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Political change doesn’t always begin with a bang; it often starts with just a whisper. From the discussions around kitchen tables that led to the dismantling of the Soviet bloc to the more recent emergence of Internet initiatives like MoveOn.org and Redeem the Vote that are revolutionizing the American political landscape, consequential political life develops in small spaces where dialogue generates political power. In The Politics of Small Things, Jeffrey Goldfarb provides an innovative way for understanding politics, a way of appreciating the significance of politics at the micro level by comparatively analyzing key turning points and institutions in recent history. He presents a sociology of human interactions that lead from small to large: dissent around the old Soviet bloc; life on the streets in Warsaw, Prague, and Bucharest in 1989; the network of terror that spawned 9/11; and the religious and Internet mobilizations that transformed the 2004 presidential election, to name a few. In such pivotal moments, he masterfully shows, political autonomy can be generated, presenting alternatives to the big politics of the global stage and the dominant narratives of terrorism, antiterrorism, and globalization.

A framework for understanding the roles of the intellectuals as they support and undermine democracy is presented. The framework is applied to an examination of the danger of intellectuals as ideologists and the potential of civil and subversive intellectuals as they open public discussion about difficult problems. The ways these roles are played in the present political and media environments are explored.

Issue Title: The Culture of Conflict in Israel and Palestine

In this paper, I show how the consideration of the role of the intellectual in democratic society informs an understanding of the critical project of the sociology of culture. This leads to a review of general sociological approaches to the problem of culture as they contribute to a critical project, suggesting the need for a distinctive conceptualization of the object of inquiry, \"culture as the arts and sciences, broadly understood.\" This approach requires making crucial distinctions, as well as studying key correlations. The distinctions are between: (1) Culture and Ideology, (2) High Culture and Autonomous Culture, and (3) Power and Knowledge. The correlations are between: (1) The Arts and Sciences, and Everyday Life, and (2) The Arts and Sciences, and Politics. At a time when the alternative to globalization is far from certain (this is what I get from the implicit debate between Calhoun and Beck), when the grounds for critique seem to be based on little more than nostalgic utopianism (this is how I understand Touraine's prognosis of the end of society) or nostalgic pessimism (see Bauman) or hopeful pragmatism (Beck), I believe it is necessary to get closer to the pits of critical reflection and creative action in the cultural sphere. Casanova points to this in his consideration of religion in public life, even globalized relition (Casanova). Sassen (1998) suggests that we must understand globalization and its alternatives in their concrete local manifestations. Here, I would like to investigate secular alternatives, attempting to localize the critique of the global, showing how the traditions and projects of culture as the arts and sciences inform a collective intelligence with democratic deliberative dimensions (Pierre Levy). This is a call to keep alive critique in the postmodern circumstance, as part of an incomplete project of critical reflection and democratic action, a call for a sociology of culture as a key instrument for a renewed sociological imagination. The paper is centered on dialogue, (the relative autonomy of) culture, and critique.

In this paper using reflections on a dramatic moment in the life of the author's ethnographic study of theater in Poland as a starting point, the relationship between art and politics is analyzed. The relationship between two central propositions is explored, leading to a conclusion: (1) Cultural freedom is a definitive characteristic of modern social life and (2) the freedom constituted by culture as the arts and sciences opens up public space for alternative social and political practices, and thus: cultural freedom is a base for political freedom. Applying these propositions to a study of theater in Poland, it is shown that art constitutes cultural freedom through its relative autonomy, and the politics of small things results. Societies are transformed.

Small personal interactions can have big political effects. In the 2004 campaigns, this process worked well for Howard Dean, but it worked even better for the Christian Right. Adapted from the source document.

Examines the political legacies of formerly communist European countries after 1989, focusing on the microstructural foundation of democratic culture leading to civil society & creative innovations in political culture. Drawing on the thought of early-20th-century US social psychologist W. I. Thomas, as well as on that of Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, & Hannah Arendt, the interaction of sociology with political theory is elaborated. The social definition of power & freedom in Czechoslovakia & Poland is explored, noting that free political action in Poland was more easily achieved because of Solidarity. Crucial elements of the sociology of Polish underground culture inform a sociology & dramaturgy of politics. J. Sadler

Argues that the absence, or at least relative weakness, of feminism in Eastern Europe has less to do with the feminine and more to with the 'ism', the way the problems of women have been understood by western feminists and have been applied to the situation of the former communist countries.