Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World

Towards the Futures We Want

Markus S. Schulz, Markus S. Schulz, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526463982, 9781526463999
• eBook ISBN: 9781526464132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contemporary world has reached a pivotal moment of escalating injustices and apocalyptic risks, but also of unprecedented opportunities. Mounting pressures of social and ecological problems are met by a confluence of intellectual trends that allow the questioning of entrenched assumptions and the unleashing of a forward-oriented sociological imagination.

In Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World, a diverse collection of international experts explore contemporary trends, alternative visions, and new directions for sociological research, raising issues that reflect the complexity of challenges facing future projects on a shared planet.

Topics include:

• Global Inequality
• Multipolar Globalization
• Climate Change
• Contentious Politics and Social Movements
• Feminist and Indigenous Perspectives in Latin America
• An African-centred approach to Knowledge Production
• Post-Islamist Democracy

Based on the revised papers of the Opening and Closing Plenaries of the Third ISA Forum of Sociology in Vienna, Austria, July 2016, which Markus Schulz organized on the theme "The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World."

1 Introduction: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World

Markus S. Schulz

The contemporary world has reached a pivotal moment of escalating injustices and apocalyptic risks, but also of unprecedented opportunities. Mounting pressures of social and ecological problems are met by a confluence of intellectual trends that allow the questioning of entrenched assumptions and the unleashing of a forward-oriented sociological imagination. This monograph explores pertinent trends, alternative visions, and new directions for sociological research. The Introduction provides in its first part a brief sketch of the social, historical, and intellectual context of sociology’s forward-turn and in its second part an overview of key arguments developed in the individual chapters. The diversity of theoretical approaches and regional expertise reflect the complexity of challenges and the multiplicity of future projects on a shared planet.

Opening Futures

Not long ago, during the 1990s, the Washington Consensus of neoliberal policies emerged so victorious from the Cold War that the ‘end of history’ appeared as its mantra. In contrast, the current Zeitgeist, or ‘spirit of the time’, appears better captured by the notion of ‘crisis’. Yet, there is something inherently puzzling about this new crisis discourse (Schulz 2016c). A financial crisis has shaken much of the world, but instead of giving way to a new economic regime, the previously established neoliberal templates persist like zombies. Billions of dollars were mobilized almost overnight to rescue banks, but austerity was imposed on the many. Today, broad sectors of European populations worry about a ‘refugee crisis’, while the refugees themselves worry about even more fundamental crises. For human livelihood on the planet, the specter of climate change has become ever harder to ignore and gives ‘crisis’ yet another dimension of meaning. The many ‘morbid symptoms’ of our time seem to fit Antonio Gramsci’s famous characterization of ‘crisis’ as an ‘interregnum’ in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. This raises the questions: What could then lead to the new? What role could sociology play in the inventing of the new?

The widespread lack of future imagination has been noted over the past few decades in a number of time-diagnoses by authors as diverse as Alvin Toffler, Norbert Elias, Jürgen Habermas, Claudio Lomnitz, and Slavoj Žižek. For example, the futurist Toffler argued in his famous Future Shock (1970) that ‘Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.’ Historical sociologist Elias (1987) came to similar conclusions within a yet longer time-frame when he wrote: ‘Today we have basically lost the ability to think of a future. Most people do not want to go beyond their present – they do not like to see themselves as a link in the chain of generations.’ Discussing political implications, critical theorist Habermas (1985) spoke of an ‘exhaustion of utopian energies’ that hampered the ‘legitimacy crisis’ of Western welfare-states. The anthropologist Lomnitz (2003) diagnosed in the Mexican context a ‘present saturation’ that ‘disables constructive futures engagements’. The philosopher Žižek (2011) argued that the Western imagination is so curtailed that it needs no censorship, as its movies can show apocalyptic asteroid collisions but are unable to depict a future beyond capitalism.

Yet, futures thinking does take place; it is just not well distributed. Naomi Klein (2001) has prominently shown how elites use ‘shock’ during ‘crises’ to impose blueprints faster than civil societies can mount resistance. Now a question for sociology: How could this be turned around? What could make publics from the grassroots stronger, unleash their imaginative capacities, and lend them more efficacy? What does it take to democratize futures?

Before tackling this question, it is worthwhile to reflect on how academia and the social sciences relate to anticipative thinking. How do disciplines differ in taking a position vis-à-vis the future? For one, the prominent anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2013) has recently castigated his discipline for neglecting the future. Appadurai criticized that ‘anthropology remains preoccupied with the logic of reproduction, the force of custom, the dynamics of memory, the persistence of habitus, the glacial movement of the everyday, and the cunning of tradition in the social life of even the most modern movements and communities’.

Yet, would a similar verdict not apply to sociology too? Have sociologists neglected the future perhaps even more spectacularly or at least failed to address it in terms that are more explicit? In business schools, it is quite common to see course offerings on the future. Marketing research revolves around studies about the anticipation of consumer choices and trends. Some of the brightest students are being taught how to devise algorithms for fast-paced trading in financial derivatives, so that profits can be made from ‘futures’, before anyone else even thinks about them. Yet, future courses are largely absent from the sociology curricula in most countries.

Such avoidance of the ‘future’ was not always the case. To the contrary, the classic founding figures of sociology were driven by their interest in the future. As religious beliefs in some future telos gave way to the positivist search for social laws during the discipline’s formative period in Western Europe, sociologists in traditions from Auguste Comte to Emile Durkheim thought this kind of knowledge to be useful for managing or administrating society. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Karl Marx shared underlying assumptions when he pronounced the laws of history would be pointing to a necessary triumph of the oppressed, though he did recognize in his more empirical writings that there were no historical automatisms but plenty of maneuvering room for contingent action. Throughout his life, W.E.B. DuBois sought synergies between sociology and open political activism. Pioneering feminist sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to broad fame as author of a best-selling utopian novel, Herland (1979 [1915]), the story of an alternative world governed by women.

The belief in an open future has been understood as the hallmark of the modern consciousness of time. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck (2004 [1979]) noted, the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’ are increasingly disassociated. This fundamental contingency opens the horizon of the possible for social and political creation. What is could have been different. The existing reality could have been differently shaped through non-determined human action, in more or less reflexive as well as in more or less conflictive or cooperative ways.

The striking absence of explicit ‘future’ engagements in the contemporary sociology of many countries can be seen as a by-product of a defensive strategy aimed at gaining respectability by emulating the supposedly rigorous methods of the ‘hard sciences’ while avoiding the inherently unpredictable. However, the time seems now ripe to re-examine such premises in a broader way. There are at least four crucial intellectual trends...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editor and Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
• 2 Futures We Want Walking Back the Cat, Positives, Negatives, Ambiguous, Balance
• 3 What Kind of a World Can Weather Climate Change? Some Philosophical and Sociological Challenges
• 4 The ‘Open Society’ and Its Contradictions Towards a Critical Sociology of Global Inequalities
• 5 Mε san aba1: The Africa We Want and an African-centered Approach to Knowledge Production
• 6 Pueblos1 in Movement Feminist and Indigenous Perspectives from Latin America
• 7 Post-Islamist Democracy
• 8 Relocalizing the National and Horizontalizing the Global
• 9 Social Movements: The Core of General Sociology
• 10 Epilogue
• Index