The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory [Volume 1: A Contested Canon, 1 ed.] 9781107162648, 9781316677445, 9781316443521, 9781107162693

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The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory This ambitious two-volume handbook of social theory consists of forty original contributions. The researchers take stock of the state of social theory and its relationship to the canon, exploring such topics as the nature, purpose, and meaning of social theory; the significance of the classics; the impact of specific individuals and theory schools; and more. Both volumes reflect a mixture of what intellectual historian Morton White distinguished as the “annalist of ideas” and the “analyst of ideas,” locating theoretical thought within the larger sociohistorical context that shaped it – within the terrain of the sociology of knowledge. Exploring the contemporary relevance of theories in a manner that is historically situated and sensitive, this impressive and comprehensive set will likely stand the test of time. peter kivisto is Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory Volume I: A Contested Canon

Edited by

Peter Kivisto Augustana College

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107162648 DOI: 10.1017/9781316677445 © Cambridge University Press 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN Two-Volume Set 978-1-316-44352-1 Hardback ISBN Volume I 978-1-107-16264-8 Hardback ISBN Volume II 978-1-107-16269-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Preface

1

The Emergence of Social Theory

page vii viii ix xiii

1

johan heilbron 2

“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

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alan sica 3

Karl Marx

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kevin b. anderson 4

The Marxist Legacy

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peter beilharz 5

Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity

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peter kivisto 6

What’s in a Name? The Sacred, Science, and the Collège de Sociologie

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simonetta falasca-zamponi 7

Max Weber

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lawrence a. scaff 8

Weberian Social Theory

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austin harrington 9

Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life

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vincenzo mele 10

Pounding on Parsons: How Criticism Undermined the Reputation of Sociology’s Incurable Theorist

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a. javier trevin˜ o

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Symbolic Interactionism lawrence t. nichols

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Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology philip manning

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Structuralism sandro segre

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Norbert Elias, Civilising Processes, and Figurational (or Process) Sociology

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barbara go´ rnicka and stephen mennell 15

Phenomenology and Social Theory thomas szanto

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Pierre Bourdieu: An Intellectual Legacy david l. swartz

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Developing Ethnomethodology: Garfinkel on the Constitutive Interactional Practices in Social Systems of Interaction

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anne rawls 18

Jürgen Habermas simon susen

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Anthony Giddens, Structuration Theory, and Radical Politics rob stones

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Index

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Figures

1.1 Number of occurrences of the adjectives moral, political, social, and economic in French by decade (1750–1840)

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Tables

7.1 7.2

Types of capitalist economy Weber’s typology of salvation religions

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Contributors

kevin b. anderson is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (2010/2016). peter beilharz is Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University, Western Australia, and Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. He is the author of 30 books and 200 papers. He founded the journal Thesis Eleven in 1980. simonetta falasca-zamponi is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, among other publications, of Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (1997) and Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie (2011). dr. barbara go´rnicka is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin, a Fellow of the Norbert Elias Foundation, and joint editor of the journal Human Figurations: Long-Term Perspectives on the Human Condition. Her publications include Nakedness, Shame, and Embarrassment: A Long-Term Sociological Perspective (Springer, 2016). austin harrington is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. His recent publications include German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2020). johan heilbron is a historical sociologist, currently Professor of the Sociology of Education at Uppsala University and affiliated with the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP-CNRS-EHESS) in Paris and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Relevant books include The Rise of Social Theory (1995), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity (coedited, 2001), Pour une histoire des sciences sociales: hommage à Pierre Bourdieu (coedited, 2004), French Sociology (2015), and The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations (coedited, 2018). peter kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College and International Reader at the University of Helsinki’s Center for Research

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on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN). He is the author or editor of 37 books and over 180 articles and book chapters. philip manning received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1989. He is Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His work concerns social theory and intellectual history, particularly the history and practice of symbolic interactionism. He recently completed an NSF project that designed a user-friendly way to store passwords in games and is currently exploring ways to increase federal grant success in small universities. vincenzo mele is Associate Professor of General Sociology in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa. He is the author of Metropolis: Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Modernity (2011), Aesthetics and Social Theory: Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu (2013), and Globalizing Cultures: Theories, Actions, Paradigms (with Marina Vujnovic, 2015). He is editor of the journal Simmel Studies. stephen mennell is Professor Emeritus at the University College Dublin, was General Editor of the 18-volume Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English (2006–2014). He holds doctorates from Amsterdam and Cambridge. His books include All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France (1985); Norbert Elias, Civilization, and the Human Self-Image (1989, later retitled Norbert Elias: An Introduction); and The American Civilizing Process (2007). lawrence t. nichols is a former professor of sociology, recently retired from West Virginia University. He continues to do research and to publish on sociological theory, the construction of social problems, and the history and sociology of social science. Dr. Nichols also edits The American Sociologist, a quarterly journal with an international readership. anne rawls is Professor of Sociology at Bentley University. Her research interests focus broadly on social theory, with emphases on ethnomethodology, communication studies, democracy, and race relations. In addition to publishing extensively on Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, she has also published on Durkheim and DuBois. She recently coauthored Tacit Racism with Waverly Duck (2020). lawrence a. scaff is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology at Wayne State University, Detroit. He is the author of Fleeing the Iron Cage (1989), Max Weber in America (2011), and Weber and the Weberians (2014), and coedited The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber (2019). sandro segre is a retired professor of sociology and sociological theory, which he taught at the University of Genoa. Some of his recent publications include Bauman, Elias, and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives (2020), Business and Financial Markets: A Weberian Analysis (2016), Contemporary Sociological Thinkers and Theories (2014), Introduction to Habermas (2012), and Talcott Parsons: An Introduction (2012).

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List of Contributors

alan sica is Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, where he is the Founder and Director of the Social Thought Program. He has served as Editor of Contemporary Sociology and Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Theory Section. He is the recipient of the ASA’s History of Sociology Section’s Distinguished Achievement Award. His books include Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order (1988), What Is Social Theory? The Philosophical Debates (1998), and The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties (2005). rob stones is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University, Australia. In 2005 he published Structuration Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), which developed the approach of strong structuration theory (SST) to inform empirical case study research. Recent publications include Key Sociological Thinkers, 3rd edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and, coauthored with Bryan S. Turner, “Successful Societies: Decision-Making and the Quality of Attentiveness,” The British Journal of Sociology (2020). simon susen is Professor of Sociology at City, University of London. He is an Associate Member of the Bauman Institute and, together with Bryan S. Turner, editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology. david l. swartz is author of the American Sociological Association’s History of Sociology Section 2014 award-winning book Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (University of Chicago Press). He is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at Boston University and Senior Editor and Book Review Editor for Theory and Society. His research interests include social theory, education, culture, stratification, and political sociology. He is currently studying divisions between American academic conservatives who support the Trump presidency and those who do not. thomas szanto is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Center of Subjectivity Research, Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. He has published widely in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, social ontology, and the philosophy of emotions. a. javier trevin˜o is Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College, Massachusetts. He is the author of several books and editor of The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons, Talcott Parsons on Law and the Legal System, and Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology.

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Preface

Social theory has a discovered and discoverable past and a complex, contested, dynamic, and anxious present. All of these adjectives save the last one – anxious – are reflected in various ways and with differing emphases throughout this handbook. I will say something about “anxious” below, but before doing so will offer a rationale for producing this multi-authored, two-volume overview reflecting the diversity of theory work in sociology and offering a sense of both how far the discipline has come and where it is today. There is no univocal answer to the question, “What does social theory mean?” Since the institutionalization of sociology in the academy and its development of subfields, theory has found a place in the overall educational structure of the discipline, in a manner akin to the way that methodology has. That is to say, both theory and methodology have been viewed in some fashion as essential to sociological inquiry, and thus relevant to all of the substantive subfields within it. At the same time, it became clear early on that consensus regarding the meaning of theory has proven elusive. As World War II came to an end and the rapid expansion in higher education was about to commence, Robert K. Merton (1945), the protégé of Talcott Parsons, claimed that six types of analysis had come to be described as sociological theory. Over six decades later, Gabriel Abend (2008) identified seven distinct though sometimes overlapping meanings attributed to theory – a figure that Omar Lizardo (2014) thinks is at the lower end of the actual number of different meanings. One way of understanding why this is the case is to turn to Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (1982: 40) early work on theoretical logic in sociology. At the outset of his fourvolume study, Alexander offers a diagram of the intellectual space in which theory happens, a capacious space located between two polar boundaries. He identifies one boundary as the nonempirical “metaphysical environment” characterized by an antiscientific relativism. The other boundary is the empirical physical environment, which is where positivism is drawn. Those who identify as theorists occupy the space between, where they can tilt, given their predispositions, either toward increased generality (the metaphysical boundary) or greater specificity (the physical environment boundary). The former move from definitions through concepts, models, and ideological orientations to the presuppositional. The latter move from definitions through classifications, laws, complex and simply propositions, methodological assumptions, to observational statements. It is at key points along the continuum that the major debates over theory occur. While there are clearly debates at the definitional, conceptual, classificatory, and xiii

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law-formulation nodes, Alexander points elsewhere to locate where the action – and the heat – can be found. Whereas the types of contestation headed toward specificity can take the form of debates over conflict versus equilibrium or within the realm of the philosophy of science, the types of contestation headed toward greater generality include systems debates, ideological critiques, and debates over order and action. The inevitable question arising when confronted with this intellectual landscape is of whether this is good or bad for theory. Or is it neither? This question was first confronted in American sociology in the interwar years of the past century, coincidental with the waning of influence of the University of Chicago in the post–Robert Park era and the parallel rise in influence of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard under the direction of Parsons, along with sociology at Columbia University, shaped by Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld. Parsons, concurring with his mentor, Harvard biochemist L. J. Henderson, answered the question by forcefully contending that all sciences required a unified theoretical framework (Turner, 2009: 551–552). To that end, he set out to construct that framework, pursuing a two-step strategy. He had entered a discipline – a field – that had a history dating to the nineteenth century, without however having developed a singular theoretical framework. The first step called for shaping the sociological canon, identifying who was important and dispensing with others. As The Structure of Social Action famously asks at its opening, “Who now reads Spencer?” (Parsons, 1937 [1968]: 3). In Parsons’s view, Spencer, a widely read thinker during his lifetime, could be ignored, whereas the discipline could ill afford to ignore Émile Durkheim or Max Weber. The key to Parsons’s work was to discover presumably heretofore hidden commonalities linking these two scholars. In the immediate postwar period more and more of their work was translated into English and they became the core of the sociological classics taught in theory courses. It is worth noting, however, that Structure included two other scholars also deemed to be important – Alfred Marshall and Vilfredo Pareto – whose subsequent reputations look more like that of Spencer than those of Durkheim and Weber. Despite not being entirely successful in his effort to stamp the canon with his imprimatur, Parsons did manage to convince many in the discipline of the ongoing value of engaging with the classics. I suspect my experience in an undergraduate theory course at the University of Michigan during the late 1960s was rather typical of elite public universities: we read and engaged in exegetical examinations of Capital, Volume 1, Suicide, and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is worth noting that, at least in Ann Arbor circa 1968, Marx had entered the canon. The second step was more ambitious, calling as it did for the formulation of that unified theoretical framework the discipline was presumed to be in need of if it was to become a genuine science. With generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation, Parsons and Edward Shils brought together a group of scholars from not only sociology, but also psychology (Gordon W. Allport) and anthropology (Clyde Kluckhohn) in producing Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951). And with evangelistic fervor Parsons sought to promote his theory, which as the subtitle made clear, was an attempt to provide the needed “theoretical

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Preface

foundations for the social sciences.” In the same year that this book was published, Parsons’s major theoretical scheme was published as The Social System (1951). He pushed and would continue to push what was pejoratively described as “grand theory” (Mills, 1959: 25–49), clearly dispositionally inclined toward Alexander’s metaphysical boundary. His effort to shape the discipline at large was aided by the simultaneous move toward the physical environment boundary at Columbia, reflected in Merton’s advocacy of middle-range theory and Lazarfeld’s efforts to bring theory and methodology into dialogue. Parsonian theory did not win over everyone in the discipline. Within his own department, George Homans suspected that Parsons was intent on making Toward a General Theory of Action (which in draft form was known colloquially as the “Yellow Book”) the “official doctrine of the department,” and forcefully spoke out against it. According to Homans, from that moment on the issue was no longer raised in departmental meetings (Homans, 1984: 303). Parsons’s correspondence with Alfred Schutz, the Austrian émigré phenomenological sociologist at the New School for Social Research, revealed the gulf between their understandings of the meaning of theory (Grathoff, 1978). Likewise, Herbert Blumer, the major spokesperson for symbolic interactionism, remained unpersuaded by Parsons’s entreaties. Located in elite Ivy League institutions, Parsons and his followers were far from successful in getting sociologists in other regions of the country to embrace structural functionalism. Stephen Turner (2014: 42) has pointed out that this was true in the Midwest, including the University of Chicago, where symbolic interactionism was strong. Turner also concluded that it did not gain traction in Southern Sociological Society, the largest of the regionals, writing that, “Many more sociologists were simply indifferent to this elite project.” Nevertheless, Parsons had a profound impact on sociology at the elite level, training a generation of students who would become prominent theorists and powerful disciplinary operatives. And he pursued his theoretical ambition to the end, as reflected in his posthumously published American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community (Parsons, 2007). And some prominent sociologists shared a similar vision for the sociological enterprise, as when Lewis Coser (1975: 691), in his American Sociological Association Presidential Address, decided to throw down the gauntlet, beginning his address as follows: “I am perturbed about present developments in American sociology which seem to foster the growth of both narrow, routine, activities and of sect-like, esoteric ruminations [the latter referring to ethnomethodology].” During the last quarter of the past century grand theoretical ambitions, linked to the belief that a sociological center or mainstream was about to emerge as the discipline matured, gave way to increased fragmentation and persistent talk that in fact Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) “coming crisis” had come to pass. What this meant for theory was that it became commonplace to refer to the discipline as a multiple paradigm science (Ritzer, 1975). This would be translated at the level of introductory sociology textbooks by informing the undergraduate audience that sociology was composed of three major theory schools: structural functionalism, conflict, and symbolic interaction. The situation was different among those who identified with

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and worked in the theory field. For them, two stark choices presented themselves. Either theorists could hunker down in their particular paradigmatic bunker and work to advance and deploy that theory while ignoring competing paradigms, or they could seek ways to overcome fragmentation and facilitate dialogue among competing theory camps. This was made all the more complicated by the internationalization of theory development and the emergence of new modes of theorizing, including but not limited to feminist theory, critical race theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, and postmodernism. These developments introduced new topical foci and, especially with efforts to theorize globalization, theorists were forced to reconsider the often implicit treatment of society as a synonym for nation-state. The difficulty in pulling off an overcoming of the fractured state of theory was evident in the attempt to promote “metatheory,” which George Ritzer (1990: 4) contended could accomplish three objectives. First, it could serve as a “means of attaining a deeper understanding of theory.” Second, it could be a “prelude to theory development,” and third, it could result in “the creation of an overarching metatheory.” From the beginning, the call to metatheory was challenged, leading a frustrated Ritzer (1990: 3) to complain that it had barely been given a chance to develop before it was condemned – and often by leading lights in theory. What was clear was that theorists continued to go about their business. This included engaging with the classics, delving ever deeper into the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, but expanding the range of classic figures deemed worthy of scholarly attention. Indeed, this period constituted something of a golden age in the Anglo-American world for scholarship in the history of sociological theory – with scholars describing their work in terms of intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, exegetical examinations, hermeneutical inquiries, and the like. In short, they did what Ritzer’s first objective of metatheory called for, but without a felt need to give it that label. Likewise with the second objective of metatheory. Parsons served as a model for subsequent theory developers who began with a period of exegetical work as a prelude to theory building. Two examples suffice: Jeffrey Alexander’s early work paving the way first for his foray into neo-functionalism and later into cultural sociology, and similarly Anthony Giddens’s exegetical preparation for his articulation of structuration theory. These examples are testament to the existence of a sociological theory tradition that theorists are expected not simply to be versed in, but to have a command of, and upon which they build their own theories – in an age more deferential to our predecessors, one might have said “on the shoulders of giants” (Merton, 1965). But what about the grander objective of constructing an overarching theoretical perspective? To speak of this in the singular rather than the plural implies that the goal is to pursue the agenda of forging a univocal, all-encompassing theoretical scaffolding that could unite everyone who saw their vocation as theory, as well as informing the research agendas in sociology’s substantive subfields. Did this mean that the multiple paradigm description advanced by Ritzer was to be overcome, rather than celebrated? Metatheory was framed in such a vague, imprecise way that it was difficult to know what its advocates had in mind. Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner (1990: 170) summarized the situation near the fin de siècle by writing that

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“metatheorists talk primarily to each other, and so metatheorizing has not succeeded as an integrating effort.” Thus, a more accurate assessment of the state of social theory at the cusp of the new century is reflected in Alan Sica’s introduction to What Is Social Theory? The Philosophical Debates (1998). In this invited collection, he recognized that the diverse visions of theory represented in the book included some he did not find convincing given his own theoretical predilections. But the conclusion he drew from this situation is worth noting: However, since theory has always been a contentious business, this is hardly surprising, nor necessarily unfortunate. In fact, one might argue quite the contrary. . . . each [theory perspective] is argued with passionate regard for its own merit, yet none so dogmatically as to rule out the efficacy of other approaches. It is this happy confusion, this Babel-like quality, that will [prove valuable] for those interested in theory’s immediate prospects, particularly as it positions itself with regard to philosophical problems. (Sica, 1998: 12)

An example of what Sica had in mind can be seen in Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (1995) collection of essays from the same era in which he assesses contemporary currents of theorizing in terms of, as the subtitle indicates, “relativism, reduction, and the problem of reason.” The goal of this project, despite being fiercely argued, was not to erase competing theoretical visions, but rather to serve as a corrective by highlighting the philosophical shortcomings he detected. If this was the state of the field two decades ago, what has changed in the intervening two decades? For one thing, the deleterious implications of neoliberalism’s intrusion into the university system – with its demand for market-driven metrics concerning efficiency, productivity, and real-world payoffs and with an assault on the professional autonomy of the professoriate – are now deeply imbedded in higher education. This is true not only of the United States, but to various degrees in all advanced capitalist societies. Combined with demographic shifts, the growth era in higher education has come to an end. This yields anxiety and uncertainty in both the humanities and in the social sciences most closely associated with the humanities – including sociology. Theory work has been especially hard-hit, as funding agencies and academic administrators look to empirical research that can have what they see as tangible external results – action being valued at the expense of contemplation, researching rather than theorizing. Secondly, this is occurring along with the graying of the generation of theorists who came of age during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, shaped by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the woman’s movement, and the cultural revolution. This “disobedient generation” (Sica and Turner, 2005) is gradually leaving the academy (though several members are represented herein). A new generation of theorists has emerged and are beginning to assume vaunted positions in theory at elite institutions, and are poised to set the agenda going forward. As an indication of their growing presence, a recent book edited by Claudio Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed (2017) reflects the generational shift underway, while offering a clear indication that they face the same challenge as their senior colleagues or former colleagues in determining the fundamental meaning(s) of theory.

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That they do so is evident in the work of two younger theorists mentioned at the outset, Gabriel Abend and Omar Lizardo. Abend’s (2008) effort to get at the meaning(s) of theory meant that he entered the territory previously trod by Merton and Ritzer, confronting the same issues but arriving at an assessment of the situation and a sketch of a path forward that is at odds with both. He takes as a given that the discipline comprises a multiplicity of theories and of ways in which doing theory is conceived. This is as it has always been. Abend is clear that this will not change, nor should it. What concerns him is the risk that theorizing is being and will continue to be done in a balkanized environment where different theory camps do their own thing, unconcerned about what others are doing. Abend wants to facilitate communication by focusing on what he calls the semantics question, one in which different approaches to theory need not be seen as disputes about what is and what isn’t theory, but rather should be understood as a consequence of being interested in making sense of different social things. To accomplish this, he proposes the implementation of “semantic therapy,” the application of practical reason, and the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism (Abend, 2008: 192–195). This is not the place to unpack his ideas, merely to note that theorists continue to wrestle with what theory is and what it means to do theory. To date his article has provoked one sympathetic critique, that offered by Peeter Selg (2013: 1), who provides an alternative to what he sees as Abend’s “deliberative-democratically oriented vision” of the community of theorists with an agonistic politics view. The anxiety voiced by theorists, noted at the outset, is evident most clearly in Lizardo’s (2014: 1–2) state-of-the-field lecture in which he confronts the changing conditions of theory production, which he frames in generational terms, writing, “If you are a theory person under the age of 45 you currently live and will live in a different theory world than your predecessors.” Among the factors working against theory production, Lizardo identifies the deinstitutionalization of the teaching of theory, the devaluation of theory work in terms of career advancement, and a “rudderless heterodoxy, with various claimants for the title of preferred mode of doing theory but very little agreement as to the ‘rules’ of the theoretical game.” If Abend’s proposal amounts to a strategy to be conducted within the world of theory, Lizardo suggests that theorists need to rethink how they are connected to the rest of the discipline. Pointing to the role philosophers are playing in the realm of cognitive science, he sees a potential parallel for social theorists. Both are generalists whose capacity for generalization can assist more narrowly focused specialists due to their capacity to “detect, diagnose, and propose incipient solutions to common conceptual and substantive issues across seemingly disparate domains of inquiry” (Lizardo, 2014: 15). Theorizing is a learned skill, a trained capacity to think like a theorist, the role of which, according to Lizardo (2014: 5), “essentially means engaging in the routine exploitation of the cultured capacities for consuming and producing theory.” The acquisition of those cultured capacities requires developing knowledge of the history of social theory and its wide-ranging contemporary articulations. To that end, guides such as this two-volume collection are intended to assist in the process of becoming and being a theorist. In Literature and Bibliography of the Social Sciences, a book

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that is little known today, its editor, Thelma Freides, offered the following succinct rationale for handbooks, writing, “In the effort of the scholarly enterprise to synthesize a body of knowledge . . . it is sometimes useful to pause and take stock of the accomplishments of the past and the foreseeable tasks of the future” (Freides, 1973: 1). This is precisely what this project sets out to accomplish. It is intended to reflect on the origins of modern social theory – the canon – and take stock of current developments, which includes locating these developments in terms of their respective relationships to a tradition of theorizing about what Charles Lemert (1997) would call “social things.” This is obviously not the first such stocktaking, and after surveying many previous efforts, it is clear that in a fundamental way the editors of those collections would agree with the general sense of what this enterprise is all about. That being said, not everyone necessarily sees eye to eye with my understanding about what makes the handbook a distinctive type of guide. In the landscape of reference books, one can find three basic types: handbooks (sometimes called something else, such as a “companion”), encyclopedias, and dictionaries. While all would agree that dictionaries are intended to offer relatively short definitions, sometimes the length of those definitions is similar to shorter encyclopedia entries. If there is one rule of thumb for dictionary editors, it is that the entries should be as ecumenical and impartial as possible, and that authorial voice should be muted. While the entries in encyclopedias generally call for more information and greater in-depth treatment, it is my understanding that they adopt a similar ecumenical and impartial style in which authors are more concerned with providing an overview of the topic than entering into sustained critiques and position taking. I note this because it is my sense that handbooks are – or should be – different. Specifically, they differ from encyclopedias in two ways. First, handbook articles should be significantly longer than those in encyclopedias. Second, authors enter into contested terrain where, while they must be as fair to competing sides as possible, they should nonetheless see their task as that of laying out an argument that tips one way or the other in the debates of the moment. In other words, while civility, fairness, comprehensiveness, and so forth are essential – facilitating mutually beneficial dialogue rather than winner-takes-all debate – the authors of handbook essays should be expected to articulate their own positions in terms of the issues they deem relevant to the topic at hand. The contributors whose work is presented in the following pages were encouraged to proceed accordingly and were permitted to write somewhat longer entries than is typical. Volume I is concerned with the canon, that body of work that had received general – never universal – consensus as having built the foundation upon which contemporary theorizing proceeds, which is the topic of Volume II. Volume I begins with two framing chapters. Johan Heilbron presents an insightfully constructed historical account of the pre-disciplinary period of social theory, while Alan Sica, with his characteristic erudition and panache, explores the meaning of being a classic. This sets the stage for the remainder of Volume I, which begins by devoting six chapters to the three figures for whom there is little dispute about their classical or canonical status: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. For each of these

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figures, a chapter is devoted to issues pertaining to intellectual biography: Kevin Anderson’s chapter on Marx, Peter Kivisto’s on Durkheim, and Lawrence Scaff on Weber. These are coupled with explorations of aspects of their subsequent legacies. Peter Beilharz’s concise and engaging account examines the contradictory legacy of Marx. Durkheim’s legacy differs insofar as in many respects it was not fully acknowledged by those influenced by his thought compared to those of Marx and Weber. This is clear in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s account of the ambiguous relationship that members of the Collège de sociologie had with the Durkheimian legacy. Finally, Austin Harrington traces the myriad ways in which Weber’s protean thought has resonated with contemporary thinkers within sociology and beyond. Georg Simmel’s status in the canon is less secure than that of the preceding trio. This was evident in the 1930s when Talcott Parsons drafted a chapter on Simmel for The Structure of Social Action, but decided not to include it. Vincenzo Mele’s chapter on the metropolitization of social life reveals the originality of Simmel’s thought, concluding with a brief analysis of his intellectual inheritance as reflected in the Chicago School. Parsons’s reputational trajectory differs from Simmel, for once he looked secure in the canon, but subsequently critics would ask, “Who now reads Parsons?” A. Javier Treviño offers a forceful defense of Parsons and a rebuttal of his critics in an attempt to rectify an unfortunate tendency to ignore his ongoing, consequential, and problematic contribution to social theory. The distinctly American (indeed, Midwestern) theoretical orientation knows as symbolic interactionism is discussed by Lawrence Nichols, tracing its history from George Herbert Mead to the present. Though symbolic interactionists would like to claim his as their own, as Philip Manning makes clear, Erving Goffman was very much a theorist sui generis – and it is perhaps for that reason that his dramaturgical sociology has not resulted in a distinctive school founded by acolytes. Sandro Segre and Thomas Szanto responded to the parallel daunting challenges of providing overviews of the capacious theorizing associated respectively with structuralism and phenomenology – doing so in both cases by managing to be both concise and comprehensive. Sandwiched between these two chapters is the more focused topic of Norbert Elias and his approach to theory. Barbara Górnicka and Stephen Mennell provide readers with compelling accounts of Elias’s theorizing of civilizing processes, but also explore the impact of his figurational sociology, particularly among British and Dutch sociologists. The final four chapters rounding out Volume I focus on four prominent theorists. In the case of Pierre Bourdieu, David Swartz offers a broad overview of his work, linking it to the varied ways in which his legacy is shaping currents of contemporary theoretical work in fields such as, but not limited to, culture and education. Anne Rawls sets out to clarify the much misunderstood theoretical project of Harold Garfinkel that he defined as ethnomethodology, illustrating the impact of his earliest research projects on the theoretical work that would follow. Jürgen Habermas’s work straddles the divide between social theory and philosophy, and Simon Susen provides readers with an instructive guide to the underlying philosophical grounding of Habermas’s distinctive efforts in theory building. Finally, Rob Stones argues on behalf of the structuration theory developed by Anthony Giddens, using the theory to critique Giddens’s political engagements on behalf of the “third way.”

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The twenty-one chapters contained in Volume II are meant to offer a broad overview of various currents of contemporary social theory, focusing both on particular theory schools and on a range of topical foci that preoccupy theorists today. The first two chapters examine respectively rational choice theory and network theory. It is instructive to contrast the two, given that the former tends to elicit polemical debates whereas the latter does not. Karl-Dieter Opp has produced a commendable overview of what rational choice theory purports to be and how it has been productively put to use – yielding light rather than heat. For their part, Mark Pachucki and Ronald Breiger present an instructive guide to the differing network traditions before turning to new developments in both the social and biological sciences. The following three chapters – on cultural theory, identity, and emotions – focus on topics that have witnessed increased attention, and current theorizing often reflects cross-fertilization between and among them. Michael Strand and Lyn Spillman provide readers with an analysis of the basic components of cultural theory followed by an account that promotes a synthesis of competing perspectives advanced by theorists who have made the “cultural turn.” Donileen Loseke and Margarethe Kusenbach wrestle with competing definitions of and approaches to emotions, shifting from there to in-depth analyses of two competing theory types, one stressing the individual and the other emphasizing culture. The two chapters that follow are also interrelated: Shelley Budgeon’s on feminist social theory and Patricia Hill Collins on intersectionality. If the focus of Budgeon’s chapter is on the sex/ gender distinction, a singularly central concern to feminist theorizing, she indicates the ways in which feminist theorists have pushed past that point, as well. One such point is located in the development of what is Collins’s topic: the emergence of intersectionality not simply as a definition of nodal points of inequality, but as the basis for a critical social theory. Modernity has been a central topical focus of sociology from the beginning, but with the passage of time what we mean by the term has become increasingly clouded. Peter Wagner’s engagement with the literature is both refreshing and original, pointing to a more tempered and conceptually productive way forward. Addressing the topic of realism – known more familiarly to many as critical realism – Timothy Rutzou’s account of how those engaged in promoting this approach conceive theory is sympathetic, while raising questions about what it might mean for doing social theory – and indeed, doing sociology in general. Writing at a moment when various unsavory currents of nationalism have taken hold among authoritarian populists, Sheila Croucher’s perceptive assessment of globalization offers a salutary viewpoint. Globalization, she argues, is a given that will not be wished or forced away. Rather, what is needed is a reckoning with the reality of the situation, which is that it is not an unmitigated good, but nor is it altogether bad. Related to the preceding chapter, Kevin Fox Gotham’s exploration into time/space comprehensively and engagingly surveys the ways time/space has been conceptualized in social theory over time. If there is one area of sociology that has remained woefully – and inexplicably – undertheorized, it is ecology. Robert J. Antonio and Brett Clark have produced a historically grounded

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theoretical inquiry into the ecological crisis, rooted in the dynamics of capitalist development that has thus far stymied nation-states and transnational political bodies in their attempts to adequately address the potential shadow of catastrophe that looms over our future. One consequence of sociology’s distancing itself from biology is that the body has not been given its due in social theory. Chris Shilling offers an account of how this came to be in Western intellectual thought, before pointing to recent attempts by theorists to rectify this long-standing tendency, seeking to bring the body back in. Stephen Valocchi’s topic is sexualities, locating it in such theoretical approaches as social constructionism, feminist theory, intersectionality, and queer theory. Christian Joppke is one of the most original theorists of multiculturalism as a mode of incorporation. In this essay, his distinctive views on the subject are on display, complemented by judicious assessments of major theorists whose work diverges from his own. Associated in particular with the work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, risk has grown as a crucial topic within social theory. Klaus Rasborg traces the significance of risk as a concept from the distant past through the rise of private insurance – and with it actuarial tables, forecasting, and so forth in efforts to measure risk – before locating it in contemporary efforts to theorize risk. Barbara Misztal addresses the topic of trust. Rather than delving into it in terms of deep history or outside of social theory, she instead examines the various ways differing theoretical traditions have addressed the topic. The divide between sociology and biology emerged over a century ago. Recently various voices in the discipline at large have called for initiating efforts to bridge the divide. Douglas Marshall take up that call in his chapter, which seeks to indicate the potential role of biosociology and evolutionary sociology in forging a sociology that recognizes the biological foundations of human social life. Civil society has had a long history in philosophy and sociology, with a burgeoning interest in it commencing near the end of the twentieth century. Aware of competing definitions of the term, Simon Susen is intent on clarifying what we talk about when we talk about civil society, doing so by tracing the term’s use over time before developing the elements to be considered in constructing a critical theory of civil society. Some sociological subfields have proven to offer distinctively dynamic programs in theorizing compared to other specialty areas. The final two chapters examine two subfields rich in theoretical work – immigration and social movements (one might add that economic sociology is another such subfield). Ewa Morawska, a theorist and historical sociologist of migration, looks at theorizing in immigration studies from both the micro and macro levels before engaging in sustained analyses of assimilation theory and transnationalism. Kevin Gillan’s examination of theory development in social movements research is tightly focused on the varied ways social movement theorists have grappled with the temporal dimension inherent in social movements – a crucial consideration since movements have finite temporal parameters in which to accomplish their stated goals.

