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The Problem of Social Suffering and the Suffering of Sociology

Abstract

This article explores the concept of ‘social suffering’ and how it has been adopted within

contemporary sociology as a means to profile the harms done to people in situations of

adversity. A focus is brought Pierre Bourdieu’s account of this matter in the interviews and

essays published in English as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary

Society (1999). Analytical attention is brought to how Bourdieu sought to combine a protest

against what suffering does to people with a further protest against the failure of sociology

to provide an adequate address to this in human terms. It is argued that The Weight of the

World bears testimony to the great burden of contradictions that Bourdieu invested in his

sociology and to how this was set to collapse in a fit protest; both against society and his

attempts to frame this with sociological understanding.

Key words: Social Suffering, Pierre Bourdieu, Critical Sociology, Praxis

Introduction

The concept of social suffering first appeared in the late eighteenth century. Its origins may

lie in a poem by William Wordsworth included in the Descriptive Sketches written between

1792-3 that document his experiences of travelling through post-revolutionary France and

the Swiss Alps (Harrington 1929; Hartman 1961). When he comes across a group of

destitute and sick peasants living in the forest along the banks of the upper reaches of the

Rhine, Wordsworth refers to their condition as one of ‘social suffering’. Here this concept is
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used not only to point to the fact that it is was due to social events and conditions that

these people were being forced to exist as refugees in a ‘mighty caravan of pain’, but also,

to refer to a social awakening linked to moral sentiments of fellow-feeling (Williams 1989).

At this time, references to ‘the social’ in human experience incorporated the understanding

that this involved a moral encounter with the humanity of others. ‘The social’ implied a form

of moral experience. It was taken to incorporate the moral feelings aroused in face of the

miseries and misfortunes of other people and was understood both as a ‘social sensibility’

and as an issue of ‘social sympathy’ (Mullan 1988). In this context, moreover, it was a cue to

question the moral character and virtue of the ways individuals are disposed to interpret

and respond to such feelings; and in the writings of key figures in the Scottish

Enlightenment, and especially those of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith,

this was carried into a philosophical debate over the potential for social sympathy to serve

as a foundation for civil society (Frazer 2010; Hume 1969 [1739-40]; 1987 [1751]; Smith

2006 [1759]).

The depiction of human misery and distress as ‘social suffering’ marked a revolution in

terms of human understanding. The coupling of suffering with the social signaled the

abandonment of age-old traditions that sought to explain the meaning of human pain and

suffering with recourse to theologies of Divine Providence. Here the experience of suffering

was no longer portrayed as a matter linked to some form of divine retribution or

redemptive process, but rather, it was cast as a consequence of conditions brought about by

human behaviors and man-made arrangements. It also bore testimony to new kinds of

emotional experience that were readily taken to involve people in many difficult questions
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of moral meaning and purpose; and these related both to the problem of making adequate

sense of the brute fact of suffering as we all as the difficulty of interpreting what is at stake

in the moral feelings of outrage, alarm, disgust and compassion aroused in face of the

suffering of others. While at the time some portrayed these feelings and convictions as

issues of common sense or as self-evident moral instincts, we now know that they were

parts of a new humanitarian revolution connected to the rise of social and cultural

conditions of modernity (Carey 2000; Paine 1995 [1776]; Pinker 2011: 155-224). This may be

construed, moreover, as the dawning of modern social consciousness itself; or at least, as a

vital part of the process whereby it first flickered into life. If we take Scottish Enlightenment

debates over the virtue of social sensibility as our guide, then it appears that in its earliest

forms the recognition of human beings as subjects of social experience was taken to

incorporate the understanding that this involves us in the attempt to decipher the moral

meaning of our encounters with and responses to the suffering of others (reference to add)

In her famous essay on ‘The Social Question’, Hannah Arendt recognizes these originating

concerns (Arendt 1963). By noting, moreover, how the ‘passion of compassion’ was used by

