Structures of political power, as well as power differentials and social inequality, are reproduced by means of culture, symbols, ideologies, and imaginaries. The material bases of power, including economic, social, and cultural capital, are in a way underdetermined, and in need of determination by means of collective ideational and cultural forms of justification and meaning-giving. The tangible material dimensions of power tend not to hold up when the cultural underpinnings of power lose grip on people’s imagination. Examples abound: Nicolae Ceaușescu fleeing from the roof of the Communist Party’s Central Committee building in Bucharest in 1989 when the crowd started booing him, or the Italian PM Bettino Craxi, in the middle of the great corruption scandal Tangentopoli in the 1990s, being hit by coins thrown at him by an angry and disgusted crowd when leaving his hotel in Rome. Political power hence needs to be imagined as just, as immutable, as normal, or even as largely invisible, in order to be reproduced. One forceful manner of reproducing power is by means of tradition and by reference to how things ‘have always already been’; power as part of the combined process of remembrance and amnesia. A related dimension emerges from Foucault’s famous insights into the capillary forms of power and the normalising social processes that underscore power, – a most intriguing and useful perception of power for generations of sociologists. –
Various contributions in the current issue engage with power and a variety of forms of traditionalism. In current times, there appears to be a return of traditionalism, nationalism, and localism. Formal political power is – once again – frequently legitimated by recourse to traditionalist and identitarian language and narratives as well as practices and forms of social mobilisation. The contemporary upsurge in right-wing populism and neo-conservatism demonstrates how conservative projects, generally aimed against modernising, globalising discourses, use a nativist, particularist counternarrative to justify their powergrab. The return of traditionalism and political closure does not, however, mean that ostensibly ethno-nationalist or religious political projects are merely past-oriented. Frequently, traditionalist-conservative projects interact with, or are complemented by universalist or globalist, potentially uprooting languages, such as neoliberalism. Despite frequent localist and sovereigntist claims, populists equally take recourse to neoliberal narratives and tools, as in the case of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
The neo-populist, nationalist wave now seems partially shattered, most prominently in the US, where voters ousted Donald Trump, a far-right populist and anti-globalist, from power at the end of 2020. It remains however a force to be reckoned with in several countries. It consists, on the one hand, in a forceful ‘backlash’ or a countermovement with regard to the post-Second World War’s liberal-democratic imaginary, grounded in an internationalist order. Populists tend to question international institutions, universal human rights, and liberal democracy more generally as a political system. In this, populism has greatly contributed to the polarisation of democratic societies and the questioning of established power differentials by attacking the establishment. On the other hand, however, populism is reproducing or continuing specific, structural trends in these societies, not least those in relation to neoliberal, market-driven projects. The neoliberal drive in some populist projects in a way ‘brings home’ neoliberalism, by utilising it for the specific purposes of the populist project. For instance, Hungary’s ‘workfare state’ combines a defence of the national interest and ‘national survival’ with neoliberal, deregulating policies, such as the so-called Slave law.
As this issue shows, the relevance of this for political- and cultural-sociological analysis lies not least in bringing out the nuances and complexities of such political phenomena and of the return of traditionalism and localism more in general. Conservative populism, for instance, becomes then not simply the stark opposite of liberal democracy, or a political project in which power is heavily concentrated rather than equally distributed throughout society. The analysis of neo-conservatism and populism rather emphasises conflict on various fronts which inter alia reveals how these political phenomena at times come surprisingly close to the concerns of non-populist forces, either in terms of pursuing similar projects of power (for instance, regarding the control over the economy) or by seeking answers to the disruption caused by globalisation and international integration. A defining feature of populism, and of traditionalist and neoconservative politics more in general, is to eliminate conflict by means of reference to superior values, embodied by tradition or by the ‘eternal people’.
A very different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive approach to conflict is represented by expert knowledge and technocracy, equally discussed in this issue. Claims to values or distinctive political understandings of reality are in this way replaced by rational-technical approaches to society, supposedly resolving conflicts, but in many ways also displacing them. The intervention of experts and professionals often involves the re-composition of value claims, with as an important result the extension of the role and status of expertise in politics. The current paradoxical developments with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate the conflictuality of expert-based solutions. On the one hand, we witness the hope resulting from, and even celebration of, national vaccination programmes, and on the other, we see the scepticism and denial as expressed in street protests, as for example initiated by the German populist social movement Querdenken, which articulate a populist uproar against vaccination and scientific rationality. - These developments require great attention to the role of power, knowledge, and their reproduction. In the case of technocracy and experts, it is the ostensible neutrality and the technical superiority of expert solutions that legitimate expert power. Professionals may however equally engage in a more delicate translation of claims of justice into material projects of societal planning. Such projects, nevertheless, are unlikely to resolve political disputes once and for all.
Analysis in political- and cultural-sociological terms requests the engagement with complexity and the application of methods and methodologies that help conceptualising and analysing the clashes, conflicts, as well as affinities between different political projects, and the way these are understood and acted upon in society. In other words, how do ordinary actors – citizens, professionals, migrants – make sense of distinctive forms of politics and how to they engage with these? Approaches that stress forms of meaning-making and ordinary actors’ critical engagement with the world, featuring in some of the contributions in this issue, include Jeffrey Alexander’s strong program in cultural sociology as well as Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology. Both approaches offer, in different ways, concepts and tools to study the pluralistic nature of political life and the contrasting forms of meaning-giving involved.
