in tr o d u c to r y r e a d in g s
edited
•
ant
by
h
0
n y
READING
1
Anthony Giddens
The Scope of Sociology
S
ociology is a subject with a curiously mixed reputation. On the one hand, it is associated by many people with the fomenting of rebellion, a stimulus to revolt. Even though they may have only a vague notion of what topics are studied in sociology, they somehow associate sociology withsubversion, with the shrill demands of unkempt student militants. On theother hand, quite a different view of the subject is often entertained perhapsmore commonly than the first - by individuals who have had some directacquaintance with it in schools and universities. This is that in fact it israther a dull and uninstructive enterprise, which far from propelling its studentstowards the barricades is more likely to bore them to death with platitudes.Sociology, in this guise, assumes the dry mantle of a science, but notone that proves as enlightening as the natural sciences upon which its practitionerswish to model it. I think that those who have taken the second reaction to sociology have a gooddeal of right on their side. Sociology has been conceived of by many of its proponents - even the bulk of them - in such a way that commonplaceassertions are disguised in a pseudo-scientific language. The conception that sociology belongs to the natural sciences, and hence should slavishlytry to copy their procedures and objectives, is a mistaken one. Its laycritics, in some considerable degree at least, are quite correct to be scepticalof the attainments of sociology thus presented. M y intention in this [discussion] will be to associate sociology with the firsttype of view rather than the second. By this I do not mean to connect
controversies and conflicts in society itself, that it has this character. However kempt or otherwise student radicals, or any other radicals, may be, there do exist broad connections between the impulses that stir them to action and a sociological awareness. This is not ... because sociologists directly preach revolt; it is because the study of sociology, appropriately understood, ... demonstrates how fundamental are the social questions that have to be faced in today's world. Everyone is to some extent aware of these questions, but the study of sociology helps bring them into much sharper focus. Sociology cannot remain a purely academic subject, if 'academic' means a disinterested and remote scholarly pursuit, followed solely within the enclosed walls of the university. Sociology is not a subject that comes neatly gift-wrapped, making no demands except that its contents be unpacked. Like all the social sciences under which label one can also include, among other disciplines, anthropology, economics and history - sociology is an inherently controversial endeavour. That is to say, it is characterized by continuing disputes about its very nature. But this is not a weakness, although it has seemed such to many of those who call themselves professional 'sociologists', and also to many others on the outside, who are distressed that there are numerous vying conceptions of how the subject-matter of sociology should be approached or analysed. Those who are upset by the persistent character of sociological debates, and a frequent lack of consensus about how to resolve them, usually feel that this is a sign of the immaturity of the subject. They want sociology to be like a natural science, and to generate a similar apparatus of universal laws to those which they see natural science as having discovered and validated. But ... it is a mistake to suppose that sociology should be modelled too closely on the natural sciences, or to imagine that a natural science of society is either feasible or desirable. To say this, I should emphasize, does not mean that the methods and objectives of the natural sciences are wholly irrelevant to the study of human social behaviour. Sociology deals with a factually observable subject-matter, depends upon empirical research, and involves attempts to formulate theories and generalizations that will make sense of facts. But human beings are not the same as material objects in nature; studying our own behaviour is necessarily entirely different in some very important ways from studying natural phenomena. The development of sociology, and its current concerns, have to be grasped in the context of changes that have created the modern world. We live in an age of massive social transformation. In the space of only something like two centuries a sweeping set of social changes, which have hastened rather than lessened their pace today, have occurred. These changes, emanating originally from Western Europe, are now global in their impact
French revolution (to which we can bracket, with some reservations, the anti-colonialrevolution in North America in 1776)for the first time in history there took place the overall dissolution of a social order by a movement guided by purely secular ideals - universal liberty and equality. If the ideals of the revolutionaries have scarcely been fully realized even now, they created a climate of political change that has proved one of the dynamic forces of contemporary history. There are few states in the world today that are not proclaimed by their rulers to be 'democracies', whatever theiractual political complexion may be. This is something altogether novel in human history. It is true that there have been other republics, most especiallythose of Classical Greece and Rome. But these were themselves rare instances;and in each case those who formed the 'citizens' were a minority of the population, the majority of whom were slaves or others without the prerogatives of the select groups of citizenry. The second 'great revolution' was the so-called 'industrial revolution', usually traced to Britain in the late eighteenth century, and spreading in the nineteenth century throughout Western Europe and the United States. The industrial revolution is sometimes presented merely as a set of technical innovations: especially the harnessing of steam power to manufacturing production and the introduction of novel forms of machinery activated by such sources of power. But these technical inventions were only part of a verymuch broader set of social and economic changes. The most important ofthese was the migration of the mass of the labour force from the land into the constantly expanding sectors of industrial work, a process which also eventually led to the Widespread mechanization of agrarian production. This same process promoted an expansion of cities upon a scale again previouslyunwitnessed in history .... Sociology came into being as those caught up in the initial series of changes brought about by the 'two great revolutions' in Europe sought to understand the conditions of their emergence, and their likely consequences.Of course, no field of study can be exactly pinpointed in terms of its origins. We can quite readily trace direct continuities from writers in the middle of the eighteenth century through to later periods of social thought. Theclimate of ideas involved in the formation of sociology in some part, in fact,helped give rise to the twin processes of revolution. How should 'sociology' be defined? Let me begin with a banality. Sociologyis concerned with the study of human societies. Now the notion ofsociety can be formulated in only a very general way. For under the general category of 'societies' we want to include not only the industrialized countries,but large agrarian imperial states (such as the Roman Empire, or traditional China), and, at the other end of the scale, small tribal communitiesthat may comprise only a tiny number of individuals. A society is a cluster, or system, of institutionalized modes of conduct. To ak of 'institutionalized' forms of social conduct is to refe to mod of
