Sociologies of moderation

What does moderation mean in the twenty-first century? And what might a reasoned project of moderation look like, intellectually, politically and in practice? This paper argues for a sociological reappraisal of the historical origins, intellectual foundations and contemporary salience of moderation. Too often wrongly defined by a sense of what it is not – by its apparent absence of ideology – moderation has come, in recent years, to be associated with ‘bland’ and incoherent notions of centrism. However, moderation presents sociologists and other scholars with particular analytical and theoretical challenges and opportunities. In a post-secular liberal democracy like Britain, an exploration of what moderation might mean demands an interrogation of the often taken-for-granted assumptions of the social sciences and the ideological extremes more generally. Moderation is about the relations among publics and the possibilities of a deep pluralism that is respectful of difference. However, publics are under threat by markets and the future of sociology, tied to the future of publics, without revivified social and political practices of moderation, may be bleak

Democracy begins at home : moderation and the promise of salvage ethnography

This article ethnographically maps the activism of moderates engaged with grassroots Republican Party politics in Kansas, a state that for the last two decades has been a primary battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’ in which the value of ‘moderation’ has been the subject of strident contestation. Drawing inspiration from the writings of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, it probes the testimony of activists in an effort to identify those political and social practices and principles that might be considered constitutive in the making of a moderate politics. The goal is to ‘salvage’ a rudimentary activist theory of moderation for those seeking to champion and defend contemporary American democracy at a time when publics and their institutions have been compromised by, or succumbed to, electoral polarization and political extremism. The article argues for the displacement of the usual representation of moderation as a default position defined by the absence of strong ideological or other convictions in favour of an understanding of moderation as a disciplined engagement with divided publics. Most importantly, moderates embrace democracy as a yet-to-be-fulfilled moral project, which serves to infuse the values that underpin moderate politics with normative power and purpose. How to render these values operational in a divided politics remains a central question for both activists and scholars committed to moderation and the practices and values it names