XVI World Congress of Sociology - The Quality of Social Existence in a Globalising World
23-29 July 2006 - Durban - South Africa

ISA - International Sociological Association

RC14 - Globalization, Democracy, and Exclusion

The intellectual in the era of globalization, beyond Mannheim’s “intelligentsia”

The extolling of the role of the intelligentsia by Karl Mannheim derives from his consideration that only in the present era has the figure emerged of an intellectual who is relatively independent of social conditioning. The critical and detached attitude of Mannheim’s intellectual, in whichever field of human activity they take into consideration, must tend to a ‘synthesis’ of various positions that can in no way be absolute or definitive. The institutions responsible for research and teaching are, however, no longer able to train the contingent personality, i.e. that configuration of mutable characteristics that enable adaptation to a society in continuous transformation. Moreover, the moral and ideological vacuum bequeathed by postmodern society is under by from neo-prophetic figures emerging under the banner of an alleged pluralism. We are thus placed in the objectively difficult position of having to discern the intellectual in a society that apparently does not enable their training.
The intellectual that we are proposing, and of whom we feel the need, is one who does not eschew social analysis of mass culture. He also should takes a critical view of the structure of the media in order not only to refute the status quo it but also to propose hypotheses for effective social change. Such a training requires a method, that we have termed “analysis of coherency”, without which the intellectual could easily become the victim and creator of yet another ideological stance.

XV World Congress of Sociology - The Social World in the 21st Century: Ambivalent Legacies and Rising Challenges
7-13 July 2002 - Brisbane - Australia

ISA - International Sociological Association

The utility vs. the interpretation of the classics II

The Coherency’s Analysis: An Updating of Sociological Thought

Classic sociological thought has often produced sharply contrasting definitions and interpretations; it is thus necessary to elaborate a methodology capable of linking historical research and the sociology of knowledge.
Coherency analysis aims at finding the interpretative methods the author under investigation had at his/her disposal and to ascertain if such methods were used in his/her research.
Adopting Paul Felix Lazarsfeld’s concept of “operationalization” of concepts, the researcher must create an interpretative model adopting the instruments supposedly used by the author in his/her socio-cultural context. In order to make up such a model the researcher should elaborate a cognitive “void” akin to Kurt H. Wolff’s theory of “surrender to”. The researcher must not identify himself with the object of his study nor rely on anthropological preconceptions: he should carefully study historical processes according to the interpretative categories of the author and his/her historical context. Coherency analysis should reveal the inconsistencies between the author’s and the researcher’s frame of mind, between the instruments available and the ones actually used, between ideological and “viable” standpoints.
Coherency analysis could lend consistency to previous theories by updating rather than revising them.
The use of this method does not imply renouncing one’s critical function as a sociologist, but favouring propositive rather interpretative potentialities.
By using “coherency analysis” one could claim that Jean Jacques Rousseau was not a forerunner of the French Revolution, as some contemporary critics keep maintaining.

36th World Congress - Social Change in the Age of Globalization
7-11 July 2004 - Beijing - China

IIS International Institute of Sociology

S040 – Global Studies – Global Knowledge? - Cultural, Institutional and Global Issues of Knowledge Mediated in International Studies and Courses

Walter Lippmann’s Concept of Public Opinion: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge

In 1922, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) the American journalist and essayist, after an intense career as a politician and diplomat, published the essay The Public Opinion. In this essay, he takes the reader on a voyage articulated by examples and historical facts, to illustrate how the images and ideas upon which individuals and groups base their behavior, represents public opinion par excellence. Reality, too vast to be completely accessible, is distorted by a series of factors that can be applied both to individual and context. Humans create at the cognitive level a sort of “pseudo-environment” between themselves and the real environment, where the orientation instruments are prejudices and stereotypes. Nevertheless, the need to go beyond the subjective micro-organism pushes the individual to use the means of communication which then become the mouthpiece for that portion of reality that is inaccessible or cannot be confirmed by the individual.
Human behavior is organized on the basis of stimuli created by the “pseudo-environment”, but the consequences impact on the real environment. Therefore, we have a representation of the real world through the “pseudo-environment” and stimuli and reactions created by the “pseudo-environment”, with consequences on the real environment, all in a continuous and circular relationship.
From this process, where the media is the means to manipulate knowledge, comes an inevitable “construction” of reality. In order to recognize fact from fiction, a path of study focused on researching the error, rather than one to confirm the hypothesis must be completed.
Knowledge for Lippmann is a possible, though not inevitable, accessible, winding journey, to be conquered, however, through the collective spirit and the individual’s will. Knowledge is that to which one must be inclined to construct a better world, and to achieve a true democracy. It is a cognitive effort against nature, for which education takes on a determinative role even if hindered by the means of communication. In fact, for Lippmann Public Opinion is a negation of knowledge.
Walter Lippmann’s biography and cultural development do not lead one to define him as a sociologist of knowledge, but after eighty years, his analyses, are still a point of reference for the numerous theories on the effects of the media, and a large part of the fundamental concepts of Sociology of Knowledge – successively systematized by Karl Mannheim with the publication of Ideology and Utopia in 1929 – can be found in The Public Opinion, if the reading of the text is cleansed, in the Mannheim manner, of the author’s strong ideological imprint.