A Self-Fulfilling Dystopia

Abstract

To the extent that reductionism has never made for goodsocial science, I do not think that it is enough to suggest, asRichard Sennett (2011) has recently argued, that the storyaround the London School of Economics’ reception of adonation from the Gaddafi family ‘is all about cash’.Insociety, things are never so simple and it is in the very callof our disciplines that we ought to actively search for whatelse may have actually been going on. I should then like touse this short intervention as an opportunity to reflect onsome broader normative and epistemological questions thatI think are important to understand how recent engagementsbetween academic institutions, social scientists, andregimes with dubious normative credentials could havebeen found acceptable in the first instance.To be sure, these kind of engagements with tyrants andtheir regimes are far from new; take, for instance, therelationships between Milton Friedman and fellow econo-mists in Chicago and the Pinochet dictatorship. But currentcases may have been additionally triggered by a widespreadview in the social sciences that the social world itself is fullydevoid of any sense of normativity. Recent trends in ourdisciplines have decidedly contributed to a conceptualisationofthesocialworldaspopulatedbyactorswhoseonlyconcernis the defence of their identities and the advancement of theirmaterial interests. And the more important the promotion ofone’sowninterestbecomes,thelessthe space fornormativityin society. We have then ended up with the self-fulfillingdystopia of a social world with no place or role for thenormative.I will take sociology as my case study and proceed inthree steps:(1) Sociology has not yet fully come to terms with thecombined effects of the postmodern (gender, cultur-alist, postcolonial) and globalist critiques of the pastfew decades. While their role was crucial in trimmingdown reified presuppositions and unwarranted gener-alisations of earlier sociology, a more problematic andless noticed consequence of this double-blow has beenthat their ultimate depiction of ‘the social’ is one inwhich there is no space for serious normative consid-erations inside the social world itself.(2) Not only social scientific concepts but also thesocial world itself becomes a space with nonormativity. While this can and has been presentedas an advancement of the discipline’s scientificmaturity, it also creates a severe void in ourunderstanding of social relations. This inability tograsp the role of the normative in social lifedramatically backfires when the discipline itself iscalled to reflect on trends and events in which themost challenging questions refer precisely to thosenormative dimensions that are no longer conceived asa real aspect of the social world.(3) Yet the attempt to recover a sense of normativity undercurrent conditions of global modernity comes at aprice: it requires us to re-engage with the universalisticthrust that actually underpins some of the very ideasand ideals that this affair have brought into question:the extent to which such issues as democracy, freedomor human dignity have really become a commonproperty of humanity. Several difficulties and chal-lenges follow from this, of course – not least, whetherthis can be done without resorting back to precisely