Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Delhi Metro - Public Transportation in Neoliberal Times
The narrative of “India rising” has captured the imagination of many middle-class Indians. The desire to be validated on the global stage is palpable. In an attempt to channel and transform this desire into votes and support for the privatization of public enterprises, the incumbent political party BJP coined the slogan “India Shining” during the 2004 general elections. A majority of the Indian electorate however confounded the confident pollsters by voting the BJP led coalition out of power. The recently concluded 2009 general elections continue the trend of reaction against neo-liberal globalization. For the first time in decades, an incumbent party – the Congress - was re-elected partly due to a number of initiatives aimed at sections of the population whose lot has worsened considerably under the neo-liberal regime.
While much of India, firmly inserted into the circuits of global capital is not exactly “shining” as the BJP claimed, the residents of its capital Delhi are literally on the move. The spanking new public transportation system or the Metro, built over a cost of over a hundred billion dollars, on budget and amazingly enough, ahead of schedule, has finally arrived in Delhi. The Delhi Metro does not and will not spell the end of the indescribably chaotic traffic on Delhi’s roads. In addition to the over five million private automobiles that make Delhi one of the most vehicle dense cities in the world, a bewildering variety of transportation devices ranging from the ubiquitous three-wheeler scooter taxis to cargo hauling vehicles powered by horses, oxen and humans. They compete road space with the public buses notorious for killing and maiming would be passengers, motorcycles and scooters transporting entire families, bicycles, human powered rickshaws filled with noisy school-kids, jay-walkers, the uniformed school children on rickshaws, the stray dogs, the donkeys, the camels and the occasional elephant. And of course there are the cows that blithely ignore everything and rest right in the middle of the roads after feasting on the seemingly endless supply of political posters pasted on the walls of the city. The message “Honking is a Disease”, displayed on giant billboards has no effect on drivers. In Old Delhi, street vendors of all kind ply their trade - from street-dentists to lingerie – on the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians on the deadly and fume infused roads. Given the incredible variety of transportation devices, any attempt at untangling the gridlocks by enforcing lane driving, is bound to fail. As it unsurprisingly does, when occasionally officials apply computer simulated theoretical models to grim street realities. There is no need to wonder what the Delhi traffic might have been without the construction of the long overdue Delhi Metro.
The fact that the Metro was eventually constructed has to do with the unintended consequences of a number of social factors. Prior to the full insertion of the Indian economy into the circuits of global capital, only the elite and the upper middle classes could afford to own cars. The vast majority of the world’s seventh largest city had to contend with the beyond overcrowded public buses to get to work. Commuting at rush hours meant playing the cat and mouse game of trying to guess how far off from the designated stop the bus driver would decide to slow down long enough to disgorge harried passengers and to prevent new passengers from alighting. Those who could divine the driver’s intention correctly would scramble in, some precariously holding on to the bars at the entrance, while others who were unlucky enough not to make it would nevertheless consider themselves lucky for surviving the experience with only bruised limbs, frayed shirts sleeves and nerves. When the public Delhi Transport Corporation buses could not cope, private contractors were handed out licenses to operate commuter buses. The drivers of these notorious “Blue Line Buses” better known to the public as “killer buses” were under constant pressure by their owners to speed so they could do more runs per day. The mandatory speed governors installed on the buses were of no use. On average, the privately owned public buses were responsible for over a hundred fatalities and countless injuries every year. On one particular day, a Blue Line Bus killed seven and badly injured another eight. The driver, himself a victim of pressure from the owners of the private buses deployed for public service, was almost lynched on the spot by the enraged public. Mass demonstrations against the state of public transportation were held for many days after. Before the Metro began operating, the grim daily toll was about five commuters killed and over a dozen injured by the public buses. To ensure more runs and thereby profits, the public buses moved literally at breakneck speeds. The so-called liberalization of the economy and with it, the relatively easy availability of credit to the middle-class led to the dramatic increase in the numbers of cars on the roads. The experience of being caught in traffic gridlocks that followed soon after is not very easy to capture in words. The steady blast of noxious fumes emanating from a variety of under maintained vehicles, the unrelenting beeping from all sides, the constant pressure from vehicles trying to squeeze into any available space, and of course, the street hawkers screaming on top of their voices, selling everything imaginable, from fresh coconut slices to pirated Rushdie novels. Together with the local Ambassadors, overpriced and horribly dented BMW’s and other powerful automobiles capable of accelerating dramatically, are literally going nowhere. The cars and their passengers fume too, endlessly reminding the unformed drivers to be careful, hoping against hope to avoid deep scratches on their prized possessions. The liberalization of the economy has led to changes in the regulatory framework of the credit system and many more people can now afford cars. However omnipresent gridlocks that are not without negative economic consequences were literally denting the very economy and the cars that had promised privatized mobility to the middle classes.
