social theory. The issue of first-person experience in relation to the problem of scale features most prominently, including consideration of consequences of cognition, consciousness, and action in processes of aggregation. In order to explicate the “impossible individuality” thesis with an eye towards contemporary concerns, Hazelrigg pays special attention to Ho¨lderlin and Benjamin, and the meaning of “theorizing with intent.” The paper “Digital Fairground The Virtualization of Health, Illness, and the Experience of “Becoming a Patient” as a Problem of Political Ontology and Social Justice”, by Alexander I. Stingl, is concerned with the present condition of individuality as well, in terms of an analysis of the constitution of the experience of being a patient. Framing “becoming a patient” as productive of a subjectivity that can be examined as a process of individuation in terms of a political ontology facilitates inquiries into a mode of production and into its relation to social justice, as a result of digital divisions. Employing semantic agency theory, Stingl considers arrangements and assemblages that constitute how ‘patient experience’ can be articulated from its position in the context of an ontology of production. The paper by Robert B. Smith the first in Part II, on sociological theory provides a study of the separation between the societal challenges political states face, with reference to micro-level political alignments. Smith relies on a data set based on a 2008 election survey, to provide macro-level measures of state problems, and applies multilevel statistical models to explain the state-to-state variance between U.S. states on antiabortion and pro-gun sentiments, in the process uncovering macro- and micro-level factors that separate a state’s neglect-of-children indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about abortion, and factors that separate a state’s crime indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about guns.

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The paper “Sociological Deconstruction and Reconstruction: Mediation of Opposites by Interpenetration”, by Emanuel Smikun, advocates a comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction that includes de-subjectifying interpretation, re-subjectifying explanation, deobjectifying understanding, and re-objectifying conceptualization, in order to make progress toward a constructive principle designed to allow for a kind of interpenetration that mediates between polar opposites. The two papers in Part III are contributions to critical theory. For Michael J. Thompson, there is continuing merit in the base-superstructure hypothesis that was central to Marx’s theory, which also was a key tenet of Frankfurt School critical theory. Rather than applying a determinist reading to this hypothesis, which would undercut opportunities for envisioning autonomous social action, Thompson stresses the need for a return to structural-functionalist perspectives on social processes that differentiate classical critical theory from more recent versions, including Habermas’s “discourse ethics” and Honneth’s “recognition paradigm.” In a similar vein, Lauren Langman argues for the need to resurrect classical critical theory as well. The early Frankfurt School’s Marxist-Hegelian approach to dialectics was conducive to understanding the societal conditions of its own emergence from the aftermath of World War I Germany to the Cold War era, with special attention to phenomena related to alienation, ideology, mass media, and the nature of the link between society and individual, in terms of the character-subjectivity nexus. Part IV of this volume continues and concludes an exchange centered on John Levi Martin’s The Explanation of Social Action (2011), whose central argument was that [T]he social sciences (in part, but in large part) explain what people do, and they explain what it means to carry out such explanations. They often do reasonably well at the first task and usually abysmally at the second. More worrisome, their failure at the second task has pernicious and ill-recognized effects on the first. The best explanations lack all conviction that they are adequate, while the worst are filled with the passionate intensity of those who are systematically and maniacally wrong (p. ix).

The paper “Action and Reaction: Response to Bradford” is Martin’s reply to John Hamilton Bradford’s (2013) review essay, published in the previous volume of this series. The paper “Explaining Social Action Revisited: A reply to John Levi Martin” is Bradford’s response to Martin’s reply. Harry F. Dahms Editor

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NOTES 1. To be sure, whether “dark” is theoretically an especially productive term may be questioned. Still, there cannot be any doubt, first, that key dimensions of modern societies have not been illuminated sufficiently, and secondly, that there is a troubling, insidious dimension (or set of dimensions) that is integral to modernity, see ˇ zek ˇ (2010). For an illustration of how life Alexander (2013), Mignolo (2011), and Zi on Earth may remain on the precipice for centuries to come, see Robinson (2012). Regarding the concept of “objective possibility,” see Fetscher (1973), also Kolbert (2014). 2. In a recent study, Cole (2014) convincingly has explained how and why the birth of “theory” should be linked to the work of Hegel, whose rendering of dialectic drew on medieval contributions, writings and traditions of thought that were concerned with the interplay between identity and difference. 3. See Aron (1967), Adorno ([1968] 2003), Bell (1973), Dahms (1999). 4. See also pp. 60, 78, 94, 112, 118, 153 157, 165, 167, 210, 214, 218, 221, 263, 275 277, 300, 322, 332, and 431. 5. For an initial entry, see Nicholls (2007). 6. Regarding the ideation of “doing justice” in Adorno’s work, see especially Honneth (2009). 7. Latour (2014, pp. 488 489) goes on to identify thirteen additional modes: metamorphosis, habit, technology, fiction, politics, law, religion, attachment, organization, morality, network, preposition, and especially “double click.” 8. For an instructive discussion of the need to distinguish between surface manifestations and underlying forces, especially in the current context of politicaleconomic conditions, see Postone (2009). Incidentally, if there is a foundation from within the development of a theory of contemporary capitalism that would appear to be a promising prospect, it would be Postone (1993), a work in which the concept of mediation also features prominently: “Labor itself constitutes a social mediation in lieu of overt social relations. … labor in capitalism becomes its own social ground. In constituting a self-grounding social mediation, labor constitutes a determinate sort of social whole a totality” (p. 150, 151). 9. On the issue of “second nature,” see Archer, Ephraim, and Maxwell (2013), especially chapter 6 by Christopher Buck, “The Utopian Content of Reification: Adorno’s Critical Social Theory of Nature,” pp. 127 148.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W. ([1966] 1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Adorno, T. W. ([1968] 2003). Late capitalism or industrial society? The fundamental question of the present structure of society (R. Livingstone, Trans.). In R. Tiedemann (Ed.), Can one live after Auschwitz: A philosophical reader (pp. 111 125). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alexander, J. A. (2013). The dark side of modernity. Malden, MA: Polity.

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Archer, C., Ephraim, L., & Maxwell, L. (2013). Second nature: Rethinking the natural through politics. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Aron, R. (1967). The industrial society: Three essays on ideology and development. New York, NY: Praeger. Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bradford, J. H. (2013). Explaining explanation: A critical review of John Levi Martin’s The Explanation of Social Action. In H. F. Dahms (Ed.), Social theories of history and histories of social theory (Vol. 31, pp. 309 332). Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Cole, A. (2014). The birth of theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dahms, H. F. (1999). Postliberal capitalism and the early Frankfurt school: Toward a critical theory of the inner logic of social value spheres. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 19, 55 88. Fetscher, I. (1973). Zum Begriff der “objektiven Mo¨glichkeit” bei Max Weber und Georg Lukacs. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 26(106), 501 515. Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61 135. Honneth, A. (2009). Performing justice: Adorno’s introduction to negative dialectics. In J. Ingram & Others (Trans.), Pathologies of reason: On the legacy of critical theory (pp. 77 87). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2014). An inquiry into modes of existence. An anthropology of the moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of western modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Nicholls, B. (2007). Mediation. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (Vol. 11, pp. 2923 2928). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. O’Connor, B. (2004). Adorno’s negative dialectic: Philosophy and the possibility of critical rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Postone, M. (1993). Time, labor, social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postone, M. (2009). Theorizing the contemporary world: David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, Robert Brenner. In History and heteronomy. Critical essays (pp. 85 107). Tokyo: UTCP. Robinson, K. S. (2012). 2312. A novel. New York, NY: Orbit. ˇ zek, Zi ˇ S. (2010). Living in the end times. London: Verso.

PART I SOCIAL THEORIES

EXPERIENCE, PROBLEMS OF SCALE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERCEPTION Lawrence Hazelrigg ABSTRACT Purpose To elucidate issues involved in the problem of scale, in particular the relations, analytical and dialectical, among first-person experiences of theorist and theorist’s object-complex of individual actor, group, society, motives and causes, intended and unintended effects, and so forth, as these experiences are manifest in an aesthetics of the judicial moment of perception, and enunciated as first-person accounts directly or indirectly, of third-person accounts, sometimes via explicit but usually via virtual or even vicarious second-person accounting practices. Approach Discussion begins with some classical formulations by neoKantian theorists (Simmel, Durkheim, Weber) regarding relations of “individual and society.” Brief citations of various twentieth century responses to the problem of scale follow. Attention then becomes more intensively focused on the basic problem of first-person experience and accounts with respect to the problem of scale, using Coleman’s “foundations” work as guidepost for navigating issues of effects of cognition, consciousness, and action in still mostly obscure processes of

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 3 51 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032003

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aggregation. This leads to explication of the thesis of “impossible individuality,” in present-day theoretical contexts and in the context of postKantian romanticism, with special attention to Ho¨lderlin and the feeling/ knowing dialectic, Benjamin’s treatment of temporality with respect to metrics of history, and the question what it means to “theorize with intent.” Findings The discussion ends with some tentative resolutions and several lacunae and aporia which are integral to the current face of the problem of scale (i.e., processes of aggregation, etc.). Originality The discussion builds upon the work of many others, with first-person illustrations. Keywords: Scale; aggregation; framing; experience; feeling/knowing; illusion

One of the perennial problem areas of theory and research in the social sciences is the relation of “individual and society,” typically conceived as a part-to-whole analytical relationship, although sometimes with notice of a “chicken-and-egg” perplexity of process. Different aspects and approaches have been followed by various authors. For example, some (e.g., Simmel, 1950 [1917], 1959 [1908]) have proceeded from the assumption that “the individual” is a given and have asked, “How is society possible?” Others (e.g., Needham, 1962) have begun from a contrary assumption that social facts such as normative prescriptions and proscriptions exist sui generis and do not reduce to, may not be explicable in terms of, individual sentiments or preferences. Durkheim (1973 [1914]), famous for insistence on the sui generis status of social facts, settled for a stance based on a premise of dual or divided condition, the homo duplex thesis. In any case, integral to the problematic core of analysis is a complex of dynamics often neglected, or attended only in glances: the dynamics of reflexivity, self-reflexivity, a reflexivity of self-consciousness both within and of the analytic relationship of “individual and society.” Of the several dimensions to that complex of dynamics, one stands out for the depth as well as breadth of its reach and circulation namely, the scaling dimension. Are “self” and “society” relatable in parallel, correlative stratifications? It has been common sense to think of “self within society” and of “society within self”; but what exactly are those relations, their

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parallels and correlations? How are the matching “practices” or “algorithms” constructed, from what vantage point(s), and with what temporal properties that are, or can yet be, encapsulated as markers in such different histories? Since scaling must depend on some sort of operation of medium and measure, what metric traverses “individual,” “group,” and “society” (or in more abstract terms, “micro,” “meso,” and “macro”)? A century and more ago social theorists (e.g., Weber, 1968 [1956], p. 4) were pursuing issues of this dimension in terms of a distinction between “behavior” and “action,” a distinction that, in referring to relations of intention, purpose, and consequence, featured puzzles of how to reconcile intents of individual percepts and their conditions, on one hand, and inconsistent, contrary, or contradictory outcomes in collective concepts, on the other. The ancient Greeks had gotten there long ago. They had a name for it (named by Aristotle, having relished fruits from Aeschylus to Euripides, as tragedy’s pivot): πɛριπτɛια (peripeteia), a sudden, unexpected turning about, such that “after” confounds “prior.” But while these students of human realities certainly appreciated the emotions as well as motions of peripeteia, they had little understanding of the dynamics (beyond vague notions of hubris, mysteries, capricious gods, and the like). Small improvements of understanding, at least of what was/is at stake, had been gained by the twentieth century. Simmel’s analytical subordination of a sociogenesis to a psychogenesis carried for him the explicit invitation to parse scaling, which he accepted in the second part of his Soziologie (1950 [1923]). Yet he also pointed to a gap within an individual’s experience (1959 [1908], pp. 340 343), a gap within which there is always already sufficient uncertainty to sustain inerasable doubt of first-person experience (with ironic implication). Simmel referred to this as “the fundamental psychologio-epistemological paradigm and problem of sociation” namely, the phenomenal fact that “something which can by no means be resolved into our representation, nevertheless becomes its content, and thus its product.” Already in his essay on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Simmel (1986 [1907], p. 145) had observed that while “the only definitive realities in humanity are individuals, … societies are so self-sufficient that from a socio-ethical viewpoint one could claim that the individual, like the atom, is but a fiction.” As for the “representational institutions” of civil society (on which, for a time, Durkheim pinned so much hope), Simmel’s account was of the dynamics of a black box: “the large group creates organs.” How? We cannot say. Only that it seems to be self-evident that, because of size but apparently not caused by size, “the large group creates organs which channel and mediate the interactions of its members and thus

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operate as the vehicles of a societal unity which no longer results from the direct relations among its elements” (Simmel, 1950 [1923], p. 96). Likewise, the “tragedy of culture”: the objective spirit of cultural items and processes can and does often come loose from intentions of the actors who created and promoted them, sometimes with dire consequences; but the process, and its conditions, by which that loosening does happen, when it happens, remains a mystery (Simmel, 1968 [1911]).1 Most of the perplexity remains to view, as the works of various and diverse scholars have demonstrated more recently when pursuing such questions regarding major analytical categories of the composition of human realities (e.g., Coleman, 1990; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Foucault, 1966 [1970]; Friedkin, 1998; Friedkin & Johnsen, 2011; Habermas, 1968 [1971], 1996 [1991]; Hannan, 1991; Kontopolous, 1993; Luhmann, 1989 [1986], 1990; Martin, 2011; Szmatka, Skvoretz, & Berger, 1997; White, 1992, 2002). Of the several institutions considered by Durkheim, for instance, the one that has received most attention is “market,” or institutions of exchange, treated at length by Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, and others of that era, and of course by anthropology, economics, and other disciplines, as well as by sociology, since that era. Some advances have been made, to be sure (e.g., Manski, 2013; White, 2002). But the analyses have reproduced segregations by scale, by and large, with person-toperson (i.e., “micro,” including intra-dyadic, etc.) exchanges on one side and “larger group” and “societal” or “systemic” (i.e., “macro”) exchanges on the other. Habermas (1996 [1991], pp. 408 409) reminded us via his appreciation of Simmel that analyses have often left us with the conclusion that “the objective spirit obeys different laws from the subjective one,” yet with only the dimmest of understandings of how that happens or even of the purported laws in question. As well, White (2002, p. xiv) was timely indeed to remind us that “the historical” is still usually addressed only via “a wave of the hand” (see also Friedkin & Johnsen, 2011, p. 305). White’s observation is apropos both in the sense (1) that even when our analytics attempt to treat the temporality of dynamics within a specified process or set of interrelated processes (and too often they do not), the temporality of parameters of specified processes usually remains untheorized (and, for lack of good means, inadequately observed),2 and (2) that when “history” is regarded in terms of period or generational difference/change, or as longer trends or comparisons, the inherent dynamics are rarely theorized with enough specificity of process to result in anything more than the sort of “just so” stories that we otherwise label as part of the ideology or belief system of a society or as an individual person’s self-justifications from

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observed or imagined conditions of first-person experience. Current disputes of and along a boundary between “belief” and “agreement” within what some have called a “planning theory” of aggregation are illustrative (see, e.g., Bratman, 2014; Gilbert, 2013). This paper pursues some “just so” stories with the aim not merely of decorating them but of explicating some internal relationships among them in order or so the hope is to stimulate clarifications of and perhaps even new thinking about the conditions and means of theorizing along dimensions of scale in present social realities. Our point of departure is with some issues of first-person experience especially with regard to processes of reflexivity and what is sometimes characterized as a doubled/ doubling stance. Simmel’s discussion in his 1908 essay was largely in terms of what might be called “first-degree sociation,” a minimalist product of processes of sociation, of which he observed some variations in general terms (1959 [1908], e.g., pp. 346 347). Later, in his treatment of “quantitative determinateness,” we see some refinement as a sort of “high-degree sociation.” But even from the standpoint of self-awareness as a minimalistdegree sociated being, an individual will therein also be aware of a dual presence a presence both inside and outside the sociational form. This doubleness, Simmel (1950 [1923], e.g., p. 97 n2) argued, transpires in/with a distinctive reflexivity: on the one hand, awareness of own existence as authentic (inside) vis-a`-vis fraudulent (outside); on the other hand, the reverse as well, own existence as authentic (outside) vis-a`-vis fraudulent (inside). The dialectical line along which this Mo¨bius path flows, while treated in Simmel’s characteristically ahistorical-formalist manner, advertises a problem that Kant had addressed more than a century earlier: the evident difficulty of perceiving dialectically part-whole relations, sequences of cause as its own effect, and so forth.3 As Simmel was no doubt aware (see, e.g., 1959 [1908], p. 348), the point is integral to what he called the logically uncertain concept of “freedom.” It is not clear, however, that he understood that it followed from Kant’s elucidation of the transcendental Illusion.4 These matters will be addressed throughout this paper.5 The reflexivity of first-person experience tends to assume anchorage in a bias of privilege (private law): I = I, simultaneously as subject and as object, here as there, now as then. Among early twentieth-century theorists, George Herbert Mead is renowned for having parsed lessons from Kant and from Hegel, arriving at a theory of “the social self” (e.g., 1913). A key feature taken over by Mead in the activity of his own theorizing is a peculiar doubling in the reflexivity of relations of subject-and-object, which accords the theorist an apparent privileged standing as a “special actor”

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vis-a`-vis her or his object of inquiry, the “ordinary-actor” subject of “everyday, actually existing societies” (see Hazelrigg, 1991).6 This doubling is peculiar relative to the general process of reflexivity in first-person experience, inasmuch as the doubling that transpires as a theorist’s “special actor” self-image manifests a strong tendency to elide reflexivities of peripeteia within and from the act of theorizing. Intent is, insofar as it is explicit, a proposal of superior knowledge, the theorist’s ability to be, at least now and then, more penetrating, more discerning, more critically aware of “non-obvious” facts and connections, thus producing insights that evince a stronger power of understanding (as in “power of test,” for instance) than ordinary actors, thought to be ordinarily more habitual, superficial, repetitive, and so forth, will ordinarily accomplish. Power of understanding is the intent, the goal, and the outcome or when not actually the outcome, a no-worse-for-wear ending in the status quo ante. While there have been voices urging the cautionary sign that “knowledge kills action” what Nietzsche (1968a [1886], §7) called “the Hamlet doctrine” it is a sign far more often read as retrograde motion. Then, too, there are various, and now mostly tired, tropes of “revolutionary action,” “emancipatory action,” and the like, which skate on issues of impassioned action, action endowed with an energy easily apprehended as both frightened and frightening, yet somehow dissolving in baths of cognition for lack of any other means; and this, too, is so often read as retrograde motion if motion at all. These are matters to be addressed.

THE PROBLEM OF FIRST-PERSON EXPERIENCE The naive starting point in analyses of scale and scaling effects has usually been, and remains, the individual actor. This item of generally prevailing common sense continues to underwrite a variety of component issues, at once epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic, including “fear of the individual,” what counts as “prosthetic,” the standing of “personal experience,” and so much more. Let’s proceed by considering first this issue of first-person experience. As many social scientists have long declared, first-person data are often too unreliable to support worthwhile generalizations, even though in everyday situations we tend to privilege each individual’s pronouncements of self-being (as in self-accounts of feelings, beliefs, health condition, and so forth). After all, the point seems to be, if a person cannot be counted on to report accurately how self and world are from her/his

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specific point of view, who else can? And yet, while one can agree with Nietzsche when he said in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1968b [1886]) that “perspective [is] the basic condition of all life,”7 no solipsism can adequately answer the question how multiple instances of the ipse, each of them solus in itself, produce/reproduce a distinctively organized collectivity e pluribus unum (see, e.g., Metzinger 2009, pp. 145 148).8 Historically, economists have been rather quicker than other social scientists to entertain and incorporate key insights into the reliability problem; psychologists have been among the most resistant (see, e.g., Brooks, 2011); and sociologists, especially those who have attended closely to the work of economists, have been somewhere in the middle. Coleman’s work provides a good example, one worth considering in some detail. Early in his Foundations of Social Theory Coleman (1990, pp. 6 23) offered a general view of the problem of scale or of one side of it, the “aggregation” side, by which events and processes at the level of individual actors are related (to put it in abstracted nonspecific terms) to events and processes at levels of group formations, of a society as a whole, and of relationships among societies. But it is notable that a more sustained treatment of the issues was postponed until page 769, the start of the 29th of his 34 chapters, after his display of other aspects of his analytic theory. He began that chapter with a discussion of interpersonal comparison: The micro-to-macro transition imposes a requirement on social theory that has not yet been made explicit in this book. This requirement is that interests of different actors must be in some fashion aggregated. Such aggregation appears to violate the general maxim, long recognized by economists, that in a positive science the utility a good has for one person cannot be directly compared to the utility it has for another. That is, although it is simple to compare the utility an apple has for a given actor with the utility an orange has for that actor on the basis of the preference the actor exhibits for one over the other, it is not possible to compare the utility that an apple has for one actor with the utility it has for another. The reason given is very simple: There is no behavior through which such a comparison can be made. (Coleman, 1990, p. 769)

Coleman then proceeded to point out that the “generally held maxim” is false, that behaviors of interpersonal comparison take place “all the time.” Coleman was correct, of course, in observing that persons make comparisons among themselves all the time. Various phrases have been coined, over the years, in recognition of that fact (“keeping up with the Joneses” is the branded example of the twentieth century, thanks to Wharton’s barely fictionalized Jones family, but similar exemplars in different periods and places can be found in Austen, Balzac, Dickens, and many others). However, this simple observation of what people do elides the point of the

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“maxim” that Coleman was so quick to dispute. The elision, hardly unique to Coleman, merits some attention before we turn to his theoretical reasoning about and from his observation of “what everybody does.” Note Coleman’s locution in the passage above: “… the preference the actor exhibits for one [good] over the other.” That exhibition can occur in two general sorts of ways, by words and by deeds (ignoring that words, read or otherwise enunciated, are deeds of a sort and not only because of the standardly conceived performative aspect of language). If we think of an individual person as a sometimes purposeful actor whose purposes (intents, goals, etc.) reflect self-interests, observations of how the world is, some sort of hierarchy of purposes in general with discernable specificity at any given moment, alternative available means of achieving at least some of the more or even most important of those purposes, assessments of likelihood of success and of costs and benefits of expending resources to achieve specific purposes, and so forth in other words, an individual person as a sometimes more or less rational actor with some quantity and quality of information about self and world then we might expect that person to be able to give an intelligent, coherent account of his or her relative preferences for some range of goods. If the theorist assumes as much of herself or himself, then it seems only fair to assume as much of any “functionally competent member of society” as a general rule (which is not to say as a rule without exception or as a rule that allows only two values, yes and no). The rub is and this was the motivation of the socalled maxim adult persons are often inconsistent, contrary, and/or contradictory in their self-reports, partly because of pockets of relative (as well as absolute) ignorance in their information about self and world and partly because even when possessing relevant information about self and world adult persons are well short of being consistently rational as judged by a calculus of analytic logic. Thus, for example, as Arrow (1951) famously demonstrated long ago, if one assumes a few basic rules that virtually everyone would endorse as descriptions of highly desirable states of affairs (e.g., absence of dictatorship),9 adult persons are notoriously quick to violate basic logical requirements of transitivity (if I prefer A to B and B to C, then I should also prefer A to C), among other tenets of analytic logic. Arrow’s insights led him to formulate what is known as his “impossibility theorem.” Coleman was aware of Arrow’s accomplishment, although he confined it to phenomena of “voting,” when in fact it has very wide application to actor statements of preference hierarchy. Furthermore, while persons are certainly capable of stating individualspecific hierarchies of preference, they are generally unable to state them

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reliably by any metric beyond rank order that is, relative ranks among some finite list of goods, with likelihood of ties increasing as the list of goods increases. An ability to rank order goods can be perfectly adequate for a given person, even for that person at different times if we are willing to assume that his or her ranking metric (its operation, not necessarily its result) is constant. But there is no verbal statement that enables comparison of one rank order with another beyond simple juxtaposition that is, none that will enable a conclusion that a good G, ranked by one person as top-most, is more valuable than the same good G ranked second or tenth-most by the next person. Comparative valuation is strictly within a given rank order, because (1) intervals from rank to rank are of unknown variation and (2) there is no starting point, no “zero degree value,” in common across rank orders. (This also complicates comparison of a person’s preference hierarchy at different points in time, our assumption to the contrary notwithstanding.) Economists gave up on actor statements of relative valuations preference hierarchies and the like long ago, not in order to protect the model of rational action, as has sometimes been said, but simply because the rationality of comparison the requirement of comparing like with like, and so forth could not be satisfied by relying on actors’ self-reports. However, “the preference an actor exhibits for one good over another” can also be ascertained by observing deeds. Here we come to something that can look more like Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” operating behind the back of consciousness and thus generally unavailable, or less readily available, to exhibition by or within actors’ self-statements. One must also be careful, therefore, about a principle very similar to Arrow’s stipulation of non-dictatorship namely, the notion that one or another “special observer,” exceptionally sensitive and sagacious, can speak for the ordinary everyday actor, because exceptionally in tune with the cunning of reason which somehow presents itself within this special actor’s consciousness. In sum, we are in the midst of a very old duality, here focused on a difference of voice: accredit the ordinary actor’s voice as authoritative of own valuations, even though the limitations of comparison and thus analytic relationships across actors are severe, or accredit the special actor’s voice (whether on the specific model of Hegel’s phenomenological observer or some other), even though this “etic” rather than “emic” authority can easily breach limits such as those stipulated by Arrow, resulting in impositions.10 If this contrast brings to mind Foucault’s “doubling of man” thesis, there is good reason: he learned it from Kant, as did Durkheim and many others, including (indirectly, one supposes) Coleman.11

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It was in an effort to avoid a “special actor” model that Coleman (1990, p. 772) rested his argument on a common phenomenological plank. The abundant evidence that what he referred to as “the generally held maxim” is indeed false consists in the observable fact of what people actually do, all the time engage in behaviors that result in social-choice outcomes. Rejecting the “peculiar assumption” that “there is a god somewhere, standing outside society, in whose eyes something is better or worse for society, and [that] it is the economist’s role to be the expositor of that god’s views to temporal rulers,” Coleman sought anchorage wholly within society, and within the nexus of actual behaviors rather than self-descriptions. Public policy should derive not from “the economist as policy advisor” (where the term “economist” presumably could be replaced by a generic “social scientist” or an even more generic “expert”) but “from the behavior of the individuals in the society itself through whatever micro-to-macro processes translate individual interests into systematic outcomes” (Coleman, 1990, p. 775). Sounding rather vaguely like the Garfinklean ethnomethodologist he was not,12 Coleman focused on two institutionalized organizational forms of that translation: markets, in which comparison behaviors transpire in exchanges of goods; and political regimes, in which conflicts arising from diverging interests and comparison behaviors transpire in contests for relative advantage, their expressions, modulations, and resolutions. Coleman was explicit that both forms organize multiplicities of individuals each exercising power to realize his or her goals. Thus, in both forms comparison behaviors involve necessarily two dimensions, according to Coleman: first, manifestations of each “actor’s willingness to sacrifice something, deriving from the utility [she or he] stands to gain or lose from the outcomes”;13 second, “a test of the relative efficacy of the actors’ resources for realizing their goals.” Beyond that, Coleman was seemingly content with rather large “black boxes.” Rather than explain the processes that actually do “translate individual interests” (among other micro factors) “into systematic outcomes” (or, in Arrow’s terms, “social choices”), Coleman modeled outcomes based on some very strong assumptions about the individual actors and about the “translation” processes.14 Further, it should be noted that by relying on the behaviorist plank Coleman collapsed a distinction that others (e.g., Scheler, 1973 [1913, 1916], pp. 87 89) have insisted is analytically important, the distinction between “preferring” and “choosing.” Insofar as an act is deliberate and not the issue of a habituation, it manifests the cognition of a choice, at minimum to engage in that action or not, perhaps more, to engage in this rather than that action. Action choice can but need not manifest an

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underlying preference. I feel happier when engaged in action A than when engaged in action B; since I prefer feeling happy over feeling sad, I prefer A to B. But I might nonetheless chose B over A, at least under specific circumstances, because a specificity of reflection recommends B as the more prudent choice or the morally correct choice or the more profitable choice, and so forth. The path to economists’ skepticism toward actors’ self-reports and intentions had been blazed during the late nineteenth century by legal theorists who had formulated a new template of selfhood for purposes of adjudicating disputes between contestants in the law of contract. Called the “reasonable man” doctrine, this judicial template was recognition of the differences that social theorists such as Ferdinand To¨nnies had summarized under the typification of a binary contrast, “Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft,” “communal” versus “associational” forms of organization (To¨nnies, 1935, 1957 [1887]). Prior to the late 1800s judges faced with conflicting claims of contractual agreement and the USA had already long been a highly litigious society could believe that they and local jurors knew most members of local community well enough to administer and apply tenets of fair play along with the law and achieve justice. But this newer society, increasingly populated by associating strangers, posed conflicts that too often were undecidable by peering into the relative integrities and intentions of contestants under the law of contract. Whom to believe, when so little was known of even one of the claimants, often both, and when so much more value was at stake than, say, a dispute over a property line between two farmers? Oliver W. Holmes and other legal theorists rendered the opaqueness of selfhood moot by substituting a new model of the legal subject, one in keeping with the anonymity of a society of associations among strangers: “What would a reasonable person do, under the known circumstances of this claim?” This profound revision of the legal subject in contract law affected torts as well. Even the testamentary law of implicit obligation in the relationship between a decedent’s will and her or his executor was altered, the emphasis shifting from the previously patent “clarity of intent by a sound mind” in a testating author’s document of personal will to a calculus of circumstances that can and often do include “interests of society at large.”15 In recent times “even” some psychologists have recognized the “impossibility” of first-person data (e.g., Metzinger, 2003, 2009), as economists have repeatedly demonstrated that, at least when it comes to matters of money income, wealth, expenditures whether as immediate consumption or as investment, and so on the reliability problem is in part due to

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ignorance and in part to a variety of perceptual and conceptual biases (see, e.g., Kahneman, 2011). This is of course a highly controversial conclusion for a disciplinary paradigm centered on the notion of a human individuality that exists, by an analytic logic, as a pre-social, pre-cultural integrity; and the politics of disciplinary authority can be rather isolating (as Metzinger could testify). Brooks’ very fine book, mentioned earlier, offers a counterpoint in that controversy, inasmuch as it is crafted from the perspective of a psychologist who resists dependency of “identity” on sociality (although professionally Brooks is identified as “literary scholar,” not “psychologist”). Various frameworks of morality do as well. But in addition, the strong assumptions of self as pre-possessing actor, agent of his/her actions, have been among the firmest of barriers to a fatalism or as Pippin (2011, p. 219) recently put it, the “deflating and depressing” suspicion that “a great deal of what we take to happen because of what we do does not happen because of what we do, happens independently of what we want to happen and try to bring about.” Further, that so much of what we do do even with the best of intents and skills has no lasting effect, or none beyond next Tuesday.16 Let’s return now to the dynamic of reflexivity mentioned earlier. It raises an interesting conundrum, hinted at earlier when mentioning logical passage from theorist’s self-assumptions to expectations of the theorist’s “object of inquiry” at micro-level of analysis: in view of agreement about the unreliability of first-person experience among those micro-level objects of inquiry, the “everyday actors,” how can theorists and researchers be so matter-of-factly sanguine about the first-person experiences on which they necessarily base their understandings and insights of theory and research? The embarrassment of this question usually prompts an ignorance (in the strict etymological sense). And why not? An authority of voice is at stake. To reprise Pippen again, some “deep questions” are raised about “very widespread assumptions we normally bring to bear on our attempts to render actions intelligible.” Those of us “who think,” or think we know, that there are such things as actions and agents requiring logically distinct forms of explanation usually [assume] many common features, the simplest being that (1) in acting I know what I am about and why I am about it (some stress especially that I know this in a unique way, nonobservationally and noninferentially) and (2) that what I am doing is subject to some kind of deliberative control (I am able to arrive at reasons for acting by deliberation and be motivated by them), and (3) that I, considered as a distinct particular, have the capacity to direct a course of events in line with the results of this deliberation. (Pippin, 2011, p. 219)

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Yet there is a substantial body of evidence (some of it adduced by Pippin from images that discomfort us) against those assumptions, in regard to any self-claimed “special actor” status as much as in regard to the “ordinary, everyday actor.” And then again, the next question posed from the dynamic of reflexivity: What difference does that disturbance, even unraveling, of a segregation make? Is the traditional “authority of voice” the sort that modern science inherited and modified in some of its principles, insisting (as Coleman said) that it seek its explanations from within its natural realms, not from some external proclamation of truths is it the only possible “authority of voice”? Let’s assume that the assumptions enumerated by Pippin (above) are seriously faulty for all of us, that claims of being a “special actor” afford no exemption: “what difference should it make in how we comport ourselves?” (Pippin, 2011, p. 220, his emphasis).

THE THESIS OF IMPOSSIBLE INDIVIDUALITY The foregoing is tied into a thesis that has been called “impossible individuality.” The thesis is multifaceted, most of it very old. It is manifest, for example, in the conundrum of “the one and the many,” which occupied the attention of more than one thinker within ancient Greek cultures, and in lesser problems of scale. It is manifest also in the question of uniqueness: just how unique can an individual person be and still be a person? Grammatically one might be reminded, having posed the question in just this manner, that “uniqueness” does not allow of degrees, only binary states: an X either is or is not unique. Indeed. And that is part of the point. The condition of being unique is one side of a binary. But the condition of being an individual is more complex than that. We are in the habit of perceiving in conception an individual, the condition of individual being, as in fact a complex of characteristics or logical-conceptual properties, at least some of which allow of gradations beyond the binary. In an older vocabulary of logic (and its underlying metaphysics) properties of being were divided between “the essential” and “the accidental.” We generally tend to avoid that vocabulary today. Locutions of what is essential and what is not still survive (as in “It is essential that …”), but these are usually involved synonyms for “necessity.” If an X is entirely unique, it is not only a self-absorptive category of one, it does not share enough of any property with any other being to have existence within any classification system larger than itself. Put otherwise, in order for an X to have location within a

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classification that includes things that are not-X, X must share at least some properties with at least one member of the non-X. As Kant observed, each and every human being shares the fact of Being with every other human being; human being also shares the fact of being human with every other human being. These form two dimensions of an analytic grid. One dimension is binary (being vs. not-being). The other allows of more extensive polytomous or gradational capacity, and it is here that variable properties of “humanness” enter the scheme (e.g., tall, medium, short, or metric gradations of height; imbecilic, below average, average, above average, genius, or some metric of gradations of intelligence, under some description of the latter; and so forth). So, relative to this sort of more or less capacious grid, where is the uniqueness of an individual human being constituted? Or is it constituted within some grid of “named persons” known by Speaker S, each of them accorded the value of “unique person” even though S makes comparisons of them, thereby degrading the uniqueness of “uniqueness”? Simmel’s understanding was manifest in his distinction between two closely related words, Einzelheit and Einzigkeit, each designating an “individualness” (Simmel, 1950 [1917], p. 81). The former (“singleness”) hails from the classic liberal tradition of the individual as (formally) free actor, loosened from feudal bonds, guild, familial ancestry, church, tradition, free to engage with similar other individuals in exchanges of commerce, locale, association. The other conception (“uniqueness”) was an emphasis within the late eighteenth, early nineteenth-century reconsideration of issues remaindered of the Enlightenment, especially in the movement commonly known as Romanticism: the individual as a personal project (Bildung) of unique being expressing differently in each instance (the ideal/goal) the epitome of an entire “higher culture” (i.e., not the “commercial” part, even though commerce had already existed many centuries earlier, but a part cordoned off, protectively but also pre-emptively, as “aesthetic”).17 Issues of and about first-person experience and scale effects were implicated in that movement, although under different vocabulary, as principals of the movement formulated their concerns with the integrity of “the individual” (person), vis-a`-vis larger-scale organizations, especially those conceived as “corporate” (embodiment) in a biologistic and/or theologistic sense. The dialectic of identity/difference operating in their formulations varied in conditions and presuppositions after all, the “principals” were themselves a varied lot (by typical listing, for example, Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, M. W. Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Herder, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Schiller, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Ho¨lderlin, Chateaubriand, Dumas pe`re, Delacroix,

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C. D. Friedrich, Pushkin, Beethoven, Verde, and many others) but the variations can be condensed under two broad umbrellas. Under one umbrella, the main conception tended to be as “atomistic” as the dominant conception of “the individual” by major Enlightenment thinkers, in the sense that the individual human being was conceived as an existence logically prior to any and all wholes constructible of human persons. Here the emphasis was on sufficiency of the integrity of individuality of person as such, formed within but not essentially by social, cultural, political, economic, historical conditions. The totality of a self-formation was an asocial, even an anti-social, process. This is the integrity of a free self-identical selfhood, an individual being who is sole director of ownbeing and who, by being able to stand out from, stand against, others, whether other persons individually or some collectivity such as a crowd or a state or a church, can represent the unsullied sublime world of God or of Nature. The second umbrella covers conceptions that differed not primarily in that view of an originary ontogenesis of “the individual” human being but rather (and because) in conception of the scope of individuality, believing it to extend at least in principle beyond the biotheologic corporate form of the individual person to other, ever more complex corporate forms such as “a people” or “Volk” and its native soul or spirit (customs, traditions, etc.), which as a cumulative treasury can be consulted and even emulated of virtuousness in a process of “personal salvation” and “education” to attain ever higher levels of virtuous being. Here, the entire matter of first-person experience tends to be integral to the problematic bounds of “a language” (a “cultural tradition,” a “national spirit,” and the like), with the “translation problem” shifted from the interpersonal domain to the inter-cultural (language, etc.) domain. One might expect to find special insights into the problem of scale, given that so much is tucked into the elasticity of individuality across scales. But as Izenberg (1992, p. 5) observed, the tendency was (and remains) to gloss “over the important issue of just how the idea of personal individuality was extended and transformed into one of the personality [national character, soul of a culture, etc.] of supra-individual entities (or regressively identified with Herder’s earlier concept of unique organic cultures).” One may recover what Izenberg failed to note namely, that his criticism began with “the idea of personal individuality” as if already clarified in self-evidence. Even so, the lesson he drew remains the point: “The question of the transition from singular individuality to collective individuality is an abyss to be bridged rather than a bridge to be crossed” (cf. Schutjer, 2001).

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In the context specifically of German Romanticism, Herder was the initial driving force of this second sort of thesis, as Izenberg recognized in the passage just quoted. Relative to Kant’s critical theory, Herder was indeed regressive, believing that he had partly built, partly uncovered a bridge over the abyss, while in fact lacking an adequate understanding even of the empirical conditions of the abyss, much less of the necessary conditions of a bridging (an understanding still feeble, however, at the advent of twentieth-century existentialism). In any case, Herder’s influence was extensive, both directly and through Jacobi’s empty reading of “intuition,” Schleiermacher’s reconsideration of phenomena of religion, and other directions of a would-be post-Kantian discourse. Izenberg has carefully scrutinized the German context of the last decade of the century in terms of the self-formations of several theorists, most intensively Schleiermacher and the younger Schlegel, with the aim of critically interrogating the common view that developments of romanticism were due to a peculiar if not unique conjunction of, on the one hand, unusually sensitive young men coming of age in a modernityresistant German culture and, on the other, the course of the French Revolution both in its own national context and in the thus-inspired imaginations of the same young men.18 Among other accomplishments in this demanding book, Izenberg has demolished the facile notion that there was a main reactionary thread vis-a`-vis “the Enlightenment heritage,” shared by most of these young thinkers/poets, and that the romanticism of that reaction developed psychologically as a sublimation of dashed hopes for any spreading of revolutionary change, substituting an “aesthetic revolution” for “the real thing.” Rather, one can see in their writings primarily a struggle to work through the inconsistencies internal to conceptions of individuality and self-identity, as inherited from Enlightenment forebears but also from strands neglected by those earlier theorists. Especially pertinent, Izenberg (1992, e.g., pp. 49 51) argued from detailed evidence in those writings, was a growing discomfort with the received notion, developed by Herder, of a radically liberated self. Although Izenberg did not draw out the comparisons and their implications, this reaction amounted to another, and then-new, chapter in the text engendered by/as (and furthering) the “fear of freedom,” “fear of the individual” thematic, at least as old as the debates among the ancient Greeks (see, e.g., Dodds, 1951; Greer, 1989). Recognizing the antinomian thrust of notions of an infinite self, these no-longer-intrepid enthusiasts sought the shelter of supra-individual forms of individual identity (e.g., “Volk”). Object lessons from Thermidor had now become merely that, object lessons illustrating

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already discerned principles carried on the winds of history from Athens and Sparta.19 In terms of the history of philosophy and the grounds of social theorizing, we have in fact not left the end of Kant’s critical theory except that most of those Romanticist thinkers imagined that they had left it behind by practicing the usual turn, changing the subject. Understanding his critical theory in full developed very slowly Hegel the chief exception, and even he admitted later in life that his early understanding had been deficient. By the late nineteenth century such understanding had resulted in a corpus, the dominant corpus, of social science that was, and largely remains, neo-Kantian. Not, strictly speaking, Kantian; for his critical theory culminated in an understanding of how and why social science could consist of empirical generalizations only. Thus, neo-Kantian, a supposed revision, an adaptation to new concerns, and so forth: social science struggled to wiggle from under the heavy burden of Kant’s verdict of what is possible. We can see the wiggle in the works of theorists such as the Weber brothers, Durkheim, Simmel, G H Mead, William James, John Dewey, and Karl Mannheim. Yet careful understanding of Kant’s diagnosis and verdict had been slow enough to take hold that Foucault was able to enjoy great repute good or bad, depending on where one stood in wake of a book originally entitled Words and Things (translated into English as The Order of Things). Few readers recognized it as a restatement of Kant’s thesis, situated now more within a French literature.20 This sort of appearance in retrospection of a “lag” or “delay” in “recognition” not Foucault’s but his readers’ illustrates Benjamin’s (1999 [1982], pp. 462 463) notion of the “now of recognizability” (Jetzt der Erkenntbarkeit): for an individual, for a community, there must be a preparedness of and for “the newly recognized,” for a knowledge that is seen as having been implicit in what was already recognized but had not yet “stood out” (existed) as “the now” of its “knowability.”21 Benjamin’s point does encompass the notion of what has been called “cultural receptivity,” or the ability (as well as then willingness) of a culture to admit from beyond its self-reflexively policed boundaries some new presence thing, belief, behavior and make it fit as its own (e.g., Ferguson, 1782 [1767], part 3, section 7; Linton, 1936, pp. 337 344). But there is more to his point namely, a reconceptualization that is usually appreciated more easily in the hindsight of an action, as, for example, when reading Simmel’s pursuit of Kant’s argument into its inherent skeptical attitude as if the second division of his transcendental logic had never been written (see, e.g., Simmel, 1986 [1907], p. xii). This erasure is what the

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neo of neo-Kantianism was crucially about (beginning with his student, Herder). Still more, however: Benjamin was bringing to light a metric of history that rests in an ex-post orientation of thinking/writing/reading in subjunctive mood; more specifically, a pluperfect subjunctive revisioning as condition to a perfect profession: what one would have known/recognized, or more weakly (probabilistically) might have known/recognized, could that knowledge/cognition have been known/thought, then. When expressed as a first-person representation of epistemic-ethical conditioning, a simply pluperfect subjunctive “had I been able to know” can appear to be nothing more than avoidance of responsibility or a special pleading on behalf of ignorance (“Had I known the tire was so worn, I would have driven slowly”). But in Benjamin’s point the socio-cultural condition is key, insofar as it is well short of uniformity.22 The fact that (to use but one illustration) Beckett did compose Waiting for Godot demonstrates that some part of midtwentieth-century European culture was capable of recognizing an existential angst as such in certain understandings and manifestations, even as a typical reception during the play’s first several decades was, for many thousands of stub holders in Paris, London, New York, and so forth (to say nothing of audiences in front of the household television set), a feeling of annoyed puzzlement (“I don’t get it such a boring play nothing ever happens!”).23 An important provision of Benjamin’s thesis is the specificity of the Now in “logical time.” This has not always been grasped. Rather, the usual presumption holds to a displacement of the reader’s Now from the logical time of the Now of Recognizability, such that the reader may still theorize with a timeless validity. In that, yet again, the presumed authority of the theorist as special actor tries to hold sway. The rub of Benjamin’s thesis in that regard comes from the simultaneous expectation of consistency: the logical time of the Now of Recognizability is of the specific Now, not beyond its own specificity. Each new reader is inescapably responsible for her/his productivity in/of a next event of recognition, of knowing again not as before but now.24 This is material for the production of history reader’s history, memorialist’s history, monuments of understanding, and the like, but also implicated in materialities not yet recognizable in/at a next moment. These processes demand an explicit theorization of history (as many others have pointed out), and one that includes dynamics of peripeteia which is to say not simply the operative, generative time of a process but the temporality of parameters of that operative, generative time, whether it be a “hidden” time or one readily perceived in/as first-person experience.25

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Izenberg wrote a fine summary of some joints of human thinking (conception, perception, etc.) at a certain juncture of European history (late eighteenth century), along which Kantian critical theory carved out the shape of “any possible social science” vis-a`-vis the common, well-nigh universal, presumption of nature and the natural world (with still usual but increasingly problematic theologic authority). As I first read his preview of that summary, a quotation of lines by Ho¨lderlin startled, then held my attention with such tenacity that I had to set aside the whole of Izenberg’s book for a later date. Yet when I returned to the book, after grappling with the quoted passage for some while, the power of that passage within and over all of my prior understanding of Ho¨lderlin in particular, and, because of that, his time-place rather generally, remained vivid. The passage as quoted reads: I know that it is only need that urges us to bestow on nature a kinship with the immortal in us, and to believe that there is a spirit in matter, but I know that this need justifies us in doing so. I know that where the beautiful forms of nature announce to us the divine presence, we ourselves project our own souls into the world; but what, indeed, is not what it is except through us? (Izenberg, 1992, p. 6)26

This was cited from Hyperion, an epistolary novel published by Ho¨lderlin in two parts, 1797 and 1799, when he was in his late twenties. Although eventually recognized as his greatest work, and as one of the greatest of that era of German literature, today Hyperion seems to have slipped back into the obscurity that awaited it soon after its publication.27 Again, one of Benjamin’s (1999 [1982], p. 460) insights is apropos: “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in the analysis of the ‘afterlife of works,’ in the analysis of ‘fame,’ is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general.” An “afterlife of works” soon dimmed out for Ho¨lderlin.28 By my prior understanding of Hyperion one would have expected a voice rather more like the following, excerpted from the end of his first letter to Bellarmin: Happy the man whose heart is delighted and strengthened by a flourishing fatherland! For me, it is as if I were thrown into the mire, as if one were to slam the coffin lid over me, whenever anyone reminds me of my own; and whenever anyone calls me a Greek, it is always to me as if he comes to throttle me with a dog’s collar! And see, my Bellermin! when at times such a remark slipped out of me, and perhaps a tear came to my eye due to my anger, then along came the wise gentlemen who readily spook you Germans, the wretches for whom a suffering soul is the perfect occasion to

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In the beginning was not the word, lamentative or otherwise, but the deed. So said the sage Goethe, in Faust. But already the young Ho¨lderlin had laid down a contrary line. To the wise man’s admonition, “Do not lament, act!” Hyperion laments that he had acted, that he ever did act. Better to return to the bosom of Nature, to “the changeless, the silent and the beautiful,” to the eternally sublime. This is the Ho¨lderlin I had known, a “romanticist reaction” etched by an acid of nostalgia. Luka´cs’ rather apologetic insistence that Ho¨lderlin had not been one of the reactionary Romantics, or not really (e.g., Luka´cs, 1968 [1947], p. 150), had been for all its suggestiveness never quite persuasive. That Ho¨lderlin’s turn to a “new religion,” as Luka´cs (1968 [1947], p. 141) called it, was an instance of what “is inevitable for all revolutionaries in this period who wish to pursue the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion, but who shrink back at the same time from its necessary result: the unleashing of capitalism with all its social and cultural consequences.” This seemed grandly certain of its universal sweep, especially for a “new religion” that had struck me as actually not all that new. The passage quoted by Izenberg also suggested a stance different from my prior reading of Ho¨lderlin. But suggestion is a weak reed. What in fact did Ho¨lderlin intend by those two sentences? Satisfied that Izenberg’s translation was unexceptional, I meant the question of intent as a question of context. My initial response to the passage reminded me of Gadamer’s (1975 [1965], p. 237) remark about “being pulled up short by the text.” But where were the limits, and thus the meaning, of this text, if I lacked its context? Although perhaps there are psychologists who still demure, most social scientists agree that context matters to the self-identity, the consciousness, the reflexivity, and so on, of an individual person; and even most psychologists concur that context matters to an understanding of a person’s utterances. Thus, I sought the context in which that quoted passage was embedded. Unfortunately, context was lost, in the sense that the passage no longer existed within the flow of any extant edition of Hyperion. It existed only among the “passed-on fragments.” This ambiguity of first-person meaning Was the left-out-ness a sign of disagreement, a change of mind, a rejection; or was the passage “left out”

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because thought to be redundant, and if so where was its “original” placement, within which it was later thought to be redundant? In whose voice this ambiguity of firstwere the two sentences uttered?30 and so forth person meaning was … what? Accidental? Intentional? How to decide? With Ho¨lderlin, it seems, that decision is especially difficult. I refer not to any rumors or medical diagnosis of mental health (see, e.g., Corngold, 1986, pp. 21 53) but to his well-known penchant for writing and rewriting, over and over, as if creating afresh via palimpsest writing, so that his tendency to compose in fragments would be laminary. Of course, most of us compose in fragments, at least part of the time, but we then work to erase the sutures and run-ons and other traces of time in composition, leaving what we consider to be “cleaner” copy for our public’s consumption. Ho¨lderlin did not attend so much to those housekeeping rules. He preserved his erasures to an unusual degree, recognizing them as integral to his acts of inscribing what he was attempting to say. Working in this manner created not just “versions” of “the same thing” but a record of the struggles of his thinking.31 One example is the mourning play for Empedocles, “the great Sicilian,” a man who was “intimate with the soul of the world”: the play was left to us in three distinctive editions (or “versions,” as David Ferrell Krell called them in his translated collection and analysis; Ho¨lderlin, 2008 [1910]). Another example is the publication record of Hyperion. It sometimes happens that acolytes wage a struggle for “possession of the body,” in wake of their leader’s death. This was, figuratively speaking, long the fate of Karl Marx in posterity and, although much narrower in visibility and scope, the fate of Ho¨lderlin as well. Various heirs of his production, surveying the accumulation of his journey of repeated beginnings as if sorting out a peculiar Nachlass, reflected their own divisions into different camps and actualized them as two official editions of Ho¨lderlin’s “collected works,” sometimes referenced as “the Blue” and “the Red” editions. Seven decades after Ho¨lderlin’s death Norbert von Hellingrath began what would eventually become a six-volume Sa¨mtliche Werke (Berlin: Propyla¨en), later known as the Berlin edition. At about the same time a separate edition, Friedrich Ho¨lderlins sa¨mtliche Werke: Text der kritischehistorischen Ausgabe (Insel, of Leipzig), was begun by Franz Zinkernagel. These two editions competed with each other as the true and authentic, definitive edition of Ho¨lderlin, as if one or the other had possessed magical insight into the intentions of a long-dead author whose writings varied so much across rewritings and whose handwriting sometimes trailed into the indecipherable. Texts of ostensibly the same work (by title) differ in words,

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in arrangements, and in notations partly reflecting different “political positions” of the acolytes and their attributions to the master (e.g., even whether Ho¨lderlin continued his youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution of 1789 or “matured” out of it) yet each put forward as uniquely Ho¨lderlin. These “debates” have continued into recent editions such the Grosser Stuttgarter Ausgabe, begun by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck in 1943 and completed in 1986, and the Frankfurter (or “Red Star”) historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Dietrich Sattler in 20 volumes and three supplements, presumably finished as of 2008. Political identities today rework deliberately and not (usually more profoundly and/or insidiously when not) the received texts. And how could they not, Benjamin cautions. So when Rancie`re writes 2013 (2011) of “the idea of a true revolution for young people, named Hegel, Schelling, and Ho¨lderlin a revolution that would abolish the cold mechanics of the State and unite a philosophy that had become poetry and mythology with the sensible life of the people” we can recognize the proper names, the relations, and the cupboard in which they have been kept; but the perceptions and sentiments of that Now, no doubt differing across the three men named, these are another matter, whether the referent of that logic of time be 1789, or 1792 and a “revolution that devours its children,” or 1798 and revolutionary activity in southwest Germany, aspirations Swabian, of an Alemannic Republic.32 What Simmel (1950 [1917], p. 61) called “purely objective valuations that permeate even the most trivial contents” often exist as/from a mobilization of public opinion precisely in order to immobilize it in a preferred stance. Thus, we encounter “the political idealist’s enthusiasm,” whether for revolution or constitutional reform, “that renders him entirely indifferent to the question how the citizens would fare under it.” So, it is difficult to know what fragments reappear where, in which edition, and under whose rules of selection, versus fragments that reside still in some obscure corner of Ho¨lderlin’s “total body of work” to say nothing of fragments that might have been left out completely.33 The dialectic of inscription and erasure well pursued in Chartier’s book by that title (2007 [2005]) was left to percolate as I set aside the rewriting of this section of what had been my own “leftovers” from a paring of Wilderness (1989) and turned attention to a different kind of thinking/writing of what Chartier called “material forms.” Chartier’s book had restimulated thinking of the powers of judgment both within and about Ho¨lderlin’s larger project/process, but then some of the traumas of life intervened, diverting energies of attention once more. Although Chartier’s fine study ends well before what might be called the modernity of Ho¨lderlin, it kindled

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self-reflection in dialectical arts of the palimpsest both as manifest in the course of Ho¨lderlin’s thinking/writing and in their rather fuzzy intersections with Kant’s lesson regarding necessity and freedom in the transcendental Illusion (as well as with Hegel’s query about the destiny of “error”). All of this prompted a question to be asked of the statement quoted by Izenberg: what would that statement have meant to Ho¨lderlin? What would have been its intensional context, what would have been the intentions of the writing, to what aim or end? Certainly the thesis of impossible individuality, if situated within the framing of Hyperion, raises interesting questions about the casting of Ho¨lderlin’s project as a major play of turn-of-the-century Romanticism. One of these questions is Ho¨lderlin’s reception of Kant’s critical theory. To begin with, did he read it? Yes, clearly he did. There is much evidence for it, including his fragment on judgment and being (1972; see also Henrich, 1997 [1986], pp. 71 89; Schutjer, 2001, pp. 163 165), though we do not know exactly how extensively he read of Kant.34 What did he make of it? In general terms, we can answer this question, too: it was a profoundly formative experience for him, even after registering his reservations about “grounds.” But more particularly, what did he make of Kant’s discussion of necessity in regard to the transcendental Illusion? How did he read that, in its own terms and then in alignment with the late publication (1798) of Kant’s lectures on anthropology? Few readers of Kant at that early date seem to have grasped the key points and implications. Perhaps Ho¨lderlin did understand it all very clearly, as a result of which we can understand the ironicizing presence of the fugitive statement, as quoted by Izenberg, within the body of what otherwise could have been, and often was, read typically as a charter statement of the ending century’s school of Romanticism. It could mean, then, that the distance from Ho¨lderlin to Nietzsche was not nearly so great as has been thought. Again, the question, What did Ho¨lderlin intend? Perhaps no more than Kant: the necessity of a conceptual scheme and all thereby entailed, including the transcendental Illusion and its consequence in necessity. But then there is Ho¨lderlin’s ending question (presumably rhetorical): “but what, indeed, is not what it is except through us?” Is this only a restatement of the “phenomenal character/limit of experience” thesis, or was he breaching that boundary? Izenberg’s (1992, p. 8) comment is apropos namely, that “the self … knows that it is the source of the idea of an objective absolute, but does not allow its knowledge in any way to shake its belief in the externality of the absolute and its ability to rely on it.” That is rather like a skeptical believer’s religion. It is also, of course, a restatement of Kant’s

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thesis regarding the transcendental Illusion. Was Ho¨lderlin merely expressing resignation in that alleged necessity? Or was he, in the moment of that left-out but passed-on handwritten fragment, glimpsing a move beyond Kant, not as Hegel did but perhaps closer to the move made by Marx, or perhaps rather something closer to Nietzsche? Perhaps Ho¨lderlin had been struggling toward apprehension of the ground simultaneously of idealism and materialism, the ground by which that distinction and division is possible (see Hazelrigg, 1993, 1995). There is no direct evidence for it. But, in the German of Ho¨lderlin’s text as in the English translation, the passage could have been written/read as that meaning, had the culture that Ho¨lderlin had in mind actually “contained” that recognizability. We know the culture informing Ho¨lderlin’s mind primarily and largely only through his pronouncements of feelings (which are not the feelings themselves, though perhaps the difference was not so great in Ho¨lderlin), of fruits of knowing, and of prospects of hoping. This “only” is of the conundrum of Benjamin’s Jetzt der Erkenntbarkeit: how does one determine that “a culture” did or did not possess a specific capacity of recognizability, other than through an inquiry of its survivals in thought and (even more distantly) deed, even if these were to begin with mostly first-person experiences now apprehended to begin with as first-person experiences? One of the strongest feelings generated by Ho¨lderlin’s text is concern for dilemmas of identity-and-difference, sometimes in his dialectical apprehension (i.e., identity/difference) but more often, and in keeping with the bountiful thrust of modernity, in his analytical framing. The increasingly convoluted relations of same/other and same-and-other are present in Ho¨lderlin’s work as an ambivalence that leaves its markings in ambiguous passages, typically reflecting personal anguish over dilemmas, gaps, between one’s own selfsameness and one’s presumption of other’s at least partly correlated own selfsameness. It is easy in our retrospections when reading many passages in Ho¨lderlin to hear “Derrida before Derrida,” as it were.35 But this sound opens for us a difference in the fragility of experience. For Ho¨lderlin it was all very new in a way it could not be for Derrida. For Ho¨lderlin the ambivalence-derived ambiguities were of his “lived experience” with a certain vehemence of passion. For Derrida, though surely no less passionate, the ambiguities and whatever ambivalences they might have concealed had already entered into de-centered fields of play, games in which the old comforting lines between the tragic and the ludic had frayed nearly to a nothingness (as they had for Aristophanes). First-person aloneness in the midst of an increasingly dense world a density of things, thoughts, subjects, objects was for Ho¨lderlin

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a mindfulness of having been cut loose, abandoned, lacking return ticket, and this appreciation was understood to be as much of world, nature, and the differing of difference, as of own selfsameness. As he said at the beginning of “U¨ber Urtheil und Seyn” (1972; written in 1795), “Judgment is in the highest and strictest sense the original separation of what is most deeply united in intellectual intuition, object and subject, the very separation through which object and subject first become possible, the originary separation.”36 Subsumed in that declaration (presumably of first-person experience) is Ho¨lderlin’s understanding that, and why, Kant had ended his critical project with the judicial standpoint: judgment, or the critique of critique. Ho¨lderlin did not say that, however, or not in any surviving writing that I have read. I can only surmise it. Today’s reader may well be struck by the force of Ho¨lderlin’s expressions of passion in the lyricism of his novel as of his poetry. Indeed, Hyperion’s struggles display such a vehemence of passion, sounding perhaps as chords of melodrama to present-day ears, and a sharply strophic quality, swinging with equal fervor in either direction, from elation to despair and back again. The vehemence of feeling, as often of passions to the “dexter” side as to the “sinister” side of the ledger, can be oddly unsettling because seemingly unbalanced, precisely because today the distribution of force is unbalanced37 the energy of vehemence more often accorded to passions of rejection, spoliation, and paranoia yet assumed to be as normally symmetrical as Gauss’ “normal curve” distribution. Thus, for instance, “hate” carries more weight or intensity at its center of gravity, so to speak, by comparison to its antonym, “love.” If that comparison is less than convincing, consider this: what is the antonym of “jealousy”? A standard thesaurus lists none at all. Likewise for “abhorrent”: no word balances it at the other end of the scale. Among its synonyms are “despicable,” “loathsome,” and “repulsive” pretty rough company. Let’s try the first of those, “despicable” (which in turn also keeps rough company for example, “contemptible,” “disgraceful,” “loathsome,” “reprehensible,” and “vile”). The thesaurus does grant it an antonym, more than one, in fact: “good,” “honorable,” “kind,” “nice,” “reputable,” “respectable.” Is any one of these of equal but opposite weight of feeling to “despicable”? (Or to “loathsome,” “contemptible,” etc.?) The transitive verb “to despise” signals an extraordinarily strong response to its object, so much so that to say “I despise X a little bit” verges on oxymoron. By contrast, to bring to bear as its opposite “good,” “nice,” “kind,” perhaps even “honorable” is to invoke what might be called a “general service” word that easily allows diminution (“it’s rather nice,” “he was somewhat kind,” etc.).38

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Precisely because Ho¨lderlin has been regarded as paladin of a “psychic type” (in the way, for example, that Beethoven was once held to account as prototypically “mad musical genius”), context must not be neglected in these matters. If one is to understand the strophic quality of Ho¨lderlin’s impassioned expressiveness indeed, of expressive passion itself the context defined first from bourgeois elation and then from bourgeois despair of realities of its turn at heroics of class revolution must be remembered as regulative frame of what Luka´cs (1968 [1947], p. 143) called the “insurmountable tragic discord” of Ho¨lderlin’s life and work.

