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, equal educational opportunity, requires measurement, but the act of measurement can get in the way of real education. Making sure that funds distributed by an NGO to disaster victims can get in the way of getting the funds to the victims. Most generally, organizing to achieve some end establishes the conditions for those who have their particular interests in the organization itself to pursue their interests. NGOs often provide for a comfortable standard of living for its employees in impoverished parts of the world, sometimes this gets in the way of realizing organizational ends. But this isn’t a new development: Robert Michels described this in the early 20^th century, as “the iron law of oligarchy.” I suggest that we think of this as a dilemma built into the social order of things.

I think one of the most fundamental manifestations of the social condition animates the work of Erving Goffman. He explored the power of the Thomas theorem more intensively than any other social theorist. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Goffman was particularly interested in how in their expressive behavior people managed to define social reality.

The dilemma arises when people disagree about the reality, are ambivalent about it, or even want to flee from it. A prime example is the concept and apparent reality of race. It’s a social construction, as every college freshman comes to know. It’s a fiction, but a fiction that we cannot ignore, a fiction that we continue to treat as real. becoming a social fact. To pretend it doesn’t matter even as it does, is to flee from enduring social problems. But attending to the problems of race carefully has the unintended consequence of furthering its continued salience in social life. Recognize race and it continues to be real. Ignore race, and it is likely that you will ignore its continued negative effects. Controversies over affirmative action policies revolve around this dilemma of race.

I worry when political actors pretend that the complications of the social condition can be easily overcome, following one formula or another, with negative political consequences. This is what motivates me to explore the topic, why I feel compelled to do so. I am concerned that bad sociology also pretends that these tensions are easily resolved, often with a theoretical slight of hand. I am planning on working on this topic, developing a more adequate approach to the social condition, with my colleague, Iddo Tavory. We will start next semester by integrating the topic into our classes.

I will be teaching an undergraduate seminar on social interaction next semester and a graduate seminar on Erving Goffman. Although I regularly teach these courses, I have now my new special theme in mind. The dilemmas cannot be definitively solved, although schools of thought and political programs often purport to do so. Thus, the courses will present a critique of politics and sociology, along with an outline of a distinctive approach to the discipline.

As I teach these courses, I will be working with Tavory. We have already had some interesting discussions about the social condition and hope to continue them not only, as we already have, over coffee, drinks and meals, but also with our students. We are planning to visit each others classes next semester to this end, bringing students into the discussion.

I am particularly excited about this project. It makes the near end of my sabbatical more bearable. I think sociology can help us make sense of the human comedy and its tragedies; working on this directly with my colleague and our students makes the normal academic life well worth living. And note regular Deliberately Considered readers: this approach to sociology helps explain this magazine’s project of public discussion beyond intellectually gated communities.

I want to take this opportunity to respond to two recent blog posts which reflect upon the usefulness of electoral politics in the wake of the Wisconsin recall election: one by Jeffrey Goldfarb (“On Wisconsin,” June 6, 2012) and the other by Doug Henwood (“Walker’s Victory, Un-Sugar-Coated”). I am in basic agreement with Jeff Goldfarb’s main points, though I have a few of my own to add. With Doug Henwood, I am in strong disagreement.

Elections matter, as Jeff Goldfarb argues, and not just presidential elections. Elections are what enabled Republicans to gain power in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. Their electoral success in Wisconsin is what empowered them to legislate a radical assault on labor and public services there. Unless they are dislodged from power through elections, they will continue to use their power in familiar ways. But ironically, even as the right demonstrates the effectiveness of electoral politics, some radicals are now arguing that the left should abandon elections.

Following Walker’s victory on Tuesday, a longtime friend of mine wrote that Wisconsin’s unions should have organized a general strike instead of fighting Walkerism by means of elections. This is almost surely an erroneous conclusion. Exit polls showed that 38 percent of voters from union households voted for Walker in the recall election, suggesting that solidarity was neither broad nor deep enough to pull off a general strike. Moreover, rather than forcing a repeal of Walker’s anti-union legislation, a strike in Wisconsin would more likely have ended like the 1981 PATCO strike, another iconic instance of government union-busting that reportedly inspired Walker. I do not oppose strikes and other forms of disruptive protest under all circumstances; I only insist that anyone who cares about the consequences of their actions must use these methods intelligently. Their effectiveness depends on the ability of protesters to surmount a host of practical obstacles, well documented in sociological studies of social movements, including the likelihood of severe reprisals. Without some serious thinking about how protesters might withstand reprisals and overcome other obstacles, calls for a general strike—both those made in Wisconsin in 2011 and those made retrospectively now—are nothing but foolish bravado. Lastly, to insist on either disruptive protests or electoral politics is a false choice. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward showed in their classic study Poor People’s Movements, protest movements have historically been most successful when disruptive protests worked in tandem with—not as an alternative to—electoral volatility.

