ABSTRACT
Sociology may have been born of eighteenth-century revolutions, but it now dwells in a world of perpetual twenty-first-century conflicts. As recent centuries have unfolded, our understanding of society has not become any easier. The mass slaughtering of the twentieth century in two major world wars and holocaust genocides – justified by the ideologies of communism and fascism, and sometimes by ‘pseudo-science’ – generated a very dark view of twentieth-century life and its appalling possibilities. And now a multitude of public global social problems – from environmental crisis, global poverty and violence to the inequalities ‘crisis’, migrations and surveillance – seem unremitting. Modern media have created a greater awareness of these problems even as they have helped structure them. At its best, sociology is charged with helping us make some sense of it all. Across the world, more and more of its people see the need for this thinking sociology. And yet, this critical sociology can hardly function well
in more authoritarian societies: if a society’s authority is unchallengeable, then people who readily critique it can hardly be acceptable. In such cultures, sociology becomes standardized to the state’s requirements and may become very narrow or go underground. Yet the modern world surely needs the sustained and serious analysis of the workings of the complex worlds we live in. That is sociology’s mission. In this chapter, I look at the value of sociology, its uses or ‘impacts’, its ‘calling’ in the twenty-first century.
