Craig Calhoun

Occupy Wall Street in perspective

Occupy Wall Street was a thrilling protest that briefly dominated media attention and reshaped American public life.As Todd Gitlin suggests, it was perhaps more moment than movement, but of course moments can be very important to movements. Movements are relatively long-term collective engagements in producing or guiding social change. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the term social movement was often used to describe the actual course of social change, especially change bringing broader social participation. The term is now used to describe all manner of mobilizations, but it is important to distinguish specific protests and other relatively short-term manifestations from longer-term patterns of action seeking to produce major changes. Movements often proceed in alternating phases of intense public action and seeming dormancy, and much of the work that shapes the long term is in fact done during what appear superficially to be mere spaces between waves of activism. The waves, moreover, are often conjunctures among multiple movements. In the 1960s, for example, people were mobilized not only around peace (or against a specific war), but also in the civil rights struggle, union struggles, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so forth. Likewise the Progressive Era saw a wave in which mobilizations for many causes around labour, immigration, women’s suffrage and other issues reinforced each other in a field of movement activity. The same goes for the era of the Second Great Awakening with religious revitalization itself, temperance, labour, women’s and above all anti-slavery movements. So there is no shame in being more moment than movement. It is no denigration of Occupy Wall Street (or the Occupy movement(s) more generally) to say it may not have a future as such. It may be a shaping influence on a range of movements and on the course of social change even if there is no continuing movement under the Occupy name. Even at its height, it was a loose-knit coalition among activists with a variety of different primary concerns: labour conditions in Walmart, fracking and energy policies, financial

The Rhetoric of Nationalism

This paper assesses the contribution of Billig’s Banal Nationalism arguing that it moved us beyond the dichotomies of civic versus ethnic and patriotism versus nationalism to focus attention on the omnipresence of nations and the question of when they are flagged and unflagged. In acknowledging the importance of these insights, it is also suggested that an undue focus on ideology, interests and the political may not do justice to the strength of what might be better called the national or nationalist imaginary. The idea of social imaginaries speaks to a curious flatness to many accounts of everyday nationalism: they limit themselves to representations, not developing the way in which these representations are embedded and reproduced in action. Finally, it is suggested that viewing nationalism as always bad obscures the importance of nationalism to some much more positive projects, including economic redistribution and social welfare

Manifesto para as ciências sociais

Se os pesquisadores em ciencias sociais de todos os paises se unissem, acima de suas inumeraveis diferencas, o que seria de seu comprometimento? Que causa mereceria o risco de seu engajamento?

‘What You Gain Should Be Some Ability to Take the Standpoint of the Other’: An Interview with LSE Director Craig Calhoun

In this interview Craig Calhoun discusses the complex relationship between sociology, national traditions and cultural peculiarities. Calhoun points to the tensions and potential contradictions that arise when sociological concepts that were coined at a specific time and refer to a specific place are applied to different conditions and contexts. Other problems come to mind: the dominance of the English-speaking world in academia, issues of cultural domination, even imperialism. The interview closes with suggestions as to how these issues can be addressed practically and the role that a more reflective world sociology can play in solving some of these questions.

In Praise of Worldly Philosophy

‘‘Worldly philosopher’’ is of course a play on Robert Heilbroner’s title for a book on the lives of great economists. It is also a very apt title for a book about Albert O. Hirschman, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, one deeply engaged with the classical thinkers Heilbroner described, and one much more actively engaged in the affairs of the world than most. Indeed, not all great economists deserve the title or deserve biographies. Hirschman does, both because of the depth and power of his thinking, and because his life itself is interesting and informative. Hirschman is deservedly famous for books such as Strategy of Economic Development; Exit, Voice and Loyalty; The Passions and the Interests; and The Rhetoric of Reaction. He is famous, moreover, for the clarity, elegance, and precision of his prose. Even though German was his native language, he learned French before English, he spent much of his life with Spanish as his working language, and he also spoke Italian and Portuguese—he wrote lovely and lucid English. But in addition to writing important books and articles, Albert Hirschman fought in the Spanish Civil War; played a crucial clandestine role in helping thousands of artists and intellectuals escape from Nazidominated Europe; worked for years as a practical participant in economic planning and public policy, especially in Colombia; and was instrumental in the development of Latin American Social Science. Whew! Jeremy Adelman has written a wonderful book, one worthy of its subject and that is high praise. Most people will read it because of Hirschman’s fame as an economist and author. But Hirschman got a late start as an academic author and his path to the later writings is fascinating. The first chapters of Adelman’s study inform us not just about Hirschman’s personal trajectory but about Germany between the world wars, the intersections of politics and intellectual life, the internal dynamics of the bourgeois, professional family into which Hirschman was born (named Otto Albert Hirshmann), and the special milieu of prosperous, mostly ‘‘assimilated’’ Jews in which it was situated. The narrative is insightful on each of these themes from the nature of education at the French lycée to which he was sent, to the tensions between his upwardly mobile father from the East and the social aspirations of his mother and her more elite Berlin family, to the process by which economic crisis and the rise of the Nazis put an end to Hirschman’s happy youth and the Weimar Republic. Albert remained close to his sister Ursula as both plunged into politics, though she was more sympathetic to communism and Albert a somewhat leftist social democrat. This created a rift with their parents who cherished more hope that the Depression and Nazism would pass without destroying their world. Yet the family was still close, and it was only after his father’s death in 1933 that the two—both still teenagers— made their way to Paris. In Paris, Albert and Ursula were part of a remarkable cosmopolitan network of Leftists and intellectuals. One key figure was Eugenio Corloni, a brilliant and polymathic Italian intellectual whom they had known while he was Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 740pp.

The Importance of Imagined Communities – and Benedict Anderson

39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691155678.