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References Abend, Gabriel. 2008. “The Meaning of ‘Theory’.” Sociological Theory 26(2): 173–199. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1982. Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies. Vol. I of Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1995. Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London: Verso. Benzecry, Claudio E., Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed (eds.). 2017. Social Theory Now. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coser, Lewis. 1975. “Presidential Address: Two Methods in Search of a Substance.” American Sociological Review 40(6): 691–700. Freides, Thelma. 1973. Literature and Bibliography of the Social Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Equinox Books. Grathoff, Richard (ed.). 1978. The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Homans, George. 1984. Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Lemert, Charles. 1997. Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lizardo, Omar. 2014. “The End of Theorists: The Relevance, Opportunities, and Pitfalls of Theorizing in Sociology Today.” Essay drawn from the Lewis Coser Memorial Lecture presented on August 17 at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in San Francisco. Open Book 010. Merton, Robert K. 1945. “Sociological Theory.” American Journal of Sociology 50(6): 462–473. 1965. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. New York: The Free Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937 [1968]. The Structure of Social Action, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: The Free Press. 1951. The Social System. New York: The Free Press. 2007. American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community. Ed. and introduction by Giuseppe Sciortino. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils (eds.). 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. New York: Harper & Row. Ritzer, George. 1975. Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. 1990. “Metatheorizing in Sociology.” Sociological Forum 5(1): 3–15. Selg, Peeter. 2013. “The Politics of Theory and the Constitution of Meaning.” Sociological Theory 31(1): 1–23. Sica, Alan. 1998. “Introduction: Philosophy’s Tutelage of Social Theory: ‘A Parody of Profundity’?” In Alan Sica (ed.), What Is Social Theory? The Philosophical Debates (pp. 1–21). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sica, Alan, and Stephen Turner (eds.). 2005. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Stephen. 2009. “The Future of Social Theory.” In Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (pp. 551–556). Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell.

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2014. American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Stephen Park, and Jonathan H. Turner. 1990. The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

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1 The Emergence of Social Theory Johan Heilbron

Social theory is an expression commonly used to avoid the more narrowly disciplinary label of sociological theory.1 The shift from disciplinary divisions to transdisciplinary sensibilities would require a study of its own, but since it is more than a passing fad, it implies a serious reconsideration of the historical development of the social sciences as well. What was social science like before it became disciplined? The question is not easily answered, because historical overviews tend to reproduce the disciplinary order. Many reserve an introductory part for the ‘prehistory’ of the discipline, portraying a gallery of ‘forerunners’ and ‘precursors’, but all too often the analysis remains anecdotal and anachronistic. And yet the central concepts and assumptions of modern social science have a history that is considerably longer than that of the academic disciplines as they have become established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modern notion of the state, for example, may be said to have taken shape during the first half of the seventeenth century in the work of authors such as Bodin and Hobbes. In their writings, as Quentin Skinner has argued, the state became a secular and abstract concept; it was no longer viewed as the personal property of the ruler, and that notion became the conceptual foundation for modern political thought (Skinner, 1989). Other examples could be mentioned, but perhaps the strongest claim for the early modern origins of the social sciences has paradoxically been made for the discipline that has taken greatest pride in its scientific progress: economics. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the notion of ‘political economy’ was introduced to mark the transition from the Aristotelian conception of the economy as private ‘household management’ to the study of larger, national economies and international trade. Political economy expanded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and according to Margaret Schabas economists have ever since been rearranging the same constituents. The key properties of money (quantity, price level and velocity, interest rate), production and distribution (factor and commodity prices, market forces), and the national economy (national income, population, employment, balance of trade, exchange rates) were all articulated in the early modern period (Schabas, 2003: 172). As these examples suggest, it is fundamentally misleading to restrict the social sciences to their contemporary, disciplinary, or transdisciplinary arrangements, and merely acknowledge an ill-defined ‘prehistory’. It is more accurate to take a longer view and include a ‘predisciplinary’ as well as a disciplinary stage in the development of modern social science (Heilbron, 1995). Predisciplinary social science, 1

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covering the period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, was characterized, first and foremost, by the emergence of modern conceptions of the social world: modern notions of state, government and legislation; of commerce and the economy; of social relations and human societies. A proper starting point for exploring the genesis of social theory would be to examine what is taken for granted today, namely the notions that constitute its vocabulary: the word ‘social’, its combination with other terms, and its derivatives. Arguing in terms of ‘social relations’ and ‘human societies’ is a distinctly modern mode of thinking. The terminological development is all the more relevant, since it provides a reasonably accurate indication of how the early forms of social thought emerged and evolved in the Euro-American part of the world. Although it has been claimed that ‘the social’ was ‘invented’ in the wake of the revolution of 1848 (Donzelot, 1984), or ‘discovered’ during the last decades of the nineteenth century (Mucchielli, 1998), the word and the theoretical perspectives associated with it arose about a century earlier. Following the key terms, I will first present a brief outline of the formative period of social thought between 1750 and 1850. I will then focus in more detail on the Enlightenment and on the figures who have generally been seen as its most significant pioneers: Montesquieu and Rousseau in France, and the ‘moral philosophers’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. Rather than being merely ‘precursors’ or ‘forerunners’, they are more accurately portrayed as the pioneers or founders of social theory (for more detailed accounts see Berry, 1997, 2013; Heilbron, 1995).

The Vocabulary and Status of Social Theory Intellectual historians have persuasively argued that in order to understand ideas we need to examine how they are embedded in particular ‘languages’ (Pocock, 1973; 2009). Among the best established intellectual discourses in early modern Europe were a religious and theological language, the language of politics, law and government, and the language of morals and morality. Since vocabularies give these languages a certain distinctiveness and autonomy, the formation of social theory can be understood by examining the emergence of a specific vocabulary and its uses in theoretically informed modes of analysis. According to the available evidence, it was in France during the decades after 1750 that a proper ‘social’ vocabulary emerged. From the 1750s onwards the adjective was used with a certain frequency, not in isolated and reified form as ‘the social’, as Hannah Arendt suggested (Arendt, 1998), but in connection to a rapidly growing number of nouns in expressions like the ‘social contract’, the ‘social order’, ‘social relations’, ‘social institutions’, and ‘the social system’ (Mintzker, 2008). The 1765 volume of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia described ‘social’ as a ‘word newly introduced into language’. The spread of the term was rapid and barely a decade later Mirabeau was already calling it a ‘dangerous word’, because of the multiplicity of ‘vague ideas it has allowed to emerge’. The new term was understood to be the adjective of the word ‘society’, a notion that has a much longer history, but that after 1750 developed in a closely

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related manner. As a generic representation of human communities the modern concept of society has similarly been described as an ‘invention’ of the Enlightenment (Baker, 2001; Kaufmann and Guilhaumou, 2003). The earliest occurrences of the term ‘social’ in the 1740s and 1750s were still related to the traditional meaning of the word society. The term referred to smaller human groups and gatherings, both in the sense of the aristocratic ‘high society’, the société or monde, and in the meaning of a legally recognized association with a particular objective or interest, such as certain commercial, learned, or religious ‘societies’. The latter meaning goes back to the notion of societas or partnership in Roman law. Societas had also been used to translate the Greek politeia, thereby designating the state as a ‘political’ or ‘civil society’. The critical change that occurred from the late seventeenth century onwards was that ‘civil society’ gradually came to refer to a sphere distinct from and potentially opposed to the state (Kaviraj and Khilnani, 2001; Riedel, 2011; Wagner, 2006). The smaller gatherings and associations that were traditionally described as ‘societies’ typically required people to be ‘sociable’, and sociability was indeed a virtue associated with societies in the older sense of the word (Gordon, 1994; Hont, 2005). Contrary to the brutal state of nature that Hobbes had depicted, sociability was viewed either as a natural human inclination, an appetitus societatis, as the natural law theorist Grotius said, or as an interest-based mode of exchange, as in commerce and trading ‘societies’. The last form of association represented an intermediary mode of association. It was, as Kant said, a form of ‘unsocial sociability’, a type of relationship that differed from the Hobbesian war of all against all, as well as from the agreeable or affectionate bonds of friendship and family. This weaker notion of sociability, associated with exchange, commerce, or traffic in the broad sense of these terms, provided the foundation for new theories of state, economy, and civil society (Heilbron, 1998/2001; Hont, 2005, 2015). The first uses of the word ‘social’, both in French and in English, still refer to the sociable qualities of human beings in smaller settings, but in particular Rousseau gave the term a new meaning (Mitzker, 2008). Instead of referring to properties that render a person sociable, Rousseau started using the adjective ‘social’ to qualify institutions, human relations, laws, and entire nations and states. From designating the character of a person in the sense of being social or sociable, it became a property of human communities. In the following, I will argue that this semantic shift can be traced to the work of Montesquieu, who transferred the idea of ‘character’ or ‘spirit’ from individuals to nations, attributing a central role to national character or national spirit in the functioning of states. When somewhat later Rousseau reformulated this idea in ‘social’ terms, it gave rise to a rapidly expanding new discourse on the structure and dynamics of human communities. What was previously described in religious, politico-juridical or moral terms was now defined as ‘social’, that is as belonging to ‘human society’ rather than to a religiously defined community of believers, a politically conceived unit of subjects or citizens, or to the private sphere of morals and morality. Using this generic, more abstract, more heterogeneous and relatively indeterminate term represented a way of thinking which allowed viewing political and moral issues in an entirely new manner. The arrangements of human

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groups and individuals were no longer viewed in terms of subjection, but more generally as constituting relations of interdependence (Berry, 2013; Elias, 1970). This new idiom formed the core of what would subsequently be labelled ‘social thought’, ‘social theory’, or ‘social science’. Representing a historical change of farreaching consequence, this reconceptualization is best understood, not in and by itself, as is often done, but in relation to competing discourses about human communities. During the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries ‘social theory’ came to form a new perspective on human communities that was recognizably distinct from the established traditions of theological, legal, political, and moral theory. Since the term came to define a relatively coherent discourse, formulated in terms of ‘social relations’ and ‘human societies’, analytically focused on the structure of human interdependencies, one can indeed argue that social theory emerged during the Enlightenment not as a discipline, but as a new intellectual genre (Heilbron, 1995) or as a language (Terrier, 2011; Wagner, 2006). Although a specific perspective associated with a particular vocabulary and distinct type of reasoning, social theory initially remained part of the larger framework of moral philosophy, lacking the institutional characteristics that are commonly used to define disciplines. The new vocabulary quickly spread from France and Scotland to other countries, and expanded further during the revolutionary era, which included the political revolutions in America and France and the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Both transformations, the political and the industrial, gave issues of government and society a profoundly new meaning and an unprecedented urgency. Preoccupied with the question of governing a ‘society’ that was founded on political rights and civil liberties, the emerging social sciences promised to deliver knowledge to national elites that could no longer rely on the dogmas of the divine right of kings and the institutions of the old regime. What kind of economic, social, and political processes could be expected to emerge under conditions of political liberty? And how might these be regulated and controlled by the authorities (Wagner, 1998)? From the very beginning the new vocabulary simultaneously fulfilled descriptive and critical as well as performative functions. It pretended to account for realities that were improperly captured by traditional vocabularies, and this alternative conception initially represented an either moderate or more radical critique of the established structures (Israel, 2011). During the early phases of the American and the French revolutions the notion of society played a critical role in the break with the old regime. In numerous pamphlets and speeches, a new political order was demanded in the name of ‘society’ or the ‘nation’. In the revolutionary process in France, for example, deputies of the Third Estate became sensitive to relatively abstract arguments, in particular those Rousseau had proposed in The Social Contract (Bell, 2001; Godechot, 1964; Tackett, 1996). The authority of the King was disputed, and his function was considered legitimate only if it would henceforth represent ‘society’ or the ‘nation’. Attempts to codify this foundational role of ‘society’ in the new political order are an apt illustration of the significance of the new idiom. In August 1789, just after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a proposal was drawn up for the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Societies’. Every society, it was stipulated,

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should have ‘the common good’ as its goal and needed to be organized in such a way that it would best serve the ‘interests of all’ (Belin, 1939: 34). During the revolutionary turmoil, the idiom of social thought was enriched with a host of new expressions. One of them was ‘social science’. It appeared in all likelihood for the first time in France in the famous revolutionary tract of Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789). In the writings of Sieyès, Condorcet and other members of the Société de 1789, ‘social science’ referred to a broadly conceived new science of government. The expression developed out of the concept of l’art social, a notion probably best translated as social policy, which had previously been used in the circle of the physiocrats (Head, 1982). Social science was to have three main branches: legislation, political economy, and morals. During the liberal Republic (1795–1799), following the Terror (1793–1794), the role of these new sciences was officially instituted. Replacing the national academies, the Institute was organized in three departments for, respectively, the natural sciences, the ‘moral and political sciences’, and literature and the fine arts. The class for the moral and political sciences was involved in a variety of policy issues, but it did not last. After conflicts with the government, it was suppressed by Napoleon in 1803, re-emerging thirty years later as the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (1832), which even then was still one of the earliest social science institutions in the world. In the early nineteenth century, after the revolutionary years and following the international counter-revolutionary reaction and wars on a European scale, two types of terminological renewal were added to the expanding idiom. The first were neologisms derived from the word social, most notably ‘socialism’ and ‘sociology’. Although both terms have been found in Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts (Guilhaumou, 2006), they appeared in print only during the 1830s. Intended to spell out certain consequences of thinking in terms of social relations, ‘socialism’ referred to the political consequences that stood in opposition to doctrines of individualism. Slightly later, in 1839, Auguste Comte forged the term ‘sociology’ as part of his undertaking to rethink the post-revolutionary changes in both the political and scientific realm. Comte conceived sociology as analogous to biology – another neologism of the 1790s. Just as biology was conceived of as an overarching and fundamental science of life, integrating botany, zoology, and medicine, sociology was to become a general and fundamental science of human societies. Comte elaborated in detail how and why sociology differed from Sieyès’s notion of ‘social science’, Condorcet’s ‘social mathematics’, and Saint-Simon’s ‘science of social organization’ or ‘social physiology’. At the same time he conceived the new science in opposition to the more traditional but then dominant conception of ‘moral and political sciences’. With few exceptions, Comte considered the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences to be a bastion of old-style metaphysics. Its leading members had indeed reconnected to classical moral philosophy and political theory. In their more conservative stance academicians consciously avoided expressions like ‘social science’ and the ‘social question’; both being associated with the revolutionary and republican fervour that the Academy wanted to combat and replace (Heilbron, 2015; 2017).

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Indicative of the newly acquired significance of social thought during the French Revolution was that aside from neologisms, the word ‘society’ and the adjective ‘social’ also penetrated and partly transformed older intellectual traditions. The conservative thought of counter-revolutionary monarchists like Bonald and Maistre is a telling example. In works like The Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society (1796) and Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws of the Social Order (1800), Bonald radically rejected the new order and the related tendency to take the empirical sciences as the intellectual model for social thought. Although rooted in the pre-revolutionary Catholic Counter-Enlightenment, Bonald’s thinking was simultaneously shaped by the fact that it emerged as a reaction to the Revolution (McMahon, 2001). Distinct from the more historically oriented traditionalism of Burke, Bonald proposed a social theory that was derived from the assumption of a natural social order, originally created by God. Existing societies were nothing but manifestations of this original society, and any encroachment upon it would inevitably lead to crises. Primary social relations were immutable and subject to invariable laws. Just as the relations between a father, a mother, and a child constituted a natural hierarchy, so did the relations between the monarch, the nobility, and the people or, in more abstract terms, between power, ministership, and subservience (Beik, 1956; Klinck, 1996). What holds for the conservative reaction to the Revolution can also be observed for the liberal tradition. Aside from the predominantly Anglo-American form of liberalism, in which the emphasis is on limiting state power, assuring the liberty of citizens, and favouring market exchange, another strand of liberalism was more broadly concerned with the conditions for preserving liberty. This current, rooted in the aristocratic opposition to absolutism and also in the work of Montesquieu (De Dijn, 2008), took shape in France and developed further as a reaction to the Revolution and the Terror. Carried by more secular factions of the notables, this form of aristocratic liberalism tends to be historical rather than analytical, more interested in institutional structures than in general principles, and has a more ‘sociological’ than a strictly political or economic focus (Siedentop, 2012). As compared to the centrality of market forces in laissez-faire liberalism, more weight is given to mores, to morals, and manners. This line of thinking was developed, among others, by Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and their successors (Geenens and Rosenblatt, 2012). If social thought expanded markedly during the revolutionary decades around 1800, it was not restricted to any political or ideological stance in particular, neither to liberalism, as some have argued (Seidman, 1983), nor to conservative thought, as both Marxists and conservatives have claimed (Nisbet, 2004; Zeitlin, 1968). Social theory initially emerged in opposition to absolutism, but soon the new vocabulary was also used by defenders of the absolute monarchy like Linguet in his Theory of Civil Laws or Fundamental Principles of Society (1767), by a physiocrat like Le Trosne in On the Social Order (1777), or by the orthodox Catholic Abbé Durosoy in his Social Philosophy (1783). Rather than expressing a specific philosophical or political stance, the emergence of social thought was more broadly both a reflection on and an ingredient of the transformative changes that took place between 1750 and

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1850. Strictly speaking it was neither simply the ‘discovery’ of a pre-existing reality nor merely an ‘invention’ that was unrelated to broader social changes and that would subsequently be ‘institutionalized’ in the process of revolutionary change (Baker, 2001; Kaufmann and Guilhaumou, 2003). Social theory was obviously itself socially constructed, produced by groups of intellectuals who had gained a greater degree of autonomy from the established powers, but their collective work was informed by social changes, processes in which it in turn intervened and which it helped to define. Aside from the political transformations of which the American and the French revolutions were the symbols, early forms of social thought were equally shaped by ongoing industrialization, by the spread of factories, and the formation of an impoverished working class in cities. Urban poverty and pauperism became the most pressing public issues during the first half of the nineteenth century. Conservative groups tended to view them as a moral issue, as a matter of character and selfdiscipline, and as a question of faith and charity. Their opponents – mainly republicans and radicals – defined poverty as a ‘social question’, implying the need for organized public intervention. In the post-revolutionary struggles over the role of the state in poverty relief intermediary positions emerged as well, and some of them typically also used the adjective ‘social’. Opposing ‘socialism’, but sensitive to the needs of working-class families, currents of ‘social Catholicism’ emerged from the 1820s onward (Duroselle, 1951). Distinct from what was in the process of becoming codified as classical economics, political economy also included schools of ‘social economics’, some of which sought to define the discipline in ways that opposed the dominant laissez-faire approach (Gueslin, 1998). Although the geography of the early forms of social theory included metropolitan cities in various regions in Europe and multiple forms of transnational circulation, France and Scotland were its leading intellectual centres. Translations, which provide an indication for the direction of the international flow of ideas, were made above all from French, which was the lingua franca of the Enlightenment. English came second and grew in importance, in no small part because of the prominence of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oz-Salzberger, 2006). The pivotal role of French contributions is also indicated by the spread of central notions. It took about three decades, for example, before the French expression science sociale was properly translated into English as ‘social science’ rather than ‘moral science’ (Claeys, 1986). References to pauperism and poverty as defining the ‘social question’ seem to have first appeared in French as well; the expression spread to England through newspaper reports about the events of the July Revolution of 1830 (Case, 2016). The term ‘socialism’ seems to have first appeared in Britain in the early 1830s in the movement of Robert Owen, but it was directly related to Saint-Simonian reformers (Claeys, 1986). The introduction of the adjective ‘social’ and its derivatives into German-speaking countries took longer, but they gradually took hold there as well (Geck, 1963). In Germany, however, new ideas of civil society and social science were largely incorporated within the framework of the Staatswissenschaften, the sciences of state (law, economics, public administration). Rooted in eighteenth-century cameralism, this state-centric tradition was refashioned in the nineteenth century by idealist

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Figure 1.1 Number of occurrences of the adjectives moral, political, social, and economic in French by decade (1750–1840) Source: Database Frantext, see www.frantext.fr/

philosophers such as Hegel for whom the state remained the leading and encompassing concept of socio-economic and civic organization (Steinmetz, 1993; Wagner, 1990). The popular uprisings of 1848 that swept across Europe put the social question on the political agenda in all advanced countries. One way of dealing with it was by more seriously studying social problems and deliberating about possible solutions. With the rise of organized worker movements in the wake of 1848, the notion of ‘social science’ spread rapidly, capturing the urgency of confronting the revolutionary threat to the established order. Related to the ‘social question’, it referred to social inquiries and initiatives for social reform. Prior to the establishment of university chairs and academic journals, the movement led to the forming of the earliest ‘social science’ organizations: the (British) National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1857), the American Social Science Association (1867), and the German Verein für Socialpolitik (1873). At approximately the same time as ‘social science’ came to be associated with studying the social question and initiating social reform – from the 1830s to the late nineteenth century – Comte’s term ‘sociology’ belatedly started to gain acceptance for the more properly scientific ambitions of social science. This occurred first in Britain and the United States, notably through the work of Herbert Spencer, and slightly later in France and Germany as well. Since France played a central role in the formative years of social theory, it is interesting to consider a quantitative indication of its early development. As compared to more or less competing terms, such as the adjectives political, moral, and economic, the frequency of the word ‘social’ in a large database of French texts shows a clearly upward trend between 1750 and 1840 (Figure 1.1). The increasing use is significant, not

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The Emergence of Social Theory

so much in itself, but as compared to rival adjectives. The adjective ‘economic’ during this period still seems a very specialized term, appearing far less often; its use doesn’t display any temporal trend either. The adjectives ‘moral’ and ‘political’ were continuously used more often than ‘social’, but their frequency tends to fluctuate, although ‘political’ was on the rise, especially after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. ‘Social’ was rarely ever used before 1750. Some growth occurs in the 1750s; it continues strongly in the 1760s and 1770s, and temporarily falls back in the 1780s, but reaches a higher level during the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. The comparison with the other adjectives, however, provides no evidence that ‘social’ discourse would somehow ‘dominate’ French learned texts during the latter half of the eighteenth century (Mintzker, 2008: 500). After decades of marked growth, a temporary decline of the use of the adjective ‘social’ occurs during the authoritarian Napoleonic years (1799– 1814). Growth picks up again in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. During the 1840s (not represented in the graph), the frequency reaches its highest level, due in all likelihood to debates about the ‘social question’ and the political upheavals of 1848, although the frequency remains below the level of the more common notions ‘political’ and ‘moral’.

The Character of Nations One of the earliest and most prominent examples of social thought was the work of an author, Montesquieu (1689–1755), who himself never used the adjective ‘social’. The admired, and widely discussed and translated Montesquieu, a provincial nobleman and member of the parliament of Bordeaux, pioneered the new approach. Although his ground-breaking contributions were widely recognized, he formulated them in a largely conventional idiom. Motivated by his opposition to absolutist rule, his grand study The Spirit of the Laws (1748) drew attention to a whole conglomerate of phenomena and principles that eluded the power of the state, but that were nonetheless essential for politics and government. What in reality ‘rules’ people, Montesquieu argued, is not so much the monarch or the laws of the land, but the ‘general spirit’ of the nation. That spirit is the outcome of a complex combination of ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ factors (climate, legislation, morals and manners, commerce, religion), and no ruler should ignore this complex infrastructure of state power; quite to the contrary, legislators are best advised to go along with the ‘spirit of the nation’. Montesquieu’s quest for the ‘spirit of the laws’ went well beyond the existing intellectual genres. He wrote about morals and manners, but in contrast to French moralists in particular, related them to climate, legislation, and political rule. He proposed a typology of state forms, but unlike political theorists linked them to a wide range of moral and physical conditions. The result of his exploration was such a broad and complex characteristic of human communities that neither the politicolegal nor the moral vocabulary sufficed. The expression ‘the spirit of the laws’ indicates that Montesquieu was concerned with the prerequisites of political and legal structures, and it was in the course of this analysis that he advocated the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the preservation of civil liberties. The

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analytical core of his work, however, is a more general phenomenon: ‘the spirit of the nation’. Nations are ruled by this spirit rather than by their ruler, and legislation and politics should be attuned to this spirit. As David Hume summarized it: ‘the laws have, or ought to have, a constant reference to the constitution of governments, the climate, the religion, the commerce, the situation of each society’ (Hume, 1902: 396). Montesquieu’s monumental work integrated and synthesized elements from various intellectual traditions. His early Persian Letters (1721) was a comedy of manners in which he depicted the absolute power of the monarch as an awkward superstition that did not fail to amaze his Persian noblemen. The entertaining descriptions were an enormous success. Montesquieu travelled to Paris, participated in salon life and engaged with the issues of morals and morality (love, friendship, happiness, taste, duty) that were favourite topics of salon conversation. Gradually, however, he dropped his literary plans and shifted his interests to politics. Having been associated with a political society, the ‘Club de l’Entresol’ (1724–1731), he travelled to England (1729–1731), and returned to his estate, where in 1734 he started working on a comprehensive study on law and the state. His Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734) had just been published, Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters (1734) was very much in the limelight, and interest in the enlightened English nation was widespread. Since reform initiatives such as the ones discussed in the Club de l’Entresol had failed, it seemed urgent to delve deeper into questions of government and state power. Fourteen years later, in 1748, De l’esprit des lois was published. Many if not all of its components have been shown to be related to existing traditions of thought. Prior to Montesquieu, however, few if any had ever produced such a comprehensive and subtly differentiated analysis of nations. The central concept, the ‘general spirit of the nation’, is already present in his early work. Not immediately related to the politico-legal theories that most interpretations have emphasized, it is informed by his experiences in Madame Lambert’s salon and the French tradition of moralistic writings (Heilbron, 1995; 1998/2001). Montesquieu arrived in Paris as the author of an entertaining satire. For seven years he was part of the aristocratic scene in the capital, but his literary career never materialized. Driven by his opposition to absolutism, his writings were more specifically based on integrating points of view other than the legal and the political with each other. The originality of The Spirit of the Laws is that it was a broad and empirically oriented synthesis of hitherto separated politico-legal, historical, and moral perspectives (Heilbron, 1995). An early text written for his Treatise of Duties (1725) contains a passage that is directly borrowed from the moralistic literature that had flourished in France since the seventeenth century. What Montesquieu was describing, however, was not a person, but a nation. ‘Societies’, he wrote, are merely a ‘union of the spirit’ and differ from each other by their ‘common character’. This ‘character’ is the ‘effect’ of a long and complicated sequence of causes, but as soon as it is formed, it becomes the ruling power (Montesquieu, 1949: 114). Here Montesquieu uses the way people were observed in salons to characterize a society. What he had in mind in composing The Spirit of the Laws was perhaps a kind of character sketch or portrait, but of

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The Emergence of Social Theory

a nation as a whole. The idea of ‘national character’ already existed, but in literary and moral sketches, not in systematic scholarly work and nearly always disconnected from political and legal theory (Bell, 2001: 10–11, 142–146; Van Delft, 1993: 87–104). What Montesquieu called the ‘general spirit’ or ‘national character’ is already present in early fragments of his work. The power of the monarch and the legislative authorities is limited, he argues, because they are dependent on the ‘character’ of the nation, and this common character is the outcome of a series of causes that cannot be controlled by the ruler. Similar to the character of individuals, the ‘general character’ of a nation, he argues, is inculcated into every individual via a ‘general upbringing and education’. Once this character is formed, it is transmitted from one generation to the next, defining what a nation or society is (Montesquieu, 1951: 58). In De l’esprit des lois, this line of argument recurs. Montesquieu begins with a typology of government (monarchy, despotism, republic). He then deals with the influence of climate and the composition of the soil. This is followed by book XIX about the ‘general spirit’, after which a range of ‘moral’ causes is discussed. The sequence illustrates that Montesquieu starts from a politico-legal point of view, but immediately enlarges his approach by connecting it to a variety of non-political factors. In many senses, the terminology and structure of his study are compromises. Although he surmounted many of the limitations of the existing political, juridical, historical, and moral literature, he did not develop a coherent conceptual system of his own. He was reluctant to do so, and perhaps consciously refrained from even trying. The title and subtitle of his study are illustrative: On the Spirit of the Laws, or on the Relationship That Laws Should Have to the Constitution of Each Government, Morals and Manners, Climate, Religion, Commerce, etc. The encyclopaedic form of his monumental study suggests that Montesquieu created a new theoretical perspective without simultaneously proposing a new conceptual language. Montesquieu does not refer to ‘social relations’ or ‘social structures’, doesn’t often use the term ‘societies’, and confines himself to combined expressions like ‘the spirit of the laws’ and ‘the character of a nation’, or avoids a proper conceptualization altogether by merely juxtaposing relationships between various orders of phenomena, as in the subtitle of his book. For the new intellectual genre that The Spirit of the Laws exemplified, the adjective ‘social’ and the modern understanding of the term ‘society’ would be critical, but their emergence is posterior to Montesquieu’s work.

