Globalization, Degradation and the Dynamics of Humiliation

Our analysis of how sociologists should respond to social degradation should take into account the way humiliation drives those who have suffered degradation to anger and action on their own account. Cycles of fear, revenge and victimization are liable to result from the moments of defeat, relegation and exclusion brought by humiliation processes. Globalization has produced these conditions not simply through the logic of the market but also through the residual strength of the imperial impulse and the increasing pervasiveness of the anomic cosmopolitan condition. Sociologists should bring their knowledge of the dynamics of humiliation into their creative exchanges with those experiencing social degradation.