President Michael D. Higgins delivers the Economic and Social Research Institute 2023 Geary Lecture
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I am honoured to have been invited to deliver the 2023 Geary Lecture, and I am delighted to be in a position to host the event here in Áras an Uachtaráin. May I welcome all of you here today, be it from the Economic and Social Research Institute, or other sites of research or teaching, in sociology and economics, across the third-level sector.
Dr Roy C. Geary, after whom this lecture series is named, regarded as perhaps the most eminent Irish statistician of the twentieth century, was the first Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute. Before taking up this post, he was head of the National Accounts Branch of the United Nations in New York from 1957 to 1960, as well as being a founding member of the Central Statistics Office. It is fitting that the lecture series is named in his honour.
Over the past 63 years, the ESRI has established a long and significant history of social science research, research that has been influential in both economic and social policy in this country.
It is notable that, at its inception in 1960, thanks mainly to a Ford Foundation grant of $280,000 to fund the new institute for its first five years, the think-tank was originally known as the Economic Research Institute (or ERI).
A decisive influence on setting up the ERI was Dr T.K. Whitaker, then Secretary of the Department of Finance, who, in the course of preparing the major study, ‘Economic Development’, published in May 1958 – itself an input into the ‘Programme for Economic Expansion (1958-63)’ – had identified the need for research on the Irish economy.
The absence of sociological research within the Institute’s remit was addressed when a Social Research Committee was established under the auspices of the Institute of Public Administration in 1963. This Committee approached Henning Friis, then Director of the Danish National Institute for Social Research, who completed a report recommending that a Social Research Institute be established and amalgamated with the Economic Research Institute to form an Economic and Social Research Institute, supported by the establishment of a field survey unit within the Institute.
While it was a far-sighted proposal for which we should be grateful, the lack of debate on the Friis Report’s recommendations is notable, and the implications of its funding model for social research would lead over time to complications and impediments for those engaged in such research outside the Institute.
The ESRI recognised early the value of social research. The appointment of Dr Damian Hannan, who would spearhead such research, was a testament to this, he becoming a Research Professor in the ESRI from 1967 until his retirement in 2000, apart from a period as Professor of Sociology in University College Cork from 1971 until 1976.
Damian Hannan, a respected friend of mine, published extensively during his time at the Institute on education and labour market integration in both Irish and international journals and books. He played a leading role in the development of sociology as a discipline in Ireland.
I can imagine his influence on the choice of two of the leading sociologists of the decades to give the Geary Lecture. Alvin W. Gouldner, author of The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology in 1970[3], gave the seventh Geary Lecture in 1974, and Peter Berger gave the fourteenth lecture in 1981 – Gouldner on objectivity, Berger on secularisation.
Hannan’s work, mostly empirical, regularly survey-based, was a reflection of his own early immersion in the Illinois School of Sociology of his time, his PhD drawing on quantitative work presented at Michigan State University. His research focus on emigration produced what is one of the classic studies of emigration from Ireland in the 1960s, Rural Exodus: a Study of the Forces Influencing the Large-Scale Migration of Irish Rural Youth[6].
Inequality was a major focus of Damian Hannan’s work, as was the theme of ‘community’. Damian and I often debated the role of cooperative behaviour in Irish life as either normative expression or alternatively as an elaborate system of reciprocities.
Sociology, a field in which I trained and which I subsequently taught, at what was University College Galway, was just emerging as a subject in the 1960s. However, my lecture this afternoon will touch on some aspects of the evolution of the relationship between sociology and economics in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and some of the consequences of such an evolution for policy, practice and scholarship, and how perhaps the latter discipline, economics, came to grow to prominence among the policymaking community, while sociology would be so much less referred to by policymakers, indeed quite ignored.
Indeed sociology in the decade of the ‘60s came to be viewed by some commentators as ‘soft’ and even ‘wooly’. Sociology, as a taught subject in Ireland, had come out of the Philosophy Departments and had frequently been taught as ‘social ethics’. Economics on the other hand, well regarded in modernisation theory and central to development, was viewed as ‘hard’, grounded, and having a realisable, functionalist purpose.
Sociology, from its foundation, was – and perhaps still is in some circles – viewed as not just a critical scholarship, but as an inherently subversive discipline, borne as it was out of three 19th-century revolutions: the development of modern science, the emergence of democratic forms of government, and the industrial revolution.
Perhaps it is unsurprising then, given its radical genesis, its critical capacity, that, over the decades, sociology would become under-funded in a society that was conservative, a prevailing ethos that did not recognise inequality or find it unacceptable, a State that had a stated materialist development project. That project stressed adjustment rather than structural engagement with issues such as inequality.
Economics, on the other hand, particularly in its more applied forms of economic theory, policy and practice, drawing on neoclassical and neoliberal economics, could become hegemonic, and thus would be the more likely beneficiary of research funds in what was a utilitarian atmosphere within an unquestioned modernisation that defined ‘development’.
