Sociology and its public

In this interview, Craig Calhoun retraces his peculiar trajectory that, from his first interests in realist cinema and anthropology, brought him to become one of the most original contemporary public sociologists. Discussing his multidisciplinary education between Columbia, Manchester and Oxford he reassembles his own particular intellectual path that mixes his youth activism in the peace movement and engagement in the Western Marxist debate of the 1970s, while at the same time studying Hegel, German classic philosophy and Continental social theorists. But it is through these apparent digressions that his peculiar way of practicing social research took shape. From his first anthropological inquiries on the Tallensi in Ghana and on the historical sociology of working class movements, Calhoun’s incursions into different disciplinary fields do indeed constitute his critical approach to social sciences that always tries to trace back the specific and contextual outcomes of empirical research to general historical-sociological dynamics.