The dialogic society: The sociology scientists and citizens like and use

Ramón Flecha's The dialogic society is not a classical sociological book—it is, rather, a deep analytical essay with autobiographical thought. This brilliant blurring of genres reminds me of Michael Burawoy's Public sociology: Between utopia and anti-utopia (2021) or some of Richard Sennett's books. It is also a blurring of sociology—a sociology that is made not only by sociologists but also by citizens, artists, or scientists. Here, citizens are invited not just to read the book (and endorse it on the back cover) but to dialogue with it as participant observers. Translated into four languages, it is a bridge call between what would be scientific knowledge and other forms of practical knowledge that come from citizens’ involvement. Flecha highlights from the very beginning (Part 1) nine orientations of how sociology (and, more broadly, the social sciences) can be liked and used by citizens and scientists, whatever their disciplines. These orientations are: dialogue, improvement (the social impact of research), truth (against ideology), goodness (part of democracy), beauty (social), gender (against sexual and gender identity discrimination), cultures (other discriminations), universal, and forward-looking (solidarity with the next generations and with the Earth).However, the main keyword is dialogue, as “there are only two ways to organize human relationships: dialogue or violence” (Flecha, 2022, p. 17). In Part 2, Flecha explains not only the responsibility of sociology to be a good listener to citizens and other disciplines but also how society can also enter into dialogue with the knowledge produced by sociologists. Flecha qualifies this knowledge as unachieved, and it is such not only because of the uncertainty of some results but also because the very dialogue is an inherent part of scientific knowledge production, i.e., with dialogue this knowledge will be achieved. This dialogue would not be possible without the connection between, from one side, what Bruno Latour called research as a cold domain and, from the other, truth, goodness, and beauty; thus, Part 3 is about this connection, which I consider part of the current ethical turn in sociology. The last part is how citizens will like and use the sociology he advocates.Before extending my summary, I would like to qualify my reading of this great book. My interest in this book comes from my research agenda in the last six years, making three calls: The first was in my candidacy speech for the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s presidential election, calling for global sociology with specific qualifications; the second was in the middle of my mandate as ISA president, for connecting sociology (more broadly, social sciences) to moral philosophy; and the third was my call in Melbourne for dialogical sociology. When Ramón Flecha gave me his book last December, I was positively surprised to discover that we had not read each other before but had both reached the same eagerness for dialogic/al society and sociology, even if we don't have the same focus.Let me review five of the themes developed in this book: conceptualizing dialogic society; dialogic sociology as a methodology; gender; social impact; and finally classical, contemporary, and democratic sociology.Flecha has many justifications for his call for a dialogic society, one of which is that there is a clear demand from people for dialogue. Those who donate to humanitarian organizations request accountability and dialogue about how the resources have been used. Following Erik Olin Wright's Real utopias, Flecha discusses the participatory budget in the city of Porte Alegre, Brazil (which became a model for many municipalities), Wikipedia, and the Mondragon Cooperative as examples of eagerness for dialogue. Employing more than 81,000 people in 2019, the Mondragon Cooperative is considered “the most dialogic group of successful companies worldwide” (Flecha, 2022, p. 37).Yet in the social sciences, dialogue was not always respected. Flecha understands dialogue (dia-logos) in the line of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, for whom “logos [is] to be the principle that guides the evolution of everything. From this original and holistic conception, dialogue includes all human dimensions like reason and desire” (Flecha, 2022, p. 53). Yet, there are two types of reductionism of the “logos”: the Apollonian rational one (Apollo is the Greek sun god linked to reason and order), represented mainly by Kant and the philosopher of language John Austin (speech acts) and the Dionysian reductionism of passion and emotion (Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and dance), represented by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. For example, Flecha criticizes the Apollonian reductionism of Habermas, whose communicative acts privilege reason through language. For him, Habermas's conception of rationalized communicative acts in the public sphere miss friendship, love, sex, and envy as components of communicative humans. Flecha, with his colleagues and particularly Marta Soler Gallart, develops this further and enhances Habermasian communicative acts theory by strongly introducing the power dimension and the feminist approach (remembering the gender orientation). They distinguish