Economics, as a formation of intellectual thought, also had a more comfortable arrival in State bureaucratic practice, particularly after 1958. Sociology’s experience decades later was different. For example, the Combat Poverty programmes saw practicing sociologists being perceived in their advocacy as unwelcome critics of a State that was “trying its best”. The eventual abolition of the Combat Poverty Agency in 2008, during austerity cutbacks, was an example of the silencing of any funded social research that might be critical of State policies.
The side-lining of sociological research and sociological scholarship and the epistemology upon which it was based facilitated a discourse of economics that could easily eschew the normative. This was particularly so in the United States, over-influenced as it quickly became by Hayekist perspectives which would lead to the Friedmanist crudities of the Chicago School.
Such an orientation was assisted a public discourse that concentrated on commodification and consumption, a rejection of structuralism, and indeed the reduction of the definition of the concept of ‘freedom’ to a narrow, laissez faire version that championed deregulation and privatisation, reduced the human experience to one of materiality, and human value to consumption, acquisitiveness and comparisons and evaluations of net worth.
Such an emphasis in the economic discourse was of course a profound, if mostly unacknowledged, ideological one. It led to the gap between sociology and economics becoming even wider.
Such a form of economics, particularly as represented in the Chicago School, made unsustainable claims for the mechanism of the market. It fostered a social unaccountability, one that had a profound social impact, most markedly on cohesion and inequality within society itself.
A notable and, by now, extensive, scholarship has emerged that has illustrated empirically the adverse consequences of such a model. Thomas Piketty’s excellent work on inequality is among that which is most often quoted, and for good reason. Piketty’s argument that, without intervention, wealth inequality tends to increase over time owing to the higher rate of return on capital compared to the fruits of economic growth, underscores how such a trend poses significant social and economic challenges.
Piketty’s early predictions of a world of low economic growth and extreme inequality are coming to pass as we witness the ongoing concentrations of economic and political power through the accumulation of capital (or wealth) by the very richest with all the attendant social ills, most notably falling cohesion.
It is in responding to such conditions that sociology and economics could, may I suggest, make a significant contribution within a shared normative agenda.
When we compare sociology with economics as disciplines, what is perhaps most startling is the different manner in which inequality is considered.
The origins of a sociology that emerged from Catholic Social Thinking, and indeed so much earlier in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, underscored how poverty and inequality were to be construed as failings of society. This was very much at odds with classical economic thought which viewed inequality as an inevitability. Indeed neoliberalism and neoclassical economics championed inequality as virtuous: a maximiser of utility and a generator of wealth, with the market envisaged as ensuring that everyone gets what they deserve.
This epistemological orientation, combined with the hegemony of a version of economics in policy discourse and practice, can be seen as a major factor in the yawning inequality manifesting itself in so many parts of the world with such corrosive consequences for cohesion in society, delivering as it does a version of society that is reductionist and in which the shared culture of daily life is commodified and peripheral.
An alternative to such a narrow view is that of the economy as embedded in a culture that appreciates and seeks to deepen the democratic experience in an ever more inclusive way.
The embedding of economy in the social and cultural is a motif developed, for example, in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi. May I suggest that such work remains relevant in our contemporary circumstances, that such ideas may be utilised to produce a forceful counter-hegemonic model to contest the depoliticisation, atomisation and commodification endemic to neoliberal globalisation.
While it was part of Polanyi’s achievement to demonstrate the repercussions of domination in the economic lives of people, Gramsci was concerned to show the political domination that necessarily precipitated it.
Polanyi’s critique of the self-regulating market, his discernment of society’s ‘double movement’, when bridged to Gramsci’s theory of ideological hegemony and his notion of ‘good sense’, can supply vital components of what might serve as a critical theorisation of globalisation, as well as the taking note of the practical strategies of resistance to the anti-politics of market ideology on which James C. Scott has made such a valuable contribution.
The critical integration of Polanyi, Gramsci and Scott into the globalisation debates, as expounded by, for example, James Mittelman, produces valuable analytical tools, ones that maintain a primacy on political agency, that critically specify the national-international distinction, and make a methodological virtue of radical democratic theory.
Incorporation of Polanyi’s ‘substantivism’ thesis into a reinvigorated economics for our times – a cultural version of economics that emphasises the manner in which economies are embedded in society and culture, is an idea that, if made popular in a revised anthropology, sociology and political science, could be emancipatory.
It is most revealing to see how, in times of austerity, a shift away from state spending on culture in some major economies occurs. This can be seen as the further articulation and broadening of a neoliberal economic paradigm that emphasises the individual, privatised experience of the economic over any collectively transcendent version of shared welfare and economic security. That culture and the economy within it is part of a shared public world is not accepted.
