Introduction: Society as More Than a Collection of Free-floating Individuals

Abstract

I once read that the celebrated radical historian E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class (that outstanding, innovatory, testament to the lives of people who had been silenced by traditional history) had wondered why it was that the level of sophistication and attention demanded by Gardeners’Question Time on British radio was so far above that required by the politics and current affairs programme Any Questions. The latter, he thought, would be an insult to children, the former could stretch adults as they should be stretched. People were equipped to take responsibility for their gardens but not for the societies in which they — and their gardens — existed. If E.P. Thompson was right, and I think he was, then it cannot be because of a lack of raw intelligence on the part of the people that appear on the panel of Any Questions for many of them are clearly bright and articulate, they clearly ‘know their stuff’. But could it, we may ask, have something to do with the ‘kind of stuff they know’? For, quite simply, most of us think about society and social life without having had any schooling in how to think about society and social life.