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, January 7th, 2013 
During my sabbatical, I have had the luxury of reading in a leisurely fashion, without courses and writing projects in mind, going where my interests take me. It has been a pleasure and, as it happens, a fruitful practice. Without intention, it has led me to a new project, as I have already reported: an exploration of the unresolvable dilemmas built into the social fabric, the study of the social condition. Today, another example, the tensions between religion and politics in modern society: I returned to this problem reading Nachman Ben Yehuda’s latest book, Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism.
Ben Yehuda, my old friend and colleague, is studying in his book Jewish extremism in the Jewish state. He investigates deviance in the religious community as a way to analyze the conflict between the religious and secular in Israel. Central religious and political commitments in Israel as a matter of the identity of the national community pose serious problems. Not only has the recognition of Israel as a Jewish Democratic state become a key demand and obstacle in negotiations with the Palestinians: it has become a problematic challenge to the relationship among Israeli Jews. Nachman, an occasional Deliberately Considered contributor explores this. His central findings are presented in part 2 of Theocratic Democracy, on the deviance and the non-conformity of the ultra orthodox, and part 3 on cultural conflict in the media.
In part 2, a selection of “illustrative events and affairs” is presented, among many others: a 1958 affair surrounding the building of a swimming pool for mixed, male and female, bathing, in ultra-orthodox rendering the “abomination pool,” and the 1981 ultra-orthodox attack on an archaeological dig of the City of David, near the old city of Jerusalem, leading to a series of conflicts, ultimately resulting in the fine tuning of the law of archaeology. During 1985-6, there were Haredi attacks on advertising posters. Further, there were attacks on movie theaters open on the Saturday Sabbath, . . .
Read more: The Social Condition, Religion and Politics in Israel
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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