1. Introduction: politicization

A. Understanding politicization of society as a process

Just as socialization means gradual introduction of the individual into norms and institutions of society, politicization indicates processes whereby spheres of social life at a particular historical context develop a political character. Political sociology studies these bottom-up and top-down processes of politicization. Through politicization aspects of social life traditionally left to their autonomy are analyzed with a view of embedded power structures. Either individuals and local cultures may initiate a process of politicization which would be called grass-root politics; or legislative bodies of the government can produce laws that would require social bodies to bear the regulative force of the state.

Example: Politicization of family

For instance, a political sociological perspective can ask if family is a natural form of human social organization? This questioning, then, would allow a study of internal and external power dynamics. Internal power relations among members can manifest through naturalized hierarchical role distributions, normalized practices and mechanisms of sanctioning that glue members to the abstract group identity. External forces may be identified by examining the alignments between the culture of family and broader and dominant culture at large. Through the analysis of values instilled, family’s role in the reproduction of larger socio-cultural norms can be unpacked.

Thus, through political sociological analysis what may initially be deemed outside of formal political structures can be brought into the political sphere can initiate a transformative process of denaturalization also called as problematization.

B. Historicization of natural categories: marking possibility and limit

Politicization is often conditioned upon introduction of historical time into the naturalized social categories (Koselleck 2004). Time as a dimension can be used to describe birth and evolution of social formations and therefore also makes possible imagination of an end to existing arrangements. Racialized and gendered hierarchies can be ended, rigid stratification of the population into classes can be opened up to social mobility and resource redistribution. Politics then as a horizon of change is intimately linked with a historical sense.

Historicization describe the steps through which problematization and politicization occur in sequence. What may deemed socially unacceptable in principle can nevertheless have a long existence before it’s materially contested. Ideas long present achieve the status of political mobilization under rare conditions. Conversely, issues politicized by state or one-group may not find wider popularization as it is not preceded by problematization. Urgency and emergency are political categories.

Elimination of slavery has become a political process only at a specific conjecture of the world history. Women’s lack of political representation has become politicized at a specific historical point with the universal human rights inscribed into the law beyond naturalized differences in social roles and exclusions from public life.

What’s not necessarily eternal then would have to have a definite past and could develop a possible future that’s different. In order to preserve a real sense of freedom, there has to be a minimum two options among which free choice can be made. Then, doing and undoing of socially available opportunities constitute one of the major focuses of political sociological analysis (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960).

For political sociologists, social relations are not given once and for all. They might have stability, common acceptance, and technical necessity —but only for a time. What might appear as stability can be also viewed as institutionalization of a relationship of domination, receiving and following orders without critical elaboration. What may seem as consensual agreement may prove to be a hegemony of a culture of a specific group. What presents itself as impossible under current conditions may become possible through political contention, creativity and inventiveness. Thus, politicization of social life objects to a deterministic naturalism of human social potential. Historicization plays an important role in the opening of this possibility by temporally limiting naturalized social categories.

Another term used to describe this sphere of political sociological analysis is normativity. In the history of political thought, first nature is opposed to history. Later, within historical structures as well one found reproduced norms. Formal and informal social institutions play a role in the reproduction of norms. Politicization is the process through which norms are problematized. This activity is also called critique. Critique inquires into the conditions of social roles, relations and practices. Through this questioning, the aura of necessity is stripped from natural conditions and specific vectors of force are articulated. It is often argued that nuclear family is a product of 20th century. Family crystallized into this form as a consequence of a series of historical processes involving 1) secularization of domestic relations away from religious regulation through the emergence of sovereignty of state that ensures civil rights, 2) the dissolution of large-family bonds due to emergence of capitalist productive relations that necessitated dispersal of local support systems across distant geographies leading to breakdown of larger family networks (Cohen, 1972), 3) the popularization of nuclear family life-styles through mass-media, and 4) education accompanied by demonizing, pathalogizing and criminalizing other bonds of sociality.

C. Open-ended politicizing: a processual political sociology

A typical political sociological study may take perennial social forms such as state, family and market as givens and analyze social activity based on these institutions. Yet, with this move, scholars and students would risk joining in their naturalization and de-historicization. Underneath their universality, there are enormous degrees of variety to classical parameters of political analysis. Often, these institutions are idealized and homogenized for the sake of conducting an analysis from a constant vantage point of view. Yet, participant-observant or ethnographic research shows that these political forms have murky, unstandardized and heterogeneous realities (Eds. Das & Poole, 2004). Challenging the ideality of state, there are state-effects—monopoloy of violence, taxation, education, diplomacy—performed by other actors in an ever unstable or metastable social environments (Roitman, 2005).

Often technical affordances become the transformative force that challenges overarching regulatory role of political institutions. The role of care assumed by family can be taken over by digitally mediated networks rendering spatial boundedness and compartmentalization of domestic and private life problematic. Thus, in this study, boundaries of socio-political analysis are seen to be porous. There cannot be a definitive and comprehensive topography of the domain of political sociology as this determination would foreclose the potentiality of the members of sociality. Mathematician Kurt Gödel described this conundrum in his work on incompleteness (Gödel, 1986;  Livingston, 2012). Legal scholar Carl Schmitt named it as theory of state of exception whereby, politically speaking, laws cannot sufficiently anticipate all circumstances where political agency is expected and therefore authorized (Schmitt 1922/2005). Thus, in writing and in practice, there could only be a series of actual and potential politicizations constituting an incomplete set. With this philosophy, throughout this book, students will be invited to explore their irreducible interest in politicizing sociological phenomena.

Works Cited

Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. Free Press.

Cohen, P. (1972). Sub-cultural conflict and working class community. In S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds.), Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (pp. 76–88). London: Hutchinson.

Das, V., & Poole, D. (Eds.). (2004). Ethnography in unstable places: Everyday lives in contexts of dramatic political change. Duke University Press.

Gödel, K. (1986). On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I (S. Feferman, Ed.; J. van Heijenoort, Trans.). In Kurt Gödel: Collected works, Vol. I: Publications 1929–1936 (pp. 144–195). Oxford University Press.

Koselleck, R. (2004). Futures past: On the semantics of historical time. Columbia University Press.

Livingston, P. (2012). The Politics of Logic Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism. Routledge.

Parisi, L., & Terranova, T. (2000, May 10). Heat-death: Emergence and control in genetic engineering and artificial life. CTheory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14604

Roitman, J. (2005). Fiscal disobedience: An anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton University Press.

Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1922)