How Optimal Marginality Created a Public Sociologist

Public sociology runs against the grain of the professionalizing logic of modern academic disciplines (Burawoy, 2005). We do not have adequate theories about how this kind of intellectual activity is produced and sustained in the era of the research university.1 Scholarship on particular public sociologists is often tinged with either hero worship or giant killing. ‘Great thinker’ or ‘excluded genius’ tropes get in the way of systematic explanations of how sociologists actually come to write and speak to the public. Sociology today is a profession embedded in modern research universities, having left behind its origins in conservative religious defenders of the medieval traditionalism and hierarchy (Nisbet, 1952), the positivist sects of Saint-Simon and Comte (Coser, 1965), social work reform (Deegan, 1988), and the grand theories of its founders Durkheim, Weber, and Spencer. With the creation and expansion of tenure within research universities, most young scholars see becoming a professor as a career path, not a vocation aimed at changing the world. This is true, even though many young scholars are recruited into the discipline through political engagement. Public sociologists who see their primary goal as engaging the public with ideas will always be a minority in the discipline because of the reward structures that encourage ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ over ‘public’ and ‘critical’ sociology (Burawoy, 2005). Traditional public sociologists who speak and write to the public based on their specialized knowledge emerge as scholars establish their credentials and careers close to the centre of the field. The kind of general interdisciplinary, normative, and best-selling books like that of Fromm's Escape from Freedom are rare. Although Fromm did have a PhD like Margaret Mead in anthropology, he operated closer to the model of more general public intellectuals like Betty Friedan, Michael Harrington, and Rachel Carson (Meyer and Rohlinger, 2012). What we are theorizing is the kind of public sociologist who gains a major audience outside of the academic field, like W. E. B. Du Bois and C. Wright Mills in the middle of the twentieth century (Aronowitz, 2012; Morris, 2015), and Arlie Hochschild and William Julius Wilson today (Gans, 1997). Earlier in the twentieth century, these kinds of thinkers would often make their name by writing best-selling books as Daniel Bell and David Riesman before attaining academic stature although by the 1960s and 1970s this pathway became far less possible as the research university professionalized.

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