What appears to be lost in the rush to privatization is the fact that even when judged by the narrow standards of profitability the public sector undertakings such as the gargantuan Indian Railways and now the Delhi Metro are performing better than many of the leading private enterprises. During the 1940’s, the Bombay Plan cobbled together by the leading seven private industrial enterprises had made the case for active state intervention and regulation for the development of indigenous industrial capacity in India. Their argument was that until the private sector was strong enough to handle large projects, massive public sector enterprises should stay. The currently pervasive myth ignores this fact in its presentation of the economic liberalization programme as a long overdue unshackling of private enterprise from an unwilling Indian state that was always ideologically against private enterprise. It is ironical that the horrendous traffic jams unleashed by the increasing privatization of the economy has once again demonstrated that importance of public sector enterprises such as the Delhi Metro.
On entering the Metro, one is literally transported to a quite different world. Away from the noxious fumes unleashed by the vehicles in various states of disrepair, it is actually possible to breathe on the Metro and the only sounds one hears are either the announcements on the public address system or the animated conversations of commuters who are still getting used to the fact that they will make it to their work-place or appointments on time! In this brave new underground world, quite in contrast to the chaotic situation on the roads, people actually queue up to buy the tokens and to board the trains. The occasional resistance to this emergent transportation culture is sometimes enforced by the numerous uniformed employees of the Delhi Metro as well as the beefy security guards armed. When compared to the residents of other large cities, the people of Delhi do not have a strong reputation for being particularly helpful to strangers. Inside the Metro however, strangers asking for help or being helped by others, is a common sight. Fellow commuters provide unsolicited tips on how to buy tokens and some even go to the extent of hand-holding the slightly intimidated yet visibly impressed elderly who, at the last moment hesitate when confronted by the steep, rapid escalators. The commuters whose rush to catch a train is interrupted by such acts of kindness of strangers are on their part, by Delhi standards at least, remarkably patient. A team of over three hundred volunteers, members of the Delhi Metro Citizens’ Forum, try to deal with the delinquents who grab seats reserved for the elderly or throw trash around. Billboards announcing another association called the “Friends of Metro” dedicated to helping fellow commuters and to keeping the system clean can be found on many stations. Quite in contrast to the world outside, all the stations and the trains are spotlessly clean. During the pre-Metro era when making it to an appointment in Delhi on time was quite an accomplishment invoking the Indian Stretchable Time instead of the Indian Standard Time was a handy excuse. It is now actually possible, if one is so inclined, to be on time for one’s appointment. As the stress on the roads eases up due to the million or so commuters using the subway daily, even the elites who so far have largely ignored the Metro will run out of excuses for being late. In addition to punctuality the Delhi Metro is engendering many other social changes in its wake. Gender relations, unlike in the larger Indian cities, always under strain in Delhi, are undergoing a subtle but noticeable transformation. “Eve teasing” or the misleadingly benign euphemism for the rampant sexual harassment of women by so-called roadside Romeos appears to be on the decline. In the past, such harassment of women thrived on the relative spatial as well as the social segregation of the sexes and was a nightmare for single women trapped in overcrowded buses. The Metro brings the sexes together, which while it can create further problems down the road, is for the moment at least, literally creating new forms of gendered sociality that was unthinkable in Delhi barely a few years ago. Quite unexpectedly, the backbreaking occupation of human powered rickshaws has received a new lease of life. For many emaciated male migrants uprooted from the rapidly transforming rural hinterland, the physically demanding task of ferrying of commuters to and from the Metro stations is the first grim taste of precarious employment in the bustling capital of over seventeen million residents. The state of the art high-tech public transportation system symbiotically co-exists with the human powered rickshaws.