Society as It Is and as It Should Be Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in all likelihood the first to use the word ‘social’ as the adjective of a newly conceived notion of society, and both The Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762) were instrumental in the spread of the new idiom (Mintzker, 2008). Initially belonging to the circle of philosophes, Rousseau contributed to the Encyclopedia, but as a Geneva-born son of a cultivated watchmaker, he was never at ease in the French capital. In spite of his ‘secret predilection’ for French culture, his

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work was rooted in his distance from the social world of the French Enlightenment, and was driven by his subversive inclinations. While his first discourses primarily address moral issues, later work engages with political theory. In both areas, Rousseau’s critical stance led him to an explicitly social perspective on human affairs. Rousseau’s first discourse, an essay for a prize contest of the Academy of Dijon, is about the question of whether the revival of the sciences and arts had contributed to the purification of morals. Rousseau answered in the negative, refusing to identify the flourishing of art and science with moral progress. Virtue, as he argued in classical Republican vein, has to be distinguished from the progress of civilization. His second discourse on the origins and foundations of inequality is a vigorous elaboration of this theme. Written for another prize contest, it tackled the question of whether inequality can be considered a natural phenomenon. Inequality, Rousseau argues, is natural only as far as it relates to physical or mental differences between people. Following a hypothetical scheme of historical development from the state of nature to modern civilization, he subsequently identifies other forms of inequality, such as those based on private property or on the subjection of citizens to despotic regimes. These moral and political forms of inequality are unnatural and unjustifiable. Private property and the division of labour have estranged people from each other and from themselves. In their desire to achieve esteem and a good reputation, people have become more interested in the judgement of others, and social life has become a frivolous game in which ‘honour’ exists without ‘virtue’, ‘reason without wisdom’, ‘pleasure without happiness’. Instead of assuming that human beings in the hypothetical state of nature are either selfish (Hobbes) or sociable creatures (Grotius), Rousseau argues from a radically different position. What philosophers had written about the state of nature and about ‘natural rights’ was a projection of later arrangements: ‘they transposed to the state of nature ideas they had taken from society; they spoke of the savage and depicted civil man’ (Rousseau, 1964b: 132). In Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature, humans live rather solitary lives, more often indifferent to others than driven by the aggressive selfishness that Hobbes portrayed as a war of all against all. It is not so much human nature that harbours vice, but human institutions that have brought about selfishness and envy. If – contrary to Christian and many secular moral doctrines – human beings have the natural capacity not just for self-preservation but also for pity, it is primarily as a result of man-made institutions that they become ‘wicked’. In contrast to the philosophes, Rousseau did not write as the spokesman of an enlightened era. The triumph of reason and the refinement of manners inspired him with suspicion, and some of the moral dimensions of his work centre around the tensions between a classical notion of virtue and modern civilization. Theologians had phrased this as the question of theodicy: how could the existence of a good and almighty God be reconciled with the existence of evil in the world? In secular traditions virtues and vices were treated as a problem of human nature, which could be based either on the urge for self-preservation (Hobbes) or on more sociable dispositions (Grotius, Shaftesbury). Rousseau did not doubt a natural selfcentredness in human beings, but there was every reason to believe that civilization

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had transformed the natural inclination of self-love, amour de soi, into amour propre, that is into a desire that can be satisfied only by feelings of superiority over others. What moralists had attributed to human nature was, in reality, the product of the development of human societies. ‘The virtues and vices of each human being do not merely relate to the individual alone. Most of them relate to society, and it is what they [i.e. moral characteristics] are with regard to the order in general what constitutes their essence and character’ (Rousseau, 1964b: 554). This ‘order in general’, this ‘society’ or ‘civilization’ to use a closely related term, had progressively become such an imposing system that individuals had little leeway to deviate from what was expected and prescribed. Society, noted Rousseau, differs from the individuals it consists of in much the same way as a chemical compound differs from its elements (Rousseau, 1964b: 284). Reformulating questions of morality in this vein Rousseau concluded that it was the ‘social order’ that needed to be studied, and that humans should be understood as social beings. Viewed from the perspective of moral philosophy, the responsibility for human behaviour could be attributed neither to a hidden wish on the part of God (the Fall of Man) nor to the presumed evil nature of human beings themselves. The historical innovation of Rousseau’s position was that he excused God and humans alike, localizing the responsibility for vices in ‘society’ (Cassirer, 1989 [1954]). Grappling with political issues, Rousseau changed the existing modes of argument in a similarly radical manner. In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau set out to find a basic principle for political association, taking ‘people as they are, and the laws as they could be’. State power, according to the central argument, can be legitimate only if it is guided by the ‘general will’ of its citizens. The general will is the answer to the central problem of politics, namely the reconciliation of freedom of the individual with the authority of the state. Although the precise meaning of the ‘general will’ is disputed, it is clear that it differs from, on the one hand, particular and contradictory wills of specific individuals, and, on the other, from the predominant political theories that assumed a contract between ruler and ruled, whereby citizens delegate their power to the sovereign in exchange for protection. Rousseau’s critical stance was not confined to the absolute state and the church, but extended to society as a whole, including its most enlightened groups and settings. For Rousseau, the term société no longer had the positive connotation of referring to smaller units of sociability and voluntary association. In order to understand moral as well as political problems one had to understand ‘society’ as a whole. Anyone who wishes to ‘deal separately with political and moral issues will never understand either of them’ (Rousseau, 1969: 524). Rousseau’s sensitivity to social constraint, to ‘social relations’ and a ‘social system’ that operates independently of individual wishes and intentions was related to his peculiar position in the French capital. His writings are the work of a man who increasingly felt himself to be a powerless outsider. ‘Society’ was the name Rousseau gave to the lack of transparency and the inauthenticity that troubled him in human interaction (Starobinski, 1957). He could not accept that these relations were somehow ‘natural’ or that they would become any more ‘natural’ if the power of the bishops were limited. Nor could he agree that enlightened lovers of the arts and

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sciences were more genuine than, or otherwise superior to the artisans of Geneva. Rousseau could not concur with any of the existing diagnoses, and his own analysis was at once more general and more radical. Just as his diagnosis differed from the predominant views, so did the remedies he proposed. In early modern political theory, the relation between the sovereign and the people was conceived as a contract assuming that the people delegated certain powers in exchange for protection. Rousseau challenged the very terms of this agreement. The ‘social’ contract, which would serve as the foundation for the nation’s government, should be an agreement among all members of the community on behalf of the community. It was an alliance of equals and as such, incompatible with any form of submission. Rejecting the idea of the ‘political contract’ as a delegation of powers and a mandate to rule, Rousseau argued that politics should be founded on a social contract. Since the cause was ‘social’, the solution had to be social as well. Rousseau’s recurrent use of the word ‘society’ and his introduction of the adjective ‘social’ were no mere coincidence. As he himself emphasized, they were the very outcome of his study. After his first discourses Rousseau worked simultaneously in different directions. In the early 1760s he published a novel about the social barriers to love and intimacy (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761), explored new forms of education (Emile, or On Education, 1762), and anchored the legitimacy of political authority in the ‘general will’. The analytical core of all of this work was that he replaced the traditions of moral philosophy and political thought with an analysis of society and social relations. Rousseau used a common denominator for issues that for most ‘philosophes’ exhibited essential differences. Rousseau viewed all institutions collectively as being part of that alien and alienating reality he called society. Being one of the earliest proponents of social theory, Rousseau formulated the principle of this new perspective more concisely than any one of his contemporaries: ‘one has to study people through society, and society through people’ (Rousseau, 1969: 524). Although a certain variety in the use of the new idiom continued to exist, its subversive sense came to the fore during the last decades of the eighteenth century. In various statements the power of the monarch and state was challenged in the name of ‘society’. Perhaps the most striking example of this type of reasoning can be found in the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), the text that more than any other catalysed public opinion in colonial America and shaped the American Declaration of Independence. Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. [ . . . ] Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one. (Paine, 1894: 163)

While Paine’s tract, and the Enlightenment in America in general, depended heavily on European sources, the American Revolution (1774–1783) in turn was an opportunity for European intellectuals to put these theories into practice (Israel,

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2017). One of the more salient illustrations of this type of cross-border circulation is that a paraphrase of Paine’s assertion was incorporated in the third edition (1780) of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (first published 1770). Raynal’s well-known anticolonial work was one of the international bestsellers of the radical Enlightenment: Society is a product of the needs of people, government a product of their shortcomings. Society always tends toward goodness, government should always be predisposed to suppress evil. Society comes first, it is in origin independent and free; government is set up on its behalf and is solely its instrument. It is the task of the one to command and of the other to serve. Society propagated public power; government, receiving this power, should totally devote itself to the task thus granted. Lastly, society is in essence good; government can be evil, as we well know, and all too often is so. (Raynal, 1981 [1781], vol. 9: 156)

Commerce and Society If the emergence of social theory can be located primarily in France and Scotland, it is, in no small part because in both countries the traditional centrality of politics and law had been undermined. In absolutist France public political debate was virtually impossible, as enduring censorship and the prohibition of the shortlived Club de l’Entresol (1731) had confirmed. In Scotland political considerations had lost much of their relevance since the country was no longer a state but a province. For different reasons, then, a shift of interest occurred in both countries towards the extra-political dimensions of government and society. In both countries, furthermore, the established intellectual powers, the church and the university, had lost a considerable part of their authority to more autonomous clubs, learned societies, and publishing ventures. After becoming part of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, the Scottish Parliament was disbanded and members of the high nobility left Edinburgh to settle in London. The low nobility, local merchants, and professionals remained behind, but without any central institution comparable to the parliament. Under these circumstances a new intellectual elite emerged with a considerable degree of independence from the traditional institutions. Its members were quick to organize their own clubs and societies; they lost interest in theological controversies and traditional political issues, and were far more engrossed in the work of Locke and Newton and in the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Hutcheson. Elaborating on this body of work, the young David Hume, born in 1711, developed a fundamental critique of all forms of knowledge that were not empirically but solely rationally founded. As its subtitle announced, his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) was ‘an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’. If the science of man is to be truly experimental, Hume argued, we cannot go beyond experience. ‘We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world.’ When experiments of this kind are ‘judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not

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be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension’ (Hume, 1969: 46). The argument led away from speculations about the state of nature and philosophical principles towards an historical science of human society. Human institutions such as law and the state did not come into being as the result of conscious agreements, as natural law theorists assumed. Such contracts were ‘fictions’, imaginary constructions about the origin of the state and society that had little to do with historical realities. According to Hume, the social arrangements people formed were historically variable conventions that arose out of needs, interests, and customs. Hume’s empirical approach unambiguously implied a consistently historical orientation. Human history, he wrote, was to moral philosophy what the experiment was to natural philosophy. His six-volume History of England (1754–1762) was intended as ‘theoretical history’, not merely as historical erudition. Hume was not the first to view the experimental or empirical method as the only appropriate way of acquiring valid knowledge. More stringently than his predecessors, however, Hume argued that searching for ‘first’ or ‘final causes’ was incompatible with the experimental method (Forbes, 1975). He rigorously distinguished between statements about natural or moral realities, and statements about their ‘first origin’ or ‘ultimate purpose’. Wanting to break with the ‘religious hypothesis’ on the origin of the world, Hume also wanted to abandon the imperatives derived from the ‘natural systems’ of law and morality. Merely engaging in what he called ‘moral anatomy’, Hume dissected human nature in order to gain a better understanding of human history, not to uncover moral duties or political obligations. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1738–1740) was published some eight years before The Spirit of the Laws and more than two decades before The Social Contract, but it was not until he presented his thoughts in more accessible form, in his essays and in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), that Hume’s work attracted attention. Together with a coterie of young men, he founded the Select Society (1754), launched the Edinburgh Review (1755–1756) and set up the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture. All were part of the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1750s to the 1780s. In 1756, in the early years of this period of intellectual flourishing, a young admirer and friend of Hume, Adam Smith, surveyed the intellectual situation in Europe. In his geo-intellectual account Smith noted that Italy and Spain had lost their once prominent position, and observed that German scholars rarely succeeded in expressing themselves in a manner that was precise and fortuitous. Only the English and the French attracted the attention of audiences beyond their own borders. These two nations, rivals in trade, science, politics, and warfare, exhibited specific merits, but the superiority of English philosophy was now acknowledged in the French Encyclopedia, in which the ideas of Bacon and Newton were lucidly explained and praised. Whereas classical French moral philosophy had not produced much original work, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson had nurtured the ascent of this field, but the English themselves seemed to have lost all interest in it. It was precisely this line of thinking that the French were now increasingly pursuing.

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As an example, Smith concluded his essay with a lengthy account of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality’, which had just been published. Smith had some appreciation for Rousseau’s style, but considered the argument largely ‘rhetorical’ (Smith, 1980). This intellectual situation, Smith suggested, gave the Scots a competitive advantage that should not be lost. Like his mentor David Hume, Smith uncompromisingly advocated ‘Newton’s method’ as the most effective one not only for natural but also for moral philosophy. In his lectures Smith elaborated this view in various directions. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Smith, 1982) engages with moral philosophy. Morality for Smith is not based on abstract principles, but derives from the feeling of sympathy, that is from the human capacity to imagine being in the position of others. But it is a mistake to assume that societies need to be based on strict moral obligations, since they may subsist ‘among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation’ (1759; Smith, 1982: 86). While recognizing that moral standards vary in time and across societies, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) doesn’t elaborate such a view. The leading idea for historicizing these issues was outlined by Smith only in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–1763), in which he sketches a universal history that became known as the four-stage theory (Meek, 1976). Mankind, Smith argues, passes through four stages, each of which is based on a particular mode of subsistence: hunting, shepherding, agriculture, and commerce. In the process societies grow in size, the division of labour develops, and human needs multiply and differentiate. In the last stage, commercial society, the exchange of commodities extends not only between individuals of the same society but between different nations as well. Smith did not publish the treatise on government and jurisprudence he announced, but The Wealth of Nations (1776) became the classic treatment of the economic dynamics of commercial societies. Combined with his other works, however, Smith offers much more than a blueprint for economics. At the heart of his thought is an appreciation of the contemporary world as an emerging new type of society. Market exchange is, in reality, but one form of the interdependencies that in commercial society are allpersuasive and that apply to all societal institutions (Berry, 2013: 199, 207). The four-stage scheme served as a common framework for the Scots, who scrutinized various aspects of this long-term process. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Adam Ferguson explains that ‘Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted. The history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and the thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species: and every experiment relative to this subject should be made with entire societies, not with single men’ (Ferguson, 1782: 8). Ferguson acknowledges a wide variety of factors that must be taken into account in order to understand societies, and rejects a contractual origin of government. Even in the most enlightened ages, historical events occur with equal blindness to the future. Nations ‘stumble upon establishments’, and institutions are indeed, in his felicitous phrase, ‘the result of human actions but not the execution of any human design’ (Ferguson 1782: 344). In

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historicizing Montesquieu’s work Ferguson follows historical progress from rudeness to refinement along the lines of the four-stage theory. Less confident about commercial society than Hume and Smith, Ferguson worried that the accumulation of wealth would engender a decline in the public spirit of citizens. In On the Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779), John Millar (1735–1801) develops a comparable account of how relations of authority have evolved. The starting point is the legal issue of rights: the right of husband over wife, father over children, master over servants, and chief or sovereign over tribesmen or citizens. Proceeding historically and comparatively, Millar examines how these rights arise, change, and are exercised. The progression ‘from ignorance to knowledge, and from rude to civilized manners’ is reflected in changes of laws and customs (Millar, 2006a: 85). Looking back on the progress achieved in this branch of study Millar notes in one of his later works that ‘The great Montesquieu pointed out the road. He was the Lord Bacon in this branch of philosophy. Dr. Smith is the Newton’ (Millar, 2006b: 404 n).

Concluding Remarks As it emerged during the Enlightenment, social theory represented a profound and far-reaching change in the way human communities were understood. The notion of ‘society’ and the adjective ‘social’ came into use for defining a new type of inquiry into the human condition. Breaking with the theocentrism of Christian doctrines and the state-centrism of politico-juridical thought, social theory represented a decentred conception of human communities. Instead of focusing on religious duties or political obligations, attention shifted to uncovering structures and processes other than those of submission to higher powers. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Scottish moral philosophers focused fundamentally on the interdependencies of human society, their changes over time, and their consequences for both rulers and citizens alike. Empires and nation states were treated as ‘societies’, and instead of appearing as sinners or subjects, human beings were understood as forming multiple webs of social relations. Montesquieu dissected the interconnections between political regimes and their physical and moral infrastructure. Scottish moral philosophers, while rejecting the importance of physical factors, historicized the perspective, and explored how a historically new type of ‘commercial society’ was emerging and which consequences that might have for social and economic relations as well as political institutions. Rousseau added a perspective in which changing structures of interdependency were viewed critically, as a source of constraint and estrangement, and as an infraction of the human personality. Examining these feelings of discontent and revolt complemented the inquiries of Montesquieu and the Scots, and became an integral part of the sensibilities of the modern age. Enlightenment social theory represented the matrix of the social sciences as they developed during and after the transformative period of the democratic and the industrial revolutions. The interdependencies of human groups could be

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conceived in largely static (Montesquieu) or dynamic terms (Turgot, the Scots). They were open to reductionist conceptions (economism as well as culturalism) and pluralist ones, and could be approached from individualist (Helvetius, Smith) and more structural perspectives (Rousseau, Montesquieu), while being politically associated with moderate or radical reform, but also with conservative defenders of the old regime and the Counter-Enlightenment. Although these theoretical possibilities would develop very unevenly, the plurality of assumptions and approaches would itself become an enduring characteristic of the social sciences. Part of this legacy is that, independent of the oppositions that continue to structure the field of social sciences, social science itself can be contested. Hannah Arendt, for example, criticized the ‘rise of the social’, because it upset, changed, and blurred the classical, and in her eyes ‘decisive’ division between the public and the private realm, between polis and oikos. For Arendt, writing during the Cold War, the rise of the ‘social’ represented a potentially totalitarian assault on the human condition (Arendt, 1998). Associating the ‘social’ with developments in France, she contrasted the French with the American Revolution. Whereas the American Revolution had remained within the limits of the political realm, the French Revolution had carried out interventionist ‘social’ policies, which had proven disastrous. The primacy of ‘social issues’, questions of poverty and inequality, and the use of revolutionary means to achieve economic and social justice is what leads to outcomes such as the Terror (Arendt, 1963). Since the main themes and theoretical models that have come to define the social sciences are rooted in the period of the Enlightenment, and took shape in the period between 1750 and 1850, they should be acknowledged as constituting a key feature of the Age of Revolutions (1750–1850) (Armitage and Subrahmanyam, 2010; Heilbron, 1998/2001). Together with ideas of universal human rights, popular sovereignty, and democratic republicanism, the formation of the modern social sciences was indeed part and parcel of the transformative changes that characterize this historical period. It is, in any case, impossible to reach an understanding of modern social science without acknowledging and understanding that its origins reach back well before its compartmentalization in university disciplines.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. First published 1958. Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyan (eds.). 2010. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1850. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Keith Michael. 2001. ‘Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History (1994).’ In S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities, (pp. 84–104). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Beik, P. H. 1956. ‘The French Revolution Seen from the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789–1799.’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 46: 3–122. Belin, Jean. 1939. La logique d’une idée-force: l’idée d’utilité sociale pendant la Révolution française (1789–1793). Paris: Hermann. Bell, David. 2001. The Cult of the Nation in France. Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berry, Christopher. 1997. The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2013. The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Case, Holly. 2016. ‘The “Social Question”, 1820–1920.’ Modern Intellectual History 13 (3): 747–775. Cassirer, Ernst. 1989 [1954]. The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. P. Gay. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Claeys, Gregory. 1986. ‘“Individualism”, “Socialism”, and “Social Science”.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47: 81–93. De Dijn, Annelien. 2008. French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Donzelot, Jacques. 1984. L’Invention du social. Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques. Paris: Fayard. Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. 1951. Les débuts du catholicisme social en France (1822–1870). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Elias, Norbert. 1970. ‘What Is Sociology?’ In Collected Works, Volume 5. Ed. by Arthur Bogner, Katie Liston, and Stephen Mennell. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Ferguson, Adam. 1782. An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). London: T. Cadell. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1428. Forbes, Duncan. 1975. Hume’s Philosophical Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Geck, Ludwig Adolph. 1963. Über das Eindringen des Wortes ‘sozial’ in die deutsche Sprache. Göttingen: O. Schwartz. Geenens, Raf, and Helen Rosenblatt (eds.). 2012. French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Godechot, Jacques. 1964. La pensée révolutionnaire en France et en Europe, 1780–1789. Paris: Armand Colin. Gordon, Daniel. 1994. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gueslin, André. 1998. L’invention de l’économie sociale. Paris: Economica. Guilhaumou, Jacques. 2006. ‘Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie: du mot à la chose.’ Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 15: 117–134. Head, Brian W. 1982. ‘The Origins of “La science sociale” in France, 1770–1800.’ Australian Journal of French Studies 19: 115–132. Heilbron, Johan. 1995. The Rise of Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998/2001. ‘French Moralists and the Anthropology of the Modern Era: On the Genesis of the Notions of “Interest” and “Commercial Society”.’ In J. Heilbron, L. Magnusson, and B. Wittrock (eds.), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity (pp. 77–106). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publications.

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Pocock, John G. A. 1973. Politics, Language and Time. Essays on Political Thought and History. New York: Atheneum. 2009. Political Thought and History. Essays on Theory and Method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raynal, G. T. 1981 (1781]. 3rd edition, orig. 1770). Histoire des deux Indes. Geneva: JeanLéonard Pellet. Riedel, Manfred. 2011. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: eine Kategorie der klassischen Politik und des modernen Naturrechts. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964a. ‘Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité’ (1755). In Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, vol. 3: 131–223. 1964b. ‘Du contrat social (1ère version).’ In Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, vol. 3: 282–470. 1964c. ‘Fragments politiques.’ In Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, vol. 3: 473–548. 1969. ‘Emile, ou de l’éducation’ (1762). In Oeuvres completes (vol. 4: 241–868). Paris, Gallimard, Schabas, Margaret. 2003. ‘British Economic Theory from Locke to Marshall.’ In Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (pp. 171–182). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, Steven. 1983. Liberalism and the Origins of Social Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Siedentop, Larry. 2012. ‘Two Liberal Traditions.’ Reprinted in Geenens and Rosenblatt French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (pp. 15–35). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin. 1989. ‘The State.’ In T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (pp. 90–131). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Adam. 1980. ‘Letter to the Edinburgh Review’ (1756). In Essays on Philosophical Subjects (pp. 242–254). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Starobinski, Jean. 1957. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle. Paris: Plon. Steinmetz, George. 1993. Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tackett, Timothy. 1996. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Terrier, Jean. 2011. Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–1950. Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers. Van Delft, Louis. 1990. Sozialwissenschaften und Staat. Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland 1870–1980. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. 1993. Littérature et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1998. ‘Certainty and Order, Liberty and Contingency: The Birth of Social Science as Empirical Political Philosophy.’ In J. Heilbron, L. Magnusson, and B. Wittrock (eds.), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity (pp. 241–263). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publications. Wagner, Peter (ed.). 2006. The Languages of Civil Society. New York/London: Berghahn. Zeitlin, Irving M. 1968. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Notes 1.

This chapter was completed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I am grateful for the comments of Silvia Sebastiani and the members of the informal Colloquium of the School of Social Science, and to Louise and John Steffens, members of the Friends Founders’ Circle, who assisted my stay during the academic year 2017–2018.

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2 “What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme Alan Sica

Scholars in academic departments like Classics, Art History, Philosophy, or Comparative Literature can quickly name their “classics” because much of their professional raison d’être revolves around reinterpretations of these enduring works, or their continual re-specification. But younger social scientists have been told for decades, if not centuries, that though knowing a little something about “classic” authors and their works is probably a good thing, it is hardly necessary while making “discoveries” that will hold the attention of their employers and peers. A philosopher, by contrast, can still entrance the avant-garde by reinterpreting Plato or Hegel, as have so many. But no social scientist will win sincere approbation by offering yet another investigation of Saint-Simon, Comte, Herbert Spencer, William James, or George Herbert Mead, even if based on new archival material or a fresh interpretative lens. While it is categorically wrong to think there is nothing more to be learned from these theorists (new scholarship about them continues to prove that), it is nonetheless heartening for today’s social scientists to assume they can cut fresh paths through the forest of human association which the “ancient” writers somehow missed, or chose not to analyze. Willful or incidental ignorance of theoretical writings beginning, say, with John Locke and Giambattista Vico is as inexcusable and professionally damaging to social science as refusal to study Bach’s fugal inventions would be to musical composition. The “new, new thing” in human studies usually owes its evanescent fame mostly to its audience’s cultural amnesia or blindness to past achievements (see Wolfe, 2016 for a recent example). The role of “classics” does not, therefore, shrink over time, but rather grows as the need of a disciplinary anchor – for some sort of tradition within a body of learning – expresses itself ever more forcefully. It is worth remembering amidst the global chaos of competing intellectual cultures that the Latin roots of “tradition” can mean “to betray” as well as “to deliver.” Ideally the word signifies the “handing down” of intergenerational insight, a practice that if denigrated or lost will compromise our collective scholarly welfare.

The Polysemous Classic The word “classic” has been denatured substantially during the last several decades, and today’s usage would be unrecognizable to Charles Lamb, Charles Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, Arnold Bennett, T. S. Eliot, and J. M. Coetzee. 24

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They are the best known of those cultural critics who have thought seriously about how a literary or philosophical classic is constituted, and why it is honored, even if more often in word than deed. Until our era of post-literacy, all cultures and subcultures have used their chosen “classics” to inspire new members and maintain the allegiance of old ones. But today we are bathed in a soft mist of wholesale pseudoclassicism: to be known as “classic” guarantees the approbation and attention of large audiences. Much of this aura, of course, has been concocted strictly for mercantile purposes, but is no less effective and enchanting for that. Thus, the “organic” and “artificial” classics become increasingly indistinguishable. Though the question “What is a classic?” might seem puerile on its face, the more one reflects on its meaning, the less transparent it becomes. Classics today often denote very little beyond image-induced, musically propelled nostalgia, relying on tediously over-reproduced photographs or films which in time become surrogates for “the real thing.” This has become especially the case for generations who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, even the 1970s. In 1980 a “classic” wedding gown for a woman choosing what to wear on her matrimonial occasion might well have been her mother’s dress from 1940, not only for sentimental but also financial reasons. Thus, comparing our own definitions of the term with its meaning not so long ago, it becomes clear that the very notion of what makes a “classic” is ever-shifting. Whereas teenagers in the 1960s did not clamor to join their parents and grandparents in dancing to music by Fred Waring, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, Bix Beiderbecke, or Art Tatum – each of whose careers had blossomed thirty or forty years prior to the advent of “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – today “classic” rock-and-roll tunes remain ubiquitous. Their actual or voiced presence has in fact become aesthetically and emotionally obligatory in films, novels, and at certain public occasions, like weddings. The first task, therefore, of the scholar wishing to identify the truly classic authorities in social and cultural theory is to walk briskly away from ordinary usage, in order to think more penetratingly about the contemporary utility of social science “classics.” Not surprisingly, the OED entry for “classic” and its derivatives occupies pages. A rare usage of classicus denotes “the highest class of citizens,” who could, so it was imagined, serve as role models for “lesser” societal members. In 31 BCE Virgil had used classicum to mean “trumpet call” in his Georgics (ii.539; translated in 1628 by T. May as “classick”): “When men had never heard the bugles blow” (Bovie, 1956: 54). This literal imagery had shifted by 1512 to a meaning closer to our own, “reference to highly regarded authors who wrote in Greek or Latin, both pagan and Christian,” closely tied to the Middle French term classique (1548): “vernacular authors held in high esteem.” By 1611 the word also meant “an acknowledged standard or model,” and in 1680 “classic” designated “the best Latin authors.” Its connection to Greek and Roman cultures was well established by 1798, and a few years later more broadly meant “in keeping with established usage or customs” in all the major European languages. “Classic,” therefore, is a relatively new term when compared with many other foundational concepts in English, and one inspiring considerable dispute as an identifier of what lasts.