In the more sophisticated form of its narrowness as to the role of culture, and happy to reap the financial gains from the cultural industries, the key advocates of neoliberalism are not concerned that the world of entertainment has eschewed any responsibility for enlightenment or education, that it is often characterised by monopoly in ownership and by such a fragmentation in audiences as turns active citizens into passive consumers.
The choices provoked within social policy that emerge are stark: inclusion versus exclusion; activity versus passivity; democratic control versus monopoly; freedom versus captivity.
Can economics then and its relationship with society, and with culture, be changed for the better? I believe it can be changed. This debate was a significant one between Australian and New Zealand economists Michael Volkerling and David Throsby.
In a seminal paper from 2000, ‘The Necessity of Utopia: Lessons from the Culture of Economics’, as part of his debate with Professor David Throsby, an economist who had argued that economics and culture were irreconcilable due to the nature of their differing foundational assumptions – the one being ‘hard’, individualistic, the other being ‘soft’, collective – Professor Michael Volkerling had addressed a contradiction that he saw as arising between changes evident in those sciences of the mind that appear to have “wholly rejected Cartesian dualism” in favour of theories of multiple intelligence and concepts of mind-body holism redolent of the Classical Age of Leisure on the one hand, “and a set of cultural policymaking practices on the other, that was not only influenced by the new consciousness but was happy to continue functioning within the failing and destructive model of neoliberal economics”
More than two decades later, this debate is not over, the contradiction suggested as to epistemological sources has not been resolved, nor does its resolution feature within the central discourse in economics or public policy. I believe, however, that economics and culture can be reconciled with benefit to both.
Culture and economics should not be envisioned as antagonistic, as any clash, as Professor Throsby suggested, of a collective impulse with the individualistic impulse. Rather, as Professor Volkerling suggested, economics should be considered as a discourse within a wider cultural discourse in terms of both its origins and in its application[13].
I agree with his suggestion that the development of economics and sociology together within a shared democratic culture that has as its aim “the full human capacity of the individual” is the best way of ensuring the emergence of the ‘representative citizen’ whose commonly shared interests it is the function of the state to safeguard:
Volkerling argued for a reconnection of economic policy with its cultural roots to produce what he called a “rich, holistic discourse”.
While the absence of the sociological perspective as a joint influence with good economics in crucial areas of policy formulation and administrative practice in Ireland, and indeed the European Union, has remained an ongoing concern, the stress on social economies, post the crisis of 2008, and the COVID epidemic, has ushered significant change. The benefits to scholarship and policy of good theoretical and policy work that represents a collaboration between theorists in ecology, economics and the social studies, given our contemporary challenges, may I suggest, is obvious.
As Ian Gough from the London School of Economics has put it, we require a better symmetry of economics, social policy and ecology, one combining ethics and human need theory with political economy and climate science[15].
From its origins, sociology has sought to be relevant by qualifying as a science, its perhaps hubristic ambition was to be included in the method and perceptions of science and specifically the gathering of scientific knowledge of a measured society.
I have often reflected on an intriguing hubristic moment in the debate as to the future of sociology. It was the announcement in the 1960s by a President of an American Philosophical Conference that the abandonment of causality in science, its replacement with probability theory when combined with the capacity for large-scale sampling, such as that assisted by, for example, ILLIAC computer technology, had brought everybody together. With probability theory’s ascendance, and such capacities, “we can all be scientists together now”, he announced. Such scientific hubris didn’t last, nor was it shared.
French sociology remained close to philosophical debate on existentialism, neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory.
The question endures: should economics or sociology aspire to be primarily a part of a scientific discourse and, if so, are there limitations as to the scope of the reach of both disciplines, economics and sociology? There are fundamental issues as to quantification and the interpretation of human data as dealt with by quantitative method and qualitative method. These are qualifications and limitations as to discourse. These were addressed in Alvin Gouldner’s Geary Lecture in 1974, The Dark Side of the Dialectic: Toward a New Objectivity.
The anthropological work of scholars such as James C. Scott attempted to capture not just the full human experience, as can be measured, what is behind the mask of presented behaviour, but how it is structured, and how it has to take account of underlying, challenging counter-discourses.
The over-determinism of structural functionalist theories with their insufficient allowance for diversity in agency was addressed by Scott.
Scott’s research on agrarian and non-state societies, Indigenous Peoples, subaltern politics, and anarchism, mostly in South-East Asia, and such societies’ resistance strategies to various forms of domination, has been hugely influential in the field of ethnographic fieldwork, political science more generally, and is an example of how the experience ‘from below’ can provide a rich scholarship from which better policy can be designed.
How might theory then meet research in sociology or economics? As Alvin Gouldner put it in his 1974 Geary Lecture, achieve the “unity of theory and practice on behalf of hope”.
Bridging the gap between what Charles Wright Mills in 1959 called “grand theory” and “abstracted empiricism” remains a challenge[19]. Over 240 years ago, Immanuel Kant formulated a similar conception: “Thoughts without content are empty and perceptions without concepts are blind”