The dialogic society: The sociology scientists and citizens like and use Open Access

Flecha has many justifications for his call for a dialogic society, one of which is that there is a clear demand from people for dialogue. Those who donate to humanitarian organizations request accountability and dialogue about how the resources have been used. Following Erik Olin Wright's Real utopias, Flecha discusses the participatory budget in the city of Porte Alegre, Brazil (which became a model for many municipalities), Wikipedia, and the Mondragon Cooperative as examples of eagerness for dialogue. Employing more than 81,000 people in 2019, the Mondragon Cooperative is considered “the most dialogic group of successful companies worldwide” (Flecha, 2022, p. 37).

Yet in the social sciences, dialogue was not always respected. Flecha understands dialogue (dia-logos) in the line of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, for whom “logos [is] to be the principle that guides the evolution of everything. From this original and holistic conception, dialogue includes all human dimensions like reason and desire” (Flecha, 2022, p. 53). Yet, there are two types of reductionism of the “logos”: the Apollonian rational one (Apollo is the Greek sun god linked to reason and order), represented mainly by Kant and the philosopher of language John Austin (speech acts) and the Dionysian reductionism of passion and emotion (Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and dance), represented by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. For example, Flecha criticizes the Apollonian reductionism of Habermas, whose communicative acts privilege reason through language. For him, Habermas's conception of rationalized communicative acts in the public sphere miss friendship, love, sex, and envy as components of communicative humans. Flecha, with his colleagues and particularly Marta Soler Gallart, develops this further and enhances Habermasian communicative acts theory by strongly introducing the power dimension and the feminist approach (remembering the gender orientation). They distinguish between dialogical communicative acts and power communicative acts. They thus refer to dialogue in terms not only of words but also of body language (gestures, looks, caresses).

For Flecha, dialogic society should combine the beauty of the arts, the truth of science, and the goodness of human rights, which are intertwined with each other: “Without science there are no human rights; the rights to health, to education, and all the others can only be real with the contribution of scientific discoveries. Without human rights, science has strict limitations. The benefits of the discoveries do not reach everybody; they do not reach those excluded from human rights” (p. 79).

One of Flecha's central theses is how he connects these three realms. For him, the first two (ethics and truth) need consensus, while the latter (aesthetics) does not. Yet this raises the problem of the freedom to choose ugliness: “The freedom to live in ugliness is neither a right nor a freedom when it becomes an imposition of ugliness on people who want to exercise their right and their freedom to live in beauty” (Flecha, 2022, pp. 90–91). Controversies arise, for example, when some cling to ugliness as part of their memory. He defends, as socio-neuroscience did, the possibility for a dialogic reconstruction of our memory so “we do not need to be slaves of our ugliest past events if we have had them. We can decorate the rest of our lives with precious moments and relationships” (Flecha, 2022, p. 91).

How to overcome the ugliness that is often promoted by commercial products? Flecha brings an example of dialogic gatherings of literature, paintings, music, and other arts. Experimental gatherings were successful in Barcelona, where they were attended not only by the middle classes but also by the lower classes. This dialogic encounter is the antithesis of how Richard Serra conceived of his famous metal wall in Barcelona. For Flecha, “Paraphrasing ‘L’État c'est moi’ by Louis XIV, some artists try to impose the idea ‘L'art c'est moi’ (The art is me)” (Flecha, 2022, p. 97).

Dialogic society requires dialogic sociology. For Flecha, dialogic sociology is not a theory as much as it is a methodology that has three features concerning the relationship to informants, collaboration, and research ethics.

First, the communicative methodology implies an egalitarian dialogue between researchers and research participants from the very beginning in order to mitigate the power dynamics. The research center where this methodology was developed at the University of Barcelona is the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA). In CREA, power interactions are being replaced with dialogic interactions in order to generate consensus. In the case study of Roma people in Spain, for instance, researchers not only include Roma voices in the study but also engage with them in reflecting on the knowledge provided by the scientific community.

