A. Understanding the politicization of society as a process

Just as socialization refers to the gradual introduction of the individual into the 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-roots 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 the family-unit is a natural form of human social organization. This questioning, then, could provoke a study of internal and external power dynamics. Internal power relations among family 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 the family and the broader and dominant culture at large. Through the analysis of values instilled by familial practices, rituals, and routines, family’s role in the reproduction of the larger socio-cultural norms can be unpacked.

Thus, through political sociological analysis what may initially be deemed to fall outside of formal political structures can be brought into the political sphere and political sociological analysis can initiate a transformative process of denaturalization also known 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 the birth and evolution of social formations, thereby making it possible to imagine an end to existing arrangements. Racialized and gendered hierarchies can be dismantled, and the rigid stratification of the population into classes can give way to social mobility and equitable resource redistribution. Politics then as a horizon of change is intimately linked with a historical sense.

Historicization describes 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 is materially contested. Ideas long present are activated through processes of political mobilization only under rare conditions. Conversely, when issues are politicized by the state or by a particular group without a prior process by problematization, they may struggle to gain wider popular support.

Urgency and emergency are political categories. History is not a homogenous process that unfolds with a uniform rhythm that’s set for eternity. While for effective transformation there might need to be a resonance between material conditions and ideals, historical scene of politics, by a singular frequency, also becomes the stage of sudden, unexpected and often improbable revolutionary or catastrophic change. Thus, while there are traceable logics to the historicity of political processes, these identifiable factors are far from being exhaustive of all temporal possibilities.

The elimination of slavery emerged as a political process only at a specific conjecture of the world history. Women’s exclusion from political representation became politicized at a specific historical point with the universal human rights had been inscribed into the law, thereby facilitating the political process of negating and transcending certain differences in social roles and exclusions from public life that had previously appeared as natural or necessary.

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, expansion and limitation of socially available opportunities constitutes 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 that render following orders without critical elaboration natural. What may seem as consensual agreement may prove to be the hegemony of the culture of a specific group. What presents itself as impossible under current conditions may become possible through political contention, creativity and inventiveness. The politicization of social life challenges what may be termed as deterministic naturalism placed upon human social potential. Historicization plays an important role in the opening of this possibility by revealing temporal limits of naturalized social categories.

Another term used to describe this sphere of political sociological analysis is normativity. In the history of political thought, theorists initially opposed nature to history. Later, scholars recognized that historical structures constitute also something of a second nature  wherein social norms are reproduced across generations through both formal and informal institutions. Politicization is the process through which such historical norms are problematized. This activity is also called critique. Critique inquires into the conditions for possibility of social roles, relations and practices. Through this questioning, the aura of necessity is stripped from natural conditions and specific vectors of force are revealed.

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) the secularization of domestic relations away as state sovereignty replaced religious authority and established civil rights, 2) the dissolution of extended-family bonds due to the emergence of capitalist productive relations that necessitated the 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 approach, scholars and students would risk participating in their naturalization and de-historicization of these social forms. Underneath their apparent universality, there are enormous degrees of variation within the classical units and parameters of political analysis. Social institutions are often idealized and homogenized in sociological analysis for the sake of conducting an investigation from a consistent vantage point. However, participant-observant and ethnographic research show that these social and political forms have murky, unstandardized and heterogeneous realities (Eds. Das & Poole, 2004). For example, Challenging the ideality of state, there are state-effects—e.g. monopoloy of violence, taxation, education, diplomacy—performed by non-state actors in an ever unstable or metastable social environments (Roitman, 2005).

Often technical affordances become the transformative force that challenges the overarching regulatory role of political institutions. The role of care assumed by the family can be taken over by digitally mediated networks rendering spatial boundedness and compartmentalization of domestic and private life problematic. Thus, in this study, the boundaries of socio-political analysis are grasped as 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, laws cannot sufficiently anticipate all circumstances wherein political agency is necessary 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)