THINKING BEYOND SOCIOLOGY: THE DIALECTIC OF POLITICS

For the discipline of sociology, it is the social that is said to determine consciousness or subjectivity. This is manifested in culture, which is determined both internally (socialisation) and externally (social constraints). In this manner both structure and agency determine consciousness (e.g. as indicated by types of social action in the work of Max Weber). There is no freedom to think outside the social except in utopias, which are precisely disconnected from social reality. The social is thereby naturalised. As a result there is no room for thinking emancipatory politics, as there is no room for excessive thought. This way of reasoning results directly from the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, which insisted on the social (i.e. the centrality of difference and the ownership of property) as the foundation of life and human freedom (e.g. in the writings of Edmund Burke) as opposed to the idea of natural equality (in Locke and Rousseau), which was understood as only subsequently altered in the social. This conservative idea and its admixture with empiricism, the equally conservative nature of which I have already noted, provide the foundation of academic sociology, especially in the Anglophone world.

The insistence on the social itself as the core of life implies prioritising both representation over thought and social objectivism over political choice. To think the excess in emancipatory politics is to think beyond the social; it is to tear oneself away from the habitual in order to think universal humanity.