sociologists-from-the-united-states

"On the other hand, ... a pragmatic turn ... expands the number of parties who may participate more or less as equals in a debate about society."

"When one appeals solely to the truth of a discourse to authorize it intellectually and socially, one represses reflection on its practical-moral meaning and its social consequences. A discourse that justifies itself solely by epistemic appeals will not be compelled to defend its conceptual decisions on moral and political grounds."

"Where a discourse is redeemed ultimately by metatheoretical appeals, experts step forward as the authorities. This situation contributes to the enfeeblement of a vital public realm of moral and political debate because social questions are deemed the domain of experts. By contrast, when a discourse is judged by its practical consequences or its moral implications, more citizens are qualified to assess it by considering its social and moral implications. A pragmatic move, in principle, implies an active, politically engaged citizenry participating in a democratic public realm."

"Most dictatorships have been anti-statist and pro-free market, today and in the past and probably in the future."

"James Petras is the undisputed foremost authority on the global and regional dynamics of US imperialism."

"In the short run there can only be international solidarity among the workers in the vassal states: the workers in the imperial states – the U.S., Germany, the Nordic states and the UK are still bound and tied to their respected ruling classes."

"Class struggle according to the most up-to-date speeches of the labor bureaucrats was superseded by modern pragmatic understandings of the common interests of labor and capital."

"The so-called Eurozone is, in reality, a mini-empire of tributary vassals and imperial states reforming empires has been historically demonstrated to be a futile enterprise."

"...The counter-position of “civil society” to the state is also a false dichotomy. Much of the discussion of civil society overlooks the basic social contradictions that divide “civil society”. Civil society or, more accurately, the leading classes of civil society, while attacking the “statism” of the poor have always made a major point of strengthening their ties to the treasury and military to promote and protect their dominant position in “civil society”. Likewise, the popular classes in civil society when aroused have sought to break the ruling classes’ monopoly of the state. The poor have always looked to state resources to strengthen their socio-economic position in relation to the rich. The issue is and always has been the relation of different classes to the state."

"The future of popular-based social and economic changes does not he in parliamentary elections, given their elitist structure and the control exercised over the process. Movement politics linked to electoral campaigns has no future; nor does simple direct action in defense of particular local terrain. The future of movements must be rooted in creating autonomous electoral power anchored and coordinated with regional or national movements of direct action—dress rehearsals for creating a new state power response to civil society."

"Anti-imperialist movements are no longer middle class dominated nationalist movements, they are class-based because imperialism is embedded in everyday work and household survival."

"The inefficiency of the state is directly related to its subordination to private interests."

"Proclaiming 19th Century ‘liberalism’, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade."

"The trade unions, narrowly focused on everyday issues and their immediate membership, ignored the mass of unemployed, especially the young unemployed, workers."

"In fact, the industrial workers and in particular their trade unions have been the least active and least militant component of the anti-imperialist movements…"

"By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neo-liberal ruling classes realised that their policies were polarising the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neo-liberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy of “from below”, the promotion of “grassroots” organisation with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among potentially conflicting classes, to create a “social cushion”. These organisations were financially dependent on neo-liberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organisations, described as “non-governmental”, numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to US$4 billion world-wide."

"Competition over shrinking resources intensifies conflict over shares of a shrinking pie."

"...As always with Petras, there is much repetition/recycling of articles/ideas,much polemic and hot air but also a genuine engagement with the issues of revol-utionary transformation in Latin America, albeit from the perspective of the privi-leged peripatetic professor from the North."

"...The problem, we are told, is not foreign investments or foreign aid but their absence and they ask for more imperial aid. The political and economic myopia that accompanies this perspective fails to understand that the political conditions for the loans and investment is the cheapening of labour, the elimination of social legislation and the transformation of Latin America into one big plantation, one big mining camp, one big free trade zone stripped of rights, sovereignty and wealth."

"... one may fairly say that what business stands for, ideologically insists upon and tries to get adopted as general principles of conduct, run directly against and reduce the chances of evoking affection and love as principles of relationship ... in promoting themes quite inimical to identification, affection, and significant membership, business thereby and to that extent tends to bring out, standardize, and reward the most unsocial impulses in man."

"There is substantial evidence, over a wide attitudinal and experimental range, that perceptions, opinions and values are systematically ordered in modern societies....Modern society...is more or less unique in the extent to which it produces standardized contexts of experience."

"By using 'man, mankind, men, he, and his' all through, you unconsciously convey the old image of the noble masterful male once more out to rescue the human race....Here is the vocabulary you must use if the new image of man is not to be sexist as the old: 'humankind, humanity, human being, humans, persons, individuals', etc. For this century, at least, until our thought habits have been reformed, the use of 'man' as an inclusive term is out....You can't stick in a sentence on women's lib and adequately transform the concept 'human' thereby."

"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."

"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t have to lug a camera."

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

"Because of unprecedented increases in , the structure has been transformed. Linkages among family members have been prolonged, and the surviving generations in a family have increased in number and complexity. Today's kinship structure (which has no parallel in history) can be viewed in a new way: as a latent web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close family relationships. These relationships are no longer prescribed as strict obligations, but must be earned—created and recreated by family members over their lives. Such changes in the structure and dynamics of family relationships raise many questions and issues for students of the family including the development of special research approaches needed to understand the complexity of these relationships and the nature of older people's family relationships in the future."

