and Segre/3 Sociological Miniaturism and the Meaning of Democracy

The article authored by Fine, Harrington, and Segre aims at showing basically two points: a) the virtues of sociological miniaturism in the understanding of politics, and b) its theoretical roots in classical sociology. More recent contributions to a mi-crosociological approach to political sociology will be addressed, this is the authors’ promise, in a subsequent article. Point a) is discussed by means of a theoretical illus-tration of the importance of tiny groups in the working of public spheres, and by means of an empirical example, while point b) via a short presentation of Simmel’s, Durkheim’s and Weber’s consideration of micro-level processes within particular groups, and their effects on a broader, macrosociological level. My comments (and questions) have to do with a small range of sub-issues: 1) what exactly is a tiny group, 2) under which conditions does it foster a democratic public sphere (and so demo-cracy at large), and – above all – 3) how should we understand the meaning of demo-cracy from the perspective of sociological miniaturism. x 1) Sociological miniaturism “assumes that processes transcend levels ” of ana-lysis [see also Stolte, Fine and Cook 2001, 388], so that it is perfectly legitimate to analyse large-scale social forces, institutions, organizations and so on, by means of the investigation of small-scale interaction domains. Sociological miniaturism is a form of sociological social psychology [ibidem, 389] that tries to bridge micro- and macro-sociology, by means of a “recursive ” mutual foundation: macrosociology is necessary in order to “prevent claims of randomness and unpredictability, ” and, in turn, microsociology is necessary to prevent bracketing agency [Fine 1991]. Sociolo-gical miniaturism’s virtues – shown in details elsewhere [as its limitations too, se