The issue starts with an analysis of traditional festivities and their relation to power. While such festivities, and related traditions and rituals, have often been understood as a way of generating sociability, consensus, and social cohesion, rituals are equally instruments used by distinctive groups to define and consolidate identity, to strengthen existing differences and forms of stratification, and enhancing forms of political domination. Joaquim Rius-Ulldemolins, Verònica Gisbert and Carles Vera’s article on ‘Traditional festivities, political domination and social reproduction. Case analysis of Valencia’s Fallas’, interrogates the normative claims of such social-cultural events. In the authors’ account, the famous rituals of the Fallas of Valencia are not merely moments of symbolic investment and reproduction but also consist of disputes and power struggles to control public space and local power. The rituals involve complex social arenas for the struggle over social hegemony and display both forms of social mobilisation and cohesion, and processes of exclusion towards those considered enemies or outsiders. The rituals see the interaction between various elites, bringing different advantages to each of them, regenerating their social capital.
In Oyman Basaran’s ‘Crossroads of Competition: Markets, Politics, and The Hospitalization of Collective Circumcisions in Turkey’, tradition and rituals are taken from another angle, that of collective male circumcision in Turkey. In Basaran’s account, circumcisions are a way of establishing legitimacy for the ruling AKP party, clearly involving religious and traditionalist dimensions. What is striking, though, in Basaran’s analysis is AKP’s neoliberal approach, which has stimulated the hospitalisation of such collective practices. The ritual consists in the public act of ‘gift-giving’, boosting the legitimacy of the ruling party, specifically with lower social classes, but is equally a site for private capital accumulation and for the reproduction of major socio-economic inequalities.
Marie Meilvang discusses a different form of the legitimation of power in ‘Sewage system, treatment plants, ‘blue-green solutions’: Professionals in the historical justifications and planning of urban wastewater infrastructures’. Meilvang focusses on the role of professionals in transforming public discussions about urban space into material solutions. She emphasises, drawing on inter alia Laurent Thévenot’s work, how professionals have ‘issue-defining’ qualities that translate public concerns into professional solutions, and, in doing so, engage in an ‘art of composition’. Professionals help finding compromises on the management of public space, steering between ecological, recreational, market, industrial, and civic concerns. In Meilvang’s view, professionals do not only advance specific solutions in order to expand their own sphere of influence but take public justifications, and hence widely adhered to notions of justice, into due account in their material solutions to urban problems. Justifications make way, however, for specific forms of planning, and in this engage in a difficult balancing act between public justifications and functional solutions.
In Alica Retiova’s ‘The helping discourse in the “conflict over family” in Slovakia’, the journal’s issue turns once again to traditions and neo-conservatism in an analysis of the ‘conflict over the family’ in Slovakia. Slovakia is a distinctive case of a rather widespread phenomenon in the European context, that is, the discussion over the true nature and composition of the family. In various societies, neo-conservative forces question the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, gender ideas, and ‘same-sex marriage’. In the case of Slovakia (as also in other countries in the East-Central European region, such as Slovenia and Romania), this neo-conservative thrust has led to a referendum on the definition of marriage. Retiova’s focus is on the ‘helping discourse’ articulated by both neo-conservative and civic-liberal groups and movements. Drawing on both Boltanski and Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology and Alexander’s strong program of cultural sociology, Retiova analyses the discourses of people on the ground, directly engaged citizens. What is remarkable in Retiova’s account is that the helping discourses on both sides – the conservative as well as liberal-progressive ones – emphasise a similar moral and discursive repertoire of helping. It is this narrative of helping that makes people engage in the struggle over specific definitions of marriage and the position of women in society. This makes Retiova end on a positive note: the narrative of helping might be a basis for a constructive dialogue and the reconstruction of a more encompassing form of solidarity in societies that are increasingly polarised over moral issues.
The Book Review section starts with Linda Haapajärvi’s reflections on Michèle Larmont et al’s book Getting Respect. Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel.
The authors undertake the challenging task to explore systematically how ethno-racial exclusion is situated in different national societies, also with respect to differently positioned minority groups. As Haapajärvi discusses critically, a core question regards possible ways to compare differently racialised minorities such as ‘black Africans, black Brazilians and Arab Palestinians’. ‘Getting Respect’ focuses on the notion of stigma and its distinctive socio-cultural consequences. The book makes a compelling and provocative reading and is interesting to a range of international scholars.
In some ways, Mario Clemens’ review of Aikin and Talasse’s book Political Argument in a Polarized Age: Reason and Democratic Life fits very well with the editorial considerations on the unfettered rise of far-right populism: how is this linked to more fundamental neo-liberal economic interests, but also to the question of how to engage in productive and constructive debate across conflicting ideologies and values? As Clemens foregrounds, the years of far-right political leadership have already impacted political cultures. Even beyond or without Trump the normalisation of hate speech and everyday racism shapes our societies and how we talk to each other in years to come. Discussing Aikin and Talasse’s approach, Clemens scrutinises the virtue of democratic debate. The review presents details on how ‘fake news’ and ‘belief polarisation’ have hindered ‘logical reasoning’, opening avenues to ‘save democracy’.