For the moment at least, the horrendous traffic fumes that have earned Delhi the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the world, have been reduced considerably. When compared to a decade ago, it takes a bit longer before the eyes reacting to the pollution, begin to tear. Although close to a million commuters use the train, the number of private automobiles added daily to the roads continues to grow. The gridlocks that have not yet disappeared are unlikely to be untangled until the elites of Delhi embrace the Metro. In India, more so than in other places, given the fact that the private car is simultaneously a device for transporting the body as well and the status of its owner, this cultural transformation is unlikely to happen overnight. However, the enormous cost in terms of time, energy, frayed nerves, clogged roads and respiratory systems might just break the current elite resistance to the culture of public transportation.
While much of India, firmly inserted into the circuits of global capital is not exactly “shining” as the BJP claimed, the residents of its capital Delhi are literally on the move. The spanking new public transportation system or the Metro, built over a cost of over a hundred billion dollars, on budget and amazingly enough, ahead of schedule, has finally arrived in Delhi. The Delhi Metro does not and will not spell the end of the indescribably chaotic traffic on Delhi’s roads. In addition to the over five million private automobiles that make Delhi one of the most vehicle dense cities in the world, a bewildering variety of transportation devices ranging from the ubiquitous three-wheeler scooter taxis to cargo hauling vehicles powered by horses, oxen and humans. They compete road space with the public buses notorious for killing and maiming would be passengers, motorcycles and scooters transporting entire families, bicycles, human powered rickshaws filled with noisy school-kids, jay-walkers, the uniformed school children on rickshaws, the stray dogs, the donkeys, the camels and the occasional elephant. And of course there are the cows that blithely ignore everything and rest right in the middle of the roads after feasting on the seemingly endless supply of political posters pasted on the walls of the city. The message “Honking is a Disease”, displayed on giant billboards has no effect on drivers. In Old Delhi, street vendors of all kind ply their trade - from street-dentists to lingerie – on the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians on the deadly and fume infused roads. Given the incredible variety of transportation devices, any attempt at untangling the gridlocks by enforcing lane driving, is bound to fail. As it unsurprisingly does, when occasionally officials apply computer simulated theoretical models to grim street realities. There is no need to wonder what the Delhi traffic might have been without the construction of the long overdue Delhi Metro.
The fact that the Metro was eventually constructed has to do with the unintended consequences of a number of social factors. Prior to the full insertion of the Indian economy into the circuits of global capital, only the elite and the upper middle classes could afford to own cars. The vast majority of the world’s seventh largest city had to contend with the beyond overcrowded public buses to get to work. Commuting at rush hours meant playing the cat and mouse game of trying to guess how far off from the designated stop the bus driver would decide to slow down long enough to disgorge harried passengers and to prevent new passengers from alighting. Those who could divine the driver’s intention correctly would scramble in, some precariously holding on to the bars at the entrance, while others who were unlucky enough not to make it would nevertheless consider themselves lucky for surviving the experience with only bruised limbs, frayed shirts sleeves and nerves. When the public Delhi Transport Corporation buses could not cope, private contractors were handed out licenses to operate commuter buses. The drivers of these notorious “Blue Line Buses” better known to the public as “killer buses” were under constant pressure by their owners to speed so they could do more runs per day. The mandatory speed governors installed on the buses were of no use. On average, the privately owned public buses were responsible for over a hundred fatalities and countless injuries every year. On one particular day, a Blue Line Bus killed seven and badly injured another eight. The driver, himself a victim of pressure from the owners of the private buses deployed for public service, was almost lynched on the spot by the enraged public. Mass demonstrations against the state of public transportation were held for many days after. Before the Metro began operating, the grim daily toll was about five commuters killed and over a dozen injured by the public buses. To ensure more runs and thereby profits, the public buses moved literally at breakneck speeds. The so-called liberalization of the economy and with it, the relatively easy availability of credit to the middle-class led to the dramatic increase in the numbers of cars on the roads. The experience of being caught in traffic gridlocks that followed soon after is not very easy to capture in words. The steady blast of noxious fumes emanating from a variety of under maintained vehicles, the unrelenting beeping from all sides, the constant pressure from vehicles trying to squeeze into any available space, and of course, the street hawkers screaming on top of their voices, selling everything imaginable, from fresh coconut slices to pirated Rushdie novels. Together with the local Ambassadors, overpriced and horribly dented BMW’s and other powerful automobiles capable of accelerating dramatically, are literally going nowhere. The cars and their passengers fume too, endlessly reminding the unformed drivers to be careful, hoping against hope to avoid deep scratches on their prized possessions. The liberalization of the economy has led to changes in the regulatory framework of the credit system and many more people can now afford cars. However omnipresent gridlocks that are not without negative economic consequences were literally denting the very economy and the cars that had promised privatized mobility to the middle classes.
