One of the great, even if unfortunately, now half-forgotten sociologists of the last
century, did famously write that one of the uses of “sociological imagination” is
the capacity to read “public issues” within “private troubles” (Mills 1959). It is the
essence not only of sociology but also of political life to turn what I might see as
my “private troubles” into “public issues”, that I therefore share with many others.
From biography to history. Or, as one of my mentors in Santa Barbara, Dick Flacks,
used to say, indeed inspiring himself to C. Wright Mills, from “making life” to “making
history” (Flacks 1988). Such a transformation is at the very roots of political
consciousness and organizing. At the end of the 19th century, in the Po Valley of
Italy, among the very first organizations of the working class, especially among the
most destitute, the daily workers, a motto started circulating, “United we are everything,
divided we are canaille!”. The proletarian who is overwhelmed within his
own private troubles is canaille, riffraff, rabble. In one of the most lucid insights of
Foucault’s “sociology” (Foucault 1975), he is nothing but a “delinquent”, when he
tries to round up his miserly income by preying on other poor people in his milieu.
He is the product of the prison and of the police, who are happier than ever to
transform dangerous “illegalities” into a useful “delinquency”.