AISTHESIS: EXPERIENCES OF KNOWING AND FEELING In the Tu¨bingen seminary three young students witnessed with enraptured rejoicing the great days of the revolutionary liberation of France. With youthful enthusiasm they planted a tree in honour of liberty, danced around it, and swore eternal loyalty to the ideal of the great struggle for liberation. Each of these three youths Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, Schelling represented in his later development a typical possibility of the German reaction to the course of events in France. Toward the end of his life, Schelling lost himself in the narrow-minded obscurantism of an abject reaction, of a revived Romanticism during the preparatory period of the ’48 revolution. Hegel and Ho¨lderlin did not betray their revolutionary oath. But when it was a question of realizing it, the difference in their interpretation reveals clearly the ideological courses which the preparation of the bourgeois revolution could and had to follow in Germany. (Luka´cs 1968 [1947], p. 137)39

The imperative of that last verbal mood in Luka´cs’ formulation is a matter of feeling, not of knowing, inasmuch as no one can know with certainty even in retrospect except as a piece of ideological expression, as a command, or as a hope (as in the categorical imperative). But that is the point. Ho¨lderlin’s hopes for revolution included the German states, as the appeals of Hyperion made clear surely to every listener and reader of that day. With the fall of the Girondists in France, along with the follies of kindling talk in Swabia, the ideals of Ho¨lderlin’s hopes had seemed ever more distant, lending even greater sense of urgency to Ho¨lderlin’s efforts through his mouthpiece, Hyperion, to stimulate the feelings of his compatriots. Meanwhile, experiences of knowing, of the possibilities and limits of knowing, were tying skepticism to feelings of hope in a radically new way. Beginning with Hume’s insistent skepticism and continuing to the end

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of the century, these years have been nominated also as “the most revolutionary and fertile” period of “modern philosophy” Beiser (1987, pp. vii, 5). This period bears the large imprint, as we have seen, of Kant’s radical investigations of the limits of knowledge, the bases of ethics, and the grounds of hope, followed by strong reactions to his conclusions, by modifications in light of those conclusions (“changing the subject” by eliminating the thing-in-itself), by early projects of a “new Kantianism” as well as other installments of philosophical idealism, and not least of all by the “decline of Aufkla¨rung,” already underway with the Sturm und Drang movement dating from Hume’s own time in the 1770s and culminating at century’s end with the “old dilemma of a rational skepticism or an irrational fideism [having] returned with more force than ever.” Although Beiser had little to say of Ho¨lderlin, the little he did offer retells the ambiguity of a young man firmly nailed to floorboards of the Sturm und Drang theater of idealism’s passions of feeling while also concerned to defend both the radical skepticism and the principle of hope of Kant’s critique (Beiser, 1987, pp. 37, 211). Fo¨rster (2012 [2011]) has attributed Ho¨lderlin’s passion to his “adoption” of “the idea that all human consciousness is conditioned by two opposed tendencies or directions of striving which are locked in conflict with each other.” That judgment might well be too exclusionary a reading of Kant’s critical philosophy alone could result in a felt need to achieve in oneself a unity of oppositions feelings, capable of passionate intensity, and knowing, subject to intensity of logical reasoning but it does point to the rather overt missionary character of Ho¨lderlin’s writings, especially Hyperion, a mission to rally his compatriots to a fellow-feeling understanding that would impel revolutionary action.40 As noted earlier (note 34), aesthetics is the study of perception, perceptual experience. Beauty and the sublime are extraordinary perceptual experiences, and as such they (along with some close kin) have monopolized attention, to the point that in common understanding aesthetics is only about them (an understanding to which some of the emphases of Kant’s third critique contributed, as has Aristotle’s discussion).41 This is mistaken understanding. One need recall that the first critique began with aesthetics; the second ended with aesthetics. Indeed, one of the most famous of passages in all of Kant’s critiques, coming at the end of the second critique, begins with this sentence: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

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Note that he joined reflective knowing with the passionate feeling of awe. Feeling and knowing are different experiences, addressed in a difference of aesthetics. One is more capable of joyful exuberance and sadness of pathos; the other is interested more in calm deliberation, skeptical regard, reservation. The tendency of analytical difference is to believe them to be necessarily inimical to each other. But here, in this passage, and in other though usually less poignant passages, Kant has them yoked together in a way that can be read as dialectical, a unity of opposites. Fisher (1998) has reminded us that “wonder” is an instance of “the aesthetics of rare experiences.” Max Weber, recall, also put much emphasis on improbable, if not always rare, experiences and events, expecting in these the better seeds of understanding dynamics of important human affairs (a point seemingly not appreciated by Fisher; see 1998, pp. 80 85). Behaviors did not figure into those expectations as much as did social actions, because the former often manifested mainly or entirely habituated motions. So one should pursue an aesthetics of action, its meanings and intents, even though (or because) these rest in some part of the realm of first-person experiences. Fisher, too, understood habituation as deadly to wonder, endorsing the view (Descartes’, for example) that experience of wonder diminishes in frequency and depth with personal age, partly because of the accumulated work of reflection but partly, too, because wonder simply has a shorter half-life. No doubt the finger of guilt has been pointed to Kant for at least that first part, because the theoretical perspective, pure reason, the rationality that defines “true science” from “false” or “pretend” or “as if” science, “reduces” all experiences to the regular and repeatable and thus ordinary. And yet that is not what the famous passage, quoted just above, offers to a careful reader of subtlety in grace. The subtlety comes with Kant’s choice of word, Gem˝ut, which is standardly translated as “mind.” This choice is appropriate Gem˝ut does mean “mind” but it can also mean “soul,” “heart,” “disposition,” “spirit,” “feeling,” and more, and in any given passage the intent need not have been to sort one or some from the others. One way in which to appreciate the connections within the variety of English “equivalents” is to consider adjectival uses, and there are three of these that tell the story of subtlety of meaning: gem˝utlich says of its reference noun that it is “good natured,” “genial,” and the like; gem˝utlos, that it suffers a “loss of feeling”; and gem˝utskrank, that it suffers an illness of feeling, in particular a melancholia. Another way is to consider the alternatives that were available in Kant’s German: the most likely, in the sense of usage rates, would have been Geist, Geda¨chtnis, and Verstand, each of which has

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narrower scope of meaning (e.g., “spirit,” “memory,” and “understanding,” respectively). Thus, Kant was saying that reflection can engender feeling of awe and admiration even when it focuses often and steadily on a specific experience. As for the matter of half-life, Kant’s citation of “starry heavens” included understanding that those points of light emanated from other suns, and his imagination extended to likelihood that the millions of suns were in many instances centers of solar systems, some of them having planets that could support life forms. One of our prosthetic devices, popularly known as the Hubble telescope, has expanded the estimate from millions to billions of billions of suns, and so forth from there. Who does not, more than two centuries after Kant, experience wonder in that? Another first-person experience although also necessarily a report and thus reflected, not the direct feeling will perhaps further the point. I know as reflective cognition the chromatic physics of Earth’s atmosphere. I know from experience the rapid shift in spectrum from deep blue to paler blue and then the whitening as one rapidly ascends, until sky quickly shifts from white to black with pinpoints of no-longer-flickering starlight, photons that have individually existed for billions of years in journeys to my perception. These cognitions are as near to being beyond doubt as any I have. But then I see canopy greens of majestic trees against the deep blue of the sky, most days on the patch of land I steward, and the feeling of marvel is each time fresh, as if unique, the heart-felt joy suffusing through my brain. That the sky is blue; that it can be so blue! Not the dusty, slightly orange pink of the wispy Martian atmosphere that I experience through my prosthetic devices named Spirit, Opportunity, and now Curiosity, for example. But blue, on some days even a royal blue. This experience has nothing to do with science, nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with history or nature or art. This experience is first-person feeling, the feeling of awe and wonder that the sky could be so blue. Lest there be misunderstanding, the feeling is not anti-science or anti-religion or anti-art. It is not anti-anything, just as it is not pro-anything. For me there has sometimes been, for example, a feeling of wonder that materials science has been able to make such extraordinary matter (or matter-energy). For those who are “religiously musical” there is sometimes wonder that their God exists or cares. For almost anyone, one would presume, there is wondrous feeling of, and that, Beethoven (for instance) composed such glorious sequences of sound-waves. These are experiences of feeling, the aesthetics of feeling-as-perception. Does an experience of feeling affect anything beyond itself? Some have believed, apparently, that vehement passions such as love, hate, jealousy,

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resentment, and the like, are vital to certain kinds of action (revolutionary, emancipative, etc.); that such action cannot be sustained, even begun, from the strains of cognition alone; indeed, that cognition, insofar as it is reflective, more often than not stills such action by quietly draining the passions on which it depends. Reflection is the second thought that undoes the firmament of radical action. We are back to Nietzsche’s “Hamlet doctrine,” now with direct connection to Ho¨lderlin: knowledge kills action, for “action requires the veils of illusion” (Nietzsche, 1968a [1886], §7; but, said Kant, so does a knowledge we can believe in); “man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects” (Ho¨lderlin, 1990 [1797, 1799], p. 4; cf. Hazelrigg, 1989, p. 81n); and didn’t we read that non-action is preferable to lamenting that one had acted? Then, too, there are reminders of another point of view, that the stilling and the draining have been useful processes, even civilizing processes, the damper that raises human being at least part way from “animal spirits” toward “angelic souls,” if not entirely to godlike dreamers. This was, of course, integral to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the immorality of Christian morality. In wake of Kant’s critical theory, Ho¨lderlin, like Nietzsche a century later, was struggling to negotiate problems of scale and find grounds of community under new conditions (as Schutjer, 2001 put it, “narrating community after Kant”). Sometimes a critical reception proves later to be fruitful of insight for what it failed to grasp as well as for what it did grasp. A case in point with respect to Kant is part of Gadamer’s (1975 [1965], p. 39) diagnosis of consequences of Kant’s first critique that in “discrediting any kind of theoretical knowledge apart from that of natural science, [Kant] compelled the human sciences to rely on the methodology of the natural sciences in selfanalysis.” In fact, Kant’s demonstration of the limits of “the theoretical part” (i.e., “the rational part”) applied as much, and without difference, to methodology or procedural theory as to substantive theory. That is, critical inquiry could not be conducted with rational self-consistency for reasons at once theoretical and methodological. The most that could be accomplished, Kant argued, was empirical generalization.42 And yet Gadamer’s point about self-understanding was appropriate, not so much despite as because of that inaccuracy, and this puts in relief the fact that his depiction of what might be called Kant’s effort of “compensatory move” is not far from the mark. As Gadamer (1975 [1965], p. 39) saw it, Kant’s “completely new departure” in regard to aesthetics made the supposedly necessary reliance on natural-science methodology which had often been characterized as “empirical-analytic” in contrast to “hermeneutic-historical” (a distinction usually itself conceived and practiced as analytical and empirical) “easier

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by offering as a subsidiary contribution the ‘artistic element’, ‘feeling’, and ‘empathy’.” Gadamer’s verdict was clear: “this kind of self-interpretation on the part of the human sciences is inadequate.” However, the route by which to grasp all of the inadequacies of that self-understanding must proceed through, not around, Kant’s intent and effort of the third critique, precisely because he did not view aesthetics as subsidiary or compensatory but accorded it a transcendental function of the judicial standpoint, in alignment with the theoretical and practical standpoints. As mentioned earlier, the judicial standpoint (or perspective) surveys critical judgment critically; it offers, in other words, a critique of critique, Kant’s critique of the very notion of critical theory.43 What was the point of Gadamer’s emphasis on the self-knowledge or self-understanding of “the human sciences,” as these had developed since Kant? It was in part about claims of “special actor” status, but more generally it was about the constitutive “power of judgment” in “prejudices” (prejudgments) and “fore-meanings” (to use his terms), which are at any moment constitutive of conscious being. They “are not at [one’s] free disposal”; one cannot gain position prior to their presence; they are integral to any “originary position.” Those that actually “enable understanding” cannot be separated in advance from those that “hinder it and lead to misunderstandings”; for we do not know in advance, if ever, that location of that difference, why it is “here” rather than “there,” what its history has been, what intents in may carry, and so forth. “Rather, this separation must take place in the process of understanding” (1975 [1965], pp. 238 239). Experiences of feeling as well as experiences of knowing are among the prejudices and fore-meanings, and thus integral to the process of understanding. And whatever evidences of the constitutive process having occurred might be privileged with pride of place, the process transpires as firstperson experience. Building community anew, under even the most genuine and benign intents, proceeds from there whether one understands the process of understanding, the conditions and consequences (possible, potential, and actual) of intention, relations of feeling and knowing and that very difference in first-person experience, as analytical or as dialectical. Gadamer was aware of course that self-knowledge, both as end and as means to reform or rebuild community, is necessarily a function of, not independent of, the process of understanding self, community, and inherent matters of scale. This statement easily sounds trivial, yet in fact the dominant tendency has been to assume just the opposite that a knowing subject is distinct from the object to be known, or that an object is distinct from and prior to any knowing subject attempting to know it, even (in

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either case of presumed starting point) as the aim is subject’s past self. Brooks (2011, p. 155) caught Rousseau in the act of that exceptionalist move in first-person experience to cite but one illustration when in his confessions he realized that “the writing self cannot evoke the writtenabout self, the subject of the narration, without encountering precisely the narrating self, the Rousseau who, at his desk pen in hand, is trying to evoke and revivify his past self.” Because one can never break through (or break apart) that involuted relation, thus to stand as witness both of the knowing subject and of the object to be known, the knowing subject (i.e., the perceiving I, trying to catch sight of itself in the act of perceiving), can never achieve that self-insight. One response to this “conundrum” is to efface the narrator, leaving an anonymous authority as source that is, a just-so story that somehow “tells itself.” Note the parallel to the “post-Kantian” response to Kant’s demonstration of limits and the necessity of the transcendental Illusion: abolish the thing-in-itself. Note, too, the parenthetical inclusion in the foregoing statement about self-insight, an inclusion that makes the statement Hume’s dictim (the radical skepticism that Kant worked hard yet failingly to defeat): Hume’s choice of process, perceiving, is, by the recognition of feeling, the more inclusive. Kant’s own resolution of the critique of critique was extraordinarily demanding. Recall that at the end of his critique of practical reason he joined the “two things” that filled his mind with “ever new and increasing admiration and awe”: the second of the two was “the moral law within me,” set on equal plane with “the starry heavens above me” (the first mentioned of the two) but involving a self-understanding at least of feelings (awe and admiration). It is clear also, however, that the relevant selfunderstanding involved knowing, and it is with this part of self-experience that the demand reached such extraordinary height. Fisher (2002, pp. 242 243) remarked the point appropriately, from the standpoint of aesthetics of feeling, passionate feeling: in order “to preserve the strict moral account of the good will, Kant … pushed roughly to the side these elements of the proto-will, the passions, so as to isolate the sublime freedom and servitude of a will submitting to laws that it itself has made and made universal for all.” These laws, which are in the manner of community and thus recognizing of matters of scale, are born of Kant’s categorical imperative, an unconditional rational standard set as the basis of morality, grounded in the freedom of autonomous will. The imperative commands each and every self to exercise will in a very particular exactitude: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law without contradiction. This command

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was repeated by Kant (2011 [1785]) in several different wordings, or “formulae,” claiming that they were all equivalent in the way that one statement can be expressed in varied sentences with varied emphases.44 The whole of Kant’s argument is complex, and arguably lacking clarity at key points in its own terms. Also, bear in mind, it was formulated as groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. In any case, translated into the terms of a critical inquiry into the practical affairs of human society (the terrain he left to “the human sciences,” to use Gadamer’s later locution), including those who conduct such inquiry, the standard is not only extraordinary but also confounding. Consider this variant sentence of the imperative: “I ought never to act” or, in English, to re-emphasize the imperative, “I must never act” “except in such a way that I would also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” Repeated as a guide to empirical rules of action, it could pass as the practical counterpart to Nietzsche’s tagline for the theoretical standpoint: “Knowledge kills action” is joined by “Morality kills action, and knowledge as well.” Facing the demand of the categorical imperative as my guide, what am I to do? Hyperion’s remorse for having acted, ever, seems the virtually inevitable outcome of any serious, sustained first-person experience of that guide, not because of ill will but because of an unrelievable ignorance. Nietzsche’s retort to Hamlet, as to the Delphic Oracle, was that the very act of trying to “Know myself” is futile to the extent that, by that act, self has moved on. Hyperion’s lament points to the futility of the opposite (i.e., forward-looking) orientation: how could I ever possibly know conditions “there then,” with such finality, when conditions “here now” of myself (including scale dynamics issuing in unintended consequences) are hardly adamantine, as to project in my action a universal law?45 While an appeal to the universality of good will is perhaps a worthwhile utopic exercise (for we can learn much about ourselves in that exercise), in terms of practical standpoint its effects are far too confounded and confounding ever to be sortable between good and evil. Nussbaum’s (1994, e.g., pp. 63 65) account of the carefully crafted integration in Aristotle’s concern for feelings (desires and beliefs) as well as knowing also points to the similarities of process by which that integration can be achieved and the basic process of market organization. The logic of market organization, insofar as it is not blinkered from without, is resistant to dictatorship, irrelevant alternatives, and so forth, but in the categorical imperative one can see a dictator’s greatest wish. The very notion of “tragedy of the idea” that even the most sublime of ideas must suffer spoliation in the act of being put into practice misleads by the measure of sorting between “the

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ideal” and “the material” (see Hazelrigg, 1993, 1995). Aristotle’s answer remains as pertinent today as it was for the Kantian critical theory. General principles about human conduct (to say nothing of universal laws) are usually insufficient in applications to particular actors and situations not because (or not only because) of error in the principles, when such there are, but because “action is concerned with particulars, and statements [of principle] must harmonize with these” (see Nichomachean Ethics, 1103b 1137b). This was not alien to Kant, of course; after all, his critique of critique began and proceeded from the judicial standpoint (law tempered by justice). But inspired by some deeply remembered fore-meanings (parented perhaps by strictures of German Pietism), Kant’s system needed a unifying anchorage in universal principle, and any such principle could be written only as/by a most abstract principle of radical subjectivity. The categorical imperative could only be completely unconditional, completely without space and time. Yet for present purposes we should not lose sight of an important fact “mind” but also “spirit,” “soul,” “feeling” within Kant’s effort. Gemu¨t and perhaps especially “good feeling” or feeling of “good will” is Gemu¨t simultaneously of “feeling” and “knowing”; and this latter, or more specifically reflective knowing, was not regarded as necessarily anathema to feeling. There is hope in that. (Kant’s third question: For what may we hope?) Whether or not Aristotle would have agreed (as conjectured by Nussbaum, 1994, p. 67), we surely understand “that some valuable forms of ethical attention and care are not even in principle universalizable. The love of a particular child or friend includes not only the highly concrete (but in principle replicable) history of the friendship; it also includes the thought [and feeling] that a substitute with the very same descriptive features would not be acceptable as a replacement.” Here, to be sure, we are bordering on the ineffable quality of particularity of a specific person, facing the question of the dialectic of same/other (or in analytical terms the line between “very same descriptive features” and “same person”).46 This was terrain familiar to Kant in his considerations of aesthetics of experience from the judicial standpoint, striving to provide a priori principles preconditional to feelings and to complete a framework of unity across all three standpoints (theoretical, practical, and judicial). At the end of the day, human beings always face choices, decisions, conditions, in their consideration of ends and relevant actions, and therein attempt as best they can to unite the theoreticalrational, the practical-ethical, and the judicial-aesthetic in their judgments, their actions of/from Gemu¨t. Kant argued that there is in that process a subjective necessity of apprehension of an object of feeling as in principle

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accessible by all and shareable among all, a principle that we must presuppose in all human beings as condition of any possible experience in general. This presupposition he based in the sensus communis, which all humans have in common and serves all insofar as they strive to think independently, critically, self-consistently, and in doing so entertain sincerely the standpoints of others (cf. Habermas, 1968 [1971]). The aesthetics of experience in judgment is terrain on which the social sciences have been remarkably shy. Economists remember now and then to talk about “animal spirits” but do hardly anything to incorporate such matters into their models in part because “such matters” remain mostly opaque for lack of appropriate means, conceptual and mensural, of inquiry. Sociologists study emotions, mostly from a social psychological point of view that bypasses matters of scale, and in the aftermath of Scheler’s early works (1954 [1923]; 1973 [1913, 1916]) have had surprisingly little to say about conditions and consequences of feeling vis-a`-vis knowing.47 Social scientists have addressed the fact that knowing (and its products, knowledges) has been “materialized” in many sorts of ways, some of them powerfully institutionalized, but has had remarkably little to say about institutionalizations of feeling, leaving feelings mainly to the “micro” realm of personal emotions. One might even hear the question, “What could ‘institutionalization of feeling’ possibly mean?” Yet a massive entertainment industry invents, organizes, promotes, directs, and profits from institutionalized feelings of “happiness,” “fright,” “shock,” and so forth. Various means, some of them powerfully institutionalized (e.g., political parties, governmental agencies, religious organizations, private clubs), have been developed to classify and manipulate “fellow feeling” for instance, in same/other dialectics of nationalism, gender and race/ethnic grids of identity/difference, even of phantom presences of supposedly no-longer-extant classes. Likewise, feelings of grief, guilt, and mortal dread have been profitably institutionalized in funereal rituals. A recent handbook (Stets & Turner, 2007) offers ample coverage of topics of a sociology of emotions, but with few and partial exceptions (e.g., Jasso on justice processes) there is no sustained attention to even a question of scale effects in matters of feeling, as if feelings either do not aggregate in any significant manner or aggregate with scale indifference. Our everyday vocabularies suggest that feelings do scale in other than simple linear fashion (i.e., with threshold effects, reversals, hysteretic filters, and so forth). But social-science theory, even the small part that attends to process and not only static descriptions and comparisons thereof, has hardly noticed.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS What I have done in part, in the foregoing pages, is to illustrate some of the kinds of first-person experiences that we (you the reader and I the writer) engage in during our activities under the label of theorist, analyst, critic, commentator, methodologist, fictionist, or whatever, as we read, reflect, and write, feeling perhaps elation having gained some insight, perplexity at a puzzle, satisfaction (or not) at the outcome of an endeavor. The illustrations are meant to pose a challenge to ourselves, to the social sciences, and in particular to sociology, since it was born as in some sense a “science of society,” has typically held itself to be the scholarly discipline concerned with all spheres, dimensions, and aspects of social realities, and claims special regard for phenomena of scaled relations and processes, especially insofar as they manifest effects that transpire “behind the back of consciousness” (i.e., “unintended consequences,” and the like). The challenge is multiple, a texture of parts. The whole of that texture is the problem of scale: Is it possible to achieve more and better understanding of the processes by which aggregations and other transformations occur, such that effects of action and behavior at the person-specific level of organization become (or not) outcomes at higher levels, not only dyadic and triadic groupings but also in markets, in commercial firms, in governmental and non-governmental agencies, and so forth, perhaps in an entire society, in intersocietal relations, perhaps global organizations? Under what conditions do specific actions generate scaled effects, and what kinds of effects, versus other conditions under which the same actions or, perhaps more likely, other kinds of action display effects that are scale indifferent, at least to some level? Subsidiary to that is the question of first-person experience, and the conditions under which it has any consequences beyond itself. And subsidiary to that is the question of the aesthetics of feeling as well as knowing: to what extent, under what conditions, do feelings, surely the ultimate first-person data, manifest in ways that are reliably observable, thus reliably integral to relations of communication between and among persons. Some have argued that they do not at all. In his essay on “democracy without dogma” Geiger claimed that the prerequisites of social relations of feeling exist only in primary groups, are absent from secondary groups (i.e., associational forms), and that “it is foolish and dangerous to stir up surrogate emotions.”48 Is there good evidence for that, evidence beyond Geiger’s personal experiences under a Nazi regime, a devastating war, and the aftermath?

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Again, one must bear in mind that a principled blanket rejection of first-person experience has profound implications for the thinking and communications of social scientists themselves.49 Coleman’s point that most persons at least seem to solve the problem of reliable understandings of other’s first-person experiences in social relations remains to be answered with sufficient specificity. Either in fact they do accomplish that action, but social scientists have yet to demonstrate how and under what conditions the understandings are reliably observable; or they in fact do not accomplish that action, but at least sometimes delude themselves into believing otherwise, and neither fact makes any important difference to how social life, the process of relations between persons beyond first-person experience, transpires. It is this latter alternative that theorists such as Adam Smith and Hegel had in mind, when they postulated “hidden hand” and “behind the back of consciousness” (as well as “cunning of reason”) processes as key facts of human reality. Insofar as that is correct, one’s intent in theorizing should in general make little difference; and more often than not the difference that does result would be perversion of intent. Kant, Smith, Hegel, Marx, and Simmel, among others (probably including Ho¨lderlin), understood the importance of that dialectical relation (sometimes encapsulated in the notion of tragedy), even if they failed to explain with sufficient precision the inherent processes, such that one could know with adequate predictability whether, and how, to change the equation. Perhaps the effects of what we do seldom last beyond the immediacy of the action. Yet if the 118,000 individuals who collect and dispose of our US garbage everyday did not do what they do, all of us would suffocate in our stinking mess. Surely if we understand the flaw of any Great Actor theory of history, we can also see the perverse reasoning of the thought that most people are analogous to the physicist’s “dark matter of the universe”: unenlightened because strictly incapable of interacting with light, existing only as a drag that manages to accelerate us to final entropy. Either Nussbaum, for instance, is thoroughly delusional, or she (1994, 2011) is on the right track in pursuing justice (adopting a certain judicial standpoint) under the umbrella of improving human capabilities, of each and all. If the social sciences are to be of major aid to that endeavor, they might improve their capability to understand and explain the large problem that Coleman, following a very long line of others, was grappling with, to his credit. And that can proceed only from and in first-person experiences unless, contrary to Coleman’s (and my) inclination, we choose to wait for

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some dictatorial supernatural force to enlighten us about “dark matter” and other such mysteries.

NOTES 1. All of this is also, of course, the stuff of storytelling, fine and not so fine. How many novelists have worked how many variations, after all, on the plot told by Rosamund in her preview of “the dreadful facts of life” (in Drabble’s The Millstone [1965, p. 9]): “I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.” The image domain of Rosamund’s reflexive perceptions gradually acquires a texture showing high kurtosis, and she notices an imprisonment (see, e.g., Mumford & Desolneux, 2010, pp. 219 221, 318 322). Regarding Simmel’s account of relations of tragedy, see also Hegel (1975 [1842]) and, in conjunction with Nietzsche, Houlgate (1986, chapter 8). 2. Further, temporality is seldom theorized but taken for granted largely in/as perspectives that date to Kant, though there have been notable exceptions (e.g., Postone, 1993). 3. Kant pursued this problem in its various guises throughout his critical project, including his third critique; see, for example, §65 of the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment” (in Kant, 2000 [1793]). The problematic has a long ancestry. The Roman Stoics, for example, evinced strong anxieties about, as they saw it, effects of sociality on stability of self (e.g., see Epictetus’ Encheiridion, 1). Interests of sociality entice one to seek others’ approval, to win their esteem, and this pleasure can become so strong within one’s judgments of the relation of “self and other” that one sacrifices autonomy as a cost of gaining and augmenting that pleasure. Epictetus (Discourses III.xii.16) warned against casting for acclaim with the bait of oneself as exhibition (epideixis). The perspective of that stance has been anchored in conviction of first-person experience of an autonomous self, a “central core” of the stratigraphy of self (see, e.g., Lanham, 1976), needfully vigilant against external threat via/from traffic with others. This “Greek experiment in a complex self” (Lanham, 1976, p. 6) has always faced the inherent peril of struggles between its external face (homo rhetoricus, Lanham named it) and its core (homo seriosus). Vigilance begins with one’s upbringing, learning and continually refining the ability to master sociality, and thereby rise against its tendency to suborn one’s moral autonomy, authenticity, and sincerity. The notorious anxieties of acting or theatricality follow in that same tradition (see, e.g., Barish, 1981 for a still highly pertinent treatment; and of course Goffman, e.g., 1974). 4. This is the illusion that any “subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts” manifests “an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves” (Kant 1998 [1787], B354/A297). The illusion is unavoidable, Kant pointed out, for it is compelled by reason itself: am I to believe that my own principles and interests of reasoning, the experiences they elucidate in coherence, and conclusions entailed therefrom are mere opinions, subjective impressions, even whims of imagination, parading as truth? Of course not. Nor do you yours. Nor, especially, does

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any theorist, analyst, thinker as special actor. It is difficult enough to persuade “ordinary people” to believe that we know whereof we speak, even when we exhibit highest credentials, awards, honors. In sum, Kant forced theory, philosophy, critical thinking, into self-consciousness, including (in principle) of its own reflexivity. 5. The inside/outside dialectic of fraudulence/authenticity has often circulated as a major key in belletristic writings. A recent example from the memoirist genre, this one formed as a collage of two seemingly separate works by Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy (2009) and Blood Will Out (2014), offers a reader easy recognition of a “way of being” in a present moment of the capacities of reflexivity. Rich (2014) has nicely explicated a part of the shimmer here relevant. 6. Herder recorded Kant as saying, in one of his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, “Der Gelehrte muß conversabel mit allen Sta¨nden seyn, da er ausser aller ihrer Spha¨re ist, vor die Hohen nicht zu tief, vor the geringen nicht zu hoch” (Kant, 1974/75, p. 81), which I translate as “The scholar must be able to converse with people of all stations [positions, situations], inasmuch as he is outside all of their spheres in the presence of those of high rank not too low, in the presence of those who are of humble/modest standing not too high.” (This is among the passages not included in the Cambridge edition of Kant.) The “special actor” thesis in Mead, in Mannheim’s “socially unattached intelligentsia” (e.g., 1971 [1927], p. 181), and elsewhere, follows from that stipulation of neutral capacity and capability. 7. Similarly, the basic structure of Kant’s critical theory is erected by three perspectives (he called them standpoints): the theoretical, the practical, and the judicial, each topical in turn in his three volumes. 8. For another view, this one via an intensely personal political journey through the interstices and circulations between being alone and solitude in a society/culture almost overwhelmed in desperate quests for identity from, and out of, the habituating pall of loneliness, see Dumm (2008) of which the author said fittingly (in an interview in (Rorotoko, 16 December 2008), “I was encouraged by my editor to find my own voice in this book, to write with more directness and clarity, while sustaining the intellectual rigor expected by Harvard University Press. Squaring that circle has become more and more difficult over the past several decades, as the academy has become more and more specialized, and as the public sphere has become more and more dumbed down.” Indeed; and integral to both the specialism and the “dumbing down” is the diremption between “feeling” and “knowing” as experiences at once epistemic, aesthetic, and practical but rarely addressed together since Scheler (1954 [1923], 1973 [1913, 1916)); but see Nussbaum, 1994. This matter will be pursued later. 9. Arrow’s statement of just four rules was sufficient to demonstrate his conclusion of “impossibility”: unrestricted domain, weak Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives, as well as non-dictatorship. 10. In typical self-image a special actor is either immune to unintended consequences of purposive action or sufficiently self-reflexively effective in action as well as in consciousness as to avoid them. In his book on Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft Engels said, “But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be of transformed from master demons into willing servants” (1987 [1894], p. 267) which Benjamin (1999 [1982], p. 465) commented: “Strange remark by Engels concerning the ‘social forces’.”

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11. There is another aspect to Coleman’s argument, one that resembles not so much Hegel as Nietzsche namely, the forward orientation of intent and action versus the backward orientation of reflection and critique (about which, more later). 12. It is, however, at least as easy to exaggerate the differences between them (Coleman and, in particular, Harold Garfinkel) as it is to invoke some facility of similarity. 13. The verbal expression, “stands to gain or lose,” is ambiguous; presumably he meant “expects to gain or lose,” but it could be read as implying an ex-post informed determination of probability. 14. For some carefully measured criticisms of this approach to theorizing and policy advice, see Manski (2013, 2007, and 2000). Not that insights cannot be gained by that approach; but they are dependent on the assumptions which, when so strong, have weak relevance for the generality of theory and more especially for matters of policy. 15. For a good account of the change in legal theory and judicial criteria see Horwitz (1992); also, the related accounts by Lewis and Smith (1980), by Wilson (1990), and by Sklansky (2002); and see Kennedy (1997). 16. It is of interest, in that regard, to query persons, individually in private, about their perceptions of consequences of “the most important behaviors or actions you engaged in yesterday” durations and scope of effects, for instance. 17. Simmel’s account was published as the fourth chapter of his Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und Gesellschaft), a review of conceptions of “individual and society” across two centuries, and as such consists unavoidably of mixtures of retrospection and commentary. One of its striking features is a skip pattern in particular, from Kant to Nietzsche, no mention of Ho¨lderlin at all (see below). 18. This attribution of “unusual sensitivity,” typical in accounts of the movement’s principals, was part and parcel of the “aesthetic” segregation mentioned above. 19. Izenberg’s study surely sinks at last the absurd notion that the German states lacked political cultures during these years, thus obviating any sense of describing those states (as did Beiser, 1992, p. 8) as having only “cryptopolitical dimensions.” 20. Likewise, Habermas’ early celebrated essay on “knowledge and interests” (1968 [1971]), although he signed his heritage from Kant (see Hazelrigg, 2009). 21. This distinctive metric of history Benjamin likened to a synthesis of dream consciousness and waking consciousness, the “now” having a “surrealist face”: see images by Magritte for example, The Treachery of Images (1928 29), more often known by its tagline, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, and The Human Condition (1934) Magritte to this extent a surrealist. Cavell’s (1976, p. 190) remark in the context of “modern art” is apropos, here as to the discomfit successors to Kant attempted to erase: “You often do not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer: modern art did not invent this dilemma, it merely insists on it.” Indeed, the object or the viewer or the artist. But as well, standard histories of mathematics are full of examples that illustrate the retrospection of “lag” time and the “surrealist face” of recognition examples from the life of irrational numbers to the life of imaginary numbers to Gauss’ declaration of the fundamental theorem of algebra to Galois’ theory of groups (see, e.g., Du Sautoy, 2008).

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22. In a related vein, Weber (2008, p. 168) made an important point about Benjamin’s Jetzt der Erkanntbarkeit by observing that it is not “simply here and now: since it is always situated in a place that can never be fully actualized, it is always ‘there,’ da (as in ‘Da-sein,’ being-there), rather than simply ‘here,’ in the place defined by the presence or proximity of a subject to itself: its selfconsciousness.” 23. In that light, another superbly crafted “fictive” illustration of Benjamin’s “now time” temporality, Borges’ well-known story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1962 [1939]), was more accessible as it accentuated the “surrealist face” with a satirical smile. By one description (anachronistic), a twentieth-century writer is reproducing Cervantes’ seventeenth century novel. Yet, Menard’s work must be accorded the accolade “original work,” because Menard’s time, his life experience, intents, and so forth, are so different from those of Cervantes. Whereas the latter wrote a “picaresque novel,” Menard’s novel is “historical,” composed in an “antique” language. 24. Thus, the judgment I offered above of modal receptions of Waiting for Godot I surely would not have rendered in 1959. 25. McFarland (2013) has come to similar insights regarding the connection of Benjamin to Nietzsche. 26. Izenberg cited p. 202 of volume 3 of the Stuttgart edition of Ho¨lderlin’s Sa¨mtliche Werke (see below, regarding the different editions), but the passage is actually on p. 192, in a section of Handschriftlich u¨berliefente Bruckstu¨cke (“handwritten passed-on fragments”). 27. One indication is given by Google’s English indexing, as a colleague recently pointed out: the word “Hyperion” (without Ho¨lderlin’s name) brings forth an array of citations drawing on (one presumes) translation of the Greek word, “high one”: the name of a moon of Saturn, various commercial entities, a very large specimen of Sequoia sempervirens, a computer software, a science fiction book, a poem by John Keats, the mythological titan of that name, and more. Not until the fourth page of search returns did a citation of the novel appear (to Project Gutenberg’s German-language online copy), and only much later in the queue did an explicit citation of an English translation appear, this via JSTOR library’s citation of Wetters’s (2012) study of Maderna’s adaptation of the novel. 28. One might have thought that Simmel would have had more to say of Ho¨lderlin, though perhaps his existing burden of difficulties in the academy being seen as “too skeptical,” “too critical,” etc. defeated whatever interest he might have had. Dilthey (1985 [1910] was one of the few of that era to recall Ho¨lderlin. Illumination has recently brightened, however (e.g., Henrich, 1997 [1986]). 29. Which is my translation of: Wohl dem Manne, dem ein blu¨hend Vaterland das Herz erfreut und sta¨rkt! Mir ist, als wu¨rd ich in den Sumpf geworfen, als schlu¨ge man den Sargdeckel u¨ber mir zu, wenn einer an das meinige mich mahnt, und wenn mich einer einen Griechen nennt, so wird mir immer, als schnu¨rt’ er mit dem Halsband eines Hundes mir die Kehle zu. Und siehe, mein Bellarmin! wenn manchmal mir so ein Wort entfuhr, wohl auch im Zorne mir eine Tra¨ne ins Auge trat, so kamen dann die weisen Herren, die unter euch

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30. The character Hyperion reports opinions, assertions, perspectives of other characters (e.g., Alabanda, a terroristic adherent of high principle; Adama, a nostalgiac of medieval virtue) in what might be called his catastrophe of torn vision. 31. While one must beware the Whiggishness of “anticipation,” retrospection points to a connection from Ho¨lderlin’s palimpsest writing to a newer version, manifested most adroitly in William Burrough’s classic, Naked Lunch, in part because of its “completion” in the hands of Allen Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s joint assemblage (a` la rosary beads on a string, gaining meaningful order by being finger-read). Gary Indiana had that in mind when he recently commented on the relation formed of Burroughs’ work within the flow of mainstream conventions of “literature”: Widely overlooked in the shocked reception of Naked Lunch was its subversion of Anglo-American syntax, an excision of connective tissue that mimicked the scanning pattern induced by advertising. The trilogy that followed Naked Lunch [The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, Nova Express] went much further in anticipating the staccato, associative patterns produced by the internet, TV channel flipping and ‘screen reality’; considered unreadable when they were published, the trilogy of books can be followed today almost as effortlessly as a novel by Hemingway. (Indiana, 2014, p. 25; see also Indiana, 2008, pp. 69 75)

32. All three of the named men were Swabian, had imbibed cultural memory of the Frankic Herzogtum (“Duchy”) of Alamannia. 33. See, for example, Michael Hamburger’s fourth edition of Poems and Fragments (Ho¨lderlin, 2004). My point is not a criticism of Hamburger (1924 2007), still, to my mind, the translator of Ho¨lderlin. Rather, it is about the enormous hermeneutical variation of “Ho¨lderlin’s work” which supports repeated editions (and a cottage industry, it has been said). 34. Ho¨lderlin related far better than did Fichte to Kant’s third critique, in which he sought to assemble one might say, unify the riven parts, “nature” and “spirit” (as laid out in the first two volumes of his critical project) by means of a critique of the power of judgment, proceeding from the ancient Greeks’ aisthesis, which refers to all perception but had been increasingly set apart as “aesthetic judgment” in the modern sense of a tertiary field, subsequent to “first principles” (metaphysics and epistemology, but the traditional order “switched” by Kant) and then ethics and morality. The dialectic on which the whole turns, however, was typically understood as an inconsistency or as a confusion (or both), and it is not clear that

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Ho¨lderlin’s was different from that. Valuable accounts of the third critique, its conditions and development, are given in Menzer (1952) and Zammito (1992). 35. It is clear that Derrida was familiar with Ho¨lderlin’s writings, though he seldom referred to them (see, e.g., McDonald’s edition of The Ear of the Other, p. 148), where Derrida refers to Ho¨lderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus the Tyrant and Antigone, published 1804, as standing in such extraordinary same/other relation to the Sophoclean texts as to comprise a twinning of originality. But Derrida’s published consideration of Ho¨lderlin was mainly through Heidegger and Nietzsche. See Corngold (1986) regarding connections. 36. While I have cited Harris’ translation, I have made some alterations. In Beissner’s Stuttgart edition (vol. 5, p. 216), the passage reads: “Urtheil ist im ho¨chsten und strengsten Sinn die urspru¨ngliche Trennung des in der intellectualen Anschauung innigst vereinigten Objects und Subjects, diejenige Trennung, wodurch erst Object und Subject mo¨glich wird, die Ur-Theilung.” The German “Urtheil” (or “Urteil”), properly rendered as “judgment,” refers deeply to an “original parting,” to which Ho¨lderlin pointed with his reminder (“Ur + Theilung”) but which has been lost to view in the English “judgment.” However, the Latin iūdco (or iūdcare) expressed that relation of parts, a measuring or matching of one thing to another (aliquid contra aliquem), and as with the German conveys both a division or parting and, thence, (the possibility of) a sharing or “participating in.” 37. This was already evident in Aristotle’s treatment of the passions as “anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites” (Rhetoric 1378a 20 25). While he advised that “Enmity and hatred should clearly be studied by reference to their opposites,” his treatment of “friendship and friendly feeling” was given in less forceful tones (1382a, 1380b 35 1381a). 38. The list goes on. For instance, both “disgust” and “repugnant” convey very negative emotion, yet the strongest antonyms reported for the former are “approval,” “like” or “liking,” and “love” or “loving,” while for the latter the strongest antonyms include “agreeable,” “good,” “likeable,” “nice,” “pleasant,” and “delightful.” Only the last of those, one would think, is more than a weak counter to the weight of “repugnant.” Greimas and Fontanille (1993 [1991]) addressed only two passions, both negative, avarice and jealousy. Fisher (2002) has testified more abundantly (if indirectly) to the tilted valence in his (otherwise) fine study of “the vehement passions” chiefly anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and shame all of which fall to the negative side, as if “vehement” itself carries only negative meaning. In fact, the word means “forceful,” “intense,” “deeply felt,” and the like, without choosing direction (its Latin origins are related to the verb vehere, meaning “to carry”), but in actual popular usage it probably is applied more often as modifier of “anger,” “fear,” “jealousy,” and other negatively charged feelings. Fisher did acknowledge passions of the other side of the ledger reverence, love, and wonder are three that he named (2002, p. 238; also 1998, his marvelous essay on wonder) but apparently these are never felt deeply, intensely, forcefully (i.e., vehemently). He doubted the very idea that “the passions” line up as oppositional pairs on a balance beam in accordance with some principle of symmetry. The mistake is to assume that symmetry must be confined to static relations.

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39. In Rancie`re’s (2013 [2011], p. 34) version of this homage (“the idea of a true revolution for young people, named Hegel, Schelling, and Ho¨lderlin a revolution that would abolish the cold mechanics of the State and unite a philosophy that had become poetry and mythology with the sensible life of the people”) one can see both how much and how little has changed. 40. An issue not addressed here is the deliberate instrumentalism of Ho¨lderlin’s writing, in particular of its strongly impassioned quality. The standard reception of his work has seemingly assumed that his rhetorical moves were free of strategic intents. The question is ultimately unanswerable, but there are grounds for treating it as legitimate. The influence of Spinozism, via Lessing and Jacobi, is one (Fo¨rster, 2012 [2011], p. 279, and his citations). Another is the fact of Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, which was published in 1793 and which Ho¨lderlin, along with fellow seminarians Hegel and Schelling, “studied intensively” (Fo¨rster, 2012 [2011], p. 278). In one of its best-known passages (Bk 3, Div 1, ch 4) Kant declared that “The wish of all well-disposed human beings is, therefore, ‘that the kingdom of God come, and that his will be done on earth’; but what preparations must they make in order that this wish come to pass among them?” It is scarcely possible to have read this, with its question of contingency, and not hear Kant’s usual skepticism, especially in view of the fact that he had just prior to that passage declared that “such crooked wood” as is humanity could not be expected to perform “a task the consummation of which can be looked for not from men but only from God,” though of course that should not keep them from trying. 41. Simmel (1968 [1896], p. 70) carried on the tradition, for example, declaring “aesthetic experience” to be of the highest forms and values (beauty, etc.), the “lower forms deriving their existential meaning from their being the support and background for the refined, bright, and exalted” (see also Simmel, 1959 [1911]). For valuable present-day treatments see Gebauer and Wulf (1995 [1992]), Fisher (1998), and Halliwell (2002). 42. Foucault’s (1966 [1970]) account of the argument was and remains cogent. 43. That Gadamer had at least glimpses of this understanding of Kant is testified by passages surrounding the one cited above (e.g., pp. 30 31, 40). 44. Needless to say, given the gravity of the imperative, these variations have been fodder for many chops. For some pertinent discussion, see Korsgaard’s introduction to Kant (2011 [1785]). 45. Can one see in that quandary why pa´thema, the ancient Greeks’ name of “passions,” evolved to become our “pathology,” study of disease and disability? 46. Here, then, a question still weakly examined regarding the bounds and conditions of “prosthesis” and “prosthetic culture.” 47. This has been sufficiently notable that Massey in his address as president of the American Sociological Association (2002) felt the need to call for more systematic attention to how human beings think and feel. 48. See Geiger (1969, p. 222), which contains the excerpted discussion of “the bonds of large-scale society” from that essay, which was published posthumously in 1960. 49. Accordingly, Geiger (1949), in his study of “the functions and status of the intelligentsia in society,” disputed notions such as Mannheim’s “free-floating intelligentsia” as illusory; but this was to leave the question of “authority of voice” (by intellectual, scientist, critical theorist, etc.) dangling.

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REFERENCES Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics (Trans. W. D. Ross). Aristotle. Rhetoric (Trans. W. Rhys Roberts). Arrow, K. (1951). Social choice and individual values. New York, NY: Wiley. Barish, J. (1981). The antitheatrical prejudice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beiser, F. C. (1987). The fate of reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beiser, F. C. (1992). Enlightenment, revolution, and romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1982]). The Arcades Project (H. Eilans & K. McLaughlin, Trans., R. Tiedemann Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borges, J. L. (1962 [1939]). Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote (pp. 45 56). In Idem, Ficciones (A. Bonner, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove. Bratman, M. E. (2014). Shared agency. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Brooks, P. (2011). Enigmas of identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cavell, S. (1976). Must we mean what we say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chartier, R. (2007 [2005]). Inscription and erasure (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corngold, S. (1986). The fate of the self. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1988). The Ear of the Other (A. Ronell & P. Kamuf, Trans., C. McDonald, Ed.). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Dilthey, W. (1985 [1910]). Friedrich Ho¨lderlin (J. Ross, Trans., R. A. Makkreel & F. Rodi, Ed.). In idem, Selected Writings (Vol. 5, pp. 303 383). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the irrational. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Drabble, M. (1965). The millstone. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Dumm, T. (2008). Loneliness as a way of life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durkheim, E. (1973 [1914]). The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. In R. Bellah (Ed.), Emile Durkheim on morality and society (pp. 149 166). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Du Sautoy, M. (2008). Symmetry. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Engels, F. (1987 [1894]). Anti-Du¨hring (3rd ed., pp. 5 309). In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (Vol. 25) (E. Burns & C. Dutt, Trans.). New York International. Ferguson, A. (1782 [1767]). An essay on the history of civil society (5th ed.). London: J. Cadell. Fisher, P. (1998). Wonder, the rainbow, and the aesthetics of rare experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fisher, P. (2002). The vehement passions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2012). A theory of fields. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Fo¨rster, E. (2012 [2011]). The twenty-five years of philosophy (B. Bowman, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1966 [1970]). The order of things (A. M. S. Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House.

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Szmatka, J., Skvoretz, J., & Berger, J. (Eds.). (1997). Status, network, and structure: Theory development in group processes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. To¨nnies, F. (1935). Geist der Neuzeit. Leipzig: Hans Buske. To¨nnies, F. (1957 [1887]). Community and society (C. P. Loomis, Trans.). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Weber, M. (1968 [1956]). Economy and Society (4th ed.) (G. Roth et al., Trans., G. Roth & C. Wittich, Ed.). New York, NY: Bedminster. Weber, S. (2008). Benjamin-abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wetters, B. (2012). Idea and actualization: Bruno Maderna’s adaptation of Ho¨lderlin’s Hyperion. 19th-Century Music, 36(Fall), 172 190. White, H. C. (1992). Identity and control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. White, H. C. (2002). Markets from networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wilson, D. J. (1990). Science, community, and the transformation of American philosophy (1860 1930). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zammito, J. H. (1992). The genesis of Kant’s critique of judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

DIGITAL FAIRGROUND THE VIRTUALIZATION OF HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF “BECOMING A PATIENT” AS A PROBLEM OF POLITICAL ONTOLOGY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Alexander I. Stingl ABSTRACT Purpose An inquiry into the constitution of the experience of patienthood. It understands “becoming a patient” as a production of a subjectivity, in other words as a process of individuation and milieu that occurs through an ontology of production. This ontology of production can, of course, also be understood as a political ontology. Therefore, this is, first of all, an inquiry into a mode of production, and, secondly, an inquiry into its relation to the issue of social justice because of effects of digital divisions. In these terms, it also reflects on how expert discourses, such as in medical sociology and science studies (STS), can (and do) articulate their problems.

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 53 92 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032004

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Approach An integrative mode of discourse analysis, strongly related to discursive institutionalism, called semantic agency theory: it considers those arrangements (institutions, informal organizations, networks, collectivities, etc.) and assemblages (intellectual equipment, vernacular epistemologies, etc.) that are constitutive of how the issue of “patient experience” can be articulated form its position within an ontology of production. Findings The aim not being the production of a finite result, what is needed is a shift in how “the construction of patient experience” is produced by expert discourses. While the inquiry is not primarily an empirical study and is also limited to “Western societies,” it emphasizes that there is a relation between political ontologies (including the issues of social justice) and the subjectivities that shape the experiences of people in contemporary health care systems, and, finally, that this relation is troubled by the effects of the digital divide(s). Originality A proposal “to interrogate and trouble” some innovative extensions and revisions even though it will not be able to speculate about matters of degree to contemporary theories of biomedicalization, patienthood, and managed care. Keywords: Biomedicalization; digital divide; patient governmentality; political ontology; social justice; subjectivities

INTRODUCTION: OF CYBORGS AND ZOMBIES What kinds of experiences can people have, when they feel healthy, when they feel sick, when they become or are patients? What makes these experiences possible and gives them shape?

On Being Modest These are the questions that I am going to consider in this inquiry. If I am asking them, one may suspect that they are less simple than they appear, that there are obfuscated factors and complications lurking behind them. Indeed, I will interrogate and trouble these misleadingly simple questions, and, moreover, I will interrogate and trouble some of the contemporary

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conceptualizations and problematizations that expert discourses, for example in the sociology of medicine or in Science & Technology Studies (STS), have created to be able both to conduct research and to deploy ideas from their fields as forms of critique or as policy advise. My aim is not to promise a reinvention of the wheel, but something more modest. By modest I defer to my colleague Sabrina M. Weiss (in Restivo, Weiss, & Stingl, 2014, pp. 71 88), who describes a character of the modest cyborg as a necessary improvement (Haraway, 1997) over the character of the modest witness, which has been and is often still considered the central character in the (near-mythical) production of scientific objectivity (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011). The modest cyborg of Weiss’s account manages to occupy a figured world […]aware of its figuratedness, and enabled to play with figures and figurations without silencing one for the other. (Restivo et al., 2014, p. 72)

The modest cyborg does not simply follow along traditional modes of inquiry, such as classical critical theory, for it offers not merely a critique of boundaries, but a redefinition of the activity in which s/he is admonished to be modest, thus evolving the very definition of modesty to be used. A cyborg may witness, but also may question and participate and create change; […]. (Restivo et al., 2014, p. 86) A modest cyborg presents an alternative, potentially postcolonial [decolonial,1 A.S.] and epistemically disobedient way of framing participants in the activity of science, recognizing that many configurations of people, cultures, and technology are both possible and valuable. The boundaries of expertise and culture become leverage points rather than polarizing filters; this diffraction splits the combined scientific activities into a spectrum of diverse perspectives. (Restivo et al., 2014, p. 88)

My approach, as modest cyborg,2 has its own, particular shape. I am adopting a theoretical-methodological approach that is related to ideas found in discourse analysis, in particular in Foucault’s version (see particularly, 1994, 1984; also, Bevir, 2008), but I also deploy triadic narrative empathy (Breithaupt, 2008, 2012), institutional geography (Smith, 2006), material semiotics (Law, 2008), and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2012). This represents an integrative, interdisciplinary methodology in terms of a semantic agency theory (Stingl, 2011) in the form of a moderate semantic holism (see in Restivo et al., 2014, pp. 101 140; Stingl, 2014) that is carried by a more programmatic gesture of a Nu¨-Pragmatism (Restivo’s Foreword and introduction in: Stingl, 2010a; also, Restivo et al., 2014). Semantic agency theory (SAT), aims to achieve methodological clarity by troubling

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ALEXANDER I. STINGL the relationship between scientific [here: medical sociology, STS, biomedicine] modeling and epistemic objects, for many epistemic objects can be construed as models. Here, we must distinguish a) between the objects of the history and philosophy of science that are analyzed as discourses (discourse analysis) and b) the objects of the sciences themselves as well as the objects in everyday life, which are discursive for they are the momentary products of a discourse and analyzed as such (discursive analysis). Therefore, in theory (discourse point of view) as well as in practice (discursive point of view), epistemic objects are subject to changes, modifications, revisions, expansions, enablements, constraints, dynamics, and temporal character. (Stingl, 2011, p. 216)

To summarize, while running the danger of glossing over important aspects, SAT focuses on practices, which can be linguistic/textual but not as a necessity: SAT assumes that textual practices are just a special case of all discursive practices. Practices connect to other practices through meaning, which informs narratives. Herein, “narrative” is limited to mean (at least two) events are connected into a sequence, with a temporal ordering between them (Tversky, 2004) nothing more but also nothing less. Since this is not (necessarily) hermeneutical, that is, not necessarily textual, it is enough that for practices, meaning, that is, the sequential order, can be pointed out (Hogrebe, 2011) to function as a mis-en-sce`ne, and obtains an affective relation with a self. Therefore and in other words, practices are meaningful in a limited narrative fashion, in terms of mantics, and, finally, are de se. Thus, the theory of mantics de se for practice regimes that connect events into sequences, which features kinds of being (objects) and assembles individual articulations of practices, I have conveniently called semantic agency theory (SAT).

Inclusion In adopting the role of Weiss’s modest cyborg, I encounter a culture and a realm of expertise that is, in a sense, already dead. It is the problem of being already dead that makes it necessary to interrogate and trouble the current discourse on health care culture and expertise, because it is inhabited by a kind of being that has an obviously questionable status. When talking about “the patient” as a “kind of being,” we can also substitute and say in the jargon of sociology of science that patients appear and are constructed as “epistemic objects” (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Rheinberger, 2010). When talking about the already dead, I refer to Eric Cazdyn’s description (2012) of a new class of people/citizens, the new chronic, that emerges by way of a configuration between the discourses of medicine, global capitalaccording to ism, culture,3 and politics. In this configuration, death is

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Cazdyn and his interlocutors (from Margaret Lock to Jean-Luc Nancy ˇ zek) and Slavoj Zi ˇ recognized as a problem of time,4 yet as a crisis that is currently ongoing, while the older notion of cure has been replaced by the a newer notion of management. (Cazdyn, 2012, p. 9)

This biopolitical configuration presents as a very influential and persuasive force in the techno-scientific imaginary, taking over more and more of the wider social and political imaginaries of Western societies in the medicalization of society (Conrad, 2007), biomedicalization (Clarke et al., 2003) of childhood (Stingl, 2010; Valle´e, 2010) and aging (Estes & Binney, 1989), molecularization (Rose, 2007), neuro-management (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013), braining our lives (Stingl, 2014), production of technogenarians (Joyce & Loe, 2010), and so on. It produces, at the same time, a culture of the individually responsible self with an understanding of one’s biomedicalized self as (permanently) at-risk, and thus subject of technologies of (biomedical) surveillance, evaluation, and prevention (Lupton, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Stingl under review; Dumit, 2012 and in Rajan, 2012). Biomedicine, public health, and health and mental health care aim to establish through this regime a system of care that has recently been described as P5 medicine (i.e., personalized, participatory, predictive, preventive, psychocognitive; Bragazzi, 2013; Gorini & Pravettoni, 2011). However, this regime of being-at-risk-and-subject-to-management and access to P5 medicine has or will have membership conditions. And these conditions constitute what Steven Epstein, although focusing on clinical research, has called, an inclusion-and-difference paradigm (2007, p. 6), which refers to the [….] policies, ideologies, and practices, and the accompanying creation of bureaucratic offices, procedures, and monitoring systems [with the goal of] the inclusion of members of various groups generally considered to have been underrepresented previously as subjects [I substitute here: “at-risk”]. [The second goal Epstein identifies, “measurement in studies across groups with regard to treatment effects, disease progression, or biological process”, would have to be considered here in terms of “profit-margins” on the corporate side, “population health” on the side of the government, and “cost effectiveness” would be the contested boundary between the two.]

