This article focuses on two examples of sociological writing that have attracted wide public interest: Didier Eribon’s best-selling memoir about his working-class origins, Returning to Reims, and Hartmut Rosa’s door-stopper work of social theory, Resonance, featured on the cover of the German news magazine Stern. These two very different works – one indebted to Bourdieu and Foucault, the other located in the tradition of the Frankfurt School – share certain qualities. First, a formal feature I’ll call scale-shifting: a leavening of theoretical claims with vivid examples and resonant details. And second, a commitment to doing justice to the phenomenological depth of ordinary persons’ self-understanding. Both writers, in other words, approach the world as deserving of a poet’s attentive and appreciative eye as well as a theorist’s critical gaze.

本文重点介绍引起公众广泛兴趣的社会学著作的两个例子：Didier Eribon 最畅销的关于他的工人阶级起源的回忆录《重返兰斯》，以及 Hartmut Rosa 的社会理论门塞著作《共振》，封面上有特色德国新闻杂志《斯特恩》。这两部截然不同的作品——一部归功于布迪厄和福柯，另一部立足于法兰克福学派的传统——具有某些特质。首先，一个正式的特征，我称之为scale-shifting：用生动的例子和引起共鸣的细节对理论主张进行发酵。其次，致力于对普通人自我理解的现象学深度进行公正处理。换句话说，两位作家都将世界视为值得诗人专注和欣赏的眼光以及理论家的批判眼光。