Abstract
Irish society is situated within a period of epoch-defining social change. We are facing in to a short number of decades, which promise the significant re-shaping of the political and social contours of our nation. Irish sociology's disciplinary mandate is to analyse that change, yet a historical debate has found new expression – heightened by the 30th anniversary of the Irish Journal of Sociology (IJS) and the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) – as to whether the discipline is utilising the appropriate means to achieve its ends. The current sociological division of labour is unevenly balanced, with empirical inquiry and sub-disciplinary focus privileged over systemic and synthesised social theorising. In the absence of such theorising, sociology runs the risk of remaining an empirical adjunct to other disciplines, as opposed to its rightful position at the centre of the constellation of social sciences. This paper acts as a contribution to the critique of Irish sociology, considering the extent of the disciplines absent centre, providing an analysis as to how we have reached our particular disciplinary juncture and offering certain proposals regarding appropriate analytical anchors for future theoretical focus.
….at the very moment when the world is coming ever more within the totalising logic of capitalism, at the very moment when we have the greatest need for conceptual tools to apprehend that global totality, the fashionable intellectual trends….…are carving up the world in to fragments of difference. (Meiksins Wood, 1991:93)
Introduction
At any given historical juncture, it is appropriate to pause, take stock and assess the current state of a particular field of enquiry. Irish sociology finds itself located within such a reflective space, emerging from two important anniversaries, the 30th anniversary of the Irish Journal of Sociology (IJS) and the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI). As noted by a variety of contributors to the 30th anniversary edition of the IJS (Corcoran, 2021; Higgins, 2021; Inglis, 2021; Keohane, 2021) anniversaries are a time for reflection; however, it is notable from reviewing the contributions that the authors are animated by far more than mere nostalgia or anniversarial convenience. A clear concern is evident, centred upon the discipline's contributions to, relevance for, and challenges faced regarding its key task of analysing Irish society. There is of course, an ineluctable relation between the two: how sociologists conceive of any given society will of course be represented in the theoretical and methodological tools and the epistemological and ontological base used by sociologists to study that society.
A review of the Irish sociological landscape reveals an uneven division of sociological labour. Predominant, is a state-sponsored and policy-focused sociology driven by a largely quantitative empiricism, emanating primarily from within the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). More critical, yet equally firmly-entrenched empiricism is a key feature of the sociology of civil society organisations such as Social Justice Ireland (SJI), the Equality Coalition (EC) and Think-tank for Action and Social Change (TASC). Finally, academic sociology has secured a relatively distinct footprint through the development of a plurality of academic sub-specialisations, a broad canon of literature utilising a variety of novel – though largely empiricist methodologies and developing new theoretical understandings from the analyses of this evolving milieu. This brief review suggests an empiricism-heavy, theory-light imbalance, a concern which has been noted throughout the history of the SAI (Fahey, 1975; Higgins, 2021; Lee, 1990; Tovey, 2001). While Irish sociology has developed theory relevant to its many sub-disciplines, it has been unable, or unwilling, to develop a canon of substantive, systemic theoretical literature relevant to understanding Irish society in summa. What presents, is a sociological constellation sans a clear centre, and whose valuable component pieces are weakened through an absence of synthesis, while the discipline as a whole, through a failure to attempt to understand the social totality, cedes its rightful mantle as social explanator to alternative disciplines.
This returns us to the debates contained within the IJS 30th anniversary edition. Within the edition, several of the most well-established sociologists in Ireland query the disciplines current orientations, relevance, breadth and focal points, the path towards and route out of the current conjuncture and note a generalised absence of literature relevant to the long-term transformations in Irish society (Corcoran, 2021; Higgins, 2021; Inglis, 2021; Keohane, 2021). This paper acts as a contribution to this debate, taking as a starting point, the intermittent, yet fundamental critique of Irish sociology's lack of theoretical means and ends. A review of the historical critique will be outlined and placed within the context of the path development of this particular feature of Irish sociology. Perry Anderson's (1968) concept of the ‘absent centre’ will act as a referent point throughout the paper and its applicability to the Irish sociological juncture considered. The case for the development of a theoretical canon is then made. As the primary purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate regarding the future directions of a sociology of Ireland, the paper contains a justification for the inclusion of certain analytical anchors relevant to the development of a fuller theoretical understanding of Irish society and social change. Throughout, the paper takes the broad view articulated by Keohane (2021), that the discipline finds itself located somewhere between hope and melancholy, and that a certain sense of urgency is required, as we face in to a short number of decades, which will witness the significant re-shaping of the political and social contours of our nation.
