introductory readings

edited by• ant h 0 n y

READING 1

Anthony GiddensThe Scope of Sociology

Sociology is a subject with a curiously mixed reputation. On the onehand, it is associated by many people with the fomenting of rebellion,a stimulus to revolt. Even though they may have only a vague notion

ofwhat topics are studied in sociology, they somehow associate sociologywithsubversion, with the shrill demands of unkempt student militants. Ontheother hand, quite a different view of the subject is often entertained -perhapsmore commonly than the first - by individuals who have had somedirectacquaintance with it in schools and universities. This is that in fact itisrather a dull and uninstructive enterprise, which far from propelling itsstudentstowards the barricades is more likely to bore them to death withplatitudes.Sociology, in this guise, assumes the dry mantle of a science, butnotone that proves as enlightening as the natural sciences upon which itspractitionerswish to model it.

I think that those who have taken the second reaction to sociology have agooddeal of right on their side. Sociology has been conceived of by manyofits proponents - even the bulk of them - in such a way that common-placeassertions are disguised in a pseudo-scientific language. The concep-tion that sociology belongs to the natural sciences, and hence shouldslavishlytry to copy their procedures and objectives, is a mistaken one. Itslaycritics, in some considerable degree at least, are quite correct to bescepticalof the attainments of sociology thus presented.

My intention in this [discussion] will be to associate sociology with thefirsttype of view rather than the second. By this I do not mean to connectsociologywith a sort of irrational lashing-out at all that most of the popula-tionhold to be good and proper ways of behaviour. But I do want to defendtheviewthat sociology, understood in the manner in which I shall describeit,necessarilyhas a subversive quality. Its subversive or critical character,however... , does not carry with it (or should not do so) the implicationthat it is an intellectually disreputable enterprise. On the contrary, itisexactlybecause sociology deals with problems of such pressing interestto us all (or should do so), problems which are the objects of major

controversies and conflicts in society itself, that it has this character.However kempt or otherwise student radicals, or any other radicals, maybe, there do exist broad connections between the impulses that stir them toaction and a sociological awareness. This is not ... because sociologistsdirectly preach revolt; it is because the study of sociology, appropriatelyunderstood, ... demonstrates how fundamental are the social questionsthat have to be faced in today's world. Everyone is to some extent aware ofthese questions, but the study of sociology helps bring them into muchsharper focus. Sociology cannot remain a purely academic subject, if 'aca-demic' means a disinterested and remote scholarly pursuit, followed solelywithin the enclosed walls of the university.

Sociology is not a subject that comes neatly gift-wrapped, making nodemands except that its contents be unpacked. Like all the social sciences -under which label one can also include, among other disciplines, anthro-pology, economics and history - sociology is an inherently controversialendeavour. That is to say, it is characterized by continuing disputes aboutits very nature. But this is not a weakness, although it has seemed such tomany of those who call themselves professional 'sociologists', and also tomany others on the outside, who are distressed that there are numerousvying conceptions of how the subject-matter of sociology should beapproached or analysed. Those who are upset by the persistent character ofsociological debates, and a frequent lack of consensus about how to resolvethem, usually feel that this is a sign of the immaturity of the subject. Theywant sociology to be like a natural science, and to generate a similar appar-atus of universal laws to those which they see natural science as having dis-covered and validated. But ... it is a mistake to suppose that sociologyshould be modelled too closely on the natural sciences, or to imagine that anatural science of society is either feasible or desirable. To say this, I shouldemphasize, does not mean that the methods and objectives of the naturalsciences are wholly irrelevant to the study of human social behaviour.Sociology deals with a factually observable subject-matter, depends uponempirical research, and involves attempts to formulate theories and gener-alizations that will make sense of facts. But human beings are not the sameas material objects in nature; studying our own behaviour is necessarilyentirely different in some very important ways from studying naturalphenomena.

