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422 Chapter 23

education, gender equality, child and maternal health, combatting HIV/

AIDS, environmental sustainability, and global partnership.

In the fall of

2008, a UN summit meeting will have taken place to evaluate how these

goals are being met in what countries with what projects. In terms of the

evaluation of a similar Summit Meeting of major global leaders that took

place in 2005, it is probable that progress has been realized albeit unevenly

for some targets and, in some countries, but the overall targets will fall

short. This is due to many factors including that many countries have not

met their pledges and that new disasters, man-made and nature-made, have

taken place that had not been counted on in 2000.

The macro level of global altruism is more than the activities of a single

multidimensional entity which is the United Nations. It is also the activities

of another set of macro actors, states. States carry out their cross-border and

global activities with a mixture of domestic and foreign interests, with altru-

ism in the form of providing aid or assistance to less fortunate countries (if

not to less fortunate citizens at home) receiving secondary consideration in

relation to other expenditures.

Two complementary tables provide an indication of global altruism by

states. Table 23.2 indicates Official Development Assistance (ODA) by

Table 23.2. Net ODA in 2007 as U.S. Dollar Amounts (millions)

Country Aid Amount

USA 21,197

Germany 11,048

France 8,918

UK 8,839

Japan 7,824

Netherlands 5,621

Spain 5,103

Sweden 3,853

Canada 3,585

Italy 3,509

Norway 3,349

Denmark 2,302

Australia 2,145

Belgium 1,756

Austria 1,613

Switzerland 1,596

Ireland 1,068

Finland 880

Greece 446

Portugal 359

Luxembourg 325

New Zealand 268

Source: OECD Development Statistics Online. Last accessed Sunday, April 27, 2008

(www.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/17/5037721.htm).

Global Altruism 423

country in 2007. What the figures do not show is the extent to which donor

countries and amounts involve restrictions, which may range from determin-

ing how the money received is to be spent by the recipient and whether it

be spent on goods and personnel furnished by the donor country to what

health or education projects may not be financed, and so forth. When these

and other restrictive factors are taken into account, altruism may not be as

detached or disinterested as might be desirable.

One last table on global altruism and individual states, table 23.3, presents

the percentage of a country’s gross national income (GNI) that goes to Of-

ficial Development Assistance (ODA), bearing in mind a commitment made

at the UN General Assembly in 1970 of donor governments to spend 0.7 per-

cent of GNI on ODA. What the table indicates is that 30 years later, only five

of the wealthiest countries of the world (including three in Scandinavia) are

carrying out the original target, or even the recently revised downward target

of 0.56 percent of GNI accepted as a commitment to uplift those still mired

in extremes of poverty and its hazards for health. The United States, while

contributing the most in total dollars (keeping in mind that this includes a

large portion of “phantom aid”) is lowest in giving as a percentage of GNI.

Table 23.3. Net ODA in 2007 as Percent of GNI

Country Aid Amount

Norway 0.95

Sweden 0.93

Luxembourg 0.90

Denmark 0.81

Netherlands 0.81

Ireland 0.54

Austria 0.49

Belgium 0.43

Spain 0.41

Finland 0.40

France 0.39

Germany 0.37

Switzerland 0.37

UK 0.36

Australia 0.30

Canada 0.28

New Zealand 0.27

Italy 0.19

Portugal 0.19

Japan 0.17

Greece 0.16

USA 0.16

Source: OECD Development Statistics Online. Last accessed April 27, 2008 (www

.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/17/5037721.htm).

424 Chapter 23

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this chapter has sought to be an introduction to global

altruism as a set of practices undertaken by various groups of actors. This

has been done more at an empirical, descriptive level than at a more com-

parative or even normative level. A more comparative level would examine

forms of global altruism outside the frames discussed here based tacitly

on Western agency (for example, in Buddhism and Islam).

Extending the

analysis to the normative is necessary, not logically but existentially, very

much in keeping with “public sociology,” with which it has affinity. It is

not a need for benign charity that is required but rather a need to instill

awareness from the top down and from the ground up that global altruism

is not only the highest activity of globalization but also that the “other”

is an integral part of the global community, that our being-in-the-world

is contingent on the other’s well-being in the world with us. Ultimately,

it is a question of resetting the priorities of globalization, from the micro

to the macro level, mobilizing both the private and the public sector, and

increasing public awareness, and appreciation of global altruists as models

of global activists.

That is a task to pursue with global altruism, an extension of the pro-

gram proposed by Jeffries et al. (2006) in light of the pioneering studies of

Sorokin.

NOTES

1. The Sociology of Revolution (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1925); Contemporary So-

ciological Theories (New York: Harper & Row, 1928); Social and Cultural Dynamics,

4 vols. (New York: Bedminster, 1937–1941); P. A. Sorokin and Robert K. Merton,

“Social Time: Methodological and Functional Analysis,” American Journal of Sociol-

ogy 42 (March 1937): 615–629.