Doug Henwood, a contributing editor to The Nation and the publisher of Left Business Observer, echoed my friend’s rejection of elections in his blog: “channeling a popular uprising into electoral politics,” he commented, was a “horrible mistake.” In his view, unions would have been better off supporting a “popular campaign—media, door knocking, phone calling—to agitate, educate, and organize on the importance of the labor movement.” This suggestion dovetails with Jeff Goldfarb’s argument that progressives must work to shape “how the broad public understands the problems of our times” or, put differently, “to win hearts and minds.” But as Jeff understands, this kind of education is entirely compatible with and indeed a necessary part of electoral politics, and it is in fact precisely what Wisconsin union members were doing when they made a million phone calls and knocked on two million doors in the weeks before the recall election.

Just as “giving up on electoral politics, or blaming Obama, … is extraordinarily foolish,” in Jeff Goldfarb’s words, it is equally foolish to give up on or blame organized labor for the outcome of Wisconsin’s recall election. This is precisely what Henwood does in his blog post. Labor unions aren’t popular, he argues, because the anti-labor right is correct about them: rather than fight for the public interest or the needs of the working class as a whole, he insists, they are a special interest who care only about the wages and benefits of their “privileged” members. The right has always depicted labor unions this way, but it is astonishing to see an avowedly progressive intellectual embrace the most anti-labor elements of the right-wing vision about America. It suggests that progressives need to start within our own ranks if we want to shape how the public understands the problems of our times.

Contrary to Henwood’s sweeping condemnation, organized labor has used its political clout since the New Deal to promote full employment and decent wages and to improve health care, education, and housing—for all Americans, not just union members. Furthermore, Henwood ignores the efforts within the labor movement since the 1990s, documented by sociologists Kim Voss, Dan Clawson, and others, to reach out to groups that were previously alienated from unions (students, immigrants, and so forth), organize the unorganized with innovative grassroots strategies (e.g., the Justice for Janitors campaign), and build a new “social movement unionism.” Lastly, Henwood’s characterization of unions is contravened by their role in Wisconsin, where they spearheaded a broad-based recall movement that was motivated by far more than the loss of collective bargaining rights.

Rather than dismiss the entire labor movement, progressives should support this kind of unionism—indeed, they should join unions whenever and wherever possible. While recent events in Wisconsin and elsewhere have undeniably weakened organized labor, they have also shown the extraordinary commitment, energy, and public-spiritedness of union members. Progressives still need unions to help realize their political agenda.

While it is a mistake to give up on electoral politics or unions, we need to do more than participate in elections. We need to fight to ensure that the electoral process is fair and inclusive. One of the chief reasons that Wisconsin is so politically polarized at present is that what we have seen there is not ordinary partisan politics within stable and consensual rules. Rather, the radical right is using its monopoly on political power in Wisconsin to alter the electoral process itself. After the 2010 election Wisconsin was effectively a one-party state with virtually no checks or balances: Republicans controlled the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, and they held a majority on the state’s supreme court. Moreover, the agenda of Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders was closer to the radicalism of the Tea Party than the moderate conservatism of previous Republican administrations. They sought not merely to enact their agenda but to ensure that it could not be undone. By crippling public-sector unions and thereby eliminating an important source of funding for the political opposition, gerrymandering legislative districts, and passing a highly restrictive voter ID law that will skew the electorate in its favor, Walker’s party has worked ruthlessly to give itself a permanent advantage and to cement its grip on power for the foreseeable future. (Although the June 2012 recall election appears to have given Democrats a razor-thin majority in the state senate, they are likely to lose it in November when the new legislative districts will be in effect.) This strategy has implications at the national as well as the state level.

Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, speaking on Fox News in March 2011, boasted that if their efforts succeeded, Obama would have a “much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin [in 2012].” Add to this state-level corruption of the electoral process the untrammeled flow of corporate money into American politics as a result of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and the electoral dice begin to look frighteningly loaded. Effective resistance to this power grab will require both symbolic work and material resources. Progressives must work to win over hearts and minds but also to safeguard democratic institutions.