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Why do “classics” remain important whenever social scientists, whether they are novices or veterans, reconsider their discipline’s history and likely future? Why are certain works apparently indispensable despite being regularly disparaged by the avant-garde? And most importantly, to what extent do “classic” works truly continue to enchant their unsuspecting readers, many of whom initially approach them with a combination of fear, incipient boredom, and irritation? Yet if such readers are persuaded to extend themselves into difficult texts with adequate vigor, becoming more or less enlightened, these skeptics not infrequently report that said classics “were actually kind of interesting!” This cyclical revaluation of ancient texts by a new generation of readers validates their claim to canonical status in a way that nothing else can. Thus it is that every student of the human sciences learns to name the authors of classic works early on as part of indoctrination into their discipline’s mysteries, whether the simple triad (Marx–Durkheim–Weber) or the more elaborate and accurate list of, say, twenty “big names” going back to the Enlightenment. (One version of this canonizing exercise includes over 140 “classic” and “neo-classic” authors active between 1690 and 2004; see Sica, 2005.) If not very often read (even in translation) beyond the required theory courses, their names are memorized and spoken with awed authority. In this way anglophone linguists struggle to pronounce Saussure’s name correctly, and sociologists speak Weber’s name as Vay-bur, not “webber,” so they can distinguish their special knowledge from that of purchasers of backyard grills. Learning these magical incantations is a rite de passage for every profession, especially those which still rely on a hoary scholarly heritage for partial legitimation of their ongoing operations. In the history of human literacy taken as a whole, emphasis on the guidance and wisdom afforded by “the classics” is not so old that it can compete with that of fairy tales and legends. But its place in educating aspirants to special status has become more important with each decade, following the growth of widespread literacy in the nineteenth century (St. Clair, 2004). Not to “know” classics at least by name is to endanger one’s claims to a professional position – at least until recently, with the ascendancy of electronic images over printed words. Even more than social scientists, literary writers ritually re-evaluate their “classics,” studying how their own work measures up to them in an almost pathological way. “S/he is no Tolstoy” is the common refrain. Nearly everyone searching for British Enlightenment wisdom regarding such things first turns to Samuel Johnson for instruction. His transformative Dictionary (1755), fruit of nine years’ work, renders “classic” as “of the first order or rank,” adding the helpful quotation: “‘With them the genius of classick learning dwelleth, and from them it is derived’ (Felton on the Classicks).” In 1775 at the age of sixty-five, Johnson observed “all who go to look for what the Classicks have said of Italy, must find the same passages; and I should think it would be one of the first things the Italians would do on the revival of learning, to collect all that the Roman authours have said of their country” (Boswell, 1992: 542). For more depth regarding Johnson’s views, one returns of course to Boswell’s immortal account, where it becomes clear that Johnson understated his own literacy,

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while nevertheless developing a classically based program of study for himself and others. Boswell quotes Adam Smith: “Johnson knew more books than any man alive,” contradicting Johnson’s cavalier remark “I never knew a man who studied hard” – presumably including Johnson himself. Boswell saw through this ruse: “He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote” (Boswell, 1992: 38). In 1773 when pressed by “Mr. Elphinston” about reading a trendy book completely, Johnson “answered tartly: ‘No, Sir, do you read books through?’” (Boswell, 1992: 462). When Boswell in 1763 asked him whether knowing Greek and Latin was essential to education, Johnson answered “Most certainly, Sir; for those who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not. Nay, Sir, it is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it” (Boswell, 1992: 286). There are thus dozens of references in Boswell’s The Life of Dr. Johnson to books, literacy, libraries, lexicography, and so on, for example: “in the morning [April 3, 1776] I found him very busy putting his books in order, and as they were generally very old ones, clouds of dust were flying around him. He had on a pair of large gloves such as hedgers use” (Boswell, 1992: 634). When he reached seventy-four, within a year of his death, Johnson told Boswell and Edmund Burke’s son: it is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse . . . which the understanding makes through a book . . . you may have pleasure from writing after it is over, if you have written well. (Boswell, 1992: 1089)

Johnson so often exhibited the contrariness of the truly learned scholar, whose impatience with “ordinary life” is palpable because easy summary – the lingua franca of daily interchange – is never a defensible substitute for solid investigation, preferably anchored in foreign languages. Like many ambitious autodidacts, young Johnson proposed for himself a set of readings from Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Theocritus, Juvenal, and others, each carefully scheduled on “a table, showing at the rate of various numbers a day. . . what would be, in each case, the total amount in a week, month, and year” (Boswell, 1992: 37–38). Later, as “master of an academy,” he gave to “a relation” an entire curriculum, “Scheme for the Classes of a Grammar School” which Boswell reproduced in toto (Boswell, 1992: 56–57). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson’s plan for youthful education now seems preposterous, and even at that time was likely too demanding for its intended audience. Much of it aims at training students in ancient Greek and Latin translation. Along the way they were to read and translate Erasmus, Eutropius, Cornelius Nepos, Justin, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Lucian, Xenophon, Homer, Terence, “Tully,” Caesar, and Sallust, among others. “Dr. Johnson’s” ideas about education and much else saturated the nineteenth century, and were codified in “primers” for “classical” (as opposed to vocational) high-school students. It’s no surprise, then,

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that adoration of classics was given sustained lip service at least until the 1950s, when the avant-garde began to be taken as seriously as had Johnson’s apothegms in the earlier period. Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous sketchbook, A Moveable Feast (1964), has become a “classic” analysis of “Paris in the Twenties,” even if it is in places factually inaccurate, more a reflection of his own need to fictionalize than a reliable portrait of that time and place for the Lost Generation (as Gertrude Stein named them). During that glorious period of sociocultural creativity, as current nostalgia views it, Hemingway wrote to his close friend, Ezra Pound (January 2, 1927): Dear Trotsky Poundsonoff, So you joined The Revolution–New Masses I. E. all well salaried style . . .. Nobody else knows anything and there is nothing for the boys like criticism. If you hadn’t become a classic at the age of was it 23 – people would still read you. But the trouble with classics is that people dont read them they just refer to them. . . I myself cannot become a classic because 1st I dont know grammar 2nd I haven’t read any of the other classics and so cant form my work and life on same (you will note that all contemporary classics are like former classics. It is only the ones that don’t arrive so fast that ever differ somewhat in structure or content[)] and 3rdly – but I find I am writing shit myself and so will close – Your devoted Comrade. Hemovitch. (Hemingway, 2015: 186–187) The cheeky author was twenty-seven when he wrote these boisterous lines, attacking the Left with as much glee as he blasphemed the Right on other occasions. For him and so many of his postwar colleagues who had witnessed the 1914–1918 carnage, all ideologies were suspect, the only real refuge being art and those few close friends with whom he could share it. Yet along with this broadside against politics, “Hemovitch” also poked fun at Pound’s odd dedication to defining The Great Books – those relatively few highly honored, little-read titles known to everyone as catchphrases, but to only a few as the intimate companions their authors had hoped they would become. Pound was fortyone at the time, the wise older brother, and far more learned than his interlocutor, the rough customer from Chicago and Kansas City that Hemingway sported as his epistolary persona. Pound’s eventual books – The ABC of Reading (1934), Guide to Kultur (1938), and Confucius to Cummings (1964) – betrayed his lifelong professorial identity, or what Gertrude Stein derided as his tireless role of being the “village explainer.” Of course, his “village” was the entire world of literature and its putative audience. At these masses Pound tossed his energetic dictates about what they should read and what ignore. When still young, at least, he believed that widespread appreciation of great literature would lead to civilizational harmony, rationality, and peace. His self-appointed role, then, was to identify great works, “the classics,” especially those off the beaten path, and show his imagined audience how to use them to improve their lives. By strange coincidence, the least lucid “explainer” of this golden era, Miss Stein, had this to say (in “Sacred Emily,” composed in 1913 using 1340 words):

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

Night town. Night town a glass. Color mahogany. Color mahogany center. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Loveliness extreme. Extra gaiters. Loveliness extreme. Sweetest ice-cream. Page ages page ages page ages. (Stein, 1922: 187; emphases added)

Nobody knows what exactly Stein meant – she may not have been certain herself – but the phrase “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” was cast in bronze, not unlike her later appraisal of her childhood residence, Oakland: “there is no there there.” Her fame and practiced irritability grew substantially during her 1934 visit to the United States, which took place after a long absence. While in Chicago she visited the university, harshly evaluated the unique Robert Hutchins/Mortimer Adler model of the undergraduate curriculum, and lectured on epics to a stunned crowd of students. Alice Toklas, her mate, told Hutchins as they left campus (to take a “ride-along” with Chicago homicide detectives at night) that “Gertrude has said things tonight that it will take her ten years to understand” (Beam, 2008: 55). Later Stein spoke to a class that Thornton Wilder was teaching, and was asked about “the third and fourth roses.” She said to the inquiring student Can’t you see that when language was new – as it was with Chaucer and Homer – the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there? . . . and after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find out that they were just wornout literary words? (Brinnin, 1959: 357)

Pound had urged writers to “Make It New,” and Stein practiced that by means of an almost incomprehensible private language. As different as they were, both agreed, despite themselves, on the need to name the classic authors and promote their works. Thus, borrowing from Stein’s intentional ambiguity, one might say: a classic is a classic is a classic. Classic rock; classic films; classic Coke; classic cars; classic MapQuest; Harvard libraries’ classic Hollis catalogue; classic ChapStick; classic moves; classic excuses; classic beauty. And surely the most important: classic books. Advertisers of merchandise or ideas affix “classic” to every product they hope to enhance through its presumed antiquity, reliability, recognizability, and trustworthiness. Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney, all septuagenarians whom journalists have labeled as “classics,” obligingly play “classic” tunes at their perpetual concerts. Yet were they suddenly to shift into the folk music of Zambia or, even more inscrutably, variations on themes of Frescobaldi, their treasured status as “classics” would instantly be jeopardized. Even if they could read music well enough to play Chopin or Brahms, they would not risk losing their audiences, so carefully cultivated over the last fifty-plus years. Attaining “classic” status is not easy, becomes increasingly valuable over time, and is not readily foresworn.

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“The classics” of high culture beginning with Petrarch (1304–1374) were Greek and Roman writers. When Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams about “Tully,” they were referring to Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose character was as well known to them as that of their intimates. “What would Tully say?” was for them a real, not merely academic, question. This is how “the classics” were relied upon when these two political theorists and their companions were formulating the United States’ government on paper. Perusal of their private libraries shows their keen attachment to “the classics,” which they studied for edification, guidance, and pleasure, and usually in the original Greek and Latin (plus German, French, and Italian). In Jefferson’s astonishing library, collected at a time when books were expensive and hard to procure, there were nine volumes of Cicero’s works, in addition to Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Epictetus, Plotinus, Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Antoninus, and so on (Gilreath and Wilson, 1989: 52–53). The intellectual-political leaders in the colonial period were as much guided by “the classics” as they were by their most gifted contemporaries: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire. They even agonized over what was missing from the classic writings, as in this letter from Adams to Jefferson on July 9, 1813: Aristotle wrote the History and description of Eighteen hundred Republicks, which existed before his time. Cicero wrote two Volumes of discourses on Government, which, perhaps were worth all the rest of his Works. The Works of Livy and Tacitus etc that are lost, would be more interesting than all that remain. Fifty Gospells have been destroyed, and where are St. Lukes World of Books that have been written? (Adams and Jefferson, 1959: 351)

Adams’ answer was that “Ecclesiastical and Imperial Despotism” were to blame for these blinding losses to The Tradition, a verdict most of his colleagues would have found congenial to their political and cultural interests. His point, however, was that “the classics” sustained intellectual and political activity in Colonial America, and he only wished there was more surviving material from those writers – one point which his habitual arguing partner, Jefferson, would not have contested. And when Jefferson wrote to Adams, especially as they entered their post-political life of retirement, the subject was often books and ideas, particularly those which Jefferson regarded as essential to his way of living and thinking. In his popular biography of Adams, David McCullough recalls a famous interchange during which having run on for several pages about Cicero, Socrates, and the contradictions in Plato, Jefferson asked, “But why am I dosing you with these Ante-deluvian topics? Because I am so glad to have someone to whom they are familiar, and will not receive them as if dropped from the moon.” (McCullough, 2001: 618)

Jefferson continues: “Our post-revolutionary youth are born under happier stars than you and I were . . . The information of books is no longer necessary, and all knowledge which is not innate, is in contempt, or neglect at least” (Adams and Jefferson, 1959: 434). Not only were Adams’ and Jefferson’s private libraries among the largest in the United States, but Adams, who possessed 3,200 books, “wished he had 100,000.” He particularly coveted a forty-seven-volume set, Acta Sanctorum, a sixteenth-century compilation of saints’ lives put together by “Bollandus,

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

Henschenius, and Papebrock”: “What would I give to possess in one immense Mass, One Stupendous draught, all the Legends, true doubtful and false!” (Adams and Jefferson, 1959: 429). Jefferson’s library, all 6,707 volumes, was bought by Congress in 1815 to replace the 3,000 volumes burned by the British Army in 1814. Immediately following this sale, Jefferson began collecting books again. If any current political leaders are as entranced by learning as these two were, they are careful to screen their enthusiasm from the public since nowadays it would seem too “elitist” and “undemocratic.” Out of this passionate concern for ancient texts, ever-changing lists of “classic” books had for centuries become a common reference point within international print culture. For instance, in the 1950s small, cheap paperbacks by the million were printed as “Signet Classics,” a branch of the New American Library of World Literature (run from a post office box in Grand Central Station). They were sold to high-school and college students, mostly as required textbooks, and were selfdescribed as “A timeless treasury of the world’s great writings . . . especially selected and handsomely designed for the living library of the modern readers.” One such list appeared in the 1961 Signet edition of Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and for no currently discernible reason listed The Ox-Bow Incident (Van Tilburg Clark), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales (Poe), The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), The Unvanquished (Faulkner), The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories (London), Humphry Clinker (Smollett), and A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe), in that order, as if they evidently embodied a meaningfully grouped clutch of vital works that students would therefore want to purchase and study. Each was introduced by an esteemed scholar (e.g., R. P. Blackmur, R. W. Stallman, Monroe Engel, J. H. Plumb), assuring the novice reader of the book’s authenticated importance. The GIs returning from World War II and the upcoming baby boomers were all educated by such claims, trained to believe that certain books, through an undefined yet unquestioned process, had achieved “classic” status, and should therefore be accorded automatic veneration, even if their contents remained mostly unplumbed. Ordinary books (“pleasure reading”), by contrast, could be left on the train, airplane, or beach after swift consumption, followed by instant forgetting. Of course, books read merely for pleasure were not to be mentioned in formal academic writing, a situation which has changed during the last several decades. The strategy of reprinting “classics” remains a backbone of several important publishers, notably the Barnes and Noble Company, which has repackaged and resold widely known works for decades, many of them long out of copyright and thus pure profit at the sales counter. The Everyman Library in Britain and the Modern Library in New York initially capitalized on these same venerating sentiments 100 years ago, and continue to do so today on a smaller scale (Sica, 2013; 2016). And when Mortimer Adler and his colleagues launched the “Great Books of the Western World” series at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 15, 1952, they promised upwardly mobile suburbanites, newly graduated from college, a remarkable level of erudition if they would simply subscribe to the huge collection, and then join a Great Books Discussion Club (see Beam, 2008). One million of them eventually did subscribe. Had Gertrude Stein lived long enough, she very likely would not have

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participated, judging from her rambunctious interaction with Adler and Robert Hutchins when visiting the University of Chicago in 1934 (Beam, 2008: 53–55). Added later to the original 54 volumes of Great Books, Twentieth-Century Social Science (Volume 58) includes long excerpts from Frazer’s Golden Bough, Weber’s From Max Weber (including 5 pages of endnotes in a miniscule font), Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, and Claude Levi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology (totaling 540 pages of double-columned texts set in “nine-point Fairfield type . . . impossible to read” [Beam, 2008: 95]). Careful study of the visually straining print in this volume would indeed introduce novices to works of extraordinary brilliance, even if they are not in any meaningful way connected on sheerly scholarly grounds. In fact, these four theorists would likely have repudiated each other’s work, which all of them based on incongruent epistemological footings. But these marked differences did not separate their representative works from one another in the pantheon of greatness conceived by Mortimer Adler and his associates. When one asks an informed source to identify “classics” within a given field of achievement, the opinion being sought is mostly motivated by the brevity of human life: How should I commit my limited energy to consuming whatever genre is in question? The Library of Congress holds 25 million items, and as I have time to read carefully only several hundred, maybe a thousand, before I expire, which ones hold “lasting” significance? Which will speak to me as they have to preceding generations, even if in different tones? The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre each hold millions of artworks, but with only an afternoon to view those on display, which ones must I see in order to enrich my visual memory to the utmost? In boxing jargon, which items “have legs” over time? If time were not the most pressing constraint in human existence, the category of “classics” would not exist, since in the end almost everything is interesting, and all of it could be taken in at leisure. Thus, trying to determine what is now, what was then, and what was never a “classic” is not the trivial enterprise it might appear to be. The need to do so oppresses everyone, ever more so as they age. Nor is this task quite so buried in the zone of the Relative that it can be branded as merely a sophomore’s dilemma. We know that Bach’s music in the West, not to mention the East, was forgotten until Mendelssohn’s rediscovery of it in the 1820s, and only in the twentieth century did it become the standard against which all polyphonic composition is measured. It is no accident that Brahms studied Bach very carefully prior to writing his own piano compositions. Similarly, Antonio Vivaldi’s music was “lost” until the early twentieth century, since which time it has become universally regarded as indispensable (partly thanks to Ezra Pound’s long-term companion, the violinist Olga Rudge). Everyone has also been told that Shakespeare’s importance waxed and waned, which today seems odd given his ubiquity, wearing as he does the crown of supreme genius of English literary composition (Rosenbaum, 2006; Schoenbaum, 1991). There are dedicated followers of the mystic Plato and there are as many devotees of the practical Aristotle, but no one would argue that they are not both “classic” thinkers whom one must learn in order to understand Western culture.

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

Going somewhat further afield, one comes upon this observation: Why should we be interested in Maimonides? There is a well-known answer: Maimonides was the greatest intellect, the greatest mind, whom the Jewish people have brought forth since the completion of the Talmud, if not since the cessation of prophecy. It is important to remember human greatness at all times, but especially in ours, in a time of excessive speed, where we have no time to look back and to remember, and where the first question is, What next?, rather than questions regarding the past. We need concrete standards of human greatness, standards supplied by the works of great men, lest we be deceived by the rush and the noise of those who advertise ephemeral figures, to say nothing of the self-advertisers. But this duty may come into conflict with higher or more pressing duties. (Strauss, 2013: 419)

Thus Leo Strauss spoke on February 7, 1960 to an audience at the Hillel House, University of Chicago, voicing a sentiment as alive now as it was then, nearly sixty years ago. If he and his auditors lived in “a time of excessive speed,” then ours flies by on wings of self-absorbed chattering that makes 1960 seem like a Conestoga wagon. Strauss became famous, of course, through his close readings of Spinoza, Hobbes, Plato, Machiavelli, Maimonides, and others, each of whom required intense concentration and enough time to absorb their vital texts on their own terms. Were he alive today, he might go mad simply trying to keep up.

Classical Analyses of Classicism Charles Lamb (1775–1834), an office worker who doubled as literary critic and essayist, wrote “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” in 1822. A good friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other Romantic poets, he was honored by the understating Eleventh Edition of the Britannica as possessing “an imperishable claim to the reverence and affection of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life.” His sister murdered their mother in a state of “mania” when Charles was twenty-one, and he took full responsibility of her for the remainder of her troubled life. Meanwhile, he somehow became “entitled to a place as an essayist beside Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele and Addison” by means of prose typified by “refined and exquisite humour, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry and heart-touching pathos” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910/11, vol. 16: 104–105). In short, he was a member of the A-Team of essayists when the public for such work was large and intensely literate. For this reason and because his works were popularly studied at least until 1963 when the Modern Library reissued a 1935 “Giant,” The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb in 1,125 pages (Lamb, 1935), he might serve as the beginning voice for pursuing our topic. As one can imagine given his wide popularity, Lamb is endlessly quotable. I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

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I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book. (Lamb, 1935: 146)

Tongue in cheek, he rejects “Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which ‘no gentleman’s library should be without’: The Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s Moral Philosophy” (ibid.; I beg to differ regarding Josephus, whose study of the wars against the Romans includes unforgettable passages about the zealous, murderous sicarii who brandished their sicae most effectively; see chapter 23 of that work). Lamb writes about books as objects d’art, some of which transcend material reality: “In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding,” including works by Fielding, Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. More practically guiding his audience of eager readers: Much depends on when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up The Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes’ sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. Winter evenings – the world shut out – with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare [sic] enters. At such a season, The Tempest, or his own Winter’s Tale –.

Lamb was interested in every aspect of literacy, including the practices of silent versus spoken reading: “These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud – to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one – it degenerates into an audience.” As Lamb knew, a vital component of familial literacy in the nineteenth century was reading to one another from favored texts, and the societal consequences for the disappearance of this activity have not often enough been probed. Ephemeral texts, though, were another matter: A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks – who is the best scholar – to commence upon The Times, or The Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud pro bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid . . . Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. (pp. 148–149)

Today’s pursuit of serious news via online addictions to The New York Times or The Guardian supports his contention. Charles Lamb represents in full color so-called cultural elitism from which professional educators have been sternly instructed to flee during the twenty-first century. The ordinary belief from the past that sharing the company of Milton or Shakespeare was by definition time well spent, and that reading lesser works or – heaven forfend! – failure to read anything, would surely cast one’s soul into perdition is as impossible to “sell” nowadays to college students as it would have been “obviously true” to their great-grandparents. “Classics” must have an indubitable quality which for Lamb’s generation were too apparent even to debate (even if he did chastise Hume, Gibbon, and other notables for their Olympian postures).

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

A generation passed before Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve asked “What Is a Classic” (1853), taking a far more cautious approach than did his predecessor: “A delicate question! One that could be answered in many different ways, depending on the time and place” (Sainte-Beuve, 1964: 1). He noted that in Rome the classici were rich citizens, but also authors of admirable texts. The Greeks were their own classics; Romans had Cicero and Virgil; and the few medieval readers oddly ranked Ovid over Homer, and Boethius as equal to Plato. Dante imitated classical forms, doing it so well that he became one himself. More generally, “the idea of a classic implies continuity and consistency, a tradition which forms a whole, is handed down, and endures” (p. 3). This is as conventional a definition as one was likely to find prior to recent times, when belief in a single, coherent tradition has become suspect – recall the blast of cold air that greeted Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon when it was published in 1994 – and the idea that it would be “handed down” in toto became a joke. (Another Bloom volume [Bloom, 2000] added insult to injury!) But is the joke on us? Surely Sainte-Beuve would think so. For him, there was no ambiguity: Example is the best definition. Once France had had her grand siècle [Louis XIV’s reign], she knew what the term “classic” meant better than by any theories . . . due to its four great men. Read Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV., Montesquieu’s Greatness and Fall of the Romans, Buffon’s Epochs of Nature, the beautiful pages of reverie and natural description of Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, and tell me if the eighteenth century, in these memorable works, did not reconcile tradition with freedom of development and independence. (Sainte-Beuve, 1964: 3)

His happy willingness to “name names” is so at odds with today’s hesitation in choosing sides, in identifying exemplars. Sainte-Beuve takes the next step: A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time. (p. 4; translation altered)

Perhaps surprisingly, a true classic only appears to be “revolutionary . . . but it is not; it only lashed and subverted whatever prevented the restoration of the balance of order and beauty” (ibid.). Here Sainte-Beuve turns to Corneille, Molière (“the most complete poetic genius”), and Goethe (who wrote “Every year I read a play of Molière”) as supreme examples of the classic temper. Quoting Goethe we learn that “genius is sublime reason,” and “I call the classical healthy and the romantic sickly . . . The works of the day are romantic, not because they are new, but because they are weak, ailing, or sickly. Ancient works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy” (p. 5). For readers of Sainte-Beuve’s period, burning aesthetic and ethical questions included Byron’s appraisal of Pope, as well as “let us

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ask from time to time . . . what would they say of us?” By “they” he meant, among others, Shakespeare, Horace, Pope, Boileau, Virgil, La Fontaine, Xenophon, Addison, Plato, Sophocles, Demosthenes, Cervantes, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Lucretius, and Milton (pp. 11–12). Who today, aside from George Steiner and very few others, would even value such a lineage, not to mention knowing the contents of these authors’ minds? A great deal has been written about Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), not least the noted monograph by Lionel Trilling (1939), which helped set him in his rightful place as a quasi-sociologist of culture, and a cultural critic of the first order. Naturally, the poet Arnold held strong beliefs about what people should read and think about, and his thorough understanding of British cultural life was anchored in the fantastically pedestrian duties attached to his “day-job.” It required that between 1865 and 1886 he rode regularly throughout England as “inspector of schools,” collecting students’ exams, which he would grade 700 at a time (Gates, 1897: xi) to evaluate the quality of schools. The job was “a burden, dull, irksome, timeconsuming” (Trilling, 1939: 158) – and he did it while also being Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He wrote to his mother in 1863: “I am now at the work I dislike most in the world – looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time” (Gates, 1897: xi). But Arnold thereby learned a great deal about British social classes, as well as educational systems on the Continent which he had examined first-hand when a young man. He was motivated by the Reform Bill of 1867 to write his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy (1869), the chapter titles of which gave to a wide public the phrases “Sweetness and Light,” “Doing as One Likes,” and “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace.” Though often chastised today by populist critics of “high culture” as an unapologetic, even unaware snob, Arnold was in fact a self-trained sociologist of culture with goals not unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s in Distinction. He was interested in how the three major classes – aristocratic, middle class, and working class – could be meaningfully compared “with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes to become a centre of authority” (Arnold, 1935 [1869]: 98). As an early editor remarked: “He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail, intellectually, morally, socially . . . He compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of human excellence and notes where his powers ‘fall short or exceed’” (Gates, 1897: xxiv). Here Arnold advances his study in an almost Weberian mode, creating what amount to “ideal-types.” He freely admitted feeling closest emotionally to the middle class, being one of them, but did not therefore hesitate to call its members “Philistines,” a description he defined as “something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children; and therein it specially suits our middle class, who not only do not pursue sweetness and light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings . . . which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched” (ibid., 101–102). For the aristocracy Arnold reserved the term “Barbarian” in that its members routinely rejected the pursuit of “light” in

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

favor of “the eternal seducers of our race,” that is, “worldly splendour, security, power, and pleasure.” He did not provide his middle-class audience with a list of edifying books they should read in order to learn “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Culture for Arnold was more fluid than that, and meant “the pursuit of our total perfection” that would be “a great help out of our present difficulties” (Arnold, 1935 [1869]: 6). Rather than list “great books,” he described “the Grand Style”: “it arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject” (Arnold, 1897: 84). Following this he reckons with the works of Goethe, Homer (about whom he wrote a famous essay concerning translation), Dante, Milton, and others, showing how artistry of the highest rank inspires valuable thoughts, emotions, and a life attentive to “sweetness and light” (a phrase borrowed from Jonathan Swift). He proposes to inculcate into his heroic middle class an “ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy” (ibid., 64; emphases in original). Arnold surprisingly names Auguste Comte’s followers as “friends of democracy,” but then waxes lyrically about a distinctly nonutopian, non-Homeric, non-Miltonian character: I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced, – Benjamin Franklin, – I remember the relief with which, after long feeling the sway of Franklin’s imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job . . . (ibid., 67)

Here again Arnold presages Weber’s strong attraction to Benjamin, whose Autobiography he read as a boy and made great use of in The Protestant Ethic. Not uniquely among the best educated and most inventive readers, their wide and deep studies led them to similar sources of inspiration. Though Matthew Arnold could easily have become, given his vocation, a highbrow scold, he resisted that easy path, instead encouraging the three major social classes to embrace “the best” via what only later came to be called, in part punitively, “high culture.” (Trilling, perhaps unconsciously, modernized Arnold’s high standards in his famous 1961 essay, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature”: “Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art, domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard” [Trilling, 2000: 386].) Some participants in the commerce of culture obviously listened to Arnold. A popular writer very famous during his lifetime for novels like The Old Wives’ Tale, but no longer much read, Arnold Bennett produced handbooks of intellectual advice for a middle class hungry to “improve” itself, so-called “Pocket Philosophies.” In addition to How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and Mental Efficiency, Arnold published in 1909 Literary Taste: How to Form It, With Detailed Instructions for Collecting a Complete Library of English Literature. This brief work offers “Chapter III: Why a Classic Is a Classic.” In contrast to

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Arnold’s elevated notions, Bennett stayed close to the ground of everyday life, and is therefore of more purely sociological importance: “The large majority of our fellowcitizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic” (Bennett, 1909: 22). Taking a matter-of-fact approach to literacy, Bennett claims that all “classics” exist exclusively because an elite says they should: “The fame of classical authors is originally made, and it is maintained, by a passionate few” (p. 23), and their “obstinate perseverance.” Could these arbiters of quality “prove to the man in the street that Shakespeare was a great artist? The said man would not even understand the terms they employed. But when he is told ten thousand times, and generation after generation, that Shakespeare was a great artist, the said man believes – not by reason, but by faith” (p. 25). Bennett was obviously employing sociological reductionism to sidestep the troubling question his chapter title posed, by reducing it to a scheme whereby loud cultural bullies insisted that everybody accept their verdicts on classical status. But what specifically about any given work so excites “the passionate few” that they ascribe to it the title of “classic”? “This is a question so difficult that it has never yet been completely answered” (p. 26), and Bennett does not try to do so. Put simply, then, “the right things” to know are such “solely because the passionate few like reading them” (p. 28). Not an aesthetically satisfying answer, to be sure, even if socioculturally plausible. T. S. Eliot, archbishop of select Kultur, came at the question from an entirely different angle. He famously asked how Arnold would have defined “the best” in programmatic terms (Eliot, 1948: 20), which recapped an important debate. One of the rare instances in which a sociologist of culture and a first-rate litterateur exchanged views regarding the direction of sociocultural change, and the role of “high culture” within it, occurred in the 1930s when T. S. Eliot and Karl Mannheim (among a cast of other notables) met regularly in Oxford or London as part of “The Moot” (Clements, 2010; Mullins and Jacobs, 2006). Mannheim was highly regarded by his literary friends, including Eliot, but the latter reviewed Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction with only polite enthusiasm (Eliot, 1940), and also disagreed with the sociologist in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). Yet he was frank in saying “I attempt, so far as possible, to contemplate my problems from the point of view of the sociologist, and not from that of the Christian apologist” (Eliot, 1948: 69). Eliot had been puzzling over how education should be carried out and what role classics played in it for many years (Eliot, 1964b). Their friendly dispute – in 1947 Eliot wrote a laudatory obituary of Mannheim in The Times – turned around the question of the “free-floating intelligentsia” to which Mannheim recommended modern societies turn in order to establish the most propitious definition of “culture.” Eliot found this dangerous and unrealistic, as have many others since, but they both agreed that “mass culture,” after the invention of propaganda films, radio, and then television, was not about to disappear: “for better or worse, we have a ‘mass’ society, and if we do not study how to use the techniques for good, then we must certainly be

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

prepared to see them used for evil” (Eliot, 1940: 782; see also Collini, 2000: 218ff.). Eliot countered with confidence in traditional scholarly and clerical elites, who found each other’s arguments persuasive and worthwhile. Their influence would permeate society in a “natural” way without the enforced conformity suggested by Mannheim’s plan for spiritual and political “reconstruction.” This is the age-old argument between those (like Auguste Comte, for instance) who put their trust in “the best and the brightest” to guide society’s future, versus traditional conservatives (like Edmund Burke, first and foremost) who dreaded the authoritarian risks attached to the allocation of supreme cultural power to any small group, no matter how well educated, talented, and well intentioned. This takes us to the nub of defining “classics”: Who does the defining? What are their criteria? How immutable are they? Thoughtful people, so-called, regularly call on Plutarch, Seneca, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Mark Twain for insights about human quandaries, or legitimation of favored posturing. Have they become therefore “classics” by sheer use? Today far more people know the lyrics of memorable popular songs (“Put a ring on it” has become a national slogan of sorts) than quotable excerpts from the works of great writers and thinkers. Harold Bloom, apparently with a photographic memory, is one of today’s most truly learned professors, yet when he published The Western Canon, he was pilloried for having favored European males to the exclusion of alternative sources of wisdom and aesthetic pleasure. This conflagration has become so routine, so utterly predictable, that no one any longer even proposes what “the best that has been thought” might mean. Each subgroup promotes its narrow canon, and is happy to dispense with the rest. This very condition, not really foreseen by either Mannheim or Eliot, has become the norm among the “most sophisticated” coteries of those who care about opinion formation or mass education. The question is not anymore which few writers to embrace as unequivocally valuable, but whether any “classic” texts could satisfy the ponderous requirements laid upon this special category of reading and thinking. On October 16, 1944 T. S. Eliot delivered “What Is a Classic?” to the Virgil Society. The published version (Eliot, 1945) is twenty-five pages long and not easily summarized, and has given rise to considerable commentary ever since. But a few points require mention. Eliot holds that “A classic can only occur when a civilisation is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind” (p. 10), characteristics embodied in Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics. Eliot believes that mature people know maturity in art when they see it: “No reader of Shakespeare, for instance, can fail to recognise, increasingly as he himself grows up, the gradual ripening of Shakespeare’s mind” (p. 11). He points out that Christopher Marlowe rivaled, even surpassed, this ripening, but his life was too short for him to be able to challenge Shakespeare’s later works. “What we find, in a period of classic prose, is not a mere common convention of writing, like the common style of newspaper leader writers, but a community of taste” (p. 13; emphases added). Following a classic period, writing becomes either monotonous or eccentric, the former owing to an exhausted language, the latter due to a tiring search for novelty, “because originality comes to be more valued than correctness” (p. 14). Only

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through “order and stability, equilibrium and harmony” do classic works arise. A cultural period filled with creative extremes indicates “an age of decay.” The best work comes from an “unconscious balance between tradition in the larger sense – the collective personality, so to speak, realised in the literature of the past – and the originality of the living generation” (p. 15). This observation quietly infers Eliot’s canonical essay in 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot, 1964a: 3–11). After more animadversions about pre-classic and post-classic periods, Eliot concludes that the true classic evidences “maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language, and perfection of the common style” (p. 17), most fully realized in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) poetry. Yet Eliot does not wish to “overrate” Pope and his period. He declares that in fact English literature has no truly “classical” writer, nor any classical period (p. 17). He considers Dante, Milton, Goethe, William Blake, and others, finally assuming a tone that resembles Mannheim more than Milton: “In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life, in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name” (p. 30). Perhaps it is called “consumerism,” which by its all-consuming nature prohibits appreciation of classics, as described by Eliot during the darkest days of World War II.