The development of sociology, and its current concerns, have to begrasped in the context of changes that have created the modern world. Welive in an age of massive social transformation. In the space of only some-thing like two centuries a sweeping set of social changes, which have has-tened rather than lessened their pace today, have occurred. These changes,emanating originally from Western Europe, are now global in their impact.They have all but totally dissolved the forms of social organization in whichhumankind had lived for thousands of years of its previous history. Theircore is to be found in what some have described as the 'two great revolu-tions' of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The first is the Frenchrevolution of 1789, both a specific set of events and a symbol of politicaltransformations in our era. For the 1789revolution was quite different fromrebellions of previous times. Peasants had sometimes rebelled against theirfeudal masters, for example, but generally in an attempt to remove specificindividuals from power, or to secure reductions in prices or taxes. In the

French revolution (to which we can bracket, with some reservations, theanti-colonialrevolution in North America in 1776)for the first time in his-tory there took place the overall dissolution of a social order by a move-ment guided by purely secular ideals - universal liberty and equality. If theideals of the revolutionaries have scarcely been fully realized even now,they created a climate of political change that has proved one of thedynamic forces of contemporary history. There are few states in the worldtoday that are not proclaimed by their rulers to be 'democracies', whatevertheir actual political complexion may be. This is something altogether novelin human history. It is true that there have been other republics, most espe-ciallythose of Classical Greece and Rome. But these were themselves rareinstances;and in each case those who formed the 'citizens' were a minorityof the population, the majority of whom were slaves or others without theprerogatives of the select groups of citizenry.

The second 'great revolution' was the so-called 'industrial revolution',usually traced to Britain in the late eighteenth century, and spreading in thenineteenth century throughout Western Europe and the United States. Theindustrial revolution is sometimes presented merely as a set of technicalinnovations: especially the harnessing of steam power to manufacturingproduction and the introduction of novel forms of machinery activated bysuch sources of power. But these technical inventions were only part of averymuch broader set of social and economic changes. The most importantofthese was the migration of the mass of the labour force from the land intothe constantly expanding sectors of industrial work, a process which alsoeventually led to the Widespread mechanization of agrarian production.This same process promoted an expansion of cities upon a scale againpreviously unwitnessed in history ....

Sociology came into being as those caught up in the initial series ofchanges brought about by the 'two great revolutions' in Europe sought tounderstand the conditions of their emergence, and their likely con-sequences.Of course, no field of study can be exactly pinpointed in terms ofits origins. We can quite readily trace direct continuities from writers in themiddle of the eighteenth century through to later periods of social thought.Theclimate of ideas involved in the formation of sociology in some part, infact,helped give rise to the twin processes of revolution.

How should 'sociology' be defined? Let me begin with a banality.Sociologyis concerned with the study of human societies. Now the notionof society can be formulated in only a very general way. For under the gen-eral category of 'societies' we want to include not only the industrializedcountries,but large agrarian imperial states (such as the Roman Empire, ortraditional China), and, at the other end of the scale, small tribal commun-itiesthat may comprise only a tiny number of individuals.

A society is a cluster, or system, of institutionalized modes of conduct. Tospeak of 'institutionalized' forms of social conduct is to refer to modes ofbelief and behaviour that occur and recur - or, as the terminology ofmodern social theory would have it, are socially reproduced - across longspans of time and space. Language is an excellent example of such a form ofinstitutionalized activity, or institution, since it is so fundamental to sociallife. All of us speak languages which none of us, as individuals, created,although we all use language creatively. But many other aspects of sociallife may be institutionalized: that is, become commonly adopted practices

which persist in recognizably similar form across the generations. Hencewe can speak of economic institutions, political institutions and so on. Sucha use of the concept 'institution', it should be pointed out, differs from theway in which the term is often employed in ordinary language, as a loosesynonym for 'group' or 'collectivity' - as when, say, a prison or hospital isreferred to as an 'institution'.

These considerations help to indicate how 'society' should be under-stood, but we cannot leave matters there. As an object of study, 'society' isshared by sociology and the other social sciences. The distinctive feature ofsociology lies in its overriding concern with those forms of society that haveemerged in the wake of the 'two great revolutions'. Such forms of societyinclude those that are industrially advanced - the economically developedcountries of the West, Japan and Eastern Europe - but also in the twentiethcentury a range of other societies stretched across the world ....