Although a progressive-labor coalition failed to unseat Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall election, and this failure will undoubtedly embolden those who wish to imitate him outside of Wisconsin, the struggle will continue in Wisconsin and elsewhere, at the state level and the national level. We must fight a war of position and not a war of maneuver. I can attest that for many of us Wisconsinites, the failure was heartbreaking and bitter, but we can perhaps take courage in the words that Max Weber famously uttered in 1918:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.

I am teaching the foundations course in our graduate program this year: “Classical Sociological Theory.” It’s a challenge. The last time I taught such a class was thirty years ago. Yet, it’s a challenge worth taking. Aside from the matters of departmental needs and resources, this is something that I believe will be particularly interesting for me, and also for my students. Over those thirty years, I have actively thought about the events of the day, and about my research, using foundational thinkers (though some more than others), “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It is exciting to revisit old friends, including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead, and spend some time, introducing them to students at the beginning of their professional training.

The first theorist was easy, Alexis de Tocqueville. I have taught an undergraduate class on his masterpiece, Democracy in America, frequently. My new book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, is not only informed by Tocqueville’s approach to culture and democracy. It is in a sense in dialogue with Tocqueville. And as the readers of Deliberately Considered know when I look at current events, I often interpret them using the insights of Tocqueville from understanding the nature of the American party system and for contemporary political debate, such as the struggle over workers’ rights in Wisconsin.

Karl Marx, the second theorist we examined in our class, is another matter.  Like many intellectuals since his time, I have a history with Marx. As I told the class in an introduction to our discussions last week, when I was young and especially critical, I thought that to be critical required one to read, know and act through Marx. I remember having a course in high school which I found particularly upsetting, “The Problems of Communism.” The author of the class text was J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the F.B. I. Talk about the state ideological apparatus, as the orthodox French Marxist, Louis Althusser, would have put it. In reaction against this nonsense, I found The Communist Manifesto in my local public library, and started my long relationship with Marx and Marxism.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Marxist, to paraphrase the terms of the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 50s and early 60s. But I was a Marxist wannabe. In high school, I found the propaganda I was fed so infuriating that I thought the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. But I didn’t have the knowledge or capacity to understand whether this friendship was genuine.

Bas-relief of an iron forger in Warsaw's MDM neighborhood (Plac Konstytucji) © Piotrus | Wikimedia Commons

As a college student, I developed my skills and expanded my knowledge. I became particularly enchanted with the Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse and his One Dimensional Man, as did many student radicals of the time. Indeed, I still find this neo-Marxist, heterodox school of thought quite enlightening, as my class will discover when we discuss Max Weber in a few weeks. Theirs is a cultural critique of capitalism, which has its problems, but also carries important insights. I think of the position as left-wing Weberian thought, informed by Weber’s understanding of the relationship between the economy, the state and various cultural endeavors. But when it came to Marx’s focus on productive forces and the centrality of class, I tried, even pretended to be convinced, but I never was.

My failure as a Marxist was consummated when I did research in Poland. I saw that environmental degradation wasn’t controlled under socialism, that, in fact, it was worse. Sexual and gender equality were more distant ideals under communism than they were under capitalism. Bourgeois democracy was real, while people’s democracy wasn’t, or, at least, democracies of the U.S. and Western Europe were much closer to democratic ideals than were the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I came to think that these shortcomings were not unrelated to Marxist analysis and politics.

I didn’t talk about these political issues in class. I just maintained that despite my history with Marx, I think of him as a great 19^th century social thinker, along with others, and that our task was to try to understand his position as it might inform ours today. Our task was to learn Marx, not to bury him (as was the goal of my high school communism text).

In the class, I want to let the important works of early sociology speak for themselves, without imposing my specific and often idiosyncratic interpretations. With Marx I thought the way to do this was to ironically tell the class a little about my “personal relationship” with him. I’m pretty sure the session was successful, but I do have a regret.

When I explained that I had been a Marxist wannabe, I didn’t adequately explain why my project failed. I have concluded that Marx’s central notion that man is the producing animal is too thin, and that the sociological implication he draws from this notion, i.e. that the history hitherto is the history of class struggles, is reductive. He presents important insights using this frame, but too many important issues are best understood outside the frame, including the sorts of issues I have focused on.

Yet, and this yet is important, Marx demonstrated that class matters and how it matters. From the sociological point of view, this was his great accomplishment, one that is important for scholarship and has great political importance today. Class is not an illusion, as many on the American political scene maintain. Class analysis, informed by Marx, provides a way to systematically study inequality. Such study in an America where the rich are getting rich, and the poor are getting poorer, is of the foremost importance.