Recent Probings of “The Classic” A walking classic himself in the eightieth of his hundred and four years of life, Jacques Barzun wrote “Of What Use the Classics Today” (Barzun, 1988). With his encyclopedic grasp of Western cultural history, he points out that Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the unique Russian classic, means very little in the United States, and that great Asian classics (e.g., The Tale of Genji) are known only to specialists in the West. Arguing against current tendencies, he insists that “no definite list” of classics can be compiled, since tastes over time and place change constantly, and the “illusion of permanence” is a problem of temporocentrism that is not easy to transcend (Barzun, 2002: 413). He then helpfully provides a checklist of qualities that pertain especially to classics: “thickness” or density, adaptability, popularity among enough readers (which recalls Bennett’s belief), and academic approbation of a single “major work” by a canonized author. Perhaps the greatest advantage to literacy of the type Barzun represents is the ability to understand current social life with ready reference to classically situated phrases and images. He recalls the story of Coleridge lecturing about an instance from “Dr. Johnson’s” life, during which the good Doctor had brought to his home a derelict woman he had saved from the street, where he cared for her until she recovered. “Coleridge’s fashionable audience snickered and clucked, the men amused, the woman shocked. Coleridge stopped and said gravely: ‘I remind you of the parable of the Good Samaritan,’” which shut them up (ibid.: 418–419). Finally Barzun examines pedagogy, a topic close to his heart since he published Teacher in America (1945): “Our obtuse educational experts would be astonished to see how passionately a group of perfectly average fifteen-

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“What Is a Classic?” Variations on an Ancient Theme

year-olds can be brought to discuss Machiavelli’s Prince or the Confessions of St. Augustine. But the opportunity is missed, and college offers the last chance of initiating the habit of reading and enjoying solid books” (p. 421). Speaking in Graz, Austria in 1991, the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee went after Sainte-Beuve’s and T. S. Eliot’s statements by stealing their title: “What Is a Classic?” He was not impressed with either of them, and showed a particular animus for Eliot’s “high church” rhetoric. For instance, in a seventeen-line sentence that fills a paragraph, Coetzee opines that Eliot was “defining nationality to suit himself and then using all of his accumulated cultural power to impose that definition on educated opinion” (Coetzee, 2001: 6) – precisely the practice Mannheim had suggested, and Eliot had repudiated. But closer to Coetzee’s heart was Bach, whose Well-Tempered Clavier he had heard in 1955 when he was fifteen, wafting across a suburban fence in Cape Town: “the spirit of Bach was speaking to me across the ages . . . I was symbolically electing high European culture” (ibid.: 9). Coetzee spends pages discussing Bach; his temporary obscurity, rediscovery by Mendelssohn, and subsequent canonization. For Coetzee, a “classic” is defined simply by duration, and in this he follows Horace: “if a work is still around a hundred years after it was written, it must be a classic” (p. 15). He also believes that the function of criticism is to analyze and reappropriate classics, however they are understood. It is revealingly interesting that Coetzee, a prose writer, spends most of his lecture discussing early eighteenth-century music rather than the written word, then or now. The most recent attempt by a litterateur to answer our perennial question is What Is a Classic? with the now predictable subtitle Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee (2014). She is Indian by birth, received her doctorate at Rutgers University, and teaches Victorian English literature at Oxford University. The book took its title and trajectory from a 2010 PMLA article. In short, she embodies (literally) all of the most recent trends in comparative literature and cultural studies. And as one would expect, she rehearses some of the arguments made by her predecessors, especially Sainte-Beuve, Eliot, and Coetzee, with positive attention as well to Harold Bloom. Mukherjee’s goal, of course, is to widen “the canon” to include Indian writers she esteems (in addition to “postcolonial” authors from other parts of what was the British Empire). This is a valuable and understandable play from someone of her background and interests: “As Pascale Casanova observes: ‘The irremediable and violent discontinuity between the metropolitan literary world and its suburban outskirts is perceptible only to writers on the periphery . . . ’” (ibid.: 44). But an existential condition of this kind, humanly persuasive and rational as it is, does not materially advance debates about the fundamental nature of classics other than to claim that more authors should fall under its warming umbrella. From another point of view entirely, the sociologist Peter Baehr and historian Mike O’Brien did a great service for their colleagues by filling the entire March, 1994 issue of Current Sociology with material that later became a book, Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes Over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage (Baehr, 2016). The authors’ goal was not only to discuss how canons form,

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but also to consider the processes whereby certain books endure in readers’ sense of their professional selves, and are therefore studied by succeeding generations. A rather fine distinction is made between founding texts versus others which may indeed have played a role in forming a given discipline, but continue to be absorbed long after the founding phase is complete. When Samuel Chugerman wrote Lester F. Ward: The American Aristotle in 1939, the title of this large, adoring work was meant to be taken seriously. No one would argue against Ward (or Giddings or Small) as vitally important to sociology’s beginnings in the United States. Yet few have read their work since the mid-twentieth century, nor would graduate students now be expected to do so. And at the very time the “founders” were composing their massive outputs, Durkheim and Simmel were writing theirs, titles which echo even today in redone translations. Baehr and O’Brien assembled an indispensable bibliography that dealt in these matters, including provocative works like Davis’s “‘That’s Classic!’; The Phenomenology and Rhetoric of Successful Social Theories” (Davis, 1986), a successor to “That’s Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology” (Davis, 1971), both of which have attained minor classic status. To pursue such works would require another monograph. On a less elevated plane, Baehr explained in 2016 that in order for a sociological work to attain classic status, it must fulfill three somewhat overlapping requirements: coinage of a memorable term or expression, “programmatic statements and methodological approaches” which become citation necessities, and the colonization of a research topic such that failing to mention the work indicates scholarly neglect (Baehr, 2016: xvi). True, to be sure, yet what is also required to achieve “permanent” classic status in the realm of social theory is the sheer beauty, the rhetorical bounty, of the language – even in translation. Though not often enough mentioned, the “real” reason that succeeding generations of students “become” Marxists, Weberians, Durkheimians, Simmelians, Meadians, even Humeans has as much to do with persuasive rhetoric as with “pure” ideas. After all, if purity of expression were the royal road to classic status, then the mathematical formulae with which Das Kapital or Trattato di sociologia generale are stuffed would represent Marx’s and Pareto’s achievements in toto. But they do not. Instead, passages of unforgettable rhetoric, “logical” or not, win new readers, devotees, and apostles as each generation marches through its educational “training.” Humans love stories, and scholar-humans cannot be otherwise.

References Adams, John, and Thomas Jefferson. 1959. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Ed. by Lester J. Cappon. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1897. Selections from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold. Ed. with notes and intro. by Lewis E. Gates. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

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1935 [1869]. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Baehr, Peter. 2016. Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes Over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Baehr, Peter and Mike O’Brien. 1994. “Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage.” Current Sociology 42(1): 1–148. Barzun, Jacques. 1988. “Of What Use the Classics Today?” Perspective (1) (Winter): 1–12. 2002. “Of What Use the Classics Today?” In Michael Murray (ed.), A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works (pp. 412–423). New York: HarperCollins. Beam, Alex. 2008. A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of Great Books. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Bennett, Arnold. 1909. Literary Taste: How to Form It. New York: George H. Doran. Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co. 2000. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner. Boswell, James 1992 [1791]. The Life of Samuel Johnson. With an introduction by Claude Rawson. New York: Everyman Library/Alfred A. Knopf. Bovie, Smith Palmer. 1956. Virgil’s Georgics: A Modern English Verse Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brinnin, John Malcolm. 1959. Gertrude Stein and Her World. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Chugerman, Samuel. 1939. Lester F. Ward: The American Aristotle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clements, Keith (ed.). 2010. The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom, and Society 1938–1944. London, UK: T & T Clark. Coetzee, J. M. 2001 [1991]. “What Is a Classic? A Lecture.” In Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999 (pp. 1–16). New York: Viking/Penguin Group. Collini, Stefan. 2000. “The Later Social Criticism of T.S. Eliot.” In Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (eds.), Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (pp. 207–229). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davis, Murray S. 1971. “That’s Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology.” Philosophy of Social Science 1: 309–344. 1986. “‘That’s Classic!’ The Phenomenology and Rhetoric of Successful Social Theories.” Philosophy of Social Science 16: 285–301. Eliot, T. S. 1940. Review of Karl Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. The Spectator, June 7, 1940, p. 782. 1945. What Is a Classic? An Address Delivered Before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October 1944. London, UK: Faber and Faber Limited. 1948. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London, UK: Faber and Faber Limited. 1964a. Selected Essays. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World. 1964b. “Modern Education and the Classics.” In Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot (pp. 452–460). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Gilreath, James, and Douglas L. Wilson (eds.). 1989. Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalogue with the Entries in His Own Order. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Hemingway, Ernest. 2015. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 3 1926–1929. Ed. by R. Sanderson, S. Spanier, and R. W. Trogdon. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Lamb, Charles. 1935. “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.” In The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (pp. 146–150). New York: Modern Library. McCullough, David. 2001. John Adams. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2010. “‘What Is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question.” PMLA 125(4) (October): 1026–1042. 2014. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mullins, Phil, and Struan Jacobs. 2006. “T. S. Eliot’s Idea of the Clerisy, and Its Discussion by Karl Mannheim and Michael Polanyi in the Context of J. H. Oldham’s Moot.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6(2) (July): 147–156. Rosenbaum, Ron. 2006. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups. New York, NY: Random House. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. 1964 [1850]. Sainte-Beuve: Selected Essays. Trans. and ed. by Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Guterman. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Schoenbaum, S. 1991. Shakespeare’s Lives. New York: Oxford University Press. Sica, Alan (ed.). 2005. Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon/Pearson. Sica, Alan. 2013. “When Sociology Reached the Masses.” Contemporary Sociology 42(3) (May): 315–323. 2016. Book Matters: The Changing Nature of Literacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. St. Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Gertrude 1922. Geography and Plays. Introduction by Sherwood Anderson. Boston, MA: The Four Seasons Company. Strauss, Leo. 2013. Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings. Ed. with an introduction by Kenneth Hart Green. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Trilling, Lionel. 1939. Matthew Arnold. New York NY: Columbia University Press. 2000. “On the Teaching of Modern Literature (1961).” In The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (pp. 381–401). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, Tom. 2016. “The Origins of Speech: In the Beginning Was Chomsky.” Harper’s Magazine 333(1995) (August): 25–40.

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3 Karl Marx Kevin B. Anderson

Dialectical Groundings Over the past century, the concept of dialectic has loomed especially large in discussions of Marx’s work. His immediate successors like Karl Kautsky stressed his materialist approach to history and society in the somewhat narrow sense of materialism vs. idealism, a perspective that founders of sociological theory like Weber found less than compelling. However, with Georg Lukács in 1923 and V. I. Lenin a bit earlier, in 1914–1915, the dialectic began to gain a more central place in Marxist theory. Lenin devoted his wartime studies to Hegel’s Science of Logic, concluding that intelligent idealism was closer to dialectical materialism than was crude materialism, and writing later in a programmatic essay that Marxists should become “materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic” (Anderson, 1995: 116). Lukács, who had studied with Weber before becoming a Marxist and then a Leninist, wrote of the dialectic as the defining feature of Marxism and criticized no less a figure than Friedrich Engels for a “contemplative” form of dialectic that ignored subject–object relations and therefore tended toward positivism and mechanical materialism (Lukács, 1971: 3). This critique of Engels earned Lukács the opprobrium of the Communist International in 1924, around the time of Lenin’s death. In other, more academic and intellectual quarters, however, the dialectic has been taken up as a central problematic by the Frankfurt School in Germany and the United States, by Antonio Gramsci in Italy, by Henri Lefebvre and the existentialists in France, by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the United States, and by newer social theorists like Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson. Dialectic originates with the Socratic dialogues, wherein a potentially endless search for truth takes the form of a conversation among philosophers and their students, most of them drawn from the top layers of society. This kind of dialectic tends toward forms of radical idealism, preoccupied with outlining visions of an ideal society as an abstract goal. But as Herbert Marcuse pointed out, the ancient form of dialectic nonetheless employed critical reason in abstract to attack an unjust reality. This contrasted with the instrumental reason of modern positivist social theory, which too remained within the confines of the existing social order (Marcuse, 1964). Developing the ancient dialectic further, Hegel perceived dialectical contradictions not only in thought, but also in social reality. Thus, in his famous dialectic of 45

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lordship and bondage in his Phenomenology of Spirit, often referred to as the master– slave dialectic, Hegel contrasted the consciousness of slaves or bondsmen with that of masters. For slaves, the shattering experience of capture and loss of freedom, “for whom everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations,” prompted greater reflexivity, leading toward their attaining a higher level of consciousness than members of the master class (Hegel, 1977: 117). Another experience of slaves, that of performing physical labor, resulted in positive self-recognition due to contemplating the results of that labor. In this way, the pathway toward a more developed human consciousness passed through the minds of the slaves, not those of the complacent and socially unreflective masters. This is an example of what Hegel termed “negation of the negation.” In this framework, slaves – in a first negation – experience the loss of freedom, but then – in a second negation – negate that previous negation and create something positive, at least at the level of self-consciousness. This process of double negation, with a positive emerging out a negative, which Hegel also termed “absolute negativity” in his Science of Logic (Hegel, 2010: 89) is what the young Marx extoled as “the moving and creating principle” of Hegel’s philosophy, this in his 1844 “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” (1961: 176). Louis Althusser (1969) saw this kind of indebtedness to Hegel as confined to the young Marx. But in the penultimate chapter of Capital, Vol. I, published over two decades later, Marx also drew from this core aspect of Hegel’s dialectic, characterizing the working-class communist revolution he envisioned as the “negation of the negation” (Marx, 1976: 929). In this context, the first negation (primitive accumulation) was the dispossession of the working people of their land and other means of production by early capitalism, while the second negation (communist revolution) was the organized revolt by the industrial workers (modern counterparts of the dispossessed peasants and artisans), a revolt that results in a positive transcendence of the capitalist social order. The concept of contradiction is closely related to that of double or absolute negation. For Hegel as for Marx, contradiction takes the form not only of arguments among philosophers, but also of social and cultural cleavages. Contradictions are always present, even in seemingly unified social wholes, like states, communities, or families. This position is of course opposed to organicism. However, these contradictions may reside below the surface, failing to appear for long stretches. In such cases, one can speak of a social institution as a unity of opposites. At other times, contradiction rises to the surface, and propels social change. Yet social change itself can be contradictory, as Marx sees it, with progressive and reactionary elements coexisting, again in a unity of opposites. Other core concepts of Marx’s dialectic include universalism and totality, conceptualizing the social world as interconnected in ways that allow one to generalize from a particular form of oppression (a brutal slave master or supervisor) to viewing this in the context of the capitalist system as a whole and its drive for surplus value and profit. Thus, Marx characterized slavery under modern capitalism as the most oppressive form of slavery ever created, because it combined ancient forms of brutality with the relentless logic of capitalist value creation on a global scale. For Marx, such totalities are not meant to absorb and merge all difference and

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Karl Marx

particularity, however. Here again, Marx takes over an aspect of Hegel, that of opposition to abstract universalism, that is, forms of totality that deny difference, as seen in his ridicule of a “night in which all cows are black” (Hegel, 1977: 9). Marx also takes over from Hegel the notion of subject–object reversal, in which human constructs come to dominate the very humans who built them (Hudis, 2012). This theme runs through the Phenomenology, where successive forms of consciousness negate earlier ones, only to construct, unwittingly, new barriers to human freedom. Marx’s dialectic also exhibits crucial differences with that of Hegel. Even though Hegel was concerned with social and historical development, singling out, for example, the twists and turns of the French Revolution as the dialectic of history in action, he focused on the development of the free human consciousness more than on the actuality of human emancipation. Thus, while Hegel’s slaves acquire a new self-consciousness that moves the human spirit forward, Hegel never discusses their slave revolts, moving on to what he sees as a higher level of consciousness, stoicism. In contrast, Marx, who does focus on slave and plebeian uprisings, takes the dialectic down to earth, to the “real corporeal human being, with feet firmly planted on the solid ground,” as he wrote in his 1844 critique of Hegel (Marx, 1961: 181).1

Dehumanization, Humanism, and the Communist Free Association As with his discussions of Hegel and the dialectic, Marx’s elaboration of the theoretical categories of alienated labor and humanism emerge most explicitly in his early 1844 Manuscripts. He differentiates four forms of alienation. The first of these, workers’ alienation from the products of their labor, is seen in how the products of labor are appropriated by capital, and that in return, workers receive wages, a paltry sum compared to the value their labor added to the raw materials. This is alienation as exploitation. A subject–object reversal in a dialectical sense also occurs here, as the products of labor enrich and strengthen the side of capital, which can then dominate the workers even more effectively than before. Alienation 2 concerns the process of labor, which is stultifying and dehumanizing. This form would still hold even if wages became very high. Alienation 3 posits human labor as that of a free conscious subject, working creatively, as opposed to the more instinctual labor of animals like beavers. But this is largely missing in labor under capitalism. The fourth and final form of alienation is alienation from other people. Strikingly, and counterintuitively for those who see Marx as a narrowly economistic thinker, he concludes that “private property” is “the product, the necessary result, of alienated labor,” thus suggesting alienated labor as the defining characteristic of capitalist civilization (Marx, 1961: 105–106). He deepens the concept of alienation in Capital, especially in the section on commodity fetishism, where he refers to the “peculiar social character of the labor” that predominates under capitalism (Marx, 1976: 165). In the topsy-turvy world where this form of (alienated) labor is the norm, human relations become

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reified, no more than relations among things. Meanwhile things (commodities) are produced and then enter into relations with each other as subjects, while workers are objectified. As Karel Kosík wrote, “Not theory but reality itself reduces man to an abstraction” (1976 [1961]: 52). This subject–object reversal is no mere illusion, since social relations now “appear as what they are” under the domination of capital (Marx, 1976: 166). Postmodernists have objected that the concept of alienation implies a fixed human essence that is or could be non-alienated (Baudrillard, 1988). To be sure, Marx projects from 1844 onwards notions of a non-alienated life, a non-alienated society. However, this is not a fixed concept of human essence, as will be discussed below under “historical materialism.” In 1859 in the Critique of Political Economy, Marx characterized capitalist society as part of the “prehistory of human society” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 29: 264), again tying his analysis of its structure to what C. L. R. James later called “the future that is in the present” (1980: 79); that is, the communist free association he projected for humanity, should it be able to progress beyond capitalism. It is often claimed that Marx’s writings “contain virtually nothing about the postcapitalist economy” (Hobsbawm, 2004: 65). But as recent work by Peter Hudis (2012) has shown, Marx’s writings on communism and the free association of the future are actually quite extensive, if one includes not only the small number of his positive descriptions of communism, but also his very extensive critical discussions of rival theories of socialism. This can be seen as early as 1844, when Marx bitterly attacks what he calls a “crude and unreflective communism” that “negates the human personality in every sphere,” and wherein “the role of worker is not abolished, but extended to all human beings” (1961: 125) via a leveling down, both materially and intellectually. In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels likewise attack various forms of socialism and communism, while espousing a form of communism in which “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 506). But it is in the 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program” that Marx, in a very few pages, sketches his concept of communism most systematically. Here, under a society based upon “common ownership of the means of production,” production to create value and surplus value has disappeared, with only use values remaining (Marx, 1996: 213). In the first, already stateless, phase of communism, members of society would be remunerated based upon the “duration or intensity” of the labor they contribute to the community (Marx, 1996: 214). At one swoop, this nearly destroys the ancient privileging of mental over manual labor, with janitors or those caring for autistic children presumably on the same level of remuneration as professors or physicians. Still, because some can contribute more labor than others due to physical or familial differences, this remains an unequal society. In the second or higher phase of communism, which appears only after a long gestation period, the standard for remuneration of labor becomes fully communal, “and society can inscribe upon its banners, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Marx, 1996: 215). The first phase of communism is also described briefly in the fetishism section of Capital 1, where Marx writes of “an association of free men, working with the means

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Karl Marx

of production held in common” (Marx, 1976: 171). Again, labor is no longer performed for value creation, and labor time “serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labor, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption” (Marx, 1976: 172). But here, the stress is on how the creation of a new society in this manner strips off the commodity fetish, rendering human relations not only free and equal, but also clear and transparent as opposed to veiled and concealed.

Historical Materialism and Modes of Production Clearly, Marx did not hold that communism could be achieved solely by a sudden leap based on strongly held ideas. It would need to wait for historical and material conditions to mature in order to form the foundation of such a development. That is seen in his insistence upon a first and second phase of communism, even after capitalism was transcended. He evokes these objective obstacles in 1852 in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he writes that human beings “make their own history,” but “not in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited” (Marx, 1996: 32). Repeatedly, Marx described himself as a materialist and referred to his method as dialectical. However, the phrase “dialectical materialism” was coined a decade after his death by the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, and as Gramsci later noted, this opened the door to reducing dialectic “to the level of a sub-species of formal logic and elementary scholastics” (1971: 435). Marx did not use the phrase “historical materialism” either, but that term was coined by his close colleague Engels and is therefore used here, albeit with caution. In 1846, Marx and Engels set out their materialist point of view in the German Ideology, castigating various idealist followers of Hegel, although not Hegel himself, for ignoring the material basis of human life and history. They wrote famously that “life requires above all food and drink, shelter and clothing, and quite a bit more” before human beings can philosophize (Marx, 1994: 127). Rather than fixed, the basic human needs they theorized were changing and developing historically, expanding over time, as the satisfaction of needs led to “new needs” (Marx, 1994: 127). In this sense, Marx’s materialism differs from the relatively fixed, ahistorical notions of human needs put forth by early modern political theorists like Machiavelli and Hobbes, although it is somewhat indebted to them. The same is true of Darwinism, which Marx criticized as “the abstract materialism of natural science” that “excludes the historical process” (Marx, 1976: 494). As Erich Fromm noted, Marx aimed at a non-materialistic, communist future to be arrived at through conscious human self-activity. He saw the predominance of selfish materialism in modern society as the result not of a fixed human nature but of a particular mode of production, capitalism: “Marx’s ‘materialistic’ or ‘economic’ interpretation of history has nothing whatsoever to do with an alleged ‘materialistic’ or ‘economic’ striving as the most fundamental drive in man” (Fromm, 1961: 13).

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In the German Ideology, they also set forth in preliminary terms what would become known as the theory of modes of production, large historical epochs dominated by a particular forms of technology and labor. As Marx intoned in 1847 in the Poverty of Philosophy, arguably the first exposition of his critique of political economy, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 166). In the German Ideology, these are presented along Western European lines, with a stateless tribal past succeeded by the ancient Greco-Roman slave-based mode of production, and then by the serf-based feudal one, with the latter succeeded in its turn by the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production. If a mode of production based upon the communist future Marx envisioned is added, one arrives at a fivefold list: tribal, ancient, feudal, capitalist, and communist. In the dogmatic forms of Marxist theory that prevailed in the Soviet Union and China, this became something of a straitjacket, as it was applied in cookie-cutter fashion to parts of the world whose social structures differed significantly from those of Western Europe. In later writings, Marx added a sixth or “Asiatic” mode of production (AMP) alongside these. However, this was not a chronological but a geographic category, suggesting that the Asian mode of production existed contemporaneously alongside the ancient and feudal formations in Western Europe. Over time, he came to include Russia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the whole of Asia in the AMP. As Marx saw it, the Western ancient and especially feudal modes of production were characterized by a greater degree of individual freedom and individual private property in the means of production, mainly agricultural land in pre-capitalist times. In contrast, the AMP tended toward more communal forms of landownership and social relations, and strong centralized states. Marx first elaborated these arguments at a theoretical level in 1857–1858 in the Grundrisse, a preliminary draft of Capital, where he contrasted the more individual peasant landholding of ancient Rome with premodern India, where “communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land” prevailed (Marx, 1973: 472). In Capital, Vol. 1, where he concentrated upon British industrial development, he left the AMP to the side, although he did refer at one point to “ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production” (Marx, 1976: 172). Later, in his 1879–1882 notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies, to be discussed below, he attacked explicitly the notion that precolonial India was feudal. Probably the most important point here is not the attempt to collapse so many non-European pre-capitalist societies into the AMP as a catch-all category, for which Marx has been criticized (Lubacz, 1984). Arguably, the key issue is Marx’s move away from the notion that the successive modes of production in Western Europe were a historical model that explained the rest of the world in unilinear and deterministic fashion (Anderson, 2016). Unlike Weber, Marx never elaborated a systematic theory of the various forms of pre-capitalist society and their differences with modern Western capitalism. Usually, he focuses on societies outside capitalism in order to define more clearly the features of capitalist modernity. At other times, he singles out aspects of still-existent noncapitalist social relations that could hasten or retard either the full development of capitalism. For example, he took up how the persistence of the British aristocracy

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both limited the power of capital and, at the same time, gave additional resources to a largely capitalist state in terms of military officers and soldiers drawn from a largely conservative rural population. At still other times, he focuses on how features of non-capitalist societies could furnish forces of resistance to capitalism.

Theory of Value and Systemic Collapse The quest for the unlimited accumulation of value, surplus value, capital, and ultimately, profit, characterizes modern capitalism as a whole, as it does in no pre-capitalist society, however wealthy or pecuniary. As Marx wrote in Capital, Vol. I, “Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production” is the driving force of capitalism (Marx, 1976: 742). Part of this is due to the remarkable technological and organizational innovations that demarcate capitalism from earlier modes of production, making possible an unprecedented level of accumulation of material wealth. An equally important aspect is, in the words of Moishe Postone, the utterly impersonal character of the capitalist system, characterized by “the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute” (1993: 30). Marx’s theory of value is indebted to the labor theory of value developed earlier by Adam Smith. As Marx notes in Capital 1, such a theory arose in the modern era, when the concept of a basic equality among human beings had become “a fixed popular opinion” (Marx, 1976: 152). This helped eighteenth-century economists to acknowledge the contribution of ordinary physical labor to the creation of value, something that Aristotle had missed, due to the class prejudices of his time. However, Marx’s theory should really be described as a value theory of labor, in that value creation, not the creation of a specific product, is the goal of capitalist production. Marx’s value theory of labor went through various changes, but in its fully developed version in Capital 1, the forms of value interact with forms of labor in an industrial capitalist society where commodity production is the overwhelmingly dominant economic form. Thus, almost all production is for sale rather than immediate or local use, and rather than a pre-capitalist surplus product in kind, capitalism is based upon the creation of commodities, not for their own sake, but for the accumulation of surplus value, and ultimately, of profit. First, Marx presents the value of these commodities as a unity of opposites, divided into use value and exchange value. Use value is qualitative, multiple, and, to an extent, subjective. Exchange value cuts across all the various uses, yet it underlies a quantifiable measurement of value. The exchange value of a commodity is based upon something uniform and calculable, the quantity of socially necessary labor time (SNLT) required to produce it. This quantifies the category of scarcity, for example: a pound of salt carries less value than a pound of gold because more SNLT is required to find, mine, and refine gold. The SNLT needed to produce particular commodities tends to decrease as capitalism develops, under the ever-moving standard of “the average degree of skill and intensity of labor

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prevalent at that time” (Marx, 1976: 129). On the one hand, all commodities must possess use value of some sort in order to have exchange value. On the other hand, in limited cases, use values can exist independent of exchange value, such as natural phenomena like meadows filled with flowers, or products produced for the immediate use of oneself, friends, or family. At another level, however, the key to commodity production is not even exchange value, but rather the creation of value, of which exchange value is one form of appearance. For example, capital is ultimately interested in surplus value, which leads to profit, not mere exchange value. A variety of things can become capital, if they are employed to create value: money, raw materials, tools and machinery, structures like factory buildings, land, and even labor power. Marx divides capital employed into two basic types: variable capital (labor power at the point of production) and constant capital (the other types of capital, mainly machinery). Closely linked to the multiple forms of value are the dual forms of labor that produce commodities under capitalism. On this point, Marx claims to have made an innovation with regard to the classical political economists. On the one hand, human work can take the form of concrete useful labor, which is related to the various specific types of labor conducted creatively with a combination of our mental and manual faculties. Here, Marx contrasts the labor of other social animals like spiders or bees to human social labor, arguing that the latter operates in a context where it is the “result” of a “purpose” that is “conscious” and that involves conceptualizing the process in advance. The results may be less beautiful or symmetric than a spider’s web or a beehive, but they are the result of purposeful and imaginative rather than purely instinctual labor (Marx, 1976: 284). Such concrete labor is transhistorically human, and as Bertell Ollman notes, theorizing at this level of generality is rather an “exception” for Marx (Ollman, 1993: 59). On other hand, human work under capitalism can also take the form of abstract labor, which is quantifiable, uniform, and where the heightened division of labor that characterizes capitalism means that the worker performs less and less concrete useful labor of the sort mentioned above. Abstract labor, the predominant form of labor under capitalism, flattens out the differences among workers, especially with regard to skill. This is possible because capitalist machine production requires large numbers – at least in Marx’s time – of unskilled factory hands, as against the highly skilled labor characteristic of the earlier guild system. The concepts of labor power and of surplus value also come to the fore here. Capital contracts labor power for a specific time period, and unlike under slavery, does not seek to own the laborer, only the product. Labor power in the context of actual production becomes variable capital, and is employed in a manner that ever more efficiently seeks to create as much value as possible during the time in which the workers are at work under the control of capital. The resultant exploitation of the workers is partially hidden under the wage system. As Marx noted as early as the 1840s, wages are not a share of the product but tend toward the minimum workers need to exist, plus be able to propagate the next generation of workers. If workers are paid by the day, for example, capital makes sure that the value they add to the product of labor surpasses as much as

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possible that expended for their wages. Moreover, this ratio continually expands in capital’s favor as the system develops. Marx introduces the category of surplus labor time to describe that part of the working day that continues, even after the workers have created a quantity of value equivalent to their wages. In his eyes, this is as exploitative as was the corvée system under feudalism, but is largely hidden from view under the wage system. Labor power at the point of production is termed variable capital because its value increases dramatically during the production process, creating a surplus value above and beyond its value at the point of purchase by capital, that is, its wages. Besides the creation of the factory itself, with its close organized supervision of labor, capital employs two basic methods to expand surplus labor time and thus to create a greater and greater accumulation of surplus value, which becomes the prime source of profit. The first of these is the creation of absolute surplus value, which results from expanding the working day without raising the daily wage. An enormous lengthening of the working day took place during the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, facilitated through technical innovations like artificial lighting. As this process became widely discredited due to the immense human suffering that ensued, and the state began to place the working day under stricter legal limits, the second form, the creation of relative surplus value, came to the fore. Here, machinery as a form of constant capital took on a more important role in the production process. Ever more complex machinery reduced the size of the workforce, allowing each worker to produce vastly greater quantities of value during the workday. For that reason, Marx emphasizes the preponderance of constant capital over variable capital (labor power) at this stage. With machine production, the amount of surplus labor time increases dramatically, as workers could create a value equivalent to their wages during a short period at the beginning of the workday, with the rest of their day becoming surplus labor time, leading to a greater and greater accumulation of surplus value. In the Grundrisse, Marx sketched the possibility of an “automaton,” a production system in which there were so few workers that they were reduced to the functions of “watchman and regulator” (1973: 705). In Capital, published a decade later, he was more cautious, stressing the deleterious effects of machine production on the worker: harder work to keep up with the machine, increased alienation, and so on. He also emphasized how advanced machine production created a permanently large force of unemployed workers, even when production was ramping up, exerting economic pressures that helped capital to control labor. Since value ultimately comes from the exercise of labor power, however, the recourse to relative surplus value via more and more machinery eventually creates a downward spiral. This results not only in stagnation within the most developed capitalist economies, but also in deep economic crises. While the immediate causes of these crises are multiple – real estate or stock market bubbles, for example – in Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx locates the underlying cause of stagnation and crisis in “a gradual fall in the general rate of profit,” which is a tendency of all advanced capitalist economies (Marx, 1981: 318). This takes place even if such a falling rate of profit is “coupled with a simultaneous increase in the absolute mass of profit.”