What appears to be lost in the rush to privatization is the fact that even when judged by the narrow standards of profitability the public sector undertakings such as the gargantuan Indian Railways and now the Delhi Metro are performing better than many of the leading private enterprises. During the 1940’s, the Bombay Plan cobbled together by the leading seven private industrial enterprises had made the case for active state intervention and regulation for the development of indigenous industrial capacity in India. Their argument was that until the private sector was strong enough to handle large projects, massive public sector enterprises should stay. The currently pervasive myth ignores this fact in its presentation of the economic liberalization programme as a long overdue unshackling of private enterprise from an unwilling Indian state that was always ideologically against private enterprise. It is ironical that the horrendous traffic jams unleashed by the increasing privatization of the economy has once again demonstrated that importance of public sector enterprises such as the Delhi Metro.
On entering the Metro, one is literally transported to a quite different world. Away from the noxious fumes unleashed by the vehicles in various states of disrepair, it is actually possible to breathe on the Metro and the only sounds one hears are either the announcements on the public address system or the animated conversations of commuters who are still getting used to the fact that they will make it to their work-place or appointments on time! In this brave new underground world, quite in contrast to the chaotic situation on the roads, people actually queue up to buy the tokens and to board the trains. The occasional resistance to this emergent transportation culture is sometimes enforced by the numerous uniformed employees of the Delhi Metro as well as the beefy security guards armed. When compared to the residents of other large cities, the people of Delhi do not have a strong reputation for being particularly helpful to strangers. Inside the Metro however, strangers asking for help or being helped by others, is a common sight. Fellow commuters provide unsolicited tips on how to buy tokens and some even go to the extent of hand-holding the slightly intimidated yet visibly impressed elderly who, at the last moment hesitate when confronted by the steep, rapid escalators. The commuters whose rush to catch a train is interrupted by such acts of kindness of strangers are on their part, by Delhi standards at least, remarkably patient. A team of over three hundred volunteers, members of the Delhi Metro Citizens’ Forum, try to deal with the delinquents who grab seats reserved for the elderly or throw trash around. Billboards announcing another association called the “Friends of Metro” dedicated to helping fellow commuters and to keeping the system clean can be found on many stations. Quite in contrast to the world outside, all the stations and the trains are spotlessly clean. During the pre-Metro era when making it to an appointment in Delhi on time was quite an accomplishment invoking the Indian Stretchable Time instead of the Indian Standard Time was a handy excuse. It is now actually possible, if one is so inclined, to be on time for one’s appointment. As the stress on the roads eases up due to the million or so commuters using the subway daily, even the elites who so far have largely ignored the Metro will run out of excuses for being late. In addition to punctuality the Delhi Metro is engendering many other social changes in its wake. Gender relations, unlike in the larger Indian cities, always under strain in Delhi, are undergoing a subtle but noticeable transformation. “Eve teasing” or the misleadingly benign euphemism for the rampant sexual harassment of women by so-called roadside Romeos appears to be on the decline. In the past, such harassment of women thrived on the relative spatial as well as the social segregation of the sexes and was a nightmare for single women trapped in overcrowded buses. The Metro brings the sexes together, which while it can create further problems down the road, is for the moment at least, literally creating new forms of gendered sociality that was unthinkable in Delhi barely a few years ago. Quite unexpectedly, the backbreaking occupation of human powered rickshaws has received a new lease of life. For many emaciated male migrants uprooted from the rapidly transforming rural hinterland, the physically demanding task of ferrying of commuters to and from the Metro stations is the first grim taste of precarious employment in the bustling capital of over seventeen million residents. The state of the art high-tech public transportation system symbiotically co-exists with the human powered rickshaws.