2. Translated and with a prologue by Elena P. Sorokin, edited and with an intro-

duction by T. Lynn Smith (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1975).

3. A tragic instance in point is Ethiopia, where millions of its rural inhabitants face

famine due to a population that has doubled in 20 years, crop failures due to drought,

and soaring global food and fertilizer prices; the “man-made” aspect of the Ethiopian

disaster is the government’s steep increase in its military budget to fight border war-

fare with Eritrea and U.S.-backed military expeditions in Somalia. See www.usatoday

.com/news/world/2008-08-17-ethiopia_N.htm and http://english.aljazeera

.net/news/africa/2008/06/20086150858597530.html.

4. “Poverty Reduction and Achievement of the MDGs,” UNDP Annual Report

2008. www.undp.org/publications/annualreport 2008/poverty.shtml.

5. Anecdotally, at a recent community meeting in North Carolina sponsored by

the NGO Witness for Peace, we heard a report that in conflict-devastated Colombia

Global Altruism 425

a significant segment of the Bogota population lives in below “extreme poverty”

levels, in what is simply called “misery.”

6. Among others, see Joseph Stieglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New

York: W.W. Norton, 2002).

7. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution,

Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life

(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1942).

8. Michael Burawoy, “Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Pos-

sibilities,” Social Forces 82, 4 (June 2004):1603–1618.

9. Barry V. Johnston, Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence: Uni-

versity Press of Kansas, 1995), 191.

10. Two of the four were single-authored by Sorokin: Altruistic Love (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1950) and The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of

Moral Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954); two were symposia organized by

Sorokin: Explorations in Altruistic Love and Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950) and

Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954).

It is beside the point to explicate Sorokin’s own explorations of love and altruism,

and how these concerns relate to broader dimensions of his oeuvre, such as civiliza-

tional analysis. There are several works that provide the reader with such overviews,

besides the essential text of Johnston, notably Ford, Richard, and Talbutt (1996),

Talbutt (1998), and Del Pozo Aviño (2006).

11. Pitirim A. Sorokin, “Sociology of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” American

Sociological Review 30 (December 1965):833–843.

12. John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge, UK: Polity and Malden, MA:

Blackwell, 2003); Diane Perrons, Globalization and Social Change: People and Places

in a Divided World (London & New York: Routledge, 2004); David Held, Global

Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge,

UK: Polity, 2004).

13. See U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2008, which es-

timates about 800,000 cases of cross-border trafficking yearly (the great majority

being women) and much more in the aggregate of intra-state trafficking for sexual

exploitation or forced labor (tantamount to and often including slavery). www

.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/105376.htm.

14. Even in the case of the World Bank and the IMF, which seek to promote eco-

nomic growth and development for the less fortunate countries, the strictures on

economic assistance, resulting in cutbacks in welfare measures, make their actions

less than bona fide global altruistic agencies. It is tempting to contrast these two

models thusly: for Model A, what is good for me and my country is good for the

world; for Model B, what is good for the world, is good for me and my country.

15. For a parallel perspective, see DeChaine (2005).

16. In this respect, a very important complement to the agencies of global al-

truism discussed in this chapter is that generated by the micro-credit movement

launched in Bangladesh by economist Muhammad Yunus with his Grameen Bank

Project. It has demonstrated the capacity “from the ground up” of people at the

grassroots level being able with minimal capital to transform their economic condi-

tion. He and the Grameen movement were recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in

2005, having provided credit to over 5,000,000 people worldwide.

426 Chapter 23

17. See José Luis González-Balado and J. N. Playfoot, eds., My Life for the Poor:

Mother Teresa of Calcutta (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985); Mother Teresa, Come

Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” edited by Brian Kolodiej-

chuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007). See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa.

18. I take “societal community” as that broad inclusive category formulated by

Talcott Parsons and explicated by Gerhardt (2001).

19. She set up the first house for AIDS patients in New York City in 1985.

20. Started in 1901 from a bequest of Alfred Nobel, inventor of TNT, the Peace

Prize is awarded, among basic criteria, for “best work for fraternity between na-

tions,” which would readily apply to Sorokin’s notion of “amitology.” I take the

Nobel Peace Prize as a global recognition of altruistic behavior done by individuals

or organizations to promote the peace process. Individual recipients have included

Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Buddhist activist Aung San Suu

Kyi. For criticisms of the selection process producing commissions as well as omis-

sions, see the section “Controversy” in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize.

21. While a member of the French Assembly, he donated his salary to the relief

work of the destitute.

22. For glimpses of the Abbé Pierre’s “rag pickers” (chiffoniers) at the first Em-

maus community, see Simon (1955).

23. For an overview of the major activities, see Carter (2007).

24. www.habitat.org/how/factsheet.aspx.

