On Schools of Sociology and Intellectuals.Dialogue with Professor John Scott

Follow up to Goffman Memorial Lecture  by Professor John Scott at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Sociology

Motto: Intellectual is ’no longer to place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity;  rather it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘discourse’. In this sense theory does not express,  translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice’  [...]The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shakeup habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of the political will. Michel Foucault

Doctor Voiculescu's Questions

Dear Prof. John Scott,

Thank you so much for your inspiring lecture. I thought of some questions I would like to address to your presentation. These might be of interest for all social scientists. There are 3 extended questions I would like to raise:

1. Your presentation referred to Edinburgh Sociology as a School of Sociology, which I found particularly interesting. I thought at that point of a different School of Sociology -the Bucharest School of Sociology -founded by Dimitrie Gusti, a sociologist trained in the West, during the inter-war times. See for more details the academic article  ’A Sociological School from a Communicational Perspective. The Case of Dimitrie Gusti’s Monographic School’ by Zoltan Rostas at

http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-social/C1-1/Social1-5.pdf.  

The Bucharest School of Sociology involved not only sociologists, but also local philosophers and intellectuals interested in engaging with the public sphere of those times. The latter was very active, and informed by inter- war transformations of the Romanian  society, in terms of economic and development programs pursued by the state, but also by the civil society of that time. It was a Militant School of Sociology, interested in and focused on producing ethnographic knowledge as a base for a larger program of  modernization of rural areas and support for civic participation of peasantry in the public sphere, which at that time represented a large part of the population (the core of the nation).

Many of the monographs of the rural areas were informed by lengthy ethnographic field-trips carried out by the members of the school and coordinated by the founder Dimitrie Gusti. Gusti's ethnographic campaigns aimed at diagnosing, in a holistic manner, the socioeconomic problems of rural life and informing, in this way, the policy-making areas of social governance, which were at that time publicly debated by all members of the school. The research campaigns had a direct influence on framing social policy and, in this sense,  concrete actions  of social intervention have been taken. The School of Sociology has also secured funding for the construction of a large number of rural civic/cultural houses, where people were able to meet, discuss, but also get information about their citizenship rights. Trained by invited experts or intellectuals, locals were expected to participate in local social actions, collaboration, and plan the future of their own communities.

The main idea of the social ethnographic research based program was to extend the public sphere developed in the urban areas into the rural. In this sense, The Bucharest School of Sociology proved remarkable in involving people from rural areas in various forms of local governance, but also in making them aware of how their rights can be better achieved and performed. At central level, there were also some major implications. Sociologists provided the knowledge base for new legislation, which concerned an extensive governmental project of rural development.

Therefore, all these achievements were part of a clear focus and program of the Bucharest School of Sociology, which aimed at not only diagnosing the social, but also intervening into the social. All members were united by these common goals and  militant ideas, which gave shape to one of the most important inter-war schools of sociology in the continental Europe.

Now, going back to your reference to Edinburgh Sociology School, I would like to raise the following question: In which way was Edinburgh Sociology constituted as a School of Sociology?  What were the aims and scope that animated its members? What were their implications for the social and economic transformations of that time? Was there a main goal grounding its workings or rather a multidirectional approach? 

I am asking these questions because I am interested in these idiosyncratic features of the Edinburgh School of Sociology compared with different other Sociological Schools which existed at that time in Europe.

2. You interestingly mentioned that sociologists at that time were intellectuals, or maybe that in general sociologists should take this role. I just thought, what would be, from your viewpoint, the definition of an intellectual?  From what I know, there are two major, in a way divergent definitions, which offer different directions of representation and action, as part of the mechanisms of social change: Gramsci's and  Foucault's. Both define intellectuals from the perspective of social chance, actors able to challenge power and reconfigure the social. On one hand, Gramsci advocates the expansion of the category of organic intellectuals, those who are part of and represent the interests of a class or a stratum in society, able to inform organized action. On the other hand, Foucault considers that in order to challenge power structures (e.g. capitalism), which produce inequalities, the very foundational knowledge of its workings need to be reformulated, subverted by specific intellectuals who produce and employ their knowledge in a particular field of action (economy, politics, religion, social, science).

I would like to add to this intricate distinction my own understanding of what an intellectual is. From my viewpoint, intellectuals are those to produce knowledge for critical debates and social change and they are the ones who go beyond boundaries and limits of representation, of knowledge production, and rigid framing of answering social problems. In other words, intellectuals are those who surpass distinctions between disciplines (e.g.sociology, philosophy, geography, politics), produce knowledge, which goes beyond a field of studies or another and crosses/blurs the boundaries established between domains of action/intervention and knowledge : academic policy-oriented and public. Moreover, I consider that they are not those to answer pre-defined questions/social problems, but those to question the ’existing’ questions/problematizations of the social and re-articulate them in public debates.

Notwithstanding, I would neither submit to an authoritarian definition of the intellectual, nor I would support their dominant exclusive presence in the realm of questioning a regime of truth or reality, but rather I consider that intellectuals' productions should concur within a large public sphere where critical knowledge(s) produced by different actors meet to reformulate the social.