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This is because, with the increasing preponderance of machinery, there occurs a “relative fall in variable capital [labor power] as a proportion of the total capital,” as a result of the vast capital outlays for machinery (Marx, 1981: 326). In fact, the tendential decline in the rate of profit underlies the effort by capital to squeeze more out of labor, by lengthening or intensifying the working day. As Dunayevskaya noted: “What Marx is saying is that even if the worker learned to live on air and could work all twenty-four hours a day, this ever-expanding monster of machine production could not keep on expanding without collapsing, since living labor is the only source of this value and surplus value” (1958: 141; see also Grossman, 1992). Marx holds that because capitalism has no other choice but to move into an increasingly skewed ratio of constant to variable capital, and yet variable capital is the ultimate source of all value, “The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” (Marx, 1981: 358). The various speculative schemes that can spark economic crises are examples of efforts to get around this problem. There are of course countervailing tendencies. For example, the problem can be resolved, at least temporarily, by austerity at home or recourse to labor in low-wage countries. Moreover, an economic crisis that destroys large quantities of capital – and ruins the lives of many people – allows the cycle to commence anew, so long as the system does not collapse entirely. But for Marx, the long-run outlook for the capitalism is tenuous. As Marx and Engels wrote as early as the Communist Manifesto, capitalism was by far the most productive economic system in history, having built up the economic infrastructure immeasurably and having created at least the potential for a higher standard of living for the working population. In this sense, the system represented social progress for humanity, something they declaimed in lyrical tones. At the same time, they noted, it was riven by a deep contradiction: It was an inherently unstable system, prone to economic crisis and even collapse at the time of its greatest apparent success. In this sense, they argued, it was a doomed system, because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 495).

Theory of Social Classes, the State, and Revolution Marx theorizes social classes in terms of their relationship to the means of production. Thus, in his model, the positions of chattel slaves, peasants, and industrial workers differ sharply from each other, although they are all members of subordinate classes. Slaves are owned outright by the master class, as is the product of their labor. Peasants are often enserfed and obligated to turn over part of their social product in kind and to furnish labor to the landowning class, but they own or at least exercise possessory rights over a plot of land, own their tools, and have other personal rights over their bodies. Often originating as dispossessed peasants, industrial wageworkers are legally free, but without possession or ownership of their tools and other means of production. Therefore, they are compelled by economic necessity to sell their labor power to the capitalist class for a specified time and a specified wage. As capitalism develops with ever more complex machinery and technology,

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also creating stupendous wealth, the relative economic distance between labor and capital grows rather than shrinks, even if wages are increased. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels elaborated a theory of polarization and revolution, which they saw as the motor of human history. All history up to their time had been, they wrote, characterized by class struggle, although the social classes had changed from those in the ancient and feudal modes of production, to those of modern capitalism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 482). Modern capitalist society placed the bourgeoisie – the old commercial middle class in pre-capitalist times that now owned the factories and other modern means of production – in the dominant position. As its members no longer owned their means of production – land and tools in pre-capitalist times – the subordinate class was composed of propertyless wage laborers in the factories and other modern spheres of production. Capitalism was distinctive in that “it has simplified the class antagonisms” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 485). The various middle strata – shopkeepers, small landowners, and so on – were destined to fall for the most part into the working classes, with a few of them rising into the bourgeoisie. Because status divisions had receded in favor of purely monetary ones, class conflict was more open than ever before, no longer hidden by paternalism or the sense of belonging to a common religious community. Since this polarization was only a tendency, when he described the actually existing class structure of the capitalist societies of his time, Marx sometimes singled out two other older but still significant social classes, aristocratic landowners and peasants, as well as the continuing presence of the petty bourgeois classes. For example, in a fragment on social classes, he writes of “the three great social classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production” as the “owners of mere labor-power, the owners of capital, and the landowners” (Marx, 1981: 1025). At another level, Marx traced in Capital 1 the historical origins of the two great modern social classes, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and the proletariat or working class. A propertyless class of workers in the urban centers emerged through a series of dispossessions and usurpations over several centuries. In this process, much of the English peasantry was dispossessed of its land, as subsistence agriculture was replaced by large-scale commercial agriculture, which required far less labor. The modern working class did not go willingly into the factories of industrial capitalism, but did so only out of desperation after being thrown, propertyless, out of the old rural economy and being subjected to harsh penalties by the nascent modern state for vagrancy and other crimes of destitution. New economic forces were thus abetted by the emerging centralized modern state. Marx’s historical sketch culminated, however, not with the birth of capitalism and the modern state, but with their overthrow: “There also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” This revolt would lead to the end of “capitalist private property.” He quickly added, “This is the negation of the negation” (Marx,

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1976: 929). As mentioned above, this was a reference to one of Hegel’s core dialectical concepts. Such a form of presentation is not unusual where Marx was concerned, for class is not a stable structure but one imbued with conflict and revolution (Holloway, 2002). Already in the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels had pointed to the possibility of class revolution by the increasingly wretched proletariat. That possibility – and that of economic collapse – formed the two bases for the notion that capitalism was a transitory, doomed system. As for the state, in the Manifesto it represented the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, although it mediated among various fractions of that class, “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 486). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx’s 1852 account of the Bonapartist state that had just emerged in France, offers what is often seen as a subtler conceptualization of the capitalist state than the Manifesto, one where the state seems at times to be suspended above the various social classes. It “restricts, controls, regulates, oversees, and supervises civil life from its most allencompassing expression to its most insignificant stirrings” (Marx, 1996: 68). While the state draws support from parts of the peasantry, who react against the urban liberals and socialists, its true basis is the French bourgeoisie, even though their political parties are repressed by Bonapartism: “But the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are intertwined in the most intimate way with the maintenance of just that wide-ranging and highly ramified machinery of state” (Marx, 1996: 68). This complexity was more like a hall of mirrors than the more instrumentalist state of the Communist Manifesto, revealing, in the formulation of Paul Thomas, “an emphasis on the power of the state apparatus itself” (1994: 105). The Brumaire analyzes what amounted to the closest political system to modern totalitarianism during Marx’s lifetime. The Bonapartist state was riven with police spies, and also appealed in demagogic fashion to the masses, especially the peasantry and part of the urban poor. It even claimed to be a revolutionary state, while at the same time cracking down on democratic and labor movements. If Britain exemplified the most developed capitalist economy of the time, Bonapartist France represented for Marx the highest evolution of the modern state. Fifteen years later, Marx developed two issues, the workers as revolutionary subject and the state as mediator of class conflict, this in the “Working Day” chapter of Capital 1. There, he recounted the successful mobilizations of English workers for a ten-hour working day during the 1840s and 1850s, something he termed a greater achievement than “the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’” (416). Marx saw revolutionary implications in this type of reform, in no small part because workers could not easily participate in political or civic life, including the communist movements he espoused, when working eighty or more hours per week. The English workers achieved this when the dominant classes split, with the landowner-based Tories allowing legislation establishing the ten-hour day as the legal limit to pass Parliament, over the opposition of the Liberals, who were close to the manufacturing interests. The factory inspectors, an element of the state, also brought pressure within the political system for

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enforcement of the new law, something capital had resisted in the courts and elsewhere. This is the most prominent place in the text of Capital 1 where Marx speaks of class struggle, here with regard to its domestic as well as international impact: “The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class . . . The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English working class, but of the modern working class in general” (413). The Bonapartist state came crashing down in 1871, in the wake of military defeat by Prussia. In the “Civil War in France,” Marx again took up both the Bonapartist state and what he saw as an incipient communist revolution in the Paris Commune of 1871. The Bonapartist state had grown not out of reaction pure and simple, but out of the failures of the 1848 revolution in France. In a sense, it was the culmination of the various “bourgeois” revolutions since the eighteenth century, all of which had ended with the strengthening and centralization of the state. Such a state was utterly compatible with capitalism, especially during a time of social upheaval on the part of the workers, when a fearful bourgeoisie retreated from its earlier commitment to democratization. The Commune represented an example of working-class revolution, the only large-scale revolution of this type that occurred during Marx’s lifetime. In the “Civil War in France,” he stressed the Commune’s anti-statist character, tying anticapitalism and anti-statism closely together. In his account, the Commune abolished the standing army and the police in favor of a popular militia. It also eliminated much of the state bureaucracy, and ruled via direct election from the neighborhoods, with representatives paid an average worker’s wage and subject to immediate recall. On the economic side, he noted that some factories were occupied and reopened under democratic management by workers. All of this amounted to an incipient communist system, at least in its aspirations. He wrote that the Commune aimed at “transforming the means of production . . . into mere instruments of free and associated labor,” adding: “But this is Communism, ‘impossible’ Communism!” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 22: 335). He concluded that it constituted “the political form at last discovered by which to work out the economical emancipation of Labor” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 22: 334). Communist revolution was by no means the only kind of revolution Marx championed, however. He also supported almost all democratic revolutions, as seen in his participation in the 1848–1849 revolution in Germany. It is important to note that during Marx’s life, most of the governments of Europe were semiabsolute monarchies. This was certainly a factor in his fervent support for the North during the US Civil War of 1861–1865, at a time when British establishment opinion was claiming that the impending breakup of the United States showed the nonviability of democratic forms of government. The Civil War, which in his view amounted to a revolution that was transforming an entire social order by giving formal freedom to 4 million slaves, also offered a model of revolution that differed somewhat from that of the Commune, one based upon constitutional and democratic principles and sentiments. Such a possibility was something of an exception in Marx’s eyes, however.

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Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Relation to Capital and Class As part of his rejection of abstract universals, Marx’s working class was not a unified whole, but contained various differences and particularities. This emerges particularly strongly in his writings on race and ethnicity. One key example of this was his analysis of the Civil War, slavery, and race in the United States, mentioned above. Even before the Communist Manifesto, Marx had seen slavery as crucial to modern capitalism: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 38: 101). During the 1850s he worked as European correspondent for the New York Tribune, the pro-abolitionist newspaper that was the journal of record of its day. As the Civil War approached, Marx hailed John Brown’s band’s attempt at sparking a slave uprising, expressing the hope that it would lead to widespread slave revolts. Once the war began, he sided with the North, as did most European leftists, labor activists, and liberals. Critical of Lincoln’s temporizing, Marx called upon the North to implement immediate abolition, the use of Black troops, and full political rights for emancipated slaves. In the face of appeals from leading British politicians to support intervention on the side of the South, Marx published articles hailing the internationalism of British workers for holding steadfast at numerous public meetings in support of the North, even as they faced mass unemployment in the textile mills due to the cotton blockade the North had imposed on Southern ports. He also enthused over the involvement of Black troops, which he argued, in an 1862 letter to Engels, “would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves” (Marx and Engels, 2016: 121). Overall, he regarded the war as a social revolution, not only, as mentioned above, because it destroyed a social system based upon the labor of 4 million slaves, but also because US radicals were calling for land distribution to the former slaves, something he mentioned in Capital 1. Also in Capital, he noted the new organizational strides made by the US labor movement after the war, arguing that the working class had been weakened due to divisions based upon race and slave status: “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (Marx, 1976: 414; Nimtz, 2003). The labor and socialist networks supporting the North extended across Western Europe and formed an important nucleus among those who founded the International Working Men’s Association or First International in 1864, and in which Marx became the decisive voice. Among the International’s first public statements was an open letter, drafted by Marx and signed by a number of labor leaders, congratulating Lincoln for his landslide victory in the 1864 elections. Cognizant of the support British labor had afforded the United States in the face of threats of British intervention on the side of the South, the Lincoln administration issued a warm public reply. A year later, however, after the conservative Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, the International issued a firm warning, in an address “To the People of the United States of America”: “As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease. Let your

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citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve. If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood” (Marx and Engels, 2016: 187). Marx’s conceptualization of race, ethnicity, and revolution achieved a greater theoretical focus in his writings on Ireland, which also formed part of the debates within the International. From early on, Marx had supported Irish independence from Britain, but the Irish question came to a head in the late 1860s, with the rise of the left-wing nationalist Fenian movement, which drew its base from the peasantry, opposed Irish as well as British landowners, and was not terribly close to the Church. This involved not only the British colony of Ireland, but also the large impoverished Irish immigrant minority inside Britain, which formed an important part of the working class. Marx wrote in 1869 that he had reversed his earlier position on Ireland, now seeing Irish national liberation as a ferment that could help move British workers forward: “For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy . . . Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 43: 398). Facing opposition to this position within the London-based General Council of the International from British trade unionists, Marx and several Continental European delegates won the day, getting the International to stage rallies and issue a petition to the Crown to save a group of Irish nationalists from execution. At this point, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, also a member of the International, protested that the General Council was involving itself inappropriately in non-labor issues. In response, Marx got a lengthy statement approved by the General Council supporting his position. Here one finds the argument that what came to be called national liberation movements are important potential allies of the labor movement inside the leading colonial powers. And more sharply even than he had with respect to race relations in the United States, to which he alludes, Marx here conceptualizes a dialectic of race/ethnicity and class at a complex level: The English bourgeoisie has not only exploited the Irish misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps . . . In all the big industrial centers in England, there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages . . . He regards him practically in the same way the poor whites in the southern states of North America regard the black slaves. This antagonism between the proletarians in England is artificially nourished and kept alive by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of maintaining its power. (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 21: 120)

Although Marx also wrote on gender and women’s oppression throughout his life, his own contribution has until recently been overshadowed by the monumental and somewhat schematic 1884 study by Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Marx’s discussions of gender are for the most part brief, and have

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received a full-scale treatment only recently (Brown, 2012). In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of gender relations as a fundamental yardstick by which to judge overall social progress: “The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behavior of the human being has become human” (Marx, 1961: 126). In an 1846 essay/translation article on suicide in post-revolutionary France, he devoted most of his attention to female suicide sparked by oppressive gender relations (Plaut and Anderson, 1999). But his lengthiest treatment of gender occurred at the end of his life, in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880–1882, part of which formed the basis for Engels’s celebrated book. In these notes on anthropological works composed at the end of his life, Marx took up a variety of cultures, from Native Americans like the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks and Romans. These notes suggested a more nuanced, dialectical view of gender than that found in Engel’s Origin of the Family. First, while also taken with the relative gender equality among the preliterate Iroquois and similar groups, Marx expresses skepticism about the degree of that equality, as against Engels’s more idyllic treatment (Dunayevskaya, 1992). Second, where Engels held that the rise of class society and the state led to permanent gender subordination for women, a “worldhistorical defeat of the female sex” that could only be rolled back by a modern communism, Marx noted how aristocratic Roman women achieved greater social power than their Greek predecessors (Brown, 2012). Marx also treated Greek gender subordination dialectically, writing at one point: “From beginning to end under the Greeks a principle of studied selfishness among the males, tending to lessen the appreciation of women, scarcely found among savages . . . But the relationship to the goddesses on Olympus shows remembering and reflection back to an earlier, freer and more powerful position for women” (Krader, 1974: 121). While he did not live to develop these notes in essay or book form, they show a striking turn in his last years.

Colonialism, Globalization, and New Forces of Revolution In these and other notebooks during his last years, Marx again turned his gaze eastward, toward India, Russia, and other societies peripheral to industrializing Western Europe. Among Marx’s earliest discussions of colonialism is a troubling passage in the Communist Manifesto that seemed to support the 1839–1842 British Opium War against China: “The bourgeoisie . . . draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 6: 488). He wrote in a similar vein in his 1853 articles on India for the Tribune, painting India in Orientalist tones as a backward, static society without any real history. Influenced strongly by Hegel’s Philosophy of History, he wrote that India had been unable to mount a serious resistance to outside conquering powers due to its internal weaknesses, and that those powers broke the stasis of a civilization without any real historical development of its own (Löwy, 1986). India’s stasis was rooted in the communal forms of labor and governance in the villages, which, as against modern

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emancipatory communism, offered a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism” from above by exercising a very effective discipline over the peasantry. The most recent of these outside powers, the capitalist British, were beginning to mold India in their image, to good effect overall. Ever the dialectician though, Marx also alluded briefly to “barbaric” features of British colonialism and expressed support for an eventual Indian revolt against colonialism (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004 12: 221). Even in this instance, however, his notion of historical change in India remained fundamentally unilinear in 1853, with European civilization serving as an overall model of progress. During the same period he also wrote scathingly of Russia as a civilization alien to Europe, with a state based upon a form of “Oriental despotism” inherited from Mongol rule. In addition, Russian culture and society lacked the potential for a revolutionary opposition due to the collectivist forms of rule under “Oriental despotism,” and had therefore been the bastion of reaction in Europe, intervening massively in the West to defeat the revolutions of 1848–1849. Marx pivoted away from these Eurocentric positions in 1856–1859, in writings for the Tribune about the Second Opium War in China and the Sepoy Uprising in India. By now, he fervently supported these anti-colonial uprisings against what he saw as an increasingly barbaric British imperialism. This was the same period in which he composed the Grundrisse, with its discussion of historical differences between premodern Western and Asian modes of production, and its critique of linear determinism in terms of successive modes of production. By 1858–1860, as peasant unrest accompanied moves by the Tsar to emancipate the serfs, he also began to move away from his earlier stance toward Russia. Marx returned to these kinds of concerns two decades later. In his 1879–1882 notebooks on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies and gender, some of which were discussed above, Marx concentrated not only upon preliterate clan societies, but also on the Indian subcontinent and its communal villages. In notes on various anthropological and historical works, Marx seemed to reconceptualize his earlier views on India. He became more aware of the incessant resistance that Indians had mounted against foreign conquerors, and lauded both the anti-Mughal resistance fighter Shivaji and, once again, the anti-British Sepoy Uprising. He also devoted considerable space in these notes to the communal village structures that had persisted from ancient times, but now he stressed historical change rather than stasis, as these villages seemed to have evolved from kinship-based to residential-based communal forms of self-rule (Anderson, 2016). During the 1870s, he also made some important changes to Capital 1 that made clear that the “primitive accumulation of capital” section was a sketch of British development and that it would be the model at most for the rest of “Western Europe,” thus leaving open the possible future development of non-Western societies (Anderson, 1983). Most strikingly, in letters to Russian intellectuals and a new preface to the Communist Manifesto, he reversed his earlier position on “Oriental despotism,” now arguing that the communal structures of Russian villages could become the basis for a modern communism. During the 1870s, he became fluent in Russian and interacted widely with intellectuals from that country where, to his great surprise,

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Capital 1 had received, upon its translation into Russian, more discussion than in Germany. Many intellectuals read his description of capitalism, especially the section on primitive accumulation, as a sketch of Russia’s future. But in these late writings on Russia, Marx denied any such intention, sometimes quoting from the French edition of his book, published too late to become the basis of the Russian one. First, he denied, in response to a review of the Russian edition of his book, that he had attempted in Capital 1 to develop “the master key of a general historico-philosophical theory” (Shanin, 1983: 136; Smith, 1995). Second, he mentioned that he had been studying Russian agriculture deeply and that his studies had convinced him of fundamental differences between the Russian communal village and its more individualized Western European counterpart. Third, he and Engels wrote, in the 1882 preface to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, which was Marx’s last publication in any language: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (Shanin, 1983: 139). This carefully worded statement extoled the revolutionary possibilities of Russia’s communal villages, while avoiding any notion that a technologically underdeveloped country could achieve an emancipatory form of communism entirely on its own. It also pointed to a theme developed throughout his life, the interconnectedness of the struggles of working people across geographic, national, and racial/ethnic lines. This preface, soon also published in German, was quickly forgotten by those who developed Marxism as a doctrine.

Conclusion A century ago, academic sociologists saw Marx as a theorist of capital and class, and more as a revolutionist than a sociologist. Then, during most of the twentieth century, his social theory was tied – unjustly – to monstrous regimes in the East that governed in his name, while Western Marxists focused upon his dialectical perspective, his theory of the state, his underlying humanistic standpoint, and other aspects ignored in the dogmatic versions of Marxism propagated by the ideologists of those regimes. In recent decades, social theorists have returned increasingly to Marx’s notion of capitalism as a global system, to his theory of class polarization and of economic stagnation and crisis, especially since the 2008 crash, and to an interrogation of his theoretical corpus in light of contemporary concerns with race, gender, and the legacies of colonialism.

References Althusser, Louis. 1969. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Vintage. Anderson, Kevin B. 1983. “The ‘Unknown’ Marx’s Capital, Vol. I: The French Edition of 1872–75, 100 Years Later.” Review of Radical Political Economics 15(4): 71–80.

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1995. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 2016. Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Expanded edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Heather. 2012. Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study. Leiden: Brill. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. “The Masses.” In Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (pp. 207–219). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1958. Marxism and Freedom. New York: Bookman Associates. 1992. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed. With a preface by Adrienne Rich. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Fromm, Erich. 1961. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Grossmann, Henryk. 1992 [1929]. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System. London: Pluto Press. Hegel. G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford. 2010 [1812–1816]. Science of Logic. Trans. George Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2004. “Marx, Karl Heinrich.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (pp. 57–66). New York: Oxford University Press. Holloway, John. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto. Hudis, Peter. 2012. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. James, C. L. R. 1980 [1947]. “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity.” In Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (pp. 70–105). London: Alison & Busby. Kosík, Karel. 1976 [1961]. Dialectics of the Concrete. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Krader, Lawrence (ed.). 1974. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Assen: Van Gorcum. Löwy, Michael. 1986. “La dialectique du progrès et l’enjeu actuel des mouvements sociaux.” In Congrès Marx International. Cent ans de marxisme. Bilan critique et perspectives (pp. 197–209). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lubacz, Heinz. 1984. “Marx’s Concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production: A Genetic Analysis.” Economy and Society 13(4): 456–483. Lukács, Georg. 1971 [1923]. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. 1961. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” Trans. Tom Bottomore. In Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (pp. 87–196). New York: Frederick Ungar. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin. 1976 [1867–1875]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. 1981 [1894]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin. 1994. Early Political Writings. Trans. and ed. Joseph O’Malley. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Later Political Writings. Trans. and ed. Terrell Carver. New York: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 2016. The Civil War in the United States. Ed. Andrew Zimmerman. New York: International Publishers.

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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1975–2004. Collected Works. Fifty volumes. New York: International Publishers. Nimtz, August H. 2003. Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ollman, Bertell. 1993. Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge. Plaut, Eric, and Kevin B. Anderson (eds.). 1999. Marx on Suicide. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shanin, Teodor (ed.). 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York: Monthly Review Press. Smith, David Norman. 1995. “The Ethnological Imagination.” In Dittmar Schorkowitz (ed.), Ethnohistorische Wege und Lehrjahre eines Philosophen. Festschrift für Lawrence Krader zum 75. Geburtstag (pp. 102–119). New York: Peter Lang. Thomas, Paul D. 1994. Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved. New York: Routledge.

Notes 1. Here and elsewhere, I have silently amended the translation, rendering Marx’s word “Mensch” more accurately (and because English usage has changed in recent decades) as human being, not “man,” for which there is a separate German word, “Mann.”

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4 The Marxist Legacy Peter Beilharz

What is the Marxist legacy? Let us begin with a mind game. Imagine yourself in a plush room in the Kremlin around 1950, the proverbial fly on the wall. To our left, the youthful figure of Cornelius Castoriadis, until recently a Greek Trotskyist, but on the way to the advocacy of the idea of autonomy as the core value for radicals; a true libertarian in the making. On our right, Josef Stalin, mass murderer, self-proclaimed saviour of the Soviet peoples, and responsible for their mass execution and starvation. Is it silence that ensues, or else angry exchange? What are these two doing in the same room? Of course, this is a mind game; they never met, and had they, Castoriadis would have been immediately dispatched to the cells, waiting for the press of cold metal on the nape of his neck. One was the master, the engineer of human souls; the other was the rebel, self-driven to say no to dictatorship, yes to self-legislation and to the dream of freedom, driven into exile in Paris. The paradox, or the contradiction of this image is apparent: these were both Marxists. The Marxist legacy is founded on this contradiction, which in turn reflects a contradiction in Marx and in the broader socialist tradition. There have been various attempts to capture, or at least to name this contradiction over the years. Hal Draper famously catalogued the Two Souls of Socialism in 1966 (Draper, 1966). Twenty years later Alvin Gouldner revisited the field in a book called The Two Marxisms (Gouldner, 1978). Others, earlier, such as the English guild socialist G. D. H Cole, referred to socialists as being either As or Bs: anarchists or bureaucrats, though historically even those two lines are blurred. As the later Marxist joke had it, scratch an anarchist, and you find a bureaucrat. Ernst Bloch, in a related dual vein, spoke of the warm and the cold streams in Marxism, the spirited and analytical threads, which he saw as mutually constitutive but which constantly risked separation (Bloch, 1986). Into the 1970s the differences among Marxists sometimes were halved between the schools of humanism and structuralism: optimists and pessimists, to caricature. There are many puzzles here, many splits and bifurcations. If the map of Marxism was, as in Borges, the same size as its object, then we could detail every nuance and difference in these lineages. But there are also some plainer patterns that emerge, as we simplify in order to make sense of all this. For the Marxist legacy is many things, With thanks to my readers: Rjurik Davidson, Chamsy El-Ojeili, Peter Kivisto, and Sian Supski, and with thanks to my Curtin Culture and Society Workshops and their participants.

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and many things more than two, but it is also this: it is a bifurcated tradition. In this chapter we will survey some of these tensions, splits and differences, initially in Marx’s work, then into the following traditions of Marxism – Classical Social Democracy; Bolshevism; Western Marxism and Critical Theory; structuralism and the residues of the emancipatory and critical lineage. For these shifts and changes are historical, ethical, and ideological – they are amenable to mapping out – but they may also be ontological. Gouldner opens The Two Marxisms with the inevitable line from Goethe’s Faust, where there are two souls in one breast, each struggling with the other. Historically, the authoritarian stream of Marxism won, pyrrhically; the emancipatory stream remains a subordinate dream (Howard, 1978). Castoriadis later gave up his formal association with Marxism, following the Hegelian maxim that world history was the world’s court of judgement: after Stalin and Mao, Marxism was irredeemably toxic, the emancipatory claims of the red flag stained irrevocably by the blood of millions. This fact of the matter seems, alone in this context, to be simple: Marxism is forever stained by its appropriation by the Bolsheviks. After 1917, with Lenin and Trotsky, after 1927, with Stalin, Marxism becomes the ideology of an actually existing state power whose actuality is totalitarian. Marxism becomes forever associated in the popular mind with the Soviet Union, this a great convenience both to the Soviets and to their Western enemies. This is to anticipate some of the broader coordinates as they here unfold: that socialism, and Marxism and modernity are transformed by their entanglement with the state and state power; and that socialist argument across this period is stretched across other frames, of Romanticism and Enlightenment (another set of dual claimants as the two souls of Western modernity), of cooperation from below and the imposition of order from above. More, Marxisms and socialisms both spread and dilute across the last two centuries; at the present time, it is possible that socialism is both everywhere and nowhere. Rarely has a family name like Marxism had to do so much work, or to obscure so many differences. Clearly some history, or periodization is necessary, for Marxism has a long modern history, and a global reach. More, it is both a theory and a practice, the two not always neatly conjoined. For the theory is often exercised by intellectuals, while the practice of the workers’ movement also has a history of its own. The broad story is then further complicated by the way in which the ideas of one man (or two?) become the leading ideas of a mass movement or social democratic counterculture, and then are appropriated by the Bolsheviks to become the ideology of a murderous totalitarian state, finally to become apparently obsolete with the eventual collapse of the Soviet Empire, but revived at a street level against the renewed rapacity of global capitalism.

Marx’s Legacy We began our investigation of the Marxist legacy with a mind game, as above: Castoriadis and Stalin in the same room. Let us follow with another, almost as paradoxical. Imagine that there could be two Karl Marxes: double trouble. One, less well known, is the green, rural, romantic hothead from the Rhineland, who dreams of

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a world of labour without alienation, who hopes for the regime of the associated producers, who believes that the emancipation of the working class can only be their own effort – a Promethean lover of freedom, one who says no to all gods. The second, better known from banners and clichés of the post-1917 Soviet world, has the bearded visage of Marx the sage, usually portrayed in iconography along with Engels, Lenin, Stalin. This is the Marx often associated with the laws of history and the inevitability of Communism. He is a Communist, not a socialist, one who can explain the nature of surplus value and the necessary transition from feudalism to capitalism and on, finally, to Communism. Can there really have been two Marxes? The question is worth asking, and not just with reference to Marx. For it opens a broader issue of epistemology and intellectual history. In its weak sense, the issue is that interesting thinkers will often be inconsistent across the path of their lives, will change their minds or even shift from one world view to another. In a stronger sense, the issue may be that the transformations of the social world demand that we periodically change our minds. This reminds us of Keynes: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’ The worlds we are born into may not be the same as those we face as we grow older. Our views of the world may also harden as we grow older and deal with defeat or disappointment. And more, the thinking of our closest collaborators, in this case Engels as the holder of the legacy, is by no means identical with ours. If there were two Marxes, one of them might sometimes look like Engels. In the case of Marx studies, the split that is commonly identified is that between the Young or the Early and the Mature or the Late Marx. This split has become an orthodoxy, though there is of course a case also to be made for continuity from the Paris Manuscripts to the Grundrisse to Capital, all of which can be tracked across the Marx–Engels Collected Works or on the Internet. The latter approach sees Marx’s master project as consisting of instalments of the critique of political economy. The former approach, which values the difference in his work over the continuity, either values the philosophical greenness over the grey-on-grey of the later work, or instead sees the later work of Capital as a more sophisticated architecture of capital and capitalism. Let us unpack these differences. The early Marx is usually typified as a humanist (see Beilharz, 1992). Like Rousseau, his animating sense is that human beings construct social relations which constrain them, make them unfree. Capital is the primary instance of this phenomenon and this activity; and in the early Marx the emphasis is indeed on activity, and on sensuous human suffering. Most famously, this involves the argument about the alienation of labour. Writing in Paris in 1844, the young Marx is finding his way intellectually. He begins from the argument that private property, far from being universal, is the historically specific result of capitalist activity. Private property, or capital, is the result of labour. Capitalism as we know it is not a universal; it is an historical formation, open to transformation. It is a process of expropriation, rather than a norm or transhistorical premise of human activity. It begets four different kinds or aspects of alienation. Under capitalism the labourer is alienated from the result of production; from the process of production; from his fellow workers; and from the human species. His premise here is that men are born free;

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but also that their nature or anthropology is to express themselves in the labouring act. The young Marx is often characterized as a Romantic, and sometimes as an Expressivist. Sometimes he is characterized as a Promethean, as the eternal rebel, who denies all gods, but perhaps also wants men to be as gods themselves. For he hates all gods, and following Feuerbach, wants man to make the world in his own image. As the root term of humanism, man or Mensch is here the actor not of world history but of everyday life. The early Marx therefore values the subject, or the actor, the sensuous, suffering, sentient individual. But he also claims to have discovered the proletariat as the collective actor of a future possible history, and here there is set in motion a kind of projection or redemption in which Marxists claim to have solved the riddle of history by having located the carrier of the cause of socialism. Viewed from a later, critical perspective, this opens up the possibility that Marx can be praised for his diagnosis, but not his prognosis. His critique of actually existing capitalism bristles with insight; his hopes for where it might be headed – socialism – have no such power of insight, but instead inscribe desire into the project, leaping from Is to Ought. Marx’s legacy cannot be reduced to the simple division between young and mature; there is also, among other things, Marx the historian, Marx the writer, follower of comedy and farce, where the devil is in the detail of the argument and sarcasm is often its dominant critical voice. But for the purpose of this chapter and this narrative, and in the main Marx reception, the division has been allowed to hold sway. In the language of sociology, which postdates Marx, Marx’s work shifts from a focus on agency to one on structure, or from experience to concept. From Paris in 1844, and the above-mentioned concerns, he finds himself in exile in England, and works for more than twenty more years on developing the critique of political economy. There are two vital transitional steps in this project, the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, and the unpublished manuscripts now called the Grundrisse, which spread across the previous two years. The crowning result of this process is the publication of Das Kapital, or Capital, in 1867. Marx spent much of this time in the British Library reading, for example, the Blue Books or government reports and commissions of enquiry into the consequences of industrialization. He wasted a great deal of time in polemics, but also gave time to organizing the First Workingmen’s International. But he also dealt with two decades of head-aching over how best to present the masterwork conceptually, coming to the conclusion that it was best procedurally to move from the elementary unit of the commodity through to the exchange of commodities, before, like Dante, descending into the secret abode of capitalist production in the factory itself. Only later in the book does the working class appear, as actors, largely here victims nestled into structures of oppression. The revolutionary working class makes a dramatic reappearance in the penultimate chapter of Capital 1, but this gesture is like a theatre prop lowered too late onto the stage. The putative revolutionary outcome of the process of capitalist production is immaculate; it is asserted, rather than emerging out of the argument itself. This, together with other claims about the tendency of the profit rate to fall, leave Marx’s revolution and his proletariat as script, rather than history.