between dialogical communicative acts and power communicative acts. They thus refer to dialogue in terms not only of words but also of body language (gestures, looks, caresses).For Flecha, dialogic society should combine the beauty of the arts, the truth of science, and the goodness of human rights, which are intertwined with each other: “Without science there are no human rights; the rights to health, to education, and all the others can only be real with the contribution of scientific discoveries. Without human rights, science has strict limitations. The benefits of the discoveries do not reach everybody; they do not reach those excluded from human rights” (p. 79).One of Flecha's central theses is how he connects these three realms. For him, the first two (ethics and truth) need consensus, while the latter (aesthetics) does not. Yet this raises the problem of the freedom to choose ugliness: “The freedom to live in ugliness is neither a right nor a freedom when it becomes an imposition of ugliness on people who want to exercise their right and their freedom to live in beauty” (Flecha, 2022, pp. 90–91). Controversies arise, for example, when some cling to ugliness as part of their memory. He defends, as socio-neuroscience did, the possibility for a dialogic reconstruction of our memory so “we do not need to be slaves of our ugliest past events if we have had them. We can decorate the rest of our lives with precious moments and relationships” (Flecha, 2022, p. 91).How to overcome the ugliness that is often promoted by commercial products? Flecha brings an example of dialogic gatherings of literature, paintings, music, and other arts. Experimental gatherings were successful in Barcelona, where they were attended not only by the middle classes but also by the lower classes. This dialogic encounter is the antithesis of how Richard Serra conceived of his famous metal wall in Barcelona. For Flecha, “Paraphrasing ‘L’État c'est moi’ by Louis XIV, some artists try to impose the idea ‘L'art c'est moi’ (The art is me)” (Flecha, 2022, p. 97).Dialogic society requires dialogic sociology. For Flecha, dialogic sociology is not a theory as much as it is a methodology that has three features concerning the relationship to informants, collaboration, and research ethics.First, the communicative methodology implies an egalitarian dialogue between researchers and research participants from the very beginning in order to mitigate the power dynamics. The research center where this methodology was developed at the University of Barcelona is the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA). In CREA, power interactions are being replaced with dialogic interactions in order to generate consensus. In the case study of Roma people in Spain, for instance, researchers not only include Roma voices in the study but also engage with them in reflecting on the knowledge provided by the scientific community.Second, it implies more collaboration in the social sciences. Flecha rightly highlights that up to 60% of articles in the social sciences are already coauthored, and most research groups reflect gender and ethnic diversity. But he advocates more coauthorship with researchers from other disciplines. He brings up the example of neuroscience, citing the work of Ramón y Cajal showing that it is social experience that changes the brain. As the plastic nature of the brain allows us to understand the different impacts of human relationships of varying quality on brain functioning and health, the social sciences are important collaborators for neuroscience. For Flecha, dialogic social science made in collaboration among different authors and disciplines can reach a much higher intellectual and scientific level than other social scientific efforts.Third, this methodology implies research ethics that goes beyond the classical focus on informants’ consent to deal with the ethics of dialogue, such as the modesty of the researcher. Flecha discusses the example of Jürgen Habermas's The theory of communicative action, which contains a flawed interpretation of Austin's and Searle's speech acts theory. Despite Searle's corrections concerning Habermas's use of the concepts of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, Habermas refused in the second edition of his book to correct the errors or even to engage with Searle. Instead, he simply chose to ignore Searle's criticism.Flecha, like Marta Soler Gallart (2017), has used dialogic sociology to combat sexual violence in Spanish society. Both call for transforming oppressed traditional masculinity (OTM) into new alternative masculinities (NAM). Their CREA research team developed the NAM against bullying, gender violence, and other kinds of violence, including in the Spanish universities where a “code of silence” was in place. Their research had a direct impact on changing policy in Catalonia and Spain on these issues.In line with this feminist approach, Flecha urges us to recognize new founders of sociology such as Jane Addams, the only sociologist Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He warns us that the historiography of sociology privileges certain founding (male/white/Euro-American) fathers and omits others—what he calls invisibilizations. His appreciation for Addams comes not only from her sociological thought as a founder of the Department of Sociology in Chicago