Sociology as science of liberation: a case-study of manual laborers

This paper begins by adverting to the re-opening of the question of the relationship between (working) class and its representation in light of mounting awareness of the price paid for the eclipse of class-based discourse within politics, academia and the media. Upon the twin bases of a ‘representational deficit’ and search for ‘integral representation’ released by material affluence and unprecedented expectations of agency, I give an account of liberation drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork among manual laborers in Fife (Scotland), beginning with a description of the ‘second nature’ brought into being by doing (manual labor). Introducing the notion of the condition of reduction, I use this as the foundation for an account of individuation which culminates in the exercise of cognitional agency characterized by the alignment of doing, being and knowing. Upon this structuration in truth the paper argues for a fully representational sociology and reviews the sociology of knowledge tradition and some of the self-limiting pre-suppositions of classical sociology, including the short-comings of Marxism, to draw out how sociology can respond to the mass advent of unprecedented freedom.