which persist in recognizably similar form across the generations. Hence we can speak of economic institutions, political institutions and so on. Such a use of the concept 'institution', it should be pointed out, differs from the way in which the term is often employed in ordinary language, as a loose synonym for 'group' or 'collectivity' - as when, say, a prison or hospital is referred to as an 'institution'. These considerations help to indicate how 'society' should be understood, but we cannot leave matters there. As an object of study, 'society' is shared by sociology and the other social sciences. The distinctive feature of sociology lies in its overriding concern with those forms of society that have emerged in the wake of the 'two great revolutions'. Such forms of society include those that are industrially advanced - the economically developed countries of the West, Japan and Eastern Europe - but also in the twentieth century a range of other societies stretched across the world .... In the light of these remarks, a definition can be offered of the subject as follows. Sociology is a social science, having as its main focus the study of the social institutions brought into being by the industrial transformations of the past two or three centuries. It is important to stress that there are no precisely defined divisions between sociology and other fields of intellectual endeavour in the social sciences. Neither is it desirable that there should be. Some questions of social theory, to do with how human behaviour and institutions should be conceptualized, are the shared concern of the social sciences as a whole. The different 'areas' of human behaviour that are covered by the various social sciences form an intellectual division of labour which can be justified in only a very general way. Anthropology, for example, is concerned ... with the 'simpler' societies: tribal societies, chiefdoms and agrarian states. But either these have been dissolved altogether by the profound social changes that have swept through the world, or they are in the process of becoming incorporated within modem industrial states. The subjectmatter of economics, to take another instance, is the production and distribution of material goods. However, economic institutions are plainly always connected with other institutions in social systems, which both influence and are influenced by them. Finally, history, as the study of the continual distancing of past and present, is the source material of the whole of the social sciences. . . . Although this type of standpoint has been very pervasive in sociology, it is one I reject. To speak of sociology, and of other subjects like anthropology or economics, as 'social sciences' is to stress that they involve the systematic study of an empirical subject-matter. The terminology is not confusing so long as we see that sociology and other social sciences differ from the natural sciences in two essential respects.
Atoms cannot get to know what scientists say about them, or change their behaviour in the light of that knowledge. Human beings can do so. Thus the relation between sociology and its 'subject-matter' is necessarily different from that involved in the natural sciences. If we regard social activity as a mechanical set of events, determined by natural laws, we both misunderstand the past and fail to grasp how sociological analysis can help influence our possible future. As human beings, we do not just live in history; our understanding of history is an integral part of what that history is, and what it may become.
READING
c.
2
Wright Mills
The Sociological Im a.glnation and the Promise of Sociology T
he sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables [the sociologist] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, oftenbecome falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the
period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of man's capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise ... No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions: 1 What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change? 2 Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period - what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making? 3 What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining? Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary
sonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being... Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issuesof social structure'. This distinction is an essential tool of the sociologicalimagination and a feature of all classic work in social science ... In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000,only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when, in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million menare unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solutionwithin the range of opportunities open to anyone individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problemand the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economicand political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situationand character of a scatter of individuals. Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honour; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war's termination. In short, according to one's values, to finda set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one's death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects upon economicand political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganizedirresponsibility of a world of nation states. Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experiencepersonal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the familyand other institutions that bear upon them. Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city. For many upper-class people, the personal solution to 'the problem of the city' is to have an apartment with a private garage under it in the heart of the city and, forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled environments - with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection - most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses
inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless - with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependants, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth. What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination.