Robespierre during the first French Revolution’s ‘Reign of Terror’ as a means to corral mass

support for acts of violence, she also dwells on some aspects of early controversies

surrounding the social aspects of human experience that persuaded many to take the view

that it was better to address these more as matters for rational debate than as issues for

the venting of moral feeling. Histories of the rise of early modern social science and of

sociology as inspired by a scientizing mission of social discovery have further elaborated on

the extent to which these were often rooted in a conscious attempt to refine rational forms

of social understanding by measures designed to have it disinfected from the pollutant of

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humanitarian feeling; for insofar as it was understood as such, ‘social sentiment’ was

increasingly cast as a force of moral corruption and as an intellectual impediment (Bannister

1991; Haskell 2000; Mazlish 1989; Poovey 1993;1995;1998) . Accordingly, at the same time

as the founding of modern social science, and sociology in particular, signaled a new quest

to develop human understanding in social terms, they were also part of a movement to set

‘the social’ in a less emotive and more rational frame. They marked a distinct departure

from an earlier understanding that social inquiry should be allied to the cultivation of moral

feeling, and especially that which was allied with humanitarian concern.

This continued, however, in the social literature of the nineteenth century (Lepenies 1988).

Books such as Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) were part an ongoing ‘rebellion of

sentiment’ against both the living conditions of the new working classes as well as the

rational terms by which these were formally accounted for by purveyors of capitalist

political economy (Roberts 2002: 258-95). With hindsight we may also recognize a

sentiment fired approach to social inquiry being sustained in works such as Friedrich Engels’

The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Eugène Buret’s De la Misère des

Classes Laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840); especially in passages where their

documentation of the harms done to people is accompanied with an open confession of

their moral feelings about the conditions they observe. Moreover, in their pioneering

documentary journalism figures such as Henry Mayhew and Jacob Riis, further advanced

forms of social understanding that took their cues from experiences of social suffering

(Mayhew 2010 [1861-2]; Riis 1997 [1890]).

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Throughout this time, the concept of ‘social suffering’ still featured in humanitarian

campaigns and reports relating to the ‘the social question’ (Blaickie 1865; Frothingham et al

1962; Schilder 1938; van Sickle 1946). However, this concept was not incorporated within

the lexicon of social science and it was not identified as a matter worthy of sociological

investigation in its own terms. Throughout most of the twentieth century, moreover, there

is no evidence that those contributing to main developments in academic sociology were

moved to dwell on lost traditions of sentiment-fired social inquiry or on their value as a

means to grasp the moral experience of human social life. Certainly, it appears that there

was no widely shared enthusiasm to enter into debate over the ways in which sociology

should equip us with the cultural means to sympathize with the situations of individuals

made subject to conditions of social suffering; and no serious thought was given to how the

cultivation of a sympathetic response to human misery might be indispensable for the

acquisition of sociological understanding.

On this view, no-one would have anticipated the ways in which these considerations and

interests were taken up as vital concerns in late twentieth century and early twenty-first

sociology and anthropology. This article reviews these later developments and notes some

ways they might be explained. A focus is brought to the collection of interviews and essays

devised under the direction and authorship of Pierre Bourdieu first published in France as La

Misère du Monde (1993) and later published in English as The Weight of the World: Social

Suffering in Contemporary Society (1999). I explore how this study is understood in the

context of Bourdieu’s oeuvre. I further analyze how it has subsequently been taken up

either as a source of inspiration or as an object of critical scorn. My overriding interest lies

not only in explaining why the problem of social suffering has returned as matter of
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passionate and critical concern, but also in the ways it serves to expose the morally

agonized condition of contemporary sociology. I highlight the extent to which this might be

construed as a return to a set of early modern debates over the moral character and

conditions of social understanding where the virtue and politics of modern humanitarianism

are set as pressing matters for critical investigation. At another level I argue that this can be

viewed as a new critical turning point in the development of social science where an open

confession and demonstration of its morally agonized condition is advanced as a praxis. This

is distinguished by a movement to combine a protest against the causes and consequences

of human suffering with a further protest against the failure of sociology to provide an

adequate moral response to how this matters for people. Much debate remains, however,

when it comes to determining how such a praxis might be rendered productive for thought

and action.

