By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 5th, 2013 
Goin’ Fishing? Not quite, but things here at Deliberately Considered are slowing down for the summer, as I go to teach in the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, and then to take part in a research project on Regime and Society in Eastern Europe (1956 – 1989) in Sofia, Bulgaria. After three years of regular, often daily, publishing, posts will be less frequent until September. At that time, we will be presenting Deliberately Considered in a new form.
Here some quick thoughts on topics I would like to write about now, but don’t have the time or energy to do so thoroughly.
On Egypt: I am fascinated by the grayness of it all: the unbearable grayness of being? I don’t see heroic figures or villains. Rather I see mortals, tragic figures, facing huge challenges, beyond their capacity to address.
Most objective observers are labeling the latest turn of events as a coup, but that seems to me to be too simple. Equally simplistic is the view of those who see the events as a clear political advance. A democratically elected leader, President Morsi, was overthrown by the military, not a good thing. But there was a significant popular movement, perhaps representing more than fifty per cent of the public, demanding the resignation of Morsi and new elections, and a resetting of the political order, which didn’t include them and their opinions, and didn’t provide the mechanisms for recalling the President. Yet, a legitimate President, from the point of view of many of the over fifty percent that voted for him, has been removed by the military. While I am no fan of military interventions in politics, I know that there is a real danger when a party confuses its particular interests with the common good. Yet, while lack of inclusion was a key problem in the Muslim Brotherhood led regime, it continues to be a problem as reports today indicate a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
On Obama, the NSA and Snowden: I am disappointed, dismayed and irritated. National security is the one arena in which I have been least . . .
Read more: Summertime and the Posting is Slowing: Notes on Egypt, and on Obama, the NSA and Snowden, and the Social Condition and the Ironies of Consequence
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 11th, 2013 
“There are more than 8 million ordinary objects in this city that carry within them a sense of its inimitable expression. They express its thundering diversity or a thorough particularity; they connect us to other places, past and present or moor us to the here and now; they enliven or aggravate daily life; they epitomize the city at large or hold true to one of its neighborhoods. They may be small, held, and mobile, or large, unwieldy, and stationary. Well-designed or just well-used, they live and survive, creating a ripple of small meanings.”
With this declaration my colleague, Radhika Subramaniam, the chief curator of Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, invited New School faculty, including me, to contribute to her unusual show at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery planned for this summer, “Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story.”
Radhika hopes a diverse group — designers, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, writers and musicians — will identify meaningful material objects in everyday life and use them to tell the story of our city. I am intrigued. She has provoked me to think about my material environment and how it speaks to me, and the broader theoretical and political implications of this.
As the author of The Politics of Small Things, I also have special interest. My “small things” was inspired by Arundhati Roy’s in the novel The God of Small Things: gestures and interactions among people as they define and create their social world, constituting their freedom and dignity, and power. In contrast, Radhika is pushing us to think about things material, not human, given in nature and shaped by men and women.
And indeed I have been thinking about such matters recently, taking part in The Politics of Materiality Conference at The New School, listening to an intriguing lecture by Nicolas Langlitz, “Homo Academicus Among Other Cooperative Primates,” attempting to make sense of the research and writing of Bruno Latour, pushed by a number of my challenging students, aided by attending Iddo Tavory’s class . . .
Read more: An Everyday New York Masterpiece: The Inconspicuous, Understated, Wise, 9/11 Memorial of the Union Square Subway Station
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 3rd, 2013 
Andrea Hajek’s post on the seamy side of satire and the Italian elections and Iddo Tavory’s post on humor and the social condition got me thinking about the promise and perils of political humor. This has fascinated me ever since I made it a nightly habit to tune into Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as a refuge from the madness that were the George W. Bush years.
I have wondered: why has my regular dose of political satire seemed so essential to my mental health? Why has it been so appealing to so many of us? On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend too much time wondering. Most scholarly accounts of humor seem to miss the point, and they are decidedly not entertaining. I feel like responding to the authors of such serious reflections: please just relax and enjoy.
