Contexts Crawler

Today the New Republic published a review of the new book, “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings from C. Wright Mills,” edited by John Summers. 

An exerpt from the New Republic article:

C.Wright Mills published his sociological trilogy during the 1950s: White Collar in 1951,The Power Elite in 1956, The Sociological Imagination in 1959. Those were years of Republican ascendancy, and while the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a moderate, the vice president, Richard Nixon, and a number of key senators, including Joe McCarthy, belonged to the conservative wing of the party. By decade’s end, the country was tiring of Republican rule and its accompanying scandals and foreign policy failures, and was harkening to the appeals of a young, ambitious, brash, Catholic politician who called for change. The times were perfect for a radical such as Mills to make his mark.

Almost a half-century later, the United States once again faces a choice between an incumbent conservative party with little public appeal and a young, dynamic politician whose race, rather than his religion, sets him apart from the usual run of presidential contenders. This time, though, there is no single social critic publishing books documenting the hold that powerful military and economic forces have over the country’s destiny, and lamenting the decline of a vibrant public sphere, and urging intellectuals to dissent as loudly as they can from the prevailing complacency. Lacking a Mills of our own, we may turn back to the original. Oxford University Press has recently re-published Mills’s trilogy, and The New Men of Power, Mills’s book on labor leaders, which appeared in 1948, has been reissued by the University of Illinois Press. And now John Summers, an intellectual historian who has written widely on Mills–including a devastating essay in theMinnesota Review documenting the extent to which another sociologist, Irving Louis Horowitz, now something of a neoconservative but then more radical, mistakenly recounted the facts of Mills’s life and prevented others from gaining access to the Mills papers that Horowitz kept over the objections of Mills’s widow–has brought together a collection of Mills’s essays, which he calls The Politics of Truth.

Fascinating… Read the full review here.

Yesterday sociologist Dwight Lang wrote an opinion piece published in the Detroit Free Press. The University of Michigan professor offered commentary on the close presidential race this fall.

He writes:

Neither Democrat Obama nor Republican McCain will actually say “white working class,” but they do talk about “working” Americans or “blue-collar” workers as the backbone of America.

The critical importance of these voters is evidenced by the vice-presidential selections. We’ve heard how Joe Biden hails from an East Coast city where families struggle from paycheck to paycheck. He has worked his way up from humble roots and achieved the American Dream. His special appeal is to Catholics, who haven’t always voted Democratic in recent years. Sarah Palin’s modest background and straightforward style clearly speak to rural voters who identify with her version of the American Dream. Working women especially understand her efforts to balance career and family. 

He concludes:

Who wins this competition for millions of blue-collar votes may very well depend on who’s seen as capable of solving economic problems: bringing jobs back to America, reducing home foreclosures, and securing certain and bright futures for hardworking families.

Read the full piece.

The Telegraph (UK) reports today about a trend in universities in England to prohibit the use of certain words deemed offensive. Among them is the term ‘Old Masters,’ often used to refer to great painters, many of whom were men. Instead, the UK sociologists who developed the list suggest that this term discriminates against women and should be replaced with ‘classic artists.’ 

Telegraph reporter Martin Beckford writes:

The list of banned words was written by the British Sociological Association, whose members include dozens of professors, lecturers and researchers. The list of allegedly racist words includes immigrants, developing nations and black, while so-called “disablist” terms include patient, the elderly and special needs. It comes after one council outlawed the allegedly sexist phrase “man on the street”, and another banned staff from saying “brainstorm” in case it offended people with epilepsy.

Call in the sociologist!

…The list of “sensitive” language is said by critics to amount to unwarranted censorship and wrongly assume that people are offended by words that have been in use for years. Prof Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent, said he was shocked when he saw the extent of the list and how readily academics had accepted it.

“I was genuinely taken aback when I discovered that the term ‘Chinese Whisper’ was offensive because of its apparently racist connotations. I was moved to despair when I found out that one of my favourite words, ‘civilised’, ought not be used by a culturally sensitive author because of its alleged racist implications.”

Prof Furedi said that censorship is about the “policing of moral behaviour” by an army of campaign groups, teachers and media organisations who are on a “crusade” to ban certain words and promote their own politically correct alternatives. He said people should see the efforts to ban certain words as the “coercive regulation” of everyday language and the “closing down of discussions” rather than positive attempts to protect vulnerable groups from offense.

Read the full story. 

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks recently wrote about individualism and decision-making in a piece entitled ‘The Social Animal.’ In his analysis, Brooks discusses scholarly work that reveals the interconnectedness which informs our decision-making processes, even broadly highlighting the work of sociologists. Brooks’ piece is centered around political decision-making and the potential for both parties to learn from this knowledge about the influences on our individual behavior.

Brooks writes:

Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures.

Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior.

What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.

This may seem like an airy-fairy thing. But it is the main impediment to Republican modernization. Over the past few weeks, Republicans have talked a lot about change, modernization and reform. Despite the talk, many of the old policy pillars are the same. We’re living in an age of fast-changing economic, information and social networks, but Republicans are still impeded by Goldwater’s mental guard-rails.

Read more.

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley published an op-ed piece entitled ‘Rich Man’s Burden,’ in honor of Labor Day. This did not go over well with Slate.com writer Timothy Noah, who wrote a response entitled ‘Stress and Class: An NYU Sociologist Claims, Preposterously, That It’s More Stressful to be Rich than Poor.’

Dalton Conley writes about how many people probably didn’t take the Labor Day holiday to relax with their families but instead remained tied to their Blackberries and connected to their laptops. Conley suggests that Americans working on holidays is not a new thing, and dexterously tied is to Weber’s concept of the ‘Protestant ethic.’ But Conley notes a significant departure from Weber’s notion in current times:

But what’s different from Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.

It was this statement that prompted Slate.com writer Timothy Noah to respond. He writes:

Dalton Conley, chairman of the Sociology Department at New York University, has written extensively about race, poverty, and social classand was himself raised in a housing project on New York’s Lower East Side. This ought to inoculate him against the popular notion, cherished by the professional classes, that the BlackBerry-punching haves experience more stress in their daily lives than the indolent poor. Apparently, it hasn’t….

Now, it may be true that the bottom fifth is working fewer hours while the top fifth is working longer hours. The authors of the study in question claim no insight as to why this should be so and note that because the observed shift took place fully two decades ago, it “is not likely related to advances in communications technology (such as the Internet) that facilitate additional work from home.” Scratch the BlackBerry and the easy availability of wireless Internet off your list of possible culprits. Remember, too, that these findings may be distorted by the survey’s exclusion of women and the self-employed. Still, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that the haves are now working longer hours than the have-nots. How does Conley make the leap from saying the haves consume more time on the job to saying, “[I]t is now the rich who are the most stressed out”?

Read the full story from Conley.

Read the full story from Noah.

Is this just about interpretation?

Noah suggests: 

It’s easy to imagine that “It is now the rich who are the most stressed out” is what readers of the Times op-ed page want to hear. But that doesn’t make it true.