Critical Sociology

This paper presents a social constructionist account of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its account of PTSD's multi-faceted origins begins with the efforts of the Nixon Administration to discredit of the voice of anti-war veterans following the fall, 1969, Moratorium Days against the war. Subsequently, mental health professionals frame veteran political behavior within a medical discourse, transporting the concepts alienation, survivor guilt, and flashbacks into the PTSD literature from other contexts. The New York Times plays a critical role in legitimating PTSD.

A paradigmatic account of the recent development of social movements has become prominent in European sociology. Labor movements are said to be in decline, and new social movements to be taking their place at the center of contemporary protest and social transformation efforts. These changes are attributed to shifts in the underlying structures of modern society. This article challenges this view, questioning the underlying theoretical assumptions about the relation of class and movement, and offering an alternative framework for understanding recent developments within social movements. The article ends with some reflections on new emerging possibilities.

This article discusses the issue of hegemony in relation to the 1995 election in Ontario, Canada's most populous and industrialized province, of a conservative government whose New Right policy platform combined a neoliberal emphasis on reducing the size and role of government with a neoconservative focus on taking a harder line toward deviant and socially disadvantaged groups, such as juvenile offenders and welfare recipients. The Conservative election strategy was redolent of the "authoritarian populism" characteristic of the New Right elsewhere, especially Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. Since the election, however, the limitations and contradictions of this strategy have become more evident, particularly vis-à-vis the role of the media. Despite being integrated into the structure of corporate capital, the media have given access to voices of opposition, especially outside the parliamentary process. Hegemony not only is secured by articulating a particular perspective to common sense, but by doing so in a way that fuses knowledge and understanding with lived experience in a way that is emotionally and normatively resonant—what Gramsci called "feeling-passion." In this respect, the division of discursive labor that the news media impose on their sources can have an inversion effect on the flow of power. The objects of real world actions, those adversely affected by New Right policies, become the subjects of discursive representation in their role as victims. The narrative emphasis of news on conflict, disruption, and harm gives moral and emotional power to victims whose voices become the principal expression of feeling-passion. In this way, the struggle over hegemony becomes a struggle over the identity and plight of worthy victims.

East Germany's revolution has been portrayed in the western media as a popular uprising rejecting the old socialist order and wholeheartedly embracing Western capitalism. This article examines the politics of leaders of the East German citizens' movement who spearheaded these changes in 1989, using data collected with prominent dissidents nearly three years after the opening of the Berlin Wall. The critical intelligentsia of East Germany were unique among dissidents of the Soviet bloc countries in their continued belief in "socialism with a human face"—even after the brutal repression of the Prague Spring—juxtaposing socialism as it actually existed with socialism as they thought it could be. With the rallying cry "We Are the People," they contested the party elite's practice of socialism, as they sought to build a more democratic alternative on East German soil. This article relates the East German state's application of the Marxist-Leninist concept of contradiction and criticism/self-criticism to the country's history of critical politics and to the politics of the citizens' uprising in 1989.