I argue that while some take the experience of value conflicts provoked by humanitarian

social sentiment as a spur to action, in the case of Bourdieu these are largely committed to

making trouble for sociology. Insofar as we take Bourdieu as a guide to our sociological

thinking and how we engage with the inherent risks of setting this in writing, I contend that

we are set to grow exhausted by the burden of contradictions we are made to bear. The

Weight of the World bears testimony to the great burden of contradictions that Bourdieu

invested in his sociology and to how this was set to collapse in a fit protest; both against

lived conditions of social adversity and his attempts to frame these with sociological

understanding.
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On Social Suffering Now

It is generally held that contemporary research and writing on social suffering engages us in

the attempt to make sense of lived experiences of deprivation, misery, pain and loss

(Kleinman et al 1997). A focus is brought to embodied experiences of societal and cultural

violence (Das et al 1997; Das et al 2000; Das 2006). Analytical attention is directed to the

moderating force of cultural meanings in people’s experiences of pain and distress. There is

a commitment to explain the part played by the dynamics of social interaction in the quality

and intensity of human affliction. Here, moreover, researchers are concerned to dwell upon

the institutional arrangements that are used to control and manage various problems of

suffering, and further aim to expose the ways in which, either through their unintended

consequences or by processes of bureaucratic indifference, these serve to worsen suffering

at the level of personal experience (Herzfeld 1992).

In most instances a privileged space is given to the voices of individuals in pain and distress

in a bid to convey some part of the ways in which social suffering is borne in experience.

There is a concern to attend to the difficulties individuals experience when brought under

the compulsion to address the moral meaning of what is happening to them. This derives

from the understanding that it is insofar as it encountered in ‘the denial and refusal of

meaning’ that the torment of suffering is made particularly ‘unbearable’ (Levinas 1988). In

addition to this, researchers committed to expose the existential dimensions and scale of

social suffering have used photography, art, poetry and film in bids to relate how as a

human experience this frequently exceeds what can be readily set in formal language; and

especially in languages of rational clarification and justification (Bourgois and Schonberg

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2009; Biehl 2005). Accordingly, the kinds of empirical data that are used as a means to

document lived experiences of social suffering do not conform to the rational frames of

analysis that are deployed as a means to render this accountable to social science. Research

and writing on social suffering tends to involve scholars in a considerable amount of

conceptual agony and methodological frustration.

Largely speaking the new gathering of interest around problems of social suffering has taken

place on the one hand within a humanitarian wing of critical anthropology, and on the

other, in the development of a critical sociology inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. Those working

in these fields have some shared ambitions and concerns. It is certainly the case, moreover,

that as far as the critical response to their work is concerned, they are often engaged with

theoretical disputes, methodological difficulties and ethical dilemmas where they encounter

a common stock of problems. These are further outlined below. However, so as to grasp the

weight of issues at stake here, it is also important to be alert to some of the contrasting

ways in which their dealings with these issues are carried out in their respective fields of

practice.

In the context of anthropology, the study of social suffering is often allied to an interest in

health care and medicine. It features as a prominent concern within humanitarian medical

anthropology. Here documents of social suffering are gathered not only with a commitment

to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of people’s health problems, but

also, with the aim of applying such understanding to practices that enable people’s healing

and recovery. Studies of social suffering are conducted in collaboration with humanitarian

social movements that seek to promote health care and access to medicine as a human
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right in parts of the world where large numbers of people are suffering from diseases of

poverty (Farmer 1992; 1999; 2003; 2006; 2013; Farmer et al 2013). It is also important to

recognize that a significant portion of this work has been developed with a concern to

account for the social causes and dimensions of mental health problems; and particularly

those linked to various traumatic experiences of extreme deprivation, political violence and

atrocities of war (Bourgois 2002; Kleinman and Good 2002). In these contexts, the

development of research and writing on social suffering is part of a wider movement to

‘socialize’ medicine; and in many instances, this represents a greater responsiveness within

medical professions to the understanding that many components of bodily illness and

embodied symptoms of distress are the products of prevailing social conditions and

presiding forms of social experience. Here problems of ‘social suffering’ are taken to expose

‘the need for a biosocial reconception of disease’, both in terms of how it is caused and how

it is addressed for treatment (Singer and Clair 2003: 434).