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Does this shift from 1844 to 1867 then sufficiently justify the dominant claim that there are indeed two Marxes? That there are some elements of continuity is indeed apparent from the insertion of the revolutionary class from the early work into the penultimate chapter of Capital. There are certainly significant differences of sensibility, among other things. The most remarkable break is historical rather than epistemological. The world that the younger Marx and Engels grow into is indeed apocalyptic, both with reference to the devastating effects of industrialization and with reference to the Age of Revolutions, not least around 1848. Into the 1850s global capitalism stabilizes, and Marx turns to explaining its capacity for selfreproduction rather than revolution. This makes sense: if the object of analysis changes, so too should the mode or attitude of its interpretation. Marx’s reliance on Hegel in designing the first part of Das Kapital suggests that there are also independent intellectual dynamics at play here. These are explanatory nuances which do not much undermine the hegemony of the young/mature Marx argument, for which the young Marx wants to change the world, whereas the later Marx feels the need to explain it scientifically. Ironic though it may seem in retrospect, none of this Marx interpretation was of any significant consequence until the postwar period, when emerging Marxist humanists in the West began to use the forgotten, or suppressed Marx of the Paris Manuscripts to argue for a new, emancipatory reading of Marx against the twin evils of triumphant consumer capitalism and Stalinism in the east. And this is certainly one key dimension of the dispute over Marx’s legacy, that the young Marx was all but unknown until the early 1960s, especially in the English language. The translation of the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse from the 1960s to the 1970s coincided with and was carried along by the culture of radicalism associated with the New Left, hippy culture, and the youth movement. To which one sceptical response would be: too little, too late, by the time the emancipatory Marx was exhumed, there were too many mountains of bodies already created in the name of Marx. The historical issue is that there is very little in Marx’s work to justify anything like Jacobinism, the terror of the Bolsheviks after 1917, and then Stalin and Mao. By the time of the later Lenin, and Mao, it was indeed the peasantry who were to be regarded as the magical or additional revolutionary class, this harnessed by an invincible Communist Party, for which there is no equivalent in Marx. Nothing could be further from the spirit of the early and later Marx, for whom socialism was only conceivable as the work of the associated producers, not the Party, and on the basis of the abundance generated by the capitalist revolution, not the primitive Communism begot by shortage, misery, famine, and poverty. The surprise, historically speaking, was that Marxism became a world idea at all. In Marx’s day his ‘Party’ was a small and loose group of the vaguely co-minded at a loose end in London, and the reading audience for his work was minuscule, with the exception of his American journalism. All this was to change with the rise of the German Social Democrats, who first made classical Marxism formulaic and spread it systematically through an elaborate system of press, publications, and Party schools. The precondition for this process of the popularization of Marxism was the emergence of a new

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political form, the institution of the mass political party as we know it today, and its consolidation in a hostile Prussian culture as a society within a society.

Classical Social Democracy Again, there is irony and paradox here. Nothing in Marx’s work was arguably necessary to the fact of the Russian Revolution. The logic of Marx’s work was that there would have to be a capitalist revolution before a subsequent socialist revolution, which was turned into a joke in some circles after 1989: now, in the post-Soviet world, there had had to be a socialist revolution as a prelude to the revolution of capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky decide to seize state power against Marx; Marx was incidental to their purpose, for the great revolutions of left and right in the twentieth century needed some strong ideology or other, the most powerful component of which was actually the nationalism which Marx kept his distance from. But nor, in the nineteenth-century phase, was there anything necessarily German about the adoption of this émigré political identity from Marx and Engels, living and working in England. Engels mediated the legacy of Marx to the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in liaison with its great early minds, those of Kautsky and Bernstein: these were the executors, and the minders of the remaining manuscripts, of Marx’s Nachlass or his very intellectual legacy itself. Marxism passed over the Channel and back to Germany again after Marx’s death. The emergent forces of German social democracy did, however, adopt Marxism as their theory and ideology. As the party consolidated into the 1890s, there were not one but three dominant voices in the SPD. There emerged here a kind of bifurcation less between the early and later phases of any single thinker, than between the grand motifs of reform and revolution. The split here was between the dominant institutional voice of Eduard Bernstein and the revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. The spirit of the party mainstream itself was best captured by the position of Karl Kautsky, who sat in between, combining revolutionary rhetoric with reformist practice, and codifying Marxism in the process, a dangerous process of simplification that would eventually lead to the so-called laws of dialectical and historical materialism in the hands of Stalin. The tension between theory and practice is already evident in the treatment of Marx’s legacy above. Theory, here, was the voice of the later Marx, where Das Kapital was the science of society, philosophically rendered. Practice or praxis was closer to the legacy of the early Marx, where a latent sociology of everyday life and labour jostled with calls for its revolutionary transformation, activity brought forward into activism. But the tension in Marx is that of a solitary thinker, in league with his friend Engels, and their handful of associates and hangers-on. By the time of the successful rise of the SPD, there was a more marked tension at work. The rise and consolidation of the SPD as a mass left party represented a major instance of the anomaly of power and its institutionalization. For when the party became a counterculture, the obvious imperative was to protect and defend the party; the question of its goals became difficult, or ephemeral. Bernstein, from the right,

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The Marxist Legacy

expressed the challenge in his famous saying that the socialist movement was everything, the goal nothing. By this he meant that the capacity of the SPD to influence society and protect the downtrodden, even to expand the parameters of change through the expansion of citizenship was to be valued over and above the piein-the-sky hallucinations of the revolutionary dreamers. Talking about revolution, from this perspective, was dangerous, but also sociologically misleading; complex societies did not give themselves to being overturned, as the metaphor of revolution suggests. Revolution would mean chaos, which would play into the hands of reaction (Bernstein, 1961). The weakness of Bernstein’s argument, well identified by Luxemburg, was that the idea of introducing socialism by instalments was also unconvincing, because incremental radical politics did not work, and because the powers that be would never allow this slide into socialism to happen in the first place. Luxemburg, for her part, sought the emancipatory image of socialism coming out of Marx, whereby the workers themselves would take power, through the process of the General Strike. Her position came to be known as spontaneist, as it had no leading role for the party, and it opposed what she called the barracks socialism of the Bolsheviks (Luxemburg, 1900). Reform or revolution: this was the hard choice presented to the constituents of the SPD by Bernstein and Luxemburg. On a daily level, it was more a matter of business as usual, though this was also punctuated by rupture and crisis into the period of the Russian Revolution and the daily pattern of violence between the left and the protoNazis into the Weimar Republic. Bernstein died a natural death; Luxemburg was murdered. By this stage, since the SPD had voted for war credits in 1914, economic crisis and political crisis had been running in tandem. In the period of high social democracy, from the 1890s on, the tension between reform and revolution was dealt with cosmetically, by embracing in effect both – reform today, revolution tomorrow. This was the point at which Kautsky dominated the stage, with his centrist maxim, that the SPD, before Bolshevism, was revolutionary but not revolution-making. Kautsky’s was the position later referred to as maturational socialism; Bebel had earlier suggested that socialism would fall into the laps of the German socialists like a ripe fruit. And this, indeed was one part of Marx’s legacy, in the idea that successive modes of production would rise and fall, bringing to fruition the basis of the next, higher stage of development from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism and on to Communism. This thread was alive and well as late as the interwar period, as in the crisis/collapse theorem of Henryk Grossman, later characterized as automatic Marxism. Over the years there has been ongoing discussion of the question of the relationship between the thinking of Darwin and Marx. Was Marx an evolutionary thinker? Almost certainly, in the most general of terms. The later Marx was plainly taken by the idea of progress, and this idea was in any case in the ether; Marx and Darwin were both Victorian thinkers. Yet Marx also believed that human beings make their own history, even if not just as they please; and he anticipated, as later did Luxemburg and then Castoriadis, that the alternative was socialism or barbarism. Nothing was actually guaranteed. What does seem clear in all this is that following Engels, Kautsky, the so-called Pope of Marxism, tended to associate Marx and Darwin

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implicitly. Socialism, in this way of thinking, would look after itself in the long run; this, or else, as Bernstein hoped, the majority of the population, seeing life from below, would themselves usher in socialism through the democratic voting system. While there is, as always, more to these thinkers than this summary here suggests, the great compromise was enshrined in Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme, aka The Class Struggle, for the SPD of 1892 (Kautsky, 1892). The founding text of Marxism, the 1848 Communist Manifesto, had already provided the precedent, tacking a series of immediate or short-term demands on to the earlier, revolutionary hymn to the bourgeoisie as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of the great power of Capital. The Erfurt Programme formalized this precedent into two steps or stages: the Minimum Programme and the Maximum Programme of the SPD. But what was the process of transition from one to the next? If reform and revolution were the two souls of classical social democracy, then the issue now was no longer Faust’s, that they ran together, but rather that they ran so far apart as to invite political defeat at the hands of the Nazis in the making who would soon be standing at the door.

Bolshevism The German Social Democrats were not the only Marxist force in the global field, but they were the most influential presence on the horizon. They were the dominant organizational and ideological force of the Second International. Others, from William Morris to the Fabians, the latter not Marxist but earnestly reformist, spoke more powerfully in England, and forces like revolutionary syndicalism were significant in France and the USA and even in Australia, especially among transient labour. These latter forces fed into the Communist parties formed throughout the world in the wake of 1917, and then organized through the Third, or Communist International from 1919. Other social democratic forces again stood strong and small, in Sweden especially with Ernst Wigforss, and in the example of AustroMarxism. The year 1917, of course, changed everything, for the history of the twentieth century and for the path of the Marxist legacy. But before 1917, Russian social democracy had also been formed in the image of the SPD. This was not a good fit, given the significant economic, cultural, and political differences between Russia and Germany, and it did not last. The German Social Democrats were committed to many things, but one of them was democracy. The Russians claimed as their Great War slogan ‘Peace, Bread, and Land, and All Power to the Soviets’. The invention and intervention of the Bolshevik, or combat party, took them somewhere else than to democracy (see Beilharz, 1992). Was there then a significant split or shift between the young Lenin and the mature Lenin, the young Trotsky and the mature Trotsky? Before state power, and after state power? The short answer to this question is yes, more so in the case of Trotsky, partly because he was more theoretically sophisticated and given to reflection; partly because he lived longer, opposed power early, and seized and then lost power in the course of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

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The Marxist Legacy

Lenin was also a sophisticated thinker, but the majority of his work was political, strategic, and given to the moment. There are strong economic treatises, like The Development of Capitalism in Russia, philosophical inquiries like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and flights of anarcho-Bolshevik fantasy like The State and Revolution in his writings, all available in his Collected Works; but even in these cases Lenin was looking to crack the heads of ideological opponents. Likely the most discernible shift across the path of his thinking is its more pragmatic turn after the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 to replace the earlier, high Bolshevik period of war Communism. This later Lenin was apparently as attracted to Bukharin’s gradualism, socialism at a snail’s pace; the primary accumulation of capital and agricultural collectivism came later, with Stalin, who sought to make by force the capital base which the Russians had lacked in 1917. Whatever the changes across this path, the standard critical view for many years has been that Lenin announces the vanguard party at the moment that Bolshevism emerges, in 1902 with ‘What Is to Be Done?’ (Lenin, 1970 [1902]), which initiates the Bolshevik view that if trade union consciousness is the proletarian norm, then socialist consciousness needs to be introduced from without, by the party itself. This was a variation on Kautsky’s view, that Marxist consciousness came from without, but by educative means, ergo the plethora of SPD party papers, journals, and schools. This in turn reflected an unresolved tension in Marx, whereby the proletariat suffered and knew, and yet the intellectuals were necessary in order formally to systematize and pass on this knowledge in big books like Das Kapital. Some recent scholarship has contested this view of Lenin. Žižek argues as though Lenin were a kind of comic Bolshevik who fell into totalitarian ways, though he also wants to make fun of the idea of totalitarianism. More seriously, Lars Lih (Lih, 2006) has gone through Lenin’s writing with a fine-tooth comb in order to argue that Lenin was an Erfurt Marxist, who actually took the more revolutionary turn. Certainly Lenin was a revolution-making, and not only a revolutionary Marxist. Indeed, it was Lenin who turned Kautsky into the Renegade Kautsky, when Kautsky’s larger error was likely that he never changed his mind at all. For Kautsky, it was r/evolution or nothing. The young Trotsky was something else, closer to the spontaneist Luxemburg. Indeed, the young Trotsky was the most vehement critic of Lenin, whom he cast in his 1904 polemic as Robespierre, famously coining the image of substitutionism in critique of the Bolsheviks: the party substitutes itself for the proletariat; the leadership for the party; the leader for the leadership. The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship over the proletariat. In short, the young Trotsky anticipated Stalinism in 1904. He changes his mind and his affiliation in 1917, becoming the Best Bolshevik thereafter, and anticipating in the process the consolidation of the Stalinism that he was to spend his last decade contesting, until Stalin finally had him assassinated in Coyocan in 1940. The legacy of Trotskyism was something else. The later Trotsky seems to have second thoughts about the nature of the USSR, but his testament in The Revolution Betrayed (1937) was more orthodox, and the 1938 Transitional Programme of his new Fourth International insisted that the capitalist world was still rotten ripe for revolution: it was only necessary for his own

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lieutenants to offer the corpse the final shove, and the job of socialists would be done (see Beilharz 1982; 1987). The young Trotsky was a skilled historian, honing his skills not least in witnessing the history of the 1905 Revolution, where it was the Soviets, here as the people, who were making Russian history from below. In terms of the diagnosis/prognosis distinction suggested above for Marx, Trotsky delivers the power of insight into what he calls combined and uneven development, but also assumes the inevitability of revolution in the formula of Permanent Revolution. By 1921 it was Trotsky, the lapsed libertarian, who authorized the shooting of the Kronstadt rebels, who had earlier been constructed as the champions of the Revolution. At the same time, he was writing books like Literature and Revolution, wildly Promethean in its conclusion, and defending barracks socialism and forced labour against the ageing Kautsky in Terrorism and Communism. Kautsky had not given up on the project of maturational socialism; but these were not his times. He died in exile in Amsterdam in 1938. By this time, Stalinism ruled, even if its hegemony was secured primarily through terror.

Western Marxism Bolshevism came after the fact to be identified as an Eastern Marxism; the locus of Marxism as a revolutionary movement was certainly moving east, heading next to China, but there shifting decisively away from the proletariat, real, or imagined, and towards the peasantry. In the interwar period another phenomenon was to emerge within Marxism. Retrospectively, it was to be called Western Marxism, and it had three major carriers: Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci. Lukács offered its most incendiary moment. From an early career in literature and high culture, he became a Bolshevik, momentarily Hungarian Commissar of Culture in its short-lived revolutionary regime. Later, in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he was briefly to be a minister with Imre Nagy’s anti-Soviet reform movement. In 1923 he published the essay for which he is best remembered, gathered in History and Class Consciousness (Lukács, 1971), whose most seminal essay was entitled ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. This argument resolved the tension in Marx with the announcement that the working class has revolutionary consciousness imputed to it; it was as though the working class were revolutionary whether it knew it or not. It was the necessary vocation of the working class to fulfil the task placed upon it by history, or by its leading intellectuals. Together with this came the brilliant analysis of commodity fetishism, anticipating Marx’s argument about alienation, which was not yet to appear until its first publication in German in 1932. Lukács’ brilliance, like that of the later Marx, was to excel at diagnosis rather than prognosis; reification in fact ruled. Romantic anti-capitalism railed against it. Lukács was then to renounce his views under the early Soviet attack on the so-called Red Professors, and to return to his literary interests, never again to achieve the quality of insight of his early work. He became a kind of internal exile, tacitly endorsing Stalinism, and his greatest later contribution was in sponsoring, and naming the Budapest School.

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The Marxist Legacy

Korsch’s contribution was less fluorescent than this, but included brilliant essays, including ‘Marxism and Philosophy’ and ‘Three Essays on Marxism’, and the 1938 study of Marx which remains one of the best books on him to date, identifying Marx’s contribution with the idea of historic specificity and explaining the change in his views with the turn to a sociology of capitalism after the collapse of the Age of Revolutions (Korsch, 1938). For Korsch, as for Lukács, Marx’s Hegelian origins were crucial; ideas, and idealism, were no mere epiphenomena. Contemplation mattered, but also activity. Korsch served as Communist Minister for Justice in Thuringia in 1923. He worked for a time in England with the Fabians, and was to become a leading advocate of the idea and practice of workers’ councils: socialism must come from below, or it would not come at all. Finally, he died in exile in the United States, where other, later council communists would include figures like Paul Mattick; the syndicalist legacy remained, however marginal it might be. The fact that its followers now found it necessary to describe themselves as Left Communists spoke as much to the mainstreaming of the left in the USSR as to their own sense of solitude (El-Ojeili, 2003). Others again, such as the Dutch council Communist Anton Pannekoek, took on Lenin as a philosopher as well as a Bolshevik. The most sustained legacy of the Western Marxists, however, was that of Antonio Gramsci, which also follows a path of transition or development from early to later in his life. Are there two Gramscis? Apparently, for there is at the least a major shift from his early to later views, a process caught up with the changing conjuncture from the revolutionary enthusiasm of the early days of the Russian Revolution to the interwar years, when Stalin grimly rules the Soviet Union, Mussolini, himself also earlier a leading socialist, rules Italy, and Gramsci languishes in his prison. In the beginning, Gramsci, a southerner and journalist, a keen organizer and advocate of prefiguration, was taken by the idea of the soviets or workers’ councils, and he was actively involved in the factory occupations in Turin in 1920, in the period of the worldwide after-effects of the October events (see Boggs, 1984). He had sympathized with the Russian Revolution as what he called the Revolution against capital, the pun indicating two things: a revolution against the capital of capitalism, but also a revolution against Das Kapital, or against the lethargic waiting for the revolution associated with Kautsky and the Second International. The young Gramsci moves from Sardinia to Turin, the home of Fiat and Italian Fordism, to study, but instead becomes a leader of the newly founded Communist Party as the Second International collapses throughout Europe after World War I. He is also taken by Hegel or his local variant in Croce. On the cusp of his arrest in 1926 he had almost finished a text entitled The Southern Question, which encapsulated many of the themes still articulated by advocates of the South today; for Italy is a microcosm of the world system of imperialism, writ small (Gramsci, 1995). Gramsci follows Marx in believing in the necessity of industrialism, but he questions its modes of development, in which the North effectively freezes the South out of modernity. But though he is a Marxist and a Communist, and is inspired by the revolutionary Lenin, he also becomes known as a practical socialist, opposed to pie in the sky, and mortified that the Italian fascists might get there first, politically, which they do. For Mussolini’s forces offer themselves as hegemonic, and they

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organize themselves, as the Nazis originally claimed to do, as national socialists. Hegemony was to become a central concern for Gramsci in prison, and then again for radicals as they discovered Gramsci, especially in English, into the 1970s. The greatest strategic breakthrough for Gramsci consisted in the acceptance that, left to itself, history would not lead to socialism but to the defeat of the left. The battle for ideas, for a new culture and ideology, would become central in this way of thinking. Written in a private Marxist language to escape the scissors of the censors, the Prison Notebooks remained a disjointed but fascinating catalogue of Gramsci’s daily thinking on Italy, the present, the past, the crisis, and the difference between not only North and South but also East and West, all this mediated by the mysterious spectre of the Modern Prince, or new Communist Party, Gramsci combining the thought of Machiavelli and Lenin here (Gramsci, 1971). Was the later Gramsci then a Leninist? Here another bifurcation takes place, at least in the subsequent reception of Gramsci’s thinking. Under the influence of cultural studies and the politics of Eurocommunism, Gramsci becomes the theorist of superstructures, language, culture, and ideology. Alongside this process of domestication, another stream of Gramsci studies seeks to keep up the revolutionary intent, though here it remains unclear just what precise configuration a revolution today might take (Thomas, 2009).

Critical Theory Gramsci died after his release from prison in 1937. Various other developments took place in the interwar period, perhaps most significantly the rise of the Frankfurt School. While the Frankfurt School was never really revolutionary, its origins and inspirations were certainly caught up with classical Marxism and the hopes of the workers’ movement. Into the 1930s, its informing motif was the idea that the German workers movement had missed its moment. As in the Italian case, the enemy were better organized, ideologically and practically, as well as being more adept at brutal persuasion. These days it is customary to narrate the history of the Frankfurt School as consisting of three phases or generations. The first phase is dominated by the figures of Horkheimer and Adorno; the second by Habermas; and the third by Honneth. Many other figures were associated with the serious infrastructure of the Frankfurt School, including Fromm, Marcuse, Benjamin, Pollock, Lowenthal, Neumann, and Korsch. How to summarize the thought and impact of this major school of Critical Theory? Several major motifs emerge: for the founders, the critique of instrumental reason, a kind of Marx–Weber synthesis anticipated by Lukács in 1923; an interest in Freud, and in combining Marx and Freud to explain the crisis of the 1930s; a more pessimistic fear that reason had turned against itself, in the dialectic of enlightenment, and that we may have indeed entered the totally administered society; yet there was also a hope that Critical Theory might stand against traditional theory. For Habermas, this took the form of an earlier interest in theory and praxis, knowledge and human interests, and Critical Theory as a theory oriented by emancipatory

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The Marxist Legacy

interests; all of this led him to the project of reconstructing historical materialism, a strong interest in the state and in legitimation, then the theory of communicative action, and on to the pragmatics of communication: throughout all of which he retained a strong commitment to constant intervention in matters of public life (Wiggershaus, 1994). Then there was Honneth, and the newly reformed enthusiasm for the politics of recognition, which added Mead and Winnicott to the mix and focused on the spirit of American pragmatism rather than Freud. The School’s interests encompassed all this and so much more, from philosophy to music and aesthetics: a long way from the culture of the workers’ movement, and yet not so far from the wealth of interests of classical social democracy. The extent of the transformation was nevertheless like that of Gramsci, from Italian Communist to poster boy for cultural studies. And in each case, the leading figures of Critical Theory also undergo significant transformation: Habermas in particular, as the most responsive to worldly change as it followed on from the postwar period. Perhaps the simple point here is that Critical Theory was also bound to become a tradition, and in this sense traditional. Yet traditions also disable, at the same time that they enable intellectual vision. The path of the Frankfurt School was both interrupted and boosted by the emergence of the New Left, the movement against the Vietnam War, and the revival of Trotskyism and Western Maoism, still today defended by serious philosophers like Badiou. The image of the Cultural Revolution was apparently irresistible. New Leftism came together with Third Worldism; there were new poster boys, Che Guevara along with Trotsky and Jimi Hendrix. And then there was something that actually looked like a revolution in Paris, in May 1968 (but there was also the Soviet invasion of Prague, following on from the murder of millions of Communists in Indonesia). Paris was notorious for intellectual fads, but the most toxic of them, well dredged critically by Simon Leys, was the French cult of Mao. No one, at first, could here utter the name of Solzhenitsyn. This uniformity was loosened by the tragedy of Pol Pot. Who could defend this nightmare under the name of socialism after Kampuchea? For the New Left overlapped the Old Left in its blindness to Stalinism, but it also revived the anti-authoritarianism of the romantic left, as evidenced for example in the Little Red School Book. Socialism, now, was as much concerned with sex, drugs, and rock and roll as with the black leather of the avant-garde. Adorno and Horkheimer were looking oldfashioned. Socialist argument in the West in the 1960s was likely at its discursive peak again. The emancipatory work of the early Marx arrived in English just in time to intersect with the Anglo New Left, though in a different sense the late discovery of the young Marx was also too late; Marxism was too much bloodied by the Soviet experience to march unconditionally together with the flag of freedom. The presenting challenge was not only to turn Marx against Marx, but also to turn Marx against Marxism. Stalinism always shouted louder. But there were always more critical voices. The Frankfurt School was not the only school of Critical Theory in this landscape, though it was clearly the most dominant. In 1971 the ageing Lukács founded the Budapest School, its leading figures Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy Markus,

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and Mihaly Vajda. Together with Maria Markus and Ivan Szelenyi, the first three took exile in Australia, having exhausted the prospects of a reform Communism or Marx Renaissance in Hungary. Heller’s work on radical needs, and Markus’ on the idea of Marxian anthropology certainly both drew inspiration from the early Marx, as well as the Grundrisse (Heller, 1974; Markus, 1978). Both followed enthusiasms for the idea of separating out the paradigm of language from that of production, finally moving on into broader fields of philosophical concern. Vajda did fine work on the critique of fascism, itself a kind of samizdat critique of Communism, and Feher, Heller, and Markus together published a strong critique of Soviet-type societies, Dictatorship over Needs (1982). Having likewise taken a one-way exit visa from Poland, Zygmunt Bauman went into exile in Leeds, scattering his energies and ideas across all kinds of fields and issues to do with socialism and culture, from the Holocaust to the postmodern and then the idea of liquid modernity, where, much as Marcuse saw it, consumption and then the new individualism was taken to be the major pathology of modern times. When looking at the path of Bauman’s oeuvre it may also seem that there are two Baumans, before and after the postmodern, the two mediated by his major work Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989; Beilharz, 2000a; 2000b). Critical Marxism had other advocates, such as the heroic urban advocate, early surrealist, later Marxist Henri Lefebvre, later still to become the doyen of Marxist geography; or the humanist Raya Dunayevskaya in Detroit; and the younger advocates of Hegelian Marxism settled around the journal Telos. New Left Review in London became the major alternative for the English-speaking left in these times, combining an enthusiasm for continental Marxist philosophy with a residual reliance on the revolutionary grammar of Trotskyism. Perry Anderson’s own extraordinary contribution seemed always to combine orthodoxy of political thinking with an astonishing ambition of scope and clarity of detail. Other Marxist journals, which would become progressively less orthodox or which were post-Marxist, such as Thesis Eleven were yet to emerge.

Structuralist Marxism, and After In Paris, the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre stood tall as the crossover point between Marxism and existentialism (Poster, 1975). Marxist philosophy, via the Hegelian adventures of Hyppolite and Kojève and the dialectical adventures of Merleau-Ponty, sows the seedbed for a later generation, including Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida, and later Poulantzas, where the analytical interest shifts to class and state. In the context of this chapter, Althusser’s moment was most auspicious, as it signalled a return to the claims to philosophical certainty and scientificity from the previous generation, which humanists including Sartre had struggled against. Althusser sought to reinstate the distinction between the early and the later Marx, between ideology and science, with the premium placed heavily on reading Capital. Here the subject was a sitting duck; humanism was a projection of godly capacities on to mortals whose fate it was rather to reproduce the system. There was more to Althusser, of course, but his enthusiastic reception looks in the rearview

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The Marxist Legacy

mirror like the last sigh of revolutionary defeatism. This diminution of the subject brought out the dissent, by way of argument or by example, of the Marxist historians, from Hobsbawm and Thompson to Bernard Smith in the antipodes. At this point of recent Marxist history there emerged two great warring camps – historians and structuralists. Feminists became active on both sides of this divide, defending the idea of experience in history or developing more sophisticated philosophical or psychoanalytical claims, though Marxist feminism also became known as the unequal marriage. Structuralist Marxism was a major intellectual force in this period, as structuralism had been throughout the history of twentieth-century critical inquiry (Dosse, 1997). Viewed in retrospect, structuralism was inspired by the interest in in-depth analysis of the phenomenal social world, as in Marx and Freud, but pushed further by the publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics in 1914. Here the interest in words shifted to the systems that animated them. The interest in reading the diachronic prevailed over the synchronic; and the logic of this view spread powerfully across the humanities, not least to anthropology and history writing in France and then England. It found an elective affinity with one stream in Anglo sociology, for which structure was always privileged over action. There are many exemplary thinkers here, from Levi-Strauss to the Annales School, but the most eminent and original came to be Michel Foucault. Foucault was a party member early in his career, and certainly on occasion thought like a Marxist, focusing on the critique of power. This was another fascinating tendency of the time, which the frequent earlier identification of Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School opened up. There was a proliferation of critical theories. The hitherto missing figure here was not that of Marx or Freud, but of Nietzsche. Others, like Edward Said, helped to fuel a postcolonial turn which also returned, in its Indian variant, to the example of Gramsci’s interest in subaltern studies, and took on powerful presence in work like that of Spivak. Literature, and Jameson, now ruled. For in more general terms, Marxism had since its inception always been cosmopolitan, and this meant that in a world of imperialism and colonialism Marxism was always ubiquitous, even if its universal mask sometimes disguised its European origins. Thus Marxism was to make a powerful intervention in the work of Fanon, the latter’s reliance on the insights of psychoanalysis echoing out through African thinking like that of Achille Mbembe, and in brilliant Indian scholarship such as that of Ashis Nandy. It was also a presence in the spirit of Brazilian street Marxist, Paolo Freire. Buenos Aires, that other great home of psychoanalysis, delivered the work of Ernesto Laclau, itself to combine with that of Chantal Mouffe to make one of the strongest contributions to post-Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, 1980; Susen, 2016). Alongside these trends there are enduring examples of the perennials, from Walter Benjamin to Raymond Williams and Catherine and Stuart Hall. The proliferation and continuity of the influence of Marxism itself is an astonishing demonstration of cultural diffusion and traffic. So where is the academic action now? Marxism has become, for better and worse, a way of thinking that, in the West from the 1960s onwards, has mainly lived in and around the universities. Three figures predominate today. Badiou is a scholar of Marxian reach, stretching from mathematics to ontology, set theory, event and

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subject. Žiźek, the Slovenian contrarian, is a creature of his times, televisual, a celebrity philosopher and clown, combining Hitchcock, Lacan, Marx, and Hegel in a manner that sometimes resembles free association. Jameson, the literary critic, in some senses the most like Marx here, continues and extends the interest in postmodern culture and political economy, totality, and utopia. And next? As critical spaces in the universities shrink, future Marxist intellectuals may well be working more peripherally, through other genres and media forms from sci-fi to the Internet.