Furthermore, I consider that the so-called intellectual scientific production needs to communicate with art, which has many times been considered a form of resistance. Excluding art from the 'social change program' might lessen the critical knowledge production's effects. Art reaches larger audiences better and faster and therefore can easier create spaces for resistance, reformulations, and subversion(s) within the public sphere.Someone might ask: but do you have any examples in mind? Yes, definitely this sort of definition applies to many contemporary public philosophers like Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Jacque Ranciere, Jean Luc Nancy etc. Nonetheless, someone might reply by saying that these well known public intellectuals are philosophers, not sociologists.That is a good point to relate to my second extended question:

Is sociology as a practice and particular knowledge production a way of confining the space of thought, critical exploration and action to very specific fields of study and inquiry, which tend to answer to  problems already discussed and articulated by structures of definition, which many times take the form of symbolic and epistemic power?

As we know, sociology is highly specialized (e.g. sociology of education, family, religion, science, emotions, cultural sociology, political sociology etc.) and these fragments of knowledge do not always communicate with each other or connect to different other disciplines which might deal with similar aspects (e.g. geography, media studies, politics, philosophy, history, literature, hermeneutics etc.). Moreover, not all sociologists produce academic knowledge. Most of those who hold a degree in sociology work in non-academic areas, while the knowledge they produce is mostly framed by the market, taking the form of policy-making, marketing research, governance, social and urban planning, national and international programs of development.

Yet, in a Foucauldian understanding, sociologists might be considered 'specific' intellectuals, but from an alternative viewpoint , mentioned here, they might not be intellectuals, and themselves might not aspire being those intellectuals. Therefore, my question is: 

What would be your working definition of the intellectual -to be and to become- and how that can apply to sociologists? In other words, in which ways does it fit sociological practice and mode of knowledge production?

3. Your presentation mentioned the role of imaginary in people's everyday lives, but also in intellectuals' engagement with the mechanisms of social change. Of course, here the debate remains whether these mechanisms lie in direct action, as Marxists claim, or knowledge production as post-structuralists would say. I find this element of the social more than interesting and in many cases it is a source of power to control and govern. A well-known example is 'nationalism' which can be considered more than a political ideology, but a social imaginary employed by the political to govern and control populations and territories. However, it seems that sociology had not yet fully examined these aspects of social imaginary, which are constitutive of power. In this context, my question is:  

Would an extended and increased sociological engagement with the study of the social imaginary lead its workings to the core of power structures, from where critical reformulations can be made to find new grounds for political action, which is understood here as a contestation of predefined realities and dominant discourses governing mentalities and practices?

Thank you so much for reading my extended questions. It would be more than interesting to have your opinion on these inquiries.

Dr. Voiculescu Cerasela

___________________________________________

Professor John Scott’s Answers

Dear Cerasela,

Thanks for your interesting comments.
I am afraid that I know little of Romanian sociology. I have come across the early mathematician Spiru Haret who wrote on social topics, but nothing more recent (though I believe that the Marxist philosopher Lucien Goldmann was Romanian). What you say about Gusti sounds very interesting. Geddes and his colleagues also promoted field trips in the form of what they called 'rustic' and 'civic' surveys. Many of thee were linked to schools or to local history societies, but they did not have the kind of links to social movements that seem to characterise Gusti's peasant collaboration. In general, they were more urban-based than rural-based, but certainly linked to ideas of citizenship and established a civic league and promoted civic education in schools. Some of the surveys are referred to in my book and other publications listed at https://sites.google.com/site/sociologysource/thebranfordproject.

The Edinburgh School had a virtual existence for much of its history. There is a follow-up paper on the Geddes Circle that discusses this in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Scottish Thought. I hope that this will be published soon, but it seems to have been held up in production.  A lot of the general issues that you raise are covered in the book Envisioning Sociology.

They took a particular definition of intellectual that derived from their analytical framework and distinguished the 'cognitive' intellectual from the 'emotional' initiator. The cognitive and emotional were seen as two aspects of 'spiritual' or cultural leadership. They saw a division of labour between the two roles, but thought that they needed to be combined for effective social action. They did not really engage with the ideas that Gramsci and others took up,. Any attempt to see some kind of 'organic' link would have been limited by their failure to develop any kind of proper class analysis. They did see intellectuals as expressing social interests, but were perhaps closer to the ideas of people like Mannheim, who saw the possibility of 'free floating' intellectuals - Geddes and Branfords certainly saw themselves as autonomous from social interests and as able to develop a wider and more all-embracing viewpoint. This was the basis for their idea of a third way, which mediates between two extremes that are more interest-based. Again, I think this is like Mannheim seeing an opposition of ideology and utopia that can be transcended by  the free floating intellectuals. Geddes and Branford saw themselves as 'utopians' but preferred the term 'eutopia' to convey the idea that they were not expressing an arbitrary desire but one that was realistically attainable.  This view of social change and the future society they took from Comte's view of the sociologist.

They certainly did not confine sociology to narrow concerns. It was a very general social science, with strong links to ethics and the arts/. They wanted to avoid any fragmentation, which they saw as inherent in the specialisation of scientific disciplines. For this reason they advocated a reconstruction of the university. They were also particularly interested in the applications of knowledge and wanted to avoid any opposition of theory and practice.

I'm not sure that they developed the idea of the imaginary, but is certainly connects with the arguments of those such as Anderson and Castoriadis who see imagined ideas as the essential lived realities of social groups. They held that the task of sociology and the arts was to develop new 'visions' that imagine alternative realities that can be attained (and so are eutopian. They do link all this to power, seeing societies as systems of material ('temporal') and ideal ('spiritual') power, but I think it is fair to say that their conception of power is underdeveloped.

Thank you again for your thoughts. I am sorry that I have not been able to give the kind of extended response that they deserve.

With best wishes,

John