As far as sociology is concerned, the study of social suffering features most prominently in

studies aiming to expose the human effects of contemporary neo-liberal social policies,

economic arrangements and forms of government (Charlesworth 2000; 2005; Frost and

Hogggett 2008; Wacquant 2010). While these might also be addressed as explicit concerns

within medical anthropology, here, more often than not, it is matters relating to the practice

of medicine and health care that take precedence over the attempt to provoke critical

scholarly debate (Bourgois 2000; Kevshavjee 2014). By contrast, taking their cues from

Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues studies published in The Weight of the World, most

sociological explorations of social suffering are distinguished by the understanding that their
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work primarily operates as a form of political protest or as a means to issue a moral

complaint against the social causes of human misery.

However, by no means is there any consensus on what might be achieved by this.

Sociological studies of social suffering have provoked a considerable amount of debate over

their purpose, value and consequences. Here many contrasting and conflicting judgements

are cast on the cultural condition of the sociology that is committed to these interests. In

short, disagreement reigns over what we should be make of the movement to render social

suffering as an object of sociological study; and especially where this is also understood to

involve us in a critical evaluation of social role and value of sociology. Moreover, it appears

that, these disputes are particularly heated when they require us to adopt a critical position

in response to Pierre Bourdieu’s work in this area.

The Burden of Bourdieu

The Weight of the World is an intimidating volume. It contains almost half a million words. It

is the product of a three year study in which a group of twenty two researchers under the

direction of Pierre Bourdieu compiled 182 interview transcripts from discussions with

participants mostly living and working in the poorer suburbs of Paris, although a few of

these also took place in ghetto districts of New York and Chicago. These are presented to

the reader as largely unedited interviews and grouped together around six main themes:

the experience of neighborhood; the experience of living in the American urban ghetto; the

retreat of the French state and its officialdom; experiences of employment and

unemployment; the experience of education and schooling; and accounts of succession

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within families that also features people’s reflection on experiences of ageing and becoming

sick and elderly. The interviews are interspersed by the occasional methodological essay or

short commentary by Bourdieu, but for the most part they are left to bear testimony on

their own. We are invited to reflect on how people make sense of their lives in their own

words and in the everyday languages that they use to explain how they deal with the many

practical and personal difficulties they are faced with.

These are documents of what Bourdieu refers to as ‘all kinds of ordinary suffering (la petite

misère)’ that derive from many daily hassles, enduring frustrations and inherently vexed

predicaments faced by people in conditions of everyday life (Bourdieu 1999a: 4). Bourdieu

contends that insofar as economic indices are the favored means for officially documenting

people’s sufferings, then too much of what people experience as the ordinary and enduring

misery of life is left unacknowledged and lost from view. The interviews are intended to

provide us with some insights into experiences and conditions that are ‘difficult to describe

and think about’ (Bourdieu 1999a: 3); and in order to draw these to our attention we are

presented with scripts in which people are evidently struggling to find words to make

adequate sense of what is happening to them and where words break down to a pained

silence.

Commentators generally note that at the time of its publication in France it was widely

hailed as a major political intervention that drew the social effects and human

consequences of neo-liberal governmental and economic policies into public debate

(Dejours 1998; Renault 2008). In this regard, it is identified as a contribution to Bourdieu’s

‘later’ works that are fashioned as political ‘acts of resistance’ (Bourdieu 1998; 2003). It is
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possible, however, to understand The Weight of the World as designed to continue with

Bourdieu’s earlier interests in the reproduction of social inequalities and the part played by

symbolic acts of violence in this, but with the aim of setting these in a more politically

provocative and morally disruptive frame (Schinkel 2003).