For the moment at least, the horrendous traffic fumes that have earned Delhi the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the world, have been reduced considerably. When compared to a decade ago, it takes a bit longer before the eyes reacting to the pollution, begin to tear. Although close to a million commuters use the train, the number of private automobiles added daily to the roads continues to grow. The gridlocks that have not yet disappeared are unlikely to be untangled until the elites of Delhi embrace the Metro. In India, more so than in other places, given the fact that the private car is simultaneously a device for transporting the body as well and the status of its owner, this cultural transformation is unlikely to happen overnight. However, the enormous cost in terms of time, energy, frayed nerves, clogged roads and respiratory systems might just break the current elite resistance to the culture of public transportation.
Friday, January 28, 2011
C. Wright Mills Re-Loaded?
Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications,
2006. 240 pp.
Over half a century ago, BBC Radio broadcast a series of lectures by C. Wright
Mills that were later published as The Sociological Imagination. In this book,
reprinted many times over the years, C. Wright Mills provided a provocative,
trenchant and compelling critique of the prevalence and the poverty of
‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ in sociology. Motivated largely
by the goal of charting out plausible alternatives to the emergent narrow
professionalism in sociology, Mills famously described the ‘sociological imagination’
as the ability to connect troubles and issues, biography and history
and the range of their intricate relations. As he pointed out, within that range
the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that
range, the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the
quality of human life in our time. He also convincingly argued that ‘the sociological
imagination’ was not necessarily the provenance of card-carrying sociologists and indeed held out the hope that it would, in due course, emerge as the common denominator of any serious reflection on the social condition of humanity. To a large extent, various versions of ‘the sociological imagination’
have indeed informed the work of intellectuals across the various
disciplinary divides and beyond. Despite the fact that they may be unaware
of it, contributors to serious magazines such as The Nation, Harper’s, New
York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of
Books, The New Yorker, etc. constantly deploy the ‘sociological imagination’.
Since the publication of The Sociological Imagination and the dozens of
reprints of it that followed, many sociologists have constantly worried about
the impact of their work in providing plausible accounts of the social world.
While some sociologists continued with the relentless formalism and abstracted
empiricism that Mills criticized, others vented their anxieties about the trajectory
of the discipline and its role or lack thereof in informing public debates
over contentious issues. Despite some transformations of the discipline in the
1960s, intellectual anxieties about the discipline as well as confidence about
its future continued to be expressed from a variety of perspectives, in a variety
of publications (Collins, 1986; Halliday and Janowitz, 1992; Calhoun, 1992;
Cole, 2001; Marshall, 1990; Horowitz, 1993; Patterson, 2002; Levine, 2005;
Jacoby, 1987; Bryant and Becker, 1990).
However, though Mills penned avigorous and hopeful defense of the importance of the sociological perspective,he harbored deep doubts, even at the height of his tragically brief career, about the direction in which the discipline seemed to be headed. Among other issues, he was most concerned with its practitioners’ obsession with a narrow, over-professionalized focus where little attempt was made to trace
the interconnections between micro- and macro-aspects of social life. As he
recounts his experience at a typical graduate student orientation at Columbia
University:
"I simply sat in a chair in a corner and one by one these guys would
come up to me, sort of approaching the pariah – curiosity stuff. They
were guys working on their Ph.D.’s, you see, and after they’d introduced
themselves, I’d ask, ‘What are you working on?’ It would always
be something like ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationship among the
Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street
between Amsterdam and Broadway.’ And then I would ask ‘Why’?"