If this particular inclusion-and-difference paradigm (co-)constitutes contemporary patient experiences as a form of subjectivity, to speak with Foucault, if it is intertwined with having access to the dynamically evolving system of health care (P5 medicine), and if it has a membership effect, then

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this begs the question, who would be excluded from membership, how or why, and is this an issue of social justice and inequality?

“Constructing the Patient” as an Epistemic Object: Subjectivity and Experience What kinds of experiences can people have, when they feel healthy, when they feel sick, when they become or are patients? What makes these experiences possible and gives them shape? The second question is contained in the first one, to some, admittedly, superficial degree: Asked “how are you?” most speakers of English (similarly German) would answer with “Good/Not so good,” rather than with “I am healthy.” If anything, it seems that one being/feeling “not so good” could then be further qualified by discussing feeling sick (stomach ache, a visible bruise, a broken leg), whereas feeling good would not need to be clarified by referring to one’s health status. Of course, it must be generally possible to experience healthiness and to be able to say “I am healthy,” even without having been sick before. I think this should be rather uncontroversial. My point is, however, that first of all to be able to say “I am healthy” and to feel healthy (and for this utterance to be understood by others), a process of medicalization must have already set in. While the concepts, “health,” “sickness,” “disorder,” “disease,” and “illness,” are ambiguous, contested, and negotiated (for example: Huber et al., 2011; Schramme, 2007), it is easy to see that health is not simply qualified in and of itself.5 To understand health, one needs an understanding of what it means or feels like “to be not-healthy.” This can be accomplished in several ways, for example, by means of certain medical practices: A person may never have felt ill in their life, and, therefore, s/he will not even have an idea what “health” means, but once I measure their blood-pressure and tell them it is “too low” and if they eat less sugar and exercise more they will be “healthy,” they are part of a practice regime that makes the idea of health intelligible. In Western societies, we are part of such regimes from the day we are born, and these regimes are subject to change and require us to change with them. These practices occupy an increasing territory of our social lives through (bio)medicalization on various fronts. It is, therefore, close to impossible not to be an object for the health care system and its care practices. These practice regimes that shape the experience of health and illness, therefore, frame the individuation process of “becoming patient” as an

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experience and as a subjectivity. Individuation is dependent on the ontology of production (Nishida, 2012), on modes of production that are the result of and (re-)produce effects of inclusion/exclusion, (in)equality, and (in)justice. Therefore, I prefer to treat ontology of production, modes of production, and political ontology as largely synonymous in this inquiry.6 With the modes of production in transition, that is, in adopting more and more information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are usually described as digital technologies,7 being healthy/sick/becoming-patient are also tightly in the grips of this transition. Most recently (even if almost too superficial to be a sufficient example), the transition to the Affordable Care Act bureaucracy (commonly referred to as Obamacare) in the United States required membership to be facilitated via an enrollment process that was largely dependent on online participation. While it seems that hardly any political practice comes closer to our organic, biophysiological existence and experience than health care practices, the digitalization of these practices affects how we can experience this existence, because the change in informational architecture literally and figuratively informs bodies, minds, and organizations in terms of producing inclusion-and-difference on the one hand, but also by producing new forms of exclusion.

Structure For the main argument of this inquiry, I will continue with a description of the modes of production in two runaway-tendencies of structural change (unversalization and interiorization) that can be observed on a tentative level (the section “Modes of Production: Hyper-Universalization and Hyper-Specialization”), leading to a brief history of the transformation of the clinical gaze to the cyborg gaze (the section “The Transformation of the Clinical Gaze”). I will then describe a possible notion of patienthood as a virtual experience in the discussion of “care and the self” (the section “Virtual Patients and the Notion of Care”), following a suggestion by Murray (2007). The lack of participation in digital culture and its information architectures in terms of the digital divide, and the consequences for health care services will be described as a problem of social justice and inequality (the section “Digital Divisions”). I will conclude (the section “Conclusion: Biodigital Citizenship”) with a summary of the digital/ informational aspect of the inclusion-and-difference paradigm in health care regimes today, and explain why this is a prolegomena of the discussion of

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biodigital citizenship, which Sabrina Weiss and myself have begun in various talks, papers, chapters, and books.27

TRANSFORMATIONS The writing of the brain is the writing of capacities enabling brains to cooperate notably through the constitution of communities of reading (that is, lettered or literate) brains, or digital brains. […] We cannot re-constitute internet access, therefore, without completely rethinking the formation and transmission of knowledge with a view to ensuring a historical understanding of the role of tertiary retention in the constitution, as well as the destruction of knowledge, and with a view to deriving, on this basis, a practical and theoretical understanding of the digital tertiary retentions that transform cerebral and social organisations. Without such a politics, the inevitable destiny of the digital brain is to find itself slowly but surely short-circuited by automata, and thus find itself incapable of constituting a new form of society with other digital brains. Automatisation makes digitalisation possible, but although it immeasurably increases the power of the mind (as rationalisation), it can also destroy the mind’s knowledge (as rationality). A “pharmacological” thinking of the digital must study the contradictory dimensions of automatisation in order to counteract its destructive effects on knowledge. Stiegler (2013)

Modes of Production: Hyper-Universalization and Hyper-Specialization Bless the Anecdata I first began considering the consequences in 2007/2008 of what seemed to me like a paradox, that healthy and sick people as kinds of being(s) could be

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simultaneously (re-)produced as epistemic objects (patients) by two processes let alone what seemed like a mindboggling display of interdependence that resulted in mutual acceleration and escalation that seemed at odds with one another: Universalization and specialization/ differentiation. I called this double-bind in biomedicine and modern health care systems “the virtualization of health and illness” (Stingl, 2010b). In early 2009, I had the opportunity to discuss an initial write-up with a wellrespected medical sociologist, who I also admire. My basic idea was, back then, to ask whether the effect of intra-systemic fragmentation of the patient body in health care and his/her transformation into data in other words: the deconstruction of the patient by specialists and bureaucracies, and reconstruction as a patient file (see also, Berg & Harterink, 2004) could be read through the analytic lens of social (in)justice and (in)equality.8 My respected medical sociologist friend found my premise and discussion highly interesting, but felt, at the same time, that I was going in the wrong direction in the end. The counter-argument was, however, slightly baffling: My discussion did in no way reflect the experiences he had with his doctors, such as for example his oncologist. Here I was conferring with a medical sociology who had researched and written far and wide about the shape and state of American health care and clinical practice, and who was whisking away my concern on the basis of his experience with the American health care system, the experience of a white, male, tenured professor with good health care insurance, with retirement plans looming ever closer. My reaction was not to scrap my position nor was it to accuse him of privilege and entitlement. I began thinking, instead, that if I did not want to discard his view as unfounded and biased, nor accept it at face value, I had to think more intensely about how much the constitution of what can be experienced in health care and what subjectivities were made possible mattered and why, and, also, why even diametrically opposed positions could equally be the product of the same system and might help me, therefore, explain the very paradox that had originally send me down this path.9 Two Processes Reviewing literatures from medical sociology, STS, and from within the discourse in biomedicine, I see two processes at work simultaneously, as I said, which would seem to be opposed to one another, yet function interdependently in a kind of double-bind. I originally defined them (2010b) as a. hyperspecialization (HS), a co-evolution of both, the biomedical profession, modern knowledge-based economy and politics, and the professions that study scientific development, and

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ALEXANDER I. STINGL b. hyperuniversalization (HU), the trend to create categories for diagnosis, therapy, and scientific study that can be easily integrated into bureaucratic processes and the advancement in information technology.

I would actually revise further the concept of hyperspecialization to argue that it denotes a process of hyperdifferentiation (HD) instead. This concept describes that within a profession, such as in biomedicine and health care, more and more professional specializations, sub-categories of therapies, disease units, etc. are being differentiated, more and more individual tests can be conducted and billed, and so on. Hyperuniversalization means, however, that despite these differentiations, path-dependencies are being enforced.10 A simplified illustration: A child does not always pay attention in school and is reported by the teachers to the parents who fill out a standardized questionnaire, provided by the school; the teachers suggest and the questionnaire indicates that they see a specialist about ADHD, and, eventually the child is prescribed a pharmaceutical treatment, which is billed with their health care insurance by a determined standard (see Stingl, 2010; Stingl & Weiss, 2012). At the same time, the specialist will not simply write-up the diagnosis ADHD, but will differentiate between attentiondeficit, hyperactivity, attention-deficit with hyperactivity, hyperactivity with attention-deficit, or in a recent development “sluggish cognitive tempo” or dysexecutive syndrome (see, Barkley, 2013). At the same time, ADHD is transformed into an adult disease on top (Bro¨er & Heerings, 2013). The kind of subjectivity that is created in between these two processes resembles what a group of authors around Jenkins (2011) has investigated under the term pharmaceutical self, the imaginary as that dimension of culture oriented toward conceivable possibilities for human life, then the pharmaceutical imaginary is that region of the imaginary in which pharmaceuticals play an increasingly critical role (…). At issue is the question of how regular consumption of psychopharmaceuticals shapes the self and conceptions of agency in postcapitalist labor markets. In this regard, I argue that the extent to which we are all pharmaceutical selves has yet to be fully appreciated (…). Also central is the problem of how pharmaceutical companies and their emissaries shape patterns of medical practice, diagnosis, and prescription. (Jenkins from introduction to Jenkins, 2011, p. 6/7)

I understand the pharmaceutical imaginary as an imaginary of technoscientific intervention, and this is precisely why we cannot reduce the pharmaceutical regime to a universal process nor can we see it only in terms of a differential medical practice. In order to “fully appreciate” it in terms of an inclusion-and-difference paradigm, we must address

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[….] the problem of how “pharmaceutical” bodies are conceptualized in relation to power, dependency, or transformation. (Jenkins, 2011, p. 7)

In terms of the actual locations, that is, institutions/organizations where this happens, we should look at sites where care is practiced, and where it is assumed that care is practiced, increasingly arranged in the form of management. Numerato, Salvatore, and Fattore (2012) show in a comprehensive literature review the lengths that care management regimes as well as resistance to the hegemony of “managerialism” go to in facilitating universalizations illustrating the Foucauldean argument that power relations are productive, but only as a continuous process of negotiation/ conflict between power and counter-power. Numerato and his co-authors identify within the intra-academic discourse about health care, a trend to interpret the introduction of management ideas into health care as ongoing and as “ideology” that contributes to the shifting nature of healthcare through the use of managerial symbols, codes and language and by approaching healthcare services with an eye toward the criteria of rationalisation and standardisation. These cognitive mechanisms facilitate the “indoctrination” of doctors into the managerialist mode of reasoning (…). Accordingly, the perspective of physicians is pervaded (in other words, colonised) with concerns regarding accountability, constant calls for transparency, evaluation and other managerial priorities. (p. 629)

They see this development as a legacy of postmodernism and the cultural studies tradition. This echoes, of course, Paul Starr’s (1982) famous verdict on the Transformation of the American Medical System. Starr predicted, basically, that it while the sovereignty of health care practitioners, that is, doctors, was waning, the threat wasn’t so much as many social scientists of his generation feared by the state and the government, but in the form of corporate interests (fee-for-service, cost efficiency, profit-based hospital chains, and so on). In a reappraisal of his own assessments a quarter of a century later, Starr concludes that the private-sector rationalization I expected 25 years ago failed as well. By privatesector rationalization, I meant a movement toward greater efficiency, effectiveness, and cost containment that I expected would be brought about chiefly by private employers and through the mechanisms of the market. Certainly there have been efforts in that direction during the past quarter- century. […] But the realistic assessment is that these developments have failed to slow the growth of health costs or to achieve promised gains in allocative efficiency. And, what is just as important, these developments have failed to arrest the deep sources of dissatisfaction that have generated demands for change. (Starr, 2008)

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The dilemma that emerges here, however, can be discussed ambiguously. Whereas scholars who study the practice of health care have found that there are many hybrid forms, where standardized managerial practices are confounded with local appropriations and adaptations implemented by informal networks (also Stingl, 2011) that exercise what has been called “soft autonomy” (Levay & Waks, 2009), two different conclusions become possible in the face of Starr’s diagnosis of managerial failure: One position would argue that the situation would be even worse, if actors “on the ground” hadn’t softened the rigid assumptions made by the managerial paradigm, the other position would argue that it is the insufficient implementation of the managerial paradigm in practice that has created the inefficiencies and, as a consequence, more managerialism is needed and not less (for a comparison with Starr on the history of the medical system in 20th century Germany, see, Gress, 2004). I find neither position particularly convincing, and would argue that it is the clash of the imperatives that are inherent in local networks and global managerial culture, that is the source of the problem and this clash cannot be avoided, because local networks cannot but differentiate and managerialism cannot but develop and implement standards. And just as I came to understand about my notion of virtualization, these practical imperatives are not in opposition, that is, the idea that they represent a force of local resistance against a global hegemony is false, the problem lies in the fact that they are co-occurring with some necessity and in a mutually reinforcing and escalating double-bind. Organizational cultures, governance regimes, and managerial practices shape how patients are cared for, and they often create such strong imperatives, because patient experience itself is not easily measurable. However, as Hillman et al. (2013) argue, this would be an important step for research in this field, since [t[he management of risk in healthcare systems has fallen victim to a wider societal trend to attempt to eradicate uncertainties through reasoned calculation. (p. 951)

Future research in this area of health care management should therefore include investigations into what I have called here ontologies of production, and reconstruct the subjectivities that are actually possible for doctors and patients in that system.11 While it seems clear, that in the construction of subjectivities of doctors (and patients, too), we can no longer ignore managerialism, standardization, and so on, we must also understand, whether as economically oriented analysts or culturally critical social researchers, that the hegemony/resistance axis conceptualizes the problem as an opposition, whereas we should be looking at HU and HS instead, which help

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conceptualize the double-bind, that performs as a constitutive frame for an inclusion-and-difference paradigm. With regard to conceptualizing the “patient,” the governance regimes that HU and HD produce, as well as the academic literature (STS, medical sociology, etc.) on this regime fall often short. The practical fallout from HU is that a patient’s individual agency is not sufficiently accounted for, while a consequence of HD can be an omission of the role of social structures, which Weaver, Lemonde, Payman, and Goodman (2014) argue on the example of diabetes self-management, proposing a resource & capabilities approach for diabetes patients, instead. I agree, but I am of the opinion that contemporary ontologies of production in health care and biomedicine, result in subjectivities that have little or no room for a capabilities approach, because with regard to the individual patient they focus on “empowerment” not “enablement,” as I will argue below in terms of the relation between care and self. If we want to create an outcome-oriented reform of health care, we need, first of all, more comparative perspectives, along the lines of Numerato et al. (2012) (also, Marmor & Wendt, 2010; Wendt & Kohl, 2010) these must include a realistic appraisal of the resources and institutional settings (including formal and informal networks): Here, I have used the term arrangements. Secondly, we need an understanding of the possible subjectivities and the capabilities, through the forms they can possibly be expressed in: Assemblage.12

The Transformation of the Clinical Gaze Assemblages in the medical system can be analyzed in terms of how a particular way of seeing the patient through a gaze, such as the clinical gaze, constitutes the patient and in a dialectical turn, the patient is starting to see himself/herself in those same terms. To gaze at something can be redescribed as an active act of hybridzation. The multiple ways of seeing and of practicing through the history of medicine and health care co-exist with different types of patients, different types of clinical and health worlds to be inhabitated: Worlds are worlded, figured, mattered to use the language of feminist and postcolonial science studies, because information, data, and knowledges cannot be isolated from the practices they shape and are shaped by, nor can they be isolated from other, adjoining fields of practice (Haraway, 1997; Harding, 2008; Schatzki et al., 2001). The integration of knowledges, data, and fields of practices is what is important here: How do decisions come to pass under these conditions? How do decisions connect

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practices with one another? How do interlocutors develop social interactions on this basis, for example, between a doctor and a patient, or between (expert) researchers and (lay) publics? There is a well-established genealogy of the development of such dialectical gazes as techno-scientific practices in biomedicine from the clinical gaze (Foucault, 1994 [1963]) to medicalization (Conrad, 2007; Zola, 1972) and biomedicialization (Clarke et al., 2003; Estes & Binney, 1989; Rose, 2007), which I am developing somewhat further using more recent critical ideas, such as recreating cyborg visuality (Prasad, 2005, 2009) in a wider frame biopolitical frame (Joyce, 2008; PittsTaylor, 2010). Clinical Gaze: Effects of the learned way of looking and gazing at the body by specialists, that is, medical experts such as physicians, particularly in the clinical context. It obtains as a way of knowing as well as a way of making the body gazed at. The act of “seeing something” is an act of seeing it in a particular and formative way: The amorphous mass in an opened skull is made into a tumor and surrounding brain tissue is “healthy” by seeing it as such, the brain-structures that make one person male and another female are made real by seeing them through a learned gaze, and so on. Medicalization: A mode of interrogation into the conditions of possibility that made it possible for a specific subject to become subject of the discourse of medicine and an evaluation of whether or not this subjectivation was substantially and normatively justified and an evaluation of the options derive from this interrogation in order not to be mindlessly governed by this subjectivation. In short, medicalization is the process that makes things a concern of medicine that were not before. Biomedicalization: The transformation of self and identity-forming process, extending Foucault’s discussion of biopower and biopolitics, between the molar and the molecular gaze in the creation of neuronal and molecular selves. This involves a dialectical connection between the emergence of a conception of self, and technologies of the self that are rooted in biomedicalization, its neuromolecular gaze and a neoliberal ideology. Cyborg Visuality: Cyborg visuality, in this account both “extends the medical gaze” and “reconfigures the body.” But this mode does not emerge out of nowhere as a socially accepted practice. Prasad and others show that processes of “disciplining,” “domestication,” “standardization,” “normalization,” and “institutionalization” of both the particular visual form and the sets of practices have to occur before they can unfold their power as a visual regime. But once it has attained such a status, this mode extends to take part as a constitutive process in producing scientific models of the inner workings of organisms, bodies, and, in particular, the human brain.

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In becoming constitutive and in producing/confirming models, this mode of visuality is treated “as if” it was unconditional. The real problem arises, when the “as if” of images, extends into one’s life-course (its temporalities), and the narrative of one’s life begins to be in-formed and governed by an image produced in cyborg visuality, in other words once someone begins to live in this image. Finally, we presently witness an emerging cyborg gaze that describes the practice of seeing that constitutes a paternalistic and imperial epistemic authority that affects spatializing, temporalizing, (re-)configuring bodies, embodiment and enactment, perception and conceptualizations, and the very ways of individual and social world- and kind-making. In the technoscientific context, the practical connection between an image that is being perspectivized by the gaze and the actual body reconfigure both image and body dialectically and iteratively. The image and the body are respatialized, re-temporalized, and re-shaped by techno-aesthetics of the cyborg in the process of the narrative dialectics of techno-scientific seeing (and other techno-scientific practices): Techno-scientific practices, such as in biomedicine, health care, or digital culture, occur between interlocutors as narrative events. They display a certain epistemic disagreement between interlocutors, owed to a vagueness of concepts and practices from the point of view of each interlocutor. As a consequence, we find a knowledge and information asymmetry. This is a description for the gap between lay and expert knowledge, but we must also understand that the asymmetry is not necessarily hierarchical, such as the stereotypical lay/expert-frame would suggest (see also, Kleinman & Suryanarayanan, 2013). While we cannot go into many details here, let me just say that the asymmetry takes different types of forms, deploys different types of epistemic authorities and strategies, calls onto various technologies, constitutes different epistemic communities, but also requires and here lies the rub epistemic responsibility. The dialectics of practices, such as here in the example of seeing, is the notion that seeing is a mediated inter-relationship that affects both/all sides in iterative ways. Tools that constitute technological kinds of seeing can be conceptualized as social actors with respective agentic properties that change the way we know and experience these affective relations. Their deployment is necessary to overcome gaps that limit and obstruct decisionmaking processes. But there are dangers when epistemic disagreement is overcome paternalistically by an agnotological stance (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008a, 2008b) toward the difference between the individual inferential distances (Roskies, 2008) assumed, evoking a persuasive power beyond the boundaries of an epistemic in-group for example when

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doctors convince a patient of a particular therapy-regime using a medical image, when an activist group denounces a new therapy or policy-measure on non-scientific grounds, and so on. In short, techno-scientific practice, such as the practice of techno-scientific seeing (e.g., through medical imaging technologies) changes, therefore, via the production of an image the temporal sequence of the image, the temporal configuration of the body and the narrative of self of a patient.13 It becomes an engine for “making up kinds,” for example cyborg kinds (cf. Franklin, 2006). But the question is, if the medical system were to be transforming its gaze to the cyborg gaze, as I suggest, can truly ever body be seen by it, and, what happens to those who are not seen and why might they not be seen? Along those lines, it can be said that where Sarah Franklin’s cyborg kinds discourse focuses on embryos and reproduction, Ann V. Bell has argued that the experiences of diagnosis for infertility may be social class dependent, and that factors like race, ethnicity, gender, and class have “not been sufficiently explored in the sociology of diagnosis”14 (2014). So far, I have somewhat illegitimately used illness, sickness, and disease indiscriminately. This is, of course, not tenable in terms of contemporary sociology and anthropology of medicine after ethnomedicine (Kleinman, 1989; see also, Hofmann, 2002; Wikman, Marklund, & Alexanderson, 2005). Following Arthur Kleinman (and others) we may distinguish between the three concepts as follows: Feeling ill and having a disease differ in so far as illness comprises the experience symptoms, limitations, fears, and meanings that constitute the patients individual experience, whereas disease15 is the conceptual unit that clinical and/or academic discourse use descriptively (even prescriptively). Thomas Ku¨hlein concludes with regard to the way this becomes relevant for general practitioners (2012, p. 48, my translation): Disease is what physicians have been trained to see. This “seeing” is refracted through the lens of theoretical perspectives in its particularized form of clinical practice. That means, physicans translate the “feeling ill” of the patient and his/her family in states of affairs that obtain technically closure.16 Put differently, the patient goes to see a doctor with an “illness” and goes back home with a “disease.” Even more concise, “illness” is the reason for a consultation, “disease” its result.

Sickness represents the public representations and articulations of a pathological event or state. This has been originally investigated in terms of social structures and systems by Talcott Parsons (2012 [orig.1951]17). Here, Parsons developed his famous theory of the sick-role in society: Being sick

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constitutes for Parsons a form of “sanctioned deviance”: A sick individual cannot be expected to participate in the (re)production systems of society as s/he normally would. S/he is considered exempt (for the time being). One is not just physically sick, one falls into a specifically patterned social role of being sick. Once that role is occupied by an individual, it is not just a mere statement of fact or a condition, it’s a complex of I would argue, an arrangement that universalizes social habits and rights as well as obligations deriving from numerous social norms that surround it: • the sick person is not responsible for their condition • the sick person is considered exempt from normal social roles, such as labor, but this also necessitates that s/he is looked after • a sick person is expected to do what is in his/her power to try to get well • the sick person is expected to seek out technically competent help and cooperate with the medical professional. The legitimation of the person occupying the sick-role follows from the authority of the medical practitioner.18 Norms that are co-constitutive of the sick-role also promote compliance with the medical regime in order to facilitate restoration of health and, subsequently, re-assumption of the “normal” roles the persons is expected to occupy. Parsons was also interested in the motivations of people occupying a (sick) role and linking them to questions of social expectations and double contingency, group formation and integration, solidarity, and the question of authority and legitimacy. Parsons’s concept has been criticized, dropped, and revived numerous times since its original publication. Most recently, May (2007) and others, who have adopted a more discourse analytical point of view (normalization theory, [bio]medicalization, etc.) to dismiss the sick-role approach as too normative or misleading, emphasizing that Parsons is focused on the (dyadic) doctor patient interaction (system). Carl May suggests that the complexity of clinical context, such as corporate culture, cannot be captured in Parsonian terms. Others, however, have recently provided some reconsiderations of the sick-role concept for empirical research (Higgins, Porter, & O’Halloran, 2014; Mik-Meyer & Obling, 2012; Van Hal, Meershoek, Nijhuis, & Horstman, 2013). In my view, it is true that the Parsonian model fails to capture certain constitutive aspects of what it means to “become patient.” At the same time, particular motivations that shape experiences of health, illness, and becoming patient are not captured sufficiently by alternative models either. Respectively, I deploy Parsons

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concept as a complementary concept, specifically because it allows for the inclusion of the notion of motivation itself.

VIRTUAL PATIENTS AND THE NOTION OF CARE Virtualization Alfred Korzybski coined the famous saying: “The map is not the territory.” Maps are removed from the actual territory, they can (merely) be idealizations. And yet, they do affect how people interact with and even transform the territory they describe. Maps are at once hyperuniversalizations and hyper-differentiations of the territory in question. Maps must universalize a territory to the point that someone who is not familiar with the territory can still “read” the territory on the map. But they are also differentiated: A hiking map for tourists, a map for (semi-) professional climbers, a map for a mining operation may describe the same territory, and yet they abstract from it in highly differential ways (see also, Serres, 2005, 2012a, 2012b). By making a territory “readable” for various people and yet open for different potential interventions and transformations (a tourist may litter, a climber may drive a hook into a rock-face, a mining operation may obliterate a forest or a mountain), the map does something to the territory: By creating a virtual representation of the territory, it opens windows for or, rather, virtual futures of transformative interventions. The two processes of hyperuniversalization and hyperdifferentiation, therefore, virtualize the territory: By abstracting from it and by opening virtual futures. In biomedicine and health care, we can see similar processes. The creation of images through medical imaging technologies, such as fMRI, PET scans, and so on (Dumit, 2004; Joyce, 2008; Prasad, 2005; Stingl, 2014 among many others), is often thought of as “taking a picture of the interior” as “making the body transparent.” But that is more myth than reality. Even a considerably simple x-ray requires certain presets for contrast, sharpness, resolution. An x-ray image, too, is a product of a flexible techno-aesthetic. With more refined methods, like fMRI, this proves even more complicated. Technicians preset machines, complex algorithms compute images from raw data, after filtering out what has been predefined as “noise” and comparing the data to predetermined “body atlases.” Only then will a radiologist create a diagnosis, utilizing his/her

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“trained gaze.” The results are entered into the complex informational architecture of patient records, and the question is more than legitimate, whether the patient that emerges from the records and the patient who came to see the doctor share the same body (Berg & Harterink, 2004; Mol, 2003). Physicians, as we have argued above, negotiate, hybridize, and reassemble the universal but virtual body from the records. And these patient records certainly are a managerial tool.19 But again, this about more than managerial hegemony and resistance: This is not about whether the patient does or does not receive good treatment based on whether they are treated according to the picture that managerial data presents, or whether doctors resist and treat the “authentic” patient. This hegemony/resistance image does not present anything useful here. The case in point is, rather again, how do we get to the point of the ontology of production of the experiences of the patient, actualized from the virtual. Even if the territory is not the map, territory displayed virtually on a map is still traversable in actuality.20 But we may find, that it has been changed according to a map, the climber may find that base-camp has been littered by tourists, and that the good portions of the view s/he expected from the top of the mountain have been eradicated by a mining company, but there still is a rock-face to climb. This is, perhaps, what Gilbert Simondon (and after him Bernard Stiegler and others) describe in terms of individuation. Along those lines, the patient is virtualized as a territory, but with the formation of subjectivities that cannot escape the biomedicalization of the wider social imaginaries through discourses on being at-risk, territory in general (society at large) seems to be virtualized accordingly: Every patient is virtual, everybody is virtually a patient. However, we must also ask, who is not part of this notion of “everybody”? Who is not included, how, and why?

Self-Care and Care-for-the-Self In a landmark essay, “Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life” (2007), Stuart J. Murray proposes a distinction between two types of assemblages that relate self and care. For the past years let us say, for the last three decades, which is the time-span that Numerato et al. (2012) reviewed and which covers the period since the publication of Paul Starr’s groundbreaking book, the systems of public health and health care operate on a regime of “self-care” that appears rooted in an individualistic and neoliberal ideology in the

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United States and the United Kingdom to a larger degree than in most of the other Western nations. For Europe, in general, the situation is somewhat ambiguous. With Colin Crouch, the Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (2011), is certainly visible on the European continent, whereas Abrahamson (2010) summarizes the ongoing trend as follows: Given these different developmental trends regarding time, space and policy it is no easy task to try and summarize the state of the art of the contemporary European welfare state, but some generalizations shall be offered. International organizations are no longer advocating a neoliberal approach to state intervention, but that has not meant a return to the post WW II social settlement. Instead the social investment state is being promoted and implemented with its emphasis on the productive and active citizen. […] Thus, one price that has been paid for the active turn in social policy and the productive citizen is a high degree of marginalization of various categories of people such as ethnic minorities, youth, people with disabilities, etc. Processes of marginalization are accompanied by strong trends toward a dualization of welfare entitlements and provisions with relatively generous benefits for the well-integrated productive middle class citizens on the one hand, and on the other hand, reduced and punitive provisions for the increasing number of marginalized people. (Abrahamson, 2010, p. 89)

The assemblage of “self-care,” in a general fashion, means that all responsibility for precaution and prevention, as well as for the acquisition or training of respective abilities to reduce and manage life-course risks, lie with the individual patient. Respectively, an individual has to take care of his/her own health and must operate under the idea that s/he is always a potential patient, responsible for promoting his/her health, to reduce costs, and seek out and install his/her own care. The assemblage of “care for the self” criticizes that in a “self-care regime,” it is mistakenly supposed that individuals, in a sense, are naturally inclined, that is, have an intrinsic motivation and incentive, to obtain the necessary abilities. In opposition to this individualistic-neoliberal idea, “care for the self” counts on the community to provide motivation as well as opportunities to obtain the necessary abilities (together). If, and only if, this condition is satisfied can responsibility be assigned to (individual) people and possibly even demanded from them; even “care for the self” allows for (or requires) some form of (informal) enforcement from within the community. “Care for the self” is not an utopic vision, but a pragmatic and realistic approach. In my view, the majority of the literature on care and on “patient empowerment” glosses over this issue, which I consider crucial for understanding both the formation of subjectivities (of health, illness, and

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becoming patient) and the problem of why certain people are not considered in the inclusion-and-difference paradigm. In short, empowerment in terms of self-care alone does not equip people with necessary abilities nor does it distill a suitable motivation structure we could call this the practical/conceptual and the affective components. No outcome-oriented approach to health-policy reform today can, in my view, neglect these dimensions (see also Marmor & Wendt, 2010, 2012; Wendt & Kohl, 2010). Murray’s essay fares much better on this dimension, and allows us to conceptualize the constitution of the patient-self and the doctor-self as dominated by communicative processes in the social context of health and care environments. The individual-neoliberal context can be summarized as the poetics and politics of risk reduction and risk management. Murray argues that the relation between care and the self in this context is construed with regard to a determinative criterion: health. By choosing health as that criterion, however, we may not reach an outcome-oriented goal, such as for example formulated in the so-called Triple-Aim-Agenda: Excellent Health, Higher Care, Lower Costs (Berwick, Nolan, & Whittington, 2008; also, Cohen, 2013). Murray suggests that, instead, we should aim for another criterion, the criterion of “a good life.” Once we have chosen the latter as the determinative criterion, we find that the present system of relating care and self, which focuses on a specific subjectivity of health and risk, is highly ineffective, precisely because it lacks the community aspect, necessary to motivate, teach, and prepare people to participate in a good life, which is a life shared with others. The key word here is: Participation. To succeed, people must participate together. The “education of patients” must lead towards enabling them: Empowerment without enablement is useless, because participation is a requirement of agents to provide patients with the education to make “an educated contribution” to “a good life” rather than “take charge” of their individual risks. Current “health”-determined process atomizes and often marginalizes people through the expectation that they take responsibility for their own risk reduction and management, more importantly, by expecting them do this in a certain (digital) way. A “good life”-based approach, following Murray’s account, involves a negotiation of boundaries in a community network and requires care-recipients (aka patients) to be enabled first and then to take their life-course into their hands. Murray summarizes that the care/self-relation can be defined in two ways: The first I call “self-care,” a model that has dominated public health policy in recent years [… that] relies on a model of selfhood that is drawn from the tradition of liberal humanism.

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The self in this model is supposed to be rational, free, and guided by conceptual reason sui generis: It is a monistic entity. Moreover, the present concepts of evidence-based best practice assume the same type of selfconstitution of the actors that have to employ best practice, aka the actors have no room for boundary negotiation aka appropriation, between “established” best practice and the actual situations they face. Individuals are expected to acquire and teach (or financially equip) themselves to acquire abilities of self-care. But even the idea of evidence-base and statistical prevention outcomes are not always well understood by doctors themselves, and their effects over- and limits underestimated (see, e.g., the critique by Ku¨hlein, 2012). The second model, “care for the self” means that the community’s task hence en-ablement is to equip the individual (patient) with the ability to take care of the self21 and to find or create motivations and incentives to do so, and, finally, to create communicative structures that sanction (positively and negatively) the taking over of responsibility. The direction-of-fit is essential: Only an individual who has been equipped by the community can take over responsibility, responsibility cannot simply be expected from an individual. Finally, just like socialist welfare state models, the neoliberal self-care model represents an ideology: Responsibility in the self-care model lies with the individual, in the socialist model it lies with society as a totality. However, in the “care of the self” model, we can avoid the trap to some degree. It is, at heart, open to a post-foundationalist approach (Marchart, 2007, 2010): Responsibility is subject to negotiation between the actors in a community. Therefore, responsibility is fleeting and volatile, it is a matter of agreements that are fluid (e.g., usances), insofar as they are adaptive to changes in the situation, and have their unique temporalities (Stingl, 2011): Responsibility regimes are not meant to be fixed in time but are expected to change if the situation changes gravely.

DIGITAL DIVISIONS We have talked about virtualizing the possible experiences for being healthy, ill, becoming a patient. In the managerial model, this virtual patient, while a suffering individual, is reduced to a bureaucratically manageable case-file under a dogma of self-care. They would be left to their own devices. They would have to navigate between the life-words that they actually occupy on the one hand, in which they are embodied, have a unique organism, and are embedded in an individual nexus of natural,

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social, and cultural environments. On the other hand, virtualized health care regimes rely on information-processing procedures, bureaucracies, and path-dependencies that appear to conclude in predetermined patient-career trajectories. Self-care is encouraged in the increasingly digitalized environment of health care management. However, the more health care is dependent on digital or information-and-communication technologies (ICTs), and the more often we encounter the deployment of the self-care assemblage, the more often people are dependent on having successfully bridged the so-called digital divide. We can draw the following two conclusions: 1. Those who live on the wrong side of the digital divide might be left behind 2. True care for the self is not enabled. The digital divide,22 to put it simply, describes a social division between people who use ICTs and are included in contemporary informational architectures, and those who are not. The reasons for non-inclusion can be plenty, of course. Since the term was coined in the 1990s, most national and international efforts to overcome the digital divide have focused on the problem of access. This was (and is) related to the idea that the economies of the future (which is presently fairly true, already) will generally require the use of ICTs. In short, ICT competence is a necessary in the mind of some, perhaps sufficient skill for every job-seeker. Of course, in a capitalist society, participation and inclusion in society come close to being the same as participation in the labor market (or, alternatively, the financial market). As a consequence, it would follow that those groups of people who were denied access to ICTs (or gaining ICT competence) are naturally excluded. It has been argued (and researched aplenty), whether this means that there is a structural effect for those groups already suffering social inequality being “left further behind.” Moreover, it has become a critical and crucial question, whether the digitalization of government services, democratic (political) process, and information in general will not have catastrophic consequences for marginalized groups. As a result, political actors and social researchers have sought counter-strategies. For most of the last 25 or so years, however, these have focused on resolving the problem of material access alone. It turns out, however, that merely making sure that people can access computers physically and publically or are provided computers in school regardless of class, ethnicity, race, gender, age does not in of itself solve social problems. For starters, specifically with elderly people, one could expect that they will not necessarily be able

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to make use of computer access, simply because computers, internet browsers, screen architecture are not as intuitive as many people seem to think. The ability to “read” a screen is an acquired skill. At the same time, even the so-called digital natives, are very often, as Hargittai (2010) has shown, digitally quite naive. While people today seem to grow up in a screen-based culture, in terms of techno-somatic figurations (Richardson, 2005, 2010), they are often restricted in how they can use and/or want to use ICTs. Specifically the notion of “not wanting to” is important here, and may serve as kind of exclusion along the same lines as previous forms of social inequality. By digitalizing health, illness, and becoming patient, and by making the possibility for participation in the health care system, that is, the possibility of receiving medical care, dependent on these particular subjectivities, those who are not on the right side of the digital divide will not be able to receive care. They are, in other words, not covered by the inclusion-and-difference paradigm, because their experiences cannot be included and differentiated. And this is precisely not a problem of access in terms of having access to a computer somewhere. As a consequence, van Dijk (2005) has suggested a more complex model of access, differentiating between four dimensions: • • • •

Motivational Material Skills Usage

Therefore, it follows that the problem is not simply one of material access or competence, but one that coincides with both old and new inequalities along a continuum of the other two dimensions as well. Virgina Eubanks’s (2011) experience with a YWCA community project that intended to help a group of local women gain “competence” led to several novel insights; above all, her work debunked the myth that hardware and software access are either/both “ailment and panacea” reinforcing her own disillusionment with the “new economy.” The women she worked with in practice had a multitude of experiences with access to technology mediated through different levels of competence and were, in my interpretation of her work, considered sufficiently “empowered” in the neoliberal sense. Among other things, they found themselves insufficiently enabled to exercise control over the information they were expected to enter into ICT systems (e.g., social welfare data), which made them highly suspicious of the potential power that ICTs could hold over their lives. Contrary to simplified models of knowledge regimes, Eubanks described a group of people who were more

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attuned than expected to the potentials for abuse and unwanted surveillance that ICTs offer to government and big corporations. Eubanks, therefore, suggests that we create a “technology for people,” that is, technology that is both inclusive and enabling: to shift the focus away from mere material access and passive competence, she suggests that we nurture new forms of “critical popular technology, technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement.” (2011) She is not alone in making these proposals, although her research seems more deeply rooted in the everyday reality of actual people than a whole lot of the current research. Nonetheless, Castells’ (2009) recent reformulation of his techno-scientific theorems into a theory of power paired with demands for the use of web technologies to create new types of commons, as is also suggested by Benkler (2007) or Lanier (2013), could in the future be synthesized into a pragmatic model for social progress that would find itself easily reconciled with her experiences and ideas. It should be clear, however, that these arguments, when applied to the question of health care, describe the idea of “care for the self” rather than its individualistic-neoliberal counterpart. The kind of “active citizen” and “active consumer” that the self-care model envisions, which its critics have argued will lead to “passive consumers” instead, because of the focus on consumption, is depicted as a false alternative for example by Lamla (2012).23 The matter, in my view, boils down to the issues of teaching competencies, and creating motivation and enlightening people to the usage aspect. This becomes critically clear in health care, where recently the questions of enrollment via the internet for the Affordable Care Act caused an intense debate. If we draw the logical conclusion that the digitalization of health care and the respective subjectivities that are being constituted, are continually digitalized and created in an informational architecture and motivational structure based on ICTs, digital screens, and so on, then those who have different motivations, different usage, and/or different/less skills will not have access. We can see with Eubanks’ that the motivational aspect is very strong here, specifically in groups that are already marginalized.24 For them, participation in terms of “self care” may not only not be an option, they may not even want it … and perhaps for good reason. Selfcare culture, in terms of biopower (Casper & Moore, 2009; Lemke, 2011; Rose, 2007), that is, governance of life and death, has been critiqued widely and intensely. If we consider the inclusion-and-difference paradigm described above, we can see that from a motivation point of view, participation in the paradigm requires a substantial investment in motivational forms that emerge as a kind of digital cultural capital. But this digital

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capital investment makes possible and invites biopolitical forms of surveillance (see also Clough & Willse, 2011). Allowing the surveillance of one’s differences (race, ethnicity, age, gender) by inclusion, means to allow inclusion by becoming different in other terms: For example, at-risk populations are created along racial demarcations, such as in the case of heart diseases (see, Shim, 2014; also, Pollock, 2012). The main problem here is as Eubanks’s study, as well as the work others mentioned here, illustrates that the issue is not yet well understood conceptually, let alone sufficiently researched empirically. For example, Halford, Lotherington, Obstfelder, and Dyb (2010) also call for more research into the role of ICTs, e-health and different clinical settings. My aim here was, above all, to contribute with as little ado as possible, to a consistent theoretical argument, why the issue of digital technologies transforming health care is (a) dependent on how the experience, that is, the subjectivities of health, illness, and becoming patient is constituted and (b) why and how this is an issue of social justice and inequality. In sum, I argue, if we want to, and I think we need to, create research projects that address these issues properly, and create outcome-oriented policy-solution, we need to reformulate our efforts in terms of the political ontology involved. My modest aim was to trouble established research paradigms in medical sociology, STS, and so on, and to create a critical realist but evidently pragmatic platform to “think with”25 when designing future research.

CONCLUSION: BIODIGITAL CITIZENSHIP Finally, I have argued that the issue of becoming a patient is not just one of having material access to ICTs or medical services but one of motivation. Motivations and affects are structured today by participation in digital ecologies, and these involve also various of subjectivities that are constituted as “being at-risk” and of “being responsible for yourself alone.” The informational architectures that we participate in with our bodies as healthy or ill, always at-risk, to some degree already dead, and the informational architectures of our cell-phones, computers, and so, are integrated and configure us as techno-somatic beings, in the terms described by Stiegler (2013), among others. Sabrina Weiss and I have redescribed this configuration in political terms as biodigital citizenship (2012). Obviously, not everybody is participating in the same inclusive manner and is given the rights of a citizen. We have been looking at the forms of exclusion, at

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Otherness that is so radical that it is not even actively excluded but simply silenced. Othering and silencing are mutual strategies of exclusion that cause a different type of subjectivity.26 In Worlds of ScienceCraft (Restivo et al., 2014) we argued for a new type of solidarity, which may make possible the inclusion of Others that are radically different in ways not covered by inclusion-and-difference paradigms, for example in health care and biomedicine. A concept of a notion of bio-civics was suggested to enable people rather than only empower them. However, between what we were doing in ScienceCraft and our exploration of biodgital citizenship, a researchpolitical step seemed to be missing. The present essay has now filled that gap for research about health care and biomedicine.

NOTES 1. See here also, on decoloniality and critical theory: Mendieta 2001; and on decoloniliaty: Mignolo (2009), Lugones (2008). 2. Those familiar with the book Worlds of ScienceCraft (Restivo et al., 2014) will know that I identify with one of the two other characters that we introduce as analog to the modest cyborg. 3. Although it must be said that we can be skeptical, whether or not care management and organizational efficiency can account for cultural differences as well as they should (Ascoli, Palinski, Owiti, Jongh, & Bhui, 2012). Cazdyn’s discourse refers, rather, to Western coloniality. 4. Death is, as we know at least since Georg Simmel, a “problem of the living,” and from Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Derrida and Agamben, this trope has been subject to very intricate philosophizing. 5. Even to say, health is the absence of symptoms or sickness, etc., does require that the person who experiences health as this absence has an (experiential) knowledge of symptoms or sickness, etc. In other words, one cannot normally experience something if that experience is not intelligible. 6. I want to emphasize that, with postfoundationalists (Marchart, 2007, 2010), I do not necessarily believe in the primacy of “the social” before “the political.” I also agree, we require a new, radical approach to democracy based on a discussion of minimal conditions for any political ontology (Marchart, 2010 names: Organization, strategy, becoming-majority, collectivity, conflictuality, partiality) that will require us to create new ideas about solidarity. In Worlds of ScienceCraft (Restivo et al., 2014), I have suggested one such avenue arguing in favor of techno-scientific practice as the prime example for political ontological inquiry, while also rejecting any notions of “pure” science. For starters, science is always techno-scientific and occurs in the form of practices; secondly, human beings generally use tools (technics), as Weiss and I have argued (Stingl & Weiss, 2014). Political ontology is, therefore, always imbricated with technoscientific governmentality. The creation of solidarity (as suggested in ScienceCraft)

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is therefore a matter of the filigree between the political and technoscience (and analog to Jeffrey Alexander’s (2001) “multiculturalism mode 2”). Marchart considers solidarity in terms of Chantal Mouffe’s discussion of agonistics. To support agonistic, radical democracy in terms of a pragmatic attitude, I have suggested to deploy the concept of usances (Stingl, 2011), particularly in terms of health care policy reform (Stingl tbd). 7. The notions of information and digitality would deserve its own interrogation. As MacKay (1969), Janich (2006), or Eglash (1999) have shown, the folk definitions of either concept are both insufficient and misleading. Nonetheless, for the present purpose, I will deploy the concepts closer to the folk notion than I would elsewhere. 8. This basic premise has, of course, not changed unrecognizably far. 9. As Centor (2007) argues, it would matter greatly in the simple dyad of doctor patient interaction if doctors would just “listen” to their patients. 10. Allen (2014) has conducted an investigation into integrated care pathways (ICPs), which she understands not only as boundary objects, but she also emphasizes the role of nurses in facilitating these ICPs. This mirrors a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the Future of Nursing (2010), which suggests reforms in nurse education, status, and payment. 11. SAT was originally developed to help understand how these possibilities can be mapped and evaluated. For STS, Weiss and myself have further elaborated some of these questions with regard to standards, differentiation, and universalization in the discussion of the so-called “better problem” and “faster problem” in the concluding chapter of Worlds of ScienceCraft (Restivo et al., 2014). 12. It should be noted that even within different disciplinary discourses, disciplinary agendas often settle conceptual and practical premises to facilitate status hierarchy conflicts (Currie, El Enany, & Lockett, 2014). 13. Steered by social imaginaries, such as in terms of the pharmaceutical self, Janis Jenkins and others have used the term of sociosomatic perspective. I would argue in terms of the pharmaceutical self being more fundamentally steered by a techno-scientific imaginary (Shusterman, 2012). 14. Of course, that there can even be a “sociology of diagnosis” as a sub-category within the sociology of medicine is a tribute to the notion of hyperdifferentiation. The terms that Bell (2014) deploys to critique the issue of class, by writing it into a professional discourse through a peer-reviewed article in an established journal based on qualitative interviews, and so on, is a function of the universalization process. The article and the critique she articulates are therefore possible only via the differentiation of an assemblage “sociology of diagnosis” in a current intellectual climate of class critique and within the permitted parameters of an arrangement of academic publishing in medical sociology (see, Stingl, 2011). 15. In this paper, I tend to use disease and disorder interchangeably, as they often and generally are. However, intuitively, I prefer to understand disease as a pathology that a person has contracted, something that is possibly communicable. A disorder is something that is functionally wrong or, at least, abnormal. This said, in my view encephalitis is a disease, whereas ADHD is a disorder, at least with regard to the act of diagnosis, because mental health problems are not contagious, whereas contagious diseases can have symptoms that display in affected mental

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capabilities. This distinction becomes important, once you consider the role of one’s social environment proliferating disorders similar to a disease, which could be the case in ADHD and has been argued for regarding obesity (Christakis & Fowler, 2007). In these cases, I consider the case one of “social pathology.” 16. “closed” in the sense of “made to cohere” or “cloˆture.” 17. For the record, Parsons planned and began to conduct research for his “medical study” in 1934 (perhaps even as early as 1932). The material is basically unpublished, save for the conclusions that he had applied in his work on The Social System (1951; see also on Parsons’ medical study: Stingl, Anthropos’s Scaffolings tbd.). 18. This has often been criticized under the term “professional bias” (HonigParnass, 1981). 19. It is an important historical fact that “management” in medical practice is not exactly a novel development. A leading textbook of lectures for students of medicine, Thomas Laycock, speaks in detail about the “management of care” in 1856 (pp. 132 148). 20. But here, too, action can occur “at a distance.” This wide field is known as “telemedicine” (Breen & Matusitz, 2010). While telemedicine is thought of turning the issue of location or “place” into a negligible factor, Dyb and Halford (2009) showed that telemedicine may actually re-accentuate the importance of place through different practice regimes and (what I call) arrangements. 21. I am just pointing out, without unfolding this here: But, this point could be similarly made with contemporary philosophy of political economy as well, regarding the Taking care of youth and generations and a Pharmacology, which makes life worth living (Stiegler, 2010, 2013). 22. I am leaving aside the digital divide that may or may not exist between Western societies and others, or the structural effects of a rich capitalist class in the cities of the South, who are often described as part of a global capitalist class. While I am highly interested in this (de)colonial discourse, it is a topic of its own, and instead of having to gloss over important details, I prefer bracket the topic entirely. 23. Armstrong’s (2014) study of the history of patient behavior in the 20th century, too, registers a significant change away from the passive model. This puts the questions of agency and/or autonomy on the spot. Traditionally, this has been reconstructed as the move away from the paternalistic model of doctor-patient interaction (see the criticism launched against Parsons’s dyadic model), but must now, of course, include questions of management imperatives ICPs, and informational architectures. 24. It should be mentioned here, that for some marginalized groups, such as people with physical disabilities, ICTs represent a particularly interesting technology that can help enable and empower them beyond physical limitations (see the classic study on the disability divide in internet use by Dobransky & Hargittai, 2006). 25. To use an idea by Marilyn Strathern, Donna Haraway, and others. 26. For a short definition, see http://alexstingl.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/silentothering/ 27. While a lot of literature is cited in the text of this paper, there are other literatures that require referecing to account for the composition of this article, as well as

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the current state of research (even if not exhausting it): Ali, Lifshitz, and Raz (2014); Ansorge (2011); Arber (2012); Association (2011); Aze´tsop and Joy (2013); Bernard (2013); Boyd (2000); Dartington (1979); Eriksen, Kerry, Mumford, Lie, and Anjum (2013); Hardey (2010); Hargittai (n.d.); Hill (2010); Holman (2014); Horrocks and Johnson (2014); Hsieh (2012); Huang, Kimmig, Getoor, and Golbeck (2013); W. pa˚ Sociologisk institut. (2007); Ioannidis (2005); Johnson and Stricker (2010); Klein, Ritchie, Nathan, and Wutzke (2014); Langstrup (2013); Lima, Alves, and Turato (2014); Lupton (2014a); Lupton (2014b); Massumi (2009); Matusitz and Breen (2007); Matusitz, Breen, and Wan (2013); Mauldin (2014); Mechanic and McAlpine (2010); Mehling et al. (2011); Moffatt, Martin, and Timmons (2013); Mol (2008); Neyland and Coopmans (2014); Oulis (2014); Papadimos (2007); Parisi (2009); Parisi (2012); Peiris, Usherwood, Weeramanthri, Cass, and Patel (2011); Pickard (1998); Protevi (2009); Radden (2012); Rains (2008); Rajan (2006); Saario (2012); Schicktanz (2007); Schwartz and Wiggins (2010); Schweda and Schicktanz (2009); Simondon (2012); Starr (1992); Starr (2004); Stingl (2015); Thille, Ward, and Russell (2014); van Dijk (2012); Veenstra and Burnett (2014); Vidal (2009); Violi, Golbeck, Cheng & Kuter (n.d.); Weitz (2012); Xie, Watkins, Golbeck, and Huang (2012).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There is a large number of people in various professional fields and areas of life, who would deserve to be mentioned here and to say thanks to. However, some of them are also informants in said fields and deserve to remain anonymous, whereas others have helped me “only” intellectually. Therefore, with a small exception, I will just say a general “thank you” to the everyone who help(ed) me in my work on biomedicine and care regimes. This paper has a strange history, which leads me to thank (a) most sincerely Harry Dahms, in his role as editor who re-invited its submission and kept insisting on its importance, and (b) the two anonymous reviewers who were brutally honest but equally sincere in insisting on the paper’s potential. This paper was originally written as requested by an editor of another, then brand-new journal in 2008/9. With that journal changing its premise from theory to state-of-the-field reviews, I was asked to rewrite it as a review without, however, changing its message impossible, but I tried. Then a peer-reviewer and a co-editor suggested in 2009/10 a complete overhaul, which would have meant for me to say the exact opposite of what I intended to say back then; I was also given an untenable timeline, while being already backlogged on work. Consequently, I withdrew the paper, though I felt somewhat relieved. I rewrote portions of the paper again in 2010 and 2011 after being asked for a contribution for a different

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anthology. However, by then I had met Sabrina Weiss and we co-wrote a different, original paper for that opportunity. I had also adopted and rewritten a key section from the 2011 version of this paper for the concluding chapter of our book Worlds of ScienceCraft, when shortly after, in 2012, Harry Dahms was looking for fun submissions. Thematically, it was not a good fit for the 2013 volume, but it was for this one. Except, the paper was in terrible shape: outdated, a patchwork of ideas, in need of substantial editing and proof-reading, and inconsistently well, to be brutally honest: horribly written. What you are looking at now represents half of the central ideas of the original, and incorporates perhaps 25% of the original text (of course, heavily edited). For changes regarding its content, I blame, largely, students. I have taught courses at Leuphana University from winter 2011/12 until winter 2013/14 on issues of care, justice, and biomedicine. Students can be wonderful in their way of “innocently” taking apart (your) ideas. I am grateful, for I learned a lot from their questions and discussions, which helped me improve this paper. I need to thank Prof. Dr.med. Thomas Ku¨hlein, who works hard to make his fellow physicians (and unsuspecting STSers) understand what Bayes’s theorem means for clinical practice and how important “quartery prevention” is. Intellectually, as will become clear, I am indebted to besides being quite in awe, admiration, and taken with my partner in life and crime, Sabrina M. Weiss, for “making all this trouble” with me.

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PART II SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM, DISTRACTORS, AND AUTHORITARIANISM: AXIOLOGICAL VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY Robert B. Smith ABSTRACT Purpose This essay studies disconnections between the macrolevel societal problems of a state and more microlevel political alignments. Design/methodology/approach Using a dataset composed of macrolevel measures of state problems and microlevel responses to a 2008 election survey, this essay applies multilevel statistical models to explain the state-to-state variance between the states on anti-abortion and pro-gun sentiments. This analysis uncovers the macro- and microlevel factors that disconnect a state’s neglect-of-children indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about abortion, and the factors that disconnect a state’s crime indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about guns.

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 95 133 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032005

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Findings The initial associations between a state’s indicators of neglect of children and anti-abortion sentiments are explained by the state’s lower human development (HD) and social attributes, especially religious beliefs, which predict social conservatism. The initial associations between a state’s indicators of crime and incarcerations are also explained by a state’s lower HD and the social attributes, especially religious beliefs, which predict social conservatism. Considering both abortion and guns as key indicators of social conservatism, the voters’ political choices exhibit a moralistic axiological rationality rather than a more pragmatic instrumental rationality. Originality/value The moral absolutism associated with sentiments about abortion and guns suggests that social conservatism and authoritarianism are intertwined but separate conceptions, which have similar consequences and determinants. Both may be influenced by the same changes in social and educational policies, especially the quality of education. Keywords: Social conservatism; axiological and instrumental; distractors; authoritarianism; abortion; guns

The political parties, meanwhile, are unable to make sense of our condition. The main topics of national debate — the proper scope of the welfare state, the extent of rights and entitlements, the proper degree of government regulation — take their shape from the arguments of an earlier day. These are not unimportant topics; but they do not reach the two concerns that lie at the heart of democracy’s discontent. One is the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives. The other is the sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us. These two fears—for the loss of selfgovernment and the erosion of community — together define the anxiety of the age. It is an anxiety that the prevailing political agenda has failed to answer or even address. — Sandel (1996, p. 3)

INTRODUCTION Weber’s (1958 [1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism connected ascetic Protestantism to values aligned with the needs of capitalism. To explain contemporary polarization in Congress, William D’Antonio

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and his colleagues connected the religion of representatives in Congress to their political conservatism and subsequent positions on social and economic issues: conservatism mediates the effects of religion on political variables; conceptually, religious beliefs → ideological conservatism → positions on political variables (D’Antonio, Tuch, & Baker, 2013). Similarly, this study examines how the public’s religious traditions affect indicators of their social conservatism, and how the latter explains linkages between some of the problems of the states in the United States and their citizens’ political sentiments. For example, if the citizens have sentiments that are aligned with the problems of their state, then one expects a state’s favorable indicators of neglect of children to be aligned with pro-life and anti-abortion sentiments because both of these factors suggest valuing the well-being of children, born and unborn. Moreover, one expects a state’s unfavorable indicators of crime and incarcerations to be aligned with progun and pro-NRA sentiments because the citizens want guns for protection and recreation. Consequently, this essay tests the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1. The citizens’ sentiments about certain social issues are aligned with the objectively measured societal problems of their states. Alternative Hypothesis. The citizens’ religious beliefs and their states’ cultural contexts misalign (i.e., disconnect) their sentiments from the societal problems of the states. The first hypothesis assumes that the citizens’ actions exhibit instrumental rationality, which implies a reasonable assessment of means to achieve rationally chosen ends. The alternative hypothesis assumes that the citizens’ actions exhibit axiological rationality, which implies a single-minded pursuit of an ultimate moralistic goal.1 This research favors the alternative hypothesis as an explanation of the effects of indicators of social conservatism and related variables.2

Research Strategy To test these hypotheses this essay studies: (1) sentiments about abortion and guns as key factors that distract voters from instrumentally rational considerations of the problems of their states and (2) how these distractors are connected to authoritarianism. It develops a set of indicators of macrolevel societal problems indicative of a state’s neglect of children and

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shows how these factors initially are positively related to anti-abortion sentiments the greater a state’s neglect of children the more anti-abortion are its citizens. It then shows how the citizens’ religious traditions and other social attributes combined with a state’s HD disconnect the abortion sentiments from the neglect-of-children indicators: a state’s HD index combines its scores for indicators of health, education, and economic well-being.3 Similarly, to study support for the gun possession and use, this essay develops a set of macrolevel indicators of crime and relates these rates to sentiments about the NRA, the organizational advocate of gun-rights. Rates of violent crime and homicides by firearms are initially unrelated to the NRA indicator, thus questioning the oft-stated need for guns for protection of family and property. When the HD context and the religious and other social attributes are controlled, then the linkages between state’s crime rates and pro-gun sentiments are attenuated; the initial relationships are spurious. The South and Heartland and devout religious traditions and religious participation shape these pro-life and pro-gun sentiments, which are core indicators of social conservatism; the other social attributes as coded have negative effects. Apparently, many citizens favor axiological rationality over instrumental rationality regarding abortion and guns, and their absolutism links them to authoritarianism. Indicators of social conservatism and authoritarianism have similar determinants and consequences but these constructs are not identical.4 But the same strategy promises to ameliorate their unfavorable consequences.5 Given that short-term solutions to myriad societal problems and authoritarian tendencies cannot be readily implemented because of political gridlock and lack of concern, what longer-term solutions may be feasible? Improving the quality of education of Americans would be a key change.6 Improved quality of education that stresses skills relevant to post-industrial economies, as well as emphasizing that people who are better off are obligated to help the less fortunate, could drive improvements in income, health, and politics thereby enhancing socioeconomic status (SES), while at the same time providing a prophylactic against the disease of authoritarianism.7 Prior Theorizing and Research By focusing on contexts, social attributes, and ideology, this essay contributes to cumulative research on these topics. The following past contributions directly shaped this study, while the endnotes cite other salient past contributions.