READING
3
Zygmunt Bauman
Thinking Sociologically
T
he central question of sociology, one could say, is: in what sense does it matter that in whatever they do or may do people are dependent on
most a way of thinking about the human world; in principle one can also think about the same world in different ways. Among these other ways from which the sociological way of thinking is set apart, a special place is occupied by so-called common sense. Perhaps more than other branches of scholarship, sociology finds its relation with common sense (that rich yet disorganized, non-systematic, often inarticulate and ineffable knowledge we use to conduct our daily business of life) fraughtwith problems decisive for its standing and practice. Indeed, few sciences are concerned with spelling out their relationship to common sense; most do not even notice that common sense exists, let alone that it presents a problem. Most sciences settle for defining themselves in terms of boundaries that separate them from or bridges that connect them with other sciences - respectable, systematic lines of enquiry like themselves.They do not feel they share enough ground with common sense to bother with drawing boundaries or building bridges. Their indifference is, onemust admit, well justified. Common sense has next to nothing to say of thematters of which physics, or chemistry, or astronomy, or geology speak (and whatever it has to say on such matters comes courtesy of those sciencesthemselves, in so far as they manage to make their recondite findings graspable and intelligible for lay people). The subjects dealt with by physics or astronomy hardly ever appear within the sight of ordinary men and women:inside, so to speak, your and my daily experience. And so we, the non-experts, the ordinary people, cannot form opinions about such matters unlessaided - indeed, instructed - by the scientists. The objects explored by scienceslike the ones we have mentioned appear only under very special circumstances,to which lay people have no access: on the screen of a multimillion-dollar accelerator, in the lens of a gigantic telescope, at the bottom of a thousand-feet-deep shaft. Only the scientists can see them and experiment with them; these objects and events are a monopolistic possession of thegiven branch of science (or even of its selected practitioners), a property not shared with anybody who is not a member of the profession. Being the sole owners of the experience which provides the raw material for their study, the scientists are in full control over the way the material is processed, analysed, interpreted. Products of such processing would have towithstand the critical scrutiny of other scientists - but their scrutiny only. Theywill not have to compete with public opinion, common sense or any otherform in which non-specialist views may appear, for the simple reason that there is no public opinion and no commonsensical point of view in the matters they study and pronounce upon. With sociology it is quite different. In sociological study there are no equivalents of giant accelerators or radio telescopes. All experience which provides raw material for sociological findings - the stuff of which sociologicalknowledge is made is the experience of ordinary people in ordin-
communication breakdown with friends and strangers. Anything sociology talks about was already there in our lives. And it must have been, otherwise we should be unable to conduct our business of life. To live in the company of other people we need a lot of knowledge; and common sense is the name of that knowledge. Deeply immersed in our daily routines, though, we hardly ever pause to think about the meaning of what we have gone through; even less often have we the opportunity to compare our private experience with the fate of others, to see the social in the individual, the general in the particular; this is precisely what sociologists can do for us. We would expect them to show us how our individual biographies intertwine with the history we share with fellow human beings. And yet whether or not the sociologists get that far, they have no other point to start from than the daily experience of life they share with you and me - from that raw knowledge that saturates the daily life of each one of us. For this reason alone the sociologists, however hard they might have tried to follow the example of the physicists and the biologists and stand aside from the object of their study (that is, look at your and my life experience as an object 'out there', as a detached and impartial observer would do), cannot break off completely from their insider's knowledge of the experience they try to comprehend. However hard they might try, sociologists are bound to remain on both sides of the experience they strive to interpret, inside and outside at the same time. (Note how often the sociologists use the personal pronoun 'we' when they report their findings and formulate their general propositions. That 'we' stands for an 'object' that includes those who study and those whom they study . Can you imagine a physicist using 'we' of themselves and the molecules? Or astronomers using 'we' to generalize about themselves and the stars?) There is more still to the special relationship between sociology and common sense. The phenomena observed and theorized upon by modem physicists or astronomers come in an innocent and pristine form, unprocessed, free from labels, ready-made definitions and prior interpretations (that is, except such interpretations as had been given them in advance by the physicists who set the experiments that made them appear). They wait for the physicist or the astronomer to name them, to set them among other phenomena and combine them into an orderly whole: in short, to give them meaning. But there are few, if any, sociological equivalents of such clean and unused phenomena which have never been given meaning before. Those human actions and interactions that sociologists explore had all been given names and theorized about, in however diffuse, poorly articulated f orm, by the actors themselves. Before sociologists started looking at them, they were objects of commonsensical knowledge. Families, organizations, kinship networks, neighbourhoods, cities and villages, nations and churches and any other groupings held together by regular human inter-
