Editorial Open Access

The present issue of the EJCPS appears in the aftermath of the 13th ESA conference, ‘(Un)Making Europe: Capitalism, Solidarities, Subjectivities’, held in late August in Athens. This is ‘the place where the most essential aspects of European identity emerged’, as a rather small plaque announces near the site of a major monument in this stupendous historical development. Situated on a wooded hill just over the road from the Acropolis, the Pnyx is a stony field with, at one side, a rocky platform whose steps orators climbed to stand on it and speak – the Bema, pictured below. This field was where the 6000 or more citizens of Athens could stand to debate in the Assembly and take political decisions, after the development of democracy in the fifth century BCE. You can look across from here to the Parthenon; its surroundings are crammed with many thousands of visitors. Aristides ‘the Just’ spoke from the Bema, as did Pericles – Aristotle’s prime example of a wise person – or Demosthenes.

The stellar achievements of this ancient rule are well known: citizens had an equal right to debate policy, and voted at the Pnyx to make war or peace, or impose taxes; they were equal before the law, and had equal opportunity to serve in political office. Office holders were chosen by lot, to obviate excessive individual power; people could be exiled if their obvious ambition seemed likely to cause public danger. Education was intended to equip people (at any rate, men) to play active parts in the debate about the state’s well-being. The point the Bema symbolises is that free, open argumentation between equals is key to the just and effective running of a democratic state.

Of course, this did not always work out as planned. The fifth-century playwright Aristophanes has a character complain that no one has bothered to arrive promptly for a crucial debate on peace or war.¹ He himself is desperate to get out of Athens and back home, and the politicians who eventually turn up are not impressive for moral or intellectual capacity. The ancient Greeks were familiar with questions that exercise us today: how people can be brought to make decisions in the common interest rather than their own, how we can organise a society to make its citizens’ commitments to civic values work out for them, or what qualities and capacities we should expect of those who are qualified to vote. As we know, the ancient Greeks’ answer here would not be ours; they disqualified women from citizenship, as well as slaves, children, and foreigners.

We now have an ambitious notion of democracy that potentially applies to the entire world. All the same, there is considerable concern about its predicament. To take one example, President Gauck of Germany, who retired in spring 2017, remarked a couple of years ago² that ‘Around the world, acceptance of democracy as a form of government has not been this low since 1989.’ Democracy in ancient Greece was eventually overcome by other forces and disappeared; Gauck, like many others, warns us against complacency in this respect. Not many people visit the Pnyx nowadays; it lies virtually neglected.

Some of the issues Gauck mentions are also addressed in this issue, such as the question of political discontent among sections of the public, explored in the article by Roy Kemmers. Taking a cultural–sociological perspective, Kemmers juxtaposes two groups’ understandings of political agency: those who vote for right-wing populists, and those who refrain from voting and actively promote non-voting. Through interviewing people from these groups, he discovers that carrying out these political projects does not emerge exclusively from political frustration, as the ‘channelling discontent’ thesis would hold. Instead, he finds that to understand these types of political agency, and why they seem so satisfactory to those involved, we must give up looking exclusively at conventional political efficacy and concentrate more on the meaning political agency can have. Citizens in the groups Kemmers interviewed could achieve a sense of political fulfilment by taking a completely anti-institutionalist position, regardless of the seemingly low political efficacy of their actions. By looking at the different meanings political agency has for these citizens, Kemmers builds a new theoretical understanding of the influence of different power orientations in constructing political agency. This is important for understanding the paradoxes – or what at the system level look like paradoxes – of populist voters’ and non-voters’ political agency. The channelling discontent thesis works if citizens locate power inside the political system, but for the increasing number of citizens according to whom power resides, more opaquely, outside the system, electoral and other institutional political activities can seem nonsensical.

In his speech, Gauck also addressed what we might contribute to this crisis. ‘People in all parts of the world can become ambassadors of conscience and uprightness, indeed we all can, if we only believe we can do it and find our own language.’ Sociologists ought to be able to offer suggestions augmenting appeals for individual change, pinpointing the immediate practices in which people are embroiled, and the meso-level networks they are involved in. It is these features of human sociality that are crucial to understand, in addition to the familiar opposition between society and individual, if we want to know how to protect social constellations we value. The article by Lisa Cortois in this issue helps to show how it has become so difficult to see beyond this opposition. We live in a time in which the idea of the individual has become an ideology, so that we can barely perceive how each person is embedded in fluid, socially constructed processes that join him or her to others. Developing the notion of individualism proposed by Alain Ehrenberg, Cortois emphasises the role of myths and culture – and, by and large, collectivity – as the source of individualities. She proposes a cultural–sociological understanding of individualism that is based on concrete myths and provides a mediating solution to actor- versus socio-centric definitions of individualism. Instead of stressing the division between individuals and society, the cultural–sociological perspective emphasises a continuum and dynamic between multiple notions of both the social and the self.

Christian Schmidt-Wellenberg points to some features of this social embeddedness we might prefer to ignore where Europe is concerned: the extent to which the development of European structures and mechanisms is influenced by, indeed an outcome of, struggles among members of specific professions and the academic disciplines linked to them. Applying Bourdieu’s concept of field analysis, Schmidt-Wellenberg examines European processes of political integration in terms of complex competitions between professions such as law – and lawyers were dominant in the early development of Europe – versus economics, now considered pivotal in even imagining governability. ‘European fields are not created out of thin air;’ Schmidt-Wellenberg traces the rise of economics as a source of political influence and institutional power – and the effects of this ‘community of like-minded agents’ on specific policies and developments, not least on the neo-liberalisation of European politics.

The article by Daniel Trottier, in contrast, examines a form of power that might be expected to be more tangible: that of the police, in this case when they adopt technologies of social-media monitoring. Trottier reports on a series of interviews carried out across Europe with early-adopting personnel involved in developing monitoring assemblages designed to assist police forces diminish vulnerabilities vis-à-vis, for example, traffickers of weapons, drugs, child pornography, and women for prostitution. Law-enforcement agencies ‘are coping with an ever-transforming terrain;’ this article provides a fascinating insight into the surprisingly chaotic ‘social morphology’ affected by ‘diverging institutional cultures’ as police forces attempt to adapt. There may be some form of basic agreement that police forces should ‘engage’ with social media, but assessing these media is a politicised task in itself, even as far as legal provisions are concerned. One fascinating insight the article provides is that police personnel may on occasion be more hesitant, less well funded, and more conscious of the dangers ‘surveillance creep’ poses to the public, than are the private experts with whom they need to collaborate.

These articles are followed by Christopher Adair-Toteff’s responses to two new volumes in a critical edition of the works of Ernst Troeltsch. Adair-Toteff argues that Troeltsch needs to be reinstated as a major contributor to the intellectual life of twentieth-century Europe. Tom Frost reviews William Outhwaite’s edition of fifteen chapters by European social scientists on Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union as they ask how this happened, what it means in political terms, and what impact it is likely to have in the future. Continuing our interest in cultural and political memory, Alejandro Baer reviews Jeffrey Olick’s work on post-War Germany and the way its politicians have variously attempted to reconstruct their country’s identity. Lastly, Inna Perheentupa reviews Mischa Gabowitsch’s enthralling work on Protest in Putin’s Russia and the ‘thirst for togetherness and solidarity’ their commitment to democracy shows.

Pnyx (photo: Ricca Edmondson)