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Epigraph
Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.
—Max Weber
What do they know of sociology, who only sociology know?
—Adapted from C. L. R. James and Rudyard Kipling
For all the students who have taught me so much.
Public Sociology
Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Michael Burawoy
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Michael Burawoy 2021
The right of Michael Burawoy to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1914-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1915-6(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Title: Public sociology : between utopia and anti-utopia / Michael Burawoy.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Why sociology matters, how sociologists can help the people they study and how it can help us to deal with the crises of the 21st century”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006108 (print) | LCCN 2021006109 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519149 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509519156 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509519187 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology.
Classification: LCC HM435 .B87 2021 (print) | LCC HM435 (ebook) | DDC 301--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006108
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006109
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Tables
2.1 The Division of Sociological Labor
5.1 The Progress of Zambianization
10.1 The Dimensions of Racial Domination under Racial Capitalism
Preface
To the 1960s generation sociology promised so much – addressing questions of social justice, social inequality, social movements, and social change. Its potential was famously captured by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his definition of sociology as turning “personal troubles” into “public issues.” This proves to be easier said than done.
In the chapters that follow I explore the promise of sociology by tracing my own trajectory into and through the discipline. I set out for India in 1967 with the naïve view that sociology would fix social problems if only we have adequate knowledge based on rigorous research. We just have to inform policy makers and they will do the right thing. I call this species of sociology policy sociology. My first lesson in sociology was to learn the importance of the social, political, and economic context of decision-making. Recognizing the limits of this policy sociology led me to public sociology, which did not speak to policy makers. It transmitted the result of research to broad publics. Here, again, I was naïve, overlooking the operation of power within the public sphere that repressed, diverted, or co-opted the aims of public sociology. That was my second lesson – a lesson I learned in newly independent Zambia from 1968 to 1972.
Instead of giving up on sociology, I decided I didn’t have an adequate grasp of its intricacies and its underlying theory. I left Zambia for the PhD program at the University of Chicago. There I discovered that the material I was expected to learn and absorb, what I call professional sociology, was more concerned with preserving rather than changing the status quo – or changing it only to keep it the same. So my third lesson concerned the umbilical cord connecting professional sociology to ideology, its complacent adjustment to ubiquitous exploitation, domination, and dispossession. I was not the only one to be disappointed. I became part of a rising generation that advanced a critical sociology, critical of the world but also of the reigning professional sociology.
That was the 1970s, when critical sociology was gaining adherents in many universities, not just in the US but across the globe. After graduating from Chicago, through an unlikely succession of events, I landed in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. There the struggle between insurgent graduate students and divided faculty had been particularly intense. After six tumultuous years I survived a tenure battle by the skin of my teeth. During the 1980s, now with the security of tenure, I sought to contribute to an emergent Marxist research program that led me to explore the meaning and possibilities of socialism in Hungary and then in the Soviet Union. I had hardly begun research in the Soviet Union when it collapsed, turning into a crony capitalism that sought
