Editorial

This journal's mission is to interrogate the multiple ways in which cultural and political aspects of social life intertwine and affect each other. Their conjunctions lie at the heart of social interaction, structure, and change: human behaviour cannot be understood without making sense of the interlaced mesh made up by the cultural and political aspects of social life. Permutations of power and meaning are therefore endlessly compelling, not only in theory but also in practice, not least in personal interaction. When encountering a new policy or person, your first reaction might reasonably be to try to form an image of the political and cultural circumstances that inform that course of action or that individual. If you do not, what they do or say might well remain irredeemably opaque to you.

Public and private projects involving contextual understanding may be compelling to some, but for others, they seem threatening. As is increasingly often remarked, contemporary political cultures have become highly tribal in recent decades. Political theorists such as Eric Uslaner contend that polarised societies do not work well as democracies, even if they have democratic constitutions. Being prepared to trust other people, on the whole, even if they are different from you, leads to attitudes producing cooperation, prosperity, and good government; trusting only people like yourself is ultimately self-defeating (Uslaner, 2018). When the institutions of civil society have been thoroughly undermined, as in contemporary Iraq, there may seem no option but to seek allegiance with some local group powerful enough to exercise a modicum of efficacy. Yet cultural tribalism may be embraced even where there is little excuse for it. Currently, a bizarre feature of much public debate in the West – about immigration, EU membership, or abortion, for instance – is reluctance to see that other people or groups might possibly have perspectives worth trying to understand, though we might in the end disagree with them. The art of argumentation has become less familiar. Both public figures and individuals routinely fail to respond to others’ points of view, preferring to elaborate the positions of their own communities and dismiss others’ out of hand.

It is true that all worldviews involve patterns of attention and emphasis that make it hard to perceive alternative configurations. This simple fact can stand in the way of comprehending how people could have habits and preferences that differ from one's own. It is fundamental to processes of misunderstanding. Admiring the new and progressive, for instance, easily makes it harder to see the virtues of the old and traditional – and vice versa. This has significant consequences. A passion for science and progress has many advantages, yet its corollary after the mid-twentieth century was the denigration of pre-existing built or natural environments. This resulted among other things in the demolition of mediaeval buildings during the post-WWII Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, paralleled by similar developments in the UK. Significant elements of the past became to all intents and purposes invisible and were erased: urgent economic pressures encouraged preoccupation with ‘progress’ guaranteed by science. Destroying much of the natural environment, for similar reasons, ploughed under significant elements of the future. A corollary was to make people who based their lives around one of these sets of values seem eccentric at best to those espousing alternative positions. Discussions surrounding culture wars and identity politics make the implications of such processes even more vexed, furnishing extra layers of reasons not to want to understand other people's positions. Such developments highlight the importance of the classical rhetorical figure of ‘presence’, used either to accentuate agreed positions or to draw audience members’ attention to patterns they had previously been unable to perceive. Awareness of such features fosters a critical understanding of one's own point of view as well as openness to that of others. Equally, an Aristotelian approach to argument can identify basic argumentation schemes derived from everyday assumptions (topoi) that often cluster in groups, obstructing some perceptions but enabling others.

Reluctance to comprehend can take extreme or aggressive forms, culminating in the wish to erase the other entirely. This is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. The early Christian iconoclasts who defaced the Parthenon frieze after the late sixth century did so not just because of their prohibition on naturalistic imagery but also to eradicate the culture the frieze represented. That is: to destroy former ways of being in the world. Similarly, the ‘iconoclastic spectacles’ of the Reformation in England (Marshall, 2017) did unparalleled damage to books and works of art all over the country. Images of saints were certainly deplored, but so also was the way of life of former communities. Contemporary Taliban and ISIS/Daesh destruction attests to the desire to erase others’ positions from existence rather than engage with them. Iconoclasm is not, of course, merely a religiously inspired practice. It can very well be political too – as in the cases of Pol Pot's Year Zero or the Cultural Revolution in China.

These are rightly regarded as extreme practices, but today the beliefs on which they are based are insinuating themselves into everyday forms of interaction. People who disagree with one should be erased; to express disagreement is understood as to express the desire to erase. The sociologist Furedi (2018) attributes the reluctance of students in the UK to utter a word in seminars partly to their assumption that disagreement equates to aggression. They are loathe to commit aggression, so they avoid discussion. They have become unfamiliar with the practice of testing their own and others’ debating positions in an effort to discover what they might entail. In practice, of course, not to engage may amount to the more aggressive course of action.

In an effort to stem the tide of such developments, in this journal, our aim is to show how the world can be better understood by exploring cultural and political analyses in sociology. The present issue takes up the question of argumentation and its links to democracy, as Paula Cossart and Andrea Felicetti probe the ‘Sociological history of New England Town Meetings’ and ‘The question of their deliberative culture’ between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. The early settlers in the United States have become emblematic for the democratic tradition, not least for commentators such as de Tocqueville. Events described as Town Hall meetings are held in the US to this day. But while the settlers did prescribe meaningful communal deliberation among citizens in the cause of the common good, the authors use the concepts of deliberative culture and group style to highlight the social norms that severely restricted their potential. They certainly aimed at what the authors call the ‘substantial and inclusive exchange of ideas’ based on reflection rather than ‘the mere aggregation of preferences’, but the political cultures within which this took place explicitly discouraged diversity. This is a fascinating exploration of problems that can arise in allowing for genuine difference even when many of the conditions for debate have been established.

