Once again the season of the anti-sociologists is upon us…[a]curious admixture of illogic and sentiment…makes up the creed and canons of anti-sociology.” Those words come from Robert K Merton, writing in the New York Times in July 1961. They are a timely reminder that some bad ideas never die. They simply find new sponsors and… Read More »
Wherever you stand on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard not to accept that it has created a serious crisis of legitimacy for the liberal social and political order… …The consequence was a set of state-backed interventions that were neither rational nor legal but harked back to an earlier time of traditional… Read More »
An unexpected element of post-pandemic reflections has been the revival of interest in the work of Ivan Illich, a significant public intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s, whose star has waned somewhat in recent decades… What does it do to a society when the very definition of health and illness comes to be monopolized by… Read More »
Today’s moral panic is about AI and machine learning. Governments around the world are hastening to adopt positions and regulate what they are told is a potentially existential threat to humanity – and certainly to a lot of middle class voters in service occupations. However, it is notable that most of the hype is coming… Read More »
Edgar Morin is probably the most influential French sociologist that the English-speaking world has never acknowledged… In part, this is likely to be because he does not fit the image of French sociology that has dominated the English-speaking academic world. Morin has always taken his own line on major issues of the day rather than… Read More »
I am not a member of Collateral Global, but they were sufficiently interested in what a sociologist might have to say about pandemics as to invite me to be interviewed by Jennie Bristow, another UK sociologist, on their behalf. We discussed the role of the historical and sociological imagination in making sense of the past… Read More »
A small group of us have recently been working informally on a hypothesis that we have called ‘social precognition’. In summary, this proposes that the world of STEM cannot make any major advances that have not already been imagined by creative artists. Science fiction precedes science… However, my researches have raised the troubling thought that… Read More »
…it seems that theory modules are being squeezed out of UK sociology degrees because students find them boring…Is part of the problem to do with how we teach theory? …Theory is not an abstract exercise but an attempt to deal with real and urgent problems. It is also dangerous. The trite narrative of ‘dead white… Read More »