to common sense to afford that lofty equanimity with which sciences like chemistryor geology can treat it. You and I are allowed to speak of human interdependence and human interaction, and to speak with authority. Don't we all practise them and experience them? Sociological discourse is wide open: no standing invitation to everybody to join, but no clearly marked borders or effective border guards either. With poorly defined borders whose security is not guaranteed in advance (unlike sciences that explore objectsinaccessible to lay experience), the sovereignty of sociology over socialknowledge, its right to make authoritative pronouncements on the subject,may always be contested. This is why drawing a boundary between sociologicalknowledge proper and the common sense that is always full of sociologicalideas is such an important matter for the identity of sociology as a cohesive body of k nowledge; and why sociologists pay this matter moreattention than other scientists. We can think of at least four quite seminal differences between the ways in which sociology and common sense - your and my 'raw' k nowledge of thebusiness of life - treat the topic they share: human experience. To start with, sociology (unlike common sense) makes an effort to subordinateitself to the rigorous rules of responsible speech, which is assumed to be an attribute of science (as distinct from other, reputedly more relaxed andless vigilantly self-controlled, forms of knowledge). This means that the sociologistsare expected to take great care to distinguish - in a fashion clear andvisible to anybody - between the statements corroborated by available evidence and such propositions as can only claim the status of a provisional, untested guess. Sociologists would refrain from misrepresenting ideas that are grounded solely in their beliefs (even the most ardent and emotionallyintense beliefs) as tested findings carrying the widely respected authority of science. The rules of responsible speech demand that one's 'workshop' - the whole procedure that has led to the final conclusions and is claimed to guarantee their credibility - be wide open to an unlimited public scrutiny; a standing invitation ought to be extended to everyone to reproduce the test and, be this the case, prove the findings wrong. Responsiblespeech must also relate to other statements made on its topic; it cannot simply dismiss or pass by in silence other views that have been voiced,however sharply they are opposed to it and hence inconvenient. It ishoped that once the rules of responsible speech are honestly and meticulously observed, the trustworthiness, reliability and eventually also the practical usefulness of the ensuing propositions will be greatly enhanced, even if not fully guaranteed. Our shared faith in the credibility of beliefs countersigned by science is to a great extent grounded in the hope that thescientists will indeed follow the rules of responsible speech, and that the scientificprofession as a whole will see to it that every single member of the profession does so on every occasion. As to the scientists themselves, theypoint to the virtues of responsible speech as an argument in favour of thesuperiority of the knowledge they offer.
time and resources most of us can ill aff ord or do not feel like spending on such effort. And yet, given the tremendous variety of life-conditions, each experience based solely on an individual life-world is necessarily partial and most likely one-sided. Such shortcomings can be rectified only if one brings together and sets against each other experiences drawn from a multitude of life-worlds. Only then will the incompleteness of individual experience be revealed, as will be the complex network of dependencies and interconnections in which it is entangled - a network which reaches far beyond the realm which could be scanned from the vantage point of a singular biography. The overall result of such a broadening of horizons will be the discovery of the intimate link between individual biography and wide social processes the individual may be unaware of and surely unable to control. It is for this reason that the sociologists' pursuit of a perspective wider than the one offered by an individual life-world makes a great difference - not just a quantitative difference (more data, more facts, statistics instead of single cases), but a difference in the quality and the uses of knowledge. For people like you or me, who pursue our respective aims in life and struggle for more control over our plight, sociological knowledge has something to offer that common sense cannot. The third difference between sociology and common sense pertains to the way in which each one goes about making sense of human reality; how each one goes about explaining to its own satisfaction why this rather than that happened or is the case. I imagine that you (much as myself) know from your own experience that you are the 'author' of your actions; you know that what you do (though not necessarily the results of your actions) is an effect of your intention, hope or purpose. You normally do as you do in order to achieve a state of affairs you desire, whether you wish to possess an object, to receive an accolade from your teachers or to put an end to your friends' teasing. Quite