Marcus Morgan

Revisiting truth and freedom in Orwell and Rorty

This article uses differing interpretations of a thread of narrative taken from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard to exploring the connection between philosophical truth and political liberalism. It argues that while no positive connection exists between realist truth and political liberalism, minimal negative connections do exist between Rorty’s humanistic account of truth and a basic commitment to democratic and liberal frameworks. It sees these minimal connections as limiting in their failure to provide a politics that moves beyond an exclusive concern with liberty and democracy to more substantive political issues of equality and justice. However, it also sees them as reassuring in showing how acceptance of Rorty’s humanistic account of truth in no way necessitates adopting his own ethnocentric political stance.

Book Review: Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman

Chapter 12 looks at policy issues and applications, discussing the effect welfare reform changes have had on low-income rural families; some of the proposals suggested provide food for thought. To conclude, this collection draws attention to the issues facing rural low-income families. The chapters all have something to offer to this topic, and whilst each develops interesting findings, the book would have benefited from linking what is happening in the USA to other countries, especially Europe and developing countries, widening its relevance to global research agendas in this area. The chapters would also have benefited from a clearer explanation of the methodological choices to enable the reader to make judgements on the validity and reliability of the findings.

The poverty of (moral) philosophy: Towards an empirical and pragmatic ethics

This article makes both a more general and a more specific argument, and while the latter relies upon the former, the inverse does not apply. The more general argument proposes that empirical disciplines such as sociology are better suited to the production of ethical knowledge than more characteristically abstract and legalistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology. The more specific argument, which is made through a critique of Bauman’s Levinasian articulation of ethics, proposes what it calls ‘pragmatic humanism’ as a viable alternative model for sociological ethics to follow. This model rejects the abstract notion of some innate and universally distributed moral impulse, and instead turns to acknowledgement of the precariousness of life as a strategic resource in the construction, rather than revelation, of ethical solidarity.

The responsibility for social hope

Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions.

Humanising Sociological Knowledge

This paper elaborates on the value of a humanistic approach to the production and judgement of sociological knowledge by defending this approach against some common criticisms. It argues that humanising sociological knowledge not only lends an appropriate epistemological humility to the discipline, but also encourages productive knowledge development by suggesting that a certain irreverence to what is considered known is far more important for generating useful new perspectives on social phenomena than defensive vindications of existing knowledge. It also suggests that the threat of what is called “relativism” evoked by critics of humanised conceptions of knowledge is largely illusory, and that in fact a far graver danger comes from dogmatic assertions of social truth that claim to have somehow secured access to non-contingent arenas of knowing, forestalling ongoing conversation, and tying future discovery to the limits of current perspectives.

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

This introductory chapter poses the question of how a dispute that erupted in the early 1980s over whether a young Assistant Lecturer in the Cambridge English Faculty was to be made permanent became such a widespread controversy. We explain the significance of our book in the context of existing literature, and detail our methodological approach and the empirical resources we will draw upon, including interviews, archival research and content analysis of various forms of published material. We also elaborate our pragmatic approach to theory, and the critical synthesis we forge between positioning theory and cultural sociology. Finally, we briefly summarise the case, and lay out the broad structure of the book.

Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis

This chapter provides three examples of performative positioning strategies employed by those we dub the ânti’ camp, showing how they were in turn met with counterstrategies. Firstly, we show how the ântis’ attempted to hold up the canon of English literature and certain methods of literary criticism as sacred entities, in demand of protection from forces of profanation. Secondly, we focus upon the semantic struggle of positioning what was imprecisely termed ‘structuralism’ as a pollutant,imbued with moral threat. Thirdly, we highlight the strategic positioning move of claiming that consensus in fact ruled, and therefore that no controversy had in fact occurred, noting the difficulties, given all the attention that had already been paid to the incident, of maintaining this stance.

Chronology of Events

This chapter provides a chronological description of the events of the affair. To the extent that it is possible, we try to avoid analysis altogether at this point, providing as matter of fact an account of what occurred as we see possible. Where facts are disputed, we draw attention to the matter, highlighting the dissension rather than attempting to resolve it via our own authoritative reading. The purpose of this chapter is both to acquaint the reader with the ‘facts’ of the episode, as well as to provide a description of the ‘raw material’ out of which the controversy was forged. Nearer the end of this chapter, we discuss some of the functions the controversy ended up serving for both its participants, and the ideas involved.

Contextualising the Dispute

This chapter locates the affair within both its broader (socio-historical) and narrower (institutional) contexts. Firstly, it draws attention to the post-Robbins expansion of higher education, the relatively more rapid expansion of the social sciences vis-a-vis the humanities and the changing nature of English studies via its incorporation of insights emerging from the social sciences and from French theory. It stresses how these factors both facilitated and provided symbolic weaponry in the dispute. Secondly, it highlights the role played by Cambridge University’s relatively unique collegiate institutional form in structuring the resultant conflict, showing in particular how colleges provided pools from which ‘performance teams’ were recruited. Overall, it argues that such material contextualisation is essential for fully comprehending the symbolic dimensions of the affair addressed in Part II.

Book review: Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method

In this important and detailed book, Savage is concerned both with the politics of disciplinary jurisdiction and the charting of British postwar change in (at least) three domains: in the history of social identities; in the development of social science methods; and in transmuting forms of British intellectualism. Savage’s aim is not simply to describe historical change in these three areas but to show the impact of their relative development upon one another, and, in particular, to demonstrate the improbable agency of the social sciences, and their methodological ‘repertoires’, in shaping the other two areas – hence the subtitle ‘the politics of method’. This argument about the performative nature of the social sciences in intervening in the worlds they ostensibly simply record has been made by various other writers influenced by the actor-network approach (Mol, Law, Callon, etc.), yet Savage’s book offers the most comprehensive historical treatment to date with reference to British sociology in particular. In order to chart this change, as well as examining responses to Mass-Observation (M-O) directives and interviewing certain key players in British sociology’s brief history, Savage innovatively takes much of his material from archives of some of the bestknown and foundational British social research studies, including those published in works such as Bott’s Family and Social Network, Jackson’s Working Class Community, Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s Affluent Worker series, and Pahl’s Managers and their Wives. One not so insignificant merit of the book is perhaps simply having rescued these research relics from hungry bookworms. The book is organized into three parts, each loosely concerned with one of the domains mentioned above. Part I begins with a comparison between recent M-O