As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.

De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than the principles of equality and freedom.

My point is that Obama is right about the strength of this country. As Max Weber has demonstrated in his great comparative studies of the world religions and in his investigations of economy and society, ideas matter. The powerful Soviet empire collapsed not only under external forces, but primarily because its institutional order was based on unsustainable principles. The same can be said about right and left-wing dictatorships, which also tend toward instability and collapse. And also in the U.S, the basic political principles and ideas matter as they have proven to provide stable support for the institutional system, and thus underlie the country’s considerable strength.

With this in mind, let me follow Sherlock Holmes’s method and think like a terrorist. If it is true that ideas are the main strength of, arguably, the strongest country in the world, then, the terrorist’s primary targets should not be military, economic or infrastructural. They would have to be ideological. If de Tocqueville is correct, as most experts agree, the terrorist would focus his or her attacks on the principles of equality and liberty to erode the country’s institutional apparatus, to create unrest and systemic instability.

To accomplish this, the terrorist would have to target key decision-makers, beginning with the President and the members of Congress. The terrorist would try to encourage them to change the basic rules, t0 diminish the role of the judiciary, to suspend principles such as habeas corpus,  to undermine the fair treatment of presumed criminals and the humane treatment of actual criminals, and to undermine the principle that the country has to wage wars according to established rules and conventions. A goal of such an extremist would be for the U.S. to wage war following undemocratic means, fostering a sense that legality can be dispensed with. Another front of attack would involve freedom of expression and the free circulation of ideas. The terrorist would hope to increase the degree of policing and surveillance of private information. Executive capacities should be transferred to specialized branches in the military and to intelligence agencies, as dictatorships do. Freedom of worship should be dealt with also, preventing religious groups from houses of worship, for example.

For all this, the terrorist would have to enlist, above all, his or her most radical opponents. With their help, the terrorist can weaken the foundations of democratic practice and social order of America, turning the country against the very principles that sustain its distinctive social order.

Years ago, I would have been convinced that such a plan would be impossible, even ridiculous. But after George Bush, I began to wonder. And even under Obama, I am concerned.

The recent movie “The King’s Speech,” has been well and broadly reviewed for the wonderful acting of stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. The film recounts the story of the arduous treatment of King George VI of England’s debilitating stutter. While the film tells a story of what media pundits call “an unlikely friendship” between Lionel Logue, an Australian actor manqué who has developed a speech defects practice and the imminently to-be-crowned British monarch, it  addresses many issues relevant to the mystery of sovereignty itself. As we approach President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address, and think about our own executive’s voice, “The King’s Voice” can be gainsaid for the way it animates key sociological insights into the nature of political legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy, and the role of the leader’s rhetoric in binding a nation together (especially a nation at war).

Ever since Ernst Kantorowicz analyzed the medieval theological innovation of the “king’s two bodies,” (a theology that managed the contradictory ideas that the king is divine and thus immortal and that the king is mortal and thus vulnerable to corruption and disease), we have recognized the ways in which real-world kings and presidents have been maneuvering to appear human and transcendent simultaneously. Other sociological and anthropological work on transcendence, political ritual, war and legitimacy (Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz spring to mind) has made us conscious of the ways that rulers use their bodies and their voices to demonstrate and symbolize the collectivities they rule.  Historically they have done so by highlighting their sovereign exceptionalism. At the same time, an American democratic diffidence toward transcendence and the divine has also insisted that our leaders be “just like us.”

“The King’s Speech” draws our attention to the role of the voice of the monarch in addressing the nation and, in moments of national peril, literally constituting the nation as a self-conscious entity ready to make sacrifices. George VI, catapulted by the abdication of his older brother into being king, must make an important speech as Britain goes to war in September 1939. He stutters badly under the best of circumstances and struggles to make his voice perform its authority. Meanwhile, the elected government of Britain actually takes the country to war, apparently accepting this symbolic division of sovereign labor as the King addresses the nation by way of his radio speech. The film plays with the liminal moments of sovereignty – changes of tone and posture and eye gaze are immediate upon the death of George V with his wife and sons in the room and the immediate transfer of sovereignty from George V to Edward VIII; more changes later upon George VI accepting his brother’s abdication. The film appears to be more explicit about democratic challenges to royalty in highlighting the ironic and playful banter engaged in by Lionel Logue as a commoner who “talks back” to a king.  That Lionel, the commoner, can speak easily and Bertie, the king cannot is indeed ironic – but the film stops there in its deconstruction of the British monarchy.  It, too, remains in the thrall of the sovereign sacred.  Nevertheless, the film brilliantly focuses on the non-trivial qualities of speech, voice, gesture, and presence in constituting legitimate authority.