In the light of these remarks, a definition can be offered of the subject asfollows. Sociology is a social science, having as its main focus the study of thesocial institutions brought into being by the industrial transformations of the pasttwo or three centuries. It is important to stress that there are no preciselydefined divisions between sociology and other fields of intellectual endeav-our in the social sciences. Neither is it desirable that there should be. Somequestions of social theory, to do with how human behaviour and institu-tions should be conceptualized, are the shared concern of the social sciencesas a whole. The different 'areas' of human behaviour that are covered bythe various social sciences form an intellectual division of labour which canbe justified in only a very general way. Anthropology, for example, is con-cerned ... with the 'simpler' societies: tribal societies, chiefdoms and agra-rian states. But either these have been dissolved altogether by the profoundsocial changes that have swept through the world, or they are in the processof becoming incorporated within modem industrial states. The subject-matter of economics, to take another instance, is the production and dis-tribution of material goods. However, economic institutions are plainlyalways connected with other institutions in social systems, which bothinfluence and are influenced by them. Finally, history, as the study of thecontinual distancing of past and present, is the source material of the wholeof the social sciences.

. . . Although this type of standpoint has been very pervasive in soci-ology, it is one I reject. To speak of sociology, and of other subjects likeanthropology or economics, as 'social sciences' is to stress that they involvethe systematic study of an empirical subject-matter. The terminology is notconfusing so long as we see that sociology and other social sciences differfrom the natural sciences in two essential respects.

1 We cannot approach society, or 'social facts', as we do objects or events inthe natural world, because societies only exist in so far as they are cre-ated and re-created in our own actions as human beings. In social theory,we cannot treat human activities as though they were determined bycauses in the same way as natural events are. We have to grasp whatI would call the double involvement of individuals and institutions: wecreate society at the same time as we are created by it ....

2 It follows from this that the practical implications of sociology are notdirectly parallel to the technological uses of science, and cannot be.

Atoms cannot get to know what scientists say about them, or changetheir behaviour in the light of that knowledge. Human beings can do so.Thus the relation between sociology and its 'subject-matter' is necessarilydifferent from that involved in the natural sciences. If we regard socialactivity as a mechanical set of events, determined by natural laws, weboth misunderstand the past and fail to grasp how sociological analysiscan help influence our possible future. As human beings, we do not justlive in history; our understanding of history is an integral part of whatthat history is, and what it may become.

READING 2

c. Wright MillsThe Sociological

Ima.glnation and thePromise of Sociology

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand thelarger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and theexternal career of a variety of individuals. It enables [the sociologist]

to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience,oftenbecome falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter,the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework thepsychologiesof a variety of men and women are formulated. By such meansthe personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles andthe indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with publicissues.

The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social sciencethat embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand hisl ownexperience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his

period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware ofthose of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terriblelesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits ofman's capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony orglee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our timewe have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteninglybroad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one genera-tion to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that helives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he con-tributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the courseof its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push andshove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biographyand the relations between the two within society. That is its task and itspromise ...

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, ofhistory and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellec-tual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts,however limited or however broad the features of social reality they haveexamined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of theirwork have consistently asked three sorts of questions:

1 What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are itsessential components and how are they related to one another? Howdoes it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is themeaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

2 Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanicsby which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for thedevelopment of humanity as a whole? How does any particular featurewe are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period inwhich it moves? And this period - what are its essential features? Howdoes it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways ofhistory-making?

3 What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in thisperiod? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are theyselected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive andblunted? What kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the conduct andcharacter we observe in this society in this period? And what is themeaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of the society weare examining?

Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literarymood, a family, a prison, a creed - these are the kinds of questions the bestsocial analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studiesof man in society - and they are the questions inevitably raised by anymind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is thecapacity to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to thepsychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assess-ment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school tothe military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studiesof contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most imper-

sonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of thehuman self - and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use thereis always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the indi-vidual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and hisbeing...

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagina-tion works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the publicissues of social structure'. This distinction is an essential tool of the socio-logicalimagination and a feature of all classic work in social science ...

In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000,onlyone man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief weproperly look to the character of the man, his skills and his immediateopportunities. But when, in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 millionmenare unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solu-tionwithin the range of opportunities open to anyone individual. The verystructure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of theproblem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the eco-nomic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personalsituationand character of a scatter of individuals.

Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be howto survive it or how to die in it with honour; how to make money out of it;how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how tocontribute to the war's termination. In short, according to one's values, tofinda set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one's death init meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes;with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects uponeconomicand political, family and religious institutions, with the unorgan-izedirresponsibility of a world of nation states.