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Contexts Red state, blue state, rich state, poor state by Andrew Gelman et al. (2008). Among their many important findings this research team reports that wealthy people in poor states tend to vote for conservative candidates but wealthy people in richer states tend to vote for liberal candidates. Moreover, red Republican states tend to be poor and blue Democrat states tend to be rich. This present research shows that the political color of a state is influenced by the categories of a typology of states. It expands the notion of rich and poor states by introducing a multidimensional HD index that includes indicators of income, health, and education. The measure of America: American human development report 2008 2009 by Burd-Sharps, Lewis, and Martins (2008). This team has organized a large number of indicators on the states in the United States and has shown how their index of HD affects these indicators. This present research links their dataset to an election night survey for the 2008 presidential election, creates a typology of states, and performs statistical analyses analyzing how contexts and social attributes contribute to the disconnection between the societal problems of the states and the voters’ political alignments. Social cleavages and political change by Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks (1999). These researchers primarily focused on how social class, religion, gender, and race affect voting alignments in the United States. This present research expands the number of social attributes that may influence ideology and voting and develops regression graph models of the effects of social attributes and state contexts on aspects of social ideology. Ideologies Ideology in America by Christopher Ellis and James A. Stimson (2012). These authors applied their innovative procedures to track changes in ideology from the post-World War II era to the present, distinguished symbolic ideology (gauged by self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) from operational ideology (which includes policy choices), and put forward doctrinal conservatism as a key component of social conservatism. The present research develops a pragmatic index of operational ideology, gauges doctrinal conservatism by feelings about abortion and gay marriage, measures gun-use conservatism by feelings about guns and military interventions, and combines doctrinal and gun-use conservatism to form a valid and reliable bipolar index of social conservatism versus social liberalism. The persuadable voter: Wedge issues in presidential campaigns by Hillygus and Shields (2008). The authors define a wedge issue as any policy

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concern that is used to divide the opposition’s potential winning coalition. Such moral issues as gay marriage and abortion are typical wedge issues, but economic and social welfare policies also are used in a wedge strategy. Their experiments show that wedge issues can persuade cross-pressured voters to vote for the party supporting their sentiments, while also reinforcing the choices of their own partisans. This present study studies how the wedge issues of abortion and guns can distract voters from considering the palpable problems of child neglect and crime in their own states; these contexts and social attributes disconnect these societal problems from the voters’ sentiments. Disconnect: The breakdown of representation in American politics by Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams (2009). Fiorina with Abrams (2009) emphasize the disconnection between the policies of the representatives of citizens serving in Congress and the public’s attitudes. This present study shall emphasize the disconnection between the objective needs of the states of the United States and their citizens’ political choices. It examines the disconnections between the societal problems of the states that may be severe and the electoral choices of the voters who may be distracted from considering these problems when they vote. Authoritarianism Authoritarianism & polarization in American Politics by Hetherington and Weiler (2009). These authors defined authoritarianism as obedience to authority and gauged it by child-rearing strategies stressing obedience to parental authority rather than encouragement of personal autonomy. They related authoritarianism to ethnocentrism, political, and economic conservatism, and such social attributes as religious traditions, church attendance, region of the country, urban versus rural residence, and education. The present research shows that authoritarianism and social conservatism are intertwined concepts that have similar determinants and consequences empirically.

RESEARCH METHODS Microlevel Data and Pivotal Variables This essay analyzes survey data from telephone interviews of voters in the 2008 election. This survey was conducted by the advocacy organization

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Democracy Corps and the polling agency Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (GQR): 2,000 voters completed the interviews on November 4 5, 2008, 1,075 voters on election-day (54.9 percent weighted), and 925 voters the day after the election (45.1 percent weighted).8 GQR drew a randomdigit telephone survey sample of landline telephone numbers, conducted the interviews over the phone, formed survey weights, and conducted their analyses.9 Using these weights for the total sample, the distributions of sample characteristics are very close to the benchmark values of the 2008 exit polls. Social Conservatism Conceptually, social conservatism (vs. social liberalism) implies a commitment to traditional values concerning the family, sexual relations, patriotism, and gun ownership and use.10 The two dimensions of the composite index of social conservatism taps doctrinal conservatism as indicated by sentiments against abortion and gay marriage, and gun-use conservatism as indicated by sentiments favoring the military intervention in Iraq and the NRA. These sentiments are indicated by feeling thermometers scaled as zero (i.e., cold feelings) to 100 (i.e., warm feelings), with 50 as intermediate. Effects of Social Conservatism. Fig. 1 sorts the means of the political variables by the four categories of social conservatism. A polarity is the difference between two extreme means. The polarity for the seven-category macrolevel Blue-Purple-Red (BPR) classification (14.3 percentage points) is smaller than polarities for these microlevel political variables: engaged operational ideology, 46.2 percentage points (i.e., this measures combines liberalism and conservatism with views about the direction of the country); symbolic ideology (i.e., liberalism vs. conservatism), 55.1 percentage points; party affiliation, 75.1 percentage points; and vote for McCain, 82.7 percentage points. Clearly, social conservatism is a pivotal determinant of these political variables. This may be because doctrinal conservatism and gunuse conservatism the two components of social conservatism tap fundamental worries about morality and uncontrolled forces that may impinge on one’s property and loved ones, as suggested by the epigraph to this essay. Consequently, the deeply held sentiments composing social conservatism can act as distractors, disconnecting a voter’s focus from the needs of the state to moral issues concerning abortion rights and the ownership and use of guns, two key components of social conservatism.

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Mean of Response Variable

0.700 0.600 0.500 0.400 0.300 0.200 0.100 0.000 High

Medium High

Medium Low

Low

BPR Detailed

0.525

0.468

0.418

0.382

Operational Ideology

0.708

0.558

0.381

0.246

Symbolic Ideology

0.855

0.694

0.509

0.344

Party Affiliation

0.839

0.676

0.273

0.088

Vote for McCain

0.880

0.705

0.225

0.053

Social Conservatism Typology

Fig. 1.

Means of Political Variables by Four Categories of Social Conservatism, Higher Scores indicate Pro Conservative Sentiments.

Distractors. Distractors are sentiments that political campaigns can activate by wedge issues that focus on these latent variables with the aim of moving voters who align with one party to align with the other party because it supports the person’s sentiments and the initial party does not.11 Moral sentiments about the morality of abortions and the efficacy of owning and using guns are now two key distractors which also are indicators of social conservatism. Feelings about same-gender relationships and the Iraq war, the other indicators of social conservatism are less salient now than in the recent past.12 Politicians on the Right or on the Left formulate wedge issues that target such sentiments as these, with the aim of moving cross-pressured people to vote for their candidates and to support their positions on issues and policies.13 A cross-pressured voter may favor women’s choice and also favor the possession and use of guns; or may be against women’s choice and favor attempts to regulate the ownership and use of guns.

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Covariates The statistical analyses will control for numerous microlevel social attributes, most importantly in this essay a person’s religious tradition grouped as Evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant, and not saying Christian (i.e., seculars and a few Jewish people), and a person’s religious attendance grouped as often, occasionally, and almost never. Other controls are: age category, urban versus rural residence, marital status (i.e., single, formerly married, married, or surviving spouse), African American, Hispanic, gender, first-time voter, union family, education, and at the macrolevel a typology of states. Macrolevel Data and Explanatory Variables The measures of HD and income equality characterizing each state in the United States are provided by the American Human Development Project. To gauge HD that project combined indicators of life expectancy, access to education, and income forming a valid and reliable (α = 0.86) construct. HD can be viewed as a comprehensive measure of a state’s SES because good health enhances income and knowledge, the two components of the HD index often used to gauge SES. Typologies By cross-classifying the states according to their HD dichotomized as lower (0) or higher (1) versus their income equality (gauged by their Gini’s coefficient) also dichotomized as lower (0) or higher equality (1), a four-category typology characterizing the states are formed. Each category of states the South (coded 0, 0), Heartland (0, 1), post-industrial (1, 0), and balancedbaseline (1, 1) has some characteristics that suppress the capacities for HD of its residents. Post-industrial states have knowledge-based economies and are not “rust-belt” states (Bell, 1976). The map of Fig. 2 portrays how this typology distributes the 50 states and Washington, DC across the United States. The states classified as South are geographically southern. The Heartland states are primarily in the Midwest and Great Plains. The post-industrial states are clustered in the coastal Northeast but also include Florida, Illinois, and California. The states balancing HD and equality are spread geographically providing a baseline for comparisons. Earlier research has validated the appropriateness of the names of these categories of states and traced their consequences.14 For example, indicators of post-industrial state economies include rates of internet access

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ME

WA MT OR

ID WY NV

CA

VT

ND

MN WI

SD

AZ

CO

NM

PA

IA

NE UT

KS OK

MO

MD

WV KY

NJ

CT

RI

DE

VA NC

TN

SC

AR MS

TX

OH

IN

IL

NH MA

NY

MI

AL

GA

LA FL

AK

HI

Fig. 2.

South

Post-Industrial

Heartland

Balanced-Baseline

Types of States.

at home, per pupil funding, spending on research and development, accessibility to medical services, and superfund environmental cleanup sites. The states are not completely homogeneous with respect to the typology’s categories: different census tracts, cities, and areas within a state may deviate from the overall pattern. The South is the least post-industrial of these categories of states but it includes such high technology clusters like the Research Triangle Park and the SAS Institute, as well as fine universities. This typology identifies many differences between the states on macrolevel indicators of social problems: the South is worse off than the Heartland and the Heartland is worse off than the post-industrial states.15 Both the baseline and the post-industrial states have higher HD and therefore rather similar consequences. Even though income inequality and economic insecurity mark the post-industrial states, in some analyses these four categories will be reduced to South, Heartland, and states with higher HD. Although these typologies validly classify the states on macrolevel indicators of social problems, they have limited effects on microlevel political variables. This difference suggests a disconnection between the palpable problems of the states and their political alignments.16

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Effects of Typology Fig. 3 depicts the effects of the macrolevel four-category typology of states on the macrolevel BPR classification and on microlevel indicators of social conservatism, conservative operational ideology, Republican party affiliation, and vote for McCain. Here the patterns of polarities differ from those in Fig. 1. With the very conservative South at one extreme and the very liberal post-industrial states at the other extreme, this depiction shows that the only large polarity is that for the seven-category macrolevel BPR classification of states, it is 0.534 or 53.4 percentage points. The polarities for the microlevel political variables in percentage point differences are much smaller than the macrolevel BPR difference: social conservatism, 14.2, operational ideology, 7.1, party affiliation, 9.1, and vote for McCain, 14.9. The typology of states organizes the patterns of the state-level indicators of social and economic problems, but its effects on the microlevel political variables are muted, especially compared to those observed for social conservatism, a key structuring variable.

0.800

Mean of Response Variable

0.700

0.600

0.500

0.400

0.300

0.200

South

Heartland

BPR Detailed

0.748

0.547

Balanced-Baseline 0.351

0.214

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0.597

0.557

0.491

0.455

Operational Ideology

0.507

0.498

0.455

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Party Affiliation

0.499

0.520

0.454

0.408

Vote for McCain

0.532

0.504

0.437

0.383

Fig. 3. Means of Political Variables by Four Types of States, Higher Scores Indicate Pro Conservative Sentiments.

Post-Industrial

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Statistical Models The multilevel modeling of this essay aims to clarify how abortion and guns can act as distractors. With anti-abortion sentiments as an example, a zero to 100 feelings thermometer for pro-life and anti-abortion sentiments will be regressed sequentially on a set of macrolevel indicators of neglect of children. (A similar strategy will guide the analysis of crime indicators and pro-gun sentiments.) The first analysis focuses on the factors that eliminate the variance component between the states. Model 1, the baseline model that lacks explanatory variables, quantifies the variance between the states and the variance among the people within the states. The significant initial variance between the states implies that with respect to the response variable some states have scores noticeably above the mean and others have scores noticeably below the mean. The other models are: Model 2, a macrolevel problem of the state is the sole explanatory variable; Model 3, the macrolevel problem of the state plus the set of social attributes are the explanatory variables; Model 4, the macrolevel problem of the state and the macrolevel three-category ordinal classification of the states are the explanatory variables; and Model 5, the macrolevel problem of the state, the social attributes, and the classification of the states are the explanatory variables. Model 5 often is the best model in that the between-state variance component is not significant and the BIC goodness-of-fit statistic has its lowest value. These best models include the effects of the level-1 social attributes and the level-2 classification of the states. The second analysis focuses on how the size of the effect of the societal problem indicator on the response variable is reduced under the controls for Models 2 through 5. For example, a societal problem indictor like a state’s percentage of low-birth-weight (LBW) infants initially has a substantial positive effect on anti-abortion sentiments. In Model 3 when the set of social attributes is controlled, the effect of LBW infants is reduced. Similarly, in Model 4 when the ordinal classification of states is the only control, the effect of LBW infants also is reduced. Finally, in Model 5 the joint controls for the state context and the social attributes obliterate the effect of the LBW indicator on the response variable. The initial relationship between the LBW indicator and the anti-abortion response variable is spurious (i.e., disconnected) when the individual-level social attributes and the macrolevel state context is controlled. Close inspection of the effects of the social attributes and the typology will show that people adhering to conservative religious traditions support restrictions on abortions while people with more liberal attributes such as

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African Americans, women, singles, and educated people, along with states with higher HD, oppose such restrictions. When these covariates are controlled, then the effects of a state’s neglect of children are no longer relevant. Similar patterns result when macroindicators of crime and incarcerations and the social and contextual attributes are studied as these relate to sentiments about the NRA. These potential macroissues fade in importance, while the debate between people with different moral sentiments continues.

RESULTS Neglect of Children and Sentiments about Abortion The eight state-level indicators of neglect of children are the stimulus variables. These include: life expectancy at birth (in years), the percentage of LBW infants, births to teenage girls (per thousand), infant mortality rate (per thousand), child mortality, aged 1 4 (per 100,000), the percentage of children living in poverty, the percentage of children living in povertystricken families, and, since obesity begins in childhood, the percentage of obese people aged 20 or older. Sentiments favoring abortion restrictions are the response variable, which is measured on a zero to 100 feelings thermometer. Given that anti-abortion advocates justify their sentiments as being pro-life, it follows that such people can be expected to work toward ameliorating the child-neglect indicators characterizing their states. Empirically, states characterized by higher scores on indicators of child neglect (i.e., the South and Heartland) tend to have citizens who are against abortion rights, perhaps leading to unwanted pregnancies and children, and to child neglect. Apparently, many citizens exhibit axiological rationality concerning abortion rights. Table 1 lists the eight child-neglect indicators in each row independently and then for each of these five multilevel models are estimated. Model 1 estimates the baseline variance component for abortion feelings across the states when there are no explanatory variables in the equation, for ease of comparison this variance component is repeated for each child-neglect indicator. Model 2 shows the singular effect of a neglect indicator on the between-state variance component. Model 3 shows the joint effect of the neglect indicator and the social attributes on the variance component. Model 4 shows the size of the component when both the neglect indicator

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Table 1. Effects of State-Level Child-Neglect Indicators and Covariates on the Between-States Variance Component for Anti-Abortion Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates, States Nested in Three-Category Ordinal Classification. Anti-Abortion Sentiments is the Response Variable (on 0 to 100 scale)

Baseline Model, No Explanatory Variables

State-Level Neglect Indicator

State-Level Neglect Indicator, Control Attributes

State-Level Neglect Indicator, Control Attributes and State Typology

Model 3

State-Level Neglect Indicator, Control State Typology Model 4

State-Level Neglect Indicators

Model 1

Model 2

Life expectancy at birth (years) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

21.60 p = 0.0698 20091.0

8.45 p = 0.1775 19811.6

14.54 p = 0.1585 20093.4

2.64 p = 0.3819 19809.5

Low birth weight infants (%) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

26.04 p = 0.0431 20091.3

6.02 p = 0.2183 19806.5

10.85 p = 0.2096 20088.9

2.99 p = 0.3595 19807.4

Births to teenage girls (per 1000) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

21.99 p = 0.0543 20089.4

0

0

19800.2

16.88 p = 0.1065 20092.7

19806.3

Infant mortality rate (per 1000) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

26.95 p < 0.0001 20094.0

10.02 p = 0.1383 19811.1

14.67 p = 0.1524 20092.5

3.50 p = 0.3468 19809.2

Child mortality, aged 1 4 years (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

31.01 p < 0.0001 20091.4

2.86 p = 0.3425 19807.6

5.57 p = 0.3026 20084.7

Model 5

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0

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

25.24 p = 0.0452 20092.4

2.40 p = 0.3729 19803.3

17.67 p = 0.1110 20094.7

0.335 p = 0.4823 19807.5

Children living in poverty families (%) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

29.47 p = 0.0289 20094.3

2.91 p = 0.3435 19807.0

19.01 p = 0.0980 20095.2

0.949 p = 0.4500 19807.6

Obesity aged 20 or older (%) Probabilities BICs (ML)

59.02 p = 0.0066 20104.5

23.62 p = 0.0568 20088.9

7.59 p = 0.1986 19809.3

15.16 p = 0.1449 20091.5

3.47 p = 0.3469 19808.5

Notes: The rate (per 100,000) is referenced to a state’s population. The variance components are restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates and the BICs are maximum likelihood estimates (ML) for the same models.

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Children under 6 living in poverty (%) Probabilities BICs (ML)

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and the three-category typology of states are in the equation. Model 5 shows the size of the variance component when the neglect indicator, the social attributes, and the three-category typology of states form the structure of a regression equation.17 There are several ways of interpreting these numbers. First, comparing the between-state variance components for Model 2 to those for Model 1, in Model 2 the state-level neglect indicators reduce the between-state variance components by about one-half. These neglect indicators also reduce the sizes of the BIC goodness-of-fit measures but the variance components remain statistically significant, or are very close to significant.18 Next, comparing the between-state variance components for Model 3 to those for Model 2, the additional controls for the social attributes reduce the sizes of these variance components, which are no longer statistically significant, and also reduce the sizes of the BIC coefficients, producing the best-fitting models thus far. Now comparing the between-state variance components for Model 4 with those for Model 3, even though none of Model 4 variance components are statistically significant, they are considerably larger than those for Model 3, as are the BIC coefficients. Holding constant the effects of indicators of neglect of children, the social attributes have stronger effects on the between-state variance components for abortion sentiments than do the three categories of this typology of states. However, in Model 5, which includes the joint effects of the indicators of child neglect, the social attributes, and the ordinal typology of states, the sizes of the between-state variance components attain their smallest values and the null-effect probabilities are the largest, the BICs are about the same sizes as those for Model 3. The social attributes alone have strong effects, but the additional joint controls for the ordinal typology of states and the social attributes generally produce the better explanations of the between-state variance components. Table 2 presents the effects of the state-level indicators of neglect of children on the voters’ anti-abortion sentiments under the controls of Models 2 through 5; Model 1 presented the uncontrolled between-state variance component and is not relevant here. Reading down the column of data for Model 2, each state-level child-neglect indicator (including shorter life expectancy at birth) has a positive effect on anti-abortion sentiments. The more child neglect in a state, the more anti-abortion are its residents unwanted pregnancies are associated with more child neglect. Conversely, the less child neglect in a state, the more pro-choice are its residents terminations of unwanted pregnancies are associated with less

Effects of State-Level Child-Neglect Indicators on Individual-Level Anti-Abortion Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates, States Nested in Three-Category Ordinal Classification.

Anti-Abortion Sentiments is the Response Variable

State-Level Neglect Indicators Life expectancy at birth (years) Low birth weight infants (%) Births to teenage girls (per 1,000 aged 15 19) Infant mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) Child mortality aged 1 4 (per 100,000 population) Children under 6 years living in poverty (%) Children living in families below the poverty line (%) Obesity aged 20 or older (%)

Effect of State-Level Child-Neglect Indicator

Effect of State-Level ChildNeglect Indicator, Control Attributes

Effect of State-Level ChildNeglect Indicator, Control State Typology

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Effect of State-Level ChildNeglect Indicator, Control Attributes and State Typology Model 5

−3.37, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008 4.09, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008 0.45, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008 3.56, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008 0.72, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008

−1.09, p = 0.0814 B p = 0.1194 2.08, p = 0.0044 B p = 0.0308 0.23, p = 0.0006 B p = 0.0048 1.35, p = 0.0597 B p = 0.1194 0.34, p = 0.0067 B p = 0.0308

−1.82, p = 0.0786 B p = 0.2358 2.75, p = 0.0063 B p = 0.0441 0.26, p = 0.0435 B p = 0.2175 1.87, p = 0.0451 B p = 0.2175 0.46, p = 0.0044 B p = 0.0352

−0.15, p = 0.8613 B p = 1.0000 1.26, p = 0.1367 B p = 0.8202 0.18, p = 0.0719 B p = 0.5033 0.50, p = 0.5085 B p = 1.0000 0.26, p = 0.0623 B p = 0.4984

1.02, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008 1.14, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008

0.51, p = 0.0053 B p = 0.0308 0.60, p = 0.0050 B p = 0.0308

0.48, p = 0.1498 B p = 0.2996 0.476, p = 0.1926 B p = 0.2996

0.36, p = 0.1544 B p = 0.8202 0.385, p = 0.1646 B p = 0.8202

1.94, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0008

0.78, p = 0.0215 B p = 0.0645

1.21, p = 0.0236 B p = 0.1416

0.48, p = 0.2767 B p = 0.8301

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Notes: The step-down Bonferroni probabilities (B p) are calculated based on the eight raw probabilities in a column of data. The first column shows that states with higher scores on indicators of neglect of children have residents with higher anti-abortion (i.e., pro-life) sentiments; restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates.

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Table 2.

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child neglect. In either interpretation, the effects are statistically significant even when Bonferroni-adjusted for the eight comparisons down the column, B p = 0.0008. The controls for the social attributes in Model 3, when compared to the effects in Model 2, do reduce the effects of the child-neglect indicators on anti-abortion sentiments but do not eliminate all of them. Six of the eight child-neglect indicators initially retain the statistical significance of their effects, when adjusted for the multiple comparisons the number drops to five of the eight. These five are LBW infants, births to teenage girls, child mortality, children under six living in poverty, and children living in poverty-stricken families. Thus, the higher a state’s child neglect on these five indicators, the more likely strong anti-abortion sentiments, even controlling for the effects of the social attributes; conversely, the lower the child neglect on these five indicators, the more likely pro-choice sentiments. However, these controls for the social attributes do disconnect abortion sentiments from the child-neglect indicators for life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, and obesity. Model 4 includes the indicators of child neglect and the ordinal threecategory classification of states. The latter is coded with the South = 1, Heartland = 0.5, and Higher HD states (i.e., post-industrial and baseline) = 0. These models treat this variable as a classification with the South being the baseline for the two indicator variables: South versus Heartland, and South versus higher HD. The results for Model 4 show initially that five childneglect factors have statistically significant effects on abortion sentiments: LBW infants, births to teenage girls, infant mortality rate, child mortality, and obesity aged 20 or older. When these effects are adjusted for the multiple comparisons, only child mortality retains its statistical significance, B p = 0.0352. The state typology disconnects these seven child-neglect indicators from the abortion sentiments. The South is most strongly antiabortion, with the Heartland intermediate, and the higher HD states least anti-abortion. Conversely, the higher HD states are most pro-choice, the Heartland is intermediate, and the South least pro-choice. When in Model 5 the social attributes and the three-category typology of states are simultaneously controlled, the child-neglect indicators have no statistically significant effects on abortion sentiments. There is a complete disconnection between the macrolevel needs of the states to ameliorate the neglect of their children and the abortion sentiments of their residents. Instead, these sentiments are shaped by the HD of the state and the social attributes. The statistically significant social attributes shaping anti-abortion sentiments are devout religious traditions and religious participation, and

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those shaping pro-choice sentiments are post-graduate education, urban residence, singles, and women. The regression graph of Fig. 4 presents the effect sizes (i.e., b regression coefficients) and confidence intervals for these significant variables. Older people, African Americans, Hispanics, and union families lean toward pro-choice sentiments. Many of the citizens exhibit axiological rationality concerning abortion and not instrumental rationality bearing on the palpable problems of their state. The religious attributes as coded are key determinants of social conservatism while other attributes as coded are key determinants of social liberalism. The difference in the direction of these effects creates much of the divisiveness between liberals and conservatives about the morality of abortions, as do different sentiments about guns.

Pr > F = 0.2815

State Contexts: State Typology

1.26 (–0.40, 2.93) Low Birth Weight 19.6 (15.68, 23.47)

C

Religious Attendance

18.5 (14.2, 22.8)

Anti-Abortion Sentiments C

Religious Traditions –7.85 (–11.8, –3.92) Post–Graduate Education –6.22 (–10.15, –2.29)

Urban Residence

–5.91 (–10.34, –1.49) Singles –5.08 (–8.07, –2.09) Women

Fig. 4. Regression Graph Depiction of Direct Effects on Anti-Abortion Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates for Model 5. Note: Solid circles represent dichotomies; empty circles, ordinal variables; and C, continuous variables. The arrows report the unstandardized b regression coefficients and their confidence intervals. African Americans, Elders, Hispanics, and union families have insignificant negative effects; first time voters have an insignificant positive effect. These effects are not reported in this diagram. With these controls the effects of rates of low-birthweight children and the three-category typology of states are not statistically significant. The other indicators of child neglect also have null effects.

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Crime and Sentiments about Guns Here, the seven state-level indicators of crime are the stimulus variables. These include violent crime (per 100,000), the percentage of homicides by firearms, property crime (per 100,000), rape (per 100,000), homicides (per 100,000), incarcerations (per 100,000), and ineligibility to vote due to a felony. Pro-gun sentiments are the response variable which is indicated by favorable feelings toward the NRA. Given that people often rationalize their possession and use of guns by a perceived need for protection, it follows that states with higher scores on the crime indicators would have citizens who have more favorable sentiments toward the NRA. The subsequent analyses show that the linkage between state-level crime indicators and the individual’s sentiments about guns are not strongly linked, especially when the state’s developmental context and the individual’s social attributes are controlled. Apparently, many citizens exhibit axiological rationality about gun possession and use. Table 3 analyzes the determinants of the between-state variance components. Model 1 shows how the baseline variance component for pro-gun sentiments measured on a zero to 100 feelings thermometer varies across the states when there are no explanatory variables. The variance component of 42.4 is statistically significant (p = 0.0078) there is significant variance in NRA sentiments across the states. For ease of comparison the results of this model appear for each crime indicator in the first column of data. Model 2 specifies each state-level crime indicator as a unique determinant of pro-NRA sentiments. With these variables in the models the between-state variance components all remain statistically significant and the BICs are about the same as in the first model the crime indicators do not explain the between-state variance components of the crime indicators. Model 3 adds to the crime indicators controls for the social attributes. These controls explain much of the between-state variance components: the probabilities are considerably greater than the .05 cut point and the BICs are the lowest values thus far. Model 4 adds to the crime indicators controls for the three types of states. These controls also reduce the between-state variance components to insignificance, the BICs are lower than those for Model 2 but generally higher than those for Model 3. The controls for the social attributes have stronger effects on the variance component than the controls for the state typology. Model 5 introduces joint controls for the social attributes and the state typology: all of the between-state variance components are now zero, the probabilities are 1.0, and six of the seven BICs attain their lowest values for these models, the

Pro-NRA Sentiments is the Response Variable (zero to 100 scale) State-Level Crime Indicators Violent crime (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML) Homicides by firearms (%) Probabilities BICs (ML) Property crime (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML) Rape (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML) Homicides (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML) Incarcerations (per 100,000) Probabilities BICs (ML) Ineligible to vote due to felony (convictions per 100,000 voters) Probabilities BICs (ML)

Baseline Model, No Explanatory Variables

State-Level Crime Indicator

State-Level Crime Indicator, Control Attributes

State-Level Crime Indicator, Control State Typology

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1 42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1 42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1 42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1 42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1 42.40 p = 0.0078 19700.1

51.99 p < 0.0001 19703.9 40.14 p = 0.0095 18690.6 32.31 p = 0.0243 19700.8 28.47 p = 0.0324 19698.5 46.90 p < 0.0001 19453.7 21.90 p = 0.0308 18864.1

3.93 p = 0.2494 19405.0 7.14 p = 0.1525 18404.8 0

0.655 p = 0.4562 19677.5 0

42.40 p = 0.0078 19700

34.60 p = 0.0142 19400.4

19395.0 1.46 p = 0.3873 19398.4 1.97 p = 0.3499 19163.8 0 18579.4 2.86 p = 0.3167 19105.7

State-Level Crime Indicator, Control Attributes and State Typology Model 5 0 19394.4 0

18663.9 0.7709 p = 0.4482 19677.3 0

19394.6 0

19673.9 0

19393.8 0

19429.3 3.22 p = 0.3078 18853.7

19156.1 0

0 19374.1

18393.1 0

Social Conservatism, Distractors, and Authoritarianism

Table 3. Effects of State-Level Crime Indicators and Covariates on the Between-States Variance Component for Pro-NRA Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates, States Nested in Three-Category Ordinal Classification.

18582.2 0 19096.2

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Notes: The rates per 100,000 are referenced to the states’ populations unless otherwise stated. The variance components are restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates; the BICs are maximum likelihood estimates (ML) for the same models as those for the variance components.

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exception is incarcerations per 100,000 population. The joint controls for the state context and a respondent’s social attributes produce the bestfitting models. Macrolevel contexts and microlevel attributes are both relevant. Table 4 presents the sizes of the effects of the crime indicators on proNRA sentiments. Model 2 shows that the effects of state-level violent crimes, homicides by firearms, and property crime (p = 0.066) have statistically insignificant effects on pro-NRA sentiments these factors tend to negate the rationalizations of gun owners that they need guns for protection. Prior to Bonferroni adjustments for the multiple comparisons, significant effects on pro-NRA sentiments characterize these four crime indicators: rape, homicides, incarcerations, and disenfranchised felons. However, when the effects of the seven indicators are Bonferroni-adjusted only incarcerations per 100,000 of population have a statistically significant effect on pro-NRA sentiments. When in Model 3 violent crimes and homicides are studied under the controls for the social attributes their effects are insignificant (B p = 0.1551). But the effects of four of the five other crime indicators are statistically significant even when Bonferroni-adjusted, only the rate of disenfranchised felons fails to attains its initial significance (B p = 0.1551). The controls for the social attributes tend to increase the significance of some of the effects of the state-level crime indicators. However, when in Model 4 the three-category typology of states is controlled, only the initial effects of homicides by firearms and incarcerations are significant, but these lose their significance when Bonferroni-adjusted. With the South as the baseline for the indicator variables, the higher HD states support the NRA much less than does the South, the difference is about −11.1 feeling degrees and all of these effects are statistically significant (p < 0.0001), whereas the differences between the Heartland and the South are much smaller, about 2.0 feeling degrees and all are not significant; the p-values are noticeably larger than 0.05. Model 5 shows that the joint controls for the social attributes and the state contexts totally disconnect the state crime indicators from the proNRA sentiments after the Bonferroni adjustments. This result implies that being pro-NRA, the indicator of pro-gun sentiments, has very little to do with the different crime rates of the states, instead these sentiments are better explained by the social attributes and the HD and income inequality of the states, as captured by the three-category typology. For each crime indicator prior to the Bonferroni adjustments only incarcerations per 100,000 have statistically significant effects under the four conditions of control.

Effects of State-Level Crime Indicators on Individual-Level Pro-NRA Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates, States Nested in Three-Category Ordinal Classification.

Pro National Rifle Association (NRA) Sentiments are the Response Variable (on 0 to 100 scale) State-Level Crime Indicators Violent crime (per 100,000) Homicides by firearms (%) Property crime (per 100,000) Rape (per 100,000) Homicides (per 100,000) Incarcerations (per 100,000) Ineligible to vote due to felony (convictions per 100,000 voters)

Effect of State-Level Crime Indicator on Pro-Gun Sentiments

Effect of State-Level Crime Indicator, Control Attributes on Pro-Gun Sentiments

Effect of State-Level Crime Indicator, Control State Typology on Pro-Gun Sentiments

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Effect of State-Level Crime Indicator, Control Attributes and Typology on Pro-Gun Sentiments Model 5

0.002, p = 0.7807 B p = 0.7807 0.155, p = 0.1742 B p = 0.3484 0.003, p = 0.0662 B p = 0.1986 0.312, p = 0.0143 B p = 0.0858 0.953, p = 0.0337 B p = 0.1685 0.031, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0007 0.003, p = 0.0494 B p = 0.1976

0.010, p = 0.0517 B p = 0.1551 0.137, p = 0.1084 B p = 0.1551 0.003, p = 0.0010 B p = 0.0060 0.223, p = 0.0091 B p = 0.0375 0.870, p = 0.0075 B p = 0.0375 0.021, p < 0.0001 B p = 0.0007 0.002, p = 0.0561 B p = 0.1551

0.001, p = 0.9064 B p = 1.0000 0.190, p = 0.0257 B p = 0.1542 0.001, p = 0.6914 B p = 1.0000 0.185, p = 0.0597 B p = 0.2985 0.545, p = 0.1349 B p = 0.5396 0.017, p = 0.0137 B p = 0.0959 0.0004, p = 0.7458 B p = 1.0000

0.008, p = 0.1379 B p = 0.4840 0.014, p = 0.0723 B p = 0.4338 0.002, p = 0.1622 B p = 0.4840 0.151, p = 0.0968 B p = 0.4840 0.550, p = 0.1052 B p = 0.4840 0.015, p = 0.0149 B p = 0.1043 0.0003, p = 0.7924 B p = 0.7924

Social Conservatism, Distractors, and Authoritarianism

Table 4.

Notes: The rates per 100,000 are referenced to the state population unless otherwise noted. The Bonferroni probabilities (p B) are calculated based on the seven raw probabilities in a column of data. In Model 2 except for incarcerations there are no statistically significant B ps for a crime indicator and support for the NRA.

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This pattern suggests that a state’s punitiveness has the stronger effect on supporting the NRA than the other state crime indicators. For these crime indicators the patterns of effects of the social covariates are similar to those for abortion sentiments: devout religious traditions and religious participation have significant positive effects with religious traditions, the stronger of these two attributes, about +17.0 (p < 0.0001) to about +3.5 (p = 0.054). All of the other attributes have negative signs, with the following ordering of the significant social attributes according to their sizes of effects: African Americans, older age, postgraduate education, urban residence, women, singles, and union families; see the regression graph of Fig. 5. The attributes with negative signs whose effects are not significant include Hispanics and first-time voters. Axiological rationality trumps instrumental rationality regarding both abortion and guns.

Pr > F = 0.097

State Contexts: State Typology

0.015 (0.003, 0.027) 17.0 (13.1, 21.0) 3.52 (–0.060, 7.09)

Pro-NRA Sentiments C

–18.8 (–24.4, –13.3) –13.2 (–18.0, –8.3) –12.0 (–15.7, –8.41) –10.9 (–14.5, –7.3) –8.74 (–11.5, –6.09)

Incarceration Rate

C

Religious Traditions Religious Attendance African Americans Age Post–Graduate Education Urban Residence Women

–4.55 (–8.63, –0.47) Singles –3.71 (–7.03, –0.38)

Union Families

Fig. 5. Regression Graph Depiction of Direct Effects on Pro-NRA Sentiments, Proc Mixed Estimates for Model 5. Note: Solid circles represent dichotomies; empty circles, ordinal variables; and C, continuous variables. The arrows report the unstandardized b regression coefficients and their confidence intervals. First-time voters have a very insignificant negative effect. With these controls the effects of rates of the three-category typology of states are not statistically significant.

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Disconnections Voters are not fools, but they can be fooled.19 The states of the United States have different scores on indicators of neglect of children, yet these problems of the states become disconnected from attitudes toward abortion when social contexts and social attributes are controlled. At best, there is no relationship; at worst, prior to these controls states with the most neglect of children are the same states whose residents strongly oppose abortion, a woman’s choice not to have an unwanted child. Similarly, favorable sentiments about the possession of use of guns for protection and sport become disconnected from the severity of the crime rates characterizing their state when social contexts and social attributes are controlled. That devout religious traditions have such strong effect on these sentiments, which are anti-abortion and pro-guns, confirm the relevance of these sentiments to social conservatism (vs. social liberalism), which leads in turn to divisiveness and polarities that block social change. These relationships pose this question: Why do indicators of social conservatism organize so many findings?

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM The four indicators composing the measure of social conservatism form a structure of ideological sentiments that is consistent with aspects of authoritarianism.20 Authoritarianism is a multidimensional concept stemming from the original investigators’ abhorrence of Hitler, Nazism, and Fascism.21 However, authoritarianism may arise on the Left, Center, or Right.22 Obedience to authority is a fundamental aspect of authoritarian personalities, as are ethnocentrism (i.e., prejudice against groups different from one’s own), overly simplistic dichotomous thinking rather than consideration of more nuanced alternatives, conventionalism and conformity rather than curiosity and innovation, dogmatism, use of force (i.e., hard power) to attain compliance rather than discussion, negotiation, and social influence (i.e., soft power), hypernationalism, and valuing property rights (i.e., social and economic conservatism) over human rights (i.e., freedom).23 Early studies hypothesized that punitive child-rearing practices create a predisposition toward authoritarianism, which is reinforced by inferior education and repetitive work that restricts initiative and creativity.24

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Hetherington and Weiler define authoritarianism primarily as obedience to authority and gauge it by a person’s child-rearing values using the paired forced-choice items forming the authoritarian index of the NES.25 Respondents who want children to be respectful of elders, obedient, polite, and well behaved have a score of 1, the maximum value of this index. Those who want children to be independent, self-reliant, curious, and considerate of others have a score of 0, the minimum value of this index. Those who have mixed responses choosing items from both sets of choices or both of a pair of choices wanting children to be well behaved and also considerate of others have intermediate scores on this index. Evidence suggests that this index is valid and reliable.26 When the indicators of social conservatism are viewed through the lens of authoritarianism certain similarities become apparent. Zealotry against or for abortion reduces a complex and personal decision to an overly simplistic and blunt dichotomy: pro-life versus pro-choice. Gay rights, especially the right for same-gender couples to marry, impinges on notions of marriage as that between a man and a woman, as stipulated by some religious doctrines and some social mores. Moreover, negative attitudes toward gay people are consistent with the notion of ethnocentrism as dislike of people who are different from oneself. Support for the NRA, which implies approval of the ownership and use of guns, indicates a proclivity toward the use of force. Support for the Iraq war taps a sense of nationalism and the use of force rather than diplomacy to resolve disputes between nations. The opposites of these views are indicative of social liberalism or, somewhat synonymously and not pejoratively, secular humanism.

Similar Consequences Authoritarianism and social conservatism structure many social and political variables similarly. Table 5 compares findings (as referenced) from Hetherington and Weiler on the correlates of authoritarianism with findings on social conservatism from this present research and related analyses. These comparisons are organized by aspects of authoritarianism as broadly defined: ethnocentrism, anti-gay rights, anti-women’s choice, use of force, and the political right. The specific indicators include these sentiments: opposition to immigration, opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), anti-same-gender marriages, anti-homosexuality, anti-abortion rights, for the NRA, for the Iraq war, for George W. Bush, engaged conservatism, symbolic conservatism, Republican party affiliation,

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Table 5.

Correlates of Social Conservatism Compared with Correlates of Authoritarianism. Social Conservatism: Correlations

Authoritarianism

References in Hetherington and Weiler (2009)

Ethnocentrism Anti-immigration

0.262

Yes

Opposes NAFTA Anti-gay rights

0.100 Yes

Yes Yes

Anti-gay marriage

0.470

Yes

Anti-homosexuality Women’s choice Anti-abortion rights Use of force For NRA (i.e., guns) For Iraq war For George W. Bush Political right Engaged conservative

0.509

Yes

p. 169, Table 8.1; p. 170, Table 8.2; p. 166 pp. 172 173, Fn. 6 p. 38; p. 92, Table 5.1A; p. 96, Table 5.2 p. 5; p. 92, Table 5.1A; p. 96, Table 5.2 p. 5; p. 96, Table 5.2

0.519

Yes

p. 78, Fn. 21

0.564 0.565 0.580

Not studied Yes Yes

No references p. 100, Table 5.4; p. 138 p. 131, Table 6.4

0.628

Yes

Symbolic conservative Republican affiliation Vote for McCain

0.598 0.665 0.717

Yes Yes Yes

pp. 206 210; p. 207, Fn. 1 pp. 39 40 pp. 155 156, Table 7.7 p. 158, p. 167, p. 172, p. 206

Note: All bivariate correlations of social conservatism with the listed variables are statistically significant at the p < 0.0001 level.

and vote for McCain over Obama. Because these two variables have similar consequences on these criteria, social conservatism structures these findings at least as well as authoritarianism.

Similar Determinants But, do social conservatism and authoritarianism have similar social determinants? Table 6 suggests that they do. It compares the relationships of the social attributes with authoritarianism and with social conservatism. These

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Table 6.

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Authoritarianism and Social Conservatism by Social Attributes.

Variables

Authoritarianism Mean (N)

Social Conservatism Mean (N)

Religious traditions Evangelical Protestants Catholics Mainline Protestants Secular Jewish Polarity difference

0.709 0.571 0.530 0.481 0.383 δ = 0.326

0.653 (601) 0.502 (462) 0.425 (445) 0.392 (457) 0.362 (35) δ = 0.291 (2000) rs = 1.00

Church attendance Weekly or more Less than weekly Polarity difference

0.689 0.549 δ = 0.14

0.598 (860) 0.441 (1140) δ = 0.157 (2000) rs = 1.00

Region South Non-South Polarity difference

0.657 0.547 δ = 0.11

0.583 (436) 0.490 (1564) δ = 0.093 (2000) rs = 1.00

Population density Rural Small town or suburbs Large city Polarity difference

0.603 0.554 0.526 δ = 0.078

0.588 (581) 0.534 (658) 0.457 (761) δ = 0.131 (2000) rs = 1.00

Education Less than high school High school degree Some college College degree Graduate degree Polarity difference

0.754 0.657 0.590 0.505 0.373 δ = 0.381

0.519 (65) 0.538 (439) 0.536 (485) 0.509 (648) 0.419 (363) δ = 0.100 (2000) rs = 0.70

Notes: The data on authoritarianism are from Hetherington and Weiler (2009, p. 59, Table 3.2). Their data on population density have been combined by averaging the rates for small towns and suburbs and by averaging the rates for large cities and inner cities to form the categories used by the social conservatism database. For education, the minority mean = 0.440, δ = 0.193, the majority mean = 0.534, δ = 0.097 the minorities are less socially conservative than the White majority.

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two constructs have very similar relationships with these social attributes: religious traditions, religious participation, region, and urban rural residence. The polarity differences (δ) between the extreme categories are similar and the Spearman rs for the rank orders of the categories of an attribute are all unity the two constructs rank the importance of the categories of the attributes in the same way.27 The patterns for education differ. For authoritarianism, the proportions authoritarian decline monotonically with no reversals from less than high school to having a graduate degree, the polarity δ = 0.381, the largest value in the table. For social conservatism, the least educated in this sample of voters exhibit slightly less social conservatism than those with a high school degree or with some college experience. Although the proportions decline through those having a graduate degree, the polarity δ = 0.100 is among the smallest in the table. The fact that the least educated have the highest score on authoritarianism and a lower score on social conservatism reinforces the view that these two concepts, although interrelated, are in fact different. When the sample is sorted by majority group (i.e., White) versus minority group the mean levels of social conservatism within each group differ considerably: the majority mean is 0.534 with a polarity of 0.098 across the levels of social conservatism and the minority mean is 0.440 with a polarity of 0.193 minorities are less socially conservative than the majority group, and those minorities holding a graduate degree are the least socially conservative among these categories.28 Social conservatism is an axiological ideology or worldview, which is in part a manifestation of authoritarianism. The original researchers of The Authoritarian Personality viewed authoritarianism as a deep-rooted personality variable, which can be activated when a person’s strongly held sentiments are threatened or targeted by the appeals of politicians, clergy, and social networks.29 A boost in authoritarianism in the United States now boosts social conservatism, militant religious fundamentalism, and radical support for the possession and use of guns. The latter, coupled with delegitimation of authority and distrust of government, creates the potential for flare-ups of violence.30 Improving the quality of education could combat these authoritarian worldviews and boost HD. Education designed to enhance HD promises to improve the health, cognitive ability, and work-related skills that would improve the economic and personal well-being of people. Better educated people generally are more employable, entrepreneurial, wealthy, aware of the consequences of inattention to medical problems, and able to deal with complexity they exhibit instrumental rationality.31 Better educated people

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are less authoritarian, more personally self-efficacious, and more likely to exercise their political voice. To address income inequality, quality education should also emphasize that those who are more fortunate should be concerned about the less fortunate and support efforts to improve their position in society.

DISCUSSION Macrolevel classifications of states in terms of their HD and income equality are strongly correlated with such macrolevel indicators as the political color of a state (BPR) and numerous societal problems. But these state characteristics have much smaller effects on such microlevel variables as social conservatism, political ideology, party affiliation, and vote. When these variables are sorted by social conservatism then the opposite pattern appears: social conservatism strongly affects the microlevel variables and has much weaker associations with BPR. One explanation for these differences is methodological: macrolevel variables more strongly affect other macrolevel variables and less strongly affect microlevel variables. Similarly, microlevel variables more strongly affect other microlevel variables and less strongly affect macrolevel variables. A more substantive explanation posits a disconnection between the problems of the states and the microlevel political and social alignments of the voters. This conjecture implies that social issues distract the voters’ attention from the problems of their states; they exhibit axiological and not instrumental rationality regarding abortions and guns, and most probably, about gay marriage rights and military interventions by U.S. forces. To test the relevance of this substantive explanation this essay developed a set of indicators of neglect of children and coordinated these problems to the voters’ anti-abortion sentiments, a key distractor. A state with lower levels of neglect of children might be expected to have many pro-life voters because both the sentiments and the societal problems would be aligned, but the opposite relationships hold initially. When the social attributes and a three-category ordinal classification of states are jointly controlled then the child-neglect indicators become totally disconnected from the pro-life sentiments, the initial relationships are spurious. These sentiments primarily depend on such social attributes as devout religious traditions and frequent religious participation and secondarily on a state’s cultural context. To further test the axiological explanation, this essay developed a set of indicators of crimes and incarcerations and coordinated these problems

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with the voters’ longing for guns, as indicated by their support of the NRA. Once again, when the social attributes and the three-category ordinal classification are jointly controlled then these indicators of crime become almost totally disconnected from the sentiments about the NRA; only incarceration rates (an indicator of punitiveness) has a significant effect prior to Bonferroni adjustments. This result works against the claim that hostile environments create a need for protection that gun ownership satisfies. Rather, pro-NRA sentiments strongly depend on devout religious traditions and less strongly on frequent religious participation. Why these social attributes affect both pro-life and pro-gun sentiments is somewhat paradoxical. The indicators of these anti-abortion and pro-gun sentiments are components of an index of social conservatism, a pivotal variable affecting ideology, party affiliation, vote, and numerous other variables. Present day authoritarianism has similar relationships with ideology, party affiliation, vote, and many of the same other variables. These two constructs are intertwined but separate conceptually. Obedience to authority, as indicated by a person’s preference for obedient children, is now used to gauge authoritarianism. In the United States the Radical Right has authoritarian tendencies, in the past the Left and Center exhibited this predisposition.32 This essay compares the index of social conservatism to an index of authoritarianism and finds that these predispositions have similar determinants and consequences. Strategies for ameliorating authoritarianism may also alleviate some of the problems associated with social conservatism. Improving the quality of education could ameliorate these authoritarian worldviews and boost HD, while also moving people from axiological to instrumental rationality. Presently, the militant pursuit of axiological goals coupled with delegitimation of governmental authority, which is indicated by the possession and militant use of guns, poses a potential danger to American democracy and the well-being of unarmed citizens (Linz, 1978). Militant religious fundamentalists with axiological goals have killed scores of people in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and even in the United States. When will this killing end?

NOTES 1. These conceptions are rooted respectively in Weber’s conceptions of zweckrationalita¨t (i.e., pragmatism) and wertrationalita¨t (i.e., moral absolutism). For explication see Parsons (1947, p. 115). Coleman (1990) develops the notion of

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instrumental rationality, while Boudon (1989 [1986], 1996, 2003) develops the notion of axiological rationality. 2. Let a person’s subjective utility for an action be conceptualized as the summation of instrumentally rational assessments and moralistic axiological assessments. This essay suggests that the axiological, moralistic assessments outweigh the instrumentally rational assessments concerning two components of social conservatism, abortion sentiments, and gun-use sentiments. 3. This essay uses the index of HD and the other macrolevel measures as reported by Lewis and Burd-Sharps (2010) and microlevel data covering 2000 voters in an election survey by Greenberg, Carville, and Iparraguirre (2008). 4. Porter (2012, pp. 1361 1363) characterizes many areas of the South as predisposed toward authoritarianism and these same areas also have high scores on indicators of social conservatism. 5. Hetherington and Weiler (2009, p. 39) do not measure social conservatism by an index but state: “Authoritarianism is conceptually distinct from [limited state] conservatism, though the two are becoming more and more intertwined in contemporary American politics as conservatives increasingly choose to make use of issues like gay rights, supporting broad surveillance of the country’s citizens to maintain security, and immigration, in which mass preferences are structured by authoritarianism.” 6. For example, see Lipset (1981 [1960a], 1981 [1960b], p. 114) who states: “The lower class individual is likely to have been exposed to punishment, lack of love, and a general atmosphere of tension and aggression since early childhood all experiences which tend to produce deep-rooted hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice, political authoritarianism, and chiliastic transvaluational religion. His educational attainment is less than that of men with higher SES, and his association as a child with others of similar background not only fails to stimulate his intellectual interests but also creates an atmosphere which prevents his educational experience from increasing his general social sophistication and his understanding of different groups and ideas.” 7. Using a standard measure of authoritarianism based on judgments about children’s desired behavior, Hetherington and Weiler (2009, p. 141, fn5) report ca. 2004 the mean score for African Americans (0.75) was considerably higher than that for other people (0.55). But African Americans are socially liberal on the measures of this present essay confirming that authoritarianism as gauged by the child-rearing scale and social conservatism are distinct concepts. Given the many problems of the inner city it is very rational for African Americans to desire obedient children and social order minimal gang warfare, drug use, gun possession, and murders. Wilson (1996, 1987) analyzes the formation and perpetuation of the poverty of the urban poor; Sampson (2012) documents and explains the devastation and resiliency of some African American neighborhoods in Chicago. In the past the constrained economic opportunities and political voice of African Americans led to urban riots in many inner cities in the United States (Spilerman, 1970). 8. For the initial reports see Greenberg et al. (2008) and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (2008). 9. This essay primarily analyzes these survey data rather than those from exit polls, the National Election Studies (NES), and other data sources because this

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survey focuses in detail on voting, the sample represents the population of voters in 2008, and the data became available a few days after this election. 10. Seymour Martin Lipset was among the first to suggest a shift from an economic class-based politics that characterized the industrial period of the United States toward a more social politics that would characterize its post-industrial period. Lipset stated (1981 [1960a], 1981 [1960b], pp. 509 510): Post-industrial politics is increasingly concerned with noneconomic or social issues a clean environment, a better culture, equal status for women and minorities, the quality of education, international democratization, and a more permissive morality, particularly as affecting familial and sexual issues.

People opposing cultural changes such as these are often referred to as social conservatives; those favoring such changes are often referred to as social liberals or pejoratively as secular humanists. Lakoff (2002 [1992], p. 33) hypothesizes that the world views of conservatives and liberals are rooted in different conceptions of the family: “At the center of the conservative world view is a Strict Father Model … The liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, the Nurturant Parent model. For an alternative view see Manza’s (2012, p. 174) summary of recent research on class-based voting and other topics. 11. Hillygus and Shields (2008, p. 36) define a wedge issue “as any policy concern that is used to divide the opposition’s potential winning coalition …. Moral issues like gay marriage and abortion are widely recognized as wedge issues, but economic and social welfare policies can just as easily be used in a wedge strategy.” 12. The Republican’s staunch opposition to gay marriage rights has engendered efforts by large donors and party activists to shift the Republicans to a middle position. A pretested survey question emphasizing the Golden Rule: … “to treat others as we’d like to be treated, including gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans” has garnered support from 89 percent of Republican voters (Wallsten, 2013). When the sentiments of White Evangelical Protestants, a core of the Republican coalition, are broken down by age, younger people are less opposed to same sex marriage: 80 percent of aged 65 or older oppose; 74 percent of aged 50 64 oppose; 75 percent of aged 35 49 oppose, but only 43 percent of ages 18 34 oppose. Consequently, to appeal to this younger age category some Evangelical leaders are softening their stance against same sex marriage (King, 2013). Bishop and Cushing (2008, pp. 288 289) report that some younger people have left strict fundamentalist congregations, their informant says: “I grew up in an Assemblies of God church, and it was rigid …. People were telling me how to think, how to dress, and how to vote. Here [in a small basement congregation] I can state my opinion and not have people jump down my throat.” Marsden (1991, p. 117) suggests that fundamentalists are militant Evangelicals who have authoritarian tendencies. These are indicated by their overly simplistic polarized views of good versus evil the moral versus immoral, tight-knit congregations under control of authoritarian preachers, and anti-intellectualism, which sorts out evidence to fit the preordained religious beliefs. 13. The Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) has become a wedge issue with conservative organizations running negative advertisements with the aim of reducing support for its implementation. In early September, 2013 a month prior to its October 1 startup, 55 percent of insured people disapproved and 40 percent

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approved of Obamacare, for a difference of −15 percentage points. Among the uninsured, 46 percent disapproved and 49 percent approved, for a small difference of only +3 percentage points. The negative ads are directed toward the 30 percent of the Independents and the 63 percent of the Democrats who approve of Obamacare. Dimock et al. (2013, pp. 4 5 presents these statistics and others on this topic. 14. See Smith (2014, chapters 7 and 8). 15. Throughout this book variables with “unfavorable effects” or “worse off” imply that they do not enhance HD broadly considered. 16. Medical coverage for the very poor is a problem of many states. Kirchgaessner and Rappeport (2013, p. 7) report that a number of formerly reluctant conservative governors will now accept Medicaid expansion. However, to implement the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) 34 states mostly in the South and Heartland are relying at least in part on federal insurance exchanges. The 2010 federal law states that people qualify for subsidized health insurance if they obtain their health insurance through an exchange “established by the state.” The Obama Administration interprets this stipulation as applying more broadly to federal exchanges and not only to state-run exchanges. Without the subsidies Obamacare would be unable to insure the poor and many in the middle class. Conservatives have initiated law suits aimed at enforcing the narrow interpretation, namely, that only people insured by state-run exchanges are eligible for subsidies (Palazzolo, 2013). 17. Here is the SAS code for a typical Model 5 run: Title ’Model 5 Child Poverty and Social Attributes at level 1 + Tristates’; proc mixed covtest ratio data = Obama9 method = reml; class stname tristates; model antiwchoice = Child_Poverty____living_in_famil tristates fourtrad01 relfreq01 agecatx01 urban01 singles01 black hispanic female firsttime unionfam postgrad / solution; random stname (tristates) / solution; run;

To get the BICs for the maximum likelihood (ML) models change the method option to Method = ML. 18. These BIC measures are from ML estimates for models with the same structures as those estimated by REML. The ML estimates of BICs gauge how the sequence of models fit THE data and the REML estimates of the BICs gauge how well a specific model fits ITS restricted pseudo data. The REML estimates of the variance components are superior to the ML estimates; the ML estimates of the BICs are superior to the REML estimates for models with different structures. 19. Key (1966, pp. 7 9) stresses the instrumental rationality of voters. Frank (2004) opines that voters often do not necessarily align with the party that best serves their economic self-interest. 20. Hetherington and Weiler (2009, p. 36) use the term “world view” for a sentiment structure that: “is composed of a set of beliefs and ideals that a person uses as a guide to interpret the world.” A worldview is closely synonymous in meaning to

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ideology as used in this essay. The notion of “worldview” is somewhat similar in meaning to “mindset.” 21. Fromm ([circa 1929 1934] 1984) showed how the inconsistent character structure of German workers would not be sufficient to stem the tide of Nazism. In The Authoritarian Personality Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950, pp. 102 150, 224 287) present the ethnocentrism E-scale gauging prejudice and the Fascism F-scale gauging implicit anti-democratic trends. Bonss (1984) and Fleck (2011) provide vivid histories of the early research on authoritarianism. Lowenthal and Guterman (1949) and Lowenthal (1987) analyze strategies agitators employ to unleash authoritarian predispositions. 22. Lipset (1981 [1960a], 1981 [1960b]) analyzes fascism (i.e., authoritarianism) across the political spectrum. 23. The F-scale of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 228) is composed of indicators on these themes: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness”, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and sex. Altemeyer (1996, p. 6) defines right-wing authoritarianism as comprising authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. 24. Adorno et al. (1950, pp. 230 231) include items about child-rearing in the Authoritarian Submission dimension of their F-scale. Here is a clear example: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.” Lipset (1981 [1960a], 1981 [1960b], p. 114) and Houtman (2004, pp. 151 153) link class, education, and cultural capital to authoritarianism. In numerous studies Kohn and colleagues study how social structure and personality development are intertwined. As Kohn writes (personal communication in Smith, 2008, p. 49): Social structure continues to affect the personality development of the offspring, as did the offspring’s parents, in a continuing cycle of social stratification and culture affecting personality development: the cultural part of the process being the transmission of values from parents to offspring, the social structural part being the effects of educational experience, and, later, occupational experience.

Smith (2008, pp. 48 49, pp. 289 290) provides a very brief overview of Kohn’s work and cites 13 of his studies. 25. Hetherington and Weiler (2009, p. 48) report the items and their scoring for the authoritarianism index. 26. Hetherington and Weiler (2009, pp. 48 50, 52 58) present evidence supporting the validity of their index. They do not report the index’s reliability but they do present trend data (p. 52, Table 3.1; p. 141, Table 7.1; p. 143, Table 7.2; and p. 144, Table 7.3.) suggesting its reliability. Pe´rez and Hetherington (2014) show that the child-rearing measure of authoritarianism does not apply to African-Americans validly. 27. To obtain a Spearman’s rs assign equal interval ranks to the proportions of an attribute for authoritarianism and social conservatism and then calculate the rs to measure the concordance of the assigned ranks. For the method and formulas see Hays (1988, pp. 834 836).