25. “I have expressed strong opposition to the recent adoption of preemptive

war as a policy that departs radically from that of previous administrations,” Carter

(2007:252).

26. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions.

27. For Amnesty International Report 08, see thereport.amnesty.org/eng.report-

08-at-a-glance.

28. In December 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 217A (III),

whose 30 articles constituted the International Declaration of Human Rights. It has

subsequently been expanded with additional legislation, conventions, and treaties.

For specific rights, see www.un.org/overview/rights.html.

29. www.msf.org/source/actrep/2008/IAR-2008_complete.pdf, p. 10.

30. As of June 2008, RAM with 36,675 volunteers had met 357,368 patients,

provided over 70,000 eyeglasses, and extracted 109,000 teeth, in addition to evacu-

ating by air over 1,000 emergency patients in Amerindian villages (ramusa.org/learn

/accomplishments.htm); for additional materials on the history and mission of RAM,

see the 2008 interview in Newsweek, www.newsweek.com/id/150847?tid=relatedcl.

31. sociologistswithoutborders.org.

32. In the past five years, WHO has verified more than 1,100 epidemics world-

wide, and documented that we have seen in this decade 40 diseases that were un-

known a generation ago: www.who.int/whr/2007/en/index/html.

33. www.who.int/whr/2007/en/index/html.

34. www.un/org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml.

35. For details on “phantom aid” versus “real aid,” and how countries rank on their

share of phantom aid, see Anup Shah, “US and Foreign Aid Assistance,” www.global

issues.org/article/35/us-and-foreign-aid-assistance. It is estimated that between 25–40

percent of the value of aid is dissipated by restrictions or “tied aid” (28).

36. I am indebted to Dr. Tomihide Kashioka for this suggestion.

Global Altruism 427

REFERENCES

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UK: Polity/Blackwell.

Bortolotti, Dan. 2006. Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders. Buf-

falo, NY: Firefly Books.

Carter, Jimmy. 2007. Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Diseases, Build-

ing Hope. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Collier, Paul. 2007. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What

Can Be Done about It. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

DeChaine, D. Robert. 2005. Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Com-

munity. Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield.

Del Pozo Aviño, Elvira (ed.). 2006. Integralism, Altruism and Reconstruction: Essays in

Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin. Valencia, Spain: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-

americans, Publicacions de la Universitat de València.

Ford, Joseph B., M. P. Richard, and P. C. Talbutt (eds.). 1996. Sorokin and Civiliza-

tion: A Centennial Assessment, with a preface by Roger W. Wescott. New Brunswick,

NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Gerhardt, Uta. 2001. “Parsons’s Analysis of the Societal Community.” Pp. 177–222

in Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology, edited by

A. Javier Treviño. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gintis, Herbert, S. Bowles, R. Boyd, and E. Fehr. 2003. “Explaining Altruistic Behav-

ior in Humans.” Evolution and Human Behavior 24(3):153–172.

Jeffries, Vincent, Barry V. Johnston, Lawrence T. Nichols, Samuel P. Oliner, Edward

Tiryakian, and Jay Weinstein. 2006. “Altruism and Social Solidarity: Envisioning

a Field of Specialization.” The American Sociologist (Fall):67–83.

Johnston, Barry V. 1995. Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography. Lawrence: Uni-

versity Press of Kansas.

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Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. 1997. World in Crisis: The Poli-

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Century. London and New York: Routledge.

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Altruism and Altruistic Love. New York: Oxford University Press.

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lennium Development Goals. London and New York: United Nations Development

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Noel. New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons.

Sorokin, Pitirim. Altruistic Love. Boston: Beacon, 1950.

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429

“Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is facing towards the past and survey-

ing the chaos of the present wrought by stormy historical events. Progress

propels him towards the future to which his back is turned.” Thus starts

Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address. The angel, however, is not

alone in taking this standpoint. It is also the temporal position from which

scientific investigations are conducted and evidence is established. The

angel’s position and perspective can thus serve as a metaphor for sociologi-

cal practice. This positioning points to a gap between our future-oriented

and future-producing subject matter and disciplinary practice that has yet

to be addressed across the four knowledge practices of professional, critical,

policy, and public sociology as delineated in Michael Burawoy’s address.

Evidence-based science gathers facts from the temporal domains of past

and present and, where appropriate, projects these forward into the future.

Our daily lives, however, are conducted projectively, surrounded by the

open and fluid horizon of past and future. We move in this temporal do-

main with great agility, pirouetting and swiveling to face both past and fu-

ture, twisting and turning in the knowledge realms of perception, memory,

and anticipation. We operate with equal confidence in the action domains

of planning and future making, alternating perspective between anticipated

future presents and enacted present futures without giving much thought

to the matter.

Futures are made continuously, across the world, every second of the day.

