Civic discourse in Israeli sociological thought

Abstract

When Alvin Gouldner wrote the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) he intended to release sociology from the weight of Parsonian functionalism and to encourage a more reflexive, engaged, and critical sociological praxis. Today, 20 years later, Israeli sociology is just beginning to awaken from its own Parsonian slumber and to experience a crisis of its own. This belated crisis has been generated by the social and political changes which seem about to overwhelm Israeli society. Since 1967, the year of the occupation of Arab territories, and more pointedly after 1977, the year the Labor Party fell and the right-wing Likud gained power, events themselves have exposed the inadequacies of the paradigm that has dominated Israeli sociological thought for about three decades. This article proposes an outline of the contours of Israeli sociology, a critical evaluation of its central tendencies, and a reflection upon its current crisis. Sociological approaches to the study of Israeli society may be classified along two interrelated axes, the analytical and the normative. Along the analytical axis, approaches differ from an order perspective at one pole to a conflict perspective at the other. Along the normative axis, approaches differ from conformity to official ideology and the prevailing ethos of the society, at one pole, to a critique of the latter at the other. From the angle of these two axes six major trends in the interpretation of Israeli society can be discerned. The term "trend" refers here to clusters of sociological practitioners and practices in a way that combines their principal theoretical charge, their norma? tive implications, and their central object-domain. The trends are identified by the following conceptualizations: modernization, elite, pluralism, class, ethnicity, and colonialism. Each is treated here in