| The 2004 meeting of the American Sociological Association was among the most successful in the organization’s hundred-year history. Overflow crowds packed the ballrooms of the San Francisco Hilton to hear a glittering array of speakers, including economist Paul Krugman, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, and former president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso (himself a sociologist). The centerpiece of the meetings, however, was Michael Burawoy’s presidential address. In that address, published in the American Sociological Review and reprinted in this volume, Burawoy issued an impassioned call for a revitalization of sociology in a turn to a “public sociology,” distinguished by its use of reflexive knowledge and its appeal beyond the university. Although by no means incompatible with other forms of sociology, only public sociology, Burawoy argues, can restore sociology to its calling as an “angel of history, searching for order in the broken fragments of modernity, seeking to salvage the promise of progress.” |