They are produced by the breadth of social institutions: politics, law and the

economy, science, medicine and technology, education, and religion. They

are constituted at the level of the individual, the family, social groups, com-

panies, and nations. These created futures extend temporally from the very

429

Futures in the Making:

Sociological Practice

and Challenge

Barbara Adam

430 Chapter 24

short to the extremely long term, spatially from the local to the regional,

national, international, and global, and materially from the surface to the

core of the quantum. Moreover, much of today’s social world encompasses

not just social relations, institutions, and social structures but also the natu-

ral environment. In its futurity much of this socio-environmental world is

not material and thus not factual in the conventional sense but marked by

latency and immanence. It is a world of actions and deeds under way: not

yet materialized as symptoms, not yet congealed into matter. It is the proc-

ess future of chemical, nuclear, biological, genetic, and fiscal activity, set

in motion by socio-political, legal, scientific, technological, economic, and

everyday enacting practices. The actions and processes associated with this

“future in the making” are ongoing, producing layers and layers upon layers

of past and present futures as well as future presents and pasts.

Much of this futurity and future making escapes the angel of history and

is bracketed in the scientific mode of inquiry which continues to focus

primarily on our social relations’ spatial and material extension, thus those

aspects that can be measured and counted. The implicit understanding

prevails that the study of society is conducted on the basis of “hindsight”

in a historically extended, spatially and materially constituted now. This

sociological neglect of the social future as subject matter has created a black

hole of knowledge that permeates the four modes of sociological inquiry

in different ways. Recognizing and understanding the disjuncture between

the temporal standpoint of sociology and the world we study, I want to

argue, is a precondition to achieving Burawoy’s ambitious vision for the

discipline.

The task, however, is not an easy one. By definition “futures” have not yet

emerged as (present) phenomena and symptoms. As the “not yet” futures

lack reality status and are not amenable to empirical study. But does this

necessarily place them outside the domain of sociological competence?

Does their potentiality make the creation of socio-cultural and socio-

environmental futures an exclusively political problem or is social futurity

also a central subject for sociological inquiry in general and public sociol-

ogy in particular? What might be involved in social investigations that are

temporally extended into the future? Is sociology equipped conceptually

and methodologically to deal with a temporal extension into the future?

What might be the particular barriers to be overcome and tasks to be

achieved by the different forms of sociological practice?

These are some of the questions I want to begin to consider in this contri-

bution to the handbook on public sociology. Accordingly, I look at the way

sociologists have approached the social future and with broad brush-strokes

paint a picture that takes us from early beginnings of the discipline to the

present. Turning our attention to the future, I am particularly interested to

focus discussion on some of the central tensions and difficulties that arise

430 Chapter 24

Futures in the Making 431

for sociological and social engagement with the “not yet” in order to begin

to open up the issues for collaborative consideration and debate.

SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO

THE FUTURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Concern with the future is to be found at the very beginning of the social

science enterprise and of sociology as an independent academic discipline.

This early social science interest in the future was closely tied to industri-

alization and the periods of intense political turmoil between the middle

of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. With the rise of scientific

knowledge and the socio-economic capacity to apply a rational calculus

to ever widening spheres of social life, the future was no longer a mere

continuation of the past but became increasingly a consequence of actions

in the present, as detailed by John Bury (1955[1932]), Jacques Le Goff

(1980) and in my own work (Adam 2004, 2006a, and 2006b; Adam and

Groves 2007). This was nowhere more apparent than in France during this

historical period. Accordingly it was the key social thinkers of France that

spearheaded a form of social science that, it was hoped, would help to bring

about the desired new world.

In his book The Prophets of Paris historian Frank E. Manuel (1962) de-

scribes Anne Robert Jacques Turgot; Marie Jean Caritat, Marquis de Con-

dorcet; Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon; Francois Charles

Fourier; and Auguste Comte as thinkers and commentators with a social

mission. All, he suggests, were concerned not just to “unveil” the future

but also to steer it in a particular direction. All sought to contribute to

the cumulative effects of innovation, to aid progress and to help facilitate

a climate of openness for novelty and change. They put their faith not in

revolution but in the perfectibility of human beings, the power of reason,

tolerance, love, and brotherhood. Most importantly, they saw themselves as

moral agents for change, laboring for posterity and a better future. None of

them saw a contradiction between their commitment to science as the path

to truth and their normative engagement in the active production of futures

they prophesied. At that point in the discipline’s history the four domains

of sociological practice were still unified.

From a different thought tradition and political context Karl Marx too

sought not merely to interpret but to change the world. As he insisted in his

Theses XI on Feuerbach, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in va-

rious ways; the point is to change it” (Marx and Engels 1969:13–15).

Thus,

like the French social thinkers before him, Karl Marx provided visions of how

the world could (and should) be different from its present alienated form

and identified paths that would lead to the utopian ideal he constructed.