The existing critique of Irish sociology and theory
The intention of this brief section is to introduce readers to the intermittent, yet fundamental critique, that sociology in Ireland has largely failed to develop substantive, systemic and applicable social theory to understanding trans-historical, macro-level social change in Ireland. Writing within two years of the foundation of the SAI, Fahey (1975) criticised what he saw as a lack of theoretical rigor within Irish sociology, drawing attention to a general aversion to theory along with the absence of an Irish Marx, Durkheim or Weber, though given the weakness of the institutional framework of non-state and non-theocratic sociology at the time, this is of no particular surprise. Referencing the same time period, Share and Tovey (2000) noted a general lack of interest in theory emanating from either ‘official’ or ‘Catholic’ sociology. Kelly et al. (1982) noted the fractured form and lack of coherent focus of sociology in Ireland. Lee's (1990) analysis, as part of an excoriation of the absence of an intellectual tradition within the broader Irish social sciences, identified a lack of theoretical imprint within the discipline and Fanning and Hess (2015) argue that the discipline in Ireland was marked by an intellectual insularity until the early-1990s. Yet, the 1980s did witness the publication of a variety of sociological texts driven by theoretical frameworks which attempted to understand (southern) Irish society from a broadly Marxian perspective (Peillon, 1982), a neo-Weberian perspective (Breen et al., 1990; Goldthorpe and Whelan, 1992). Each of these publications displayed a clear materialist focus, in that their clear weighting was towards the economic, failing to consider society in summa and excluding a variety of areas including gender relations (Byrne and Lentin, 2000; O’Connor, 1998), partition and colonialism (O’Dowd, 1991), sexuality (Inglis, 1987) etc.
With the establishment of the IJS, Bell (1991) writing in the very first edition, continued the critique, arguing that a theoretical vacuum existed in Irish sociology, which had been filled – inappropriately – by the importation of status quo-friendly theoretical models. Referring to Irish social theory itself as an oxymoron, Bell argued that the universal logics of classical and Marxian sociologies were insufficient tools to map on the Irish experience of colonialism – in both its historical and unresolved manifestations – and delayed capitalist development. The traditions which were imported led to a Durksonian focus (Tovey, 2001) for Irish sociology on Anglo-American empiricism, as opposed to European social theorising (Bonner, 1996), while the discipline as a whole remained fragmented, according to O’Dowd et al. in his contribution to a review sympoisum, one decade after the establishment of the IJS (2002). Of note within these works are their date of publication, each of which – Tovey and O’Dowd aside – were written in, or about, an Ireland, and a sociology only beginning to embrace the post-modern, post-structuralist turn. A few years in to this broad turn, Conway (2006), in one of the only analyses of Irish sociology during that decade, argued against the prevailing analysis, claiming that there was an unhealthy imbalance between the theoretical and empirical, favouring the former, though he similarly agreed with previous authors as to eschewing of the development of a native intellectual tradition due to the importing of theoretical frameworks. The next review of the sociological field was undertaken by Fanning and Hess (2015) almost one decade later. Whilst not identifying a lack of theory as a systemic element of contemporary sociological work in Ireland, they do reference the various historical periods in which this was problematic, in addition to cautioning against a restrictive practice of focusing on fashionable trends in the absence of a grounding in systemic theory. And in line with various other authors, acknowledge the lack of any Irish sociological innovator.
A review of the IJS 30th anniversary edition reveals similar concerns. Higgins (2021) poses the question as to whether the discipline has abandoned its normative theoretical work and orientation and appropriate historical analyses, setting this within a concern for whether or not sociology in Ireland is equipped with the appropriate tools for contemporary macro-social analysis. Keohane, in calling for a ‘School of Irish Sociology’ (2021:340) describes an Irish sociology that has been too narrowly focussed, seeing ‘mostly only particular trees, but misses seeing the forest of symbols that is Society (2021:340). Inglis (2021) asks how we have arrived at our current juncture, why – mirroring others, Irish sociology has produced no national figure and a generalised absence of literature relevant to the long-term transformations in Irish society; Corcoran (2021) queries what the future holds and sociology's contribution towards it.
