A New Millennium

‘The New Sociological Imagination,’ a special issue of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, is a strange creature that only this specific historical moment at the beginning of the twenty-first century could have produced. In it, co-editors Hector Raul Solis-Gadea and Diane E. Davis gathered eight articles on the challenges posed to sociology by the new millennium, written by the most prominent social thinkers, among them Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Lévy, and Alain Touraine. What makes this project so interesting, though, is the timing of publication: The articles were conceived as a series of talks to be given at the New School for Social Research in New York from November 2000 to May 2001 (see D. Davis, ‘Preface’ 109). But the book version was not released until spring 2005. Acknowledged in the editors’ writing, the ‘emotional aftermath of 9/11’ (D. Davis, ‘Preface’ 111) delayed the publication for understandable reasons but also left it in a hybrid position in terms of historical specificity: Written pre-9/11, the essays took a positive view of the new millennium that collided with the pessimistic views of a post-9/11 historical reality evoked by terror and grief. In 2005 the essays appeared nonetheless, accompanied by explications of the shifting realities of the historical moment: What had changed from pre- to post-9/11, and how did this influence sociology?

Under the heading ‘Re-Examining the View from the Year 2000,’ Diane Davis makes explicit the mission statement of the essays as an examination of ‘the fundamental shifts in social practices, cultural discourses, business tactics, legitimization strategies, and national or social identities that have accompanied intensified changes in technology, global capitalism, and the partial eclipse of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis for understanding and taking political action’ (‘Speaking’ 294). While most of the essays profess a positive and hopeful outlook in their call to find sociological methods engaging the realities of liquid modernity, globalized capitalism, and a hypermediated world, Diane Davis points out that Zygmunt Bauman does not share in the slightly more optimistic spirit of the other contributors – his essay is darker, more somber, and questions the effectiveness of sociology to deal with the new and drastically changed world.