ABSTRACT
Sociological thinkers have had difficulty representing felt experience with the same analytic force as they manage in depicting structural phenomena. A strong tendency, unfortunate both politically and intellectually, is to treat individuals’ struggles as epiphenomena, useful perhaps as anecdotes of suffering but not as something to be understood and explained. Individual troubles come up as after-effects of the more basic forces. Our tradition, fundamental in Marx but shared by other schools, is to learn the workings of the structures that oppress, note the injustices that result, but do little to show (rather than just assert) the linkage. Attending to the experiences, dilemmas, and angst – especially of everyday life – risks descent into psychologism or anecdote. Worse yet, it risks association with naïve self-help aficionados. At whatever their level of sophistication, dwelling upon ‘feelings’ obscures the need for fundamental change.