(Mills and Mills, 2000: 12)
At roughly about the same time, another ‘big-picture’ sociologist, Barrington
Moore Jr at Harvard, was writing about the dominant style of sociological
research that found its way in the leading journals of the discipline. Like Mills, he drew attention to the "many generalizations that social scientists seek with a technical apparatus and logical rigor that contrasts ludicrously with the results" and to illustrate this point Moore quoted from a recently
published paper in the American Sociological Review. According to the
author of a paper titled ‘Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus’:
"...the experience of being offended was not altogether associated with
trivial situations as shown by the fact that 20.09 per cent were offended
by forceful attempts at intercourse and 6.2 per cent by aggressively
forceful attempts at sex intercourse . . . A 3 _ 3 table yielding a Chi
square significant at the .05 level suggests that episodes of lesser offensiveness
are concentrated in the fall and more offensive in the spring."
(Moore, 1958: 129–30)
Despite the many outstanding individual sociologists who consciously sought
to address the issue of ‘why’, incorporating causality and meaning, there
seems to be little doubt that the dominant trend, partly reinforced by the
reward structure within the discipline, has been to shy away from asking the
big questions. It is not only a question of heeding Mills’s warning to prospective
sociology students to avoid the fate of becoming ‘mere specialists’. After
all, specialists do provide invaluable empirical material that plays a very
significant role in the production of ‘big picture’ sociology. Rather, it is a
question of raising the issue of ‘why’ in a self-conscious manner to generate
a measure of clarity about the social world.
Over five decades since Mills’s important attempt to get sociology back
on the rails, many social and intellectual transformations have occurred.
Against the backdrop of these intellectual and social upheavals, the issue of
rethinking sociology in particular and the very concept of the social and
human sciences in general has been the preoccupation of a number of intellectuals
(Wallerstein, 1996). With the emergence of the ‘new biology’ and a
particular strand of environmentalism that seeks to position humans as just
another species within the larger natural order and disorder, the very idea of
a social and human science has been questioned by a number of scholars. In
light of the new biology, biosocial theories of human behaviour and neuroscience,
a number of questions have emerged. Are humans really that unique
that we need anthropocentric social science divorced from biology to understand
them? If we take a broader view of the natural world and the position
of humans within it, would evolutionary biology and neuroscience, rather
than social science, not make better analytical and environmental sense? It is
not just the scientists who are raising such questions. Indeed the evolutionary
psychologist David Barash in a book titled Madame Bovary’s Ovaries:
A Darwinian Look at Literature (Barash and Barash, 2005) has sought to
promote what he and his co-author daughter call ‘Darwinian literary criticism’.
Many literary critics such A. S. Byatt (2006) promptly jumped on this new professional bandwagon, even as other practising natural scientists such as Raymond Tallis (2008) among others have trenchantly criticized this intellectual turn. Within the scientific community as well, there is a wide diversity
of opinion about the exact implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
There has been no shortage of acrimonious debates on this issue. Richard
Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, for example, read and interpret Darwin in
quite a different way than do E. O. Wilson, David Barash, Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. Some intellectuals appear to accept the idea that even though there is no need at this particular point of time to scrap the social sciences completely, the very idea of a field devoted exclusively to the human species smacks of arrogant and self-righteous anthropo-centrism.
In _The New Sociological Imagination_ Steve Fuller takes up the challenge of
defending the besieged social and human sciences.. His important book raises a number of critical issues that cannot be avoided if one seeks to make serious sense of the texture and trajectory
of the global condition of humanity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barash, D. and Barash, N. R. (2005) Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look
at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press.
Bryant, C. G. A. and Becker, H. A., eds (1990) What Has Sociology Achieved? London:
Palgrave.