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28. The proportions socially conservative by education for minorities are: less than high school = 0.549, high school degree = 0.443, some college = 0.454, college degree = 0.443, and graduate degree = 0.356. For the white majority these proportions are: less than high school = 0.530, high school degree = 0.570, some college = 0.565, college degree = 0.532, and graduate degree = 0.432. 29. See Hillygus and Shields (2008) for explication of how wedge issues target people’s sentiments. 30. The dispute between a racist rancher, who will not pay the federal government for grazing privileges, resulted in an armed standoff involving a thousand armed “Patriots” and armed federal officials from the Bureau of Land Management. The Economist (2014, p. 33) reports that: “Supporters drove hundreds of miles in pickup trucks bearing patriotic stickers, bringing with them an awesome armory. After a brief but tense standoff, during which the protesters trained assault rifles on their adversaries, the officials released the 400-odd cattle they had rounded up and beat a hasty retreat, leaving behind a jubilant mob and a rancher secure in his defiance.” 31. Scholzman, Verba, and Brady (2012) probe the relationships between SES and political voice. 32. Smith (2004) shows that in 1992 the Right resembled today’s Tea Party taking consistently negative positions on issues bearing on social equality, economic equity, the environment, and voting choice, whereas the Center and Left took more nuanced positions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Harry Dahms for his encouragement and editorial comments, several anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and critique of earlier drafts, and Junhak Lee of the University of Texas, Arlington for preparing the map of the typology of states. Of course, any errors are my own responsibility.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bell, D. (1976). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bishop, B., & Cushing, R. C. (2008). The big sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company. Bonss, W. (1984). Critical theory and empirical social research: Some observations. In W. Bons (Ed.), The working class in Weimar Germany: A psychological and sociological study by E. Fromm (pp. 1 38). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Boudon, R. (1989 [1986]). The analysis of ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Boudon, R. (1996). The “cognitivist model”: A generalized rational choice model. Rationality and Society, 8(May), 123 150. Boudon, R. (2003). Beyond rational choice theory. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 1 22. Burd-Sharps, S., Lewis, K., & Martins, E. B. (2008). The measure of America: American human development report 2008 2009. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. D’Antonio, W. V., Tuch, S. A., & Baker, J. R. (2013). Religion, politics, and polarization: How religiopolitical conflict is changing congress and American democracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Dimock, M., Doherty, C., & Kiley, J. (2013). As health care law proceeds, opposition and uncertainty persist. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Ellis, C., & Simson, J. (2012). Ideology in America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Fiorina, M., & Abrams, S. (2009). Disconnect: The breakdown of representation in American politics. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Fleck, C. (2011). A transatlantic history of the social sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the invention of empirical social research. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Frank, T. (2004). What’s the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Fromm, E. (1984 [circa 1929]). The working class in Weimar Germany: A psychological and sociological study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gelman, A., Park, D., Shor, B., Bafumi, B., & Cortina, J. (2008). Red state, blue state, rich state, poor state: Why Americans vote the way they do. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. (2008, November 12). The change election awaiting change. Washington, DC: Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Greenberg, S., Carville, J., & Iparraguirre, A. (2008, November 12). The new politics and new mandate. Washington, DC: Democracy Corp and Campaign for America’s Future. Hays, W. L. (1988). Statistics. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hetherington, M. J., & Weiler, J. D. (2009). Authoritarianism and polarization in American politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hillygus, D. S., & Shields, T. G. (2008). The persuadable voter: Wedge issues in presidential campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Houtman, D. (2004). Lipset and working class authoritarianism. In I. L. Horowitz (Ed.), Civil society and class politics (pp. 131 160). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Key, V. O. (1966). The responsible electorate: Rationality in presidential voting, 1936 1960. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. King, N., Jr. (2013). Evangelical leader preaches a pullback from politics, culture wars. Wall Street Journal, October 22, p. A1 A14. Kirchgaessner, S., & Rappeport, A. (2013). Expansion of Medicaid splits US conservatives. Financial Times, February 26, p. 7. Lakoff, G. (2002 [1996)]). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, K., & Burd-Sharps, S. (2010). The measure of America: American human development report 2010 2011. New York, NY: New York University Press. Linz, J. J. (1978). The breakdown of democratic regimes: Crisis, breakdown, & reequilibration. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. .

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Lipset, S. M. (1981 [1960]a). Fascism Left, right, and center in political man: The social bases of politics. by Seymour Martin Lipset (Chap. 5). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, S. M. (1981 [1960]b). Political man: The social bases of politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lowenthal, L. (1987). False prophets, studies on authoritarianism: Communication in society (Vol. 3). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Lowenthal, L., & Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of deceit: A study of the techniques of the American agitator. New York, NY: Harper. Manza, J. (2012). Elections. In E. Amenta, K. Nash, & A. Scott (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to political sociology (pp. 168 179). Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley. Manza, J., & Brooks, C. (1999). Social cleavages and political change: Voter alignments and U.S. party coalitions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Marsden, G. M. (1991). Understanding fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Palazzolo, J. (2013). Health law faces new legal challenges: Suits claim wording of statue means federally run exchanges can’t offer subsidies; a drafting error or key flaw? Wall Street Journal, October 21, p. A6. Parsons, T. (1947). Introduction to Max Weber’s, the theory of social and economic organization. Glencoe, IL: The Falcon’s Wing Press. Pe´rez, E. O., & Hetherington, M. j. (2014). Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the cross-racial validity of the child rearing scale. Political Analysis, 22, 398 412. Porter, J. R. (2012). Religion and politics: Understanding the effects of conservative origins on contemporary patterns of sub-national relative human development. Quality & Quantity, 46, 1359 1376. Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sandel, M. J. (1996). Democracy’s discontent: America in search of a public philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Scholzman, K. L., Verba, S., & Brady, H. E. (2012). The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, R. B. (2004). Political extremism Left, center, right. In I. L. Horowitz (Ed.), Civil society and class politics, essays on the political sociology of Seymour Martin Lipset (pp. 107 121). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Smith, R. B. (2008). Cumulative social inquiry: Transforming novelty into innovation. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Smith, R. B. (2014). Social structures and voting in the United States. Cambridge: Social Structural Research Inc. Spilerman, S. (1970). The causes of racial disturbances. American Sociological Review, 35, 627 649. The Economist. (2014). Cowboys vs. feds, a misguided insurrection revives an old debate about land in the West, April 26th May 2, 33. Wallsten, P. (2013). Gay rights supporters wage a quiet campaign to push Republicans to the middle. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ gay-rights-supporters-wage-a-quiet-campaign-to-push-republicans-to-the-middle/2013/ 10/20/c2a09990-30fd-11e3-89ae-16e186e117d8_print.html. Accessed on October 21, 2013.

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Weber, M. (1958 [1905]). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. New York, NY: Child Scribner’s Sons. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York, NY: Knopf.

SOCIOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION: MEDIATION OF OPPOSITES BY INTERPENETRATION Emanuel Smikun ABSTRACT Purpose The paper argues for a comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction that includes: (i) de-subjectifying interpretation, (ii) re-subjectifying explanation, (iii) de-objectifying understanding, and (iv) re-objectifying conceptualization. Design Both methodological and substantive arguments are guided by the constructive principle of mediating interpenetration of polar opposites. Findings Status groups and class interests are conceived as major categories of sociological differentiation mediating between the abstractions of individuals and society. Three types of class formation are discovered in Weber’s legacy beyond Marx’s property one. Sorokin’s work

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 135 157 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032006

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in a two-dimensional social stratification and mobility is found to have major significance for developing the concept of social classes and for reconciling divergent ideas of social stratification. The principle of concept formation by mediation of interpenetrating polar opposites is found to be of greater complexity and effectiveness than Hegel’s logical principle of transcendental supersession. Originality The comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction seamlessly integrates qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology as well as concept formation and research. Keywords: Sociological method; deconstruction; reconstruction; status and class; mediation by interpenetration; concept formation

Social theories become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant with the passage of time. That includes the works of sociological classics. There can be no firmly established truths in social sciences, only certain generalizations valid for limited periods of time and for local conditions. Spencer’s laws of growth and of structural or functional differentiation are hardly remembered by sociologists today, nor are Marx’s laws of the falling rate of profit and of the impoverishment of the working class. Yet we keep using their conceptual language, the only common professional language learned by every new generation of sociologists. If it is not their substantive theories what, then, do we value in the sociological classics? It must be the methods they used in producing those theories as well as their central concepts. Having to do with the overall process of developing new social-scientific knowledge rather than with its products, these methods and concepts form the bedrock on which middle-range substantive social theories and conceptual schemes rest. In this sense, sociology as a whole can be seen as a scientific method as Durkheim and Simmel did. It was in this broad sense of the word that they spoke of sociology as a distinct social science characterized by its own method. The sociological method is much more than an assortment of separate research techniques, like data collection and data analysis. It is also interpretation, conceptualization, and modes of theorizing. This calls for a comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction that represents all phases of social-scientific thought processes from the de-objectifying understanding of classic authorities to their re-objectifying conceptualization, and on to de-subjectifying interpretation

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and re-subjectifying explanation.1 As explanation presupposes theory construction and testing, measurement, and modeling, the structure of this method can clarify the relationship between basic sociological theory and applied research as well as between theory and concept formation that are still problematic in sociology. To demonstrate this method let us begin by considering the notions of status and class and certain theories that would benefit from using them.

STATUS GROUPS AND CLASS INTERESTS Much of today’s sociology is devoted to the analysis of social injustices or social inequality. Social stratification is predominantly conceived as groups of ascribed social status and class. Gender and race distinctions are particularly popular as subject-matters in this literature. While these ascriptive categories may indirectly indicate levels of achieved social status and thus of class interest, such indications will most probably be associated with racial and gender discrimination. This use of primordial demographic categories such as age, gender, ethnicity, or race may be effective in commercial and political market research. However, they are poor substitutes for direct, unmediated categories of status achievement and of class interests. Rather than to solid conceptual foundations, they owe their popularity in sociology to the ideology of the post-WWII social movements for civil rights and women’s liberation as centered on defense of identity rather than on strategic gains (Cohen, 1985). While the protection of these movements’ unique identities may well have been a new theme in their theoretical consciousness, they were also prominently present in the old-style, labor, and communist movements as well. The history of the four Communist Internationals is marked by internal struggles against right- and left-wing revisionism, as is the history of national communist movements, especially in Germany and Russia. New social movements are no different in that respect. They have been focused on protection of their strategic economic and political gains just as much as on protection of their identities if not more so. The whole purpose of the civil rights movement was equality in the sense of equal inclusion without discrimination equal access to housing, to property ownership, and equality in political pursuits and in organizational promotion. Women’s liberation and gay-and-lesbian movements are not much different. Their main purpose has also been equal inclusion and equal access

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to employment and organizational promotion. And it is these strategic gains that women, gays, and lesbians primarily enjoy and cherish today rather than their biological differences. In this sense, the new social movements have actually fought for a re-definition of African Americans, women, and gays as legitimate members of general American social classes settlement, industry, organizational, and political rather than “blacks,” “women,” or “gays and lesbians” as separate classes of the American society based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. These movements will never achieve their goals of non-discrimination if they continue to identify themselves as such isolated groups. Continued use of racial categories can only perpetuate racist prejudice, or else promote reverse discrimination. Paradoxical as this may sound, women’s and civil rights movements can achieve their goals only if their consciousness of special gender- and race-based identities is changed to better reflect their identities of social status or class standings and of social mobility. For this is where really important differences lie.2 There is a variety of status groups and class types to consider. Marx left an impressive analysis of the historic origins of property classes and of their mid-19th century social structure identifying the deeply antagonistic relationship between the upper class of capitalists and the lower class of the propertyless industrial proletariat. The existence of certain European middle classes was also pointed out, notably in Eighteenth Brumaire. While Marx described the formation of the property classes in the differential historic process of capital accumulation, Weber gave a much more detailed conception of the process of Western rationalization. But what is rationalization in Weber’s sense? It is much more than the process of certain ascetic sects acquiring value-rational orientations leading to a meaningful methodical conduct of life. That was only the starting point of the Protestant ethic. Its further development took the form of the historic processes of bureaucratization and professionalization as the two major ingredients of Western rationalization. If we add the historic process of urbanization also vividly described by Weber in Economy and Society, we will find that like the effect of differential capital accumulation in Marx, what Weber understood by the process of rationalization similarly lends itself to an interpretation as three additional historic processes of class formation. The three types of social classes whose formation can be deduced from Weber’s historic writings even if they do not conform to Weber’s own explicit notion of social class can be called settlement, industry, and organization classes. It is in and by the processes of differential urbanization, professionalization, and bureaucratization that these distinct types of

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social classes have been forming historically. The term organization classes is preferred here to bureaucratic classes to avoid the strong derogatory connotation of inefficiency and red tape associated with bureaucracy in today’s popular usage. “Organization classes” is a neutral, non-evaluative term. In today’s post-industrial society we also list professional and support services in addition to manual workers as industry classes. With professionals as the upper industry class, we can thus account for industry class formation as the modern outcome of differential industrialization-professionalization processes. The term petty-bourgeoisie has been widely used in Marxist literature as representing the middle property class besides the commercial class and “workers’ aristocracy” while the term big bourgeoisie is used synonymously with the class of capitalists. However, the original etymological meaning of bourgeoisie is simply European town-dwellers as opposed to peasantry settled in open rural areas and aristocrats protected in their castles. Today we must also speak of suburbanites and residents of large metropolitan centers as two more categories of settlement classes formed in the historic process of urbanization-suburbanization. Weber could not have given names to all these class structures specific for the empirical social realities of our place and time. This fact may even be propitious for sociology. Marx did leave a concept of property classes that was appropriate for his time and place, and this often leads to a lack of analytical distinction between property, industry, and political classes that were all fused together in Marx’s time. At that time capitalists large property owners were also industrialists and managers. While pursuit of industries separated from residential settlement earlier in history, property ownership and management separated only in the 20th century (Berle & Means, 1932/1967). Not having from Weber any class taxonomy specifically designated for organization, industry or settlement classes leaves us free and unencumbered by dated or undifferentiated concepts to form our own conceptual scheme for these three types of social classes whose formation was explored by Weber. Weber’s juxtaposition of status and class is the most accepted view of conceiving social stratification today. The first thing to note here is that what we generally mean by social status today is not what it meant in Weber’s writings. Rather than occupational, educational, financial or family achievement that status means in today’s usage, what Weber meant by this term was primarily inherited honor and prestige as used in the 19thcentury Germany still not too far removed from the medieval world of feudal knights and chivalry. According to Sørensen (2001), the real reason

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why Weber’s draft notes on status and class are preferred to Sorokin’s innovative ideas may be purely accidental, having to do with Weber getting higher overall prestige as a scholar. Lenski, too, noted that while Weber “never developed a systematic theory of stratification,” Sorokin’s Social Mobility was “probably the first extensive systematic treatment of social stratification in which the synthetic perspective is dominant.” Lenski argued for a synthesis of the two aspects of social inequality noted in Weber’s early distinction between status and class that was reflected in the two contesting theories of social stratification of his (Lenski’s) time the functionalist and the conflict ones. The methodological foundation for such a program consisted in the recognition that “both structure and dynamics are abstractions from the same reality and hence can never be completely divorced from one another” (Lenski, 1966, pp. 18 73). Lenski’s conceptual contribution in this direction was the idea of status crystallization and status inconsistency as its opposite. They were found to be major sources of stress in society as well as in individuals and a breeding ground for radical movements of all kinds. It would not take a big stretch of imagination to see societal effects of status and class inconsistency as sociology’s core analytical area where historic processes of social action meet impersonal structures of institutional social practices resulting in one stage of unsustainable social development being replaced with another. Sorokin made a strong and convincing argument against theories of any permanent trends or regularities in social stratification. This argument was richly documented with historical facts that cut across ages, continents, and civilizations. All that can be said about social stratification or inequality, Sorokin insisted, is that it fluctuates without any regularity. He saw all empirical cases of upward and downward mobile societies as located between the two ideal poles of total social closedness, or impermeability, and total social openness, or permeability. As a measure of upward and downward mobility, Sorokin proposed an aggregate index composed, in turn, of two indices, an index of intensity and an index of generality. Sorokin also described main channels of vertical social mobility the armed forces, the church, school, political parties, professional and business organizations, and the family. His two-dimensional vision of social inequalities and social mobility allows for a consistent conceptualization of modern meanings of social status. It can also help bring into focus the concept of social classes. Sorokin’s vision of two orthogonal dimensions of social structural differentiation and of its change over time can be helpful in bringing these two

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central sociological concepts closer to today’s social realities. It can help separate the core ideas of class and status from their historic meanings in the 19th-century Germany. Citing authorities from Adam Smith and Marx to Sombart and Kautsky, Sorokin argued that a purely economic (property) conception of class was insufficient, that it also had to account for political and industry (occupational) class stratification. He considered such notions of class a “purely local and temporary,” and therefore not applicable “to different societies and to different times” (Sorokin, 1959, p. 18n2). Instead, he spoke of a universally significant two-dimensional social space where the vertical dimension included several stratified groups consisting of members of unequal ranks, from high to low, performing different functions. Horizontal mobility referred to changes of social positions that did not involve in changes of residential, citizenship, family, religious, workplace or occupational status (Sorokin, 1947, pp. 407 414, 1959, pp. 381 413). It is this horizontal dimension in Sorokin’s two-dimensional social space that is of special interest for the concept of social classes. What Sorokin never considered in his notion of horizontal mobility was the reasons such changes of social position are made at all. If it does not involve changes in social status, why do people move from one neighborhood to another? Why do they immigrate and change citizenship? Why do we change jobs and seek promotions within the same occupation? Why would anyone change his/her occupation if it did not make any social difference? The reasons are always numerous and may seem purely individual. But they are also powerful sociological reasons having to do with social climbing, with improving one’s social standing on the ladder of social classes or at least with not lagging behind others who do move up. Numerous empirical studies from the Chicago urban sociology of the 1930s to the more recent occupational mobility literature demonstrate that what Sorokin called “horizontal” moves are actually motivated by desires to move up in social class from lower to lower-middle, from lower-middle to upper-middle, or from upper-middle to upper. Thus, if social mobility is reserved for changes of status on one of Sorokin’s two orthogonal scales, and if we also want to have a concept of class mobility, we must see the sociological meaning of Sorokin’s horizontal mobility as changes of class. Settlement, organization, industry, and political classes being also stratified, as status groups are, the vertical and the horizontal scales of social mobility become interchangeable. Or, if one wishes, both are vertical in the sense of being stratified, but if we want to represent them graphically, one of them will be horizontal, and it does not matter which one. Within the framework of such analysis, any status

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group can be differentiated by class, and any class can be differentiated by high-medium-low cross-cutting levels of social status as well as by their institutional domains. Classes represent special interests circulating in social distribution and exchange whereas status groups stand for distributions and exchange of family, educational, occupational, or financial conditions. As it was for Weber, status differences can be registered by social scientists interested in summarizing such conditions and life chances. Differences of class, however, are social realities that affect more removed, impersonal social relationships. The intertwining, cross-cutting relationship between status groups and their class interests is one reason why Weber saw them as overlapping and why they continue to be confused or used interchangeably in sociological literature (cf. Chan & Goldthorpe, 2004, 2007). Unlike achieved or inherited status that is visible, at times even conspicuous, class is defined by our position in the much less ostentatious and yet much more powerful structures of vested industry, political, settlement, and organization interests. It is these structures of deep-seated class interests that are the big secrets hiding behind yesteryear ideologies that social scientists have always tried to debunk.

MEDIATION OF OPPOSITES BY THEIR INTERPENETRATION With the entry into the nuclear and rocket age following the conclusion of World War II and subsequently into the computer age, a dramatic technological upheaval took place bringing about a demise of numerous occupations in the West, especially those of the manual production type. It resulted in the rise of knowledge industries requiring better education and professional training. Closely related to this trend was the assumption that occupational stratification and mobility are primarily economic issues related to work and to making a living. Yet, industry classes can engage in closure and exploit their position also in the financial, educational, and family institutional domains when such positions are privileged and exclusive, as in legal and medical professions. This can hardly be said of unskilled manual or clerical industry classes.3 The study of educational and occupational achievement as predictive of income in status attainment theory (Blau & Duncan, 1967) is an unrecognized form of status and class or inconsistency.4 Yet, even if theory of distributive social justice

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inequality as economically influenced sociologists prefer to call it stepped away from Homans’ and Blau’s individuals as units of analysis it is still focused on ascriptive status rather than groups of achieved status and their inconsistencies with class. The situation is not much different in rational action theory. Coleman (1986, 1990) and his followers highlight a simple yet seemingly versatile two-level model for explaining outcomes of social structural changes as a way of bringing social theory and empirical research together. Within its framework, outcomes of structural social changes are explained by purposive actions of individuals who are guided by the rationality of making informed and optimal choices. While assuming consciously self-interested social action as producing social outcomes, rational choice theories talk about institutional constrains of action in the same breath, something that presupposes value-rationality. If action is characterized by the instrumental rationality of self-interest, it cannot be institutionally controlled and valuerational at the same time. And vice versa, if social conduct is value-rational and constrained by institutional norms, it cannot also be seen as selfinterested instrumental action. An argument can be made that rather than by the individual actors of this ahistoric theory, big structural changes are produced by collective practices of achieved status groups in pursuit of their class interests that deviate to a larger or smaller degree from the same ideal value of rationality. This is the meaning of the charge that rational choice theory is not capable of answering the big questions of sociology posed by the founders Marx’s question of social justice, Weber’s question of rationalization, and Durkheim’s question of social solidarity or cohesion (Ultee, 1996). Contemporary social structures can be grasped by social science only as intertwined with past historic processes not unlike space and time in the natural world. All social structures are but stopped, momentary representations of social processes beginning at some past points in time and ending as current trends representing projections of those processes into the future. The notions of upper-middle and lower-middle classes or medium-high and medium-low status groups are also the products of bilateral interpenetration: of downward mobility of European aristocracy and upward mobility of the poor and powerless. Historically, social structures of high status groups and upper class interests have served as standards for normatively controlling directions of social development only occasionally punctuated by lower status and class revolts. Evaluations of consistency and inconsistency between status groups and their shared class interests must include comparisons of their whole structures including high, low, and middle

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social strata. To have legitimate standards of social justice and social progress, it must be demonstrated that status or class structures are better, more stable, and more reliable. This is implied by the very notion of measurement standards. Explanations and theory construction are also characterized by an interpretation of the opposites of observation and measurement, on the one hand, and general sociological concepts, on the other. Indeed, the promise given by neatly built conceptual schemes successfully to grasp and interpret empirical social reality never comes without a price. Genuine lived meanings of empirical data are always fuzzy, haphazard, and ultimately unfathomable. While the harmony, comprehensiveness, and consistency imposed by an extraneous conceptual scheme on observed lived meanings may obviate the problem of reliability, the extreme rationality of abstract conceptual meanings may easily rob them of their original validity. Common-sense native meanings cannot be simply replaced with sociological conceptual jargon. The precipice separating them can only be bridged by meanings that are intelligible both in terms of abstract conceptual schemes and in terms of the unique meanings that constitute the language of a local community of natives. While penetrating answers to these questions must be presented within a coherent system of general sociological concepts, they make also sense in terms of everyday experiences and the existing stock of common-sense knowledge. Sociologists knowledgeable in both general and unique meanings of everyday social life must be able to combine them into particular meanings having correspondences in both sets in general sociological categories and in the unique local meanings of lived social reality. Social indicators make this mediation possible between observational data and abstract conceptual schemes. Owing to their mediating role between observational variables and general concepts, social indicators carry within themselves these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of their origin. In their deductive modality, social indicators can produce new domain-specific concepts that have a foundation in general theory and methodology. They can then be used as formal building blocks of applied social science. In their inductive empirical aspect, on the other hand, social indicators supply substantive meanings to the abstract notions of social structure, social change, social justice, and social development. Ultimately, only a solid system of social or perhaps they should better be called sociological indicators can give social research comprehensiveness and cumulative discipline. We must have such descriptive indicators before any attempt is made at building middle-range social theories.

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Social indicators are uniquely positioned to provide a systematic set of middle-range sociological categories that are meaningful both in terms of common-sense local usage, and in terms of the abstract and esoteric language of general sociology. Only such indicators can mediate between complex empirical social realities and abstract conceptual schemes. These two opposites interpenetrate in social indicators and are mediated by them. Once their operational definitions are constructed and deployed within a consistent scheme of social differentiation, these social indicators can be used to determine quantitative relations among a great variety of social groups. The resulting picture of social relations will form the deep structures of synchronic as well as diachronic social change. For their users, the meanings of such indicators come in part from the content of survey questions on which they are based. Ultimately, however, it is the nature of stratified social groupings obtained from raw measurement variables and the relations among them that determine the meaning of every social indicator. Their interpretation is also limited to a certain extent by labels given to produce social categories, or strata, of which all social indicators are composed. In addition to this external interpretation, social indicators can be interpreted internally from the perspective of particular social strata. The principle of mediating interpenetration has a respectable pedigree in concept formation. Parsons apparently adopted the idea of interpenetration from Weber’s categories of the relation between religious ethics and the world, and he invoked it as early as “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory” (1935/1991). When Parsons introduced the idea of boundary zones and the AGIL four-function paradigm he effectively albeit not consciously abandoned the natural-scientific logic of structural functionalism in favor of the sociologically more appropriate one of mediation. He made this turn even if he did not fully realize that imputing useful contributions (functions) to structural forms is only legitimate in a detached naturalistic study of living organisms and species whose survival may be problematic. By contrast, the idea of prevailing social institutions performing some “useful functions,” could only serve manipulative or exploitative causes, as in Merton’s interpretation.5 The AGIL paradigm was the product of a mediating interpenetration between two pattern variables modeled on To¨nnies’ opposites of community and society as values requiring reconciliation. Mediation of opposites by their bilateral interpenetration is also evident in Marx’s materialist modification and expansion of Hegel’s triadic scheme of thesis antithesis synthesis. In Hegel’s Logic (1975, pp. 111 122),

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dialectic had a negative-critical meaning. It referred to a critical phase of thought that follows understanding and precedes positive speculative reasoning. Having adopted the principle of the primacy of being over consciousness and of praxis over theory, Marx reinterpreted Hegel’s speculation as (abstract, idealist) antithesis of understanding, and critique as (materialist) synthesis. Historic praxis became for him a second necessary synthesis, a positive mediation between the interpenetrating polar opposites of speculation and understanding. The positive synthesis reversed the outcomes of negative critique. In accordance with this new method, Marx believed that the goal of the working-class movement the particular historic praxis of abolishing exploitation could be achieved by the mediation of two (interpenetrating) opposites the unique critical analysis of prevailing conditions of the working class including alienated labor, on the one hand, and classless communist society as the universal opposite, on the other. This second mediation was reflexive in that it relied on the results of the primary negative one critique of political economy and led from the first (unique) member of the initial juxtaposition worker’s exploitation in the opposite direction to the previously formulated (universal) opposite communism. The two mediations were complementary. They were supposed mutually to justify and reinforce each other.

DE-SUBJECTIFYING INTERPRETATION AND RE-SUBJECTIFYING EXPLANATION Every representation of social structures is in some sense inadequate. First of all, it is usually outdated, referring to a more or less distant past. Secondly, what it tells us about our social world is but a snapshot of innumerable intertwined processes of social exchange, social distribution, and social mobility. It is such processes themselves that we are rather interested in since they can tell us something about the past and therefore about possible future. Neither the macroscopic reality of institutional social systems, nor the microscopic reality of human consciousness is real in the full sense of the word. Both of them are scientific abstractions from the more concrete reality of particular status groups and class interests the only social reality that lends itself to direct participatory experiencing and control. By conceptualizing social structures as resulting at once from institutional social practices and from conscious value-rational social action, we can capture these two complementary facets of social reality. The

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knowledge of the processes going on at the macro-social and micro-social levels provides a necessary background for adjustments of and to structures of status groups and class interests, but in itself it is always deficient. Macro-social structures do register outcomes of social action; they are finished social products so to speak. But their study inevitably retreats into the infinite questions of global human society and world history. The study of individual consciousness is also bound to retreat into the infinite depths of the human mind and its reflexivity. Only limited by the practical urgency and concreteness of achieving social justice and progressive social development can these important studies acquire their proper place and meaningful anchorage. Interpretation of classic authorities is also a product of mediation by interpenetrating opposites of understanding and conceptualization. We interpret the classics by de-subjectifying their ideas and the senses intended in their concepts and categories. We interpret classic concepts and categories in the light of today’s sociological concerns. Above all, this must involve the concepts of social class, of status group, and of the relationship between them. We can also compare and integrate Marx’s and Weber’s historicism, then Durkheim’s and Parsons’ functionalism, and then see how the classic historicist and functionalist ideas could be fused together in a working concept of progressive social development. It is also useful at this stage critically to find inconsistencies or unresolved problems in the classic texts. That could involve either problems of the classics’ professed methodologies or their substantive themes or possibly inconsistencies between the two. Marx’s and Weber’s historicism has often been juxtaposed as opposites with Durkheim’s and Parsons’ functionalism. The fact is that neither the efforts by Habermas, heir of Marx’s and Weber’s historicism, nor the efforts by the neofunctionalists, heirs of Durkheim’s and Parsons’ structural functionalism, have been able to produce successful amalgamations of these two perspectives on social system and social action. It has been charged that while neofunctionalists were justified in paying more attention to the multiplicity of parallel and intertwining historic processes of social differentiation, the action-theoretic aspect of their program was still tied to meeting the imperatives and needs of an orderly functioning system of social institutions. On the other hand, Habermas saw Luhmann’s abstract systemic functionalism as an indispensable supplement to his concept of communicative social action and as a way to account for the complexity of external conditions of action in the world where their aggregate consequences would otherwise be incomprehensible to actors. Thus the objective view of

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systemic social relations was still tied by Habermas to the needs of social action with no re-coupling of the initially postulated decoupled social system and lifeworld. Ultimately, for Habermas, the way the social system functions could only be understood through the perspective of social actions and interests as they are involved in symbolically mediated social exchanges (Schwinn, 1998). One of the main sources of these shortcomings is the fact that neither the vision of normally functioning institutional social systems, nor the vision of ideal-typical historical individuals is real in the full sense of the word. These perspectives are two analytical aspects of the same abstract idea of structured developmental processes one focused on processes, the other on structures. It is impossible to deny that both historicism and functionalism are necessary and valuable as perspectives on social development (Zaret, 1980). And yet, both of them remain social-scientific abstractions from the more concrete reality of particular status groups and their class interests the only social reality that lends itself to direct participatory experience and control. Today’s social science is called upon to overcome this shortcoming by connecting the perspectives of historicism and functionalism in an overall conceptual scheme as interconnected moments of the social reproduction process of stratified status and class relations. The classics had a tremendous influence in large part because they tried to answer this call. Marx saw capitalism as a developmentally unsustainable social order. He saw world history as a change of socio-economic formations precipitated by class struggle for equitable relations of property classes (organization classes) lagging behind a progressive development of productive forces (industry classes). He therefore envisaged a just classless society to be achieved by way of a revolutionary workers’ movement conscious of its class interests. These ideas were novel and powerful, yet utopian. They resulted in big social transformations of world-historic proportions in the Soviet Union, in Asia, and in the Western hemisphere that could not be sustained. Similarly, Weber who was guided by the ancient religious idea of social justice advanced his conception of a better, rational social order to be achieved through value-oriented social action in the form of personal commitments to a lifelong selfless pursuit of a vocation. However, Weber’s idea of rationalization did not promise any more humanity than Marx’s communist workers’ paradise. It was a somber picture of the reality of civil service as a dehumanized “iron cage” of instrumental rationality, of a society of “specialists without spirit” and “sensualists without heart” that frightened Weber in the conclusion of The Protestant Ethic.

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Durkheim was also inspired by the idea of a moral society in the form of organic social solidarity and professional ethics to be achieved by education and a rational social science. As it happened, the only practical realizations of Durkheim’s ideas were in a more efficient Western colonial administration in Asia and Africa informed by French and British functionalist anthropology. With the colonial system dismantled after WWII, Durkheim’s ideas and Weber’s language found a follower in Parsons. Parsons used his fertile scholarly imagination to elevate the achievements and the way of life in the 20th-century America as a universal idea of normally functioning social structures where individual conduct conformed to Western liberal values and traditional cultural norms. The universal normality of such a social order has also been brought into question. We interpret and re-interpret classic ideas and concepts with a view of addressing today’s problems in social science and in sociological practice. Since the number of interpretations of the same texts is limitless, the criteria for evaluating interpretations must be the completeness of the material covered and the internal consistency of the interpretation itself. Different interpretations of the classics do not necessarily negate each other if for no other reason than because the classic ideas themselves show changes of position and are not free of ambiguities and contradictions. Preference may also depend on readers’ interpretive interests. Being a product of human minds, there is no less subjectivity in them than in theory construction. Every interpretation attempts to de-mystify classic authorities and to de-subjectify them in this sense. This is an opposite operation by comparison with explanation and theory construction where interpreted social reality is re-subjectified. We re-subjectify the social reality every time we offer theories of its causal explanation. Theory construction and thus empirical research that supports it always involve reliance on certain ideas of classic authorities as they are understood, and on their concepts as they are adapted for constructed theories. This also involves modeling the subject-matters of our investigation and quantitative empirical analysis of present-day problems such as social justice. Modeling creates a solid basis for constructing a variety of substantive social theories and for their empirical testing. Quantitatively modeled social structures, social practices, and their underlying social values make it possible to evaluate past and present social processes and prepare for the future. Any interpretation needs an ontological frame of reference. However, in a sense this relationship holds the other way, too. Any ontological presupposition can only be expressed in, justified by, and based upon an

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interpretation of their meanings that are substantive and concrete in some other, extraneous context. This is what Heidegger described as the hermeneutic circle of understanding. This circle can be broken and avoided when the task of semantic interpretation is separated from the reflexive critique of prevailing misunderstandings and misinterpretations as well as from the critical analysis of pertinent literary material. In a similar structural process, Saussure insisted on separating observed collective phenomena of human speech (langage) and individual acts of communication (parole) from language proper (langue) as consisting of evaluated syntagmatic and associative relations of meaningful signs. Hermeneutic interpretation is not an end in itself. Its primary task is to provide necessary material foundations for a new integration of conflicting extant usages so that newly constructed theories may be grounded and have a chance of being considered valid if only for a limited time. The idea of a hermeneutic circle harks back to Hegel’s dictum that what is rational is real (is actualized in the historic development of human Spirit), and what is real is rational. The latter is not necessarily true, however. At any present moment we are faced with multiple realities whose rationality must be questioned. Ontological presuppositions that are always present in our interpretive work are also likely to be polysemantic. Attempts at their explicit interpretation will immediately expose their biases that cannot be rationally justified. Gadamer appropriately called such presuppositions prejudices. Yet this is but another way of saying that just like any explanation, interpretation is a mediating product of interpenetration between understanding and conceptualization with an emphasis on conceptualization. Causal explanation is also a mediating product of this interpenetration between understanding and conceptualization. The difference is that in explanation the emphasis is on understanding understanding of the core meanings contained in classic sociology such as social justice and social progress that are as germane to today’s empirical realities as ever.

DE-OBJECTIFYING UNDERSTANDING AND RE-OBJECTIFYING CONCEPTUALIZATION To interpret classical works with a view to today’s tasks in sociology, it is necessary first to understand their original historic meanings. Without such an understanding any interpretation can easily slip into a distorted, arbitrary picture of the classics. And without interpretation, a historicist

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reading alone remains just an academic exercise devoid of practical usefulness outside the academy. As interpretation needs understanding, so must understanding be followed by interpretation. There is no middle ground between interpretation and understanding. The term interpretive understanding is a poor translation of Weber’s Verstehen. Today we take Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons as classic authorities when we recognize them as the undisputed foundation for our sociological work and use their works as material for our own hermeneutic reinterpretation and re-conceptualization. These classic authorities become utopias when rather than using them as material for de-objectifying understanding and de-subjectifying interpretation they are treated as describing objective reality and when attempts are made to build or promote social movements aimed at institutionalizing such utopias. This is the sense in which Mannheim wrote about them. Social utopias, especially extreme ones of either left or right as in the case of Marxism substitute readymade social ideology for the laborious but necessary comprehensive method of social science. They can be dangerous. As the history of the 20th century shows, in times of crisis utopias can and have been made real by seductive demagogical leaders putting them into practice by force. The falsehoods of ideology and utopia can be avoided in what Mannheim called a quest for reality.6 As political reality can only be found in a synthesis of conflicting partisan positions, so must sociology synthesize its particular ideological conceptions that must, in turn, be subjected to new, revised syntheses.7 Synthesizing classic authorities in (continuously revised) conceptual frameworks allows us to create two mediating forms of this social science where understanding of the classic legacies and their re-conceptualization interpenetrate: hermeneutic interpretation and social research practices where multiple alternative theories of causal explanation can be constructed and tested. Although the legacy of classic authorities exists for us as objective reality, true sociological consciousness can find reality only in their critical amalgamations, only in their de-objectification. This work that has preoccupied much of sociology does not have to take several volumes or even one thick volume. It can be done in a few short chapters. There are two main ways suggested for reading sociological classics. One is the presentist way of interpreting them with a view of applying their ideas to today’s social relations that are different from those that the classic authors themselves had in mind (Seidman, 1985). The other way is historicist, the opposite way in a sense, that mandates the reading of classics in their own context and without adding any interpretive language at all that

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was not used by the classics themselves (Jones, 1977). There is also a phenomenological way suggested for reading the meanings of historic texts as lived ones, unmediated symbolically by speech. According to Rock (1976, p. 363), this gives us “an opportunity to enter into the forms and content of life prepared by the dead. The seizing of such an opportunity becomes a phenomenological reality grounded in the present.” This method can be seen as a special, extreme case of historicism. There is also a fourth way of reading the classics that is supposed to combine and supersede the extremes of both the objectivism of the historicist way and the constructivism of the presentist one (Kelly, 1990). An initial historicist reading of a classic would explore his main themes and in so doing reveal his key concepts and categories. This would make it possible to evaluate how well substantive classic themes were worked out with the help of those concepts and categories. In a subsequent interpretation we would use classic concepts and categories revealed in prior reading with a view of developing our own themes relevant to today’s sociological concerns. So first we read the classics in a purely historicist mode striving at understanding them in their own terms. The new element here may be in the selection of themes and in the emphasis laid on some of them as against others. Such choices will usually prefer seminal, original elements of classical works. As Jones (1977, p. 284) said, we always decide “what is worthy of study.” Also, certain relationships among selected themes may be brought to light. We will also want to find valuable commonalities among them. In doing so we may feel free to change somewhat the exact meanings intended by the classics and to adapt their language to today’s needs. This becomes necessary especially when we then want to construct our own conceptual scheme rather than simply follow Weber as against Marx or Durkheim as against Parsons. Thus, in reading Weber, for example, we will want to show a thematic unity across his major works Protestant Ethic, Economy and Society, and his sociology of religion. We will want to elucidate his central substantive and methodological categories such as ideal types of legitimate domination, of orientation of social action, and his methodology of historic causation. We may want to pay special attention to Weber’s idea of value-rationality as a property of social action or of action orientation, and to the theme of value-freedom as Weber’s normative take on the relationship between theory and practice. A similar approach will be useful in reading Marx, Durkheim, and Parsons. Again, the reading of the classics must be a narrative that is internally consistent with respect to a sociologist’s perspective and with regard to the

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classic texts. It can consist of several layers not necessarily separated in time and in space. So first comes a historicist reading in Jones’ sense a reading covering possibly most of the classic legacies without, however, losing their internal unity. Here we elucidate the classics’ seminal concepts and categories of thought both substantive and methodological. One can also address certain unresolved problems found in the classic legacy, such as the relationship between theory and practice in Marx, the problem of positive functions of crime in Durkheim or the problem of value-neutrality in Weber. In such a re-reading, we should find that central classic sociological concepts exploitation and class struggle, social values and rationalization, solidarity and social coordination, and social integration and exchange were all rooted substantively or reflexively, for example, in problems of social justice and sustainable social development as the most fundamental issues of today’s social order. This first stage is purely historicist. In a subsequent conceptualization on which every interpretive and explanatory work relies we extract the classic concepts and categories out of their historical contexts and use them as material in building our own conceptual schemes still making an effort to do as little violence to their original meanings as possible. This was done by Marx himself with respect to classical economists even though his voluminous Theories of Surplus-Value was written after The Capital. Parsons did the same with respect to Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber. We will not be concerned here with literally following the meanings of the categories used in the original works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim or Parsons. Indeed, both the historicist and the presentist methods are valuable in their own right only if used jointly, in relation to one another. While still trying to preserve as much of their original meaning as possible, we may nevertheless take them out of their original context and adapt them to the problems of today’s social concerns. In this way, we can re-conceptualize the ideas of the sociological classics as if they all saw different aspects of one and the same ideal object.8 But is there such a single perspective that will be congruent with the conceptual and methodological legacy of all the four sociological classics who were so different after all? The answer must be yes since according to a general consensus existing in sociology, they are all relevant to our today’s efforts in building a valid and useful social science. So the question should rather be how do we find or construct such a single perspective? This is equivalent to asking, what relevance does the work of the classical sociologists have for us today? Which classical concepts and methods are meaningful in today’s social realities? There is also a requirement that

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combining the classics’ central concepts should not be eclectic. The new conceptual scheme must be internally coherent and consistent. In this work of sociological re-conceptualization we combine and re-combine some of their central ideas and categories in an internally consistent conceptual scheme of our own. Such a conceptual scheme can be stated explicitly or implied as our ontological presupposition. In either case it will be presumed to have properties of objective social reality. In this sense, every work of new conceptualization based on classic sociological legacies involves re-objectification. In this reconstructive part of the method, we can use the idea of status and class consistency as the central criterion of social justice in empirical analysis of social reproduction and progressive social development. C. Wright Mills’ critique of Abstract Empiricism was directed against social research where atomized individuals were taken as units of analysis rather than status groups pursuing their class interests, and substantive conclusions were often inductively drawn from spurious relationships among variables found with the help of poorly specified models. Following the principle of bilateral interpenetration and mediation of polar opposites it can be shown that status groups and their shared class interests can be successfully modeled in sociology, and that standards of rationality and fair exchange can be effectively used to evaluate current social trends. This is also an effective way to define major types of status groups and class interests as well as modes of social production, consumption, distribution, and exchange in a way that makes them mutually exclusive and exhaustive (Smikun, 2011). The result will be status groups and class interests presented as mesostructural social forms produced by an interpenetrating mediation between the trite dichotomous ideas of individuals and society. We can thus construct grounded theories of social-structural factors causing conflicts among divergent values. Such theories will be part of empirical research projects addressing today’s social problems. We can measure social structures of status achievement, status satisfaction, and status practices, and then compare them with structures of class interests, class confidence, and class action. Inconsistencies among these cross-cutting social structures can then be estimated by standards of social justice interpreted as their consistency. As part of practical social reconstruction, such research programs will be similar to the overall method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction. The idea of interpenetration has been attributed to Kant (Mu¨nch, 1981), but it may go even further back to Aristotle (Dubrovsky, 1999). Indeed, in

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Grundrisse Marx (1973, p. 89) presented exchange and distribution as middle terms of a standard syllogism where general-societal production and singular-individual consumption were interpenetrating opposites. Mediating bilateral interpenetration of polar opposites is a systemic principle of concept formation and theory construction of greater complexity than either Kantian dichotomies or Hegelian triads of (unilateral) transcendental supersession (Aufhebung), and it can be seen as incorporating them both.

NOTES 1. As used here, the term reconstruction is intended in juxtaposition to preliminary hermeneutic deconstruction as its necessary methodological as well as terminological complement. It has nothing to do with Habermas’ (1976, 1979) notion of “reconstructive science” that is thoroughly individualistic modeled as it is on Freud’s psychoanalysis, Piaget’s concept of child development, and Chomsky’s concept of linguistic competence. To numerous critics of this idea Habermas responded by modifying or qualifying his claims and conclusions that were based, nevertheless, on the criticized original distinctions (Alford, 1985; Arnason, 1982; McCarthy, 1978; Schmid, 1982). 2. Aspects of this argument have been advanced by Boswell, Brown, Brueggemann, and Peters (2006), Rose (1997) and Carsten (1988). 3. When Weber speaks about occupations conceptually rather than empirically (1978, pp. 140 144), they are synonymous with a calling, or vocation. Actually, it is the same word in German Beruf whose original meaning is religious and thus cultural in Western Protestantism. 4. Later Blau (1977) similarly suggested that exchanges of status in intermarriage take place due to social-structural forces. Those forces were nothing if not classes. Unrecognized status and class inconsistency is also implied in Heterogeneity and Inequality by Blau, Blum, and Schwartz (1982). 5. Despite his attribution of useful functions to crime, Durkheim’s functionalism was primarily concerned with effects of changing social structures rather than with causes of their extant forms. 6. “The attempt to escape ideological and utopian distortions is, in the last analysis, a quest for reality. [ … ] All the conflicting groups and classes in society seek this reality in their thought and deeds, and it is therefore no wonder that it appears to be different to each of them [ … ]. The special cultural sciences from the point of view of their particularity are no better than everyday empirical knowledge” (Mannheim, 1985, pp. 98, 101 102). 7. “The continuously revised and renewed synthesis of the existing particular viewpoints becomes all the more possible because the attempts at synthesis have no less a tradition than has the knowledge founded on partisanship” (Mannheim, 1985, p. 151). 8. Ritzer (1981) argued for an integrated sociological paradigm in a similar sense.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is partially based on a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of American Sociological Association, Denver 2012, and an essay written for the online newsletter of the ASA Theory Section. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft version of this paper.

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Kelly, C. (1990). Methods of reading and the discipline of sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 15, 301–324. Lenski, G. E. (1966). Power and privilege. A theory of social stratification. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Mannheim, K. (1985). Ideology and utopia. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. New York, NY: Vintage. McCarthy, T. (1978). The critical theory of Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mu¨nch, R. (1981). Talcott Parsons and the theory of action. I. The structure of the Kantian core. American Journal of Sociology, 86, 709 739. Parsons, T. (1935/1991). The place of ultimate values in sociological theory. In C. Camic (Ed.), Talcott Parsons: The early essays (pp. 231 257). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ritzer, G. (1981). Toward an integrated sociological paradigm. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Rock, P. (1976). Some problems of interpretive historiography. British Journal of Sociology, 27(3), 353 369. Rose, F. (1997). Toward a class-cultural theory of social movements: Reinterpreting new social movements. Sociological Forum, 12(3), 461 494. Schmid, M. (1982). Habermas’ theory of social evolution. In J. Thompson & D. D. Hell (Eds.), Habermas: Critical debates (pp. 162 180). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schwinn, T. (1998). False connections: Systems and action theories in neofunctionalism and in Jurgen Habermas. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 75 95. Seidman, S. (1985). The historicist controversy: A critical review with a defense of a revised presentism. Sociological Theory, 3(1), 13 16. Smikun, E. (2011). Distributive justice and fair exchange. Peabody, MA: Aminso. Sørensen, A. B. (2001). Basic concepts of stratification research: Class, status, and power. In D. B. Grusky (Ed.), Social stratification: Class, race and gender in sociological perspective (2nd ed., pp. 287 300). Boulder, CO: Westview. Sorokin, P. A. (1947). Society, culture and personality: Their structure and dynamics. A system of general sociology. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers. Sorokin, P. A. (1959). Social and cultural mobility. New York, NY: Free Press. Ultee, W. C. (1996). Do rational choice approaches have problems? European Sociological Review, 12(2), 167 179. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. An outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zaret, D. (1980). From Weber to Parsons and Schutz: The eclipse of history in modern social theory. American Journal of Sociology, 85(5), 1180 1201.

PART III CRITICAL THEORIES

THE BASE-SUPERSTRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY Michael J. Thompson ABSTRACT Purpose To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those who see this hypothesis as determinist and eliminating the possibilities for the autonomy of social action. In doing so, it is able to retard and atrophy the critical capacities of subjects. Design/methodology/approach Emphasis on the return to a structural-functionalist understanding of social processes that places this version of Critical Theory against the more domesticated forms that consider “discourse ethics” and an “ethic of recognition” as the normative research program for Critical Theory. Also, an analysis of the purpose and logic of functional arguments and their relation to Marx’s concept of “determination” is undertaken.

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 161 193 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032007

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Findings The essence of Critical Theory hinges upon the ways that social structures are able to deform and shape structures of consciousness of modern subjects to predispose them to forms of domination and to view the prevailing hierarchical structures of extractive domination as legitimate in some basic sense. Research limitations/implications The foundations of Critical Theory need to be rooted in a renewed understanding of the relation between social structure and forms of consciousness. This means a move beyond theories of social practices into the realm of social epistemology as well as the mechanisms of consciousness and their relation to ideology. Originality/value Few analyses of the relation between the base and the superstructure or material organization of society and the socialepistemological layer of consciousness delineate the mechanisms involved in shaping consciousness. I undertake an analysis that utilizes insights from the philosophy of mind such as the theory of intentionality as well as the sociological approach to values through Parsons. Keywords: Critical Theory; base and superstructure; functionalism; social epistemology; ideology

INTRODUCTION A central development of contemporary Critical Theory has been the thesis that theories of social action of communication, intersubjective recognition, forms of justification, and so on are to be given primacy over the influence of the structures and functions of social institutions and their grounding in the economic structure of society. According to this view, the original project of Critical Theory was mistaken in that it placed too much emphasis on the dynamics of social structure and its ability to inhibit individual autonomy. The move toward paradigms of social action as the primary basis for a Critical Theory of society, therefore, became absorbed into the mainstream of social science and normative philosophy. The basic feature of critique for advocates of these positions is that we are able to find, immanent within the action of everyday life and the phylogenetic capacities of the species as a whole, a kernel for the emancipation of society from non-democratic forms of life. Habermas’ attempt to make Critical Theory into a form of rational justification of ethical arguments, open to

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discursive praxis and critique, and then juridified into institutional and legal norms that can become regulative for the community as a whole, therefore, made use of the Kantian roots of German Idealism as opposed to the Hegelian roots of the Marxian current. This developmental path of Critical Theory has displaced the core aims of its originators who were concerned with questions of alienation, dehumanization, and the pathologies of rationality that accompanied administrative-capitalist societies. At the core of this is a theory of social epistemology that is shaped and structured by the forces of social structure. The original aim of critical theorists was to define the structures that were responsible for the lack of critical cognition in modern subjects and to outline the ways that the structural features of capitalist economic life and highly rationalized social institutions were capable of thwarting critique and promoting a sterile conformism among members of mass society. Put simply, the trajectory of Critical Theory has moved away from its critique of capitalism and its pathological effects on modern subjectivity and toward a neo-Idealist paradigm that has essentially displaced the Marxian problematic. These attempts to offer an emancipatory form of praxis fall into a deep and dangerous form of abstraction in the sense that they eschew the concrete mechanisms of political power and the kinds of logics necessary to contest the power of capital politically. My aim here is to try to address this problem by showing the relevance of the base-superstructure hypothesis for Critical Theory and to argue that it is at the core of a Critical Theory of society. Marx’s basic premise was that the forces of economic power necessitate certain social, political, legal, cultural, and mental forms of life. The relation is rightly seen as determinist, but wrongly seen as mechanistic. As I will argue here, it should also be seen as the core of Critical Theory since the project of the critique of consciousness, of Ideologiekritik, was always the main concern of Critical Theory whose radical character has always consisted of its ability to explode false forms of consciousness, to identify the expansive ways in which the imperatives of modern, capitalist economic systems can transform consciousness in order to reinforce the extractive imperatives of society through the expansion of the commodity form, the embedding of instrumental rationality, and the domestication of radical critique of these things as systems of power, domination, and control. However, traditional Critical Theory was unable to meet these challenges politically because, at least under the impulse of the later work of Adorno and Horkheimer, a move was made that placed renewed emphasis on subjectivity as a realm of contesting reification in terms of a “negative

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dialectic,” the cynical indictment of Enlightenment rationality, a turn to aesthetics as a domain of resistance, not to mention its lack of any kind of political theory. In my view, Critical Theory can be relevant once again only by regrounding its link with Marx by seeing the central ways in which capital itself a specific mode of organizing the ensemble of social relations is also able to determine consciousness in such a way that we can diagnose the irrational forms of social and political consciousness that in fact allow for the persistence of a hierarchically organized social order of extractive social relations. Marx’s hypothesis about the relation between base and superstructure lies, for me at least, at the heart of this enterprise. This is because Critical Theory’s basic enterprise is the diagnosis of perverted forms of consciousness: forms of thinking and reasoning that are unable to connect subject and object rationally, connecting them instead only through the mystifications of irrationality, ideology, or other forms of false consciousness. Critical Theory’s impulse is to disclose the forms of pathological reasoning that leads to the degradation of human life and a consciousness of the social and human needs that are prerequisites for an actualized, fully developed, humane existence (Thompson, 2011a). I argue that a reconstruction of the base-superstructure hypothesis can be effected along the two basic lines of argument. According to the first, there is an essential primacy of functional forces of social organization to those of consciousness in the sense that social facts are able to impress and shape cognitive frames of thought. The material organization of the social world operates according to certain logics of power where institutions are hierarchically organized based on the capacity of economic life to force some degree of harmonization with its own logics. Second, the socialtheoretic argument deals with the problem of the constitution of subjectivity. This “constitution problem” occurs along two lines as well: (i) through the constitution of certain forms of cognitive capacities that individuals possess and utilize in the operation of their consciousness, and (ii) through the shaping of moral-evaluative forms of reasoning and value-orientations, which affect the nature of how individuals act in the social context of norms and obligations. This constitution problem, as I see it, is distinct from many recent approaches that emphasize social practices but lack a theory or model of how consciousness is shaped by social forces and how those forms of consciousness legitimate practices and institutions. In what follows, I provide a model of the constitution of subjectivity by showing how value-orientations and intentional mental states are shaped by socialstructural forces.

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I therefore attempt to reconstruct the base-superstructure hypothesis to show how the imperatives and logics of capitalist institutions come to shape the subjective life of individuals. This process is not mechanistic, even though it is deterministic. It is deterministic in the sense that the power to shape consciousness comes from specific and identifiable institutional logics. It is also non-mechanistic in the sense that it is not structured in such a way that the causality of the model is total, but rather functional. More precisely, I advance the thesis that capitalist forms of rational-economic life shape and condition (i.e., determine) the mental states of individuals as well as the broader personality complex. It does so imperfectly, however not totally. But my proposition is that it is effective enough to constrain the critical capacity of subjects and, to go further, corrupt significantly their capacity to cultivate and obtain an active critical consciousness through the means of communicative action, recognition, or other forms of intersubjective praxis. In this sense, the Marxian premise of an economic base that has functional primacy to forms of consciousness can be defended and the premises of communicative and discursive forms of social action can be seen to be defective in the face of capitalist forms of social organization and institutionalization. I submit that the base-superstructure model stands at the center of any genuine form of Critical Theory because of its ability to deal with the constitution of consciousness and subjectivity and hence with the central connection between the nature of socio-historical formations and the shaping of subjectivity. This means opening up once again the problems of alienation, false consciousness, and reification as challenges to pragmatist-inspired theories of action and epistemology. I end by considering the ways in which current trends in Critical Theory can be reworked to reintegrate the constitution problem and its relevance for contemporary social and political philosophy.

THE AUTONOMY OF SOCIAL ACTION IN NEO-IDEALIST CRITICAL THEORY The reconstruction of the base-superstructure model that I advance here is meant to reconstruct Critical Theory along Marxian lines. This means reconnecting it to forms of economic power and mitigating against a domesticated form of Critical Theory that places emphasis on subjective and intersubjective forms of agency at the expense of structural and

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economic sources of social power and their respective capacities to shape, determine, and distort the consciousness of subjects. This domesticated Critical Theory has ushered in a kind of neo-Idealism, turning its back on the radical insight of Marx that “social being determines consciousness.” In many ways, this begins with Ju¨rgen Habermas’ thesis that emphatic weight needs to be shifted away from the systemic and structural functional institutional processes of modernity toward the intersubjective and discursive forms of action, which comprise the essence of solidaristic forms of socialization and democratic ego- and will-formation. This intersubjective and linguistic turn in Critical Theory has culminated in a vision of critique that undervalues the persistent and consistently pathological ways in which the economic organization of society (especially under capitalism) is able to pervert the powers of subjective and intersubjective reason and socialization from achieving critical power against oligarchically structured forms of social power. Habermas made the first move against the Marxian foundation of Critical Theory when he attacked the base-superstructure model for its reliance on a model of rationality that placed too much emphasis on the technical rational mode of rationality at the expense of communicative rationality. Since Marxist theorists conceived of economic relations of production as characterized by forms of technical and strategic rationality: “The dialectic of productive forces and productive relations has often been understood in a technicist (technizistischen) sense. The theorem then argues that techniques of production necessitate not only certain forms of organizing and mobilizing labor power, but also, through the social organization of labor, the relations of production appropriate to it” (Habermas, 1976, p. 159). In this view, the relations of economic life are characterized by modes of rationality that do not exhaust the types of action and interaction characteristic of the species. He sees communicative action as distinct from the technical rational modes of thought and action that Marxian theories took as basic: “However, we must separate the level of communicative action from the instrumental and strategic action combined in social cooperation” (Habermas, 1976, p. 160). This results in the thesis that “the species learns not only in the dimension of technically useful knowledge decisive for the development of productive forces, but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness decisive for structures of interaction. The rules of communicative action do develop in reaction to changes in the domain of instrumental and strategic action, but they follow their own logic” (Habermas, 1976, p. 163).

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My proposition here is that this move by Habermas was made without properly theorizing the power of the base-superstructure model. Rather than reducing the economic sphere to technical and strategic action alone, it is crucial to see that a connection exists between the ways in which economic logics shape those institutions that in turn socialize members of society. Capitalism, therefore, is concerned not only with the aims of production but also with the ability to harness as many institutions as possible to its logic in order to secure increased growth, consumption, legitimacy, and social stability. The communicative competence, the cognitive power of subjects, is dialectically related to these forms of socialization anchored in institutions that are increasingly aligned with economic logics. We cannot escape the materialist thesis through a model of intersubjectivity and socialization, which is external to the processes of dominant economic forces. My counterclaim to Habermas, therefore, concerns the mechanisms that facilitate the creation of value-orientations within subjects that are shaped by those economic logics as well as which shape their cognitive and mental powers. The crucial weakness of neo-Idealist expressions of Critical Theory lies in their assumption that the logics of capitalism are somehow contained within an economic sphere, separable both analytically as well as empirically from the other domains of society (something that perhaps could have been deduced given the state of capitalist development in the late 1960s and 1970s, i.e., before the neo-liberal transformation of capitalism), in particular the cognitive processes and powers that are developed through discursive or recognitive forms of intersubjectivity. However, I submit that this thesis is not tenable, that, despite its philosophical appeal, it fails to take into consideration the ways that capitalist forms of social integration shape consciousness in such a way that solidaristic forms of social action and social consciousness become increasingly scarce and, when it does in fact occur, decreasingly radical and threatening to the nature of the contemporary social order. More crucially, I think that it is more likely to argue that the very mental states, cognitive patterns, and attitudinal structures of modern subjects are deeply formed by institutional logics within everyday life that are harnessed to capital and the rhythms of economic rationality. My central aim in what follows is to resurrect the Marxian hypothesis of the base-superstructure model of society in order (a) to show how Critical Theory is rooted in its basic premises and (b) to show that the intersubjective, discursive, and recognitive theories that dominate neoIdealist critical theory fail in their attempt to formulate an immanent critique of domination in modern societies.

