This paper discusses how modes of social coordination can destroy the plausibility of egalitarian norms. It focuses on formal organizations – more specifically, on political parties – and on the mechanisms through which these organizations can destroy the plausibility of the ideas that they were meant to institutionalize. Its goal is to save some of the insights that can be found in Robert Michels’ Sociology of Political Parties (1911/1924), a now mostly unread ‘classic’ that, precisely because of its age, has the advantage of not treating party organizations, and the ways in which they typically operate, as a natural fact of social life. Michels’ book remains interesting for its ethnographic descriptions of everyday micro-practices, and for its ideas on how these practices can transform the ways in which party members understand themselves and their worlds. In order to reconstruct the social mechanisms that can be found in Michels’ descriptions, this paper uses the pragmatist concepts of selective attention, situated reflexivity, and social self.
The paper will appear in: Jenny Brichzin, Jasmin Siri (eds.), Soziologie politischer Parteien, VS 2021.