[lbo-talk] C. Wright Mills, Psychology and Social Science

[Eubulides]

On 09-12-31 02:46 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> ``Social scientists want to understand not only social structure and
> history; they want to understand the varieties of individual men and
> women that are historically selected and formed by the social structures
> in which they live. The biographies of these people cannot be understood
> without reference to the historical structures in which are organized
> the milieux of their everyday lives. It is now possible to trace the
> meanings of historic transformations not only for individual ways of
> life but for the very characters of a variety of human beings. As the
> history-making unit, the nation-state is also the unit within which
> types of men and women are formed: it is the man-making unit. That is
> one reason why struggle between nations and between blocs of nations is
> also struggle over the types of human beings that will eventually
> prevail; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related,
> and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological
> imagination. The problems of social and historical psychology are in
> many ways the most intriguing that we can today confront. For it is in
> this area, it happens, that the major intellectual traditions of our
> time, in fact of Western civilization, have now come to a most exciting
> confluence...''

==================

"At the beginning of
the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or
locally but only globally. ‘Globalization’ is a non-linear, dialectic 
process in
which the global and the local do not exist as cultural polarities but as
combined and mutually implicating principles. These processes involve not
only interconnections across boundaries, but transform the quality of the
social and the political inside nation-state societies. This is what I 
define
as ‘cosmopolitanization’: cosmopolitanization means internal globalization,
globalization from within the national societies. This transforms everyday
consciousness and identities significantly. Issues of global concern are
becoming part of the everyday local experiences and the ‘moral life-worlds’
of the people. They introduce significant conflicts all over the world. 
To treat
these profound ontological changes simply as myth relies on a superficial
and unhistorical understanding of ‘globalization’, the misunderstandings of
neoliberal globalism. The study of globalization and globality, 
cosmopolitanization
and cosmopolitanism constitutes a revolution in the social
sciences (Beck, 2000a, 2002a; Cheah and Robbins, 1998; Gilroy, 1993;
Shaw, 2000; Therborn, 2000; Urry, 2000)."
Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies

http://www.stonybrook.edu/sociology/faculty/Levy/Beck%20Cosmopolitan%20Society%20and%20its%20Enemies%20(TCS).pdf

It is 2010, time to ditch methodological nationalism.

Class compositionality anyone?