Second, it implies more collaboration in the social sciences. Flecha rightly highlights that up to 60% of articles in the social sciences are already coauthored, and most research groups reflect gender and ethnic diversity. But he advocates more coauthorship with researchers from other disciplines. He brings up the example of neuroscience, citing the work of Ramón y Cajal showing that it is social experience that changes the brain. As the plastic nature of the brain allows us to understand the different impacts of human relationships of varying quality on brain functioning and health, the social sciences are important collaborators for neuroscience. For Flecha, dialogic social science made in collaboration among different authors and disciplines can reach a much higher intellectual and scientific level than other social scientific efforts.

Third, this methodology implies research ethics that goes beyond the classical focus on informants’ consent to deal with the ethics of dialogue, such as the modesty of the researcher. Flecha discusses the example of Jürgen Habermas's The theory of communicative action, which contains a flawed interpretation of Austin's and Searle's speech acts theory. Despite Searle's corrections concerning Habermas's use of the concepts of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, Habermas refused in the second edition of his book to correct the errors or even to engage with Searle. Instead, he simply chose to ignore Searle's criticism.

Flecha, like Marta Soler Gallart (2017), has used dialogic sociology to combat sexual violence in Spanish society. Both call for transforming oppressed traditional masculinity (OTM) into new alternative masculinities (NAM). Their CREA research team developed the NAM against bullying, gender violence, and other kinds of violence, including in the Spanish universities where a “code of silence” was in place. Their research had a direct impact on changing policy in Catalonia and Spain on these issues.

In line with this feminist approach, Flecha urges us to recognize new founders of sociology such as Jane Addams, the only sociologist Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He warns us that the historiography of sociology privileges certain founding (male/white/Euro-American) fathers and omits others—what he calls invisibilizations. His appreciation for Addams comes not only from her sociological thought as a founder of the Department of Sociology in Chicago but also as a social activist and co-founder of Hull House. Hull House was Chicago's first social settlement, a place where immigrants and working-class people of diverse communities gathered to learn, to eat, to debate, and to acquire the tools necessary to put down roots in their new country.¹ Addams described her activities in terms of “three Rs”: Research, Residence, and Reform. For Flecha, “the social impact of her project was much bigger than the social impact of Durkheim and Weber together” (Flecha, 2022, p. 87). Addams contributed to reforming many laws at the time of the great transformation of the New Deal in the Roosevelt era.

Flecha, like all the research team members at CREA, does not conceive of research in terms of publishing academic papers in refereed journals only read by some peers but as engaging with society. He uses an example from an EU conference titled “Science against Poverty,”² where a critique was voiced against science that just offers diagnoses of poverty without investigating the success of actions with the aim of overcoming poverty. Flecha quotes a participant in the conference: “Investing 3 million euros for research on poverty is only justified if researchers can present evidence that, with their studies, poverty will decrease more than if the 3 million euros are given to the poor themselves” (Flecha, 2022, p. 90).

Ramón Flecha characterizes the main legacy of sociology by the fact that it serves humanity and has always been in collaboration with other disciplines. He gives an example of how sociology can help us to realize some objectives of humanity like the Sustainable Development Goals. Sociology has been instrumental in providing research for addressing poverty, social inequality, and social cohesion.

While classical sociology (e.g., that of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx) in the early 20th century set not only the research agenda but also the theoretical foundations, contemporary sociologies have been elaborated under the social disruptions related to Nazism, Stalinism, colonialism, civil rights, and feminist and gender movements. For Flecha, Parsons dedicated all his life to seeking to consolidate democracies against the risks of Nazi or Stalinist dictatorships. After classical and contemporary sociologies, within the current 21st century's scientific revolution, for Flecha, we witness an accelerated elaboration of democratic sociologies coming from diverse countries, cultures, genders, ideologies, and perspectives. For him, this is evidenced by the public sociology of Michael Burawoy, the multicultural feminism of Fatema Mernissi, the real utopias of Erik O. Wright, and the social impact of Marta Soler Gallart. Along with Flecha, Soler Gallart recently developed very heuristic thoughts on how to deal with Habermasian rationalistic public sphere deliberation regarding validity claims. For her, this concept has “three limitations that are overcome by using the concept of dialogic relationships, which includes (a) placing claims in social structure, (b) considering the ethics of responsibility, and (c) accounting for both feelings and desires in the analyses” (Soler Gallart, 2017, p. 142).