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experi-encepersonal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four yearsof marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of astructural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and thefamilyand other institutions that bear upon them.

Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificentsprawl of the great city. For many upper-class people, the personal solutionto 'the problem of the city' is to have an apartment with a private garageunder it in the heart of the city and, forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill,garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these twocontrolled environments - with a small staff at each end and a private heli-copter connection - most people could solve many of the problems of per-sonal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid,does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses.What should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up intoscattered units, combining residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands?Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new cities according to newplans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decideand to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues;to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political andeconomicissues that affect innumerable milieux.

In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem ofunemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is

inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization ofthe world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless- with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lackof system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turnswomen into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers andunweaned dependants, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remainsincapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped mega-lopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of theoverdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by per-sonal ingenuity and private wealth.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is oftencaused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes ofmany personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And thenumber and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutionswithin which we live become more embracing and more intricately con-nected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and touse it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among agreat variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociologicalimagination.

READING 3

Zygmunt BaumanThinking Sociologically

The central question of sociology, one could say, is: in what sense doesit matter that in whatever they do or may do people are dependent onother people; in what sense does it matter that they live always (and

cannot but live) in the company of, in communication with, in an exchangewith, in competition with, in co-operation with other human beings? It isthis kind of question (and not a separate collection of people or eventsselected for the purpose of study, nor some set of human actions neglectedby other lines of investigation) that constitutes the particular area of socio-logical discussion and defines sociology as a relatively autonomous branchof human and social sciences. Sociology, we may conclude, is first and fore-

most a way of thinking about the human world; in principle one can alsothink about the same world in different ways.

Among these other ways from which the sociological way of thinking isset apart, a special place is occupied by so-called common sense. Perhapsmore than other branches of scholarship, sociology finds its relation withcommon sense (that rich yet disorganized, non-systematic, often inarticu-late and ineffable knowledge we use to conduct our daily business of life)fraught with problems decisive for its standing and practice.

Indeed, few sciences are concerned with spelling out their relationship tocommon sense; most do not even notice that common sense exists, let alonethat it presents a problem. Most sciences settle for defining themselves interms of boundaries that separate them from or bridges that connect themwith other sciences - respectable, systematic lines of enquiry like them-selves.They do not feel they share enough ground with common sense tobother with drawing boundaries or building bridges. Their indifference is,one must admit, well justified. Common sense has next to nothing to say ofthe matters of which physics, or chemistry, or astronomy, or geology speak(and whatever it has to say on such matters comes courtesy of those sci-encesthemselves, in so far as they manage to make their recondite findingsgraspable and intelligible for lay people). The subjects dealt with by physicsor astronomy hardly ever appear within the sight of ordinary men andwomen: inside, so to speak, your and my daily experience. And so we, thenon-experts, the ordinary people, cannot form opinions about such mattersunless aided - indeed, instructed - by the scientists. The objects explored byscienceslike the ones we have mentioned appear only under very specialcircumstances, to which lay people have no access: on the screen of a multi-million-dollar accelerator, in the lens of a gigantic telescope, at the bottomof a thousand-feet-deep shaft. Only the scientists can see them and experi-ment with them; these objects and events are a monopolistic possession ofthe given branch of science (or even of its selected practitioners), a propertynot shared with anybody who is not a member of the profession. Being thesole owners of the experience which provides the raw material for theirstudy, the scientists are in full control over the way the material isprocessed, analysed, interpreted. Products of such processing would haveto withstand the critical scrutiny of other scientists - but their scrutiny only.They will not have to compete with public opinion, common sense or anyother form in which non-specialist views may appear, for the simple reasonthat there is no public opinion and no commonsensical point of view in thematters they study and pronounce upon.

