Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life  clearly mattered when it was published in 1985: One of only a handful of truly sociological books on the New York Times\u27 list of bestsellers in recent decades, it was widely discussed in congregations, book groups, and classrooms throughout the country. But how might it matter today? Does it carry lasting significance twenty-plus years after publication, or stand as an important but dated commentary on the excesses of 1980s individualism

Wood, Richard L.

English

University of New Mexico

University of New Mexico
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2006
Thinking Culturally about Politics: Habits 20 Years
Later and 20 Years Hence
Richard L. Wood
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Recommended Citation
Wood, Richard L.. "Thinking Culturally about Politics: Habits 20 Years Later and 20 Years Hence." For a twentieth anniversary special
edition of Sociology of Religion edited by David Yamane, 2006 (2006). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/soc_fsp/2
1 This article was first given as a paper at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Association for
the Sociology of Religion, at a session on Habits of the Heart: Twenty Years Later organized and
convened by Dr. David Yamane, now of Wake Forest University. My thanks to him and to the
other panelists Kelly Besecke, Wendy Cadge, and Robert Zussman. Author may be contacted at
rlwood@unm.edu or 505-277-3945.
Thinking Culturally about Politics: Habits 20 Years Later and 20 Years Hence1
Richard L. Wood
University of New Mexico
For a twentieth anniversary special edition of Sociology of Religion edited by David Yamane
2006
DRAFT: Please do not circulate without author’s consent rlwood@unm.edu 
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life clearly mattered
when it was published in 1985: One of only a handful of truly sociological books on the New
York Times’ list of bestsellers in recent decades, it was widely discussed in congregations, book
groups, and classrooms throughout the country. But how might it matter today? Does it carry
lasting significance twenty-plus years after publication, or stand as an important but dated
commentary on the excesses of 1980s individualism?
In reflecting on these questions, I step outside the usual conventions of a book
symposium in several ways. First, I take this opportunity to consider Habits not only analytically
but also autobiographically and politically. Second, I consider not just Habits, but also its sister
volume, The Good Society. I think the two books are best understood in relation to each other.
Finally, I not only look back at the last twenty years, but also reflect on our current moment and
twenty years hence.
Three dimensions of the Habits/Good Society legacy appear both most interesting and
most important. To be very bodily about it all, I will call them the heart, the head, and the
appendix of these 1980s works (Good Society, though published in 1991, was mostly written in
the late 1980s).
I take as the heart of the Habits/Good Society legacy their focus on the relationship of
culture, institutions, and social structures in social life. In this regard, both books simultaneously
reflected and advanced the cultural and institutional turns that have occurred in social science
over the last two or three decades. At a deep level, both books are about both culture and
institutions, and both try to change the structural conditions of society by thinking culturally and
institutionally (though this remains largely in the background). But Habits  focuses primarily on
the “soft tissue” of the social body: on culture and meaning and how they shape society. The
Good Society  focuses on the “skeletal tissue” of the social body, on institutions and their
relationship to fundamental patterns of social life. 
If this is so, let me suggest that The Good Society  really ought to be the book closer to
most of our sociological hearts. And in some ways it is, at least for me: To the extent that we care
that our intellectual work fosters positive social change, then The Good Society’s focus on
reforming institutions becomes urgent. I think it is true that only by focusing on institutions can
we really hope to claim some long-term impact.  The Good Society  really is the better
sociological book, in a narrowly pragmatic or instrumental sense. And yet: Habits draws our
attention – perhaps claims many of our hearts – far beyond what The Good Society  does. It drew
a larger readership, gained enormous attention among institutional leaders from grassroots
communities to elite settings, provoked conversations from parish halls to board rooms around
the country, and continues to be talked about in ways that The Good Society  never was, I
suspect. Why might that be? 
In part, this is no doubt a reflection of the condition that Habits analyzes: in a society
driven by individualism, it is hard for an institutional analysis to gain traction. But I think the
attraction of Habits is also a reflection of the deeper theoretical commitments that lie at the heart