But Iddo’s analysis, which is part of our on-going dialogue on the social condition, seemed to hit just the right notes: it moved our deliberations on the social condition forward, as it helped me understand important developments in global political culture, and it had a light informative touch, focused on a joke. A Jewish father warns his son not to marry outside of the faith, finding confirmation in his warning when the son’s new wife takes the faith too seriously, insisting that her husband no longer work on Saturdays, both the Jewish Sabbath and the most important day of his father’s business week.
The joke is funny in the telling. Social structure as it is manifested in interaction makes the “funny telling” possible. Social structure – the family, religion and the economy – informs the structure of the joke, which sets the stage for the performance. As Tavory maintains: “If we attend to the structure of humor, we can see that jokes work precisely because they shine light on dilemmas that are built into the social fabric.”
Political satirists work with this, for better . . .
Read more: The Personal and Political Significance of Political Satire
By Iddo Tavory, January 11th, 2013 
Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.”
As every undergraduate student learns after her first introduction to sociology, our world is socially constructed. People constantly give meaning, together, to a world that may not have an intrinsic meaning to it. In its deepest form, the one that Berger and Luckmann saw so well over 45 years ago, social construction is an existential drama. It is not only that, as undergraduates quickly learn to recite, identities are constructed by a social world (gender and race being the favorite examples). This is, of course, true and important. It is, rather, that our entire existence, as so far as it is meaningful, must be socially constructed and re-constructed. Like a shoddy plane over the void of meaninglessness, we construct a meaningful world—a world in which human existence, institutions and identities make sense. We may not do it actively the whole time, as, after all, we are born already into a social world that precedes us, and so into a world of meaning. And yet, meaning is always in danger of collapse. In liminal situations—when planes hit the twin towers, when children are slaughtered in their school, or simply when a loved one dies—we suddenly see how rickety our world is.
The second sociological project is that of “social effects,” the intellectual project that has come to define most sociological work. Here, sociologists note that we encounter social categories and processes as a reality that is beyond us. And this world that we encounter is far from equal. Sociologists thus study how social categories predictably affect the way different people encounter their worlds, and their chances to thrive within them. To take a particularly poignant example, Devah Pager . . .
Read more: The Social Condition: The Third Intellectual Project
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 13th, 2012 
I am embarking upon a new project, the investigation of the social condition, highlighting dilemmas that are inevitably built into the social fabric, and exploring the ways people work to address them. Some examples:
It is obviously important for a democratic society to provide equal opportunity for all young people. The less privileged should have the advantages of a good education. This is certainly a most fundamental requirement for equal opportunity. On the other hand, it is just as certain that a good society, democratic and otherwise, should encourage and enable parents to provide the best, to present the world as they know and appreciate it, to their children: to read to them, to introduce them to the fine arts and sciences, and to take them on interesting trips, both near and far. But not all parents can do this as effectively, some have the means, some don’t. Democratic education and caring for one’s children are in tension. The social bonds of citizenship and the social bonds of family are necessarily in tension. This tension, in many variations, defines a significant dimension of the social condition.
Another dimension of the social condition was illuminated in a classic lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” by Max Weber: the tension between what he called the “ethics of responsibility” versus the “ethics of ultimate ends.” We observed an iteration of this tension in the debate about Lincoln, the movie. In politics there is always a tension between getting things done, as Weber would put it, responsibly, and being true to ones principles. Ideally the tension is balanced, as it was portrayed in the film: Lincoln the realist enabled Thaddeus Stephens, the idealist, to realize his ends in less than idealistic ways. A wise politician, Weber maintained, has to know how to balance, ideal with realism. But this tension goes beyond individual judgment and political effectiveness. Establishing the social support to realize ideals is necessary, but sometimes the creation of such supports make it next to impossible for the ideals to be realized. Making sure that educational ideals are realized, for example, . . .
Read more: The Social Condition
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