Peter Baehr

Social extremity, communities of fate, and the sociology of SARS

This article identifies the chief factors which transform a group of people into a “community of fate”. A community of fate refers to a temporary form of existence, born of duress and social emergency, which cuts across familiar divisions to elicit something socially consequential. One such community materialized during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong. It is examined here in detail together with a range of other crisis communities – from Montreal battling smallpox, to the captives of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Unmasking and disclosure as sociological practices: Contrasting modes for understanding religious and other beliefs

Unmasking is a recurrent feature of modern sociology and cultural criticism. While false consciousness is imputed by intellectuals to religious groups and to certain social classes, unmasking is, or claims to be, a corrective performed by intellectuals themselves. Unmasking supposes that enlightened enquirers are able to help the less rational to understand their real interests; a type of exposure, it offers a cognitive tool of emancipation. This article (a) examines unmasking; and (b) contrasts it with an approach to understanding that we call disclosure. Our claim is that disclosure is more attuned to the full keyboard of social action, and less demeaning of its players, than unmasking is. Disclosure attempts to grasp what actions are like for those who enact them. Nothing has been more often or consistently unmasked and with more venom than religion. It is the main example explored in this article.

The Honored Outsider Raymond Aron as Sociologist

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) assumed many guises over a long and fruitful career: journalist, polemicist, philosopher of history, counselor to political leaders and officials, theorist of nuclear deterrence and international relations. He was also France’s most notable sociologist. While Aron had especially close ties with Britain, a result of his days in active exile there during the Second World War, he was widely appreciated in the United States too. His book Main Currents in Sociological Thought was hailed a masterpiece; more generally, Aron’s books were extensively reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review (in earlier days, it hosted a review section), Contemporary Sociology, and Social Forces. And he was admired and cited by sociologists of the stature of Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and David Riesman. Yet despite appearing well poised to become a major force in international sociology, analogous to his younger collaborator, Pierre Bourdieu, Aron has almost vanished from the sociological landscape. This article explains why, offering in the process some observations on the conditions—conceptual and motivational—of reputational longevity in sociological theory and showing how Aron failed to meet them. Special attention is devoted to a confusing equivocation in Aron’s description of sociology and to the cultural basis of his ambivalence toward the discipline.

From the headscarf to the burqa: the role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil

Abstract Opposition to the burqa is widespread in Europe but not in the United States. What explains the difference? Focusing primarily on the French case and its Belgian facsimile, we seek to underscore the role of social theorists in legitimizing bans on the full veil. Ironically, this role has been largely disregarded by Anglophone theorists who write on the veil, and who often oppose its prohibition. This article suggests that Europe tends to be more repressive towards full veils because its political process is more open to multiple theoretical representations of the phenomenon of veiling. Conversely, the United States is more open to the provocative display of religious symbols in public because the political process is pre-structured by legal conventions that tend to filter out social theory. The push to ban the burqa in France principally derives from its brand of republicanism rather than being a product of racism and Islamophobia. Of particular significance in the French case is the emphasis on reciprocity as a political principle, a principle that is elongated into an ideal of sociability by French theorists in different disciplines. The arguments of these theorists are described, their rationale is explained and the impact of their intervention on the policy process is documented. The French case, where the popular press and legislature play a major role in shaping policy towards the burqa, is contrasted with that of the United States, where the judiciary, defending religious freedom, remains the most influential collective actor. Each country has correspondingly different attitudes to democracy. In France, the mission of democracy is to extend political equality to the social realm whereas in the United States it is religion that is prioritized so as to protect that which is deemed most sacred to the individual.

China the Anomaly Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Maoist Regime

During the autumn of 1949, Hannah Arendt completed the manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism. On 1 October of the same year, the People’s Republic of China was founded under the leadership of Mao Zedong. This article documents Arendt’s claim in 1949 that the prospects of totalitarianism in China were ‘frighteningly good’, and yet her ambivalent judgment, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, about the totalitarian character of the Maoist regime. Despite being the premier theorist of totalitarian formations, Arendt’s interest in China was half-hearted and her analysis often wildly inaccurate. The concern of this paper, however, is less with the veracity of her remarks, than with a counterfactual question. If Arendt had known what we know now, would she have considered Maoist China to be a totalitarian regime? Put another way: to what extent is our modern picture of Mao’s regime consistent with Arendt’s depiction of the Soviet Union under Stalin or Germany under Hitler? While Arendt got many of her facts wrong, her theory of totalitarianism — as shapeless, febrile, voracious of human flesh, and endlessly turbulent — was in good measure applicable to Mao’s regime, even though she failed to recognize it.

