Jack D. Douglas

Abstract

Since the late 1960s, Jack D. Douglas has served as the primary theorist and champion for the everyday life perspective of existential sociology – or existenz. By common definition, existential sociology refers to the study of human experience-in-the-world (or existence) in all its forms. There have been other outstanding scholars in sociology who have contributed to the early demarcation of existenz, and they generally located it as an offshoot of earlier varieties of everyday life social theory, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interaction. Jack also took this path early in his writing, but soon made it clear that the existenz perspective was overwhelmingly driven by the concrete experience of embodiment in everyday life and not theoretical doctrine. Ironically, Jack’s anti-institutional approach to scholarly activity created the fertile space for him to incorporate a wide range of intellectual ingredients into his ever-evolving work. These ingredients have included history, economics, biomedical science, theoretical physics, clinical medicine, Christian and Eastern mysticism, and fictional literature among many others. Again, in his early writing on the integration of affect, reason, and values in the formation of social order, Jack Douglas presented his distinctive perspective on traditional social scientific topics such as suicide, crime and justice, organizational behavior, and qualitative research methods. More recently, he has applied his creative ideas on human nature to more general and policy-related issues such as the welfare state, politics, family, and national security. In all, Jack Douglas has published over twenty-five books, and dozens of articles and essays, but he continues his scholarly productivity by modifying the key features of his thinking to the contemporary conditions of discourse. For example, Jack’s seminal and analog thinking on team field research located this methodological and mentoring approach in terms of trust, friendship, and appreciation for individuality, as opposed to structuralist notions of hierarchy and control in group research. Jack’s digital team now consists of salon-like, international, and intellectual discourse conducted over the Internet. He continues the discussion of key concepts in existenz such as affect (e.g., the centrality of hubris in political life); becoming (e.g., the value of history in understanding contemporary everyday life); and autobiography (e.g., locating the essence of self in emerging relationships such as family and friends). Jack’s legacy largely rests on the ability of his students to convert the values of friendship, trust, intellectual openness, and ethical and moral obligations to one’s protegés they learned from Jack to their own very successful academic and intellectual careers.