Suchergebnisse

This article attempts to disrupt some of the ways in which engaged social science at times is forced to choose between the technocratic workings of the state and the political world of civil society. In disrupting the common sense distinction between `critical distance' and `heroic immersion' in the everyday life of the city, the piece tries to reframe an understanding of what the `public sociology' powerfully advocated by Michael Burawoy, when chair of the American Sociological Association, might achieve. Rather than conceptualize the ways in which particular knowledges enter into the public realm, we might alternatively think through the manner in which these forms of knowledge themselves constitute publics, congregate audiences around particular forms of expertise that need to be drawn on pragmatically and instrumentally in attempts both to achieve the good society and to link the academy to the civil realm. To do so we might also need to refigure the relation between the sentimental and the rational in the operating of state bureaucracy and the powerful economization of everyday life that sets precedent for the more influential forms of public engagement.

Rather than considering legal and judicial arenas as the mere surface of the heavy social processes that shape European integration, this article contends that they are actually one the essential spaces where the government of Europe is being produced. To account for this paramount role played by law in EU polity, two rather unexplored research paths are undertaken. First of all, a socio-historical perspective focuses on the critical junctures in which case-law and judicial governance have been formalized as the locus of European integration and as the most legitimate model for EU government. Second, a more sociological look is taken at the functioning of the "European legal field". It shows the intense circulation of Euro-lawyers in-between the various (national or supranational) academic, bureaucratic, political and economic poles that make up Europe. Thereby located at the crossroads of European elites and sectors, the European legal field occupies a critical position in a EU polity deprived of a State organizing in a perennial way the mediation between social interests.