With sociology it is quite different. In sociological study there are noequivalents of giant accelerators or radio telescopes. All experience whichprovides raw material for sociological findings - the stuff of which socio-logicalknowledge is made - is the experience of ordinary people in ordin-ary, daily life; an experience accessible in principle, though not always inpractice, to everybody; ... experience that, before it came under the magni-fyingglass of a sociologist, had already been lived by someone else - a non-sociologist, a person not trained in the use of sociological language andseeing things from a sociological point of view. All of us live in the com-pany of other people, after all, and interact with each other. All of us havelearned only too well that what we get depends on what other people do.All of us have gone more than once through the agonizing experience of a

communication breakdown with friends and strangers. Anything sociologytalks about was already there in our lives. And it must have been, otherwisewe should be unable to conduct our business of life. To live in the companyof other people we need a lot of knowledge; and common sense is the nameof that knowledge.

Deeply immersed in our daily routines, though, we hardly ever pause tothink about the meaning of what we have gone through; even less oftenhave we the opportunity to compare our private experience with the fate ofothers, to see the social in the individual, the general in the particular; this isprecisely what sociologists can do for us. We would expect them to show ushow our individual biographies intertwine with the history we share withfellow human beings. And yet whether or not the sociologists get that far,they have no other point to start from than the daily experience of life theyshare with you and me - from that raw knowledge that saturates the dailylife of each one of us. For this reason alone the sociologists, however hardthey might have tried to follow the example of the physicists and the bio-logists and stand aside from the object of their study (that is, look at yourand my life experience as an object 'out there', as a detached and impartialobserver would do), cannot break off completely from their insider'sknowledge of the experience they try to comprehend. However hard theymight try, sociologists are bound to remain on both sides of the experiencethey strive to interpret, inside and outside at the same time. (Note howoften the sociologists use the personal pronoun 'we' when they report theirfindings and formulate their general propositions. That 'we' stands for an'object' that includes those who study and those whom they study. Can youimagine a physicist using 'we' of themselves and the molecules? Orastronomers using 'we' to generalize about themselves and the stars?)

There is more still to the special relationship between sociology andcommon sense. The phenomena observed and theorized upon by modemphysicists or astronomers come in an innocent and pristine form,unprocessed, free from labels, ready-made definitions and prior interpreta-tions (that is, except such interpretations as had been given them inadvance by the physicists who set the experiments that made them appear).They wait for the physicist or the astronomer to name them, to set themamong other phenomena and combine them into an orderly whole: in short,to give them meaning. But there are few, if any, sociological equivalents ofsuch clean and unused phenomena which have never been given meaningbefore. Those human actions and interactions that sociologists explore hadall been given names and theorized about, in however diffuse, poorly articu-lated form, by the actors themselves. Before sociologists started looking atthem, they were objects of commonsensical knowledge. Families, organiza-tions, kinship networks, neighbourhoods, cities and villages, nations andchurches and any other groupings held together by regular human inter-action have already been given meaning and significance by the actors, sothat the actors consciously address them in their actions as bearers of suchmeanings. Lay actors and professional sociologists would have to use thesame names, the same language when speaking of them. Each term sociolo-gists may use will already have been heavily burdened with meanings itwas given by the commonsensical knowledge of 'ordinary' people like youand me.

For the reason explained above, sociology is much too intimately related

to common sense to afford that lofty equanimity with which sciences likechemistry or geology can treat it. You and I are allowed to speak of humaninterdependence and human interaction, and to speak with authority. Don'twe all practise them and experience them? Sociological discourse is wideopen: no standing invitation to everybody to join, but no clearly markedborders or effective border guards either. With poorly defined borderswhose security is not guaranteed in advance (unlike sciences that exploreobjectsinaccessible to lay experience), the sovereignty of sociology oversocialknowledge, its right to make authoritative pronouncements on thesubject,may always be contested. This is why drawing a boundary betweensociologicalknowledge proper and the common sense that is always full ofsociologicalideas is such an important matter for the identity of sociologyas a cohesive body of knowledge; and why sociologists pay this mattermoreattention than other scientists.

We can think of at least four quite seminal differences between the waysin which sociology and common sense - your and my 'raw' knowledge ofthebusiness of life - treat the topic they share: human experience.

