Critical Sociology at 50

Origins

In 1968, with the Vietnam War raging, a range of social movements arrayed in opposition to colonialism, poverty, and racism mobilized during the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest. At the same time in Boston, a radical group of young faculty and graduate students called the Radical Caucus of Sociology gathered for the American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting, looking to alter the course of the discipline. The social unrest of the 1960s laid the groundwork (Fasenfest, 2024) for their challenge to a keynote speech by the then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Wilbur Cohen, on a typically dry subject, ‘On the Gap Between Sociology and Social Policy’.

Martin Nicolaus, a member of the Sociology Liberation Movement and someone that would become well known within Marxist circles as the translator of The Grundrisse into English in 1973, excoriated the American state and professional sociology from the floor of the ASA plenary, pointing through barbs and lashes to a different way to do sociology. In his response, Nicolaus outlined the failings of Sociology as a discipline and issued a challenge for reorienting it:

What if that machinery were reversed? What if the habits, problems, secrets, and unconscious motivations of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers, were hourly pried into, analyzed and cross-referenced; were tabulated and published in a hundred inexpensive mass-circulation journals and written so that even the fifteen-year-old high-school drop-out could understand them and predict the actions of his landlord to manipulate and control him? (Nicolaus, 1968)

The next year at the 1969 ASA convention in San Francisco, a group calling themselves the Western Union of Radical Sociologists built on the previous year’s actions by issuing a statement of principles. In their essay on Elitism and Democracy (Steering Committee of the Western Union of Radical Sociologists, 1969), the group announced their intention to turn professional sociology on its head. They called for all radical sociologists to take the initiative by planning workshops and social actions to unsettle the discipline’s establishment sociology, which had no compelling response to the social crises of the day. To that end, they began putting out a regular series of articles and essays in a little newsletter they called The Insurgent Sociologist.

By 1971, those involved with the Sociology Liberation Movement (Ross, 2010) and the Western Union of Radical Sociologists merged with the New University Conference, an organization of ‘revolutionary socialists who work in and around institutions of higher learning’ (Sociology Liberation Movement, 1971). They transformed The Insurgent Sociologist from a mimeographed newsletter into a journal, focused on publishing critical sociological analyses of capitalism.

The political and intellectual ferment of the time created The Insurgent Sociologist, a journal that prioritized scholarship that envisioned a different world. It thus advocated for a sociology that offered the tools for radical social change, a critical sociology. The new journal became the outlet for the critical and radical scholars not well-received by most departments and whose research remained excluded from mainstream sociology journals. In this way, the journal gave a home and a voice to aspiring sociologists marginalized by their discipline.

Expansions

In the decade that followed, the ASA slowly transformed from a monolithic homogeneous organization into a heterogeneous one with multiple sections. By the 1980s, race, class, gender, and even Marxism was on the agenda at annual meetings. Radical sociology ceased to be singularly insurgent. Reflecting this critical shift in the discipline, in 1987 The Insurgent Sociologists changed its name to Critical Sociology. Explaining this shift, the editors stated: ‘The Insurgent has grown from a small-circulation newsletter to a full-fledged journal. Rather than communicating only to the committed, we have taken up the task of disseminating radical sociological perspectives to a broader audience’ (Editors, 1988). In doing so, the fundamental principles of promoting and publishing radical scholarship, of creating a safe and supportive environment for young scholars, and the principle of addressing the important issues of the day remained the foci of the journal.

During the decade that followed, a series of editorial collectives in Eugene, OR and Binghamton, NY worked to put out the journal. In 1998, David Fasenfest became the editor of Critical Sociology and proceeded to implement a series of changes. As The Insurgent Sociologist and then for the first decade as Critical Sociology, the journal focused on the nature, impact, and consequences of capitalism explicitly informed by various interpretations of the actual works by Karl Marx. Serious scholarship was published on class and class structure, the state, and its supposed relative autonomy, labor politics and policies, and many other important issues.

Starting in 2000 Critical Sociology implemented a series of changes to expand its intellectual and political reach. First, the journal embraced a more multidimensional view of social inequality and published more articles on race, gender, and other dimensions of power inequities that employed a wider range of theoretical perspectives—but all critical. This shift brought a broader and more ecumenical theoretical perspective that moved beyond the traditional tropes of orthodox Marxism. Second, the journal became explicitly international in scope. This was accomplished by creating a network of regional editors who helped attract authors from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. As a result, new ideas and new ways of thinking about the problems of a globalizing international capitalism were reflected by authors from these regions. In this way, our readers in North America became more exposed to important international scholars. Symposia on topics as varied as Japanese capitalism (see https://bit.ly/3ZNKbjs) and post-Soviet critical theory (https://bit.ly/3tncpFD) featured the work of scholars whose research is typically left unengaged by American and European sociologists.

