European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

ISSN: 2325-4823 (Print) 2325-4815 (Online) Journal homepage: https://tandfonline.com/loi/recp20

Patterns of power and the (sociological)

imagination

Eeva Luhtakallio & Ricca Edmondson

To cite this article: Eeva Luhtakallio & Ricca Edmondson (2019) Patterns of power and the
(sociological) imagination, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 6:1, 1-5, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2019.1560978

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1560978

Published online: 03 Jan 2019.

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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
2019, VOL. 6, NO. 1, 1–5
https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1560978

EDITORIAL

Patterns of power and the (sociological) imagination

The last year of the 2010s begins in a world struggling with multiple
complex and fuzzy conflicts marked by unclear and complicated power
relations. While there is perhaps nothing new under the sun regarding
the geopolitical fuzziness and devastatingly deadly power games con-
stantly at play at the expense of millions of civilians, the political turbu-
lence within numerous polities comprising of unpredictable voters and,
into the bargain, unpredictable leaders, has quickly become part of the
new normal in Europe and the US. Unpredictability is not only a
synonym for moodiness, but describes too the various institutional
domino-effects and collateral impacts of turbulent political leadership
that we repeatedly witness in different national and local contexts.
The crisis of representative democracy, in the headlines for a good four
decades now, appears to constantly unfold new layers of disappointment
for citizens. The promises of participative democracy for some, and popu-
list movements for others, to mention but two aspects, respectively prove
unable to fulfil expectations of wider, more equal, or simply different dis-
tributions of power. The decline of traditional working-class jobs with the
accepted allegiances between them, as well as paralyses in welfare-state
protections that had come to be regarded as traditional, make it much
more difficult for ordinary citizens to trace how power circulates in the
societies they live in and to know what it is reasonable to expect or
demand of these societies. Not least, the machinations of gargantuan-
scale social-media manipulators on the one hand and cabals of ultra-
rich individuals on the other are deliberately designed to disrupt patterns
of political imagination among contemporary populations.
The first issue of the EJCPS’s sixth volume can be described, without
being specifically intended as a special issue, as thematically centred
around different aspects and dimensions of power. Power, of course, is
a concept right at the thematic core of cultural and political sociology –
to an extent to which it is possible to say that cultural and political soci-
ology always deals with power in some regard. At the same time, power is
an overwhelming topic, both conceptually and in its mundane forms, and

© 2019 European Sociological Association

2 EDITORIAL

thus addressing it in novel ways is laborous and requires intellectual

courage. The latter is not lacking, we find, in the articles in this issue.
In their robust manifesto, Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman
propose a new direction in which social theorists can sharpen their
tools to understand questions of agency, power, and modernity. At the
core of their suggestion is the idea of the different roles of the actor in situ-
ations of power, or, as the authors more radically put it, the distinction
between action and agency. By dismantling the action-by-individuals
and agency-of-individuals node, the authors address the eternal social-
scientific struggle to satisfyingly define the relation between structure
and agency, reminding us of the importance of considering in any given
case what project is being aimed at, and how ownership of projects cru-
cially affects the power constellations at hand. This reminder, emerging
from a re-reading of Hannah Arendt in particular, leads to the recognition
(and conceptual novelty) of the three figures of Rector – who has the
project –, Actor – who acts on behalf of the latter, as a legitimate delegate
–, and Other, the outsider, and potentially an obstacle to the project in
question. These figures are proposed as inherent to power relations and
challenge us to revisit social-theoretical conceptions of power. It is in
the intertwining chains of rector-actor-other relationships that the
authors locate their new promise to understand social power, and they
do so with an intriguing array of examples from historical and contempor-
ary power relations. Building on Lukes, Foucault, and Bourdieu with
regard to dimensions of power in social theory, and on Coleman and
Pateman on the overarching social-theoretical questions of actor intersub-
jectivity and mutual recognition, and finally arriving at Kantorowicz’s
account of state power by way of the logic of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’,
Reed and Weinman invite us to reconsider the established understanding
of the transition to modernity. Using the rector-actor-other lens, they
explore examples of governance reflecting these ‘two bodies’, the concrete
body (of the king, and later, in modern democracies, of the people) and the
symbolic one (the sacred figuration of the king’s power, or of the ‘people’),
from the French revolution to the current crisis of present-day republican-
ism. This opens new windows for illuminating the complex power
relations in contemporary societies, and the increasingly common dead-
locks of ‘democratic governance’ in a number of polities.
Certainly, this bold effort to redefine of social theory leaves many ques-
tions open, as Reed and Weinman also acknowledge. In order to facilitate
this fascinating and worthwhile debate further, we asked Professor Risto
Heiskala to write a first comment on Reed and Weinman’s article,
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 3

