Public intellectuals, globalization and the sociological calling: A reply to critics

‘Public sociology’ and ‘public intellectuals’ are ideas that are very much in fashion. The call ‘for public sociology’ by Michael Burawoy partly provoked this discussion in the British Journal of Sociology (Burawoy 2005a: 259–294, 2005b: 427–32; see also British Journal of Sociology September 2005 ‘Continuing the public sociologies debate’) and has been further supported by a symposium on Rhonda Levine'sEnriching the Sociological Imagination (2005) in Contemporary Sociology. For the prospect of a radical sociology, C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) has always been the benchmark, but in historical terms it is the shadow of 1968 that remains decisive, and there is therefore in the current articulation of radicalism a large degree of nostalgia as the baby boomers come towards their inevitable retirement (Sica and Turner 2006). I would prefer to ask by contrast: is there anything we can learn from this postwar history in order to rebuild sociology for future generations to preserve a critical perspective on society? I am grateful to the critics of my lecture for generously spending the time to think about alternative accounts of sociology, and hence imagining different futures.