One seeming disparity presents within this timeline, and that is the relative lack of continuity with the argument from approximately 2001–2021 bookended by Tovey's critique on one-end, and the collective critique with the IJS's 30th anniversary edition. One obvious explanator of this would be that this period has been one in which the cultural turn and anti-grand narrative obsessions of postmodernism became hegemonic within the wider discipline, leading even dedicated materialists to be blind-sided down the culturalist alleyway (Coulter, 2015). This aside, we might categorise the historical collective critique as intermittent, yet relatively consistent in focus, within which a number of themes arise. First of these is that Irish sociology has experienced a general absence of indigenous theory, failing to produce a developed theoretical canon, or theoretical figures. Second, and related, this disciplinary feature must be situated within a historical tradition of anti-intellectualism within the broader social sciences in Ireland (Chubb, 1993; Lee, 1990; Lynch et al., 2016) and that sociology's current closest discipline, social policy, has experienced a similar phenomenon (Fanning, 2004; Fanning et al., 2004; Powell, 2017) where a generalised under-theorisation of Irish society has been noted, along with the absence of a distinct canon of Irish theoretical works on social policy. Third, that where macro-theoretical works do exist, they have been too narrow in focus, centring on only particular aspects of Irish society, and even then, Irish society limited to an analysis of the 26-county state only. And finally, that this historical critique is reflected in a contemporaneous concern as to the discipline's ability to analyse, and relevance for, understanding the globally-inspired and endogenously derived macro-level social change facing Irish society.
Perry Anderson and the ‘absent centre’
In his historical analysis of the British social sciences in the late-1960s, the British Marxist Perry Anderson (1968) positioned sociology at the centre of the constellation of disciplines precisely for the reason that its mandate was both totalising and synthesising – the attempt to understand society in summa. For it was this synthesis of a variety of disciplines (history, psychology, political economy, philosophy, political theory, geography, etc.) and domains of society (economic, political, cultural and social), which he described as the differentia specifica of classic sociology. However, British sociology, alone amongst major European societies, failed to develop either a classical sociology of the Durkheimian, Paretian or Weberian kind, or a Marxian counterpart: in short, it failed to develop a social theory, which transcended disciplinary boundaries and offered a synthesised totality through which to understand society and social change. This left the remaining disciplines within the social sciences family discretely separated from one another, without an interlocking analytical anchor, a ‘sociology of no sociology’ (Anderson, 1968:12) hence, the absent centre.
For Anderson (1968) the causal elements behind this non-development were centred on class relations, and in particular the non-manifestation of revolutionary class forces of either the bourgeois or working-class variants. In the case of the former, the nascent bourgeois forces of pre-Industrial Revolution England, never confronted the old aristocratic landed order in open conflict, nullifying the requirement for a revolutionary ideology, opting for assimilation instead. Once hegemonic, the potential for the development of intellectual tools capable of understanding the social totality presented as threat, and was naturally, repressed. The second key non-development was the absence of the emergence of revolutionary working-class organisation and accompanying ideology: for Anderson, classical sociology was a bourgeois reaction to the Marxism, and so the absence of a national Marxism nullified the potential for any ideological counter. The argument outlined above offers, from a Marxian perspective, a logical explanator of the non-development of a substantive, theoretical sociology in Britain, though, given the use of his concept within this paper – to act as a conceptual comparator to the general critique of Irish sociology's lack of appropriate theoretical development – Anderson's analysis does require critique on a small number of fronts. The first of these is that Anderson failed to acknowledge the causal influence on the non-development of theory, of the broader international trends within sociology, towards, for example the separation of political economy (and other disciplines) and sociology (Milonakis and Fine, 2009). It is difficult to separate out this broader trend – already well underway during the early-20th century – with the absence of a sociological centre, and so the casual mechanisms ascribed by Anderson – yet not the substance of the thesis itself – can face the accusation of being a little too singularly-focused. The second of these is temporal, in that the absent centre concept pre-dates the postmodern turn by approximately two decades, during which advanced capitalist societies have experienced rapid and considerable social, political, economic, cultural, technological and demographic change and a consequent re-working of the full panoply of social relations. Finally, Meiksins Wood (1991), in a critique of Anderson's thesis, argues that British social sciences, had not suffered from an exclusively impoverished theoretical consciousness, more one that was rigidly constrained by the political context, and one dominated by psychologism, an individualism of both substance and method and a fragmentation of the disciplines.