There is a noticeable lack of agreement on what Bourdieu achieved through this work, and

there are also widely varying views on the terms by which it should be assessed. For

disciples such as Loic Wacquant The Weight of the World represents an attempt to advance

‘an ethical conception of sociology’ where its purpose is largely Socratic. Thus, the

documentation of people’s social suffering is taken as a means to stimulate critical thinking

about the values they have acquired and are made to live by. It is portrayed as an

‘intervention’ in which, as Wacquant puts it, sociology operates ‘to short-circuit the

censorship built into established forms of social and political representation’ (Bourdieu and

Wacquant 1992: 200). However, even if this is accepted as an accurate summary of what is

attempted here, others are moved to address the sociological purpose and value of The

Weight of the World as in need of further debate.

Angela McRobbie contends that this manner of sociological writing is both ill-conceived and

naïve (McRobbie 2002). She argues that the critical value of The Weight of the World is

excessively comprised by the ‘methodologies of intimacy and empathy’ that it uses to

document people’s life experiences. She contends that the overall effect is to crowd out the

text with a ‘proliferation of voices’ that offer no space for sociological reflection to develop

(McRobbie 2002: 131-3). Such as it is, the overall achievement of the work is cast by

McRobbie as ‘sociologically banal’ and as ‘mere reportage of various degrees of misfortune’.

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Moreover, she accuses Bourdieu of acting from a position of bad faith that is not only

exploitative of people’s miseries, but also, largely useless when it comes to equipping them

with the cultural means to address their social condition with sociological understanding.

Here The Weight of the World is dismissed both as work of sociological obfuscation and for

the extent to which serves as no more than an encouragement to political apathy.

A contrasting, although still highly critical view is advanced by Didier Fassin (Fassin 2012).

Fassin worries about Bourdieu’s commitment to stoking humanitarian sentiment as a means

to advance his sociological ambition and argues that this operates more as a staged

performance of ‘empathetic listening’, than it does to offer a means to engage people in

informed debate over the meaning of social justice (Fassin 2012: 32). Adopting Foucauldian

premises combined with some elaborations from Agamben, Fassin complains that Bourdieu

fails to involve himself in a sufficiently in-depth and analytically rigorous inquiry into the

metaphysics as well as the moral economy of compassion, and as a result, appears to be

naively unaware of its potential to operate as a force of domination. He argues that by

involving sociology in the documentation of social suffering, The Weight of the World

operates as a work of ideological mystification. On Fassin’s account, it amounts to a sham

display of ‘listening’ to people’s expressions of misery; and offers no more than this.

Furthermore, he contends that, insofar as it was subsequently used as an example of how to

official recognize and respond to ‘the social question’ of our times, it encourages people to

take the disruption of moral feeling as a substitute for critical thinking and political action.

When looking back on the public debate that followed its publication in France, Fassin

writes:
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First, by offering both an interpretation and a response, social suffering suggested a

political resolution in a socioeconomic situation that the government admitted it had

not got a purchase on. Second, in being validated by official bodies and attested by

the social science, it became observable and even quantifiable. Third, by privileging

compassion over repression in the management of the social question, it provided a

positive moral axis

(Fassin 2012: 33)

Others, while still seeking to set The Weight of the World in a more carefully elaborated

frame of analysis, offer more positive accounts of its sociological worth. For example, whilst

arguing that in their attempts to document the language of everyday experience Bourdieu

and colleagues fail to pay inadequate attention to the influence of mass media and popular

culture in people’s ‘common sense’ constructions of the realities they inhabit, Nick Couldry

suggests that these still have much to offer by way of insights into the habitus of social

subjects trapped in conditions that provide no opportunities for redemption or escape

(Couldry 2005). He contends that The Weight of the World must be read with the

understanding that it is essentially concerned with the uneven distribution of economic,

cultural and symbolic capitals through society, and that the aim here is to involve readers in

the frustrations borne by the individuals featured in the study. Couldry contends that in

order to appreciate what is being attempted here, we need to have a prior acquaintance

with Bourdieu’s worries about the value condition of sociological research methods and

writing. In this regard, he emphasizes that The Weight of the World is composed with a

concern to have readers reflect on forms of experience that, through their translation into

the conceptual language of sociology, are strained out of official scripts of social life; and
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further, in this Couldry also underlines the fact Bourdieu is particularly alarmed by the

potential for sociological writing to operate as a form of symbolic violence.