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CRITICAL THEORY AND BASE-SUPERSTRUCTURE: A BASIC AXIOM The limitations of the classical Marxist model of base-superstructure is plagued by an inability despite its intrinsically dialectical character to account for the mechanisms that shape subjectivity and the ways in which this leads to the quiescence of political movements and the distortion of rational, critical consciousness more generally. Critical Theory’s basic project was, from the beginning, to explore the categories of the superstructure, that is, to seek to tease out the ways by which capitalism creates subjects compliant to the interests and imperatives of capital; in short, to legitimate an oligarchically structured community that could sustain a highly technical, highly consumptive phase of capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a reaction to the mechanistic form of consciousness and praxis that characterized orthodox and classical Marxism. What unites Gramsci, Korsch, and Luka´cs in this sense is that all were seeking to theorize a new means by which to confront and explode the cultural and cognitive clenches that deflected critical consciousness and nullify critical activity and emancipatory forms of social praxis. This means explaining the pathologies of modern life in terms of the ways that the economic imperatives of capitalist are able to distort the subjective (i.e., cognitive, moral, aesthetic, psychological) attributes of modern personalities. The dehumanization of modern man is seen as a symptom of the permeation of commodification, reification, exchange value, etc., into deeper domains of cultural and personal life. In what follows, I will seek to outline the basis for a non-mechanistic understanding of the base-superstructure hypothesis; one that I will call a “functionalist” model of base-superstructure. I believe this argument will transcend the hyper-structural and dogmatic versions of the theory, and also show that it is suited to be a basic model for a Critical Theory of society.

Axiom: Social Being and the Determinants of Mental Life We should begin with an analysis of Marx’s basic hypothesis. According to him: “The totality of [the] relations of production forms (bildet) the economic structure of society, the real basis (reale Basis), on which rises (erhebt) a legal and political superstructure (U¨berbau) and to which correspond (entsprechen) definite (bestimmte) forms of social consciousness. The

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mode of production of material life conditions (bedingt) the social, political, and cultural lifeprocess (geistigen Lebensprozeß) in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines (bestimmt) their existence, but their social being that determines (bestimmt) their consciousness” (Marx, 1971, pp. 8 9). It is important to analyze this passage with some precision. First, Marx’s use of the words “determine,” “constitute,” and “condition” are important since these are the words he uses to describe the causal nature of the mechanisms that constitute the base-superstructure model. Second the distinction between bestimmen and bedingen is an important one. The verb bestimmen indicates a more definitive, stronger sense of determination or causation, whereas bedingen, rendered here as “condition,” is one which sets the necessary preconditions for an event to take place. Rather than one event causing another to occur unidirectionally and directly, bedingen implies that one structure will come to correspond with another, that the kind of causation is softer, more pliable, less acute than a billiard ball type of causality. In Marxian terms, to say that something “determines” something else does not imply a mechanistic form of causation. Rather, Marx means by “determine” (embedded in the use of both bedingen and betstimmen) the act of placing limits on something, by “blocking or selecting out all such phenomena that do not comply with it” (McMurtry, 1978, p. 161). Determinare, in Latin, is the verb which means “to confine within limits” or “to set bounds to” or “to delimit boundaries.” This semantic dimension to the term is important since it means that the act of determining, for Marx, means to control the fundamental, rule-governed structure of any process or structure. When applied to the life processes of individuals, the economic structure, the “real basis,” for the community sets up the preconditions, the rules of the game, so to speak, that regulate, shape, and, therefore, determine those life processes. In this sense, the act of determining any thing is the result of the kinds of patterned forms of life and action that any structure (in Marx’s case, the economic structure) can impose on agents. The result is a dialectic between structure and agency where subjects take on the patterned forms of structured life into which they are socialized and which pervade their lives. The determinative relationship of base and superstructure is, therefore, the result not of the classical or orthodox causal model, one influenced by positivist conceptions of scientific reasoning, but rather the result of a structural functional adaptation of subjects to social structures. This means that the base-superstructure model is historical in nature in that it is a diachronic process of adapting both institutional forms as well as forms of consciousness, practices, culture, and so on to the

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imperatives of the valorization of capital. But this thesis relies on a prior one that articulates the nature of the determinative relationship between different kinds of structures. The first iteration of the axiom of base and superstructure can be stated as follows: A1. Structure A determines structure B iff structure A is able to place limits on the functions (rules, norms, laws, etc.) that govern structure B. These structures can be social in nature, as in formal institutions such as schools, firms, and so on, or can refer to informal institutions such as social relations, or to “structures” of consciousness, or the personality. Nevertheless, what is necessary is that one structure or set of relational rules is able to set limits on some other set of rules or norms. This means that as a first approximation, structures can be hierarchically related to each other to the extent that one is able to limit the attributes of another or a plurality of others. In Marx’s basic formulation, the basic organizing institution or structure is capital. Capital is, as Marx reminds us, not a thing, but a “social process,” a “relation among men,” and, in the Manifesto, a concrete “social power” (eine Gesellschaftliche Macht). The basic form of the base-superstructure hypothesis, therefore, lies in the ability of capital to order the dynamic processes of those institutions it requires for its maintenance and/or expansion even as it extinguishes others based on their vestigiality with respect to the imperatives of capital. In terms of capitalist society, this axiom can be filled out to give us a more concrete one: A2. The logic of capital determines the structure and function of social institutions which, in turn, come to determine the forms of consciousness and personality of individuals. These two formulations have much in common, but also differ in certain senses. A1 maintains that there exists a relation of structural dominance of a specific set of rules over another specific set of rules. This means that determination here is a form of power where one structure of rules is capable of rewriting the rules or scripts of another. When applied to the economic sphere, we derive A2 which is Marx’s hypothesis about the relationship of base and superstructure. But in this sense, we are forced to move from an abstraction of a dominance of one set of rules over another, and into the realm of social being and consciousness, respectively. We should perhaps break this axiom down into its core constituent parts: A3. The logic of capital determines the institutional logics and norms of economic and non-economic institutions.

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This postulates a distinct, causal relation between the structure of rules and norms that govern two spheres of social institutions: capital as a social relationship and those social institutions that are external to the sphere of economic relations. The key here is to note that in A1 we defined the fundamental base-superstructure relation as residing in the capacity of one structure to place limits on the rules that govern another structure. But in addition to this, we see that institutional norms possess a socializing function for agents, thereby granting them a determining character on the personality system of subjects.1 This process of subject-formation, of subjectivation, occurs as a result of the ability of institutions to place limits on the content of norms to which individuals come to assent as well as the cognitive and epistemic structures of thought (i.e., the thought categories, or Denkformen) that come to constitute their reflective and rational capacities. Hence, the last axiomatic claim in this series of arguments is: A4. The structures and patterns of subjective norms, mental states, and cognitive capacities are determined by routinized logics of social institutions. This suggests that the link between capitalist imperatives, the logics of social institutions, and subjective mental states, powers, and capacities come to be linked through a determining chain of causation where economic forces shape institutions which in turn socialize or “subjectivize” agents. Therefore, we see that both A3 and A4, when combined, give us the basic axiom of the base-superstructure hypothesis: A5. Economic logic shapes social relations and institutional logics which in turn socialize individuals according to the norms necessary for those logics and economic goals to succeed and operate efficiently. It is clear that much remains to be filled in here. First, the important feature of this axiom is that it is functionalist in nature: it presupposes that the efficacy of the economic imperatives is premised on their ability to root themselves in non-economic institutional logics (or the values of work, of consumption, of cultural taste, and so on). Second, there is also the assumption that we understand that what is meant specifically by the term “logics,” “patterns,” and “structures” is essentially the norm- and rulegoverned attributes of social life and the ways these are altered in accordance with the interests of the economic structure of the community. There is a reason why, for Marx, capitalism was a unique, total institution since it was the first that was able to colonize almost every non-economic institution in modern societies.

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This seems to lead us to a unidirectional causal model where economic imperatives impress themselves on the other institutions of the community. This was the idea initiated by Plekhanov (1992) and his five-part model of base and superstructure which was more concerned with the explanation of law and state and the ways in which rights were articulated by economic forces (Smith, 1984). However, the expansion of the field of explanation beyond the sphere of politics is crucial since at its root we are dealing with the problem of norms and values that come to organize the social and individual forms of consent and legitimation that is required for modern forms of authority to congeal (Wacquant, 1985). As a first approximation for a general model of base and superstructure, we can begin by delineating it not as a dichotomous relation between economic forces and non-economic institutions and structures, but rather as a tripartite one that shows a cascading chain of determinative causation between the various layers of economic relations and imperatives, institutional norms and logics, and the processes of individuation, self-formation, and cognition that occur at the level of the individual (see Fig. 1). Key to this model, as suggested by A1, is that the determining character between each different level of social reality occurs within the realm of the normative structures of each sphere. In this sense, we are dealing with a functional form of causation where each level of societal functioning is able to impress its imperatives onto subsequent normative orientations. But the problem with this becomes apparent when we think about the lack of subtlety that characterizes the model (cf. Jakubowski, 1974). For one thing, it presupposes a form of causation that is too simplistic and mechanistic.

Capital accumulation surplus "improvement"

Fig. 1.

Social Institutions family school workplace culture law state

Subjectivation self-formation epistemic capacities cognitive style will-formation ego-formation judgment

Tripartite Base-Superstructure Model.

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The premise that economic logics of capital form and shape subsequent forms of consciousness through institutions is not in itself problematic, it is that the means by which this happens is simply lacking. But this model ends with the formed subject rather than seeing that the proper logic of causation as being one where subjects are shaped by an interpenetration between the value systems of their personality and the institutional logics that dominate their socialization processes. Since productive forces and productive relations are internally related (cf. Rader, 1979), we should be able to show that the different elements of the model are related internally, not simply causally, as external elements impinging on others. What exactly is the connective tissue between the layers or part of the model? As I have been suggesting, the key to a model of base-superstructure that can serve as the basis of a critical theory of society needs to recognize the ontological status of values and value-orientations that come to be the very substance of modern institutions and the subjective adherence to administrative norms. This itself structures the symbolic realms of language and other forms of communication as well forms of signification and meaning-formation for agents (Bergesen, 1993). But before I consider this, I must show why functional arguments are essential to this thesis. Briefly stated, functionalist arguments in Critical Theory are those that are able to show how economic imperatives are able to shape non-economic institutions, which then come to shape forms of consciousness and subjectivity necessary for those economic imperatives to achieve success. Hence, Fig. 1 is inadequate because it is unable to show the goals of each sector of the model: the circular nature of which is to achieve and secure the goals of economic imperatives.

A Functionalist Theory of the Dominance of Base over Superstructure According to the understanding of functional argumentation, we need to focus on the ontological status of values as the means by which social institutions as well as cognitive functions are held together as complexes. The reason for this is that values or value-orientations are, to take up a definition from Parsons, “the commitments of individual persons to pursue and support certain directions or types of action for the collectivity as a system and hence derivatively for their own roles in the collectivity” (Parsons, 1960, p. 172). To say this means that “they are directions of action rather than specific objectives” (Parsons, 1960, p. 172), and that these directions are the very things that form the connective element between the objective

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world of institutions and the subjective domain of mental states. The functionalist element of explanation here is not, as Cohen proposes, reducible to an analytic statement regarding the nature of causation where “the occurrence of the explanandum event (possession of the explanandum property, etc.) is functional for something or other, whatever ‘functional’ turns out to mean. Thus consequence explanations which are functional explanations may be conveyed by statements like ‘The function of x is to ϕ’, whatever may be the correct analysis of the latter” (Cohen, 1978, p. 263). But this seems too rigid when we look back to Marx’s text. Particularly because Marx seems unable to commit himself to the view that there are such discrete forms of meaning in explanation, that it is more dialectical in nature, and that the social processes of life are far more subtle and non-reducible to an analytic formulation. Rather, it seems to me that Marx’s thesis can be better understood as suggesting that determination and causation be seen in the light of the dominance of certain functions over others. The purpose of this, of course, is that the imperative be efficiently carried out, that the goal set by subsystem A can be achieved (only or perhaps more efficiently) through the cooperation or manipulation of subsystems B, C, D, … n.2 In this way, the base-superstructure model is able to provide us with a working model for a critique of modern society. The premise that I am working with here is that functional statements in social criticism are those that are able to identify the ways that institutions are capable of (i) patterning value systems, (ii) successfully routinizing those value systems, in order (iii) to adapt forms of institutional action and subjective agency to those very value patterns and orientations.3 Therefore, we cannot simply state that economic imperative p obtains goal x. Rather, we need to show that for goal x to be obtained, p must adapt function ϕ (or any set or complex of functions, {ϕ1, ϕ2, ϕ3, …, ϕn}) to secure goal x. Each of the functions in question are the properties of a social institution, I. So, in this sense, base acts upon superstructure in order to reorient the purposes of institutions toward economic goals; these institutions must change their internal logics in order to perform new functions to achieve that economic imperative (or to act under its limitations), and these logics must be accompanied by new value patterns and value-orientations that individuals must come to adopt if they are to be successful within the new institutional environment structured by p. I have summarized the institutional element of this process in Fig. 2. According to this diagram, any intended economic imperative, p, that seeks goal x1 will need to adapt institution, I, away from achieving its own goal, x2, and toward the goal of p. Since t1 is inefficient for the purposes of

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x2

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x1

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p

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Fig. 2.

= Actual action

Economic Imperatives and Reorientation of Institutional Goals.

p, there exists a need to change the orientation of the goals and purposes of I. The proliferation of this process over time leads to a series of institutions, I1, I2, etc., to be oriented toward the goals of the economic imperative. If we recall that each institution possesses a series of functions, {ϕ1, ϕ2, ϕ3, …, ϕn}, then we can also see that imperative p must also shape those functions if it is to be able to secure broader social goals. Hence, each sphere of society can be adapted to the goals of economic imperatives: schools away from education and toward training for the demands of the business community, artistic expression and taste toward the most profitable forms of entertainment, the ends of scientific research away from genuine human needs and toward marketable ends, and so on. Resistance to these imperatives, therefore, creates inefficiencies within the social system as a whole and, as the social system is increasingly colonized by the imperatives and goals of economic calculus and interests, the various social functions of social institutions formal and informal come under the dominance of that calculus as well. Hence, for economic goals to be secured, the functions and logics of institutions must be reoriented toward the goal in question. In other words, for capital to be able to achieve any given goal requires that the functions of all necessary subsystems within society be adapted to the logic of capital.4 But recall that the essence of the model for Marx is a relation between the economic, social-institutional, and mental/psychological states of subjects and that the character of the relation between economic structure and social institutions is one of “conditioning” or “shaping.” In this sense, the

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real question is not simply the ways in which any given event can come about or be explained, it is about the specific ways in which social systems are able to adapt their constituent parts according to different imperatives from within the system. By an imperative I mean the force that a specific component of society is able to exert on other subsystems within the society as a whole in order to adapt them to its own functions and logics. Hence, different periods in history have seen the relative strength of religion, of the state, and so on. But modern capitalist societies are characterized by the dominance of economic rationality and the interests of production consumption for the ends of profit (i.e., the circulation of capital). It is obvious that the coordination of individual actions to secure specific outcomes is a prerequisite for the success of the expansion of capitalism. The rationalization of the industrial order (Sklar, 1988) and political institutions of the state (Carpenter, 2001; Skowronek, 1982) did in fact precede the colonization of cultural and personal spheres of life through the culture industry. But the key to the story is the thesis that there exists a diachronic process of adaptation by the imperatives of capital absorbing the political, legal, institutional, cultural, and psychological subsystems of society. The functional element in the argument is dependent on the question of whether or not a given social system is made to operate according to the imperatives of any single subsystem, that is, if the functions of society as a whole become colonized by the functional logics and imperatives of capital. Indeed, as I have been suggesting, the base-superstructure model is one that gives us insight into the basic framework for a Critical Theory of society because the colonization of society by the logics of capital is dependent upon the capacity of rationalized social institutions to inculcate specific value-orientations within the subjective matrix of the personality system of individuals. Recall that for Marx, the forms of social consciousness “correspond” (entsprechen) to the political and legal forms that arise out of the relations of production. Further, recall that the means of production “shape” or set the conditions for (bedingt) the social, political, and cultural life processes in general. This indicates that we are dealing with a kind of causation that is subtle, pliable, and complex. I propose that this thesis is best understood through a functionality understanding of value acquisition, the process whereby institutions are able to disseminate and inculcate specific value patterns into the personality system of individuals. Lacking this, individuals would not grant legitimacy to social institutions, and the economic structure of the community would no longer be able to dominate the logics of non-economic domains of life. The extent to which this kind of adaptation of subjectivity to economic relations is successful is the extent

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to which domination can be secured. It is from this basic thesis that the entire structure of Critical Theory is derived.

Functionalist Arguments and the Ontology of Values Thus far I have suggested that the real essence of the model of base and superstructure is a functionalist logic where the imperatives of one subsystem of society, the economy, come to dominate and to determine the functions, logics, imperatives, and goals of other non-economic institutions within that society. The economic subsystem, therefore, comes to map its imperatives and goals onto those of society as a whole. Now, in order for this argument to defend against the charge that it is mechanistic, I will now seek to show how this determinative dominance of the base over superstructure requires and includes the shaping of subjective mental states, forms of cognition, and other basic elements of the personality system. This is important because it has been left out of much of the discussion of how capitalist institutions constitute subjectivity. Seeking to overcome the mechanistic nature of older Marxian theories of subject-constitution, Postone argues that Marx “seeks to establish the intrinsic connectedness of objectivity and subjectivity by means of a theory of their constitution though practice” (Postone, 1993, p. 217). For Postone, the mediating element between objectivity and subjectivity between base and superstructure resides in the ways that practices are shaped: “Marx’s theory of constitution through practice is social, but not in the sense that it is a theory of the constitution of a world of social objectivity by a human historical Subject. Rather, it is a theory of the ways in which humans constitute structures of social mediation which, in turn, constitute forms of social practice” (Postone, 1993, p. 218). What this misses is that practices must also mediate consciousness, the very structures of thought and feeling that orient behavior. The legitimacy of social institutions and practices require a cognitive and evaluative layer for them to be stable and to be recreated. Postone stops at practice, but consciousness and the personality are the true seats of the source of legitimacy and the very essence of where the action is for the base-superstructure hypothesis. In order to expand the base-superstructure model into a theory about the nature of consciousness, it is important to consider how functional arguments and values play a central role. In order to make functional arguments more fitting to the actual working of social and psychological life, it is important to modify the mechanistic form of functional argumentation

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with a more organic mode of argument. To do this, I will insert the crucial variable of value-orientations as an element that fuses the structural and agentic attributes of the model. A value-orientation is a mental state that combines the cognitive, evaluative, and affective (or the rational, normative, and emotional) elements of the personality and which directs the beliefs and modes of evaluating and thinking about the world as well as one’s place within it. Value-orientations collectively make up a value complex or a system of beliefs that constitute a distinct belief system that is essentially a cognitive map of the world that the subject utilizes to orient his behavior within and conceptions about society.5 Since individuals are socialized into society through the inculcation of value-orientations, it is important to show how individuals are dependent on these valueorientations to be able to participate in society without deviance, but also how institutions and coordinated social action also require that these valueorientations be subscribed to.6 Both derive from values which have ontological status as social facts since they are the products of social relations: the particular, legitimate mode in which any given social relation should be ordered and the ways that agents ought to behave within those roles. On this view, values possess an ontological status in a twofold sense: (i) to the extent that they are cultivated and rooted in the social relations that socialize the ego, and (ii) that the values that ego comes to internalize are then used to endow social relations and roles with specific forms of authority and power. In a certain sense, this is anticipated by Althusser and his account of ideology as the interpellation of the subject. For Althusser, the relation between base and superstructure is tied together by ideology: “it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there” (Althusser, 1971, p. 164). This means that ideology functions to represent a false world to the individual, to mask the real conditions that pervade his world. But Althusser goes further to suggest that the essence of this process is one where the individual is “transformed” into a subject (a process he calls “interpellation”) and “which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (Althusser, 1971, p. 174). The thesis here is that the result of this hailing by the policeman would evoke within the subject the impetus to turn around, to respond to this hailing: “By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and

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not someone else)” (Althusser, 1971, p. 174). Althusser is here proposing that ideology is something that totally subjectifies the individual to the extent that it becomes the total world of meaning that he inhabits. But his thesis lacks a precise mechanism.7 Althusser proposes that ideology transforms the subject, but he also seems to suggest that it is the very act of being formed into a subject that we are shaped by ideology. But what this actually means is not systematically worked out. I think Althusser is essentially correct in the sense that subject-formation is deeply shaped by the institutional imperatives of economic life, but that this process is not total. Rather, I will propose here that the process of subject-formation is one where the mental states of individuals are routinized by rationalized institutions shaping forms of cognition that legitimate the social relations that pervade the world. I will, therefore, in contrast to Althusser, look at the philosophy of mind to compliment the base-superstructure thesis and to work out a more plausible, more precise theory of subject-formation. What is needed, then, is an account of mental states and forms of consciousness, which shows their relation to social-structural forms and functions. To do this, I will proceed by building a model of socialization that includes the ways that institutions serve as crucibles of socialization through the shaping of social relations and, more centrally, the mediation of values and value-orientations. As I pointed out above, value patterns are a central means for the determination of consciousness since institutions are responsible for socializing subjects in accordance with them. If, as Parsons suggests, the “values of the society will define the main framework of attitudes toward the attainment of collective goals, the broad types of goals to which commitment is likely to be made, and the degree of ‘activism’ with reference to such goals” (Parsons, 1960, p. 187), then we can see that the value-orientations of subjects can be a powerful mode of legitimation articulating stable forms of legitimate authority and domination. Values link the institutional domain and the subjective domain through socialization processes where certain value patterns and orientations are acquired through a process of internalization (Parsons, 1951, p. 211ff.), which requires an intricate reworking of the transformation of the norms and rules of institutional functions such as schools, the workplace, and so on. But in addition to Parsons’ theory of value acquisition, there is the second feature of values that I pointed at above, that once they are acquired by the subject, they can then be used to legitimate specific relations of social power. John Searle argues that an ontology of social power exists once we consider the existence of “status functions” and “constitutive

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rules.” Both of these stem from the imposition of statuses and rules onto social relations and actors. A status function is when human agents “impose functions on objects, which, unlike sticks, levers, boxes and salt water, cannot perform the function solely in virtue of their physical structure, but only in virtue of a certain form of the collective acceptance of the objects as having a certain sort of status” (Searle, 2007, p. 87). Hence, it is the result of intentionality, or the capacity to endow an object with specific meaning, functions, and statuses.8 An intentional mental state is one that allows agents to give meaning and status to objects in the world, and we can extend Searle’s basic account by fusing it to Parsons’ thesis that the key to social life itself is the value-orientations that individuals possess as a result of socialization. In this sense, the intentional state of any subject is also the source of the forms of social power that exists in any society since such power relations are the product of subjects to assign value and powerstatus to an object, person, role, or whatever. The socialization of norms and values shape not only our evaluative capacities, but also the kinds of intentional expectations we have of others, given that we are routinized into certain logics of behavior and action, certain forms of meaning that we come to attribute to the world and the way people in it should act, how we should act, and what kinds of behavior and beliefs we come to see as having authority in that world. The (intentional) mental state that I possess is dependent on the institutional rule-set that governs the institutional context that I inhabit at any given moment. Now, each institution requires that the agent, and all agents that participate in that institution, be properly socialized into the values that govern that institution. Therefore, any mental state will be dependent both on me internalizing the rules and norms of the institution and that others within the institution have also internalized those rules and make them an element of their mental states, at least within I. My relations to others are not simply a script, in this sense, but are embedded in the very mental capacities, the very intentional system that any institutional or social context provides for me and in which I participate.9 What this means is that an ontology of values can be derived from the ways in which they provide an intentional system for social agents and the ways that these values are independent of my own subjective choice. A value obtains an ontological significance once it is a norm or a rule that multiple individuals share and which also directs social action and behavior. Such a rule or a norm is a value, however, only once it achieves a social significance for directing the consciousness of individuals as well. Values orient subjective behavior not according to the spontaneous desires

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and goals of the agent, but from norms and goals that shape their personality system and structures of cognition through the inculcation of valueorientations. In this sense, we can see that the cognitive and cathectic elements of the subject will come to be mapped on to the functional logics of the institutions in which any individual participates. To the extent that this is successful, then the subject has been successfully socialized. The success of institutions, as I argued above, therefore, requires that such socialization is secured for large segments of the population and, to this extent, if we see social institutions as increasingly determined by the logic of economic calculation and capital, we can see a relation between the logic of economic life on the one hand and the formation and shaping of institutional and subjective value systems on the other. Hence, we can begin to glimpse a functionalist model of the base-superstructure hypothesis that is still consistent with the basic axiom defined above. The shaping of personalities that will accept the social order and the goals of that order as valid is one that is both produced by economic imperatives of the social system and which also come to secure the goals of those imperatives. This seemingly circular logic is best seen as the product of how mental states are the product of value systems, which are themselves shaped and structured by the determinative forces of economic logics. This is the essence of the critical-functionalist proposition: social power congeals through the colonization of social-institutional functions and logics, which then come to shape subjective and agentic mental states and forms of cognition and other features of the personality of individuals. As I have suggested above, this is itself achieved through the shaping of valueorientations as well as the kinds of learning and socialization processes that institutions provide. As the theory of intentionality demonstrates, social facts can be seen, at least in one basic sense, as the result of the constitutive rules (Searle, 1995, p. 27ff.) that individuals project on to the world and in which they participate. Now, if we consider the base-superstructure model I have been proposing, it is crucial that it possess the feature of a non-unidirectional type of causation. In other words, the key characteristic of a functionalist understanding of the base-superstructure model is that it is causal, but also selfreinforcing: the success of any system is the result of its capacity to colonize and harmonize the institutional and agentic structures that pervade the society. Hence we produce what Marx knew as a “social formation”: a complex of economic imperatives and purposes that come to construct new norms, legal structures, forms of political authority, and cultural and personal values and ways of life and thought that come to characterize any given

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Cognitive Patterns and Epistemic Capacities

Politics and Law

Economic Imperatives

Social Norms

Logic of Social Institutions

Fig. 3.

Cultural Norms and Values

Economic Imperatives

Evaluative Powers

A Simple Functionalist Base-Superstructure Model.

society. Lacking this, there is no way for it to be able to secure and to reproduce itself with any degree of efficiency. We see, then, something akin to the model in Fig. 3.

THREE FUNDAMENTAL THEOREMS OF BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE I can now restate my thesis: That the logics of capitalist economic forms and imperatives, and their search for increasingly efficient forms of accumulation, map their logics onto non-economic social institutions which, in turn, shape the value patterns and intentional systems of meaning of subjects. Hence, the above discussion can be broken down into three separate theorems that cover the general model of base and superstructure in the sense that I am reconstructing it here. Central to this approach is the existence of value-orientations as the very social and psychological variable that glues together the structural realm of economic rules and imperatives on the one hand and the forms of consciousness and social action on the other. I will elaborate each of them below so that we can see the overall structure of the mechanisms of the model after which I will consider its relevance for renewing the tasks of a critical theory of society.

Theorem A: Structural Determinism and Institutional Isomorphism The first, and necessary, theorem that derives from the base-superstructure model described above is that there exists a significant degree of institutional isomorphism that comes to proliferate over time in order for the

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capitalist imperatives to expand and to be secure from threats to its aims. As I have summarized in Fig. 2 above, isomorphic tendencies among social institutions occurs because of the power that economic logics can exert on them over time or, in another sense, to the extent that certain social forms and institutional logics simply can no longer operate within a changed social-institutional environment. What is meant here is the ways in which different sectors and subsectors of society become increasingly adapted to the needs and logic of capital. Put more clearly, the functions of different institutions come to “correspond” to the functional imperatives of the economic system as it becomes the dominant mode of logic for others spheres of society.10 This was what was meant by the basic axiom of the basesuperstructure hypothesis formulated above, that is, that the determination of one institution by another means that one has the ability to place limits on the logics and rules of the other. In this sense, the nature of technology, the legal system, the educational and cultural spheres, as well as aesthetic and religious domains, comes under the determining pressure of economic growth and the valorization of capital on pain of extinction. The isomorphic character of these institutions means that an increasingly unified system of rationalization comes to predominate late capitalist societies.11 This should not be taken to mean that there is no critique of these imperatives, no room for dissent. What it does mean is that oppositional attitudes and social counter-pressures become less frequent, and less politically viable the more such a universalization of expansion-rationality takes hold. The force of the determinative logic of capital on other social institutions produces an isomorphism where the logics of capital map onto the logics of other institutional forms and, in the end, onto the personality system of the individual. As a result, capitalism as a system becomes not only more firmly rooted into the social system as a whole over time, but it also becomes more reified in the consciousness of its subjects and is seen less and less as the source of social pathologies.

Theorem B: Routinization of Authority and the Persistence of Social Domination The acceptance of the social order means that individuals or at least a significant number of them have come to see the collective goals of the society as a whole as valid and not in need of questioning or justification. Institutions are not simply congealed forms of practice and rules; they are processes whereby the subjectivity of subjects comes to be shaped by a

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particular set of values and goals that individuals come not only to recognize but, at least in some nominal sense, adopt themselves. As I have suggested above, the connective tissue between the institutional forms and the subjective complex of the individual is the ontology of values and valueorientations that come to shape the intentionality of subjects. What this means is that if we take the theory of intentionality seriously, the very cognitive powers and mental states of individuals come to be redirected by the institutional patterns that socialize them. Since, as I argued above, there exists an ontology of values, this means that the only way for a social action to exist in a social sense and as a social fact requires that the individuals involved in the act assign a legitimacy to that act and that they follow rules that are shared among them. These values of legitimacy and rules mean that they have internalized, to some basic degree, the norms of the institutions they inhabit. This can only occur, however, not by mere rational choice, but through a process of socialization that inculcates value systems into the personality of the subject. If any institution that sustains and/or is an expression of a hierarchically organized society is to maintain itself, it cannot efficiently do so with the threat of violence as its primary mode of motivation. Even though such institutions may at first be subject to the “double-movement” described by Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 1971), over time if such institutions are to last, they have to be able to routinize and rationalize their logics of organization of power. And this routinization of power can only succeed to the extent that it can be internalized by the agents that make up and which will themselves sustain the institution (Giddens, 1986; Thompson, 2013a). This internalization takes place as a result of the routinization of the shared value system that dominates the institution, setting its rules and norms, and rooting its logics into the psyche of individuals. The logic of any institution is essentially comprised by the complex of norms that govern the forms of legitimate action and behavior that channel individual actions to coordinate group behavior. The subject’s relation to institutions and their socialization by them is essentially the mapping of institutional logics onto the basic personality drives and values that comprises the subject. As a result, domination becomes a reality once an elite sub-group within the community is able to organize the logics of institutions to benefit them rather the general interest of the community as a whole. Domination becomes a secure form of power within any hierarchical social formation once the subjects socialized into that hierarchy accept the logic and values of that social formation in some basic sense. It easy to see then that the early growth of industrial capitalism was able to spark more resistance to its

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imperatives since these were not yet internalized and legitimated by social actors. If the institutional isomorphism that I have described above can take place more quickly than the counter-pressures and movements against it, then the base becomes unable to affect, or to determine, the superstructure; if, however, this is not the case, then the routinization, rationalization, and internalization of institutional logics and values come to predominate more and more of the socialization processes of society and culture. Recall that Weber’s theory of modern, legal rational forms of domination (Herrschaft or Autorita¨t) maintains that domination is “the chance of commands being obeyed by a specifiable group of people.” He also adds that the ruled makes “the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake.” (Weber, 1972/1922) Taking both of these, the forms of hierarchical and extractive power that constitutes the essence of the capitalist system can be secured only by the internalization of domination into the consciousness of subjects. They come to see the authority-relations that constitute their world as intrinsically valid.

Theorem C: The Reification of Consciousness and Defective Cognition We can now see how the structure of consciousness itself is affected and shaped by the previous two theorems. If we see the causal path from the thesis of institutional isomorphism to that of the routinization of value patterns, then this provides a strong socialization context for the structure of consciousness and the personality, giving the phenomenon of reification a new and more deeply relevant role. Traditionally conceived as the infiltration of the commodity form into the realm of thought, resulting in the translation of human phenomena into the rationalized categories of exchange value, reification should also be expanded to cover the problem of defective forms of cognition that arise from the processes associated with the universalization of capitalist logics described above. Indeed, for Luka´cs, the problem of reification was a problem of being confined to the realm of the “understanding” or of the kind of mental relation to the world that was unable to discern the actual, essential kinds of social relations and the ways they were perverted by capitalism forms of rationalization and exchange relations. Reification was the inability for the subject to grasp rationally and correctly the object of consciousness. The reification of consciousness is therefore a cognitive and epistemic pathology, not a pathology of recognition or whatever.12 It refers centrally to the defective forms of rationality that constrains the critical capacity of the subject, thereby

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limiting, mis-directing, or even extinguishing any sense of practical activity or ethical reflection. Reification of consciousness therefore needs to be seen as a cognitive pathology wherein the subject’s power of cognition (of forming reasons about the world) and epistemic capacities (of ability to receive information about the world) become aligned and see as valid the dominant value patterns of the social world. The extent to which this occurs is a metric for the extent to which a social system is becoming rooted in the everyday life and consciousness of its members. But from the standpoint of reification, the key element is that these value systems serve to distort the cognitive processes of the individual rendering him either unable to think through the world rationally or to simply applying the internalized value patterns and value-orientations uncritically onto the world. Reification, therefore, becomes a phenomenon where the object of consciousness actually disappears from cognitive view.13 What results is a kind of defective form of cognition characterized by an inability to grasp the totality within which different moments or aspects of reality relate. This means, in our case, the inability to grasp the nature of capital as a social relation, but a social relation that shapes consciousness in such a way as to misperceive the ontological category of what it means to be human, that is, that the true nature of human life is social, associational, and, as a result, capitalism constitutes a system of social life that is deficient, unjust, and not attuned to the true nature of human life. The determinate negation as opposed to the negative dialectic, in this sense would require the transformation of society based on the reorientation of the organization of social labor; a reorientation grounded in the social essence of human activity and the premise that all social production ought to be for common, not particular or private, ends. This is something that can only be learned and understood socially, not generated from within by the subject. But the effects of reification go deeper than the cognitive inability to grasp the totality of social relations and the logic that dominate that system; it is also rooted in the contradictory nature of the base itself. Even though the routinization of domination and authority is generally effective for the majority of society’s members, those that deviate from those legitimate authority-relations can also be affected by an irrationalism of political consciousness. In an important sense, this results in forms of reaction to the system that ultimately results in an ineffectual form of extroversion that seeks to expiate the tensions that derive from the unsatisfied desires created by the system itself (cf. Therborn, 1978, p. 224ff.). Since the economic system is riddled by contradictions and crisis, the irrationalist reacts

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to it through seeking to transcend it, rather than through immanent critique. Reification and defective cognition become the telos of the model, the place which enables the maintenance of the system as a whole to reproduce itself. Hence, these three theorems constitute what I am calling a functionalist model of base and superstructure. It remains now to see how this is relevant for critical theory and how contemporary forms of critical theory have strayed, to their detriment, from this basic theoretical doctrine.

PERVERTED SUBJECTIVITY AND THE LIMITS OF INTERSUBJECTIVE RATIONALITY The problem of base and superstructure is, therefore, a problem of the particular sociological mechanisms by which the present oligarchic and hierarchical social order of modern capitalism is able to secure itself and to reproduce itself. The nullification of critical consciousness is real, and it should be taken seriously as a threat to the practical realization of discourse ethics and theories of “recognition” that are in vogue in critical theory. But at a deeper level, it is also a problem not only of subjective but also of intersubjective forms of consciousness. In this sense, we should turn our attention to the ways in which the current forms of Critical Theory that rest upon the linguistic, communicative, and recognitive theories of socialization and of moral consciousness are affected by what I am calling here the “perversion” of subjectivity. Consider the foundational argument laid out by Habermas on the autonomy of communicative forms of action from other forms of social action: “The grammar of language games links symbols, actions, and expressions. It establishes schemata of world interpretation and interaction. Grammatical rules establish the ground of an open intersubjectivity among socialized individuals. And we can only tread this ground to the extent that we internalize these rules as socialized participants and not as impartial observers. Reality is constituted in a framework that is the form of life of communicating groups and is organized through ordinary language” (Habermas, 1971, p. 192). But there are problems with this basic idea that Habermas lays out. For one thing, as I have suggested above, the power of language to constitute the world for any subject is not prior to the powers of institutional forms to organize the context of meaning that shapes the very intentional states that serve as the very content of thought itself. Intentional states, in this sense, need to be seen as wired into the social-institutional

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contexts that socialize us and which shape subjective senses of meaning and action. Put another way, linguistic meaning (as social practice and as system of meaning) is not prior to the existence and force of social formations. Communication itself cannot be separated out from the kinds of moralcognition and the normative categories that, in many instances, are embedded in the personality system of individuals. And this process of embedding normative categories is itself a strong product of institutions that, as I suggested above, are increasingly shaped by the determining power of capital. The thesis that language is some kind of separate sphere that can be used autonomously against the conformative effects that accompany the forms of socialization under capitalism is not tenable. The very powers of judgment that are required to demand justifications, articulate reasons, and so on, that can call into question the broader structure of injustice under capitalism are themselves shaped by the value systems that secure the legitimacy of the system. Base-superstructure is, therefore, a model that suggests that the mental states of individuals which comprises the linguistic, conceptual, emotive, moral-cognitive, epistemic, intentional, and so on are deeply affected by the socialization that occurs within a capitalist system. The isomorphism of institutional functions and logics come to permeate the collective intentionality of individual subjects and their consciousness. Hence, Habermas’ theory about the nature of discourse ethics seems to fall into a neo-Idealist trap where the structure and content of consciousness as well as the capacities of subjects are premised on a detached conception of the social from its economic foundations. Now, as I have been trying to demonstrate, this is not tenable given the thesis that the functional argument of the basesuperstructure puts forth, namely, its ability to shape and condition the consciousness of its members. This basic premise is something that grounds Critical Theory in an alternate conceptions of human rationality, socialization, and social practices. It means that we should view the problem of perverted subjectivity or the condition that results from the inculcation of heteronomous value patterns and systems as a central critical concern in the analysis of political, social, and cultural phenomena.

RECONSTRUCTING CRITICAL THEORY Central to the concept of Critical Theory, as I have been arguing here, is the thesis that capitalist forms of social organization actively shape

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non-economic social institutions and cultural forms of life. These changed social and cultural forms, in turn, have a pathological effect on the powers of rational, critical cognition, thereby rendering the rational powers of subjects weak and ineffectual. Marx’s hypothesis about the relation between base and superstructure, therefore, seems to me to be at the heart of this enterprise. Even though it is generally denounced as mechanistic, deterministic, and, finally, dogmatic and anachronistic, I have sought to show here that these views are generally incorrect and lack a sophistication to the general hypothesis of base and superstructure relation. Further, I am convinced that this basic idea is central to the Critical Theory tradition, for it constitutes a fundamental insight into the ways that power are rooted in social forms and the ways that consciousness critical consciousness in the most basic sense of the term can be rendered sterile and mute. The key to any Critical Theory of society, it seems to me, is to find out how the superstructural categories work so as to legitimate the system as a whole. As I have sought to show here, the model of base and superstructure, when reconstructed in functionalist terms, provides us with an account of the ways theoretical approaches that seek to leave economic structure behind and simply formulate normative theories based on social relations alone, or consciousness, or practices, or whatever, simply must fail to be critical in any genuine sense since the powers of modern economic systems possess too much weight against the autonomy of society to articulate itself outside of its influence. It is not the case that we must choose between a highly mechanistic view of the matter as, for instance, Althusser’s model of “interpellation” suggests and an approach to social theory that allows for the independence of social action from social structure. Rather, the base-superstructure model I have sought to outline and defend here seems to me to come closest to a general theory for social critique and critical social research. I also think that it can refocus the concerns and efforts of critical theorists in an effort to reestablish a genuine political impulse to that tradition and serve as a counterweight to the current trends that dominate the social sciences and social theory more generally.

NOTES 1. For more on the theory of subjectivation, see Dufour and Pineault (2009) as well as Pineault (2008).

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2. On this view, if there exists an imperative p of the economic subsystem for goal X, and Y the goal of another institutional subsystem I, and ϕ the function of that institution, the logic of this kind of process would be p I ϕ X, where the success of Y is necessary for the success of p. Hence, the expansion of consumption requires the re-engineering of subjective desires and tastes; the maximization of relative surplus value is dependent upon the alteration of previous ideas about time, leisure, and work, and so on. The imperatives of capital will constantly need to reformulate the functions of institutions in order for them to secure the promotion of its ends. Put another way, it produces and cultivates those kinds of social functions and accompanying value-orientations that it requires for its own agglomeration. 3. This thesis differs from those based on a game-theoretic model advocated by Little: “economic structure rests on the notion of a social relation of production. A social relation is an objective relation among men and women that is embodied in the structure of society through some set of incentives and penalties” (Little, 1986, pp. 44 45). But this misses the way in which value-orientations play a central role in human action and thought, particularly in the way that individuals come to grant legitimation to rational forms of authority and domination. Little’s account seems too mechanistic, and lacks the kind of subtlety that critical theory requires to be an adequate theory of modern society. 4. Marx and Parsons seem to disagree on this point. For Parsons, the economy “is a functional subsystem of the society not, as such, a ‘structure,’ which primarily articulates the institutional and collectivity levels of the organization of social action in this field” (Parsons, 1960, p. 181). However, it seems to me that this can still be altered to show that the economy, as a functional subsystem of society, can come to dominate the other subsystems within society thereby organizing them around its needs and interests. 5. Maurice Godelier argues correctly, I think, on this point that “The mental part of a social relation consists, first of all, in the set of representations, principles and rules which must be ‘acted upon’ to engender that relation between the individuals and groups which constitute a society needed to make it into a concrete mode of organization of their social life” (Godelier, 1986, p. 169). The mental is, therefore, to be seen as the foundation for the various social formations in that it is the specific mental states that orient the behavior and action of individuals but also, as I will show, grant validity and legitimacy to the values and goals that underwrite those social formations themselves. 6. Lucien Se`ve argues that we should see the individual in what he terms a “juxtastructural” relation to the base and superstructure: “It is vital not to confuse the purely external connection of two structures which are independent in themselves, a connection which therefore tends toward an equalizing reciprocity, with what I call here a juxtastructural relation in which, although its support has an independent existence and source one of the structures is entirely subordinated to the other, their necessarily reciprocal functional determination then having the form of an oriented circularity: one of the structures is always the determinant structure in the last instance” (Se`ve, 1978, pp. 144 145). In this sense, the personality system of the subject is “meshed into” the structural logics of social institutions, thereby becoming persistently subordinate to social roles, rules, functions, and so on.

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7. Althusser proposes, correctly I think, the educational system has taken the function in modern times of conditioning the subject: “I believe that the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus” (Althusser, 1971, p. 152). 8. Elsewhere, Searle defines intentionality as “that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world” (Searle, 1983, p. 1). In this sense, intentionality covers a large field of subjective mental states. Theorists of intentionality have not explored the ways in which the social processes of institutional life comes to shape the content of those intentional states, and it is this that I will sketch in brief here. 9. Daniel Dennett argues on this point that “We approach each other as intentional systems (Dennett, 1971), that it, as entities whose behavior can be predicated by the method of attributing beliefs, desires, and rational acumen” (Dennett, 1987, p. 49). If we see the relations between individuals in this way, then it means that they are shaped and structured by the kinds of beliefs, desires, and so on that each attributes to the other within any social relation. Another way of saying this is that each individual predicates his relation with another by attributing certain beliefs about them that they also expect, in some basic sense, to be reciprocated back to them. Lacking this, there would be no stable means of sustaining social relations. 10. I think this goes against the thesis put forth by Althusser and his followers that “overdetermination” is at work in the social and cultural sphere. According to this thesis, “a social process does not express or represent any or all of its constituent aspects; rather, it is the product of a complex process of transformation, where the determinations emanating from each social process are acted upon and altered as they interact. Overdetermination is a concept that stresses a ‘decentering’ of discourse and history in its rejection of all forms of essentialism” (Amariglio, Resnick, & Wolff, 1988, p. 488). 11. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) contend that institutional isomorphism occurs “as the result of processes that make organizations more similar without necessarily making them more efficient. Bureaucratization and other forms of homogenization emerge, we argue, out of the structuration of organizational fields. This process, in turn, is effected largely by the state and the processions, which have become the great rationalizers of the second half of the twentieth century” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 147). The emergence of these “highly structured organizational fields” is the result not only of aggregations of individuals and their rational attempts to deal with uncertainty, but also, it must be added, of the need to secure compliance to the broader social and institutional goals of economic growth. Lacking this latter condition, there would be no sense of interest at stake in the structuring of institutional fields and we would be left with a kind of Luhmannian “autopoietic” logic of institutional development. 12. This conception of reification has become popular since Honneth’s (2008) reconstruction of the concept along the lines of recognition. Also see Stahl (2011) for this view with respect to false consciousness. 13. According to this interpretation, Verdinglichung is interpreted according to terms of subjective Idealism, as literally “becoming-Ding-like.” According to Kant,

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a Ding is something that is hidden from the subject’s power of reasoning. Only by becoming a Gegenstand does it first become an object of awareness for the subject before finally becoming an Objekt, or a thing that can be an object of rational investigation and knowledge. The Dingheit of any thing refers therefore to the extent to which the thing is obscured from cognitive awareness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sections of an earlier draft of this paper were originally delivered at a conference on Critical Theory at New York University, April 28, 2013, and later at the 6th Annual Critical Theory Conference of Rome, Italy, May 6, 2013. I benefitted from discussions with Stephen Eric Bronner, Andrew Feenberg, Lauren Langman, and the comments of other participants at both venues.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Amariglio, J., Resnick, S., & Wolff, R. (1988). Class, power, and culture. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bergesen, A. (1993). The rise of semiotic Marxism. Sociological Perspectives, 36(1), 1 22. Carpenter, D. (2001). The forging of bureaucratic autonomy: Reputations, networks, and policy innovation in executive agencies, 1862 1928. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, G. (1978). Karl Marx’s theory of history: A defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. (1971). Intentional systems. The Journal of Philosophy, 8, 87 106. Dennett, D. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147 160. Dufour, F., & Pineault, E´. (2009). Quelle the´orie du capitalisme pour quelle the´orie de la reconnaissance? Politique et Socie´te´s, 28(3), 75 99. Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Godelier, M. (1986). The mental and the material: Thought, economy and society. London: Verso. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1976). Zur rekonstruktion des historischen materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Honneth, A. (2008). Reification: A new look at an old idea. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Jakubowski, F. (1974). Ideology and superstructure in historical Materialism. London: Allison and Busby. Little, D. (1986). The scientific Marx. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, K. (1971). Zur Kritik der Politischen O¨konomie. In Marx-Engels Werke (Vol. 13). Berlin: Dietz Verlag. McMurtry, J. (1978). The structure of Marx’s world-view. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Parsons, T. (1960). Structure and process in modern societies. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Pineault, E´. (2008). Quelle the´orie critique des structures sociales du capitalisme avance´? Cahiers de Recherche Sociologiques, 45, 111 130. Plekhanov, G. (1992). Fundamental problems of Marxism. New York, NY: International Publishers. Polanyi, K. (1971). The great transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Postone, M. (1993). Time, labor, and social domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Rader, M. (1979). Marx’s interpretation of history. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York, NY: The Free Press. Searle, J. (2007). Freedom and neurobiology: Reflections on free will, language, and political power. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Se`ve, L. (1978). Man in Marxist theory and the psychology of personality. Sussex: Harvester Press. Sklar, M. (1988). The corporate reconstruction of American capitalism, 1890 1916: The market, the law, and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skowronek, S. (1982). Building a new American state: The expansion of national administrative capacities, 1877 1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. (1984). Considerations on Marx’s base and superstructure. Social Science Quarterly, 65(4), 940 954. Stahl, T. (2011). Verdinglichung als pathologie zweiter ordnung. Deutsche Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie, 59(5), 731 746. Therborn, G. (1978). What does the ruling class do when it rules? London: Verso. Thompson, M. (2011). Marxism, ethics, and the task of critical theory. In M. Thompson (Ed.), Rational radicalism and political theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Thompson, M. (2013). A functionalist theory of social domination. The Journal of Political Power, 6(2), 179 199. Wacquant, L. (1985). Heuristic models in Marxism. Social Forces, 64(1), 17 45. Weber, M. (1972/1922). Wirtschaft und Geselleschaft. Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck.

BRINGING THE CRITICAL BACK IN: TOWARD THE RESURRECTION OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Lauren Langman ABSTRACT Purpose To resurrect and renew the tradition of the early Frankfurt School, whose of Marxist Hegelian dialectical approach to understanding the societal conditions of its emergence post World War I Germany, the rise of fascism, New Deal politics, the defeat of fascism, and the subsequent rise of consumer society remains relevant to studying present circumstances, stressing the cultural dimension of capitalism, the proliferation of alienation, ideology, and mass media, and, finally, the nature of the society-character/subjectivity nexus. Methodology Employing a comparative historical approach to the study of alienation, ideology, and character, to articulate socialtheoretical standards for critical social research today. Social implications Global civilization faces an array of crises, beginning with economies whose lack of growth or stability the ability of a large segment of the world’s population to obtain jobs conducive to a

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decent standard of life. With governments’ inability to implement public policies to buffer instabilities, cultural values are in crisis as well. Findings Reviving the framework of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory is necessary to promote a better world. Originality Reconstructing key concerns of the Frankfurt School is conducive to critiquing this tradition’s recent preoccupation with communication and recognition, and demonstrates how the first generation’s legacy helps us understand contemporary social movements of the Right and the Left, in ways that are similar to the Weimar Republic in Germany. Both the Right and the Left being products of legitimation crises that trigger a desire for regressive or progressive social change the Right would restore a mythical past, the Left would foster a new social order based on humanistic concerns. Keywords: Frankfurt School; alienation; ideology; character; social movements

INTRODUCTION These are indeed the times that try men’s and women’s souls. Since the elections of Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980, respectively, it has been ever more evident that the Golden Age of America’s postwar capitalist prosperity had come to an end. Between advanced technologies of production and administration, globalization and its embrace of neoliberalism, while economic growth continued, the distributions of income and wealth began to change, slowly but surely: while workers kept losing jobs, there was greater and greater inequality. But meanwhile, by the end of the 1980s, with the incorporation of China into the global economy as its low wage factory and the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism celebrated its triumphal moment it was the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). Margaret Thatcher proclaimed “TINA” there is no alternative and so it seemed. Although the Colossus of global capital saw unabated growth, its underlying foundation, financialization, increasingly was based on profits resulting from speculation, fictional capital, or what Susan Strange (1986) called “casino capitalism.” Then came 2008. While history may not repeat itself, the conditions of today are strangely reminiscent of Europe after World War I. The various economic crises (including especially the Euro crisis that began in 2010) have not been

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ameliorated by government policies. If anything, austerity programs have made the conditions worse. In Europe, we see growing Right Wing mobilizations that are typically nationalist, and many are even embracing the symbols and ideologies of fascism. In many places, Muslims have become the new Jews; some of the more virulent strains of these mobilizations have indeed revived a seemingly lost anti-Semitism. These post World War I conditions were the social context for the emergence of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the foundations of cultural Marxism. As will be argued, the Frankfurt School, while deeply rooted in the Marxist critique of domination, was primarily concerned with understanding the various cultural aspects of capitalism, beginning with its rationality, its culture (mediated by ideology), and especially its then new mass-mediated forms of leisure entertainment via film and radio. Its members especially Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno were also concerned with the psychodynamics of character, especially authoritarianism, which they saw as disposing the embrace of Right Wing nationalisms or, quite often, indeed fascist movements. In the pages that follow, I will endeavor to demonstrate the continuing importance of three features of the early Frankfurt School project: (i) The Frankfurt School offered a profound theoretical framework, rooted in both Western philosophy and Marx’s critiques, which informed also by Weber and Freud spoke of the issues of its time. While the social and economic consequences of World War I were especially evident in Europe, we must also note that government policies were ever less able to deal with the crises of the time. But further, these crises were not only political-economic, but ideological and indeed characterological as well. (ii) Despite the complexity and abstract nature of German Idealism, the erudition of its proponents, and the marginalization of Marxist thought especially in the postwar United States the Frankfurt School members nevertheless had considerable impact beyond their small number of actual practitioners. (iii) The “second generation” of Frankfurt School scholars, beginning with Ju¨rgen Habermas, moved the locus of critique from a Marxian critique of capitalist culture, consciousness, and character to a philosophical concern with language, communication, and recognition. This approach drew upon such diverse sources as analytic philosophy, symbolic interactionism, developmental psychologies of morality, and psychoanalytic theories of object relations. But in doing so, they clearly left the realm of cultural Marxism behind. Although scholars may debate when this began, this was clearly evident when Habermas published The Theory of Communicative Action (1983/1987) that presented an alternative to Marx’s materialist theory of history.

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At this point, I would like to call for the resurrection, revitalization, and renewal of classical Critical Theory as the very kind of multidimensional, multidisciplinary theory that is needed to understand our present age, and bring about the kind of freedom and democracy that can and will enable the conditions in which the self-realization of each would be dependent on the self-realization of all. In the pages that follow, I would like to show how the foundations of the Frankfurt School critique offered us profound insights into the rise of fascism, the domination of reason, the concerns with culture and ideology, and last but not least, the concerns with character psychodynamically in understood that offered the starting point for revitalized Critical Theory in the 21st century.

PART I: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL The Roots of Critical Theory By the end of the 19th century, with urbanization, industrialization, and growing populations of exploited workers, there were also working class organizations and mobilizations seeking amelioration of the adversities of capitalism. Often their members were socialists or communists. Marxism had morphed from a philosophically informed critique of capitalist political economy into a significant political force, especially evident in 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the czar. Marxism was becoming a significant intellectual force as evident in the writings of some of its intellectual leaders, especially Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemberg. They prepared the intellectual context of the 1920s that would lead to the emergence of the Frankfurt School. The work of three scholars might be noted. 1. Georg Luka´cs. One of the most important influences of the Frankfurt School was the philosopher Georg Luka´cs, a friend of Max Weber (see below), who offered a profound reinterpretation of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, further informed by acknowledgment of the problematic nature of means-end rationality (later to be framed as “instrumental reason” by Max Horkheimer and “functionalist reason” by Jurgen Habermas). Luka´cs attempted to illuminate the salience of culture as more than a simple epiphenomenon of capitalist and industrial machinery. More specifically, his analysis of consciousness suggested that the fundamental logic of bourgeois thought a process of reification systematically and effectively

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eroded the capacity of proletarians to understand their own position and become revolutionary class. 2. Wilhelm Reich. It was at about this time that Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst informed by Marx, began a reformulation of psychoanalytic theory that is likely to have had a considerable amount of influence on Fromm and Marcuse, though he was little cited. More specifically, for Wilhelm Reich, Freud had conflated civilization with its specifically repressive, capitalist forms that demanded the obedience of the proletariat for the sake of submitting to the discipline of factory work much as it required subordination of the lower middle classes to perform highly regulated work within bureaucratized organizations, both public and private. For Reich, early forms of subordination to authority began with inculcation of drive repression, specifically sexual repression. At that time, bourgeois society attempted to control the sexuality of the young (beginning with masturbation and ending with the suppression of adolescent sexuality). Reich argued that this repression, aided by a strict superego in the service of capitalist society, was the basis of psychopathology and support for fascism. One of the main reasons for his unpopularity was his Sex-Pol movement, an attempt to encourage adolescents to engage in safe, mutual satisfying, safe, sexual relations. For Reich, this was not simply extolling hedonism, but it was political, subverting the authoritarianism that sustained capitalism. Not surprisingly, he was forced out of both the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Communist Party and nor was he often cited. Nevertheless, as will be apparent, he did influence Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. 3. Max Weber. The concern with rationality was central to the work of Weber in his attempts to understand the rise of Western modernity and how modern rational capitalism emerged, while at the same time, though underdeveloped, he noted that rationality, as the price of modernity, demanded the suppression of the self its entrapment in iron cages. For Weber, modern capitalism emerged with the rise of the market societies of southern Europe in which rational law, based on Roman law, rational methods of accounting, and rational organization of commerce would enable efficient commerce and prosperity. Accordingly, he differentiated means ends rationality as the most efficient way to pursue a specific, set, secular goal, while substantive rationality was the means to attain a particular religious or perhaps political value, or desirable “end” itself subject to evaluation. For Weber, bureaucracy was the most efficient form of administration, yet a form that became a source of domination and dehumanization. One of the major contributions of the Frankfurt School has been its

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critique of Enlightenment rationality as valorized by the Enlightenment philosophers and now the dominant logic of modern societies.