Irish sociology and the absent centre
At first glance, there appears a certain resonance between the generalised absence of an indigenous, systemic theory within the Irish sociological canon and Anderson's concept of the absent centre. Anderson identified an absence of either a dominant classical or Marxian sociology within his paper, identifying a largely empirically-dominated discipline in its place. These elements converge with the Irish experience as understood by Bonner (1996), Share and Tovey (2000) and Higgins (2021). Anderson's claims of the absence of a national figure were made prior to the rise of Anthony Giddens, yet at the time rang true and chime with the arguments of Fahey (1975), Fanning and Hess (2015) and Inglis (2021) regarding the absence of such a figure or figure in Ireland. The most substantive claim is that the discipline as a whole had failed to produce a thorough, synthesised understanding of society in its totality. Again, echoes of this argument can be identified within many of the critiques outlined in the previous section. Certainly, there is an absence of Irish sociological literature focused upon substantive and synthesised theoretical frameworks. Certain key texts have of course analysed Irish society from the macro-perspective, yet these texts are either out-dated (Kelly et al., 1982; Peillon, 1982); out-dated and too narrowly-focused (Breen et al., 1990; Goldthorpe and Whelan, 1992; O’Connor, 1998); contemporary, but too narrowly focused (Ó Riain, 2014); insufficiently synthesised due to their anthological format (Cullen and Corcoran, 2020; Coulter, 2015). The IJS has published a multitude of special editions ranging in focus from walking sociology, through social movements and gender, yet the one special edition dedicated to social theory – inexplicably – features no articles dedicated to a consideration of Irish-specific social theory.
So, we might reasonably claim that there are certain key areas of convergence with Anderson's thesis – certainly not a complete overlap – yet enough, I would argue, for the absent centre to act as a useful conceptual tool to help us understand our current disciplinary juncture. Yet, a piece within this jigsaw is missing: an explanator as to how we have arrived at this juncture. It is here that Anderson's analysis diverges somewhat from the Irish experience, and it is to this, which we now turn.
The path development of the absent centre
Anderson argues that it is the broader political context – in his logic, the balance of class forces – which gives rise to particular forms of sociology ascending to assume hegemonic status. Boudon, paraphrasing Pareto, reminds us that ideas are more likely to be favourably received where they ‘correspond with cognitive, ideological or material interests, with caste, class or groups interests’ (Boudon, 2003:8), and the path development of Irish sociology does seem to broadly reflect the logics inherent within these arguments. Inheritance and context form a useful dialectic for the elaboration of the debate. Within this uncontentious schema, each, admittedly ill-defined generation inherit within their historico-political context, the methodologies, theoretical legacies and logics of the previous generation, and attempt either an assimilation with or break from this inheritance within their contextual milieu. This path development has been broadly detailed by various authors (Conway, 2006; Fanning and Hess 2015; Share et al., 2007), however, these analyses have been broad in scope, whereas this paper focuses on a small number of key junctures relevant to the theory–sociology nexus.
Whatever potential existed for the development of sociological theorising was always constrained by Ireland's role as a colony, as this was the overarching framework through which social change manifested. And the roots of Irish sociology are in fact embedded within the discipline of (liberal) political economy (Fanning and Hess, 2015), under colonial rule, a political economy concerned with statistical data gathering as opposed to anything resembling social theorising and operating as a tool for political elites (ibid: 2015). The 1913–1923 revolution and counter-revolutions, culminating in the British partitioning of Ireland, quashed any emergent class consciousness, ensured that cultural nationalism and Catholicism secured intellectual hegemony in the South (Connolly, 2003), whilst in the North, Orangeism and the associated sectarianism acted as the key stultifying influences to any intellectual tradition which may have explained – never mind challenged – the status quo. The bourgeoise elements of both societies thus cultivated particular intellectual traditions which marginalised the emergence of a theoretically-centred sociology of either the classical or Marxian variant, as the contextual requirement of power elites in both newly formed states was to develop their own hegemonic ideological explanators of society, and consequently the sociology which did develop was supportive, as opposed to critical of the status quo. The second key period witnessed the establishment of the Economic Research Institute (ERI) in 1960, which drew an inheritance of quantitative methodologies from the Dublin Statistical Society into the context of the Lemassian drive for industrial development and the requirement for economic and social research to support this agenda. Any form of critical social theorising was unnecessary – and received with hostility (Fanning and Hess, 2015) – within this project. The third key period was the early 1970s, which involved a triumvirate of the breaking of Catholic hegemony over the discipline, the long-delayed establishment of chairs in sociology in third-level institutions (it took until 1977 in the North) and the establishment of the SAI. The theoretical inheritance, given the essentially new beginning for the discipline, was relatively bare and certainly lacking the form of social analysis and theorising central to much of European sociology (Fanning and Hess, 2015). The social context was two polities on the cusp of EEC accession, one only just beginning to develop industrially and beginning to experience the winds of the new social movements, the other in the midst of a slow industrial decline (Rowthorn, 1987) and immersed in serious political violence.