To start with, sociology (unlike common sense) makes an effort to sub-ordinate itself to the rigorous rules of responsible speech, which is assumed tobe an attribute of science (as distinct from other, reputedly more relaxedand less vigilantly self-controlled, forms of knowledge). This means that thesociologistsare expected to take great care to distinguish - in a fashion clearand visible to anybody - between the statements corroborated by availableevidence and such propositions as can only claim the status of a provi-sional, untested guess. Sociologists would refrain from misrepresentingideas that are grounded solely in their beliefs (even the most ardent andemotionallyintense beliefs) as tested findings carrying the widely respectedauthority of science. The rules of responsible speech demand that one's'workshop' - the whole procedure that has led to the final conclusions andis claimed to guarantee their credibility - be wide open to an unlimitedpublic scrutiny; a standing invitation ought to be extended to everyone toreproduce the test and, be this the case, prove the findings wrong.Responsiblespeech must also relate to other statements made on its topic; itcannot simply dismiss or pass by in silence other views that have beenvoiced,however sharply they are opposed to it and hence inconvenient. Itis hoped that once the rules of responsible speech are honestly and meticu-lously observed, the trustworthiness, reliability and eventually also thepractical usefulness of the ensuing propositions will be greatly enhanced,even if not fully guaranteed. Our shared faith in the credibility of beliefscountersigned by science is to a great extent grounded in the hope thatthe scientists will indeed follow the rules of responsible speech, and that thescientificprofession as a whole will see to it that every single member ofthe profession does so on every occasion. As to the scientists themselves,they point to the virtues of responsible speech as an argument in favour ofthe superiority of the knowledge they offer.

The second difference is related to the size of the field from which thematerial for judgement is drawn. For most of us, as non-professionals, sucha field is confined to our own life-world: things we do, people we meet,purposes we set for our own pursuits and guess other people set for theirs.Rarely,if at all, do we make an effort to lift ourselves above the level of ourdaily concerns to broaden the horizon of experience, as this would require

time and resources most of us can ill afford or do not feel like spending onsuch effort. And yet, given the tremendous variety of life-conditions, eachexperience based solely on an individual life-world is necessarily partialand most likely one-sided. Such shortcomings can be rectified only if onebrings together and sets against each other experiences drawn from a multi-tude of life-worlds. Only then will the incompleteness of individual experi-ence be revealed, as will be the complex network of dependencies andinterconnections in which it is entangled - a network which reaches farbeyond the realm which could be scanned from the vantage point of a sin-gular biography. The overall result of such a broadening of horizons will bethe discovery of the intimate link between individual biography and widesocial processes the individual may be unaware of and surely unable tocontrol. It is for this reason that the sociologists' pursuit of a perspectivewider than the one offered by an individual life-world makes a great dif-ference - not just a quantitative difference (more data, more facts, statisticsinstead of single cases), but a difference in the quality and the uses ofknowledge. For people like you or me, who pursue our respective aims inlife and struggle for more control over our plight, sociological knowledgehas something to offer that common sense cannot.

The third difference between sociology and common sense pertains to theway in which each one goes about making sense of human reality; how eachone goes about explaining to its own satisfaction why this rather than thathappened or is the case. I imagine that you (much as myself) know fromyour own experience that you are the 'author' of your actions; you knowthat what you do (though not necessarily the results of your actions) is aneffect of your intention, hope or purpose. You normally do as you do inorder to achieve a state of affairs you desire, whether you wish to possessan object, to receive an accolade from your teachers or to put an end to yourfriends' teasing. Quite naturally, the way you think of your action servesyou as a model for making sense of all other actions. You explain suchactions to yourself by imputing to others intentions you know from yourown experience. This is, to be sure, the only way we can make sense of thehuman world around us as long as we draw our tools of explanation solelyfrom within our respective life-worlds. We tend to perceive everything thathappens in the world at large as an outcome of somebody's intentionalaction. We look for the persons responsible for what has happened and,once we have found them, we believe our enquiry has been completed. Weassume somebody's goodwill lies behind every event we like and some-body's ill intentions behind every event we dislike. We would find it diffi-cult to accept that a situation was not an effect of intentional action of anidentifiable 'somebody'; and we would not lightly give up our convictionthat any unwelcome condition could be remedied if only someone, some-where, wished to take the right action. Those who more than anyone elseinterpret the world for us - politicians, journalists, commercial advertisers -tune in to this tendency of ours and speak of the 'needs of the state' or'demands of the economy', as if the state or the economy were made to themeasure of individual persons like ourselves and could have needs or makedemands. On the other hand, they portray the complex problems ofnations, states and economic systems (deeply seated in the very structuresof such figurations) as the effects of the thoughts and deeds of a few indi-viduals one can name, put in front of a camera and interview. Sociology

stands in opposition to such a personalized world-view .... When thinkingsociologically,one attempts to make sense of the human condition throughanalysing the manifold webs of human interdependency - that toughest ofrealitieswhich explains both our motives and the effects of their activation.

