A Sociological Imagination

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Notes

¹ From the perspective of 2312, Robinson narrates, “How they despised the generations of the Dithering, who had heedlessly pushed the climate into a change with an unstoppable momentum to it, continuing not only into the present, but for centuries more to come” (Robinson 2012: 316).

² Following Cazdyn I am referring to the events of October 2008 as a financial “disaster,” and not a “crisis,” which is the common usage. Cazdyn points out that “crisis” is the common condition of capitalism, whereas “disaster” is when “the sustainable configuration of relations fail,” and is thereby temporarily made visible (Cazdyn 2012: 53–55).

³ In addition to exemplifying the return of metanarratives, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first century also participates in the trend toward interrogating neoliberal economism. From within the field of economics, Piketty critiques his discipline’s pretensions – especially in the United States – to scientific objectivity and its related blindness to social issues such as income inequality. He writes bluntly, “[t]he truth is that economics should never have sought to divorce itself from the other social sciences and can advance only in conjunction with them” (2014: 32).