The final key juncture from the perspective of the analysis adopted in this paper, dates from the early-1990s with the emergence of neoliberalism and postmodernism as critical additions to the material and ideological elements of Irish life. The sociological inheritance was a discipline more diversified in focus than in previous epochs, guided by the winds of the previous decade's social movements, the generalised marginalisation of Marxism, an emergent post-modernism in the intellectual driving seat, and a state-sponsored quantitative sociology privileged over critical academic sociology (Inglis, 2021). The context was a southern state on the cusp of a qualitative shift-change in the capitalist mode of production and an associated change in social relations and social identities, while the northern state stood on the precipice of an uneasy peace. This particular juncture was idealised by elites as a collective end of Irish history moment (Coulter and Coleman, 2003; Ruane, 1999). It was the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. It was TINA (There Is No Alternative). It was the end. The end of the economic question. The end of the national question. What need for understanding the totality, when the totality was no longer problematic? What need for synthesis, in a world of diversity, contingency, fluidity, fragmentation, difference and individualism. And so, the focus of much sociological effort chimed with this logic.
There was of course, a supreme irony in all of this, in that the advanced capitalist material world and post-modern intellectual world in to which Irish sociology stepped, holds a particular Janus-faced quality, in that it simultaneously fragments and homogenises modern societies. A tendency towards fragmentation on the individual and social group level co-exists with a homogenisation at the structural level, whereby national societies are, more than ever, recognisable within and between one another, from the totalising capitalist mode of production, to liberal democratic political structures, the McDonaldisation and Twitterisation of culture, the centralisation of linguistics, etc. So, while the society which Irish sociology was analysing, was experiencing an undoubted internal heterogenisation, it was simultaneously experiencing a pronounced homogenisation, progressively adding the features of other advanced capitalist societies. Faced with this intellectual juncture, the vast majority of the discipline only recognised one side of Janus. Meiksins Wood identified this irony in the context of international sociology: …at the very moment when the world is coming ever more within the totalising logic of capitalism, at the very moment when we have the greatest need for conceptual tools to apprehend that global totality, the fashionable intellectual trends … are carving up the world in to fragments of difference. (Meiksins Wood, 1991:93)
Does our current conjuncture require systemic theory?
One of the obvious questions arising from such an analysis is whether sociology in Ireland requires a sociology of Ireland, which contains such a systemic, synthesised theoretical canon? Before responding to this, it would be prudent to note that this generalised absence of theory and disciplinary fragmentation is by no means an Irish-specific phenomenon and is in fact, a general feature of sociologies. Yet, omnipotence should not place a phenomenon beyond intellectual reproach. If we accept the general argument contained above, that there is an absence at the centre of sociology in Ireland, then two obvious questions arise: does this matter, and with what might we fill this absent centre? This section deals with the first of these matters. Of course, our individual responses to such a question are determined by what we determine as the purpose of sociology. Marx's famous aphorism of not only wishing to interpret the world, but to change it is a useful starting point, as it is reasonable to presume that most of us who are involved with the discipline hold the second, as well as the first of these ideals. Of course, change is an elastic term, and each of us sits on some different nodal point along the continuum between reform-type change and revolutionary-type change. This in turn is dictated by our analysis of the scale of the particular – or collective – social problems which we attempt to interpret and contribute towards changing.
This returns us to Higgin's (2021) call regarding sociology's relevance to the ‘great societal challenges. What might these be exactly? Reviewing the Irish sociological landscape – and doing so from our all-encompassing position at the centre of the constellation of the social sciences – a nation (and of course, a world) undergoing significant transformation is revealed. The evolution towards the ending of Britain's involvement in Ireland and the monumental task of integrating two polities in to one; an untrammelled capitalist political economy structured towards an upwards redistribution of wealth and inevitable cyclical collapse and subsequent social devastation; the consequent fraying of social relations built upon an always-thin progressive neoliberal consensus. Ours is the time of Gramsci's (1971) ‘monsters’, bedecked in suit and tie, buying up land and homes and condemning tens of thousands to despair, impoverishment, debt servitude or homelessness; bedecked in hoods, burning the tents of homeless refugees; bedecked as clumsy, matted-haired colonial relics, caring not for the fortunes of their Irish subjects. Yet more appear as in the form of faceless corporations, feasting upon the living labour and data of the masses, and awaiting the opportunity to take flight upon the appearance of more fertile opportune. And now, we face an AI-inspired nightmare of Baudrillardian dystopia, as these man-made machines, reduce human intellect and creativity and expression and ingenuity to a click of a button, pave the way for mass unemployment, and provoke mass psychological breakdown through the ultimate manifestation of a hyper-reality in which the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality is complete.