of the book: that meaning and sense-making are fundamentally constitutive of human life and at
their best are communal activities. Indeed, meaning construction and sense-making are such
fundamentally human processes that they sometimes override (even for sociologists!) more
obviously relevant causal processes. 
A digression into my own biography may illustrate the point: In the mid-1980s, I spent
five years in poor urban neighborhoods and the countryside of Mexico and Central America,
living with local folks and working to end Reaganite intervention in the civil wars then racking
the region. In 1987, as I was preparing to return to the U.S. for graduate school, I was given a
copy of Habits as a gift. By all rights, it should have been less than compelling for me: I was
deeply vested in a political and structural reading of American hegemony in Central America –
and whatever Habits offers, it’s certainly not that. By all rights, a more obviously political and
structural analysis of American life should have drawn my attention. But I also needed to
understand my own journey “home,” to make sense of my own transition back to life within
American culture. I needed not only to find the right structural analysis, but also – and more
urgently – to undergo a journey of the heart back to my home culture.  Habits of the Heart was
the single most helpful source for that journey: it’s combination of thorough-going critique of
some of the deep currents of our culture, positive appreciation for other deep cultural currents,
and sense-making of that 1980s moment in American history provided key intellectual
undergirding for that transition in my life. 
Thus, if forced to choose between these books, I would be tempted to say something like
“as a sociologist I prefer The Good Society and want even more structural analysis, but as a
human being I would choose Habits hands down.” But of course, that gets it all wrong: the “soft
tissue” cultural analysis of Habits is fully as sociological as the harder institutional analysis of
The Good Society, and both strove to contribute to rolling back the structural injustices of
American life. 
The terminology here becomes difficulty, because I think that as sociologists we still have
not developed adequate conceptual tools for adequately analyzing the complex interweaving of
cultural, institutional, and structural causation within society (even after theoretical progress on
the relationship of culture-and-structure over the last decade). But the interpretations of cultural
and institutional dynamics that lie at the heart of in Habits and The Good Society have helped us
to see part of that terrain more clearly. 
I turn next to the analytic argument underlying the Habits/Good Society project. Think of
this as the project’s left-side dominated “head”. In its rawest terms, that underlying argument
holds that culture ultimately forges history. Of course, that bald statement needs all sorts of
further nuance and several caveats: it’s only partially true, material conditions are crucial, power
can trump culture in the short term, etc. Nonetheless, cultural dynamics take center stage here for
a reason: they fundamentally forge our common life, our politics, our economic future, and the
workings of power in society. Thus, whether you care passionately about structural injustice and
think sociology should focus on addressing it, or think sociologists ought to limit themselves to
better explaining societal outcomes, you have to engage with culture and its institutionalized
expressions – that is, with “traditions” in the language of Habits.
Recalling that analytic argument is important, because Habits ‘s critique of American
culture, its call to community and to re-engaging with democratic and religious traditions, was
regularly misinterpreted as an exercise in nostalgia, a backward-looking yearning for an idealized
communal past. Though I think this may have been a willful misinterpretation, I think it true that
the language of Habits left the book vulnerable to this charge. Nonetheless, it represents a
profound misreading. Habits was never a nostalgic work. In its analytic argument, the language
of community was always much closer to the invocations of progressive utopias that have a long
and worthy pedigree among progressive thinkers: a call to building a better societal future, albeit
here spiked with a dose of realism. What Habits did was to root that call to engagement in the
soil of democratic and religious traditions that can sustain progressive social action over the long
term. Misreading this as conservative nostalgia was and is symptomatic of the continuing failure
of the secular left and many academic liberals to understand real human communities –
depressingly, a failure that debilitates us intellectually, politically, and professionally today. 
This also suggests something crucial about our present political moment. Right now,
neither major political party really understands religious commitment. The Republican Party
