Alan Wolfe

The winner-take-all society : how more and more Americans compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes, encouraging economic waste, income inequality, and an impoverished cultural life

The emergence of winner-take-all-markets, with few winners and many losers, has transformed the US economy. The authors of this book conclude that this has resulted in income inequality, overcrowding in some areas and increased cultural conformity, and suggest policies for reversing this trend.

Identity Politics and the Welfare State

Motivated by a deep sense that injustice and inequality are wrong, liberals and reformers in the Western political tradition have focused their energies on policies and programs which seek inclusion: extending the suffrage to those without property; seeking to treat women the same as men, and blacks the same as whites; trying to ensure that as few as possible are excluded from economic opportunity due to lack of resources. Under current conditions, such demands for inclusion take two primary forms, especially in the United States. One is a commitment to using the state to equalize the life chances of individuals. The other is a call for treating groups which have experienced discrimination with full respect. The former leads to the welfare state, while the latter is produced by, and in turn produces, what is commonly called identity politics, the politics of recognition, or the politics of presence.

Mind, Self, Society, and Computer: Artificial Intelligence and the Sociology of Mind

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) raise the possibility that humans may not, as classical sociological theory held, be unique among species. A Meadian distinction between brain as a neurological phenomenon and mind as a sociological one is introduced to examine such a claim. Software approaches to AI avoid the problem of modeling the human brain, but, because they require thorough and unambiguous instructions, they cannot model how human brains understand external reality. Hardware approaches to AI, such as parallel data-processing models, do attempt to model the brain but only in an engineering sense: in substituting procedures for meaning, they again fail to account for how human brains, let alone human minds, work. The hypothesis of human distinctiveness, consequently, is not rejected, but expanded and elaborated. The actual results of work in AI support interpretative trends in sociological theorizing rather than system-oriented ones.

Books vs. articles: Two ways of publishing sociology

Sociologists tend to publish either in the form of articles in scholarly journals or in the form of books. This paper attempts to show that not only do specific university departments have scholarly cultures emphasizing one or the other, but that structural and demographic factors — such as location, public or private status, and size — are correlated with each. Book departments tend to be found at exclusive private universities in or near big cities on both coasts, while article-producing departments tend to be in land grant universities in the South and Midwest. Recognizing that such publication decisions are not purely scientific in nature but are also partially socially constructed ought to allow us to have more diversity in how departments structure their scholarly cultures.

The cultural and social incorporation of sociological knowledge

Any evaluation of sociology as a discipline ought to focus not only on the way sociology is produced, but also on how it is consumed. In this article, we examine the degree to which sociological concepts have been incorporated into the vernacular of American society, the impact of sociological techniques and methods on politics and society, and the relationship between sociology and public policy. While sociologists often point to the problems caused by a certain alienation from the general culture—for example the notion that sociology is written in an obtuse language that the public cannot comprehend—we point to the problems that develop when sociology is too readily incorporated into American culture and society. The danger is that the more popular sociology is, the less likely it will be to maintain the sharp intellectual edge that made its incorporation possible in the first place.

The Evangelical MIND Revisited

On May 21, 2005, President George W. Bush delivered the commencement address at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For both Mr. Bush and the college, the event seemed a nobrainer. As candidate and as president, George W. Bush had developed a reputation for paying close attention to the concerns of the conservative evangelical Protestants who cement his political base. And few institutions of higher learning seemed to fit the “conservative Christian” profile better than Calvin. While not a fundamentalist college in the sense of Bob Jones or Liberty University, Calvin’s long association with the Christian Reform Church marked it as an institution strongly shaped by its faith commitments. Many of America’s leading evangelical scholars teach (or have taught) there, and its provost, Joel Carpenter, wrote a relatively sympathetic history of American fundamentalism. The president’s visit should have been a meeting of the minds.

Academia (Kind of) Goes to War: Chomsky and His Children

It does not seem far-fetched to imagine such a collaboration between the policy inclined and the academically inclined. American foreign policy could certainly use it. A future war would probably not resemble either Vietnam or Iraq. But we need to bring together the two worlds of expertise they rendered

Sociology as a vocation

During the 1950s, when sociology modeled itself on the natural sciences, the vocational ideals that shaped the profession were also modeled on the natural sciences; objectivity, peer review, and other such ideals were linked to the epistemological assumption that reality existed out there in the world to be discovered by the techniques of science. With postmodern and other similar philosophical challenges in the air, it is no longer possible to believe that the relationship between reality and its representations is so uncomplicated. But what do these new epistemologies have to say about professional conduct? This paper argues that it would be a mistake to practice the deconstruction one preaches. Epistemological skepticism, far from leading to an attitude toward professional conduct that “anything goes,” requires an ever-greater belief in professional responsibility.

Inauthentic Democracy: A Critique of Public Life in Modern Liberal Society -

One of the most difficult issues to be resolved in the study of democratic theory is the problem of false consciousness.

Empty Nest: The Demise of a Species

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, liberal hawks were so close to neoconserva tive hawks that only an expert political ornithologist could distinguish between the species. Kanan Makiya, the eloquent Iraqi dissident, played the same role on the left as Ahmad Chalabi played on the right, enumerating the evils associ ated with Saddam Husseins regime. Human rights activists such as Samantha Power and Michael Ignatieff, who had demanded an end to genocide and eth nic cleansing, included Saddam in their catalogue of evil, even if Power herself opposed the war. Kenneth Pollacks The Threatening Storm, with its melodramatic Churchillian title and its solemn call to action, did more to build support for the war than the more obviously partisan pamphlets produced by the right. Even as difficulties mounted in the aftermath of the invasion, liberals generally stuck to their guns. As George Orwell had done in the face of totalitarianism in his day, liberals would resolutely stand with liberty, even if doing so seemed to have turned at least one of them, Christopher Hitchens, into a conservative. Because neoconservatives identified themselves so much with George W. Bush and his war, his failures in Iraq became their Waterloo. The same was not true of the liberal interventionists, however. All too many of them, although critical of the president, took the position that it was not their ideas that failed