The First Generation of Frankfurt School Critical Theorists Given the intellectual legacies noted, an interdisciplinary group of scholars established the Institute for Social Research that brought together a number of “permanent colleagues” (as Horkheimer put it in his inaugural address) with a variety of backgrounds, especially philosophy, economics, political science, including even Eric Fromm, a psychoanalyst. Moreover, many of the philosophers, especially Horkheimer and Marcuse [Adorno did not join officially until 1938], were trained in German idealism, especially Hegelian dialectics with its concerns with Reason, phenomenology, and ethics. The publications of Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (1923/2009) and Luka´cs’ History and Class Consciousness (1972), and the rediscovery of Marx’s early writings of 1844, the Manuscripts with its systematic critique of alienation as estrangement and objectification informed by his view of human nature in terms of “species-being” that was warped and truncated by the demands of wage labor informed their critique. The worker had become estranged from his/her community, denuded of his/her agency, without creativity and self-fulfillment. S/he was shorn of dignity or recognition and reduced to little more than an objective factor of production. For Hegel and indeed Marx as well, human beings produced themselves in their work, but given that wage labor was alienating, the resulting self was, in the words of Eric Fromm, a monstrosity. For the sake of exposition, I would like to briefly note contributions of some the central figures of the early Frankfurt School whose work I will argue was not only insightful, and remains so, but needs to be resurrected in order to make sense of our times and envision a better world. If any single publication embodied the early Frankfurt School, it would be Dialectic of Enlightenment (DOE) by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which wove together the philosophical anthropology of Marx’s (1844) Manuscripts, Nietzsche’s notion of conscience as ressentiment, and Freud’s view of patricide, guilt, and the rise of civilization. DOE was a lamentation on the conditions of modernity in which Reason led to its own negation, fostering the collapse or “regression” of Reason; functional Reason was used to fashion the weapons and concentration camps of World War II to attain irrational ends. Much of the Frankfurt School critique was in reaction to this kind of (non) thinking in which reified thought,

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traditional thought, and the logic of science seeking objectification and control initiated the new economic, political, and cultural realities of the 20th century, for example, the advanced technologies of Fordist production, the administered State if not the entire society, advertising, and propaganda. It would seem as if modernity and the mastery of nature had not brought forth freedom, democracy, and human fulfillment, but the contradictions of capitalism led to the return of barbarism in National Socialism and with it, World War II and unprecedented degradation, debasement, genocidal death, destruction, nihilism, and mass celebrations of the irrational. Weber charted the “disenchantment of the world.” They would argue that “Myth is already Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to mythology” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). It should also be noted that the DOE introduced the idea of the “culture industry” in which the production of mass culture, much like the mass production of factory, produced mass media that much like classical propaganda serves political ends fostering passivity and compliance distraction and often escapes to fantasy. It was Eric Fromm, sociologist-turned psychoanalyst who had the most direct influence in the Frankfurt School’s interest in psychodynamics, culminating with a variety of studies on the German working class and later, the still classical study of authoritarianism The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). For Fromm, a central concept was the historical constitution of “social character,” the most typical psychological character structure (desires, defenses, internalized values and conscious selfrepresentations, ego identity) of the members of a people or perhaps more specifically of a social class, that disposed people to “want to do what society required them to do.” “The social character comprised only a selection of traits, the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group” (Fromm, 1941). Herbert Marcuse’s now eponymous One-Dimensional Man (1964) updated, and indeed expanded upon the early work of the Frankfurt School and perhaps developed one of the most systematic critiques of ideology, consciousness, and subjectivity in his analysis of the new forms of repression in late industrial society that begins with the intersection of capitalism and the nature of its rational, “one-dimensional” logic of technology, which could potentially enable human freedom, but which instead maintains new and perhaps seemingly “benign” forces of invisible domination and repression. (And the goal of imminent critique is precisely to unmask these moments of cultural and characterological domination.) All aspects of life have become dominated in the “administered society,”

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including especially sexuality. Whereas for the early Frankfurt School, following Freud and Reich, sexual repression fostered the compliance of the “docile bodies” of workers, for Marcuse, with the explosion of consumer society, sexual freedom, qua “repressive desublimation,” extolling sexuality, served to reproduce domination while indeed reproducing subjugation. Consumerism depended on the erosion of restraints such as asceticism and thrift, instead, its culture industries and advertising fostered the insinuation of “false needs” to prompt consumption, and thereby, both distract the actor from concerns with the social and grant legitimacy to the system in which subjectivity was increasingly restricted to one dimension. But Marcuse would also argue that such conditions called for a “great refusal” and in the late 1960s, many people anointed him as the guru of both the hedonistic counterculture and the politicized, antiwar movements. But these were not working class movements, workers had been incorporated into the system. Rather, these were coalitions of the disaffected, especially certain college students and minorities. Between Freedom Summer, antiwar movements, and “be-ins,” these folks would spearhead the “movements.” At this point, let us just quickly review some of the fundamental insights of the early Frankfurt School to which we will return. We might perhaps begin with (1) alienation and the distortion of what is essentially human, (2) the immanent critique of ideology further informed by the work of Luka´cs (1972) on reification and Gramsci (1971) on the hegemony of values, norms, and consciousness. For many people, religiously based antiintellectualism, an integral aspect of authoritarianism, greatly limits the capacity for self-understanding let alone a critique of power and/or ameliorative praxis. If reification limited the self-understandings of the workers circa 1920, one-dimensional thought, its iteration of the 1960s kept people in general oblivious to both their domination and more gratifying possibilities. The critique of culture needed to consider the influence of mass media, from its propaganda function to its pure escapism to its hedonistic forms of carnivalesque distractions. Closely allied is the importance of consumerism as both a legitimating ideology, and for many people, the consumption of fashions, homes, cars, and lifestyle became the fundamental basis of identity; you were what you buy. (3) Finally, the role of character remains a salient moment of hegemonic process in which people reproduce their own subjugation. While many consider the Frankfurt School traditions pessimistic, it is also an emancipatory critique in which the roles of hope and vision are especially salient. Given the conditions of our age, legitimation crises at the level of the political-economic system have not been resolved in any form of capitalism. Such crises have migrated into the life

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worlds and fostered a great deal of anxiety, anger, indignation and disbelief (see below pp. 218 221). Capital’s culture celebrates capitalism as promising freedom and prosperity for all, while its crises hurt more and more people. The barely nascent social movements of today may foretell the emergence of “a better kind of world.”

The Eclipse of Critique Slowly but surely the early concerns of the Frankfurt School with alienation and domination, sustained by culture and ideology that had shaped character in which domination, acceptance of power, and “artificial needs” for consumerism were insinuated within the individual began to wane. There are several reasons why. From within, the critique of domination/ emancipation shifted from immanent critique that revealed the often mystified workings of capitalist ideology and domination. Habermas moved from his early concerns with legitimation crises and the public sphere to language and communication and then to democratic theory and constitutionalism. The next generation of Frankfurt School “students” moved to concerns with discourse and communication in which a “theory of communicative action” displaced the materialist basis of classical Critical Theory. Social mobilizations had become little more than quests for “truth speaking situations” where disembodied male elites could engage in “undistorted communication.”1 This movement was especially clear in the work of his acolytes such as Honneth, Fraser, Jaeggi, etc., who have moved further and further away from its early, and I would argue, even more, can little address the radical changes in our age of fluid modernity that rests upon neoliberal, global capitalism. For Habermas, all that was left of Freud was the methodology of dream interpretation as if decoding a rubric led to social transformation. Freud’s concerns with character structure, embodiment, and bodily desire and defense/repression, especially the nature of the superego/authority relationships, were generally forgotten. And with that amnesia, a site of resistance against the new forms of domination was lost. At the present moment, even when a serious scholar like Nancy Fraser voices a concern with the political-economic and has made the issue of redistribution central to her work, as well as the basis of her critique of Honneth, nevertheless, she rests her analysis primarily on Karl Polanyi rather than Marx whose entire opus addressed inequality. Redistribution generally takes place in social democratic societies and may have relieved some of the issues

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of dire poverty, but the fundamental basis of a critique of capitalism was not simply the economic impoverishment of workers as such, but his/her alienation, dehumanization, and domination. For Marx, the issue was the possibilities, their creative self-fulfillment, and indeed the dignity. This was especially clear to Marcuse who yet critiqued the new forms of alienation, ideology, and character at time of relative affluence that had “incorporated,” or should we say bought off the working classes who would become bastions of support for conservative causes and support for imperialist misadventures starting with Vietnam. With Axel Honneth, the migration away from Marx, indeed the explicit rejection of Marxism, has been completed. We should also note several other factors without limiting the concerns with the classical Frankfurt School perspectives, not the least of which was the all-pervasive anti-communism if not the rabid McCarthyism of the American postwar years. While there were a few critical voices like C. Wright Mills (who actually read a number of the Frankfurt School publications), most critique was liberal rather than radical. It was not until the 1970s that most university level theory classes would even include Marx as a major terrorist. Furthermore, understanding the Frankfurt School requires familiarity with German idealism, especially the importance of Reason as we have seen in Kant and Hegel’s dialectics the latter addressed questions of recognition raised by Fichte and the more psychological insights of people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and indeed Freud. Most social scientists, and regrettably even many social theorists, generally have little background in these traditions and instead, for both personal reasons and the nature of the disciplines, it is been much easier to embrace various “traditional” theories in which prediction and control theory and research has been more rewarding for academic careers. For many years, structural functionalism served this purpose. Similarly, the preferred mode of research has been the large-scale surveys devoid of any theory. While to be sure, such surveys may provide us with a great deal of information, especially when the researchers have a background in history and philosophy as did Adorno; most such research might be considered part of the problem. One might also note several other issues, such as the complex and abstract nature of German idealism and dialectical arguments might seem either complex or contrary to more pragmatic forms of explanation. Similarly, the elitism of critical theorists was confronted by the egalitarianism of American culture. This was especially evident in the massive rejection of Adorno’s interpretation of jazz as proto-fascism, indicating his limited understandings of American cultural traditions and his personal biases against popular culture. Moreover, with growing interests in communication studies and the emergent approach of the Birmingham school, the

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Frankfurt School approach to mass culture was criticized as denuding the subject of agency and rendering him/her a “cultural dupe” incapable of negotiating and creating alternative if not reversals of cultural meanings as forms of resistance. Similarly, academic psychology, in general, largely dominated by behaviorists, disdained psychoanalytic understandings of character. For example, Fromm’s publications were widely read by the general population but unheard of in psychology departments.

PART II: THE ENDURING RELEVANCE CRITICAL THEORY The second generation of the Frankfurt School version of Critical Theory moved further and further away from its original Marxist Hegelian roots. The theory was cleansed of its pessimism and became “domesticated” for mass consumption, and while indeed most of their positions were quite liberal, indeed social democratic, they could no longer envision a radical transformation of capitalist society.2 Nevertheless given the rise of identity politics in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a natural affinity with philosophical concerns for recognition and dignity, especially among various subordinated groups such as women, gays, and minorities, who had been the victims of either misrecognition, typically denigrations, or quite often, denied any recognition of their humanity. Thus, with the growth of academic interests and programs in women’s studies, queer studies, and minority studies, there was an “elective affinity” not only toward these developments and changes in the later generations of the Frankfurt School, but so too did other theories, especially postmodern and poststructural theories gain popularity in so far as these theories too, were often quite critical of domination, especially what was embedded within discourses. Yet their critique was little concerned with the early Frankfurt School. But that said, if we consider the major questions of today, the legacies of the Frankfurt School, updated for the present age, yet offer profound insights. Moreover, as shall be later suggested, among these insights are the embrace of hope and indeed utopian vision. Alienation As was noted one of the primary influences on Frankfurt School thought was the publication of Marx’s (1844) critique of estranged labor. From Hegel, Marx drew upon the need for recognition as the basis of self-consciousness

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that begins with work as the transformation of nature. Although the concept of alienation was rooted in Hegelian theory, Marx focused on material factors beginning with agents who alienated their labor power in exchange for wages. With wage labor as the basis of capital, the production of the commodity turned the worker herself into a commodity, a thing; the worker’s sense of self, her identity, was reduced to a cost of production as the basis of value. When workers do not own their own tools or the products of their work that are produced for markets, but instead they sell, alienate, their own labor power sold as a commodity, they themselves become commodities. Such alienated labor in turn attenuates agency and thwarts creative selfrealization, they are denied their fundamental human dignity. Their social ties are undermined eroding any sense of community. Finally, workers become estranged from the unique human capacity to think of themselves as a species and imagine what they might become. As Marx notes: It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species being. Such production is as active species life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor therefore is the object of negation of the species life of man for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness but actively and actually and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself is. 1844, p. 329)

Most work in capitalist societies, even among many of the higher paid higher skilled jobs, tends to be repetitive, boring, and allows for little creativity or autonomy. It should be noted that a recent Gallup survey found that about 70% of Americans did not really feel connected to or engaged with their work. It might be parenthetically noted that workers in worker/community owned plants where they have a degree of autonomy, and self-management report far higher levels of personal satisfaction. Thus, alienated labor, the objectification of the human essence which is its potential, and the frustration of fundamental human desires created contradictions that needed to be overcome and this could only happen with the abolition of private property. But it should also be noted that one of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism is that it can no longer provide enough jobs and in many of the advanced countries, what jobs do exist, tend to be intermittent short term and without any benefits or permanent connections to the workplace. Such work has been described as precarious and as economist Guy Standing (2011) has noted, the lack of connection to work organizations. The denial of dignity to the unemployed and/or underemployed not only leads to a form of alienation, but such alienation can make the precariat a dangerous class.

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A central concern for the Frankfurt School was and remained the alienation of industrial society, especially given the domination by rationality. But they expanded the concept beyond the factory. Following Weber, and to an extent Nietzsche on repression, ressentiment and the conformity of the herd mentality, the domination of modern life by rationality, the basis of modern science and capitalism, along with the demystification of the world, was the basis of a world “without feelings or without heart.” Modernity in general left people with a life that was sterile, empty, and devoid of passion or meaning. For Weber, the rationality of modern society facilitated the administration of government, while rational capitalism efficiently produced vast amounts of wealth but led to the dehumanization of everyone now trapped in iron cages.3 After World War II, the Frankfurt scholars initiated a critique of consumerism which they saw as a form of alienation that had migrated from wage labor at the site of factory production to the culture/ideology of capitalist societies in general and consumerism in particular (Langman, 1992, 2001). More specifically, as was noted, alienated labor frustrates basic human desires and without meaningful self-production in work, empties the self. But the intertwining of mass consumption and mass media, rooted in the psychology of propaganda, is extremely successful in insinuating a variety of “false needs” that tap into people’s unfulfilled desires. The consumption of goods and particular services offers a variety of compensatory gratifications, beginning perhaps with providing a sense of agency as people believe they make empowering choices in the selection of mass produced goods, especially fashion goods, that might express their “uniqueness” and sophistication as a buyer. Moreover, the possession of goods, or perhaps the display of specialized services (trainers, stylists, even plastic surgeons), might bring individual a certain degree of recognition and ersatz feelings of self-esteem. Similarly, certain patterns of consumption, those especially tied to leisure and lifestyle, serve to incorporate people into various groups where people find more meaningful relationships than they do in work, especially when work is becoming more and more a series of short time and involvements, Finally, for many people, consumerism, as a way of life, provides them with a sense of meaning, “I shop therefore I am.” Moreover as will be noted below, consumerism that promises the “goods life” not only serves as an alienated, albeit compensatory form of subjectivity, but as a central aspect of contemporary society. Alienation in modern society is often seen in terms of meaninglessness and, to a great extent, is often rooted in the kinds of work one does. For Eric Fromm, people had a very deep and fundamental need for meaning,

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but as we all know the accumulation of goods, or the possession of wealth over and above which enables a decent lifestyle provides people with neither happiness nor meaning. If a person produces himself/herself in his/ her work, but that work is alienating, s/he is not likely to find life meaningful. Indeed recent research has shown fundamental differences between happiness and meaning and indeed, more and more people today seek a meaningful life rather than a happy one.4 Happy lives tend to be more individualistic and concerned with gratifying one’s own needs, focusing on the present. Meaningful lives are more likely concerned with the past and future as well and is more concerned with relationships and especially giving to others, and finding realms of self-expression.

Character Marx’s theory of alienation rested on a tacit theory of human nature/ subjectivity that was never fully articulated (Geras, 1983). Marx could draw upon Aristotle to see that human beings were inherently social. For Hegel, alienation meant objectification and estrangement, which Marx saw as estrangement from species-being. Marx focused on material factors impacting agents who theoretically produced themselves through creative self-fulfillment in work. Freud’s psychodynamic theory of character, sharpened by the insights of Reich, further developed by Eric Fromm and later Marcuse, provided a theory of character, desire, and defense as it was shaped by social conditions or perhaps we might better say misshaped, thwarted, and alienated by capitalism. By character is meant the totality of the person’s conscious and unconscious psychological structure, his/her self-reflexive ego, defenses/modes of repression, goals and values, for example, the superego and basic desires of the id. For Freud, the demands of civilization to minimize conflict between people and maximize their work limited the full and free development of character, not just through external constraints, but perhaps more importantly, the internalization of those rules and regulations in which guilt maintained the repression of desire and thus limited human happiness for which people might find alternative compensations such as intoxicants. But what was crucial for Frankfurt School, as noted by Wilhelm Reich, that Freud had conflated civilization with its repressive capitalist forms that demanded the obedience of the proletariat for the sake of the discipline of factory work as well as the subordination of the lower middle classes to enable the highly regulated work required by bureaucratized organizations. This was

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especially true in terms of the internalization of authority relationships and the intergenerational reproduction of subjugation to authority (Horkheimer, 1972). For Eric Fromm, “social character,” consisted of a widely shared, historically determined, character structure, the patterning of his or her psychological structure and his or her character traits namely their desires, defenses, internalized values, and his or her self representations or what we now consider one’s identity as a narrative”. For Fromm, a social character is the most typical at a particular time that there are indeed many other patterns as well. And finally kinds of character structures are typically found in certain class locations. “The social character comprises a selection of traits, the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group” (Fromm, 1941). Just as labor was historically variable, so too was a particular character structure most frequently found within a particular society or at least a class within that society. Moreover, such a character was motivated by socially shaped desires and regulated by social norms to “do that which s/he must do” in any particular historical moment. Feudal society demanded a passive, receptive character structure one ideally suited to accept dynastic rule. The early stages of capitalism required self-constraint to enable the accumulation of capital, which fostered an anal compulsive “hoarding character,” ideally suited for the small merchants and independent farmers at the dawn of the rising capitalist class in which Protestant asceticism became the basis for capital accumulation and investment. Later, given the nature of industrial capitalism in which most people either did factory work, office/small business work, and/or worked as state functionaries, such people were especially likely to be highly repressed “sadomasochistic” authoritarians. Not only do such people willingly submit to authority while from below demanding obedience, but are prone to authoritarian aggression that is more likely than not “projected” toward “out groups” seen as dangerous, deviant, and perhaps both. Such sadomasochistic authoritarians actually enjoy inflicting pain or observing others suffer especially out groups and/or subordinates. As they argued, following Wilhelm Reich, the authoritarian character structure, instilled by repressive and often punitive child rearing practices, disposed both the willingness to engage in the kinds of work demanded by a capitalist system and the fervent embrace of authoritarian ideologies that extolled obedience to authority and suppression of the self. Thus, ideology was not simply a set of intellectual explanations as to how the world functions, but comprised its dominant ethical norms and ways to

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navigate everyday life. Rather, those perceptions, interpretations, and logics of everyday experience were insinuated within the person, specifically his/her superego, and anchored by powerful emotions that in turn impacted individual’s identity. Particular character structures shaped by a materialist-based ideology not only sustained class relationships, but embraced ideologies, mystifying those relationships, while the internalization of authority more often than not led to the acceptance of domination, which became part and parcel of colonized individual consciousness and motivation that thwarted human fulfillment. In other words, alienated labor was supplemented by an alienated character. Moreover, if we move our theoretical framework from the early Freudian theory of character to more contemporary concerns with identity, it becomes easy to note that one of the consequences of alienation in the classical sense of Marx, as well as the dehumanization by “rationality,” was that whatever else capitalism may produce in the way of commodities, capitalist production also fosters particular modes of subjectivity, a deformed character structures with alienated identities and colonized desires that actively reproduce the system.

Ideology, Culture, and Character For Marx, ideology was a systematically distorted view of reality that sustained the power of the ruling class, “the ideas of all societies were the ideas of its ruling classes.” These ideas generally justified social arrangements and valorized compliance to elites. One of the main systems of ideological justification was religion, which served to sustain class domination by distracting from earthly arrangements, while sacralizing elite rule. Religion served to provide comfort to the oppressed; the “opiate” of the people assuaged the “cry of the oppressed.” Religion promised workers a better life in the next world. Similarly, as Marx would show in the 18th Brumaire, the French peasant landowners, notwithstanding their high taxes and exploitative mortgages, disdained the proletariat and instead cast their lot with Louis Napoleon, the foolish nephew. This of course did nothing for the peasant farmers but furthered the riches of the urban capitalists. The immanent critique of ideology was inspired by Marx’s writings on the distortions of consciousness, mystifications of self-interest, and the fundamental contradictions of bourgeois ideology in which “freedom” meant the freedom of the marketplace, free of restrictions for the bourgeoisie,

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democracy gave to the “people,” primarily rich male people, the right to select between equally rich candidates. By the early 20th century, three moments impacted the Frankfurt School’s ideology critique. First, Weber’s analysis of rationality, the dominant value of modernity had become quite influential in the academic community. Then, Georg Luka´cs melded Marxist theory of reification within the commodity fetish with Weber’s notion of rationality that became theorized as a legitimating ideology for modern societies that itself became a source of domination and dehumanization. Further, given the new technologies of communication, the new mass media was utilized by the fascists for dissemination their propaganda via film including endless showings of The Triumph of the Will, which was one of the first great “media spectacles.” Moreover, radio provided endless martial music or Hitler’s speeches. The study of propaganda led directly to the postwar concerns, with mass media itself a form of propaganda that might seem neutral, but serving more political ends such as sustaining the system, supporting government policies, or advancing political agendas think Fox news. Or, consider the propaganda campaign of the Bush administration that engendered mass support for the attack on Iraq. The concern with propaganda raised psychological question about why some were “prepared” for its messages and just what impact it had. Following the traditions of Luka´cs, the Frankfurt School, and the work of Antonio Gramsci, we can now better understand ideology and how hegemony, the ideological control of culture, sustains particular historic blocs coalitions of economic, political, and cultural elites of every society at a particular moment. Hegemony rendered the interests of the ruling classes as normal, natural, “common sense,” and in the “best interests of all.” Hegemony normalized the historically arbitrary system of domination. Moreover those who might critique the hegemony of the ruling classes would be marginalized, rendered as deviants, immature, and perhaps pathological. For Gramsci, hegemony was the result of a number of groups with common interests in maintaining their economic, political, and social domination. Thus, hegemonic ideologies were instilled from the earliest of ages by schools/educational institutions, the Church, and mass culture/ mass media that would today include consumerism. But how and why do people accept the values, world views, and understandings that engender consent to the status quo that is the basis of their domination and subjugation? As noted above, to understand the willing part of “willing assent,” we must move to a critical social psychology based upon the insights of Freud to fully understand the insinuation of

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hegemonic ideologies within one’s very identity, and how such an identity provided the basis for (1) “willing assent to domination,” and (2) an active denial of the validity of alternative claims. People acquire identities that have been ideologically crafted, but not under circumstances of their own choosing, the identities of prior generations, shaped by earlier authority relationships, weigh down upon the individual and colonize consciousness and desire. But this is not a rational process, as was evident in the Frankfurt School studies of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism. One function of ideologies is to alleviate anxieties over uncertainties in this world and perhaps the next. Moreover, the maintenance of group ties through conformity to group norms can be a source of gratifying attachments as well as a basis for self-esteem. Thus, ideologies are not simply rational explanations of social reality, or misrepresentations of social reality that both mystify and sustain the power of the ruling classes. Rather, ideologies and values are essential components of one’s identity, which itself has both conscious and unconscious components that are closely intertwined with powerful feelings and emotions. Thus, “willing assent” to hegemonic ideologies and/or social arrangements rested upon emotional configurations. For Fromm: The fact that ideas have an emotional matrix is of the utmost importance because it is the key to the understanding of the spirit of a culture. Different societies or classes within a society have a specific social character, and on its basis different ideas develop and become powerful … our analysis of Protestant and Calvinist doctrines has shown that those ideas were powerful forces within the adherents of the new religion, because they appealed to needs and anxieties that were present in the character structure of the people to whom they were addressed. In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character. Not only thinking and feeling are determined by man’s character structure but also his actions … the actions of a normal person appear to be determined only by rational considerations and the necessities of reality. However with the new tools of observation that psychoanalysis offers, we can recognize that so-called rational behavior is largely determined by the character structure. (Fromm, 1941, pp. 277 278)

The concerns of Eric Fromm and the Frankfurt School provided an early framework for understanding the emotional basis of how ideologies were actively internalized the course of early life. Moreover, the “willing assent” to hegemonic ideologies/particular historic blocs was not based on logic, reason, facts, or figures, but feelings and emotions which are intrinsic moments of character structure that people employ “motivated reasoning” to “accept” facts or evidence or deny and reject that which is inconsistent with their own identity that has not only itself been fashioned by various

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ideological agencies from family to school and media, but identity acts as either a facilitator or barrier to world views, information, and understandings and in turn motivates both reasoning and action.

PART III: AMERICAN CHARACTER: STABILITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE In order to demonstrate the enduring value of the early Frankfurt School for a critical understanding of our times, as earlier noted, we need to consider the impacts of the various legitimation crises of the economy, the limitations of governments, intense cultural conflicts, some of which have to do with questions of what is “acceptable sexuality,” and social movements Left and Right that in some ways echo the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the contributions of the Frankfurt School not only remain insightful, but are especially so. Generational differences indicate this is a time in which American social character is in the process of change, which intersects with the various legitimation crises of our time. This is clearly evident in the political polarizations of Left and Right and the resulting social mobilizations reflecting intense passions, the contentious movements of our times. Moreover, foregrounded by the decline of American hegemony and the deteriorating economic conditions for the majority, the outcome of this bifurcation suggests an outcome of either a new barbarism or a Mad Max World, or the kind of a democratic egalitarian society envisioned by Marx. The study of American character constitutes a vast literature that surely goes back to 1797 and most clearly the 1820s and the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Let us first begin with the observation of Eric Fromm that every historical era, especially its political economy, shapes a particular social character that is more or less well adapted to its milieu. As Horkheimer (1972) so brilliantly argued, cultural legacies can endure for several generations indeed long after the conditions that gave rise to these patterns have changed. And thus as will be argued, certain qualities of American character can yet be traced to the early Puritan settlements of New England. But at the same time, as Fromm observed, the concept of “dynamic character change” suggests that given changing circumstances, characterological transformations are indeed quite possible long after childhood, quite often during the crucial moments of adolescence/youth when people establish an identity that is indeed shaped by the context of the times. For the sake of simplicity, one might discern four major patterns of

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American culture that continue to impact our society. For the sake of brevity, we would note the importance of religion, violence, achievement, and exceptionalism.

Religion The first point that should be noted is the salience of religion, especially the strident Puritanism of the early settlers. Although headed to the Virginia colony of Jamestown, they wound up in Massachusetts and after years of hardship were somehow able to survive. As devout Protestants, this was interpreted as a sign of God’s blessing. They likened themselves to the ancient Jews and saw themselves creating a “New Jerusalem.” Moreover, given the verdant forests and fields of the relatively unsettled lands and like most settler colonialists they eventually displaced indigenous people. They prospered. With abundant forests, they became shipbuilders and in turn whalers and traders. The northern colonies turned Caribbean sugarcane into rum, which was sold to England. Meanwhile the Southern colonies prospered from the exports of cotton and tobacco. Of course, Southern agriculture depended on slavery, which was a problem for Protestant doctrines of the equality of all men (sic) before God. The solution was simple. African slaves were dehumanized and for the most part little more than workhorses or pack animals. And surely, as religious Christians, Southern slave owners noted how the Bible considered the ownership of slaves as normal and natural. Moreover, slave owners and slave masters were typically quite well armed-just in case theological justifications failed and slaves might question servitude. Their survival in the New World coupled by their relative prosperity was seen as an indication of God’s blessing, as first articulated by John Winthrop who proclaimed in his “City on the Hill” address: The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. (1630)

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For our purposes, the salience of religion was more than simply a legitimating ideology and explanation for earthly success but became an enduring part of American character that is indeed with us till this very day. This is the basis for this American exceptionalism, notwithstanding the Enlightenment, a fervent embrace of religion endures. Two points might be noted. Protestantism has long stressed the importance of the individual in terms of his/her relationship to God and the secular world. His or her economic self-sufficiency indeed success was the indication of one’s moral worth. But further as de Tocqueville asked, why did religion have such staying power when it was no longer required by the State. But he answered his own question by noting that in this new nation with abundant land, people lived relatively isolated from each other and the only time they came together as a group was for church services. Surely this observation influenced Durkheim who saw the primary function of religion as granting and celebrating identity based on common kinship and solidarity through the collective efflorescence of emotions that come from singing, dancing, eating, and even a few cases drinking with each other. Moreover, as de Tocqueville noted, given the frailty of social bonds in the new nation, individuals dared not stand out from one another on the basis of intellectual attainments. Thus part and parcel of what would become American social character was not simply an anti-intellectualism that disdained ideas, but a virulent rejection of ideas that might be considered critical of the system. In these ways, religion as an ideology has not only became an intrinsic aspect of American character, but for the most part, has endured till this very day. Closely associated with the legacies of early Protestantism are a number of other values such as the “this worldly asceticism,” which according to Weber linked together a motivational basis for achievement, namely, salvation anxiety assuaged by the results of work as well as a repression of the sensual the bodily, the emotional and the passionate. And to be emphatically clear, this included sexuality. Moreover despite the quality of all believers, orthodox religions tend to be authoritarian and structure the world in terms of hierarchy beginning with the subordination before God. But even within that subordination, there are gradients that begin with the superiority of men over women, much of which is often legitimated by the quotation of Scripture. Second while the Bible said little about race, it did accept slavery and in the American case, there was little differentiation between slaves mostly Africans and some Native Americans in which race and slavery were clearly intertwined. One might also note that the Bible condemned sodomy and homosexuality.

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Violence Settler colonies generally have a problem with indigenous people who already live on the land and more often than not, they displace them from lands deemed valuable. Given the importance of the rural economy in early America, slowly but surely Native American populations were displaced; thus, we should note that this was not a gentle process but more often than not, depended on the use of force, especially the use of guns. But we similarly note the importance of guns that have become central part of American character and identity. It was the widespread possession of guns that enabled a ragtag colonial army to defeat the most powerful empire at that time.5 The gun remains a salient feature of American character and identity. Between its Puritanism and the historical conditions of the colonial era, there emerged a cultural ideal of masculinity as coarseness and toughness, expressed in the celebrations of guns and violence, blessed by God that has been enshrined in our popular culture as “moral masculinity” (cf. Slotkin, 1992; Wilkinson, 1984). The American hero-male could dish it out especially when aggression was part of moral redemption (cf. Wilkinson, 1988).6

Achievement and Identity The conditions we noted primarily in its fertile lands were the lack of an existing social structure such as feudal land ownership and political control that might impede individual commerce. Moreover religious based motivation, “salvation anxiety” combined with the moral evaluation of work was such that eventually the colonials prospered. What was extremely important is that in dilute scratch that individual achievement became a highly valued goal and basis of desirable identity. This was even clear to de Tocqueville who noted that workers did not feel animosity toward their employers since part of the national narrative suggested that at some later point, they would move from employees to employers and become colleagues rather than workers.

Cohort Flow and the Changing American Character “American character” or should we say the relative distributions of character types in American society is in a process of change. More specifically,

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by understanding Eric Fromm’s concept of “dynamic adaptation,” it will be evident how and why American social character is changing at least for younger people, while at the same time, characterological patterns among older populations are more recalcitrant to change. Finally, I would like to show how these patterns of character have become articulated in the predominant social movements of our time, namely, the Tea party (TP) and Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The study of historically changing character structure needs to consider stability and change. One of the most remarkable aspects of American character has been its stability and the persistence of certain values, internalized as character that have endured for many years and indeed impact many immigrants such that second or definitely third generation immigrants quite closely approximate what has been the typical American character. Moreover, in so far as this character structure today is most typical among the middle classes, we also find elements of this character among the upwardly mobile. But what is especially important for us is to note the changes in culture and character. It should first be noted that there has been a long-term secular decline in the use of physical punishment, which suggests a waning of authoritarianism and the embrace of religiously sanctioned “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Perhaps one of the most significant changes has been the waning of religious fervor and although this may not be evident from the mass media depictions of the mobilizations of evangelical/conservative Christians whose sound bites and sight bites provide great infotainment, survey after survey has shown Americans becoming less and less religious. Although many may very well believe in God, fewer and fewer regularly attend church services indeed, while half of Americans claim they regularly go to church, empirical studies of church attendance shows that only about onefourth of Americans actually do get to the pews. Indeed as many sociologists of religion have shown, the fastest growing religion in America today comprise the “nones,” who profess no formal religion that is to say those consider themselves atheists, agnostics, pagans, and/or Wiccans. There is no simple explanation for this change. At least two factors should be noted. Traditional American character, as a legacy of Puritanism, was quite restrictive about sexuality, especially the sexuality of women. Perhaps the fate of Hester Pryne, forced to wear the A in Scarlet Letter captures this tradition. Evangelical Christians, especially those in ministerial positions, continually extol repression and abstinence; but their messages typically fall on deaf ears since most American youth, whatever their religion, generally lose their chastity by about 18 years or so. The change in American sex norms can be seen as a result of both material and cultural

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factors. Firstly, as more and more women entered the workforce, whether they were married or single, they became more independent as was seen in the women’s movement. One of the major demands of the women’s movement was the right for women to determine their own choices about their bodies and given the milieu of the 1960s, there was a sexual revolution and revolutionaries won. Secondly, there were gradual changes in the content of mass media and whereas at one time radio, recorded music, film, and early television were quite puritanical, this has indeed changed. This was of course noted by Marcuse (1964), who argued that consumer society not only required a relaxation of constraints in general but had used free and open sexuality to maintain new forms of domination. Close to 95% of the population has premarital sex, cohabitation is typical, and any kind of porn is available with the click of a mouse. As studies of cognitive dissonance have long noted, when values and behaviors are discordant, people seek consistency to alleviate the discomforting dissonance and thus more and more people, especially young people, have moved away from religious based norms of sexual restrictions to bring their values and behaviors together. It should also be noted that among younger cohorts between 18 and 30 years of age, especially among the educated college attendees, there has been a profound increase in the toleration of differences of race, ethnicity, and gender orientation. We might also simply note that interracial groups and couples are now quite common and that a majority of Americans approve gay marriage. Finally, these changes in culture and character suggest that given the nature of more liberal social values, if not perhaps economic values, there have been major changes in the nature of social character. In the classical studies of the Frankfurt School, the dominant character type was the authoritarian predisposed to submit to authority and dominate subordinates. That character was also prone to the projection of aggression to enemies and indeed needed those enemies to maintain his or her psychological equilibrium. As Sartre said, “if the Jew did not exist the anti-Semite would have to create him.” Marcuse claimed that the authoritarian character with its rigid superego was becoming extinct, obsolescent. The new character type found his/her identity though consumption and that in turn eroded values of thrift and acetic. But that type is itself now obsolescent insofar as the nature of the contemporary is such that people are likely to have a number of jobs, move quite often, and see partnership relationships as temporary. This can be seen in different kinds of alienation; the older generations see the economy as stagnant if not crisis prone, meanwhile their values and very identities

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are under attack. Younger Americans see a bleak economic future of poorly paid, intermittent jobs, often at skill levels below their levels of education. At the same time, they are quite alienated from the older conservative values. Today, the emerging dominant character type has been seen as more flexible, more fluid, or even Protean. On the one hand, this character type is typically more flexible, s/he less committed to ideologies, and less able to sustain loyalties, relationships, or commitments.

Kaboom! It is often the case that changes or crises that suddenly emerge have had a very long incubation period. So too was the 2008 meltdown, which had indeed been long in the offing. Indeed, some might say that while globalization, import substitution, the search for ever lower wages, and financialization had long undermined the wages and incomes of most people, its crisis-prone tendencies were already evident in the Thai real estate crisis, the crisis of the Asian Tigers, the Dot com crisis, and the collapse of Enron. Then came the massive implosion; the meltdown of 2007 2008. Suddenly, the fragility of the foundations of the Colossus became evident. In the years since, the economic toll has been evident in a variety of ways growing unemployment in Europe that that have led to austerity programs and in turn growing numbers of the precariat (Standing, 2011), many of whom had come from the more affluent, educated classes who were now facing limited job prospects. Meanwhile, governments that generally support neoliberalism qua market fundamentalism have been little able to impact growing inequality. And the adversities of pollution/global warming are not only more evident, but between floods and droughts, very costly and perhaps threaten the very survival of humans as a species. Truly we face a systemic crisis. To bring the various moments of the classical Frankfurt approach together and show the relevance for understanding contemporary society, we might note the recent wave of protest movements that followed the 2007 2008 implosion triggered two different social movements, the TP and the OWS. While the TP may not quite be goose stepping Nazis any more than OWS consisted of Communists, these differences yet remind us of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps one of the best ways of understanding what happened was suggested by Habermas (1975); legitimation crises occur when there are failures in the objective “steering mechanisms” of the systems of advanced capitalist industrial societies that provide

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(1) adaptation, namely, the economy that produces and distributes goods and services and (2) social integration, secured by ideology and the State. System integration depends on mechanisms of domination, for example, the State and the mass media. Social integration, part of the life world, however, depends on normative structures value systems that express norms and identity as well as secure loyalty and cohesion. But each form of integration possesses distinct logics and, in turn, a different kind of rationality. Social integration comes through socialization and the creation of “life worlds” of meaning, namely, a culture/ideology that legitimates the system and provides personal meaning. In contemporary societies, states, markets, and their ideologies have “migrated” into the subjective that is to say “colonized the life world” thus crises at the level of political economy impact the subjective namely identity, motivation and values (Habermas, 1975, 1981). As Habermas suggests, these movements emerge at the seam between system and life world (Habermas, 1981). Thus, crises of political economy have subjective consequences in the life world where motivated identities are experienced and performed. At times of crises, people withdraw commitments to the existing social order, creating spaces for alternative views, values, understandings, and even identities. But, these conditions do not lead to social movements per se. Crises need to arouse collective emotions; they must be interpreted within existing frames or newly emergent frames that resonate with an actor’s social/network locations, identities, character, and their values to impel joining/creating networks of actors. Anger, Indignation, and Mobilization Following the 2007 implosion, many people lost jobs, careers, or businesses. Insofar as such crises migrate to the subjective realm of the life world, they foster emotional reactions. People were outraged, angry, fearful, anxious, and resentful toward the “system” and its elites and withdrew their loyalty. But their understandings and reactions to crises were dependent on preexisting fault lines, which, in turn, fostered different understandings, actions, and perhaps social mobilizations. Surely as we learned from the early Frankfurt School, economic crises foster reactionary responses from the lower middle classes and affluent workers, while most workers and some intellectuals support Leftist parties. As will be argued, for both the TP and OWS, the economic duress and shocks were intertwined with feelings of alienation, anger, and indignation. As has been noted, for the Frankfurt School, alienation was not just an aspect of wage labor, but a general condition of capitalist societies. Between the long-term trends and sudden

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economic shock, many people felt powerless, without recognition, and bereft of the possibilities of self-fulfillment. The anger toward economic hardship, coupled with feeling of indignation, animated both of these movements. But we would also note that with the anger, fear, and indignation came a disdain for the elites but given class locations, cohort and character, each accepted and reconfigured radically different ideologies. The members of the TP cherish the thought of going back to an earlier, mythical time, when the power of white, heteronormative, religious men was the basis of a dignified identity based largely on work. Of course, the elite targets differed; for the TP, it all was the fault of Obama no matter that he had not yet been the president. Meanwhile for the young, cosmopolitan, secular members of OWS, embracing equality, radical democracy, and visions of a better world, the targets of outrage were the economic elites, the “1%” who controlled the economy, and had long fostered greater inequality while growing ever richer. While such movements have long incubation periods, a precipitating event can trigger massive responses, and the outpouring of long pent-up emotions, anger, and indignation.

The Tea Party Right wing populism has a long tradition in the United States, a country that began its history with the violent overthrow of a government and enduring ambivalence to the one that replaced it, often seen as an outside agent, if not a conspiracy that would deprive people of their freedom and support “unpopular,” liberal agendas. If we go back to what was said about American character, we noted the importance of religion, and indeed, for those outside of cities or academic centers, conservative Protestantism is the norm especially conservative in the South. But at the same time, it was also noted that there has been a long-term secular change; indeed, the country has become more secular! For religious people, their norms and beliefs are not simple choices like Starbucks coffee or Baskin Robbins ice cream. Rather, religious choice is a major aspect of their identities, which are undergirded by the internalized norms of repression. As Nietzsche noted, religious moralism was based on denying others the very things you desire. Thus, despite mega-churches, TV programs, marches, and demonstrations, there has been a decline in religiosity, combined with a greater toleration of sexuality. Wilhelm Reich (1970) may have been right after all. But, as noted, these assaults upon

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traditional character and identity, as aspects of contemporary alienation, foster anger, ressentiment, and Right wing mobilizations. It should be noted that the TP was clearly racist. While most are not KKK members or subscribers to Stormfront, its membership comprises about 98% White. Much of their racism is cultural, for example, their disdain of African-Americans or Mexicans is based on claims that the latter are “lazy,” “parasites” enjoying unlimited benefits which Whites in turn support through taxes. In the 2008 election, when Sarah Palin ranted against Barack Obama for his associations, the crowds began to shout “Kill the traitor!” Even John McCain was taken aback and told her to stop doing so. But even before the election, the intense rage toward Obama was evident, and the dog whistled racism never abated. But then the economy crashed, Bush initiated the TARP programs that bailed out the banks, lest the economy totally collapsed. Nevertheless, Obama was blamed. In much the same way, changes in gender roles have eroded male “superiority” and employed women now show greater independence and autonomy. (This was also a factor in disposing greater sexual freedom as women made their own choices.) And then came the attacks on heteronormativity, which was supposed to signal the “end of the world” as gays come out and even marry. So now we can see that conservative religious doctrines over sexuality have been discarded. The “superior” status of Whites has been eroded. The growing number of women in the workforce has eroded patriarchy, and homosexuality has become acceptable. Thus, we can understand how the TP, as an expression of long-standing Right populism, confronted not only the economic shock, but also the changing values of America, which challenged their identities and the bases of their dignity. And while they seemed allpowerful politically, and gained power in the 2010 election, buyers’ remorse set in and their popularity has plunged. They are now on the losing side of demographic change. Like almost all reactionary movements, its members would like to return to an earlier time, when they were more financially secure, and their conservative identities were unchallenged.

Occupy Wall Street In many way, OWS activists were the mirror image of the TP, they were young, not old, and secular (or from tolerant religious backgrounds like Quakers or Reformed Judaism), not religious fundamentalists. They were typically urban, not rural, more tolerant of everything from sexuality to

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sexual orientation, and more culturally diverse and cosmopolitan. (Some were sociology or philosophy majors, and some were indeed graduate students.) The basis for their mobilization was again not simply economic, but feeling alienated from a society which regarded them as surplus. OWS was an expression of indignation; it was as much an attempt to find dignity as economic justice. Surely the OWS were offended by the injustices, if not criminal acts of the banking/finance communities and the complete indifference on the part of the government to the general welfare of the people, especially the newly jobless and the homeowners that were fleeced and lost their homes. Moreover, the recent college graduates did not often find jobs commensurate with their educations while trying to pay of huge college loans. And in NYC, the inequality between the rich and poor is especially visible. Thus, OWS was as much a reaction to indignity, as to financial duress. As they proclaimed, the banks got bailed out, we got sold out. Thus, the Occupiers, much like their counterparts in the Arab Spring or South European movement, demanded recognition and dignity. Insofar as the OWS movements were spontaneous, leaderless, and rhizomatic, their most trenchant critiques were not so much in manifestos, documents, and speeches, but in their practices in which “alternative” lifestyles, values, and identities articulated in the encampments and protests were both a critique of the existing conditions and attempt to envision in practice if not theory an alternative to neoliberal capitalism, as well as other aspects of domination, especially religion and patriarchy, which themselves often are intertwined. “Occupiers” had established an alternative community that highlighted the inequality between the “99%” and the “1%” with the latter controlling both political parties, perpetrating injustices in the form of bailouts to the rich and sellouts to the poor, and exercising indifference regarding the plight of the masses. While the occupiers tended to be nonviolent, their critique of inequality, combined with their exemplification of an alternative type of participatory democratic, egalitarian society, rapidly spread throughout the country and even the world. The very existence of OWS, naming the exploited the 99%, identifying the elite 1%, changed the discussions and raised challenges to the legitimacy of the capitalist system in fundamental ways, and much like other such movements raising such questions perhaps the Paris Commune as the best example that it needed to be crushed, and the State mobilized the instruments of repression. It should also be noted that such movements take place in waves, the initial mobilizations wane, while at the same time preparing subsequent events and stages.

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CONCLUSION The foundational moments of the Frankfurt School were influenced by Marx’s theories of the historically unique nature of the suffering under capitalism that rested on the exploitation, alienation, and degradation of workers, along with denial of recognition of their basic humanity and their dignity. Marxism was understood as both a critique of existing society and as a vision, often utopian, of an alternative possibility that cannot be foretold (e.g., Jacoby, 2005). As has been argued, the concerns with alienation, ideology, consciousness, and character remain essential for a critique of the present age, a time when neoliberal capitalism has fostered greater and greater adversities for many people around the world, while mass culture/ mass consumption typically serves to distract from concern for seemingly “distant” political-economic issues and to dull the capacity for critical thought. As I endeavored to illustrate, in order to understand the conditions of our age, considerations of the TP and OWS have shown the continuing explanatory power of the Frankfurt School’s analysis. And while that analysis was an attempt to explain the conditions of our time, we once again need to remember that one of the central moments for that tradition was its emancipatory vision. One of the most salient moments of Marx’s critique of capital was dialectical, domination-created resistance based on the vision of an alternative possibility for society.7 But that vision of the possible was thwarted by capitalism, warped by its alienation, stunted by its reification, and suppressed by the hegemonic ideologies that reproduced the system. Yet the vision of a better alternative was an essential part of the Enlightenment “project of modernity” even and especially for Habermas.8 The utopian visions of Marx have been preserved in the opus of the Frankfurt School, especially in the works of Bloch, Benjamin, Marcuse and Fromm, inspired in part by a messianic Judaism in the works of Martin Buber and Gershom Sholem (see Jacoby, 2005, Langman, 2013). More specifically, as Bloch (1995) had argued, hope was a fundamental human emotion rooted in the human capacity to dream, and dreams provided wish fulfillments. Indeed, in the West there is a long tradition beginning, perhaps, with Thomas More’s Utopia that has understood that economic inequality creates a number of other inequalities, especially inequalities of opportunities for personal fulfillment and dignity. Indeed, epidemiological research has shown that high rates of inequality are reflected in poor health with shorter, less healthy lives, both physically and mentally; unequal societies have more fragmented communities and greater levels of crime, drug abuse,

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and violence (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). The critique of domination, with its alienation and inequality, was clearly evident throughout Marx’s work which informed his emancipatory vision of an egalitarian society freed of class domination based on private property. As has been argued, the defining feature of the Frankfurt School has been its continuation of the critique of alienation and domination through its imminent critique of ideology, considerations of character, and its emancipatory vision of an alternative to capitalism, where the fulfillment of each depend on the fulfillment of all. Our times demand such theorizing.

NOTES 1. Fraser (1990) has, of course, critiqued this notion and has spoken about feminist public spheres as well as oppositional spheres. 2. The utopian moment within the classical Frankfurt School, especially the legacy of messianic Judaism, and the importance of hope (Bloch, 1995) will be noted in the conclusion. 3. As they argued, one appeal of fascism was the valorization of intense emotions, joyously celebrating the celebrating their own, superior, nation and participating in emotion-laden rituals that often involve the denigration of a hated “other”. 4. http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happy_life_different_from_meaningful_ life http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKeyDifferencesHappy LifeMeaningfulLife_2012.pdf Suttie (2014) Is a Happy Life Different from a Meaningful One? http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happy_life_different_from_meaningful_ life http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKeyDifferencesHappy LifeMeaningfulLife_2012.pdf 5. In fact, the hunting rifle was ill-suited for military combat given that much of the actual combat at that time was more likely the close proximity combat using the bayonet than the legendary sharpshooter picking off enemy soldiers from afar. Most of the guns used by the colonial armies were supplied by the French since they not only had capacities for bayonets, but were far more quickly reloaded. 6. By way of comparison, Lipset (1997) has contrasted American “frontier justice” with Canadian respect for the law and order in the persons of the Mounties. 7. Marx’s rejection of utopian socialism was not a rejection of a Utopian vision, rather utopian socialism did not provide any practical means for its realization. See Hudis (2012). 8. More specifically just as the French philosophes critiqued the tyranny of dynastic rule, German philosophy extolled Reason and rationality as the antidote to the tyranny of traditional thought, modernity offered the possibility of freedom.

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Just as Kant saw the Enlightenment as humanity’s release from its past ignorance, from its self-imposed immaturity. “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” Hegel saw the idea of the State as an “ethical totality” where true freedom came with the transcendence of the conflict between the individual and the ethical community. Neither Kant nor Hegel considered the material basis of social relations and ideas nor had they yet witnessed the extent to which the rising capitalist class would control the economy. Nor at that time could they imagine an alternative to capitalism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is very indebted to Harry Dahms whose editing was above and beyond the call of duty.

REFERENCES Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D., & Sandford, N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley. Bloch, E. (1995). The principle of hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56–80. Retrieved from http://www.jstor. org/stable/466240. Accessed on April 18, 2014. Published by Duke University Press. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York, NY: H. Holt & Company. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York, NY: Free Press. Geras, N. (1983). Marx and human nature: Refutation of a legend. London, UK: Verso. Gramsci, A. (1971). Prison notebooks. New York, NY: International Publishers. Habermas, J. (1975/1981). Legitimation crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1983/1987). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 2). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory: Selected essays. Lexington, KY: Continuum Publishing. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hudis, P. (2012). Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket books. Jacoby, R. (2005). Picture imperfect: Utopian thought for an anti-utopian age. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Korsch, K. (1923/2009). Marxism and philosophy. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Langman, L. (1992). Neon cages. In. R. Shields (Ed.), Lifestyles of consumption. London: Routledge. Langman, L. (2001). Carnivals of consumption: Local identities in a global era. In P. Kennedy & C. Danks (Eds.), Globalization and the crises of identities. London: MacMillan.

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Langman, L. (2013). Capitalism, crises, and great refusals. Radical Philosophy Review, 16(1), 349 374. Lipset, S. M. (1997). American exceptionalism. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Luka´cs, G. (1972). History and class consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1844). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In D. McClellan (Ed.), Selected writings. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Reich, W. (1970). The mass psychology of fascism. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter nation: Myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America. New York, NY: The Maxwell McMillan International. Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London, UK: Bloomsbury Press. Strange, S. (1986). Casino capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Suttie, J. (2014). Is a happy life different from a meaningful one? Retrieved from http://greater good.berkeley.edu/article/item/happy_life_different_from_meaningful_life. Accessed on May 29, 2014. Wilkinson, R. (1984). American tough: The Tough-Guy tradition and American character. New York, NY: Praeger. Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Winthrop, J. (1630). ‘A model of Christian Charity’ speech. Retrieved from http://religious freedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html. Accessed on March 2, 2014.

PART IV A DEBATE CONTINUED JOHN LEVI MARTIN’S THE EXPLANATION OF SOCIAL ACTION (2011)

ACTION AND REACTION: RESPONSE TO BRADFORD John Levi Martin ABSTRACT Purpose This paper attempts to rebut criticisms of, and give further clarifications to, arguments about the nature of sociological explanation previously made by Martin (2011). Design/methodology/approach Here, arguments initially derived through historical reconstruction of theory are instead drawn out from our common stock of experiences. Aspects of the argument that were complex as initially presented are simplified here, and the maximum contrast between this approach and the more conventional is made. Practical implications The implications for practice are many; most important, the claim of Martin (2011) rejected by Bradford (2013), as critiqued herein to offer a coherent alternative to our current understanding of the task of explanation, if successfully demonstrated, suggests a reorientation of sociological research toward the production of intersubjectively valid cartographies and away from causal or pseudocausal accounts.

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 231 258 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032009

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Findings Social theorists who are willing to seriously think about what lies in between our practice and knowledge as sociologists and as actors to do the research. Originality/value The value of the paper, therefore, derives from its capacity to dispel common misunderstandings of Martin (2011), and to allow social researchers as well as social theorists, to make use of a coherent vocabulary for the development of social research, which otherwise would remain inaccessible to them. Keywords: Esthetics; social theory; explanation; field theory

INTRODUCTION I am grateful for the close attention given to The Explanation of Social Action (henceforward, ESA) by John Hamilton Bradford in his 2013 critical review (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 31, pp. 309 332). We all should be blessed with such a serious and close critique, and a careful critic is always to be prized above a sloppy supporter. Not surprisingly, I will argue against almost all of Bradford’s conclusions. In most cases, he has fallen prey to a common misunderstanding that I set up; in some cases, it is a more particular misunderstanding; in some cases, he is making unfounded assumptions. In two cases he is right and I was wrong. I refer to his main points as enumerated in his abstract in square brackets; I organize my response in a way that allows me to reproduce some of the key arguments of ESA as opposed to always following his order.

WHAT ARE WE EXPLAINING What is ESA About? First, Bradford (2013, p. 310) begins with a misinterpretation that others have shared, thinking that I attempt to answer the question of why people do what they do: that is, that the book The Explanation of Social Action is the explanation of social action. That isn’t the way the title sounded in my head: I meant that the book was about the explanation of social action, not

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that it was it. Thus, it isn’t the answer to the question, it is hoping to be the answer to the question of how to answer the question, and the answer is, change the question. (To be sure, Bradford himself later [p. 313] says something just like this.) I think perhaps because of this, the scope conditions of the book, which I thought were clear, were missed not only by Bradford but by others. Given that it is called The Explanation of Social Action, I had imagined that it would be clear that I was only talking about the explanation of social action. It is true that I think that most American sociologists underestimate the degree to which sociology should involve the explanation of action, but it isn’t clear that it all should be an explanation of action, and it is clear that current sociology includes types of explanation that aren’t explanations of action. Thus, I totally agree with Bradford [p. 318] that there are other things that we can explain, and thought that ESA had been clear on this, but if not, I concur. Thus contra his first point [pt. 1] I am not arguing that we must only focus on the explanation of social action; it is merely that this is my focus. The central argument of ESA and I will return to this below starts from the fact that we have two registers, or sets of vocabulary, for trying to explain such action. One, “first person” accounts, come from the ways in which actors orient themselves to the world, and refer to things that they believe that they have experienced. The second, “third-person” accounts, explain some action by employing causal forces outside of the phenomenological experience of the actor in question. I argued, and I think quite well, that third-person accounts for the explanation of action are inherently problematic and paradoxical. That does not mean that such third-person terms might not well be used to explain something else, such as an outcome. However, given that in sociology, most outcomes “come about” via social action, it seems that a fuller, more scientifically valid, explanation will sooner or later involve us grappling with action, and here the third-person vocabulary fails us. Rather than accept first-person accounts, what we must do (or so I argue in ESA) is to compile experience to recreate the way in which actors respond to the environment, and I argue that we can here build on previous work by the Gestalt/field theorists and the pragmatists on this environmental relation. This is because (and I will return to this below), following the Gestalt theorists, I believe that one of the things that we experience (as opposed to infer or reason) is what we should do with things in the environment. In the language of ecological psychology, we directly perceive what things about us “afford” us as actors. But this all depends on us trying to explain social action.

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Keeping this scope in mind suggests that some of Bradford’s points, while accurate, are hard to construe as critiques of ESA. Bradford [p. 317] correctly points out that I have little to say about the unintended consequences of action. But (to use a familiar distinction and vocabulary, at some risk of misinterpretation) there isn’t any reason to think that to understand the causes of rainfall, we must understand its effects, is there? I believe that the recognition of the importance of the unintended consequences of action, well developed in the Weber-Merton-Giddens tradition, has been one of the most important developments in sociological theory, and I have nothing to add here. I even think that it may well be that pursuing this rigorously supports a notion of autopoietic systems arising (as argued by Luhmann). Because of the feedback loops, such coagulated dynamics are of course relevant for the explanation of any particular set of actions … but they don’t change the issue of how we should analytically approach the situation that confronts the actor. ESA, then, does not aim to give a general social theory but rather to determine what sort of minimal vocabulary for the explanation of social action is internally consistent and avoids assuming what is to be proven. This point about a minimal vocabulary turns out to be relevant to a number of other points made by Bradford, as well as by others.

Definitions and Action Bradford [pt. 2] thinks it is a problem that I never define “action” or “social action;” many readers may agree with him that this is unacceptable in an identifiably “theoretical” work; I do not, and think this issue is an important one. Our sociological nominalism coming from the assumption (critiqued in ESA) of a fundamentally disorganized world awaiting top down imposition of mental categories leads us to imagine that without definitions, we are lost. I do acknowledge that there are cases when definitions are required (especially when employing new terms), but not all cases are of this sort. In other cases, defining may give the appearance of rigor, but is actually only a form of distortion. Consider a zoologist studying mating behavior among some avian species. It might be that in the species in question, there is no confusion as to what mating behavior is where it stops and starts. In such a case, it is a silly waste of words to define mating behavior as opposed to just getting down to studying it. Of course, sometimes there is confusion we aren’t sure whether something is a case of mating behavior. In those cases, defining it is the worst

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thing we can do. Because then we give the appearance of knowing what we are talking about, when in fact we don’t. We may still need to begin by explaining precisely what we looked at which of the large class of potential observables was the initial focus of attention but in such a case, I insist (and I call the mighty Hegel and Marx to my side) the definition of our phenomenon must be the conclusion of our investigations (if they are successful), and not the preface. Bradford also takes me to task for not defining “explanation;” again, this is a deliberate choice (defended in the book). I think we are better off starting out with “whatever most folks commonly understand by explanation,” seeing what this entails, and then trying to do it in a more scientific way. Otherwise, we can define and, I believe, we have defined “explanation” in such a way as to make even our more incredible and preposterous endeavors seem not only scientifically valid but also necessary. That is, we defend our (poor) choices of criteria for good as opposed to bad explanations by conveniently redefining explanation in an idiosyncratic way so that our choices seem unquestionable. In particular, we try to make a distinction between “description” and “explanation,” which turns out to lack the epistemic justification we believe it to have.

Description Versus Explanation An answer to a “what” question, like “What is that man doing?” (Answer: he is sawing a log) is a descriptive act. An answer to a “why” question, like “Why is that man sawing?” (Answer: he wants to make a house) is an explanatory act. On this, we all agree. I firmly side with those who argue that this distinction is not an inherent one in the nature of the processes we study, but rather, indexes the particular combination of knowledge and ignorance that we have. Because sometimes we would find the question, “What is that man doing?” to provoke the answer “He is making a house.” This now seems descriptive as opposed to explanatory, yet the same answer before appeared as an explanation! How can this be? It is because we ask Why about the actions of others either when we do not see the purpose of the action or when we think that the actor can be taken to task for having acted thusly. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, though soon I will derive some problematic aspects, but once we recognize that this difference has to do with the state of our knowledge, it becomes implausible that we should urge all people to “explain” and not describe, as one person’s explanation can be another’s description.

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When it comes to this distinction between description and explanation, Bradford seems not to accept my rejection of this distinction, yet it may be that there is simply a confusion of emphasis. If I understand him correctly, Bradford takes my argument that the difference between the two is not a scientific one but a social one as undermining my claim that this is a false dualism. He gives [p. 320] as an analogy I think a good one that “it would be equally absurd to argue that the difference between left and right constituted a ‘false dualism’ and, therefore, invalidated egocentric coordinates.” I see the takeaway from this excellent analogy quite differently, because I find myself in the position of one arguing with those who are claiming that the world is divided up into left and right, that this is not an egocentric division, and that we as scientists, can reach our goal by always “going right!” I say that this is a false dualism in that (1) what is on the right is not different from what is on the left; (2) what is right and what is left depends where you stand; (3) there are other, less egocentric, ways of orienting; (4) we’re not going to do much until we understand this. Same thing here: others are saying description and explanation are intrinsically different, and we need to explain, and not do mere description. I claim that this depends on where you are and what is of interest to you, there are better ways of orienting, and we’re not going to make any progress as a science until we get past this false dualism, and this requires resolving it into the true one classes of social situations. In sum, explanation like its close kin, causation turns out to be an anthropocentric concept. That’s as it should be. But pursuing this further requires, then, that we take into account the social relation of a researcher and researched, and not fetishize the explanation as if it were something independent of that relation. Of course, others have said this before; where ESA differs from most such arguments (but sides with the Gestalt, ecological, and field theoretic traditions) is to derive from this not an irreducible subjectivity of explanation, but rather the need for the production of intersubjectively valid social cartographies not piecemeal “explanations.”