As Barack Obama, a wartime president, prepares his own exhortation to the nation, commentators have already anticipated the importance of the sovereign voice. Writing in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter notes that the nation needs rousing and that: “Fortunately, we have a president with the rhetorical skills to rouse us. Unfortunately, he hasn’t so far. Obama’s biggest mistake in his first two years was that he took Mario Cuomo’s famous dictum—“you campaign in poetry and govern in prose”—too much to heart. To succeed, he needs to govern in poetry, too. He needs to use the music of his voice to sell math and science and engineering and entrepreneurship and all the other skill sets we let deteriorate when our brightest college graduates went to work on Wall Street.”

Alter is right about the need to govern in poetry, but he’s wrong about the substantive referent. The sovereign voice is domesticated and profanized when it speaks of math, science, and entrepreneurship, no matter how important these things are for society. The core of sovereignty lies with its authority to wage war.

Ultimately, as Max Weber taught us, political legitimacy relies upon the constant reiteration of the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of force – violence, the war and the nation bound together, the nation heeding the voice of the sovereign, for better or for worse. The United States of America is still fighting a war that has uncertain enemies, uncertain goals and uncertain achievements.  Barack Obama may speak of many things in his State of the Union address, but he must find a way to re-authorize the war that the nation is currently waging, to make it necessary and legible for his nation. Unlike George VI, Obama has been known to be a brilliant speaker, but both sovereigns have shared the mandate of legitimizing war in the eyes and ears of their nations with their voice.

In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has chosen Cathie Black to be Chancellor of the largest public school system in the United States. She is not an educator, never went to public schools, has never worked on school issues and didn’t send her children to public schools. But the mayor still confidently declared her to be the most qualified person, as The New York Times reported, calling Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.”  Hers are market, not educational, qualifications for a management position in the NYC public school district.

In my and the country’s second city, Chicago, where I studied for my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in the meanwhile, smaller issues are at stake, a local battle of symbols.  The Chicago Transit Authority is selling naming rights “for rail lines and stations, bus routes, retail concessions, and special events. Even the venerable (sic) CTA logo will be on the auction block,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

And where I studied as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany, because of a budget crisis, five humanities programs, including French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater, have been suspended, apparently because these programs don’t contribute to the university’s and the individual’s bottom line. (link) Such majors don’t attract many students, and those who are so attracted upon graduation have trouble finding work.  But how can there be a university without the humanities? (link)  This hits close to home for me. Albany is the place where I decided to make the unusual move that has defined my career, starting my research by studying the sociology of theater.

How can it be that the business of the New York City school system and of my alma mater is primarily business, and not education?  This is disturbing.

The naming of public places is another issue.  The CTA faces a practical problem, needing to pay for a public good that requires public investment and maintenance that exceeds public capacity, especially in a troubled economy.  The authority recently concluded a $3.9 million deal with Apple Inc. to refurbish the North/Clybourn Red Line stop, partly in exchange for a future naming-rights contract for the station, which is near a new Apple Store.  I am not excited about the prospect, but it is a question of balance and judgment.  And the Tribune reports that the CTA “will be sensitive to avoid naming rights that are in poor taste or at all questionable. So don’t worry about seeing a Viagra Express or Miller Lite bus route on Rush Street.”

I think market penetration into previously protected public domains should be a matter of careful judgment and public discussion.  Sometimes the market can support activities that otherwise may be difficult if not impossible, perhaps DC and the CTA.  But sometimes it works against important autonomous values.  We should realize when goods other than market ones are at stake, and need to be protected and cultivated.  This is something I have been working on for much of my career, most explicitly in my second book, On Cultural Freedom.

As we judge and discuss this problem, we should draw upon commonsense and social science theory and research.  On the one hand, the traditional wisdom tells us that there is a time and place for everything, and on the other, a central thesis of the modern discipline of sociology examines a key characteristic of modern society as social differentiation.  The founders of the discipline made this central to their intellectual projects, from Max Weber’s notion of the institutional differentiation, to Karl Marx’s and Emile Durkheim’s explorations of the division of labor, to Georg Simmel’s analysis of individuation.

