Cracking the Ivory Tower: Proposing ‘an Interpretive Public Sociology’

Abstract

When I arrived at Leeds University (UK) in October 1968 to study sociology, the whole campus seemed to have been painted with slogans from the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation. Seeing this, and entering its magnificent Brotherton Library, made me think I was entering a slice of heaven. In 1969, when Alan Dawe (1979) finished his lecture with Max Weber’s words quoted above, I began to feel it was worthwhile doing sociology. I read the quote (above) from Karl Marx in 1970, and I began to think that radical, politically engaged sociology might be my vocation. But, by 1974, after two years of a PhD thesis, I was convinced that universities were ivory towers, and that the Marxist intellectuals were part of the problem, not the solution (Louis Althusser (1969) was becoming hegemonic among the university Marxists). In the late 1980s, I needed a proper job and started teaching ‘community education’ part-time at Leeds Polytechnic. In the early 1990s, I turned again towards sociology. Reading Zygmunt Bauman and Stuart Hall, I began to think there might be some point in the discipline after all. This chapter reflects on aspects of the journey I made. Through an examination of Bauman’s work on intellectuals (1987) and Burawoy’s argument for ‘public sociology’ (2005), it offers support for those who work to open the space within universities for a sociology which is passionate about changing the world in favour of its oppressed and exploited peoples.

We shall set to work and meet ‘the demands of the day’, in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibres of his very life.

Max Weber (1918/1991)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx (1845/1968)