Finally, let us recall that the power of common sense over the way weunderstand the world and ourselves (the immunity of common sense toquestioning, its capacity for self-confirmation) depends on the apparentlyself-evident character of its precepts. This in turn rests on the routine,monotonous nature of daily life, which informs our common sense whilebeingsimultaneously informed by it. As long as we go through the routineand habitualized motions which fill most of our daily business, we do notneed much self-scrutiny and self-analysis. When repeated often enough,things tend to become familiar, and familiar things are self-explanatory;they present no problems and arouse no curiosity. In a way, they remaininvisible.Questions are not asked, as people are satisfied that 'things are asthey are', 'people are as they are', and there is precious little one can doaboutit. Familiarity is the staunchest enemy of inquisitiveness and criticism- and thus also of innovation and the courage to change. In an encounterwith that familiar world ruled by habits and reciprocally reasserting beliefs,sociologyacts as a meddlesome and often irritating stranger. It disturbs thecomfortingly quiet way of life by asking questions no one among the'locals' remembers being asked, let alone answered. Such questions makeevident things into puzzles: they dejamiliarize the familiar. Suddenly, thedailyway of life must come under scrutiny. It now appears to be just one ofthepossible ways, not the one and only, not the 'natural', way of life....

One could say that the main service the art of thinking sociologically mayrender to each and everyone of us is to make us more sensitive; it maysharpen up our senses, open our eyes wider so that we can explore humanconditions which thus far had remained all but invisible. Once we under-stand better how the apparently natural, inevitable, eternal aspects of ourliveshave been brought into being through the exercise of human powerand human resources, we will find it hard to accept once more that they areimmune and impenetrable to human action - our own action included.Sociologicalthinking is, one may say, a power in its own right, an anti-fixating power. It renders flexible again the world hitherto oppressive in itsapparent fixity; it shows it as a world which could be different from what itis now. It can be argued that the art of sociological thinking tends to widenthe scope, the daring and the practical effectiveness of your and my freedom.Once the art has been learned and mastered, the individual may wellbecomejust a bit less manipulable, more resilient to oppression and regula-tionfrom outside, more likely to resist being fixed by forces that claim to beirresistible.

To think sociologically means to understand a little more fully the peoplearound us, their cravings and dreams, their worries and their misery. Wemay then better appreciate the human individuals in them and perhapseven have more respect for their rights to do what we ourselves are doingand to cherish doing it: their rights to choose and practise the way of lifethey prefer, to select their life-projects, to define themselves and - last butnot least - vehemently defend their dignity. We may realize that in doingall those things other people come across the same kind of obstacles as wedo and know the bitterness of frustration as well as we do. Eventually,

sociological thinking may well promote solidarity between us, a solidaritygrounded in mutual understanding and respect, solidarity in our jointresistance to suffering and shared condemnation of the cruelty that causesit. If this effect is achieved, the cause of freedom will be strengthened bybeing elevated to the rank of a common cause.

Thinking sociologically may also help us to understand other forms oflife, inaccessible to our direct experience and all too often entering the com-monsensical knowledge only as stereotypes - one-sided, tendentious carica-tures of the way people different from ourselves (distant people, or peoplekept at a distance by our distaste or suspicion) live. An insight into theinner logic and meaning of the forms of life other than our own may wellprompt us to think again about the alleged toughness of the boundary thathas been drawn between ourselves and others, between 'us' and 'them'.Above all, it may prompt us to doubt that boundary's natural, preordainedcharacter. This new understanding may well make our communicationwith the 'other' easier than before, and more likely to lead to mutual agree-ment. It may replace fear and antagonism with tolerance. This would alsocontribute to our freedom, as there are no guarantees of my freedomstronger than the freedom of all, and that means also of such people as mayhave chosen to use their freedom to embark on a life different from myown. Only under such conditions may our own freedom to choose beexercised.