I think the centrality of this aspect of modern life is most clearly explored by Erving Goffman in his classic, Asylums, where he explores the rule by closely studying its breach in total institutions.  In normal society, different people do different things at different times.  When you are with family, you act one way, at work another way, with friends, yet another.  Depending on the situation, different rules, different expectations and different behaviors are forthcoming.  Commonsense and sociology agree.

Yet, in recent years, this solid bedrock of normal existence has been challenged by the workings of our economy and by the nature of our media environment, and I fear these challenges feed on each other.

Max Weber, author of "Politics as Vocation"

It sometimes feels like Barack Obama has studied Max Weber’s classic, “Politics as a Vocation,” a bit too carefully.   In his lecture, given in the aftermath of the tragedy of World War I, Weber made a strong distinction between an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of ultimate ends  – between an ethics that is based in getting practical things done politically, serving one’s constituency’s interests and understandings, and an ethics of principled politics, true to one’s core values.

Such a distinction leads Obama to clearly distinguish between an ethics of responsible governance and an ethics of imaginative and eloquent political campaigning, including attractive depictions of ultimate ends.  Obama’s reticence to use the poetry of campaigning, while he is engaged in the prose of governing, has meant that he hasn’t attacked those who have viciously attacked him.  It is only now in campaign mode that he is responding.  There are pressing questions:  has his been a responsible approach? And has his position made Obama’s (and his supporters) ends more distant?

Thus,  Brian Beutler, in a post on Talking Points Memo, applauded President Obama in his speech on the economy of September 8 in Cleveland for his direct attack on John Boehner, criticizing him “by name no less than eight times,” but laments “Complicating matters for Democrats is that, well, few Americans know who “Mr. Boehner” is. That might not be the case if Obama had given speeches like this starting a year ago. But there are still several weeks to go until election day.”

And Bob Herbert, in his op-ed. piece on Tuesday, was very pleased but also bewildered,  “ Mr. Obama linked the nation’s desperate need for jobs to the sorry state of the national infrastructure in a tone that conveyed both passion and empathy, and left me wondering, ‘Where has this guy been for the past year and a half?’”

The Method to his Madness?

Yet, it should be understood that there is a method, or at least a significant strategic decision, to the President’s madness.  He knew that he might need at least a few of his opponents support to pass his legislative agenda, and he also hoped that he could forge a broad coalition in support of necessary social, political and economic change, a hope that has been frustrated with Republicans calculating that complete opposition to all proposed reforms was the road out of their political darkness.  In his campaign, he is now willing to call them on this.

But even now, while attacking, Obama  stands by his centrist principle of bringing all people of good will together drawing upon multiple perspectives and principles to forge a commonly agreed upon approach.  He advanced in his September 8 speech one important variation on the Labor Day theme.

“This country is emerging from an incredibly difficult period in its history -– an era of irresponsibility that stretched from Wall Street to Washington, and had a devastating effect on a lot of people.  We have started turning the corner on that era.  But part of moving forward is returning to the time-honored values that built this country:  hard work and self-reliance; responsibility for ourselves, but also responsibility for one another.  It’s about moving from an attitude that said “What’s in it for me?” to one that asks, “What’s best for America?  What’s best for all our workers?  What’s best for all of our businesses? What’s best for all of our children?”  (Applause.)

These values are not Democratic or Republican.  They are not conservative or liberal values.  They are American values.  As Democrats, we take pride in what our party has accomplished over the last century:  Social Security and the minimum wage; the GI Bill and Medicare; civil rights and worker’s rights and women’s rights.  (Applause.)  But we also recognize that throughout our history, there has been a noble Republican vision as well, of what this country can be.  It was the vision of Abraham Lincoln, who set up the first land grant colleges and launched the transcontinental railroad; the vision of Teddy Roosevelt, who used the power of government to break up monopolies; the vision of Dwight Eisenhower, who helped build the Interstate Highway System.  And, yes, the vision of Ronald Reagan, who despite his aversion to government, was willing to help save Social Security for future generations — working with Democrats.  (Applause.)

These were serious leaders for serious times.  They were great politicians, but they didn’t spend all their time playing games or scoring points.  They didn’t always prey on people’s fears and anxieties.”

Dilemma and Promise

Obama has as an ultimate end of moving the center to the left, of turning the political debate from big government versus limited government, to good government versus bad government, as I explored in my last post.  To do this, he seeks to include Republicans and the Republican tradition.  Thus, he must praise them, and not just attempt to bury them, as many of his critics on the left, including me in my less deliberate moments, would like.  This is the dilemma, but also the great promise, of his political position.