Despite my general agreement with the thesis of Flecha's magisterial work, I have three concerns related to how some of his critique is offered in a heavy-handed manner, the way he connects an author's thoughts with an author's life, and, finally, his over-optimism about the spread of democratic sociology.

I fully agree with Flecha that some scholars have impoverished social sciences with affirmations and theories that are not the result of sound empirical research but rather driven by ideology. In this line, he criticizes not only Marx and some Marxist sociologists for their vulgar materialism but also the reductionism in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and James Samuel Collen. Yet readers will sometimes notice that Flecha engages in heavy-handed criticism against some sociologists in an unjustified manner and without proper contextualization. Let me give two examples.

First, Flecha considers the result of the literary gathering experiment in Barcelona, being attended by all social classes, as a counterexample to Bourdieu's work on distinction. The concept of distinction captures a trend of how each social class constructs its artistic and leisure tastes, and this should be understood as a significant statistical association and as a result of his fieldwork in the early 1970s, a time when the theory of social reproduction was salient in giving the working class more rights. Therefore, the success of the literary gathering does not necessarily undermine the heuristic value of Bourdieu's theory. The second example concerns Coleman. For Flecha, “Coleman confused correlation with causation, and from the reality that most rich students obtained better results than most poor students, they deduced that education was not useful for overcoming inequalities” (Flecha, 2022, p. 106). However, Flecha did not read the US debates of the 1960s carefully. On the basis of his fieldwork, Coleman demonstrates the limitations of putting more resources into schools without improving the socioeconomic status of the locality where the school is located. According to this reading, Coleman was revolutionary in requesting more civil and socioeconomic rights for the American Black community, so he didn't want to stigmatize the poor but to empower them. By the way, the same limitations apply to efforts to improve the United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon without addressing the socioeconomic precarity of their families, dwellers of miserable camps.

The beauty of the arts is definitely connected, among other factors, to the artist's respect for the principles of human rights. Flecha considers the case of a mismatch prompting people to differentiate between art and artist, or “the author's works” and “the author's life,” respectively. He criticizes such separation, using the example of Michel Foucault, who, according to Flecha, “defended the depenalization of pederasty and rape” (Flecha, 2022, p. 87). Likewise, Anthony Giddens moved from being a sociologist to being a politician supporting Blair's “third way,” which “ended in failure politically and intellectually.” He also criticizes the relationship between Giddens, as president of LSE, and the former Libyan leader Gaddafi. In the same vein, he criticizes Althusser, who strangled his wife. All these critiques are calls not to engage with the work of these scholars.

I think this issue is much more complex, as I cannot establish a direct correspondence between the author's thoughts and the author's life. We need to acknowledge that scholars have positionality, inducing some blind spots, and strive for power, and in both cases, we need to reveal this and not throw away their thoughts entirely. Thus, I consider the perfect alignment of truth, goodness, and beauty in research as a Weberian ideal type that can be used to evaluate the work of a scholar by approximation to that ideal.

Historically, many scholars were uncritical of colonialism/slavery (Marx, Durkheim, Rousseau, Locke, etc.) and are still so even now. Currently, the case of Jürgen Habermas is exemplary, as he has a strong appeal to liberal theories of politics and ethics, as well as solid philosophical foundations for both democratic communication and the ethics of difference, and yet he stumbled when it came to the right of Palestinians for national liberation. He co-signed the “Normative Orders” Research Center at the Goethe University Frankfurt's “Principles of solidarity. A statement,”³ which is one-sided without any regret for what Israel did in Gaza. He has been completely insensitive about what Israel is doing in the Palestinian territories, a fact of which I became aware when I met him in the early Second Intifada in Jerusalem over a dinner. I was taken aback by his position at that time. His denial of Palestinian national rights is thus not simply a political faux pas. Regardless of one's interest in Habermas as a human being and his political views, we have to deal with his thoughts and dialogical communicative theory.

Here, I would follow Michael Gill's two-part justification (Gill, 2023) and develop them to three. First, “conceptual isolation” of some thoughts of a problematic scholar from his racist/flawed views. Second, “division of intellectual labor,” i.e., some of us will focus on a problematic scholar's positive contribution to knowledge, while others will focus on his racist/flawed views. Third, “historical development of scientific/moral views,” that is, humanity has developed a conception of otherness different from what it was in the past, and what we believe is ethical today may be considered racist/flawed in the future.