which he did, with depth and precision. Sympathetic to the overall ambi-
tion of the manifesto, Heiskala suggests that we recognise a few restric-
tions to its scope of application, and ends with a discussion of the
theme of the King’s two bodies as applied to contemporary Europe.
Rightly, Heiskala points to the vulnerabilities affecting the European
Union at the moment, seeing it as ‘incompletely defined’ but still
subject to bitter disputes about its future direction. He underlines the
need for an effective European public sphere, characterised by accessible
public media and forums for discussion, within which innovative types
of legitimacy could be built, ‘new solutions based on recognition and soli-
darity’. It will be far from easy to construct a public sphere of this kind,
but, Heiskala says, if this does not happen, it is hard to see who will
defend Europe’s democratic values in the future.
Heiskala is certainly pointing to a multi-layered problem. He counters
contentions about the ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe by explaining the leg-
islative and executive structure of the European Union, and of course it is
correct to do this. Nonetheless many politicians, as well as non-politicians,
perceive this system as distant and tortuous: ‘We have the laws made for
us by people in Brussels whom we didn’t elect’ (David Davies, M.P. (Con.);
Sky News, 17 December 2018). Davies must know that this is not techni-
cally true, as Heiskala shows it is not, but in the absence of the vibrant
public sphere he calls for it is often felt to be true, and not only by
people in Britain.
Part of the European public sphere needs to be composed of an imagi-
native space in which political debate is close to citizens’ lived experience
and they can enjoy taking part in it. Otherwise, the public imagination
remains prey to political fantasies such as those described by Fintan
O’Toole in his Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018). Sym-
pathetically but devastatingly, O’Toole analyses the delusion that portrays
the United Kingdom as both victor and victim, devastated by foreign
exploitation. ‘The problem is that the whole gesture is based on something
imaginary: an enormous overstatement of the power of the EU in the gov-
ernance of England’ (2018, p.192). Symbolic power like this cannot be
countered merely by pointing out its misguidedness. It needs lives to be
lived in an alternative reality. In seeking to understand the complexity
of Brexit, or the French yellow-vest protests, for that matter, with their
complex demands associated, by and large, with the sentiment of demo-
cratic deficiency, the framework suggested in Reed and Weinman’s
article opens promising new directions.
4 EDITORIAL

In one sense the next article shows how difficult debate can be even
when all the actors accept the overall reasonableness of a particular
project. Pertti Alasuutari, Hanna Rautajoki, Petra Auvinen and Marjaana
Rautalin address the Single European Sky (SES) initiative and the pro-
blems faced in implementing it, from a neo-institutionalist perspective.
They show how the decoupling of principles and practices – as put
forward, for instance, in world society theory – among multiple levels of
actors translate into a limbo of constant transformations of a project,
and hence to difficulties in stabilising any one outcome of such an institu-
tionalisation process. Questions of delegating authority – and different
types of authority –, as well as the power to implement measures are at
the heart of this problematic too, even though the authors’ viewpoint
differs from those in the previous texts. Analysing supra-national
policy-making ‘as an evolving discursive process’ that various actors
strive to steer in defence of their own respective positions, the article
sheds light on the complexities of power and capacity in multi-stakeholder
harmonisation projects. Actors’ persuasive uses of different sources of
authority display the ways in which they attempt to protect their interests,
impacting as they do so on the whole SES project.
Caroline Patsias, Julian Durazo Hermann and Sylvie Patsias explore a
comparative puzzle of citizen participation and politicisation, and show
how local group styles that link with national political cultures direct
the ways in which citizen groups pursue and perceive politics. Exploring
case studies from France and Canada, and the respective civic and empow-
erment styles dominant in the cultures that have evolved within these
citizen groups, the authors show how crucial the intertwinements of pol-
itical culture and local context are in understanding differences in citizen
participation, even despite seemingly similar participative devices. The
two groups studied believe in and emphasise citizens’ right and capacity
to power, but they interpret the means to power very differently. This
has consequences for their efforts to politicise issues, and for the elisions
between politicisation and avoiding politics that characterise both groups.
It also places them at different positions on the scale of political action, as
well as within local power games.
Our reviews in this issue point to often-horrific interactions between
power and the imagination, with Vincent Druliolle’s review of Memory
and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era – ‘the “dark side” of the well-
intentioned and complex idea of Never Again’; then Rebecca Dolgoy on
Sodaro’s Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past
Violence . Dolgoy agues that Sodaro explores ‘the tension between affect
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 5

and effect’, confronting the fact that all the efforts by memorial museums
fail to correlate with reductions of violence in the present. Indeed, Dolgoy
contends that these museums constitute political projects that fail ade-
quately to confront the precariousness of our political systems and their
vulnerability to manipulation. It is fitting, given the questions raised in
these reviews, that we can also include Gábor Tverdota’s review of the
edition by Meja and Kettler: The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim.
Since this is ‘the first companion book dedicated to the work of Karl Man-
nheim’, Tverdota urges a resurgence of interest in this author and in the
sociology of knowledge in general as ‘the organon of the self-formation
of humanity in the context of modernity’.

Reference
O’Toole, F. (2018). Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. Croydon: Head of
Zeus (Apollo).

Eeva Luhtakallio
Eeva.Luhtakallio@staff.uta.fi

Ricca Edmondson
Ricca.Edmondson@nuigalway.ie