“gets religion” in the sense of affirming conservative moral values, but largely in an instrumental
sense, denying the broader moral values of the historic religions any effective claim on party
ideology or policy. Meanwhile, within the Democratic Party, what passes for visionary thinking
about religion is “framing” – the need to better frame issues so that religious Americans will
understand them in light of underlying democratic values and narratives, rather than in light of
competing narratives of hierarchy, patriarchy, and militarism. I do not doubt that better
democratic framing might help the Democratic Party, at least marginally. But such framing
assumes that people hold an underlying attachment to egalitarian values and narratives. What if, a
la Habits and Good Society, the institutions that carry those democratic values and tell those
egalitarian narratives are withering? What if those cultural traditions are being distorted or
simply replaced (sometimes by paper-thin simulacra of the same name, say “Christian”)? Then
our political tasks – for whatever political party – are far more profound than framing analysis
can imagine: we have to re-appropriate, reconstruct, re-invigorate, and sometimes re-invent the
cultural streams and institutions that make democratic framing possible and effective. It’s not just
a language game, but a social, political, and cultural  struggle for the soul of the nation. 
Having considered the heart and head of the Habits/Good Society oeuvre, I want to say a
little about its “appendix.” Habits was published with a substantial closing appendix titled
“Social Science as Public Philosophy.” A summary is beyond my purposes here, but bears re-
reading well, these 20 years hence. Its call to a more publicly-engaged social science and a
revival of the tradition of public intellectuals in American history even offers a certain hopeful
note, in light of recent efforts in the American Anthropological Association, the American
Sociological Association, and other professional bodies to reclaim a public intellectual role for
our disciplines. I would by no means suggest Habits or its appendix has been anything like the
primary driving force in this, but it mattered greatly to many of us who fashion ourselves in part
as public intellectuals. And I think it not a coincidence that Bob Bellah was for decades among
those at the moral and intellectual center of the Berkeley department called home not only by
Ann Swidler but also by Michael Burawoy and, until fairly recently, Troy Duster, Todd Gitlin,
and other architects of public sociology. Thus, even the lowly appendix of Habits matters, along
with its cultural and institutionalist heart and head. 
I close by looking another 20 years into the future, not in a spirit of positivist prediction,
but in a spirit of analytically-grounded hope. “Analytically-grounded” in that nothing
predetermines that a positive scenario will play out in American life or the world stage in the
years ahead. If anything, the evisceration of democratic engagement and “public work”
transcending elite interests bodes poorly for our democratic future; our national leadership’s
cynical machinations in the Middle East may have undermined any semblance of America as a
democratic beacon, and poisoned the language of democracy, in that crucial region for the next
generation. Yet I hope that over the next twenty years, we can deepen democracy in this country
and around the world. I hope that in about 2025, when I’ll be 65 and my kids will be grown
adults, that we will be living in an America that at least strives mightily to live up to her promises
to her own people, and works in partnership with democratic currents everywhere in the world.
This risks sounding naive, in this inauspicious moment for such yearnings, but call it my own
utopia. And to the cynics among us, I note that if we fail to imagine a different future, we will
never build one. 
If we witness something closer to this vision in our old age, where we are today is where
the neocon barbarians currently controlling American policy will find themselves in 2025.
Today, we look back ruefully over the last 40 years as the disciples of Leo Strauss, Milton
Friedman, and others were laying the intellectual foundations of neoconservative hegemony. In
20 more years, I hope the neocons look back ruefully 40 years, and see that the intellectual
foundations of their demise were being laid. Those foundations will be built partly as
bookshelves, and those bookshelves will hold a rich and diverse library. Among the key volumes
there will be Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, with their culturalist and institutionalist
analysis of the deep currents of American society at the end of the 20th century, and a vision for
public intellectual life in the 21st. 


Thinking Culturally about Politics: Habits 20 Years Later and 20 Years Hence

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Thinking Culturally about Politics: Habits 20 Years Later and 20 Years Hence

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