"Today's social structures and norms are the vestigial remains of the nineteenth-century, when most people died before their work was finished or their last child had left home. Age 65 was established as the criterion for —yet age 65 is still used in many countries under today's utterly changed conditions of longevity."

"Possibly overshadowed by Matilda’s many public accomplishments is her service as a teacher and mentor at and , and the dedication and accomplishments of some of her students and menses to the study of aging and the life course, especially Anne Foner, Marilyn Johnson, and Kathleen Bond. She built a modern sociology-anthropology department at and was named the Daniel B. Fayerweather Professor of Political Economy and Sociology in 1975; in 1996 the building housing the department was named in her honor, and she received honorary doctoral degrees from (1972), Rutgers (1983), (1994), and the (1997)."

"Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career."

"... one seems forced to conclude that a disproportionally large number of the nation's "pockets of poverty" are found in rural-farm areas."

"In 1979 at the age of 68, Matilda embarked on a 20-year career at the (NIA) of the (NIH). The NIA’s founding director, , and the NIH Director, , invited Matilda to establish the NIA’s granting program on Social and Behavioral Research (SBR) as well as to guide the expansion and integration of these disciplines throughout the NIH. During her first year at the NIA, she and Kathleen Bond (one of her former graduate students) developed and implemented a multidisciplinary vision for research on aging that integrated the aging of individuals into societal structures. This program emphasized the influence of social structures on the lives of individuals (Matilda exclaimed often, “People don’t grow up and grow old in laboratories—they grow up and grow old in changing societies.”) and the lives of individuals on social structures. This vision extended to the biological sciences, for Matilda recognized the need for a biopsychosocial understanding. The publication of this blueprint as a NIH program announcement set the course of NIA’s program and influences its direction even to this day."

"Remember that, as a sociologist, your focus is on social interaction—i.e., not on the biological or psychological processes of the actors, but on their and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes."

"Interviewing individual group members separately affords privacy and encourages all members to answer. Respondents may be more frank if that others in the group will not hear what they say (thereby removing the possibility of group sanctions). This may be the best way of obtaining responses from individuals with lower positions (younger, lower , e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation."

"Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things."

"It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business."

"[E]very morning all 200 million of us get out of bed and put a lot of energy into creating and re-creating the social calamities that oppress, infuriate and exhaust us."

"The troubles we're experiencing didn't arise because someone made the wrong economic prediction, or used the wrong economic indicator or the wrong theory of corporate investment. They arose because we've been using our energies mindlessly for decades; we've put our labor and resources into activities that have brought us nothing back."

"Americans need to wake up to the fact that right-wing Republicans don't believe in democracy and never have. They have always admired military dictatorships and seem to be working hard to set up the equivalent here in the United States. Their goal is to create an authoritarian government, with control of the media and the judiciary; to weaken all restraints on executive power and eliminate democratic freedoms; to undermine the public education system through fiscal starvation and rote learning, so that the poor will learn only enough to follow orders; and to create the kind of economic inequality so many Third World countries enjoy--by filling the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich individuals and impoverishing the rest, thereby providing a mass of cheap labor."

"Conflict will never be eliminated from human affairs. Conflict is simply the active expression of difference, and an essential part of human development. Without conflict change would be impossible. Our goal as a species at this point in our development is to mold a world in which conflict can be contained within a larger embracing understanding—the realization that we share certain goals and aspirations in common, no matter how much we scream at each other about procedures."

"As a society, we encourage selfishness. We expect people to be interested primarily in their private or family welfare, with little concern for community needs. The care of the sick, old, disturbed, or poor, for example—a task that most societies take for granted—is carried out grudgingly, carelessly, or not at all."

"[If] you brainwash people into forgetting that they're part of each other, you can manipulate them...that's how individualism leads to fascism - divide and conquer."

"The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction."

"Instead of using money to serve ourselves, we use ourselves to serve money."

"[If] the purposes for which money were designed were fulfilled completely, there would be no reason for humans to exist as decision-making beings."

"...For many years the only woman in her department, she along with others established the Organization of Women Faculty at Northwestern University in the late 1960s. In the late 1970s their study of faculty salaries revealed significant gender disparities that embarrassed the administration."

"...One can see traces of arguments that she developed in her later work critiquing the orientalist notion of an Islamic city, or the urban apartheid of Rabat, when she carefully explains the ways in which foreign elites separated government and social decision-making from the indigenous population for centuries."

"Except for the extermination of the Tasmanians, modern history recognizes no case in which the virtually complete supplanting of the indigenous population of a country by an alien stock has been achieved in as little as two generations. Yet this, in fact, is what has been attempted in Palestine since the beginning of the Twentieth century. Herein lies the nub of the Middle East – at once its greatest tragedy and its most perplexing but inescapable problem."

"A resistance to formal organization is common among the Left, as we have seen not only in the but also in phenomena like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Activists sought to intentionally avoid the inherent conservatism of institutions, which can often fight to maintain their own self-interest and internal power structure. But the avoidance of organization hamstrings any movement’s ability to achieve its own goals."

"...These are exciting times. Another World Revolution is happening. The Global Right and the Global Left are once again contending with each other and with centrist liberalism. It is different this time around, but imagination and perseverance will be rewarded, as they were in the World Revolution of 1917. As my old friend often said, a luta continua. (2020)"

"Eric M. Leifer,"