Breaches in the Wall: Social Inequality, Sociology and Experience-Based Knowledge
Unequal societies have to protect themselves from the critical scrutiny of those who see themselves as the victims of inequality. The need to present existing inequalities as inevitable and right increases with the extent of those same inequalities, given the risk of resentment leading to calls for radical social change. How can sociology develop a critical distance with respect to arguments that seek to legitimate inequality, and participate in the production of a more egalitarian society ? This text suggests ways of breaching the walls that enclose the knowledge-spaces presenting social inequalities as having to be the way they are. The text begins by looking at approaches that see inequality as a condition deriving from individuals themselves or as a technical problem based on faulty policies and programmes. I then turn to perspectives on social inequality as a relationship between groups, and the way in which different types of relationship are characterized by different types of racialization or naturalization. In the third section, I look at the role of sociology in the building of the « walls » that protect social inequality, before providing a critical reading of the technobureaucratic State and its contribution to the reproduction of inequality. The text ends with an appeal for a sociology that allies itself with other actors in the social world, recognizes the value of experience-based knowledge, and participates in the transformation of the Welfare State and its capacity to produce a more equal and free society.