So, in contradistinction to the post-modern fantasists, we are not at the end of history, we are at the end of the end of history (Hochuli et al., 2021). We are amidst a moment of epochal change, and the shifting of hegemony, both nationally and globally (Arrighi, 2010; Streeck, 2017) as societal consensus fractures. And amongst the crises, a desperate longing for understanding can be discerned from within the demos: a longing to make sense of a world increasingly bent out of all recognisable shape, and one in which many cannot imagine a dignified life for themselves or their children. The sources which are pro-offering understandings – nationalisms and (proto)fascisms – provide simplified understandings of our social totality, in recognition that humans do wish to understand the entirety of our social existence. Two related questions are worth considering here: what role will sociology play in this struggle and – related – what type of alternative answers can we provide for people to help them to understand our current historical juncture? Or, as Keohane and Kuhling queried from amongst the social wreckage of the middle of the last decade, ‘How can we get a perspective on our situation by virtue of which we may be able to imagine alternatives? (Keohane and Kuhling, 2014). The post-1990s canon of Irish sociological literature (Joseph, 2018; Lentin, 1998; Ryan, 2003; Smyth, 2005; Smyth, 1992) has added substantially to our knowledge of social issues and social groups too long marginalised in Irish society, making a substantive contribution to constitutional and social change. Yet – and this is not intended as a negation of these, or other similar works – they offer us insight in to a multitude of fragments. At this historical moment, offering fragments alone will not suffice within this endeavour.
So, from the perspective adopted within this paper, it is difficult to comprehend how Irish sociology might valuably contribute to our historical moment without the use of comprehensive social theory to explain the social totality. There is a clear need to fill our absent centre with theoretical perspectives, which are sufficiently historical, broad and synthesised and which offer an analysis of the current trajectory of our social totality. For at present, the discipline's orientation feels a little too exogenously determined, too fragmented, too caught up in the intellectual trends of the post-modern/neo-liberal synthesised milieu of progressive neo-liberalism (Fraser, 2019). Perhaps, in an unintentional inversion of Anderson's argument, this is Irish sociology's absent centre: a fragmented, diffuse grouping of multiple sub-disciplines centred largely on cultural affairs and oriented toward the concerns of the comfortable middle classes. While playing a critical role in highlighting social issues and social groups too long marginalised, this amorphous centre suffers from the absence of unifying analytical anchors in which to ground this work. Sans clear analytical anchors or generally accepted view of how to conceptualise Irish society, the various sub-strands of the discipline are weakened.
It should be noted that this problematic is in no way unique to Irish sociology, for as Susen and Turner note ‘sociology, probably more than most disciplines in the social sciences, is constantly influenced by external factors. To be precise, it is influenced by constantly changing social factors, including social movements’ (2021:231). Anderson (1968) argued that the price British society paid for the absence of such an instrument to conceive the social totality involved an inevitable retreat in to ‘the nuclear psyche’ (1968: 56) – psychologism – as explanator of society and history. This chimes with contemporary intellectual trends in Ireland: from within the broader family of social sciences from which social analyses may be drawn, publics and policymakers have predominantly turned toward psychology and economics for answers. Given the broader ideological context in which this search for understanding is located, the turn toward those branches of the social sciences, which centre on a fundamentally introverted logic is no surprise: the liberal capitalist order, in an ideologically-inspired inversion of C Wright Mill's (1959) analysis, posits social problems as personal troubles. It is these disciplines – this intellectual syllogism – which dominates intellectual and public debate regarding societal analysis: sociology has ceded too much ground to these disciplines as explanators of our social totality. Without some attempt at overall theory, sociology will remain positioned, as Craib (1992) argues, as an empirical adjunct to other disciplines. So, our need contains both a societal and a disciplinary impetus.