The evidence in support of reading the work with these concerns set to the fore is drawn

from Bourdieu’s account of his intentions in the ‘Preface’ to the book along with his

concluding essay ‘Understanding’ (Bourdieu 1999a; 1999b). In the former Bourdieu declares

that he is particularly worried by the moral position occupied by the sociologist when, for

the sake of advancing a sociological point of view, s/he is required to operate from an

‘objectivising distance that reduces the individual to a specimen in a display case’ (Bourdieu

1999a: 2). This worry is revisited in the concluding essay where it is set out in more detail

and with more force. Here sociology is identified with theories and methods in which ‘we do

nothing but gloss one another’ (Bourdieu 1999b: 607). These are then labelled as holding

the potential to operate as types of ‘symbolic violence’ where the risk is that they not only

work to distort the reality of people’s experience, but also, operate as forms of abuse and as

acts of harm. Indeed, if Bourdieu’s essay on ‘Understanding’ is taken as the interpretive

guide to reading The Weight of the World, then one might argue that the intention here is

not so much to reveal conditions of social suffering, but rather, to have us critically reflect

on how sociology is destined to fail in its attempts make these adequately known or

understandable. On Bourdieu’s account, this is far more than a consequence of the fact

that, when compared to the subjects of their studies, sociologists occupy ‘very privileged’

positions where they are set at a safe distance from the suffering they bear witness to. It is

also a result of the rationalizing conventions of academic writing that work to clear and cut

a way through the many hermeneutic confusions and epistemological frustrations borne by

people under common sense conditions of everyday life. Bourdieu contends that many of
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the methods used to mine empirical data for core material that holds sociological

pertinence result in treating too much of the cultural agony endured through damaging

experiences of social life as a mere inchoate noise or as an irrelevant waste by-product.

Bourdieu contends that through their writing sociologists are committed to filtering out

some of the most essential components of social suffering; at least that is in terms of how it

takes place in human experience.

In developing this understanding further, Willem Schinkel argues that the decision ‘to let the

sufferings of the ordinary man speak for themselves’ was the result of Bourdieu’s

longstanding frustration with his own sense of powerlessness when documenting the

reproduction of inequality (Schinkel 2003: 79). He argues that we should understand The

Weight of the World as Bourdieu’s attempt to raise the volume on the contradictions that

he inhabits and enacts through his sociological practice (Bourdieu 2000). Accordingly,

Schinkel suggests that it is a ‘daring venture’ to expose the doxa of the sociological field to

critical question in a bid to use such critical self-reflexivity as a mean to advance debate over

the value bounds and condition of what passes for sociological understanding. Accordingly,

while on the one hand Bourdieu champions sociology as a form of knowledge that holds

value as a means to equip people with the means to understand and possibly undo the

social causes their misery, on the other, he aims to make us skeptically orientated towards

this account of sociology and its worth. His overall aim is to make the contradictions within

his own sociological standpoint somehow productive for critical thinking; and even, for

these to be adopted as a spur to political action.

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The Praxis of Social Suffering

By the middle of the nineteenth century the terms of public debate relating to humanitarian

social sentiment were already well established (Halttunen 1995; Reddy 2000). Those

campaigning for the abolition of slavery by documenting details of the physical abuse and

cruelty done to slaves were primed to respond to the criticism that they were purveyors of

promiscuous voyeurism. Prominent figures in American anti-slavery movements such as

Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs were devising new writing techniques with a concern

to educate compassion so that this was kept from being a mere indulgence of feeling