Next, Nata Duvvury, Áine Ní Léime and Aoife Callan deal with ‘Pension rights under siege: Experiences of older women in Ireland’. Combining the feminist political economy of ageing with a life-course approach, they show how the post-2008 economic crisis affects different segments of populations differently. In large part this is steered by cultural-political constructions of fundamental human activities such as caring for others: either not perceived at all or perceived as not deserving of economic security. Consequently, older women in Ireland are affected by gendered forms of vulnerability with sociopolitical effects, undermining their social rights as citizens. This article uses quantitative and qualitative data to identify the distribution of older Irish women's (un)paid employment and occupational pension coverage, and to focus on meanings they attach to work. Women's employment has increased, but their ability to contribute to pensions has not kept pace. Reforms need to address issues arising from the social construction of women and care, as well as the effects of fiscal measures under ‘austerity’ regimes.

The third article in this issue, by Kristoffer Kropp, deals with social-scientific knowledge production itself, exploring mechanisms by which it is bound up with powerful political processes. It focuses on ‘The European Social Survey (ESS) and European research policy – Homological structures and conjunctural alliances’ involved in European integration, and the actors and institutions involved. The European Social Survey was set up in the late 1990s and is now seen as a highly significant transnational survey, closely related to research policy in the EU. Using a field-analytical approach inspired by Bourdieu, Kropp analyses how this came about. He reminds us that social statistics have played an integrative role in unifying European nation-states, producing ‘intelligible and manageable social realities’ that can shape the social world. Kropp then identifies three sets of processes culminating both in a recognised European field of social research, and social research of a particular nature; then EU institutions identifying and linking social researchers; lastly, actors able to move social capital between these two fields. Tracing the scholars and networks involved in Europe-directed social-scientific analysis since the 1950s, he analyses the ‘common symbolic and technical tools’, networks and scholarly institutions that jointly contributed to ‘building Europe’ and the emergence of the ESS. The author closes by asking what effects this process will have on future forms of social-scientific knowledge production, and the criteria for evaluating them.

Lastly, we return to the question of the social origins of knowledge among social actors themselves, with Chris Gilleard's article, ‘Society and its representations: Reconsidering Castoriadis’. Gilleard revisits Castoriadis’ concept of the social imaginary, since, despite sustained interest in the topic since at least the time of Durkheim, there is still ‘no consensus’ about ‘how ideas, beliefs, representations and understandings about society, its divisions, institutions, practices and relations are constituted’ and should be studied. Castoriadis rejected the structural determinism he associated with successors to Durkheim up to Althusser, seeing the desire to make sense as generating the potential for questioning, even subverting, a society's symbolic order. Castoriadis argued that there is always a surplus of signifiers that allows for the contestation of any representation or ideology, and for constructing alternatives. For him, this makes interchange possible between the individual's radical imagination and the existing imaginary of society – even though, without this imaginary and the social meanings it offers, the individual would never become a social being. Gilleard contrasts Castoriadis’ position with that of Charles Taylor, whom he sees as much more Durkheimian, locating the ‘social imaginary’ as the source of a society's principal meanings, enabling a sense of social coherence in people's understanding of social relations and the world, but downplaying the multivocal, diffuse, and multiple meanings stressed by Castoriadis. Gilleard points out that this raises questions not of causality but of power: how do social representations persist through time and space? And how do we trace ‘the possibility of being otherwise’ that they still leave the individual? He concludes that Castoriadis’ thought could inspire a compelling approach to social thought and its capacity for creativity.

Our book reviews cover Thomas Eberle's explorations of the role of photography in the study of society, and Victoria Browne on Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History. But we want to draw special attention to the review of Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question, by Robert Fine and Philip Spencer.

Robert Fine, who died in June 2018 at the age of 72, had a special closeness to this journal. He served for four years on the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association at the time of the Journal's foundation and gave it continuing support throughout its early years. For the 2014 volume he co-edited, with Rodrigo Cordero and Wolfhart Totschnig, a special issue on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, offering a new reading of this relatively neglected work. Characteristically putting at the centre of his own approach a blend of sociopolitical theory and hermeneutic analysis, Fine argued for reading Arendt in the light of Camus’ ‘rebellion as moderation’ and that her work throws light on modern political life in general as well as on the revolutionary tradition (Fine, 2014). He never wished to divide up disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and politics, less from a specifically interdisciplinary ardour than because of his awareness of the depths and difficulties of real life. For him, his analytical method was not purely historical. It was a gateway to phenomenology, to understanding what is really going on in any particular complex of issues. And the intellectual questions he worked on were not tangential to his life, but at its heart.

I recall his re-reading of Marx's ‘On the Jewish Question’ for graduate students at the ESA summer school in York in 2014, and the meticulous care he spent in showing the students how to take this approach. But this should not give the impression of a reserved scholar, retiring from the bustle of everyday life. When some practical problem was being discussed he would cry, ‘Leave it to me!’ – an intervention unusual enough to be worthy of note. His hallmarks were commitment, care, occasional irascibility, unceasing intellectual curiosity. He was an intriguing companion and a pleasure to know. It is up to us to continue the spirit of his contributions.

Robert Fine. (Photo: Ricca Edmondson.)