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
By Chad Alan Goldberg, June 8th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: Lessons of the Wisconsin Uprising
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 20th, 2011 
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 . . .
Read more: Teaching the Classics: Reflections of an Ex-Marxist Wannabe
By Rafael Narvaez, August 10th, 2011 
The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
 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 . . .
Read more: Thinking like a Terrorist
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, January 10th, 2011 
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 . . .
Read more: The King’s Speech, the President’s Speech
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 17th, 2010 
I worry about the penetration of the market and its logic into all spheres of social life. I see this almost everywhere I turn. It’s the future of America that Republicans wish for, but it is my nightmare.
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 . . .
Read more: Is the Business of America Business?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 12th, 2010
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 . . .
Read more: Obama’s Dilemna: Responsible or Principled Politics?
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