ABSTRACT
It is a frequently voiced criticism of sociologists that they tend to project their own socio-political aspirations on to the subjects of their research. Too often they have indulged, as John Goldthorpe has so aptly described it, in ‘wishful, rather than critical, thinking’—a ‘tendency to assert that what was desired was already historically in train’. Most commonly this accusation has been levelled at those on the political left. In pursuit of their own goal of revolutionary socialism, so the argument goes, left-wing intellectuals focus their interpretive efforts almost exclusively on the consciousness and actions of the working class, since this is the most likely agency through which a unity of revolutionary theory and practice might be effected. Where, as has invariably proved to be the case, explicit support for socialism among proletarians is largely absent, a highly implausible degree of implicit ‘resistance’ to the individual and privatized concerns of a ‘capitalist hegemony’ has been read into the norms of working-class culture. Alternatively, there has been a retreat from empirical research altogether, in favour of speculative, usually highly abstract and often covertly historicist theorizing, in the attempt to demonstrate some objective or ultimate commitment to communal rather than personal concerns on the part of the proletariat. 1