China the Anomaly

During the autumn of 1949, Hannah Arendt completed the manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism. On 1 October of the same year, the People’s Republic of China was founded under the leadership of Mao Zedong. This article documents Arendt’s claim in 1949 that the prospects of totalitarianism in China were ‘frighteningly good’, and yet her ambivalent judgment, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, about the totalitarian character of the Maoist regime. Despite being the premier theorist of totalitarian formations, Arendt’s interest in China was half-hearted and her analysis often wildly inaccurate. The concern of this paper, however, is less with the veracity of her remarks, than with a counterfactual question. If Arendt had known what we know now, would she have considered Maoist China to be a totalitarian regime? Put another way: to what extent is our modern picture of Mao’s regime consistent with Arendt’s depiction of the Soviet Union under Stalin or Germany under Hitler? While Arendt got many of her facts wrong, her theory of totalitarianism — as shapeless, febrile, voracious of human flesh, and endlessly turbulent — was in good measure applicable to Mao’s regime, even though she failed to recognize it.

Of politics and social science : ‘Totalitarianism’ in the dialogue of David Riesman and Hannah Arendt

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, David Riesman and Hannah Arendt were engaged in an animated discussion about the meaning and character of totalitarianism. Their disagreement reflected, in part, different experiences and dissonant intellectual backgrounds. Arendt abhorred the social sciences, finding them pretentious and obfuscating. Riesman, in contrast, abandoned a career in law to take up the sociological vocation, which he combined with his own heterodox brand of humanistic psychology. This article delineates the stakes of the Arendt Riesman debate by examining Arendt’s critique of social science and Riesman’s defence of a sociological interpretation of totalitarianism. In addition, the article argues that Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism misdescribed the nature of Nazi and Bolshevik societies in ways that damaged her political account more generally. Riesman intuited that weakness and, as the following article shows, modern historical research has confirmed it.

Marxism and Islamism: Intellectual conformity in Aron’s time and our own

We celebrate great writers not only by reconstructing their ideas but also by thinking in their spirit. Many aspects of Raymond Aron’s legacy could, today, be exploited by writers of an Aronian turn of mind. They might draw on his philosophy of history; his defense of the specificity of politics; his acute awareness of the burdens of responsibility imposed on great powers. In this article, I flag a different topic: Aron’s concern with the impact of regimes and local cultures on political discussion. Of special interest to him were state-sponsored ideology and self-induced groupthink (the ‘opium of the intellectuals’). After briefly describing Aron’s views of both of these phenomena within the context of official and unofficial Marxism, I examine two modalities of communicative inhibition that have emerged since his death. Both turn on the emergence of Islamism as a major modern political ideology; both entail impediments to free speech: the vilification of political disagreement as ‘phobic’ and, relatedly, the political use of law (‘lawfare’) to halt debate on matters sensitive to Islamists.

The Novelty of Jihadist Terror

It is notoriously difficult to grasp the distinctiveness of one’s own epoch. We lack distance from events, and hence a sober perspective on them. Intellectual laziness and wishful thinking may induce us to fall back on entrenched habits of mind. Another salient obstacle to creative thought is the inertia of our language. Terms well suited to past situations are often applied to radically different times; hence the reflex of modern commentators to label the jihadist radicalism of al Qaeda as “fascist,” “totalitarian,” or “Islamo-fascist.” The first thing to note about such analogies is that, ironically, they provide a measure of conceptual solace by implying that we are in familiar territory. After all, we know what National Socialism and Bolshevism were. A second, less obvious point, is that the language of totalitarianism in the Islamic context inverts, rather than escapes, earlier simplifications. During the 1990s a host of self-styled American Middle East experts minimized the accelerating wave of Arab and Islamic radicalism by imposing on it a variety of consolations. We were told that the Middle East was undergoing a “Reformation” (the Tehran university professor Abdolkarim Soroush was briefly assigned the role of Martin Luther); that Fatah was a “democratic” or “progressive” organization of the Palestinians; and that the West Bank and Gaza were hotbeds of “civil society.” (Such wishful thinking is punctured in Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers in the Sand, available as a free download at http://sandbox.blog-city. com/ivory_towers_on_sand_download.htm) Those depictions look rather silly now but even they might have become serviceable if their exponents had been willing to recognize that democracy can be repressive and that civil society is capable of assuming vicious forms. Most Muslims are not radicals, and militant Islamism is itself a large and heterogeneous set of movements, so it is useful to distinguish among

The fabrication of man: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006

is a work that deserves the widest audience. I will begin by summarizingits argument; proceed to build on its insights; and then offer some criticalremarks.FULLER’S ARGUMENTArising early in the 19th century, sociology secularized two key features ofreligious monotheism. The first was the belief that human beings, created inthe likeness of God, occupy a special place in the order of things. The secondwas the notion that God’s dispensation touches all human beings equally,irrespective of social rank or physical status. To these core beliefs, Fullercontinues, the early sociologists affirmed that humanity is more than a meredatum, a creature of fate or physical necessity. It is an active project committedto increasing the sum of human welfare and to asserting greater control overthe arbitrary use of power. Sociology’s role was to record that human projectand guide it. A similar ambition characterized socialism with which sociol-ogy ‘was born joined at the hip’. Common to both normative science andpolitical movement was the belief that humans distinguish themselves fromother animals by their ability to create public institutions (guilds, sects,