Towards the development of a sociology of Ireland
The intent within this penultimate section is not to offer prescriptive ‘solutions’ to the sociological dilemma of our current conjuncture. Instead, the suggestions offered argue for the inclusion of certain analytical anchors relevant to the challenges faced by the generalised absence of macro-level social theory in Ireland. A general criteria for inclusion is proposed, beginning with a requirement that the proposed analytical anchors of enquiry are trans-historical, in that their historical roots are deeply embedded with Irish history and that they continue to inform the present and future trajectory of Irish society; the second criteria is that they are structural and fundamental to broad, systemic social change; thirdly, that they hold immanent synthesising qualities. Here, I reject Beck (2002) and Styrdom's (2011) calls for a methodological re-orientation from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism and the latter's call for the ‘painful excision’ of the classics from the sociological imagination. This logic is centred on an argument that nation-states are no longer an appropriate unit of analysis for social theory and that: Social science must be re-established as a transnational science of the reality of de-nationalization, transnationalization and ‘re-ethnification’ in a global age – and this on the levels of concepts, theories and methodologies as well as organizationally. This entails that the fundamental concepts of ‘modern society’ … must be released from the fetters of methodological nationalism and must be reconceptualised and empirically established within the framework of a cosmopolitan social and political science. (Beck, 2002: 53–54)
So, the call is for a methodological nationalism, yet one which will inevitably lean on – as all theoretical development does – the work of international models, thereby bridging the theoretical tension between universality and difference which has invariably divided Irish studies when it comes to social theorising (Connolly, 2003). When discussing the development of the capitalist economy, for example, wholesale importations of orthodox Marxian theory should be tempered with the national realities of a hyper-speeded transition from a pre-industrial to post-industrial society in the south of Ireland and a more typical – though unevenly distributed – transition in the north of Ireland. Equally, theories of post-colonialism must be tempered with the reality of the ongoing process of colonial disentanglement and with the uneven development of this process, given the two polities on the island.
The proposed analytical anchors hold back-to-the-future qualities, in that they are a return to the twin centrifugal elements underpinning social change throughout modern Irish history: the development of the capitalist socio-economic order and the development of the colonial relationship with Britain. These suggestions belie my own disciplinary interests and, true to the central thesis within this paper, are trans-historical, systemic and synthesising in nature. Peering in to the Irish sociological future, these present as the most obvious determiners of that future.
In regards capitalism what is being proposed as an analytical anchor is not a narrow vision of capitalism as a mere mode of production, but capitalism as a totalising social order, akin to its absolutist and feudal predecessors. This form of analysis is certainly not novel, for as Streeck reminds us ‘Once upon a time, sociologists knew that modern society is capitalist society: that capitalism is not one thing – a particular kind of economy – and modern society another’ (2016:1). For Streeck, capitalism is not an economic mode of production, but a social system, driven by a constant pressure to revolutionise economic and social relations, a social order which defines our collective understandings of what might be considered the good life, which defines and redefines the democratic parameters of its polities, and a social order which determines our daily lives, geographies, routines, labour, social relations, family and intimate relations and family forms. In similar vein, Nancy Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) offers a ‘de-orthodoxified’ vision of capitalism as an institutionalised social order incorporating foreground and background spheres. Formally separated from one another, yet in reality resting within an inter-dependent dialectic, they coalesce to provide a systemic, synthesised understanding of our social totality. Fraser argues that the foregrounding of commodity production is reliant upon a background of social reproduction, which of course, is still overwhelmingly conducted by women, contributing to the evolving form of gender relations within capitalist societies. This argument has been emphasised in an Irish context within the recent work of Lynch (2022) and Cullen and Corcoran (2020). The background of the natural world, with its ‘free gifts of nature’ provides for the foreground of human society, as a critical input for commodity production and capital accumulation, whilst simultaneously imperilling the very conditions for existence. While the foreground of the economic sphere is reliant on the occluded, background role of the polity to ‘establish and enforce its constitutive norms’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 38) under a legal framework conducive to market logic, which in-turn incrementally removes democratic control over the economic sphere. The works of both Streeck and Fraser recognise also the deeply racialised nature of the global capitalist political economy and the manner in which local and national political economies like Ireland benefit from their privileges position within the core-periphery matrix of inter-state relations and the subsequent financial bounty extracted in the form of cheap human and natural resources. The social consequences of this nexus of extractivism and the increasingly uneven distribution of material within capitalist societies resources is only beginning to bear its overtly-racist fruit in contemporaneous Irish society.