Critical Sociology is now a leading academic sociological journal. Since its initial publication in 1969, it has increasingly provided an intellectual space for critical scholars to explore the crucial fault lines of our time. We are a journal that focuses on the conditions facing advanced capitalism and offers theoretical frameworks to undertake emancipatory and radical scholarship (see Fasenfest, 2007). But Critical Sociology has always been more than a scholarly journal for professional publications. Almost since its inception, it has been organizing all day conferences, sponsoring panels at conferences, providing travel grants and other forms of support to international and early career scholars, all of which contributed to creating and sustaining a community which nurtured critical sociological scholarship. It is more than a journal and is instead a growing network of critical scholars that spans the globe.

Transitions

This editorial marks the beginning of the 50th volume of the journal. To build upon the foundation that has been laid, Critical Sociology has reached a point ready for reinvigoration and a generational passing of the torch. This year, the make-up of our Editorial Board and Associate Editors will undergo substantial transformation and enlargement as a new wave of critical social theorists and scientists participate in guiding the journal. This transitional period will also mark one in which Michael A. McCarthy, the Senior Associate Editor of the journal, will take on a more central role in guiding the journal forward and editing content for its pages.

Academic journals come and go as social currents and fashions in intellectual life that give them content emerge, are sustained or decline. As the social conditions that give rise to a publication fades, so do the publications themselves, unless they pivot toward new identities and content. Though the Vietnam era social upsurge that gave rise to The Insurgent Sociologist is now a faded memory the acts of resistance and struggle in the name of human freedom and a flourishing society to which it was part and parcel, persist and have since been renewed on timeless occasions. The complicated human yearning for a better and more just world, what W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) called ‘spiritual striving’, is this journal’s flame.

Yet, what is being passed from one editor to the next, from one board to another? What has made Critical Sociology a distinct journal of sociology? It is not simply that it broke from the professional norms of the 1960s or that it continues to do so. Nor is it that it has a Marxist hue, concerned with capitalism’s pitfalls, even as they exist in realms, at first glance, some distance from economics in spheres such as race and ethnicity, gender and care work, politics and democracy, and nature. It is that this journal’s focus is critical.

In particular, the journal has taken up the charge of building, article by article, a sociology that aims to analyze and comprehend our conjuncture’s core contradictions and develop frameworks of analyses and conceptual toolkits that arm its practitioners with emancipatory exits from those contradictions. Critical Sociology has been and will remain a journal of theory and action, of analysis and policy, and of critique and construction. And it will continue to pivot toward publishing content that not only brings the sharpest tools of methodological analysis and theoretical interpretation to bear, but also aims to better understand our current confluence of key contradictions and systemic crises.

To that end, Critical Sociology seeks out research that both reveals relations of domination, exploitation, and extraction but also points the way to emancipatory alternatives. We want to answer the big questions and deal with the big problems. The onset of 2024 marks a time of overlapping crises across most major spheres of life. We face economic instability and worker precarity, we experience transformations in social reproduction and gendered backlash, we struggle against coloniality, occupations, and empire, against oligarchic political institutions, racial inequality, and we try to kickstart stalled movements for justice. This journal seeks to address crumbling healthcare provisioning and the spread of disease, knock down barriers to citizenship and immigrant marginality, and reverse the devastating impact of ecological degradation, environmental racism, and climate change. Our journal considers these overlapping crises its basic terrain.

Although the term polycrises has become popular, we instead think the current conjuncture has more in common with what German state theorists once termed a ‘legitimation crisis’ or what Antonio Gramsci writing in his prison notebooks called an ‘organic crisis’. We are in a period of fractured hegemony, an interregnum in which our social and political trajectories are derailed from their previous neoliberal tracks while our ecological trajectory is barreling toward a sunburn. Critical Sociology seeks to fill that void.

As editors, we enter this new phase of the journal with a dogged commitment to a single charge: publishing content that shows what critical sociology and social theory have to offer, both in terms of analysis but also for resolving the crises bearing down on workers, plebeians, and the poor in every corner of the globe. Critical Sociology is home for critical thinkers from multiple disciplines and those who are interdisciplinary. We are a journal for thinkers whose work, ideas, and politics denaturalizes dominant relations of power and points to emancipatory alternatives.

We welcome everyone who share this basic political ambition, regardless of their theoretical stripe. We reject any ambition to achieve editorial consensus or the pretention to knowing all the answers, thereby seeking contributions that conform to what we might have concluded anyway. Instead, we want novel and daring approaches and fresh perspectives. The ideal Critical Sociology paper breaks with orthodoxies old and new. We will also continue to host rigorous theoretical debates and exchanges and their analytical conclusion, both on issues empirical but also conceptual. This year, we are sponsoring a 1-day conference at McGill University, Canada, on the theme, ‘Emancipatory Politics in Times of Crisis’, which will host discussions of our most pressing political issues. We are a rigorous scholarly publication that will continue to publish articles of the highest standards through our review process. But we are not now, nor will we ever be, an insular academic journal. We are concerned with the redistribution of power and position, and prioritize work with political implications.

In his jeremiad to the ASA in 1968, Martin Nicolaus remarked that, ‘The things that are sociologically “interesting,” are the things that are interesting to those who stand at the top of the mountain and feel the tremors of an earthquake’. Critical Sociology seeks work that shakes the earth.