(Sorisio 2000; Spelman 1997: 68-82). Moreover, some of those working to draw public

attention to the condition of the working poor in Britain were openly committed to combat

a ‘sentimentalist fallacy’ that encouraged people to ‘shed tears over abstract justice and

generosity’ without feeling for the more ‘vulgar’ circumstances of those they came across in

their own streets (James 1907). Indeed, in this regard Henry Mayhew’s documentation of

the lives of London’s poor through ‘a literal description of their labour, their trials and their

sufferings in their own unvarnished language’ was intended to make it possible for his

readers to relate to them as ‘full-size’ human beings (Douglas-Fairhurst 2010: xxvii). While

there may have been a brief period in the mid-eighteenth century where purveyors of

‘social sentiment’ were naïvely unware of the moral and political controversies they were

set to aggravate through their work, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century these

were all too familiar and well understood.

Those committed to documenting experiences of social suffering knew that they were set to

court moral disapproval and political condemnation; and that in some instances that they
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set to be portrayed as a public danger. Gregg Crane argues that in her novel Dred: A Tale of

the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Harriet Beecher Stowe sought to defend sentiment-fired

social inquiry by making clear that she understood the greater danger to lie in the direction

of upholding a rational culture that was inherently conservative to a point that denied the

possibility of questioning established convention (Crane 1996). Whilst Stowe recognized

that some people could be moved by force of moral feeling to the conviction that they were

justified to take actions against suffering without sparing any thought for their wider

consequences or human cost, nevertheless, she held that the stirring of social sentiment

was a necessary part of the struggle for humanitarian social justice. She identified ‘the

eruption of moral sympathetic feeling’ evoked by graphic depictions of cruelty to slaves as a

‘sure signal’ that they were entitled to ‘fundamental human rights’ (Crane: 1996: 177-86).

Stowe further took the experience of ‘moral-emotional dissonance’ as fuel for critical

thought. On her account, the struggle to realize humane forms of society could not be

sustained by mere clarification of principle; rather, it required a motivation succored by

emotional upset.

A similar stance is adopted by Jane Addams in her account of the methods she used in her

humanitarian practice of ‘doing sociology’ where she advocates a deliberate courting of

value conflicts and life ‘perplexities’ as a means to gather sociological insight into people’s

social states (Schneiderhan 2011; Seigfried 2002). Addams operates with the understanding

that proper sociological understanding is founded on emotionally challenging experiences

and that it is only made possible through a personal acquaintance with upsetting social

conditions (Addams 1965 [1892]; 1998 [1910]; 2002 [1902]). On this view, it is not only

important for sociologists to have a personal stake in the conditions they are seeking to
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understand, but also, for the experience of perplexity to work within them to awaken them

to the values they embody and socially enact. For Addams, this is the means to acquire

critical sociological self-reflexivity.

More recently, this praxis has been embraced and promoted by those advocating a ‘return’

to the study of ‘social suffering’. For example, Arthur Kleinman argues that here social

research becomes a ‘moral epidemiology’ that is bound to make us discomforted by the

value-conflicts we embody (Kleinman 1999: 389). On this account the cultivation of a

sociological imagination must be personally destabilizing, and all the more so in contexts

where researchers record experiences of social violence or where they attend to the harms

done to people through conditions of everyday life. Similarly, Paul Farmer holds that

experiences of moral disquiet and emotional upset provoked from encounters with people’s

social suffering are necessary for galvanizing movements to promote the rights of the poor

and for forging ties of solidarity with victims of social injustice. Farmer argues that ‘the road

from unstable emotions to genuine entitlements - rights – is one we must travel if we are to

transform humane values into meaningful and effective programs that will serve precisely

those who need our empathy and solidarity most’ (Farmer 2006: 153 and 164).