Byatt, A. S. (2006) ‘Observe the Neurones’, The Times Literary Supplement, 22
September.
Calhoun, C. (1992) ‘Sociology, Other Disciplines and the Project of a General
Understanding of Life’, in Halliday and Janowitz (1992) Sociology and its Publics.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 137–95.
Cole, S., ed. (2001) What’s Wrong With Sociology? London: Transaction.
Collins, R. (1986) ‘Is 1980’s Sociology in the Doldrums?’, American Journal of
Sociology 91(5): 1336–55.
Halliday, T. C. and Janowitz, M., eds (1992) Sociologists and its Publics. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Horowitz, I. L. (1993) The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
New York: Basic Books.
2006. 240 pp.
Over half a century ago, BBC Radio broadcast a series of lectures by C. Wright
Mills that were later published as The Sociological Imagination. In this book,
reprinted many times over the years, C. Wright Mills provided a provocative,
trenchant and compelling critique of the prevalence and the poverty of
‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ in sociology. Motivated largely
by the goal of charting out plausible alternatives to the emergent narrow
professionalism in sociology, Mills famously described the ‘sociological imagination’
as the ability to connect troubles and issues, biography and history
and the range of their intricate relations. As he pointed out, within that range
the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that
range, the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the
quality of human life in our time. He also convincingly argued that ‘the sociological
imagination’ was not necessarily the provenance of card-carrying sociologists and indeed held out the hope that it would, in due course, emerge as the common denominator of any serious reflection on the social condition of humanity. To a large extent, various versions of ‘the sociological imagination’
have indeed informed the work of intellectuals across the various
disciplinary divides and beyond. Despite the fact that they may be unaware
of it, contributors to serious magazines such as The Nation, Harper’s, New
York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of
Books, The New Yorker, etc. constantly deploy the ‘sociological imagination’.
Since the publication of The Sociological Imagination and the dozens of
reprints of it that followed, many sociologists have constantly worried about
the impact of their work in providing plausible accounts of the social world.
While some sociologists continued with the relentless formalism and abstracted
empiricism that Mills criticized, others vented their anxieties about the trajectory
of the discipline and its role or lack thereof in informing public debates
over contentious issues. Despite some transformations of the discipline in the
1960s, intellectual anxieties about the discipline as well as confidence about
its future continued to be expressed from a variety of perspectives, in a variety
of publications (Collins, 1986; Halliday and Janowitz, 1992; Calhoun, 1992;
Cole, 2001; Marshall, 1990; Horowitz, 1993; Patterson, 2002; Levine, 2005;
Jacoby, 1987; Bryant and Becker, 1990).
However, though Mills penned avigorous and hopeful defense of the importance of the sociological perspective,he harbored deep doubts, even at the height of his tragically brief career, about the direction in which the discipline seemed to be headed. Among other issues, he was most concerned with its practitioners’ obsession with a narrow, over-professionalized focus where little attempt was made to trace
the interconnections between micro- and macro-aspects of social life. As he
recounts his experience at a typical graduate student orientation at Columbia
University:
"I simply sat in a chair in a corner and one by one these guys would
come up to me, sort of approaching the pariah – curiosity stuff. They
were guys working on their Ph.D.’s, you see, and after they’d introduced
themselves, I’d ask, ‘What are you working on?’ It would always
be something like ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationship among the
Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street
between Amsterdam and Broadway.’ And then I would ask ‘Why’?"
(Mills and Mills, 2000: 12)
At roughly about the same time, another ‘big-picture’ sociologist, Barrington
Moore Jr at Harvard, was writing about the dominant style of sociological
research that found its way in the leading journals of the discipline. Like Mills, he drew attention to the "many generalizations that social scientists seek with a technical apparatus and logical rigor that contrasts ludicrously with the results" and to illustrate this point Moore quoted from a recently
published paper in the American Sociological Review. According to the
author of a paper titled ‘Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus’:
"...the experience of being offended was not altogether associated with
trivial situations as shown by the fact that 20.09 per cent were offended
by forceful attempts at intercourse and 6.2 per cent by aggressively
forceful attempts at sex intercourse . . . A 3 _ 3 table yielding a Chi
square significant at the .05 level suggests that episodes of lesser offensiveness
are concentrated in the fall and more offensive in the spring."