naturally, the way you think of your action serves you as a model for making sense of all other actions. You explain such actions to yourself by imputing to others intentions you know from your own experience. This is, to be sure, the only way we can make sense of the human world around us as long as we draw our tools of explanation solely from within our respective life-worlds. We tend to perceive everything that happens in the world at large as an outcome of somebody's intentional action. We look for the persons responsible for what has happened and, once we have found them, we believe our enquiry has been completed. We assume somebody's goodwill lies behind every event we like and somebody's ill intentions behind every event we dislike. We would find it difficult to accept that a situation was not an effect of intentional action of an identifiable 'somebody'; and we would not lightly give up our conviction that any unwelcome condition could be remedied if only someone, somewhere, wished to take the right action. Those who more than anyone else interpret the world for us - politicians, journalists, commercial advertisers tune in to this tendency of ours and speak of the 'needs of the state' or
stands in opposition to such a personalized world-view .... When thinking sociologically,one attempts to make sense of the human condition through analysing the manifold webs of human interdependency - that toughest of realitieswhich explains both our motives and the effects of their activation. Finally, let us recall that the power of common sense over the way we understand the world and ourselves (the immunity of common sense to questioning, its capacity for self-confirmation) depends on the apparently self-evident character of its precepts. This in turn rests on the routine, monotonous nature of daily life, which informs our common sense while beingsimultaneously informed by it. As long as we go through the routine and habitualized motions which fill most of our daily business, we do not need much self-scrutiny and self-analysis. When repeated often enough, things tend to become familiar, and familiar things are self-explanatory; they present no problems and arouse no curiosity. In a way, they remain invisible.Questions are not asked, as people are satisfied that 'things are as they are', 'people are as they are', and there is precious little one can do aboutit. Familiarity is the staunchest enemy of inquisitiveness and criticism - and thus also of innovation and the courage to change. In an encounter withthat familiar world ruled by habits and reciprocally reasserting beliefs, sociologyacts as a meddlesome and often irritating stranger. It disturbs the comfortingly quiet way of life by asking questions no one among the 'locals' remembers being asked, let alone answered. Such questions make evident things into puzzles: they dejamiliarize the familiar. Suddenly, the dailyway of life must come under scrutiny. It now appears to be just one of thepossible ways, not the one and only, not the 'natural', way of life.... Onecould say that the main service the art of thinking sociologically may render to each and everyone of us is to make us more sensitive; it may sharpen up our senses, open our eyes wider so that we can explore human conditions which thus far had remained all but invisible. Once we understand better how the apparently natural, inevitable, eternal aspects of our liveshave been brought into being through the exercise of human power andhuman resources, we will find it hard to accept once more that they are immune and impenetrable to human action - our own action included. Sociologicalthinking is, one may say, a power in its own right, an anti fix ating power. It renders flexible again the world hitherto oppressive in its apparent fixity; it shows it as a world which could be different from what it isnow. It can be argued that the art of sociological thinking tends to widen thescope, the daring and the practical effectiveness of your and my free do m. Once the art has been learned and mastered, the individual may well becomejust a bit less manipulable, more resilient to oppression and regulationfrom outside, more likely to resist being fixed by forces that claim to be irresistible. Tothink sociologically means to understand a little more fully the people
sociological thinking may well promote solidarity between us, a solidarity grounded in mutual understanding and respect, solidarity in our joint resistance to suffering and shared condemnation of the cruelty that causes it. If this effect is achieved, the cause of freedom will be strengthened by being elevated to the rank of a common cause. Thinking sociologically may also help us to understand other forms of life, inaccessible to our direct experience and all too often entering the commonsensical knowledge only as stereotypes - one-sided, tendentious caricatures of the way people different from ourselves (distant people, or people kept at a distance by our distaste or suspicion) live. An insight into the inner logic and meaning of the forms of life other than our own may well prompt us to think again about the alleged toughness of the boundary that has been drawn between ourselves and others, between 'us' and 'them'. Above all, it may prompt us to doubt that boundary's natural, preordained character. This new understanding may well make our communication with the 'other' easier than before, and more likely to lead to mutual agreement. It may replace fear and antagonism with tolerance. This would also contribute to our freedom, as there are no guarantees of my freedom stronger than the freedom of all, and that means also of such people as may have chosen to use their freedom to embark on a life different from my own. Only under such conditions may our own freedom to choose be exercised.