In his essay on ‘Understanding’, Bourdieu writes of ‘the risks of writing’. Here he emphasizes

that these concern far more than the risk that sociological writing fails to provide any

clarifying or worthwhile insights into our life conditions. For Bourdieu, the risks of writing

are largely political. Here he makes clear that when set to address problems of social

suffering they concern the perils courted through the attempt to convey ‘the dramatic

intensity’ and ‘emotional force’ of human experience (Bourdieu 1999b 623). Here he
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appears to be resigned to being forced to make a choice between, on the one hand, the

pursuit of sociological rigour, and on the other hand, the sounding of moral alarm and the

marshalling of political protest. Bourdieu recognizes that ‘emotional force can ...generate

ambiguity [and] even confusion, in symbolic effects’, but it is yet more alarmed by the

extent to which the ‘gloss’ of sociology leaves readers unmoved and with no zeal for change

(ibid.). He declares that ultimately his decision to document unvarnished experiences of

social suffering was take in a bid to ‘touch and move the reader, to reach the emotions,

without giving in to sensationalism, [so] that they can produce the shifts in thinking and

seeing that are often the precondition for comprehension’ (ibid.).

For Debate

It is now customary to refer to ourselves as living within an ‘age of extremes’ (Hobsbawm

1994). This is due to the dynamics of capitalist societies that are set to reproduce ever more

extreme levels of material social and cultural inequality. It is also a consequence of the

quality of the ever more abundant knowledge we have of ourselves as being made to exist

under these conditions. For many of those concerned with new problems of social suffering,

the task of setting these conditions within adequate frameworks of sociological and

anthropological understanding involve us not only confronting that the fact that we inhabit

a world that produces great affluence for a minority at the cost of a great mass of wasted

lives, but also, dealing with the consequences this holds for our social subjectivity as we are

made to accommodate the experience of knowing ourselves to inhabit such a place as this

(Bauman 2003). The assumption here is that practitioners of sociology and anthropology

must carry with them into the field the burden of understanding that they are set to
 21

investigate the trap that the world has become. This is accompanied at the same time,

however, by a further commitment to the view that ‘moments of crisis and states of

exception can disturb and enlarge presumed understandings of what is socially possible and

desirable’ (Biehl et al 2007: 5).

Marianne Weber records that one time when Max Weber was asked what is scholarship

meant to him, he replied, ‘I want to see how much I can stand’ (Weber 1975: 678). She

adds that ‘he regarded it has task to endure the antinomies of existence and, further, to

exert to his utmost his freedom from illusions and yet keep his ideals inviolate and preserve

his ability to devote himself’(ibid.). This was a precarious balancing act and it was a position

that involved him in much disappointment and failure; and often this was often taken to

intolerable extremes. A similar form of self-understanding and work ethic is in evidence in

Bourdieu’s writing. Arguably, this is drawn most clearly to surface and set in sharp relief in

the context of his writing on social suffering.

It might be argued that at this point Bourdieu’s sociology buckles under the weight of the

contradictions it is carrying. However, an alternative view might be that here we are witness

to an unburdening. Whilst The Weight of the World can be read as a testimony of

sociological failure, it is also possible to approach it as an attempt to throw off a dead

weight of methodological agony and of writing constraints that leave sociology lacking

sufficient human value and moral meaning. If we take the latter view, The Weight of the

World might be read as bid for freedom; albeit with a clear and cold sighted view of the fact

that can be no guarantees of any happy outcomes or endings.

 22

At the same time Bourdieu uses The Weight of the World to issue a protest against social

suffering, he also makes it a protest against the frustrations borne through his sociology and

his own sociological subjectivity. One might argue, however, that more than protest is

required here; otherwise we are ultimately left with no more than an angry outburst of

moral outrage and exhaustion. Perhaps this is as far as we can travel with Bourdieu as our

guide?

Others, however, have taken this as a passage towards new terms of practice. Here research

and writing on social suffering is taken as a step towards making social science relevant for

the care of people in practice. On this view, it involves a move to reconnect social inquiry to

humanitarian conviction and the struggle to practically realise this in humane forms of

society. There is a way of making the ever sharpening antinomies of our existence yet

productive for thought and action; but this is set to involve us in many enduring conflicts of

human value and ever pronounced difficulties of understanding how we should live and

what we should do as to advance right conditions for humanity. As Jane Addams might put

it, this requires us not so much to engage with struggle to correct our manner of sociological

thinking, but more in the effort of ‘doing sociology’.

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