It seems that Erving Goffman was not a nice man. He liked to ruffle feathers and watch the fallout. One time he invited a group of colleagues to dinner, save one, whom he invited to “join us for dessert”. Another time he started shouting at his colleagues in a crowded restaurant, seemingly with no aim other than to see what would happen. He got kicked out.
Erving Goffman was a first-rate sociologist, the kind who could see through a person’s skin to their tendons and then past that to t...