Tagged with sociology

George Osborne and ruling class decadence

George_Osborne_in_ChinaIf you think this is about the chancellor’s youthful larks with Natalie Rowe, you will surely be disappointed. What’s more important – and far more damaging – from the standpoint of British capital is his current game of footsie with the Chinese Communist Party. The very notion that not only is he letting the Chinese state build and run a cornerstone of Britain’s electricity generating capacity at Hinkley Point C, but will also be shovelling hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ cash their way as a sweetener is flabbergasting.

Forget the EU and its silly rules about straight bananas, if I was a UKIP’er I’d be hopping about in a panic because the chancellor has handed over a large chunk of British sovereignty to a COMMUNIST power! In fact, what is interesting about this deal is how the hard right, those doughty defenders of this sceptred isle, that die-in-a-ditch-for-queen-and-country brigade haven’t so much as raised a murmur of protest. Instead, it has been the liberal-left Keynesian Will Hutton to jab the boot in. Continue reading →

The sociological imagination revisited

Let me confess a sin. The opening chapter from C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination was the very first piece of required reading handed to me as an undergraduate. It also holds the distinction of beginning a chain of photocopied chapters and essays that were filed away in my waste paper bin. Like many first years, scholarly activity initially came second to binge drinking and intimate trysts with the toilet bowl. And so this classic statement of introductory sociology got the body swerve treatment, and Imagination remained one of the many canonical works I hadn’t got round to reading. Two decades on and I’m beginning university afresh, albeit now as a lecturer. So, belatedly, I was quite pleased that Monday morning’s introduction to social theory tutorial required I read the self-same chapter I unceremoniously dumped all those years ago.

What then is this thing, the ‘sociological imagination’? Using the state of 50s America as his jumping off point, Mills argued that the popular sense, the popular mood was suffused with a strange sense of unease. It was a condition in which people were told by their papers, their screens, their politicians and ideologues that they lived in a state of freedom. An American could be whoever they wanted to be and follow their own inclinations and desires. But the scope of this freedom was very much limited to every American’s private life. Hence the popular feeling, the hard-to-place sensation that all wasn’t safe and well was an outcome of the friction between the boxed-in character of private/familial social relations inside the home, and the uncertain, potentially terrifying buffeting of large, invisible, unknowable and impersonal social forces outside it. Continue reading →