Thinking culturally about politics: Habits 20 years later and 20 years hence

Habits of the Heart clearly mattered when it was published in 1985. One of only a handful of truly sociological books on the New York Times' list of bestsellers in recent decades, it was widely discussed in congregations, book groups, and classrooms throughout the country. But how might it matter today? Does it carry lasting significance twenty-plus years after publication, or stand as an important but dated commentary on the excesses of 1980s individualism?

In reflecting on these questions, I step outside the usual conventions of a book symposium in several ways. First, I take this opportunity to consider Habits not only analytically but also autobiographically and politically. Second, I consider not just Habits, but also its sister volume, The Good Society. I think the two books are best understood in relation to each other. Finally, I not only look back at the last twenty years, but also reflect on our current moment and twenty years hence. Three dimensions of the Habits/Good Society legacy appear both most interesting and most important. To be very bodily about it all, I will call them the heart, the head, and the appendix of these 1980s works (though published in 1991, The Good Society was mostly written in the late 1980s).

THE HEART

I take as the heart of the Habits/Good Society legacy their focus on the relationship of culture, institutions, and social structures in social life. In this regard, both books simultaneously reflected and advanced the cultural and institutional turns that have occurred in social science over the last two or three decades. At a deep level, the books are about both culture and institutions, and both try to change the structural conditions of society by thinking culturally and institutionally. But Habits focuses primarily on the "soft tissue" of the social body: on culture and meaning and how they shape society. The Good Society focuses on the "skeletal tissue" of the social body, on institutions and their relationship to fundamental patterns of social life.

If this is so, The Good Society really ought to be the book closer to most of our sociological hearts. And in some ways it is, at least for me: To the extent that we care that our intellectual work fosters positive social change, then The Good Society's focus on reforming institutions becomes urgent. I think it is true that only by focusing on institutions can we really hope to claim some long-term impact. The Good Society really is the better sociological book, in a narrowly pragmatic or instrumental sense. And yet Habits draws our attention--perhaps claims many of our hearts--far beyond what The Good Society does. Habits drew a larger readership, gained enormous attention among institutional leaders from grass-roots communities to elite settings, provoked conversations from parish halls to board rooms around the country, and continues to be talked about in ways that The Good Society never was. Why is that?

In part, this is no doubt a reflection of the condition that Habits analyzes. In a society driven by individualism, it is hard for an institutional analysis to gain traction. But I think the attraction of Habits is also a reflection of the deeper theoretical commitments that lie at the heart of the book: that meaning and sense-making are fundamentally constitutive of human life and at their best are communal activities. Indeed, meaning construction and sense-making are such fundamentally human processes that they sometimes override (even for sociologists!) more obviously relevant causal processes.

A digression into my own biography may illustrate the point. In the mid-1980s, I spent five years in poor urban neighborhoods and the countryside of Mexico and Central America, living with local folks and working to end Reaganite intervention in the civil wars then racking the region. In 1987, as I was preparing to return to the U.S. for graduate school, I was given a copy of Habits as a gift. By all rights, it should have been less than compelling for me. I was deeply vested in a political and structural reading of American hegemony in Central America--and, whatever else Habits offers, it's certainly not that. By all rights, a more obviously political and structural analysis of American life should have drawn my attention. But I also needed to understand my own journey "home," to make sense of my own transition back to life within American culture. I needed not only to find the right structural analysis, but also--and more urgently--to undergo a journey of the heart back to my home culture. Habits of the Heart was the single most helpful source for that journey. It's combination of thorough-going critique of some of the deep currents of our culture, positive appreciation for other deep cultural currents, and sense-making of that 1980s moment in American history provided key intellectual undergirding for that transition in my life.

Thus, if forced to choose between these books, I would be tempted to say something like, "As a sociologist, I prefer The Good Society and want even more structural analysis, but as a human being, I would choose Habits hands down." But of course, that gets it all wrong. The "soft tissue" cultural analysis of Habits is as fully sociological as the harder institutional analysis of The Good Society, and both sought to contribute to rolling back the structural injustices of American life.