What is Explanation? It is because of our tendency to define “explanation” in an indefensible way, one that begs the question of what we should be doing, that I think we’re better off not defining explanation but rather starting with what we’ve learned about this distinction between description and explanation, namely, that explanation is something of interest to those with a certain kind of

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ignorance. ESA then tries to sort out which sorts of these “somethings” are of greater or lesser scientific status … even without defining explanation. Bradford assumes this to be impossible. But there is no inherent difficulty to making a clear, and well-defined, partition of an unclearly defined class. Mental illness, for example, is a very murky class, and some are not sure if it really should be treated as a class at all. Yet that doesn’t mean that we might not be able to divide mental illnesses up into two classes, those associated with lesions in the brain and those not so associated. So too for the case at hand, where the class is “explanation,” ESA proposes (among other things) the partition “those that make reference to terms lacking first person correlates” as opposed to “those that do not,” and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. In other words, I merely say that if you pick up different explanations of action, and read them to the actors and talk about them, in some cases, the actors will (whether they agree or disagree) understand each term and accept that it points to something existent, even if these elements are (to an analyst) somewhat abstract (“voters,” “Republicans,” “taxes,” “faith”). In other cases, unless cowed by authority, the actors will not accept that the terms have real referents (perhaps, “false consciousness,” “repressed fear,” “anomie”). (In still other cases, actors may accept or propose explanations that make reference to terms out of their phenomenal experience yet accepted by habit or tradition.) Thus, making a partition between the first two types of cases, the partition that is central for ESA, is not difficult, does not require defining the class of explanations, and does not imply that first-person accounts should be treated as veridical. It does, however, suggest that we should confront explanations employing third-person terms with a great deal of suspicion the burden of proof is on those who would explain action with terms actors do not recognize. I do not believe that the weight of the evidence leads us to accept any such terms for explanations of action. But my arguments here did not convince Bradford, and indeed, seemed to him wildly implausible. I want to go on to reconsider these.

RELATIVISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM An Implausible Thesis? A major critique that Bradford makes is that I cast the history of sociology as one in which relativism leads to authoritarianism. Put this way, this does

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sound contradictory at best, ludicrous at worst. My argument, however, was not about relativism in general, and certainly not ethical relativism; rather, it has to do with the specific theory of the arbitrariness of perception associated most notably with Mary Douglas. I am not saying that Freudianism “came from” relativism [p. 314], but rather that Freudianism was used to shore up a critique of a doctrine of the fundamentally arbitrary categories used to perceive the world, a doctrine that was often associated with relativism. But this doctrine, often proposed by those who were advocates of the reasonableness of the particular group they studied (and intended as an attempt to do justice to “their culture”), had destabilizing implications, by implying that people had no more authority to say what their own experiences were than did others. It may well be true that those we study do not deserve any special position of authority, but my argument is about this specific linkage, and not about relativism in general. In ESA, I tried to use an investigation of intellectual history to make this point. Let me re-derive the bare bones of this argument more abstractly, which I think may be more convincing.

The Problem of Instability First, let me give the problem of instability in its most delicious form. Freud and Jung are off to travel together. Jung speaks enthusiastically about some prehistoric remains found in Bremen. Freud, understanding that Jung sees himself as possibly Freud’s student and successor, interprets this as Jung’s Oedipal wish to have Freud (the “prehistoric remains”) disposed of. Freud faints dead away. Jung interprets this as Freud’s own inverted Oedipal obsession (Gay, 1988: 208f). In other words, each thinks that the other is crazy, and each explains the other’s theory as part of his aggressive craziness. If we provisionally assume either is right, then the other is completely wrong and has no place from which to make any legitimate critique. But either one seems as good a place to start as the other. This, in a nutshell, is the problem of instability we have a doctrine that can produce completely opposite statements of truth given the same empirical inputs; it is only stabilized when there is some external anchor of social authority to determine who is the crazy (or stupid, or ignorant) one. Now one could argue that it’s always this way. You could go to the optometrist and read the chart, “E, F, P, T, O, Z, L, F,…” “That’s wrong,” the eye doctor days, “that last letter is supposed to be a P. You need

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glasses.” Well, maybe she needs the glasses. Sure, maybe. But it makes a difference if you and the doctor can both go, together, closer to the eye chart and come to an agreement. “You were right, doc, it is a P.” We don’t always do this, but we know we can, and we probably would if the glasses we got made our head hurt, and we noticed the doctor bumping into things. Now the pragmatist understanding of science and truth, which is associated with Peirce, James, and Dewey, basically held that what we mean by “truth” is what we’d eventually agree on, if we all did in fact walk up to the eye chart and take a good look at it. If you don’t accept that definition, and in fact you find yourself in a room with three eye doctors who are having a fierce disagreement as to whether after the P it goes “E, D” or “E, O,” you might wonder whether you should really believe them when they all turn on you and insist you’re wrong, at any rate, about the F. My argument is that this is the position we’re in, and though it may sound funny, it does come, though indirectly, from the type of relativism that sociology has incorporated into its fundamental world view.

The Relation of Relativism to Decision Relativism by itself can’t be bad, because it’s symmetric, in that it refuses to give any one view a head start in the race for truth. That sounds to me like the right place to start a science. The problem comes because we haven’t just started with relativism, we’ve started with two specific planks about the relation of cognition to action. The first (which we’ll denote as PA) might be thought of in terms of what Bourdieu (1990) has called the “scholastic fallacy,” namely, the academic’s tendency to give a primacy to theoretical accounts. But it’s even more fundamental than this (and Bourdieu himself understood this quite well): it is that we tend to model actors’ subjectivities in terms of propositional beliefs: things like “those elitist liberals are taxing hard working Americans to support the lazy poor.” We retroject, as Mills (1940) said, actors’ accounts into fundamental cognitive elements that we then assume to be core structural elements of mind. We’ll put on hold the precise nature of such verbal (whether spoken or silent) productions for a bit, but we can note that such an emphasis doesn’t necessarily sit well with what seems to be the widespread agreement among social theorists that we should give a primacy to the practical, that is, we understand actors as actors first, thinkers second.

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The second plank (which we’ll denote as PB) is that our cognizer/actor takes in a set of particular sense impressions that can only be integrated and identified as an instance of some species due to our presence of a cultural template. With admirable symmetry, this notion of actors’ cognition parallels our epistemology our theory of our own knowledge production namely, the theory of concept formation we’re taught in school. This is a voluntarist form of neo-Kantianism: each of us must form “concepts” on the basis of our “theory” so as to be able to best reach our own, possibly idiosyncratic, analytic goals. If I happen to be interested in the relation between “global migration” and “crimes against persons,” I establish these two boxes, define them clearly, and put in them whatever particularities satisfy my definitions. As a result, there isn’t any natural basis on which the superiority of one template over another can be demonstrated. Who should be included in the species “elitist liberals?” They aren’t a natural kind; rather, this is category constructed by some actors and is different from those of other actors, especially the accused elitist liberals themselves. But who’s to say they’re wrong? We’re relativists, after all?

The Intolerance of Tolerance Yes, but only up to a point. I think sometimes the attempt to catch relativism as being inherently contradictory (“so if relativism is relative then you refute yourself!”) has been considered far more important and intelligent a statement than it is. However, it is also the case that we do need to do something, and say something, which means, sooner or later, someone will predicate something. And as Latour (2004) in particular has argued, we generally have to make some statements of the starkest and most unquestionable form if we are to carry out the sort of destructive critique that was integral to this relativist approach. Now I simply don’t think that relativism is inherently flawed in this way; here I am only talking about that specific form that is about the arbitrariness of general terms (PB) when joined to a theory of action that emphasizes propositional cognition (PA). My argument the one that sounded so ludicrous when recounted in compressed form by Bradford is simply that in order to be able to say something, given these presuppositions, social scientists needed to assume a position of experiential authority that they had no right claiming. And here I don’t mean no political right, I mean no epistemic right. A sociologist might say something like this: “Conservatives

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say ‘those elitist liberals are taxing hard working Americans to support the lazy poor,’ but this is not accurate. Rather, they construct their ideas of ‘elitist liberals,’ ‘hard working Americans,’ and ‘lazy poor’ on the basis of an uncritical integration of low quality information and pernicious chatter, and use this to support their own political project. So really, the conservatives are attempting to repress the stirrings of an alliance between the downtrodden and exploited (on the one hand) and certain progressive factors of the educated elite (on the other) so as to preserve their own dominance.” What’s wrong with this statement? It might well be true. But we can’t avoid noticing the parallel to the subjects’ own way of thinking; thus we can imagine a different expert who might argue, “Liberal social scientists say, ‘Conservatives say “those elitist liberals …,” …. so as to preserve their own dominance,’ but this is not accurate. These sociologists do so …. to preserve their own dominance.” And so on. This formal parallel is not in itself problematic, so long as there is some empirical way of deciding who is right. But, since each side is using concepts that each is free (or so we say) to construct in his or her own way, for his or her own “analytic purposes,” there is no reason to think that there can be such an empirical adjudication. That is, it isn’t simply that our two social scientists disagree. It is how they understand the project of marshaling evidence. Our first social scientist could and, as I discuss in Martin (2001), actual social scientists did support this argument through concept formation and data gathering. One could argue that there is a personality trait, say “right wing authoritarianism” (RWA), that leads people to react punitively to the weak based on their own neurotic fear of weakness. Our scientist could construct measures of this based on his theory, and find that conservatives were high in this trait. He could then find that conservatives were higher in RWA, and that this explained their unwillingness to support programs for the poor. But our second social scientist could support his argument with a different set of concepts. “There is no such thing as RWA,” our scientist might argue. “The reason liberal social scientists believe that there is, is that they tend to be high on a different, and a real, trait, ‘left wing wimpiness’ (LWW), which leads elites to fearfully identify with any critic of elites based on their own neurotic guilt.” He could construct measures of this based on his theory, and if he could somehow get social scientists to fill out his surveys, he could find that indeed, his liberal social scientist subjects were high on this trait, and this explained their action. You might respond, but this is obviously bad social science: our first social scientist measuring the existence of RWA on the basis of responses

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to questions like “do you disapprove of nude beaches” and our second measuring the existence of LWW on the basis of responses to questions like “do you find reggae music interesting.” But my point is that what each is doing proposing (potentially idiosyncratic) concepts, using his own theory to derive testable implications, using these to construct measures and then seeing whether the resulting data are compatible with his theory is just what we say that social scientists should do. In essence, we take a flawed theory of science, one that assumes the incommensurability of different theories, and use it as our guidebook. It is for this reason that I made the claim and I stick by it that our particular form of relativism, namely, the belief in the voluntarist construction of concepts and the arbitrary nature of species in social perception, coupled with our focus on propositional knowledge, undermines our attempt to find a rigorous social science. It is not objectionable in itself simply because it delegitimates the perspectives of actors you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It’s that there after all that, we don’t even have an omelet. Now if there were no other way to start, we’d just conclude that there can’t be a social science, which would save us all a lot of trouble. But it seems to me that this conclusion isn’t warranted. The problem is that we’ve made some assumptions that we shouldn’t have, and if we rip them up, we find a stable footing. Just as there was something that our optometrists could “go up to” to determine who was correct, so there is something that we sociologists and actors can go up to.

The Option for the First Personal I noted that where I believe that Bradford misinterpreted the argument of ESA, he was not alone. The most common problem that I set myself up for was the belief that I was trying to rehabilitate first-person accounts answers to the question, “Why did you did you do this?” (Bradford [p. 310] begins by arguing that I attempted to do exactly this.) It is indeed the case that I argued that third-person accounts to the question “Why did A do this?” are problematic, and to do so, I negatively compared them to firstperson accounts. Even though I did make various asides that I did not mean for us to accept first-person accounts, because I pushed this off until later, a number of readers misunderstood me as defending these first-person accounts. Bradford does in fact recognize and discuss my attempt to distinguish between such accounts (talk about experiences), which I believe to be

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problematic as data, and the underlying experience itself, and that it is the retrieval of the latter that I think must be our goal (though it is invariably accessed indirectly). But still, Bradford [p. 317] thinks that the fact that first-person accounts may be implausible counts against my claims. In ESA, I do indeed criticize mainstream sociology for, in effect, first asking actors “Why did you do y?” and then dismissing the answers. But not because I think that we should accept the answers! Rather, we have asked a question that is (1) rude and (2) of dubious scientific value. The rudeness might seem scientifically irrelevant, but I believe that it is not; by first provoking a response worthy of dismissal, and then dismissing it, we convince ourselves that lay reports are worthy of dismissal. As I will go on to argue, rather than being dismissed, these need to be compiled and organized by the analyst. A reasonable critique, however, is that very few of us actually do this: those who ask actors “why” tend to accept the answers, and those who reject actors’ explanations do not even bother asking “why.” Now to the extent that there are “why” questions that do not involve explaining action, I completely accept (and accepted in ESA) that such cases are outside of the scope of the argument. For example, we might ask why the rate of savings in the US population dropped in the early 20th century, and conclude that the correct explanation is simply a compositional one, having to do with the decreased number of agriculturalists and the rise of an urban white collar population. No one’s behavior had changed, just the number of each type in the population, and so we are not trying to explain the action (we treat this as nonproblematic). That’s a successful explanation that doesn’t require fishing for first-person experience. Yet more often than we would think, when we ask a “why” question, we are implicitly asking a question that calls forth a first-person account, and indeed, is only stable thusly. For example, if we ask “what caused people in place p at time t to rebel” and we understand this in first-person terms, it would seem that we should be interested in what they have to say about it. I think we would be wrong to do that. Because one of the robust findings in social psychology is that when we ask people “why” they did something that they have already accomplished, we tend to get them to generate an “account,” which usually explains why what they did was a right or reasonable thing for someone (especially the questioner) to have done. When speaking to a religious person, we might emphasize religious values; when speaking to a secular person, secular values. All these things may be true “in a way,” but trying to sort out “an” answer from such accounts is a fruitless task.

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Even when respondents are doing their best to help us, they tend to be much better at explaining why they would undertake such an action now than they are at reproducing the constellation of factors that confronted them then. So it makes a great deal of sense to reject these accounts as an answer to our question.

CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS AND INFERENCES Third-Person Causality But should we therefore accept a third-person account? And what sort of an account would this be? In sociology, we take for granted that this would be a “causal” one, and our interpretation of this causality tends to revolve around necessitation and counterfactual dependence (though generally watered down to some “probabilistic” version). For example, had people A not experienced relative deprivation (x), they would not have rebelled (y). Further, to the extent that our ideas about causality make sense, we are required to imagine that our cause x could be randomly allocated to persons. This means two things. First, because counterfactualism introduces imaginary worlds, there are an infinite number of causal explanations that we treat as equally valid, even though many are silly. (For example, had people A been wearing mind control caps [z], they would not have rebelled.) Second, people cannot cause their own actions, though they can cause others’ actions. That’s because any time we are doing something ourselves, we have a form of selectivity that wrecks our understanding of causality. Note the importance of ESA’s focus on action it is here (and not everywhere) that we are on strong grounds for rejecting a third-person causal explanation. Now Bradford rejects my arguments about causality, and indeed, one of his arguments seems to be that my own notion is defined in terms of counterfactuals [pt. 5]. Contrary to the implication, no counterfactualist would assimilate the approach I review sympathetically, which identifies candidates for causality on the basis of their deviation of actuality from what members of community treat as normal, to current counterfactualism, which turns on a general issue of our capacity to construct imaginary worlds. Bradford’s critique is at its weakest here and it sheds little light on the most important issues; so I will pass over this somewhat quickly, but I do want to respond to two parts of his review here.

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On Necessity Bradford [p. 324; p. 311n18] has a few minor glitches in his discussion of causality; we would say that x is necessary for y when there is no y without x, which means that x’s absence implies y’s absence (∼x → ∼y), which we also say as “only if x, then y.” Counterfactual dependence is understood to mean a relation of necessity, because the question of whether, in this factual world, where x and y both existed, x actually caused y, is answered by asking whether (∼x → ∼y). Sufficiency is when (x→y), which we say as “if x, then y.” “If and only if x, then y” means both of these (x→y; ∼x → ∼y). Some of the things Bradford brings out here are interesting and important (such as a point he attributes to Alan Garfinkel, one earlier made by something I disDavidson (1967: 698), regarding the fragility of events cussed, but in abbreviated manner). Further, his overall takeaway is correct that I criticize unreasonable practices, not thinking in terms of causality per se, nor in terms of counterfactualism. However, Bradford [pt. 6] says “no one endorses these ideas anyway.” Were that true, I would be right, but silly. However, not only do people endorse them that is, that causality is an inherent and mind-independent part of the world, that it is equivalent to simple counterfactualism, and that there is no explanation that does not turn on causality but many believe them to be so obviously true that anything that violates these assumptions must be banished from sociology. Courses are taught, articles are rejected, and books criticized, on the basis of these ideas which Bradford, I think rightly, calls unreasonable. It is true that some of the most important theorists of counterfactual statistics, such as Morgan and Winship (2007: 4f), emphasize the difference between the counterfactual approach to causality in philosophy (on the one hand) and their use of a framework for alternative treatment values (on the other). However, statisticians are able to begin by setting up conditions for the rigorous deduction of their techniques that, as I point out in ESA, are rarely satisfied by the consumers of their products, and the issue for us is how practicing sociologists think. Since Lieberson’s (1985) wonderful work on making sociology more rigorous, there has been a widespread conception that scientific analysis in sociology is causal, that causality implies simple counterfactualism, and that this implies an experimental or quasi-experimental research design. An explanation of action that turns on some factor x is pushed to conceptualize x as a cause; once this is done, the explanation is pushed further and further toward an experimental set up involving the allocation of x. If we

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fail, in that we cannot push our explanation very far in this direction, it is criticized as inconclusive and we hang our head in shame; if we succeed, we find, to our puzzlement, that all of the action, the phenomenon in which we were interested, has disappeared. This does not mean that all employments of causality are flawed, nor even that we are unable to use the concept of causality in a helpful way, but it does mean that, so long as we hold to conventional understandings of what causality is and how we use it in our work, we have no way of defending the good and rejecting the bad. Indeed, when it comes to the explanation of action, the more seriously we take these definitions, as opposed to using rough-and-ready common sense understandings of causality, the more confused we are going to become. Like Bradford, I side with MacIver (1964 [1942]) (in his wonderful though flawed treatment of social causality), at least to the extent that causality, as used in sociology, is about differences: it is a mental operation, not an aspect of the things. And, as I have said, this type of mental operation becomes cumbersome and contradictory when applied to action. But we have also seen a problem with the first-person accounts. What do we do? ESA’s answer is that rather than look for retrospective accounts from actors, we want to get a sense of their prospective orientations and their present experience. Even though we generally cannot quite get their actual present experience, we can come a lot closer than we do. Unlike accounts, such experience does not need to be subjected to the purifying flame of destructive critique before it is of use to us as social scientists.

FROM CAUSATION TO EXPLANATION The Veridical Nature of Experience ESA’s emphasis on treating experience uncritically appeared quite batty to Bradford. A way of clarifying this might be to use the distinction between sensation (which in the 18th century, philosophers argued we could never be “wrong” about) and perception (which is the identification of an object that is the cause of the sensation, and thus involves judgment and which therefore can be mistaken). Bradford who thinks I have wasted people’s time talking about judgment in close detail doesn’t see any distinction between perception and sensation [p. 316], thereby illustrating the problem at hand. When he thinks that I am stuck on a dilemma about “how to

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square the validity of first-person experiences with the apparent fact that people are wrong about why they do what they do” [p. 323], he is finding himself in the same position as one who would argue that a philosopher (like Reid, 1969 [1785]) who maintained that sensation was always veridical (“you really do have a cold sensation on your fingertips …”) was inconsistent to deny the perception (“… but you are wrong to think that this sock is wet”). Following Dewey, I make a similar opposition, between experience (on the one hand), and propositions about experience (on the other). It is of the utmost importance to be clear here as to the nature of this distinction between experience and accounts (propositions about experience), and what ESA claims as to the status of each. The reason it is crucial for ESA that experience be veridical is that, following the Gestalt school, I argue that we perceive what we can and should do with objects (their “affordances”), and this is where sociology must start (though not end) in our explanation of action. If actors’ experiences are misleading and illusory, this class of explanation is obviously invalid. But this does not require that actors be able to explicate the nature of their experience, store it away accurately, and/or regurgitate it upon request. In fact, the direct nature of our perception of affordances means that in many cases, it is because our experience is veridical (potato chips really are delicious) that we are unable to give a good account of our actions (for our hand may be reaching for the chips and bringing them to our mouth without us really thinking it through). The difficulty in adopting this framework for social science is that we have to accept that there is disagreement about what things “afford” that some will see the Democratic party as sickly and pathetic, while others see it as courageous and patriotic. Much of ESA tries to work through how we grasp these sorts of non-random differences in veridical experience, but fortunately, this was not the focus of Bradford’s critique, as a defense would be quite lengthy. Here, we need to simply emphasize the separation between the nature of experience and accounts, and that ESA requires the first (but not the second) of these to have a form of ecological validity. Further, I think that Bradford makes a serious error (flagged by the use of “of course,” which can indicate an indefensible assumption) in saying that “people’s experiences are, of course, not independent of their statements about experience.” Of course they aren’t independent (they can’t be if the statement is about the experience), but the question is whether someone’s experience x is shaped by what she will later say about it. It is hardly so obvious to me that this is the case that I would employ an “of course” here. If the argument is that our experience of some x2 is not independent

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of our statements about an earlier x1, that is fine, but completely in harmony with what (following Dewey) I said about the “funded” nature of experience (that it folds in our state of being, a point also made by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty). If the argument is that x is shaped by our thoughts about what we would/could/should say about it, that is certainly an empirical possibility (pointed to by Mills, 1940), but it isn’t obviously always the case. Bradford is, however, still right about a key part I (like Dewey) struggle to explain how the experience has veridicality without the statement partaking of this veridicality, just as Reid struggled to say how a sensation was real and a perception not, given that a sensation is often, immediately, the sensation of something. I think I am on stronger grounds in that in this case, the talk-about-experience is temporally disconnected from the experience itself. Still, I confess that this problem (how to understand where the “error” creeps in in social perception) is not completely solved in ESA, but as far as I am aware, no one else has solved it either. Our normal way of making the partition is (as I argued in Chapters 4 and 5) completely untenable, as it relies on a demonstrably false theory of cognition in general and of vision in particular. Perhaps this will turn out to be a problem that theorists cannot solve on their own.

First Persons and Scientists The only place where I think Bradford makes a serious misstep, and I confess it seems to be a side thought, is his attempt to argue that by saying that we shouldn’t allow social scientists to invoke third-person entities in their explanation, I am contradicting my own advice, because such thirdperson explanations are first-person to the social scientists, and their action is explaining action. This strikes me as sophistry the production of a statement that does not survive serious reflection (that is, do you really experience third-person causality in social data? I spend a lot of time analyzing data, and I never have). However, this gets to a real point: if social scientists were not to slap a third-person account on their own experiences, these would indeed provide valuable data. I think the most important example here is Christie’s (1993, p. 88) admission that when he was applying sociometric tests to subjects to determine if they were “authoritarian” an attribution that most of these subjects would not only reject as applying to them, but dispute as a having an actual referent as intended he could tell who would score high from his initial interactions with them. Those he

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disliked would turn out to be authoritarian. This dislike was a first-person experience, and has fundamental validity. His account of this dislike could, with suitable cleaning, compilation, and organization with other such accounts, be useful data. The abstraction placed on the person (A is an authoritarian) actually removes the fundamentally relational account, and takes what is in fact a joint production, and misconstrues it as an abstract individual quality, one requiring the utmost theoretical nicety to uncover. This confusion between social scientists’ own experience and their own accounts of this experience gets to a more fundamental one that I think we see in Bradford’s argument [pt. 7] that my attempt to separate experience from reports about experience is inherently useless, because sociological findings are invariably reported in propositional form. Although I will argue against Bradford’s conclusion here, I should emphasize that he is thinking in precisely the right direction taking for granted that if ESA (or any work of theoretical methodology) is to be acceptable, it must have that minimal reflexivity of being able to exist in the same world as other explanations without requiring some sort of total war. My argument was not that propositions about experience could never be accurate, but that if we are looking to stabilize our analyses by building in an epistemic “option for the actor” that is, an “innocent-until-proven-guilty” that means that not all ways of seeing things (note, not talking about them) are equal we cannot do this by giving actors’ accounts this credibility, but rather, their experiences. This compiled, organized, and aggregated experience is thing “we go up to” to see if we are correct. At the same time, I have emphasized that our social scientific work must not only be understood as a refined and improved form of that social competence that actors have, but must be restricted to the employment of terms that have phenomenological validity to those whose actions we explain. It might indeed seem that this implies that social scientists are simply some actors among others, no different at all. And yet I do not think that this is so. A true social science one that involved the systematic compilation of experiences into an organized terrain in which both actors and social objects can be positioned readies us (and any actors who would like to use our products) to begin crawling toward defensible propositions, and mutual critique can turn such a crawl into something more like a walk. Again, I would throw my lot in here with Latour it is quite true that the “universal” is a local configuration, and the view-from-above is not the same as a view-from-nowhere. But the locality of the universal, the fact that it requires abstraction of some sorts and the loss of many specific characteristics of experience, in no way counts

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against its objectivity. Thus, when we make an analysis, a social cartography, and then make statements based on it, we are not making statements about our own first-person experience, but about the principles of organization of others’ experience. There is simply no reason to think that the problems that come with actors’ accounts arise here, for the social situation and associated exigencies are completely different. That does not mean there are no problems with these situational demands, but they are different and must be analyzed in terms of their own specificity. Finally, I think that Bradford again, like others assumes that because I object to many sorts of experiments that mete out treatments to actors so as to cumulate evidence for a third-person explanation of action, I must reject all such experimental studies [pt. 8]. I certainly do not Gestalt psychology was an experimental science, and the evidence that lies at the heart of my understanding of the nature of cognitive processing all comes from experiments. In fact, the greatest works showing the problems with experiments (namely, the ways in which experimenters were somehow unconsciously guiding their research subjects to the “right” results) were all experimental (and done, it should be noted, by descendants of the Gestalt tradition). There is nothing wrong with third-person knowledge, even of human beings. And there is nothing wrong with experiments. The question is whether we can found a science of human action on the principles that (1) said action should be explained in causal terms; (2) our understanding of causality should be that underlying the classic treatment/control experiment. None of the successes of the experimental method have suggested that this is the case and indeed, when we put them together, they strongly suggest that it is not.

From Experience to Fields The argument of ESA that we have reproduced so far is that we need to take as our data the experiences of actors, because their experiences are of objects that “tell us what to do with them,” and hence explaining the nature of the objects (and their relation to the actors) is equivalent to explaining the action; ESA thus argues that the most promising direction for this task, termed therein a “social aesthetics,” will be a field theory. In the next section I’ll try to clarify my use of this terminology, but first, a brief clarification on whether I understand this project as requiring the abandonment of the project of inference and current statistics. I certainly

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don’t. I suspect that my critique of our normal way of doing statistics as explanation misled Bradford into thinking, first, that I opposed inferential statistics, and second, that I wanted us to only do case studies and aggregate them. What I would say is that, in actuality, we always only do case studies and aggregate them, and so we misinterpret our own actions when we read a study with an N of 3,000 as if it were about a single abstract person (a point I previously made in Martin, 2000), introjecting inter-individual comparisons as if they were intra-individual dynamics. Just as my critique of simple counterfactualism led some to mistakenly imagine that I was opposed to the counterfactual approach to causality as method, so this seems to imply that I am against inferential statistics, when my argument is that we should not being trying to infer to the average man of a “representative population,” but to the structured landscape of the distribution of the social, and for this reason, I am extremely enthusiastic about the extension of new techniques (including “General Linear Reality” types such as hierarchical linear models and other mixed models) that make it easier for us to include heterogeneity of different types, and make the right inferences. Thus Bradford is absolutely right that I think that we need to compile and organize our data. That’s what we do anyway. I think we should use field theory to do this in a way that produces descriptions that are intersubjectively valid and relatively theory-free (in the sense that they can be used to answer many different questions, in the way that a good map can be used to go many different directions, even though maps are made for specific things). Here I want to respond to Bradford’s critique of my use of field theory and again clarify.

FIELD THEORY AND EXPERIENCE Field Theory and SAF’s Bradford repeatedly [pp. 312, 319, 327] cites me as speaking of “action fields,” a term that I don’t think I have ever used, though it is used by my friend, teacher, and colleague Neil Fligstein. Bradford says that what I am talking about are not in fact such action fields, but, rather, fields of experience [p. 327], and seems to think that this is a critique of ESA [pt. 4]. But this is indeed exactly what I, like the Gestalt psychologists, want to talk about. This is a conception of “field” that was developed by the Gestalt psychologists in the mid-20th century, and which influenced

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Bourdieu via Merleau-Ponty (here one may see Martin and Gregg, 2014). I cannot overstate my conviction that this approach to social explanation was the most promising direction that we had, that its abandonment was a great setback for the social sciences, and that one of the many praiseworthy features of Bourdieu’s work was his rehabilitation of this perspective from independent starting points. Bradford reduces my claim, acceptably for this level of specification, to “Experiences drive actions” and “fields induce experiences.” And it is also correct that, as Bradford [p. 328] says, the converse of these is true … but this is not quite as relevant as he makes it seem. That is, experiences (via actions) do change fields, but it is that the aggregated actions of many participants change fields, and fields induce the experience of single actors. Thus, the argument of ESA is exactly what Bradford thinks should follow logically from its premises; whether it is correct or not is a different matter. The chain “fields induce experiences which drive actions” is derivable from two planks: First (QA) that, as the Gestalt theorists, like the pragmatists, emphasized, the objects in our field of experience have qualities that call out for us to do things with them; second (QB) that in social action, the objects we confront include not only simple material ones but the virtual social objects that are constellations or complexes of relations. Thus Bradford’s main critique seems to be that simply reproducing a field of experience, should it be possible, is not in itself sufficient to explain action. This is technically incorrect, because the basis of the Gestalt approach is that to do one is to do the other (QA). I will briefly reproduce this logic, but later return to Bradford’s critique and link it to a stronger one he made.

Quality I was quite sorry to find Bradford [p. 330n12] noting as if it were obvious that my use of the term “quality” is “out of place in the context of discussing human sensory perception,” for this means that I failed at what was perhaps my chief object, namely, to convince sociologists that our theory of action was wrong because our model of cognition was wrong, and that our model of cognition was wrong because we believe that quality is an arcane and unscientific expression and that we can discuss human sensory perception without discussing quality. In fact, this is the only critique of

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Bradford’s that mystifies me. Does he not himself perceive qualities in his environment? Such a rejection of the idea of qualities would account for Bradford’s conviction that the Gestalt approach does not explain action. Let me briefly sketch ESA’s arguments here. First, what do we mean by a “quality” in an object? We mean that it has a potential to induce a certain form of response in something else, and in this case, we mean a certain form of experience in a human. But the key thing about human perception, argued the Gestalt theorists and ecological psychologists, is that one of the types of qualities possessed by objects is that they “tell us what to do with them.” A cup with a handle actually tells the human how to pick it up, in that when we see the cup, we know how to wield it without any further thought. A French fry indicates that it would very much be a good thing to eat, and if we try to ignore it, it will remind us. Its capacity to remind us is its deliciousness, and thus if one eats a French fry, and one is asked why, one need do nothing more than point to the deliciousness of the French fry. In this simplified rendition, to explain the quality is to explain the action. Of course, this is simplified, but we always start with simplifications. Bradford makes a serious critique of this simplification, and I will return to this below and agree with him. The problem, however, isn’t that of simplification. But before we get to that issue, we need to understand why this perspective which I believe to be empirically defensible as a first approximation, while our other simplifications are not is also theoretically progressive, in that it solves problems that other theoretical approaches cannot. Judgment In particular, the focus on quality, and on what we should understand as qualitative predication (our capacity to attach a quality as predicate to a subject), is, or so I believe, central for understanding the relation of action to subjectivity. You will recall that I began by saying that I believed one problem with our current approach came from our assumption (PA) that the cognitive components of action should basically be seen as propositional beliefs, things like “2 + 2 is 4” or “those elitist liberals are taxing hard working Americans to support the lazy poor.” I have, or so I do believe, demonstrated that this leads to an instability in our science that can be resolved if we give an epistemic priority to that which is experienced (and not to the accounts of actors). But that would be irrelevant at best,

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sophistical at worst, if I were to try to smuggle in the propositions to the world, and say that certain actors, say, “experience” that “those elitist liberals are taxing hard working Americans to support the lazy poor.” But the considerations sketched in ESA do not imply such smuggling, nor even allow for it. Statements like “those elitist liberals are taxing hard working Americans to support the lazy poor” are explanations (folk theories, we might say) that are given by persons to justify their actions and make sense of their experience. What they perceive in the environment is not such (synthetic) propositions, but objects with qualities. Although in some cases, these can certainly be unpacked into (analytic) propositions (thus seeing a red fire truck can turn into “the fire truck is red”), we do not perceive the propositions, nor the form of predication, but rather a unity, and some propositions almost certainly cannot be perceived. Thus, an actor may indeed perceive “elitist liberals,” “hard working Americans,” and “lazy poor,” but will need to theorize the conjunction. Now ESA does not claim that the actors perceive physically (say) one elitist liberal after another, and compound the set after this series of experiences. Rather, what our actor perceives is a social object, a bundle of relations. I believe that this is (again) true as stated, that is, what such complexes are is nothing other than the relations that persons establish, following the logic laid out by Marx (e.g., 1906 [1867]) in his work on the fetishism of commodities, and explored again by Simmel (1978 [1907]) in his Philosophy of Money. The chief critique that I personally would make of ESA is that this statement is, at best, obscure. I do not know how we do this. But I am pretty sure that we do, because we are able to produce intersubjectively valid knowledge of the properties of complexes like political parties without having any direct experience of the individuals as individuals who make up this set. Obscurity is indeed troubling, but it is not fatal. I am not sure yet if anyone knows how our visual system fills in texture in areas of the visual field that are not really being seen with the degree of resolution necessary for the determination of said texture. Yet it occurs whether we completely understand it or not. One of the central arguments of ESA is that when we recognize that actors are capable of this sort of judgment, we have a more defensible conception of how what is in their heads relates to their actions. Further, we then find that our own, scientific, understanding makes use of actors’ capacities, but compiles and systematizes many judgments, as opposed to negating them. Now Bradford, I think, takes my arguments about judgment in a way I did not intend. I do indeed emphasize that our conventional way of thinking

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about generalization, one which only allows for subsumptive judgment (when we put a particularity in a more general class by attending to only a few of its attributes), is in a weak position for understanding social action. Such action, I argued (and here I appeal to the entire history of Western thought from Aristotle onwards) necessarily also involves reflective judgment, our capacity to attach a universal predicate to a particularity without such subsumption (e.g., “the rose is beautiful,” or “Dukakis is a pansy”).1 I am not saying that we should not formalize (as Bradford [p. 322] takes it), but that (1) when actors cannot formalize, they may still have veridical cognitive components to action; (2) we should be studying these and indeed measuring these; and (3) we are fortunate that we can expect that these are the subjective correlates of the affordances of social objects. So far, I have recapitulated what I believe to be the strengths of ESA’s analysis: by starting from the veridical capacity of actors to intuit the intersubjectively valid (though differentially distributed) qualities of social objects, they “know what to do with them,” and action can unproblematically be derived as an interaction between objects and actors placed in the same overall configuration, or field. However, there is a serious weakness in this analysis, one which Bradford uncovered, and to which I now turn attention.

CHARACTER Bradford [p. 326] charges me with “overemphasizing” the external causes of action [pt. 3]. I have long dismissed such sorts of critiques of theories for two very good reasons. The first is that there is no “metric” for the “degree of emphasis” in theorizing, so this seems to come down to personal predilection. The second is that it is better to have a clear and consistent theory that has a limited range of applicability than one that seems to produce reasonable statements for everything, but only because of adhocery and other forms of fakery. However, I have come to believe that Bradford [p. 327] is fundamentally correct here, and I indicate the way that I think we need to approach this in the forthcoming (2014) Thinking Through Theory, though it is not fully worked out there (I am still not sure how to work it out). But first let me re-state the criticism in a way that I think is more powerful than the issue of “degree of emphasis.” The field theoretic account says not merely that action is a function of the situation and the habitus of the actor, but, more

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particularly, that these actions are in response to the ways in which objects call out for us to do things with them. These affordances are differential to the actor: someone who has never eaten a paint chip may think one affords eating; someone who has never used a cherry pitter may not understand what it can do for us; someone who grew up on a farm in Iowa may have a different feeling about the Democratic party from someone who grew up in Milwaukee. The field account can, technically, handle differences between people by simply allowing for differences in habitus. But there is good a priori reason to think that there is one type of difference that is different, and this would be a general capacity to withstand the beckoning of objects. I first started thinking about this seriously when reading work on neurological impairments that led certain people to be over-responsive to the qualities of objects: they would grasp anything that hovered in front of them. They were the perfect subjects for the Gestalt field theory and they were impaired. Most of us have a capacity to suppress such a reaction. If that is the case, then there may be (and I think there is good reason to believe there is) individual variation in degree of susceptibility to the demands of the environment. In the old days, this was called “character,” and I now think that any theory of action that relies on field and habitus also needs something vaguely like “character” in order to be stable. There is one way of thinking of habitus such that it encompasses character, but I worry that simply trying to erase this distinction would produce a pathological theory in which both predictive success and failure are treated with equal satisfaction (habitus becomes the sort of thing which explains why habitus doesn’t behave as anticipated). This may turn out to be a big deal, or it may not. Of course, I am hoping it does not that the outlines of the field approach remain stable when we allow for suppression of response but I think the only way to go forwards is, once again, to triangulate sociological evidence, psychological evidence, phenomenological evidence, and the clearest thinking we can muster.

WHO IS ESA FOR? The saddest part in reading this review, however, was that Bradford took for granted that those who would read ESA were not those whom I was really addressing those engaged in research. In addition to my error

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regarding the role of character, I erred in thinking that a book about the fundamental conceptual problems in the practice of sociology, if written forcefully and clearly, would reach practicing mainstream sociologists. Perhaps, this can be done, but it does not seem that I have succeeded in doing so. It would be nice if someone else could succeed here, but there may be another way. When I was in graduate school, and the anti-theory movement was building momentum (I discuss this in [2014]), we were told that theory was too important to be left to theorists, and that all researchers were theorists. That might well be, but I haven’t been consistently impressed with the results. So perhaps it’s time for the theorists those who identify themselves as such and are willing to seriously think about what lies in between our practice and our knowledge as sociologists, and for this reason, those who must seriously think about what lies in between our practice and our subjectivity as actors to do the research.

NOTE 1. Bradford correctly [p. 322] notes that in reflective judgment we do not necessarily pay attention to every particularity (thus when saying a rose is beautiful I do not necessarily pay attention to its weight); I think a fair way of putting it would be that our attribution is, first, an attribution of a quality possessed by a whole and second, does not reach universality by suppressing particularities. This issue of the difference between subsumptive and non-subsumptive judgment, however, is well understood and need delay us no longer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Lawrence Hazelrigg for probing criticism that led to clarification in many places, although he would still not endorse all the arguments here, and to Harry F. Dahms, for making this interchange possible.

REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. (1990). The scholastic point of view. Cultural Anthropology, 5, 380 391. Bradford, J. H. (2013). Explaining explanation: A critical review of John Levi Martin’s the explanation of social action. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 31, 309 332.

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Christie, R. (1993). Some experimental approaches to authoritarianism: I. A retrospective perspective on the einstellung (rigidity?) paradigm. In W. Stone, G. Lederer, & R. Christie (Eds.), Strength and weakness (pp. 70 98). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Davidson, D. (1967). Causal relations. The Journal of Philosophy, 64, 691 703. Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York, NY: Norton. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, 225 248. Lieberson, S. (1985). Making it count. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MacIver, R. M. (1964 [1942]). Social causation. Boston, MA: Ginn and Company. Martin, J. L. (2000). The relation of aggregate statistics on belief to culture and cognition. Poetics, 28, 5 20. Martin, J. L. (2001). The authoritarian personality, 50 years later: What lessons are there for political psychology? Political Psychology, 22, 1 26. Martin, J. L. (2014). Thinking through theory. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Martin, J. L., & Gregg, F. (forthcoming). Was Bourdieu a field theorist? In M. Hilgers & E. Mangez (Eds.), Bourdieu’s theory of social fields. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1906 [1867]). Capital (Vol. 1). In F. Engels (Ed.). Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company. Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review, 5, 904 931. Morgan, S. L., & Winship, C. (2007). Counterfactuals and causal inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reid, T. (1969 [1785]). Essays on the intellectual powers of man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simmel, G. (1978 [1907]). The philosophy of money (2nd ed.). In T. Bottomore & D. Frisby (Eds. & Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

EXPLAINING SOCIAL ACTION REVISITED: A REPLY TO JOHN LEVI MARTIN John Hamilton Bradford ABSTRACT Purpose To clarify and address questions that have arisen concerning John Levi Martin’s Explanation of Social Action (2011). I reply to some of Martin’s comments to my original review of his book (2012). In particular, this paper examines the distinction between first-person and third-person accounts of human action and whether third-person explanations of action are ever justified. Findings This paper concedes several of Martin’s points, but contra Martin, maintains that third-person accounts are sometimes valuable forms of explanation. This paper also concludes that the distinction between first-person and third-person explanations is relative to the actor. Methodology/approach A careful and close analysis of his reply is employed along with careful explication and exemplification of central concepts related to the study of human action.

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 32, 259 269 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032010

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Social implications Martin has argued that third-person explanations of social action generate epistemological instability and hierarchical social relationships between researchers and those researched. This paper expresses doubts about the generalizability of these claims. Originality/value of paper To date, no extended discussion has been published pertaining to the social value of third-person explanations of social action. Keywords: Social action; social science; experience; instability; thirdperson accounts; explanations

INTRODUCTION I appreciate the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with John Levi Martin about his book The Explanation of Social Action (ESA). I also thank Martin for his thorough and insightful response to my recent review of ESA and for providing me with an opportunity to reply. Martin’s response strikes me as refreshingly earnest and reasonable. He cleared up several misunderstandings that I had of ESA and has motivated me to revisit my initial questions and to rethink my earlier arguments. I am also pleased to discover that my difficulties with the text were not mine alone, and I hope that our exchange will be helpful to others who have already read or plan to read the book. To be clear, although my review focused predominantly on what I thought were a few of the book’s shortcomings, I have always regarded ESA as an impressive work of scholarship that promises to positively reorient sociological inquiry. To save time and print, I will not recapitulate all of the many points with which I agree. Thus, an omission by me of any of Martin’s specific points means that I either agree with them or regard any differences I have as relatively unimportant. Because I have been given the “last word,” I do not want to raise additional questions that Martin won’t have the opportunity to answer. I will focus my attention defending one argument: third-person explanations are sometimes valid explanations of social action.

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THE PROBLEM OF INSTABILITY The large number of articles and presentations that make unnecessary use of third-person explanations, especially in overtly “theoretical” works, is a problem for social science, in part stemming from the way we teach our undergraduate and graduate students. Martin is, therefore, right to remind us that we should not ignore first-person experiences when explaining actions, and also that actions are often, according to our own experiences, induced by the qualities of objects in a field. For example, as an instructor, I may read a student’s paper, judge it to be of poor quality, and give it a failing grade; the poor quality of the paper causes me to give that paper a low grade; and I perceive this quality relative to an explicit or implicit set of criteria relevant for that course and to a wider field of related courses. Despite my affinity for Martin’s approach, however, he has not (yet) convinced me that social science should dispense with third-person explanations of social action altogether or that the “hermeneutics of suspicion” is without value.1 Martin does not invalidate Freud’s basic insight, namely, that ego-centered explanations (or experiences) of action are sometimes inadequate because people have unconscious motives.2 And although I entirely agree with Martin that, “we should confront explanations employing third-person terms with a great deal of suspicion” and that “the burden of proof is on those who would explain action with terms actors do not recognize,” I do not share his contention that we cannot “accept any such terms for explanations of action.” Explanations of the social behavior of children, for example, can refer to models of developmental stages that are unknown and possibly even unknowable to them. These are still good explanations, despite being third-person explanations. Throughout ESA and in his response to my review, Martin makes two types of arguments against the use of third-person explanations, namely, an epistemological argument pertaining to the veridicality of experience, and a consequential argument pertaining to the problem of instability.3 I will address each of these in reverse order. Martin’s primary objection to the use of third-person explanations for social action is that using thirdperson explanations produces undesirable outcomes. Martin says that third-person explanations are rude, generate authoritarian relationships with actors, and most importantly, their use generates epistemological instability a situation in which “completely opposite statements of truth” can be produced “given the same empirical inputs,” and which can only be

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stabilized given “some external anchor of social authority ….” Martin illustrates the problem of instability with a story of mutual misperception: Freud, “understanding that Jung sees himself as possibly Freud’s student and successor, interprets this as Jung’s Oedipal wish to have Freud … disposed of.” Martin provides a second example of instability in which liberals and conservatives accuse each other of willfully mis-interpreting their theories as covert attempts to achieve social dominance, precisely in order to achieve social dominance. In both cases, each party is responding to explanations, and these explanations are themselves the objects that they experience and to which they respond. This suggests, in contrast to what Martin writes elsewhere, that humans can have experiences of (i) propositions and/or (ii) third-person accounts. Freud is reacting both to what Jung says or communicates in linguistic (“propositional”) form, and also to his own interpretation of what Jung says, stated implicitly or explicitly in some linguistic form. Martin could argue that Freud is here not responding to propositions or explanations of experience, but rather, to his relationship with Jung. This explanation, however, would undermine the distinction between propositions about relationships and experiences of relationships, a distinction, which was introduced by Martin in order to defend the absolute veridicality of the latter. I would evaluate the parable of Freud and Jung as follows: Freud attributes to Jung the (unconscious) intention to murder him and then faints. Freud reacts to his own interpretive explanation of Jung’s action, and this interpretation is faulty for all the reasons that Martin gives. Jung, however, correctly diagnoses Freud’s reaction as a response to his own “inverted Oedipal obsession.” Freud may or may not be right because he is attributing unconscious motives to Jung. Jung probably is right, however, because Freud is reacting to his own consciously perceived theory of Jung’s unconscious. In short, Jung’s account is right, Freud may or may not be right, and I can easily assume that both are right. So, although the story is supposed to exemplify an unstable equivalence between equally invalid and mutually exclusive perspectives, the story does not succeed in this purpose. We don’t have to choose between Jung and Freud because their theories are not mutually contradictory. As Luhmann (1998) repeatedly points out, all observing contains a blind spot: we cannot see what we cannot see. To be faithful to our own experience as observers of the actions of others (and as retrospective observers of our own actions) may entail attributing those actions to situational factors and social forces (or pseudo-forces) that are not acknowledged, recognized, or corroborated by the actors themselves during the act.

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Does Martin’s project of mapping first-person social experiences eliminate or ameliorate the problem of instability? To answer this question, we must specify for whom the problem will be eliminated. It is not at all clear to me how or whether adopting Martin’s approach would resolve these disagreements between the actors. I would venture to suggest that the problem of instability likely arises proximately from a self-reinforcing mutual lack of trust, and ultimately from the way in which language (i.e., symbolic reference) becomes entangled with immediate sensory experiences, but this rather vague hypothesis does not contravene directly anything Martin has written. To my mind, Martin has not demonstrated how the mapping of first-person social experiences obviates the potential problems of instability, but neither have I proven that his approach would fail. Instead, I pose as an open question for future exploration the manner in which a fieldtheoretic commitment to the compilation of first-person social experiences might stabilize competing worldviews and the importance of this endeavor.

DISTINGUISHING FIRST-PERSON AND THIRD-PERSON EXPLANATIONS Whether my argument that third-person explanations are sometimes valid is itself valid (or at least convincing) really depends on how we distinguish first-person and third-person explanations. According to Martin, firstperson explanations will use terms that the actors will recognize as actually existing, even if, as Martin says, to an analyst these terms are “somewhat abstract” (“voters,” “Republicans,” “taxes,” “faith”) (p. 4). In contrast, third-person explanations will make use of terms that the actors will not recognize as having “real referents (perhaps, “false consciousness,” “repressed fear,” “anomie”)” (p. 4). Martin recognizes that first-person explanations can utilize “somewhat abstract” terms because people can relate to or have experiences of abstract social objects. Third-person explanations of social action are those that invoke “causal forces outside of the phenomenological experience of the actor in question” (p. 2). The intuitive plausibility of this distinction seems to arise from the predication we implicitly make of social actions as being concrete sorts of things, as opposed to thinking, which seems more abstract. The ambiguity of the distinction rests upon the ambiguity of terms such “real referent” and “phenomenological experience.” An important question becomes what sorts of things can become objects of experience. And for Martin, the distinction between

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experience and language (i.e., propositions about experience) becomes crucial for delimiting the kinds of explanations that can count as “firstperson.” Since it was not mentioned in my original review or in Martin’s reply, I want to point out that in ESA, first-person explanations of action can include both those explanations in which actors see themselves as active subjects initiating action as well as those accounts in which actors see themselves as passive objects re-acting to external, situational factors. To lesson our moral culpability for past actions, for example, we often stress the situational factors that caused us to act in certain ways (first-person accusative), while underplaying the significance of situational factors when explaining the actions of others or when imagining our own future actions (first-person nominative). So, for Martin, and in contrast to Weber, the difference between third person and first person is not the difference between passively determined re-action (the accusative case) and freely willed action (the nominative case). This means that Martin, in principle, espouses no objection to an explanation, which treats actors as being pushed around by outside forces so long as the actors experience these forces for themselves. Someone’s frequent outbursts of expletives can be explained by Tourette Syndrome, for example, and this would count as a first-person accusative explanation because the person suffering from Tourette Syndrome (potentially) explains her own actions this way.4 Martin is also careful to stipulate that first-person explanations are not necessarily explanations that actors themselves would immediately accept (or understand); they might be agreed upon (or understood) only after being explained to the actors. It is interesting, but certainly not “fatal,” to point out, however, that “with dialogue” (Martin, p. 336), many patients actually do assent to and regard as beneficial the Freudian-type explanations to which Martin objects. Are we then to classify Freudian explanations as first-person under these circumstances?5 Based on these considerations, I infer that it is not the particular content of any explanation of action that makes it third person, and that the distinction between first person and third person is always relative to a particular actor. The potential danger is that we end up using the term “third person” as an ex post epithet we attach to any and all explanations we happen not to like. Fuzziness, however, doesn’t necessarily lead to this problem. Even if we are unable to specify exactly ahead of time which theories will fit into each category, the distinction may have concrete empirical meaning. Moreover, the strong warning against the use of third-person explanations has prima facie plausibility and can reorient the way empirical inquiry is conducted.

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ARE THIRD-PERSON EXPLANATIONS EVER VALID? Martin acknowledges that experiments demonstrate that people are not always aware of all of the factors influencing their actions and judgments. In ESA, he discusses in depth the implications of “experimental studies that demonstrate that subjects may have a misplaced confidence in their ability to understand the causes of their thoughts;” that they “can be primed with information, images, or other characteristics of situations that predictably lead them to certain sentiments, moods, or attitudes and, more important, even to biased conclusions after reasoned judgment” (p. 174). In response to these experimental findings, Martin presents in ESA two sets of arguments: first, Martin challenges their ecological validity and points out that we cannot infer from these studies that persons in general are controlled dupes, confused as to the causes of their own actions, because the experimenters, who exercise a high degree of causal agency and control, are themselves persons; second, Martin reasons that these experimental findings do not show that people are mistaken about their experiences, but rather, that people’s accounts of experience are sometimes unreliable, either because of the cognitive limitations of retrospection or because the social context of questioning causes actors to give defensive and distorted answers. But none of what Martin has written demonstrates that people cannot have mistaken, incomplete or inadequate perceptions, and not just mistaken accounts of those perceptions. Taken together, the findings reported by Gestalt and ecological psychologists indicate that actors are not omniscient. The fact that we have cognitive limitations, however, is not a valid reason to ignore first-person experiences, nor is it a justification for any and all third-person explanations. Researchers, however, have by and large interpreted these experimental results in precisely this manner. In response to what he perceives to be a total disregard of first-person experiences, an attitude which is without warrant and which has, moreover, contributed to the proliferation of thirdperson explanations of action in social science, Martin adopts the opposing position, defending the veridicality of experience as a kind of new foundationalism. The choice, however, between rejecting all of experience and accepting all of it as veridical is a forced choice it is a false dichotomy. Although I admit that making stark contrasts in order to accentuate the differences between one’s position and one’s opposition is often an effective polemical strategy and pedagogical technique, as an issue of pragmatics, we need not be constrained by an “all or nothing” approach to cognition. Can we not also adopt a more banal position, for example, that our perceptual

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and cognitive faculties have been evolutionarily adaptive for our species, that humans have a remarkable capacity for observing (“qualities” in) our environments, but that our perceptual systems are not perfect, and that we are also prone to making systematic errors of judgment? Why insist that all such errors only “creep in” outside of the experience? Martin wants to attribute “errors” exclusively to memory lapses (i.e., because accounts are retrospective), to language (i.e., because accounts are propositions about experience and not experiences in themselves), or to social pressures. Social researchers can go astray (i.e., away from experience) if they rely only on data acquired from retrospective accounts expressed in linguistic propositions. This does not mean, however, that perceptions or “experiences” themselves might not also be mistaken or at least incomplete, at least some of the time. Martin’s position, in an attempt to defend experience at all costs, seems to deny what is to me itself a self-evident experience, namely, that experiences are fallible, and judgments are corrigible. To cite Dutton and Aron’s (1974) study, is it not reasonable to infer that we are more likely to experience sexual attraction to an attractive person more acutely and intensely under conditions of “high anxiety,” or at the very least, that the qualities we perceive in “objects” depend in part on the background conditions within which those perceptions take place? My point is simply that variable background conditions have variable effects on human behavior; we cannot be aware of or consciously attend to all of those conditions; and that therefore our first-person experiences of what motivates our own actions are often incomplete. All of this seems to suggest that we can supplement first-person experiences of action with third-person accounts of action, but again, this depends on how we parse the difference between the two. Martin extends the veridicality of experience to racist and other prejudiced perceptions by arguing that racist perceptions are not distorted perceptions but rather, accurate perceptions of distorted objects. He then adds that the perceived “objects” are really social relationships. To say that the objects that people experience are really “bundles of relations,” however, becomes a third-person explanation insofar as (from our point of view) the actors hypostasize these relations into natural or supernatural entities. For example, consider the (late) Pastor Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. The Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for its anti-gay bigotry and runs the website, “godhatesfags.com.” We can imagine three reactions that a social scientist might have to such homophobia, expressed and justified in religious vernacular. The first would be to attribute the observation to the observer(s) and not to the object observed

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(e.g., “Mr. Phelps and his congregation are bigots. They experience a hateful God because they are themselves hateful”). The second kind of response would be to attribute the observation to the object being observed, which in this case would mean siding with Mr. Phelps and adopting the (firstperson) point of view of the other although this is certainly not the kind of first-person explanation Martin, or anyone else, would endorse. Martin seems to advocate the third kind of response, which is a more nuanced version of the first. It would go something like this: “Mr. Phelps is not right about what he says, but his experience that motivates him to say it is real, and that experience is the experience of a real (hateful) relationship he has to people he calls ‘fags,’ to his God, to his followers, to the media, and to his many detractors and critics.” Now, there is definitely merit to this last explanatory effort. My point is simply that because the members of this church do not themselves regard their God as a mirror of their church or as a projection of their own bigoted attitudes onto an external, supernatural authority figure, explaining their experiences (and hence their actions) as the experiences of distorted, reified social relationships potentially introduces explanatory terms that are not recognized by the actors as having real referents. It is thus useful precisely because it is a third-person explanation.6 To be clear, I do think we should try to explain actors’ actions by getting at their experiences of those actions, and we can accurately describe without introducing unnecessary moralism. I also agree that many social objects consist in “bundles of relations.” I am just pointing out that we can regard people’s experiences as “real to them” without presuming the infallibility of those perceptions and concomitant judgments. Because this point seems self-evident and even trivial to me, I will presume that Martin would agree with most of what I have written here, but would argue that his theory is not an attempt to establish the absolute truth of experiences. He might also argue that the explanation I provided above is not really a third-person explanation. Martin states explicitly in several places that actors do not need to agree with the explanations in order for those explanations to qualify as first-person explanations. Perhaps, then, there is a way to explain the social actions of the Westboro Baptist congregation (e.g., protesting at funerals) by referring only to the feelings of obligation they have toward one another and to the church. We might also choose to refer to their experiences of God without reducing this to an ensemble of relations, since this would be tantamount to effacing the objects we are supposing to be preserving in our explanatory accounts. Following Latour (1993, 2005), we could regard the category of the social

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as something to be explained, rather than a means to explain. We would instead, as Martin proposes, try to compile and organize people’s experiences of social life. If I am correct in my anticipation of Martin’s likely responses, then my comments can be regarded as elaborations of ESA rather than as criticisms.

NOTES 1. Martin avoids much of what I had taken to be a criticism that he unnecessarily limits the scope of sociological inquiry by acknowledging that third-person explanations are sometimes okay for explaining things other than social action, such as outcomes. Because I think it strengthens his argument, I infer that Martin would include aggregate patterns in this latter category as well (e.g., properties of networks or distributions such as the power law), and that he regards as valid the use of third-person terms to explain them. 2. To accept this position does not necessitate that one accept Freud’s specific hypotheses or even the notion of a “Freudian” unconscious that represses anxietyprovoking memories. By the “unconscious” I mean more generally both the Freudian unconscious, the preconscious, as well as the “cognitive unconscious,” namely, those mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that still influence our judgments or behavior. 3. Martin uses the word ‘veridical’ quite often, by which he means that our experiences are ‘consubstantial,’ that is, something like objectively true. I am proposing that we regard first-person experiences as veridical in the sense of being subjectively sincere, at least when they are experienced as such. They are also probably veridical in the sense of objectively true, but I am not convinced that this is always the case. How the veridicality of experience could be inter-subjectively established, however, considering it is all we ever access to, is a conundrum I will not even attempt to (dis)-solve here. 4. A cross-tabulation of these two distinctions (first/third person and internal/ external attribution) renders four possible types of explanations: first-person accusative; first-person nominative; third-person nominative; and third-person accusative. Third-person nominative accounts are used to make valuations of the actions of others, as when pointing to a villain’s moral failures or to a hero’s exceptional character. Martin restricts his admonition for third-person accusative explanations. 5. In addition to Freudian explanations, in ESA, Martin provides several other examples of explanations that fit into the “third-person” category, including: (1) Turner’s (1984, p. 199) explanation of the “popularity of jogging by recourse” to the “requirements of capitalist society” (p. 108) and (2) presumably any explanation that makes use of the variable “intrinsic religiosity,” because, as Martin says, “there is no such thing as intrinsic religiosity” (p. 110). This seems compelling. I concur that “intrinsic religiosity” does not have the same sort of concreteness that “wealth” does, and people do not refer to their “intrinsic religiosity” in order to explain anything they might do but certainly might refer to wealth as a motivating force.

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6. Martin admits that the “chief critique” he would personally make of ESA is that it does not provide a precise account of fetishism: we don’t know exactly how social relationships become reified objects. I agree that this is troubling rather than fatal, and that nobody else has really explained this either.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank Larry Chappell and Rhydon Jackson for their invaluable assistance and suggestions.

REFERENCES Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under considerations of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 510 517. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1998). Observations on modernity. Writing science. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press. Turner, B. (1984). The body and society: Explorations in social theory. Oxford: Blackwell.