(Moore, 1958: 129–30)
Despite the many outstanding individual sociologists who consciously sought
to address the issue of ‘why’, incorporating causality and meaning, there
seems to be little doubt that the dominant trend, partly reinforced by the
reward structure within the discipline, has been to shy away from asking the
big questions. It is not only a question of heeding Mills’s warning to prospective
sociology students to avoid the fate of becoming ‘mere specialists’. After
all, specialists do provide invaluable empirical material that plays a very
significant role in the production of ‘big picture’ sociology. Rather, it is a
question of raising the issue of ‘why’ in a self-conscious manner to generate
a measure of clarity about the social world.
Over five decades since Mills’s important attempt to get sociology back
on the rails, many social and intellectual transformations have occurred.
Against the backdrop of these intellectual and social upheavals, the issue of
rethinking sociology in particular and the very concept of the social and
human sciences in general has been the preoccupation of a number of intellectuals
(Wallerstein, 1996). With the emergence of the ‘new biology’ and a
particular strand of environmentalism that seeks to position humans as just
another species within the larger natural order and disorder, the very idea of
a social and human science has been questioned by a number of scholars. In
light of the new biology, biosocial theories of human behaviour and neuroscience,
a number of questions have emerged. Are humans really that unique
that we need anthropocentric social science divorced from biology to understand
them? If we take a broader view of the natural world and the position
of humans within it, would evolutionary biology and neuroscience, rather
than social science, not make better analytical and environmental sense? It is
not just the scientists who are raising such questions. Indeed the evolutionary
psychologist David Barash in a book titled Madame Bovary’s Ovaries:
A Darwinian Look at Literature (Barash and Barash, 2005) has sought to
promote what he and his co-author daughter call ‘Darwinian literary criticism’.
Many literary critics such A. S. Byatt (2006) promptly jumped on this new professional bandwagon, even as other practising natural scientists such as Raymond Tallis (2008) among others have trenchantly criticized this intellectual turn. Within the scientific community as well, there is a wide diversity
of opinion about the exact implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
There has been no shortage of acrimonious debates on this issue. Richard
Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, for example, read and interpret Darwin in
quite a different way than do E. O. Wilson, David Barash, Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. Some intellectuals appear to accept the idea that even though there is no need at this particular point of time to scrap the social sciences completely, the very idea of a field devoted exclusively to the human species smacks of arrogant and self-righteous anthropo-centrism.
In _The New Sociological Imagination_ Steve Fuller takes up the challenge of
defending the besieged social and human sciences.. His important book raises a number of critical issues that cannot be avoided if one seeks to make serious sense of the texture and trajectory
of the global condition of humanity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barash, D. and Barash, N. R. (2005) Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look
at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press.
Bryant, C. G. A. and Becker, H. A., eds (1990) What Has Sociology Achieved? London:
Palgrave.
Byatt, A. S. (2006) ‘Observe the Neurones’, The Times Literary Supplement, 22
September.
Calhoun, C. (1992) ‘Sociology, Other Disciplines and the Project of a General
Understanding of Life’, in Halliday and Janowitz (1992) Sociology and its Publics.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 137–95.
Cole, S., ed. (2001) What’s Wrong With Sociology? London: Transaction.
Collins, R. (1986) ‘Is 1980’s Sociology in the Doldrums?’, American Journal of
Sociology 91(5): 1336–55.
Halliday, T. C. and Janowitz, M., eds (1992) Sociologists and its Publics. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Horowitz, I. L. (1993) The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
New York: Basic Books.
On physics envy
"The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human...How, then, can there be a social science? The answer, surely is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science though it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly...Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology, because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to be a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of humanists."
Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor of Genetics at Harvard University.
Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor of Genetics at Harvard University.
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