but also as a social activist and co-founder of Hull House. Hull House was Chicago's first social settlement, a place where immigrants and working-class people of diverse communities gathered to learn, to eat, to debate, and to acquire the tools necessary to put down roots in their new country.1 Addams described her activities in terms of “three Rs”: Research, Residence, and Reform. For Flecha, “the social impact of her project was much bigger than the social impact of Durkheim and Weber together” (Flecha, 2022, p. 87). Addams contributed to reforming many laws at the time of the great transformation of the New Deal in the Roosevelt era.Flecha, like all the research team members at CREA, does not conceive of research in terms of publishing academic papers in refereed journals only read by some peers but as engaging with society. He uses an example from an EU conference titled “Science against Poverty,”2 where a critique was voiced against science that just offers diagnoses of poverty without investigating the success of actions with the aim of overcoming poverty. Flecha quotes a participant in the conference: “Investing 3 million euros for research on poverty is only justified if researchers can present evidence that, with their studies, poverty will decrease more than if the 3 million euros are given to the poor themselves” (Flecha, 2022, p. 90).Ramón Flecha characterizes the main legacy of sociology by the fact that it serves humanity and has always been in collaboration with other disciplines. He gives an example of how sociology can help us to realize some objectives of humanity like the Sustainable Development Goals. Sociology has been instrumental in providing research for addressing poverty, social inequality, and social cohesion.While classical sociology (e.g., that of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx) in the early 20th century set not only the research agenda but also the theoretical foundations, contemporary sociologies have been elaborated under the social disruptions related to Nazism, Stalinism, colonialism, civil rights, and feminist and gender movements. For Flecha, Parsons dedicated all his life to seeking to consolidate democracies against the risks of Nazi or Stalinist dictatorships. After classical and contemporary sociologies, within the current 21st century's scientific revolution, for Flecha, we witness an accelerated elaboration of democratic sociologies coming from diverse countries, cultures, genders, ideologies, and perspectives. For him, this is evidenced by the public sociology of Michael Burawoy, the multicultural feminism of Fatema Mernissi, the real utopias of Erik O. Wright, and the social impact of Marta Soler Gallart. Along with Flecha, Soler Gallart recently developed very heuristic thoughts on how to deal with Habermasian rationalistic public sphere deliberation regarding validity claims. For her, this concept has “three limitations that are overcome by using the concept of dialogic relationships, which includes (a) placing claims in social structure, (b) considering the ethics of responsibility, and (c) accounting for both feelings and desires in the analyses” (Soler Gallart, 2017, p. 142).Despite my general agreement with the thesis of Flecha's magisterial work, I have three concerns related to how some of his critique is offered in a heavy-handed manner, the way he connects an author's thoughts with an author's life, and, finally, his over-optimism about the spread of democratic sociology.I fully agree with Flecha that some scholars have impoverished social sciences with affirmations and theories that are not the result of sound empirical research but rather driven by ideology. In this line, he criticizes not only Marx and some Marxist sociologists for their vulgar materialism but also the reductionism in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and James Samuel Collen. Yet readers will sometimes notice that Flecha engages in heavy-handed criticism against some sociologists in an unjustified manner and without proper contextualization. Let me give two examples.First, Flecha considers the result of the literary gathering experiment in Barcelona, being attended by all social classes, as a counterexample to Bourdieu's work on distinction. The concept of distinction captures a trend of how each social class constructs its artistic and leisure tastes, and this should be understood as a significant statistical association and as a result of his fieldwork in the early 1970s, a time when the theory of social reproduction was salient in giving the working class more rights. Therefore, the success of the literary gathering does not necessarily undermine the heuristic value of Bourdieu's theory. The second example concerns Coleman. For Flecha, “Coleman confused correlation with causation, and from the reality that most rich students obtained better results than most poor students, they deduced that education was not useful for overcoming (Flecha, 2022, p. Flecha not read the of the the of his the limitations of more resources into without the of the where the is to this was in more civil and rights for the so he want to the poor but to them. the the same limitations to to the and for the in without addressing the of their of beauty of the is among other to the for the of human rights. 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