John Hall

English

Research Papers in Economics

British Sociology: Gains and Losses
by John Hall
McGill University
Sociological Research Online, 16 (3) 17
<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/17.html> 
10.5153/sro.2349
Received: 5 May 2011     Accepted: 20 May 2011    Published: 31 Aug 2011
1.1 It may be as well to give information before seeing what it means, both to me and to the general
question being posed. I went to the USA for a year in 1986 on half sabbatical, with extra funding from
Leverhulme. After a term teaching in California designed to increase my funds, I took up a Fellowship at
the Center for European Studies at Harvard. Whilst there I was offered a job, teaching in Sociology and in
Social Studies, a famous undergraduate concentration somewhat like Oxford’s ‘Modern Greats’ (that is,
PPE – politics, philosophy and economics). Given the ﬁnancial atmosphere of the time my university was
only too happy to grant me extended leave. So I spent a happy period in Boston, made happier by not
having to climb through all the hoops required to get tenure at Harvard. But in 1990 I did decide to stay in
North America: marriage and an unexpected offer of a job from McGill University in Montreal made a real
jump possible. I have been here ever since, albeit with extended periods in Central Europe, Northern
Ireland and Denmark.
1.2 An initial point to make is that displacement has not been total. I return very often, and have some
sense of the state of play within social studies within Britain. More important, my intellectual agenda was
more or less formed before I left, and continual interaction thereafter with Ernest Gellner and Michael
Mann, the great inﬂuences on my work, meant that its force was not lost. That said, I feel myself to have
gained a great deal from moving. One very particular point concerns being close to the United States,
looking in at it from a very advanced but highly dependent country. There is a sort of default position in the
United States suggesting the right to rule the world, made all the more curious in that possession of the
power to do so is tacitly denied by the commanding heights of the conceptual economy—which stress
socio-economic motives, thereby failing to appreciate the pleasures that can be derived from the exercise
of power. Montreal has always been a particularly good position from which to think about power in the
modern world—better I think than Europe, a civilization which for so long had its own autonomy. A point of
very great importance to me is life within Quebec rather than Canada per se. Work on Central Europe for
many years has made me aware of the horrors of modern Europe. Prague seems typical: once Kafka’s
tricultural city, it is now homogenized and dull, despite its great beauty. Montreal has two nations, and
many immigrant communities, making it exceptionally interesting and vibrant. But of course there are
tensions, and these led to a further advantage of my move. I would never have thought deeply about
nationalism without experiencing it ﬁrst hand, every day. The British overseas often have an easy time of
it. In Quebec Anglophones can feel discriminated against, in mild ways, making it possible to get some
sense of the stakes involved in nationalist conﬂict. Finally, a measure of distance from one’s own society
can give clarity, making me at times rather critical of the culturalist turn of a good deal of social studies in
Britain.
1.3 The literal meaning of diaspora is that of displacement. But I think there is another sense to the word,
namely that of continual linkages within a single community spread around the world. The maintenance of a
common culture, with intellectual and trading links within it, seems to characterize both Judaism past and
present and many Chinese in the contemporary world. In the light of this deﬁnition there are clear losses in
my own case. The sense that I have of the state of British sociology is fragmentary, and it is decreasing all
the time; my connections are to scholars of a previous generation. I miss this, miss the feeling that I once
had—not least as it so very absent in the United States, if less so in Canada—of being able to contribute
to public debate. Differently put, I am less the member of an engaged diaspora than a rather marginal
ﬁgure, truly at home nowhere. I have already stressed that there are advantages to this, above all the fact
that distance allows for clarity. Raymond Aron once remarked somewhere that British sociologists stood
too close to the Labour Party, his point I think being that hopes could replace analysis. This was probably
accurate, now as well as then, but I still miss normative engagement. And there may be something deeper.
Recently I was asked to reﬂect on the career of Ernest Gellner, whose biography I have just written, as
part of a workshop dealing with marginality. At ﬁrst sight, Gellner seems a marvelous example of the
conceptual riches that thinkers of Jewish background have given us, as the result of experiencing the dark
vicissitudes of Europe’s twentieth century. But the more I thought about it, the more cautious and perhaps
skeptical I became. Homelessness and marginality certainly played a key role in Gellner’s visceral
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/17.html 1 31/08/2011endorsement of Max Weber’s view that our lives are and must be colder and disenchanted. But is that a
correct reading of the lives of most people in the modern world? Are there not more social connections,
more warmth, in daily life than marginal thinkers realize? I suspect there are, and now look back at some
of my work and more of my preconceptions with a little anxiety.
1.4 So displacement has gains which entail losses. There are opportunity/costs here, as the economists
have it, for sure.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/17.html 2 31/08/2011

British Sociology: Gains and Losses

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British Sociology: Gains and Losses

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