Societal polarization, academic freedom, and the promise of dialogical sociology

Abstract

In my recent work, I argued that the bulk of the responses of the social sciences to the pathologies of late modernity was defined as being classically liberal but politically illiberal —I call this peculiar combination “Symbolic Liberalism.” Corollary to that, we witness a hierarchical polarization in various societies, manifested by the widening of the space between different elites. It is present everywhere including in university campuses and the media where we witness suffocation of academic freedom and intolerance in debates. Interestingly, such intolerance is shown by both the Left and the Right, as it is evident in the subscription to what is known as “cancel culture” by both camps but to different degrees. To illustrate this, I will give two examples mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom to show how such cancel culture has spread widely in liberal democratic countries, and a case study related to the current war on Gaza.