I will, therefore, engage with Habermas's dialogical communicative theory, even if I disagree with his political position on Palestine. Having said that, I can observe some patterns. With the partial exception of Marcuse, all the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School project were just so utterly blind and deaf to movements from what we today call the Global South. In that sense, Habermas is just simply being a good Frankfurt School theorist.

I would use the same reasoning to deal with Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, Locke, Kant, Hume, Marx, etc. This should also be extended to (current and historical) politicians, celebrities, and leading public figures so that we may celebrate what can be considered good deeds while criticizing their position taken in political practice, particularly remaining conscious of their colonial legacy. One good example could be the National Museum of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, where they add to each painting of a historical Dutch personality an additional label explaining their role in the slave trade. I would prefer this approach over the removal of David Hume's name from the “David Hume Tower” at the University of Edinburgh.⁴ It was initially suggested to rename it “Julius Nyerere Tower” in honor of the anticolonial Tanzanian leader who graduated from this university in 1952. It was then pointed out that Nyerere's leadership was characterized by despotism and homophobia (Gill, 2023). We will never end this spiral of exclusion by dichotomous thinking: angel or demon, guilty or innocent, etc. Only the three-part justification suggested above overcomes such a self-defeating approach.

Based on the work of Flecha and Soler Gallart, I am now convinced that the whole sexuality thought of Foucault is problematic and shouldn't be used today, but not, for instance, his concept of biopolitics.

Democracy is the daughter of pluralism, rightly contends Flecha. Since Parsons and Habermas, among others, we know that democracy began due to the need for dialogue and consensus on the rules of coexistence between people and groups of different religions, origins, ethnic groups, and languages. This is also accepted by both sides of the liberalism–republicanism debate. Yet is our mainstream sociology dialogic/democratic? I think dialogic sociology is much smaller than Flecha thinks. For me, a good part of sociology does not sufficiently acknowledge the plurality of the conception of the good.⁵ In a previous article (Hanafi, 2023), I argued that the bulk of the responses of the social sciences and/or sociology to the social, political, and environmental pathologies of our late modernity can be defined as classically liberal but politically illiberal—I called this peculiar combination “Symbolic Liberalism” (SL). Empowered by emotional and neoliberal capitalism, this kind of liberalism seeks to impose a hegemonic and deculturized conception of the good while neglecting social justice. SL is not a problem for sociology alone; rather, it manifests itself through many sectors of public life, including the media, politics, law, and education. Furthermore, the problem of SL is present not only in the Global North but also in the Global South, thanks to a wide range of global convergence forces.

I, like Flecha and Soler Gallart, call for dialogical sociology, and I am glad that they are more optimistic than me and they see its promises rightly in the work of their research center in Barcelona and beyond. What I mean by sociology being dialogical is to disentangle its commitment to civil society (a vocation so dear to Burawoy) into two levels.

First is the level of mediation where sociology provides scientific research that is important for public deliberation in society carried out by different groups in civil society, whether conservatives or progressives. This entails the possibility of providing knowledge to governments or organizations that we don't agree with, at least all the time. Mediation has to respect what is construed as universal social justice, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Universality here is understood abstractly, though universal social justice is instantiated concretely through culture and history in a given society. Thus, this level entails soft normativity.

Second is the level of strong normativity where sociology not only engages with civil society but also takes a position in favor of marginalized groups against the hegemonic powers and defends certain values dear to sociology. Sociology as an emancipatory science believes in social change and wants to push it for a more just world in each nation-state and globally. This entails the possibility of actively participating in social movements and even revolutions when the system cannot be changed from the inside.

Having said that, my dialogical sociology and Flecha's dialogic society are not really substantially different, but they differ regarding their emphases. I am worried when sociology analytically conflates the two levels or, worse, neglects the first level and becomes incapable of engaging with all strata of society. For instance, some forms of anti-clerical or symbolic liberal sociology have become incapable of engaging with religious communities in the Arab world and, I am sure, also elsewhere.

Finally, this book, being both readable and insightful, a blend of scholarship and personal memoir, is a breakthrough and landmark in social theory and a must-read, not only for sociologists but also for citizens who have some general understanding of the social sciences.