The Racial Order - Softcover

"Race in its multiplicity and ineluctability has pervaded the modern world while paradoxically--or perhaps unsurprisingly?--evading comprehensive theorization. If the truth lies in the whole, as Hegel thought, that multi-dimensional racial whole has either been perverted in past racist biologism, flattened in class-reductivist Marxism or subjectivist psychologism, denied altogether in contemporary liberal color-blindness, or abandoned as a theoretical goal in pursuit of localized empiricism. Now, in this impressive interdisciplinary synthesis, Emirbayer and Desmond offer a bold and ambitious new framework for thinking of race that does justice to structure as well as agency, relationality and social psychology, recalcitrant white habitus and the transformational reconstructive ideal of racial democracy. Agree or disagree, every serious scholar of race will need to read this book."--Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University "This work begins with a compelling statement: 'There never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race.' The authors attempt to provide just that, drawing on and intricately interweaving nearly all prior race scholarship, with a special emphasis on the work of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu. Their approach stands out from prior frameworks by demanding greater attention to culture, making space for social psychology and collective emotions, emphasizing racial agency at every analytic level, and rejecting a binary between structure and culture."--Choice "The Racial Order is a daring, ambitious, and important book. With its demanding but much needed conceptual equipment, it is also challenging and rewarding. By broadening significantly the range of authors whose work informs contemporary views on racial dynamics, Emirbayer and Desmond take a gamble: they add important layers of complexity to what often feels like a well-trodden sociological terrain. While The Racial Order will certainly generate debates, it should entice us to plough new paths for inquiry in what is perhaps the most highly politicized field of knowledge production in the social sciences. May social scientists committed to the pursuit of racial democracy and social justice raise to the occasion! It is well worth the effort."--Mich le Lamont, director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University "In this ambitious theoretical program, Emirbayer and Desmond intertwine structure and culture, Bourdieu and Pragmatism, Durkheim and psychoanalysis. Their empirical scholarship is wide-ranging. The Racial Order inspires moral clarity about the pernicious racialism that continues to divide the American civil sphere."--Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University "The Racial Order is a landmark in the theoretical analysis of race relations. Integrating and building on ideas from some of the most important thinkers on intergroup relations, Emirbayer and Desmond provide a comprehensive framework that takes race scholarship to a higher level of illumination and will inform and provide direction for empirical scholarship. Look no further for a publication that addresses the complexities of racial life with explanatory power."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

Proceeding from the bold and provocative claim that there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race, Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond set out to reformulate how we think about one of the most vexing and central aspects of American life. Magisterial in scope, yet empirically grounded and engaged with some of the defining problems of our time, The Racial Order offers piercing new insights into the inner workings of race: its structures and dynamics, institutions and insurgencies, culture and psychology. Animated by a deep and reflexive intelligence as well as a normative commitment toward multicultural democracy, this work articulates how - and toward what end - the racial order might be reconstructed. The result is not only a rich new theory of race in America, but also an elegant work of social theory that engages with fundamental problems of order, agency, power, and justice.