The call to include capitalism – or more specifically, to study Irish society as capitalist society – as a key analytical anchor in the development of a sociology of Ireland, is substantiated by the centrality of each of these spheres and their synthesised totality. Of course, Irish sociology has not completely ignored capitalism. Allen (2013) and Coulter (2015) amongst others have produced works analysing the impact of the neoliberal variant of capitalism on Irish society, however even these works have generally failed to develop the rigorous, over-arching conceptual frameworks required of social theory.
It would also be remiss – as regrettably it has been more recently for Irish sociology – to ignore the other key macro-analytical issue relevant to Ireland: that of colonialism, which acts as the second proposed analytical anchor. Whilst the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was posited, in its own unique way, as a form of Irish end-of-history moment (Ruane, 1999), the passage of time has revealed it as a mere node (Ó Rálaigh, 2023) – though admittedly an important one – in the broader schema of colonialism in Ireland: it was a mere 18 years between the GFA and Brexit, within which the southern polity was largely shielded from the impact of Britain's ongoing claim over part of Ireland, before the reality of colonial rule once more came crashing in to the everyday life of Irish political economic and social life. Any change to the constitutional order will inevitably involve a considerable re-structuring of social relations along lines of class and ethno-national lines along with considerable cultural and institutional change. Placed in this context, the failure to include colonialism as a key analytical anchor for understanding social change in Ireland appears less as short-sighted error and more as a gaping methodological and theoretical chasm. Despite the SAI's honourable all-Ireland remit, and excepting the works of Liam O’Dowd and Colin Coulter, the discipline in Ireland more broadly has largely and unproblematically accepted the post-nationalist/end of Irish history thesis and the ideological re-construction of Ireland as the 26-county state. Hayward (2016), on the 25th anniversary of the IJS, noted the almost complete absence of articles relating to the North of Ireland or the GFA. Fortunately, the more recent work of Allen (2021) and in particular McVeigh and Rolston's (2021) recent monograph offers a refreshed analytical starting point at which to begin to consider these issues from an all-Ireland lens. McVeigh and Rolston's work also provides a wonderful example of the manner in which the relatively new (for Irish sociology) sub-discipline of race/ethnicity is strengthened and contextualised once set within such a key analytical anchor and a rigorous, synthesised macro-sociological theory lens.
Conclusion
On the 10th anniversary of the IJS, Tovey argued that Irish sociology should try to develop a sociology of ‘an Irish local or national destiny’ (2001:83). This demand remains unfulfilled. The calls for such a sociology have been relatively intermittent, yet by their very nature are fundamental to the discipline, and have continued to appear across different generational junctures, with the most recent calls emanating from some of the most revered Irish sociologists of the past four decades. The arguments articulated within this paper appear as a little messy in some regards, reflecting perhaps, the beginnings of any process of reflection and renewal, and, on a humbler note and belying the author's relative novelty within the discipline, no doubt reveal only certain trees within the Irish sociological forest. Whilst it would be inaccurate to argue that Anderson's concept of the absent centre maps entirely neatly on the landscape of Irish sociology, this paper has argued that there is certainly enough of an overlap for it to be considered as useful starting point for such a debate: hopefully it will be one amongst many. If the tone has presented as somewhat dismissive of the various sociological sub-disciplines, this has not been the intent, rather, the aim has been to attempt to illuminate that which is absent. It is posited as an attempt to provoke those who might be so inclined, to begin to consider the role that a sociology of Ireland can play in contributing towards filling the theoretically absent centre at the heart of the discipline and (re?)claiming Irish sociology's position at the centre of the constellation of social sciences
And whilst disciplinary clarity and purpose are important at any given historical juncture, there is a pressing need for clear societal analysis within our present disjuncture, when women and men everywhere are desperately seeking ways of understanding their worlds. Sociologists should carefully note that the dominant intellectual countertrends to the prevailing progressive neoliberal consensus have been systemic and synthesising in their own way, namely, the unifying logics of nationalism and (proto)fascism, who attempt to impose simplified understandings of the social totality in acknowledgement that there is a desire to understand societies in their totality. Irish society is no different in this regard, and as we progress in to a short series of decades, which may well see a fundamental re-setting of the contours of our society, there is at least some responsibility on sociologists to offer theoretical analyses capable of offering an understanding of an alternative, progressive social totality.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Daithí Mac an Mháistir and Dr Clay Darcy for their comments during the preparation of this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