Conclusions By the 1990s, the postmodern was all the rage, and post-Marxism was often in its slipstream (Beilharz, 1994). Post-Marxism involved a doubling; the pluralization of the patterns of radical thinking was further urged on by a distinct political process, which involved the dissolution of the Soviet world itself. Finally the dead hand of Stalinism was released; or was it? Perhaps less for the denizens of the old Soviet Union than for the intellectuals of the West. The spectres of Stalinism persist in the old Soviet Empire. Marxism had always been plural, before the conformist demand for compliance and service of the Party came to rule via the Russian Revolution and its anti-politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union indicated the final collapse of the Soviet hold on the left’s imagination. Except that the association of socialism and Stalinism was by now so widespread, that the presence of the libertarian alternative was the stuff of the Wunderkammer. Stalin won the argument by virtue of his will to power; Castoriadis was to become a new source for a rising generation of socialists and radicals for whom the core value was autonomy, a fine value but not necessarily one with the critical power of earlier claims to socialism and freedom. Part of the tag team responsible for moving the terms of reference on from modern to postmodern was Castoriadis’ erstwhile collaborator, Lyotard. After the Fall of the Wall, the new buzzword was less the postmodern than globalization. And just as the postmodern was both enthusiasm for and critique of the new present, so did globalization-talk bifurcate into critique of global inequality and its alternate, sometimes called glossy globalization. New movements like Occupy came into play. Older established autonomist Italian Marxists like Antonio Negri gained new audiences for claims about the immanent revolution of the anti-capitalist multitudes. Established philosophers such as Derrida called for the remembering of Karl Marx and Chris Hani, and the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in sociology always had its Marxist element. The renewed inequality of global capital called out the revival, or transformation of Marx’s Capital into Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty, 2013). Other stalwarts like David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, John Pilger, Tariq Ali, and Naomi Klein kept banging the Marxist drum. It was as though the Manchester experienced so apocalyptically by Engels in 1844 was back with a vengeance; maybe it had never really gone away, just been globally relocated and made more or less invisible to tourist eyes. By these criteria, Marxism in the twenty-first century still had its critical, diagnostic work cut out.

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Viewed in retrospect, the story of the Marxist legacy involves promise followed by tragedy. The idea of bifurcation or splitting is one way to characterize its history, or at least the history of some of its more interesting thinkers. The lazy view of this is to see it as some kind of process of growing up, or as a hardening of the arteries. Plainly there is some pattern of a loss of hope and a later realization of the power of domination in these cases of bifurcation or shifting, from Marx to Habermas and beyond. The more suggestive approach is likely to inquire into what the change of circumstances across time and place brought about in the diagnostic repertoire of its best thinkers. The longer trend, from Marx to the present, indicates the submergence of the libertarian movement by the will to power of Stalinism. The detail of the stories hinted at here suggests rather a process of diffusion, as the actors in distinct paths of cultural traffic select and appropriate insights and categories which seem to become useful when at hand. Marx’s work, itself the product of a fusion of existing insights, claims, and categories, in this way returns to the culture which first created it. All this time on, we may after all be none the wiser. Or else, it may be the case that more of us are wiser, but none of us are able to be as clear as our predecessors were about claiming to read the way forward. Marx’s original sensibility, that knowledge had some clear relation to action, these days seems more opaque. Overwhelmed by scale and complexity, by the tedium and weight of everyday life, the challenge of understanding and even changing our world remains before us.

References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford, UK: Polity. Beilharz, Peter. 1982. ‘The Other Trotsky.’ Thesis Eleven 2: 106–113. Beilharz, Peter. 1987. Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism. London: Croom Helm. 1992. Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy. London: Routledge. 1994. Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, City and State. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 2000a. Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity. London: Sage. 2000b. The Bauman Reader. Oxford, UK: Polity. Bernstein, Eduard. 1961. Evolutionary Socialism. New York: Schocken. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 3 vols. Boggs, Carl. 1984. The Two Revolutions: Antonio Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism. Boston, MA: South End. Dosse, Francois. 1997. History of Structuralism. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2 vols. Draper, Hal. 1966. ‘The Two Souls of Socialism.’ New Politics 5(1): 57–84. El-Ojeili, Chamsy. 2003. From Left Communism to Postmodernism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, and George Markus. 1982. Dictatorship over Needs. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Gouldner, Alvin. 1978. The Two Marxisms. New York: Seabury. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. The Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

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1995. The Southern Question. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera. Heller, Agnes. 1974. The Theory of Needs in Marx. London: Alison and Busby. Howard, Dick. 1978. The Marxian Legacy. New York: Macmillan. Kautsky, Karl. 1892. The Class Struggle. New York: SLP. Korsch, Karl. 1938. Karl Marx. New York: Russell and Russell. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1980. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lenin, V. I. 1970 [1902]. ‘What Is to Be Done?’ In Selected Works, Vol. 1 (pp. 117–271). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lih, Lars. 2006. Lenin Rediscovered. Leiden: Brill. Lukács, George. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1900. Reform or Revolution. London: Militant. Markus, George. 1978. Marxism and Anthropology. Assen: Van Gorcum. Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Poster, Mark. 1975. Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Susen, Simon. 2016. The Postmodern Turn in the Social Sciences. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Peter. 2009. The Gramscian Moment. Leiden: Brill. Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Further Reading Bauman, Zygmunt. 1976. Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: Allen and Unwin. Beilharz, Peter. 1994. Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1984. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bevir, Mark. 2011. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bottomore, Tom, and Patrick Goode. 1978. Austro-Marxism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1992. Political and Social Writings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 3 vols. Cole, G. D. H. 1955. A History of Socialist Thought. London, Macmillan, 14 vols. Davidson, Alastair. 1978. Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin. De Man, Henri. 1928. The Psychology of Marxian Socialism. London: Allen and Unwin. Draper, Hal. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 4 vols. Gabriel, Mary. 2011. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx. New York: Little, Brown. Goytisolo, Juan. 1996. The Marx Family Saga. London: Faber. Held, David. 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory. London: Hutchinson. Henry, Michel. 1983. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Higgins, Winton and Geoff Dow. 2013. Politics against Pessimism: Social Democratic Possibilities Since Ernst Wigforss. New York: Peter Lang. Hook, Sidney. 1933. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. London: Gollancz. Hosfeld, Rolf. 2013. Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Berghahn. Howard, Michael, and John King. 1989/ 1992. A History of Marxian Economics. London: Macmillan, 2 vols. Hunt, Tristam. 2009. The Frockcoated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Frederick Engels. London: Allen Lane. Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination. London: Heinemann. Kloppenberg, James. 1986. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press. Knei-Paz, Baruch. 1978. The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1978. Main Currents in Marxism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 3 vols. Loewith, Karl. 2004. Max Weber and Karl Marx. London: Routledge. Lowy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lovell, David, and J. Flaherty. 1997. Marxism and Australian Socialism. Melbourne: ASP. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, Adam. 1985. Capitalism and Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sassoon, Donald. 1996. One Hundred Years of Socialism. London: Tauris. Tudor, Henry, and J. M. Tudor. 1988. Marxism and Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Steve. 2002. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto.

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5 Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity Peter Kivisto

Émile Durkheim’s contemporary status as one of sociology’s most important foundational scholars would appear to be so secure that it is tempting to assume this has been true since his death a century ago. Indeed, some would see him as standing on a pedestal over his French competitors during his lifetime, the assumption being that once he published his three famous texts during the 1890s, his reputation had been secured. Moreover, in contrast to the peripatetic and marginal Marx, standing outside of the academy, and the psychologically tormented Weber, whose mental collapse removed him from the professoriate, Durkheim’s career can be seen as the product of a single-minded and clearly defined sense of how to advance sociology on his terms. However, this oversimplifies and thus distorts reality. To begin with, according to Johan Heilbron (2015: 69), “During his lifetime [Gabriel] Tarde was undoubtedly the best-known sociologist in France” – not Durkheim. It is true that Tarde died in 1904 and Durkheim’s stature rose during the twentieth century, but his highly productive early period was met with decidedly mixed responses, with the negative predominating. Tarde was a particular nemesis of Durkheim, such that Steven Lukes (1973: 302–313) devotes a lengthy section of his biography to the debate between the two. Lukes (1973: 204) describes Tarde as a “dilettante” who was “hostile to socialism and in favor of an intellectual aristocracy.” When Tarde was appointed to the Collège de France’s chair in modern philosophy, Durkheim expressed his dismay to a friend, contending that this “would prove detrimental to both sociology and philosophy.” Confronted by the negative reviews of each of his three books, Durkheim revealed his insecurity and fear of failure by asking, “Am I just slashing at water with a knife?” (quoted in Fournier, 2013: 5). Despite Durkheim’s efforts to secure the institutionalization of sociology in the French university system, Victor Karady (1981: 35) concluded that in the interwar years the results were at best ambiguous. While it was true that a number of Durkheimians acquired teaching posts, “these posts themselves remained, throughout the period, utterly marginal” in French universities. “In fact,” according to Karady (1981: 35), “the place of sociology in the faculties of letters remained peripheral. It continued in an auxiliary role as part of the philosophy curriculum.” None of this is meant to suggest that Durkheim had been forgotten. His work seeped into French sociology, sometimes with explicit acknowledgments of his influence, sometimes not. Charles Lemert (2006) made a convincing case about the intellectual debts to Durkheim owed by such later luminaries in French intellectual life as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques 84

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Derrida. In the English-speaking world, Durkheim was appreciated by British social anthropology, particularly in the thinking of Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and in American sociology, particularly with the 1937 publication of Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action, Volume I. Parsons made his claim about Durkheim’s place as a foundational disciplinary thinker in the interest of laying out the parameters of his voluntaristic theory of action. For the next few decades, Durkheim’s thought was linked to the structural-functional paradigm shaped by Parsons and his students, which exhibited hegemony in American sociology until the late 1960s. That paradigm increasingly came under attack from different fronts during a moment some saw as a legitimation crisis of the discipline. Randall Collins (2014: 667) contends that by the early 1970s (when Steven Lukes published his biography), Durkheim’s “reputation was at its nadir.” To the extent that this is an accurate characterization of the situation, I would contend that this was in no small part due to the association many made between Durkheim and the Parsonian tradition – both of which were accused (inaccurately, as it happens) of being inherently conservative. Collins (2014: 667) contrasts this to four decades later, when Fournier’s biography appeared and when one could point to many indications that “neo-Durkheimian influence animates many branches of today’s sociology.” In the intervening years rethinking the Durkheimian legacy became something of a cottage industry. Numerous scholars have sought in various ways to deconstruct (Lehmann, 1993) or reconsider (Stedman Jones, 2001) his thought. Thus, correctives have been offered to the common view of Durkheim as a positivist. Émile BenoitSmullyan’s (1948: 205) assessment makes the claim very explicitly, characterizing Durkheim and his “school” as advancing a view of sociology he calls “sociologism,” a term he uses to describe as a blend of methodological positivism with a doctrine that assumes that “the group precedes and constitutes the individual” and is the “source of culture and all higher values.” Challenges to this view became more common from the 1970s onward, seen for example in Mike Gane’s (1988) booklength reinterpretation of Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1938 [1895]). More recently, David N. Smith (2014: 166) addressed the issue by challenging the view that Durkheim engaged in sociological reductionism, and thus was “an enemy of psychology and the inner life.” Another generalization that had deep roots was the view that Durkheim was a conservative in both a political and sociological sense. Such a view has been challenged vigorously, if not without seeking various correctives to Durkheim, by Frank Pearce (1989) and Mike Gane (1992), both of whom use the adjective “radical” to describe the Durkheimian project. Third, scholars have engaged in a reconsideration of Durkheim’s understanding of his Jewish roots and his relationship with the Jewish community in France (Filloux, 1976; Fournier, 2013; Goldberg, 2017; Strenski, 1997). While these and other correctives were intended to set the record straight, they did not necessarily imply that Durkheimian theory has any particular relevance to or resonance with contemporary currents of sociological theorizing. In this regard, the area where scholars have expended efforts to deploy, albeit critically, Durkheim’s theorizing and thus reveal its relevance is in cultural sociology. Indeed, the cultural

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turn has resulted in a resurgence of interest in Durkheim. This is particularly evident in the emergence of a “strong program” in cultural sociology associated with Jeffrey C. Alexander and the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (Alexander and Smith, 2005; Alexander, 1988a). Cultural sociologists have turned their attention to the later Durkheim in which he, too, exhibited a cultural turn, with its deep reflections on religion, culminating in his fourth major book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965 [1912]). Interrelated with the impact of Durkheim on developments in cultural sociology is a growing concern within the discipline with the topic that was central to him: solidarity (Fournier, 2012: 178). This is evident in Alexander’s (2006; see Kivisto and Sciortino, 2015) articulation of civil sphere theory, which can be read as being shaped by a critical reading of Durkheim and an equally critical reading of Talcott Parsons’s (2007) attempt to develop a theory of the societal community. Parsons (2007: 56) contends, “the idea of solidarity involves a conception of mutual identification as common members of a social collectivity,” an idea that he thinks was “first brought into clear analytical salience in the work of Durkheim.” It is the idea underpinning both his understanding of the societal community and Alexander’s development of civil sphere theory. Before turning to Durkheim’s contribution to these and similar developments in theorizing solidarity, we first offer a brief contextualization of his life and times.

Biographical Context Durkheim’s lifelong concern with the moral and social bases of solidarity can be read in part as a reflection of the perceived threat to solidarity that was an everpresent possibility in France during his lifetime. Though it was actually Georg Simmel (1971 [1908]) who wrote an essay titled, “How Is Society Possible?” it was Durkheim who persistently addressed the question throughout his academic career. Robert Alun Jones (1986: 11–23) observed that Durkheim’s life had been framed by two wars. Born in 1858 in Épinal, a small city in the Lorraine region bordering Germany, he was only twelve years old when, on a suspect pretext and with inadequate planning, Napoléon III declared war on Prussia. The French were isolated from other nations in the region and suffered a humiliating defeat. The terms of the treaty called for the transfer of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany. This territorial loss was a bitter one, and one of the reactions of local residents was to engage in anti-Semitic scapegoating, blaming Jews for the plight of France (Lukes, 1973: 41). The war and its immediate aftermath highlighted the profound divisions within French society, which pitted republicans against monarchists, radicals against reactionaries, and Roman Catholics against anticlerics and secularists. This reflected the intense struggle within French society to come to terms with the meaning of the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century, the nation had lurched between a new regime seeking to instantiate itself and the old regime seeking to restore the status quo ante, with neither side succeeding in defeating its opponents once and for

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all. Civil war broke out in 1871. It ended when the republicans taking part in the Paris Commune were defeated in a bloodbath. James Miller (2018: 154) summarized the role it would play in the future by noting that although “doomed from the start,” it nevertheless became “a paradoxical symbol of a better society still to come.” The immediate impact for France of this crisis was the establishment of the Third Republic, to which Durkheim was committed. Although the Republic survived throughout his lifetime, its future was often uncertain. At the other end of Durkheim’s life a longer and far more destructive war broke out – World War I – that again pitted France against Germany, but this time it also involved other countries and, late in the war, the United States. Although France emerged a victor in the war, the victory was pyrrhic given the war’s human toll. Certainly for Durkheim, who became a patriotic defender of the French war effort, the personal consequences of the war were tragic. Not only were several of his most promising students lost on the battlefield – most notably Henri Hubert – but he also lost his beloved son André, who died in the Balkan campaign. Randall Collins (2014: 672) is quite harsh in his assessment of Durkheim’s involvement in the war effort, contending that the pamphlets he produced amounted to “patriotic hack-work” that required “blindfolding his sociological eyes.” This did not prevent him from becoming the object of anti-Semitic attack, accused in both the press and in the French Senate of being a German spy (Riley, 2015: 23). During this time, Durkheim’s goal of producing a major work on the sociology of morality came to an effective standstill. The one attempt to get into the project in a serious way, in early 1917, floundered. Though he had complained about chronic fatigue since before the turn of the century, which was likely linked to an underlying depression, his health became more fragile. He suffered a stroke in 1916 and though he tried to resume his activities, his stamina was depleted (Jones, 1986: 23). He died on November 15, 1917 at the relatively young age of fifty-nine, “his work unfinished, having lost, in the course of the war, many of his closest collaborators and finest students” (Lukes, 1973: 559). The career that he developed in the preceding decades can be divided into two periods, the formative and the mature. The formative period includes his educational career through the period of maximum scholarly publishing productivity. The local Jewish community in Épinal might have expected that the young Durkheim would become a rabbi, following in a family tradition that dated back to his great-grandfather. Instead, with his father’s blessing, he headed to Paris to pursue a secular education at the École normale supérieure. Multiple intellectual and political currents shaped Durkheim’s thinking during his student years (Lukes, 1973; Poggi, 2000), including what amounted to what would become a lifetime of coming to terms with his Jewish identity and his understanding of what it meant to be a French Jew (Strenski, 1997). This included such diverse intellectual influences beyond developments in French social science as philosophers from Spinoza to Kant. He wrote a thesis on Montesquieu’s role in the rise of modern social science (Fournier, 2013: 135). He read deeply in the literature on French socialist and republican thought (Stedman Jones, 2001) and German social science (Jones, 1999). He was well acquainted with the work of Auguste Comte

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and Herbert Spencer. Durkheim was especially impacted by the work of Wilhelm Wundt on morality (Riley, 2015: 18) and Charles Renouvier, who Heilbron (2015: 73) describes as “a central figure in redirecting philosophical reflection toward questions of science, republican politics, and secular morality.” During his university years, he developed what would become a lifelong friendship with Jean Jaurès, who would become a democratic socialist leader and who was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist in 1914 in response to his efforts to prevent the outbreak of war. Upon passing his agrégation exam in 1882, Durkheim taught a nationally prescribed curriculum in a French secondary school 50 miles outside of Paris, during which time, despite the time constraints imposed by the job, he also worked on his doctorate. Heilbron (2015: 74) notes that what was initially intended as a study exploring the relationship between “individualism and socialism” was revised to become a study of the relationship between “individual personality and social solidarity.” Thus commenced a career preoccupied with understanding the bases of solidarity. In 1887, he was hired to teach social science and pedagogy in Bordeaux – the first sociology course taught in the French university system, though not identified as such. In the same year, he married Louise Dreyfus, the daughter of a Jewish businessman from Paris. In Bourdeaux, he began to articulate his understanding of sociology’s distinctiveness. It was not only to be independent of philosophy, but was an autonomous social science. He was critical of those – he had Comte in mind – who promoted grand generalizations, arguing instead that the task of sociology was to conduct empirical investigations on different categories of social phenomena that perform specific functions (Heilbron, 2015: 75–76). It was in Bordeaux that in quick succession The Division of Labor in Society (1964 [1893]), The Rules of Sociological Method (1938 [1895]), and Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1951 [1897]) appeared. It was also during this period that he began his single-minded and unwavering commitment to advancing sociology as a discipline in the French academy, which he linked to his desire to contribute to the moral and political development of the Third Republic. He rose to the rank of professor. While in Bordeaux, he launched L’Annèe sociologique in 1896, assembling a research team to assist him, including his nephew Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, François Simand, and Célestin Bouglé. The goal of the journal was to review relevant sociological research in Europe and America during the preceding year while also producing original essays. The task proved to be onerous. Collins (2014: 670) summarizes the biographical findings when he writes that, “The burden of work is so heavy, taking up his vacations as well as any moments left over from his teaching and examining responsibilities, that Durkheim’s private correspondence is full of complaints of how it wears him down.” His tenacity in sticking with the project was motivated in part by competition provided by René Worms, who had founded the first sociology journal and established both an international and French sociological organization. In private communications, Durkheim made clear that he did not take Worms seriously as a scholar and thus did not want to be involved in his enterprises, viewing L’Année as an

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alternative that could serve as a vehicle for Durkheim’s understanding of the sociological enterprise (Heilbron, 2015: 78). Durkheim moved to the Sorbonne in 1902, hired initially as a lecturer but being elevated to a Professor of the Science of Education four years later. He would spend the rest of his career in Paris. A decade after his arrival, he published his fourth and final major work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965 [1912]). Fournier’s (2012) biography points to the administrative and teaching demands placed on him during this time. A question raised by Philip Smith (2014) was whether the gap of fifteen years between Suicide and his fourth book was a consequence of the time he devoted to his circle of students. Was this the reason that his publishing productivity plummeted – was it “the cost of collaboration?” A further question about Durkheim’s scholarly interests revolves around whether or not one can detect a continuity between his early work and the later phase. One way of framing this question involves whether the early Durkheim offered a social structural theoretical approach, while the latter sought to introduce culture as an autonomous sphere of social life. While this remains an unresolved discussion, one thing is clear. At some point, Durkheim turned his attention to religion. This actually began while in 1895 while still in Bordeaux, when he offered a course on religion. He describes its significance for his thinking by writing that at that moment he “achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life.” He went on to write that, “This was a revelation to me. That course of 1895 marked a dividing line in the development of my thought, to such an extent that all my previous researches had to be taken up afresh in order to be made to harmonize with these new insights” (quoted in Lukes, 1973: 237). Smith (2014: 249–250) has pointed out that students such as Mauss, Hertz, Hubert, and Bouglé were instrumental in setting Durkheim on this path. Fournier (2014: 523) goes further by contending, “Hubert and Mauss prefigured several of the crucial arguments of Durkheim’s later sociology of religion (such as the equation of society and the sacred).” These contemporary interpretive issues related to coming to terms with the Durkheimian legacy cannot be resolved here. Instead, the chapter will pursue a more limited task of tracing out the central idea of solidarity in the early Durkheim, linking it to his essay on “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969 [1898]), and briefly exploring how the later Durkheim might offer insights into contemporary theorizing of solidarity.

The Division of Labor’s Two Types of Solidarity In the formative period of Durkheim’s career, he identified two types of social solidarity: mechanical and organic. This typology emerged out of his critical engagement with similar attempts to specify the distinctive character of modern society. Lukes (1973: 140–147) identifies three thinkers of particular significance: Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Ferdinand Toennies. Of the three, it was the last that served as the main foil, having summarily dismissed the authoritarianism of Comte and Spencer’s utilitarianism. Toennies’ (1957 [1887]) distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft proved to be more useful for Durkheim in his own

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efforts to formulate a positive understanding of the potential for the type of solidarity best suited for a society predicated on the valorization of the individual. In making sense of Toennies’ argument, the exegetical challenge was made more complicated by the fact that it is not always clear if he is writing in terms of a formal sociology of pure concepts or in evolutionary terms where the bonds of Gemeinschaft described premodern society, while Gesellschaft depicted modern society. He defined the former as characterized by collective identities, the familiar, a low level of social differentiation, the centrality of the family, and social control predicated on tradition and religion. In contrast, he describes the latter as predicated on individualism, the impersonal, high levels of social differentiation, the centrality of state and economy, and social control based on law and contract. Behind the theoretical argument and empirical evidence brought to bear, one can detect a disdain for Gesellschaft and a romantic attachment to Gemeinschaft. Edward Tiryakian (1978: 198) considers The Division of Labor in Society to be intended as a “rebuttal of Toennies’ view of modern society.” He quotes Durkheim: “the society which Mr. Toennies describes is the capitalist society of socialists; indeed, the author frequently borrows from Marx and Lasalle the dark colors in which he represents that society.” Durkheim further wrote, “If I have properly understood his thought, Gesellschaft is supposed to be characterized by a progressive development of individualism, the dispersive effects of which can only be prevented for a time, and by artificial means, by the action of the state. It is seen essentially as a mechanical aggregate” (1972 [1889]: 146). Durkheim believed that Toennies saw individualism as working against a moral order. In such a social universe, people become isolated atoms floating in space, unattached to each other. This, Durkheim asserted, is a view that Toennies shared with such utilitarian philosophers as Jeremy Bentham. In such a state of affairs, Toennies seemed to suggest, the only thing that held people together, and that prevented the fracturing of social relations and the relationship of the individual to society, was the imposition of order and coherence by the state. Durkheim (1972 [1889]: 146), in signaling his point of departure from Toennies, argued, “The life of large social agglomerations is just as natural as that of small groupings. It is no less organic and no less internal.” This organic metaphor is carried over into The Division of Labor, Durkheim’s first systematic formulation of types of solidarity, both the one seen primarily in small, undifferentiated societies and the one evident in large, complex ones. Durkheim’s view stood in contrast to not only Marx and Toennies, but also to such German contemporaries as Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel, for whom the fundamental theme in coming to terms with modern society and national identity was, as Weber’s friend Friedrich Naumann noted, to answer the question, “What is capitalism?” Naumann suggested that the French responded to a different question: “What was the great Revolution?” (quoted in Muller, 2002: 229; see also Goldberg, 2017: 43–75). Indeed, Durkheim paid relatively little attention to capitalism per se, concentrating instead on industrial society in general. This is evident insofar as the divisions he wrote about in The Division of Labor bore little resemblance to the classes described by Marx and in various ways carried over by subsequent

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Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity

generations of German social thinkers. Instead, he focused on the divisions into various specialized occupations and with this the rise of professions that were becoming so characteristic of modern society and thus were seen as of critical significance. In making sense of modern society, the idea of two different types of solidarity – mechanical and organic – offered an analytic distinction intended to specify what was unique about the modern. While it was true that the former was characteristic of traditional societies and the latter of modern societies, this does not mean that mechanical solidarity disappears entirely in modern societies. However, Durkheim thought that organic solidarity would predominate because of “the simultaneous growth in the volume and density of societies” (quoted in Tiryakian, 1978: 197). His use of these two metaphors is intentional because by depicting past and less differentiated societies as mechanical, and modern complex, highly differentiated societies as organic, he was standing Toennies on his head (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]: 3738). There is a somewhat counterintuitive quality to these metaphors. After all, because premodern peoples are generally seen as being bonded to a collective and at one with their natural world, shouldn’t this be described as organic? In a machine age, however, when people have moved off the land and tradition-based communities are replaced by the dictates of the impersonal marketplace and the artificiality of cities where their social relations are defined increasingly in terms of a world of strangers, this would hardly appear to be organic. Indeed, because industrialization and mechanization are closely related words, wouldn’t it appear appropriate to construe modern societies as ones in which mechanical solidarity prevails? The question that needs to be addressed is why Durkheim would switch these terms in this way. In his first major book, the answer hinged on the impact of structural changes, resulting from the expansion of the division of labor, on social solidarity. In brief, Durkheim noted that in mechanical societies there is a relatively simple social structure with a minimum level of labor division. For example, in early hunting and gathering societies, the major societal division is made across gender lines, within the confined of kinship relations. Clans, tribes, villages, and other forms of what Durkheim referred to as “segmented societies” did not rely, or relied minimally, on external social organizations, instead functioning as small networks for the provision of life’s necessities. Segmented societies were not economically interdependent in any significant way. The solidarity that bound their members together is predicated on the sameness of their lives. In other words, people were bonded together by commonly held values, or what Durkheim (1964 [1893]), borrowing from Rousseau, referred to as the “collective conscience.” Modern societies are characterized by their increasingly complex social structures and by an ever more refined division of labor. Such societies necessitate the specialization and compartmentalization of work, and with this arises a growing interdependency. The new reciprocity characteristic of social relations is precisely the quality of modern societies that establishes the basis for organic solidarity. The differences in the functions that different members perform produce individual differences, thereby serving as a stimulus to individualism. In other words, the

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bonds of mechanical solidarity were based on “a more or less organized totality of beliefs and sentiments common to all the members of the group” (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]: 129). More recently, they had given way with the dawn of modern societies to potent new forces that were characterized by heightened complexity and differentiation, an increased dependence on society, and, what might at first glance seem to be a paradox, a growing level of individual autonomy. From this early point in his career to the end, Durkheim was concerned about the social problems that were endemic to modern societies. At the same time, he sought to distinguish those problems from the ones resulting from the dislocations arising due to rapid social change, when the potential for a moral vacuum increases. He identified three “abnormal forms” of the division of labor that undermine rather than contribute to organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]: 353–395). The “anomic division of labor” occurs in conditions where normative regulations are insufficiently powerful to deter conflict during crises. An example he gives is the conflict between capital and labor. He thought that the state was the sole institution capable of effectively combatting this pathological form. The second form Durkheim calls the “forced division of labor,” which resulted when inequality was so pronounced that job opportunities were unavailable to sectors of the population who might objectively be qualified for those positions. Though he did not name the third form, commentators have referred to it as the “bureaucratic division of labor,” which Riley (2015: 60) describes as resulting from “a situation wherein individual effort is not given appropriate scope,” resulting in “stifling individual activity.” Alexander (1988b: 53) has argued that the book contains a “fatal weakness” because its three parts “cannot be related to one another in a systematic way.” Durkheim must have been dissatisfied and in the process of rethinking aspects of it, he undertook his second major sociological study.

Suicide and the Abandonment of the Binary Typology of Solidarity Anthony Giddens (1971: 82) contends that the ideas developed in The Division of Labor served to “constitute the foundations of Durkheim’s sociology, and the bulk of his subsequent writings represent elaborations of themes set out in that work.” This observation is evident in Durkheim’s next major study, Suicide (1951 [1897]), which was published around the time that he began to shift his focus from social structures to cultural structures, but which in fact is very much in line with the central concerns of the former. However, there is also a difference between the two studies that Robert Nisbet (1966: 86; see also Pope and Johnson, 1983: 690) observed, namely that Durkheim no longer distinguished mechanical from organic solidarity, instead addressing solidarity as a singular phenomenon, that moreover had the characteristics of mechanical solidarity. The reason for writing about this particular topic was overdetermined. At the personal level, the suicide of Victor Hommay, a very close friend, likely contributed to his interest in the subject. Beyond this, however, because suicide is a serious moral

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Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity

and social problem, and because Durkheim was interested in the ways sociology could address social problems and inform moral understanding, the subject represented an ideal research topic. This was particularly so because he was intent on indicating how sociology’s object domain differed from that of psychology, attempting to illustrate how the two disciplines could complement each other while each respectively managing to offer unique insights. In other words, he sought to establish the scientific status of sociology by revealing how it was capable of providing a compelling account of the power of society in influencing this seemingly most individual of acts (Lukes, 1973: 191–195). The study of suicide afforded Durkheim with the opportunity to explore the dangers of contemporary individualism and an opportunity to develop a theoretical account of particular pathological social conditions that prove incapable of providing, as Lukes (1973: 217) stated, “the requisite sources of attachment and/or regulation, at the appropriate level of intensity.” When this occurs, those psychologically vulnerable people who could be considered suicide-prone are more likely to respond by committing suicide. Durkheim (1951 [1897]: 44) defined suicide as any direct or indirect act that the individual commits with the knowledge that it will result in death. In making his case that suicides are responsive to changing social conditions, he focused on suicide rates, beginning with the assumption that a certain number of suicides can be expected to occur in any society, with different societies varying in terms of their particular aptitudes for suicide (Jones, 1986; Nisbet, 1974). From this perspective, suicide rates are an example of social facts. Thus, the focus of his investigations was on the differing influences of different social environments, and insofar as this was the case, he was not concerned with individual motives, which were seen as falling under the purview of psychology. Thus, he examined such factors as religious affiliation, marital status, and economic crises. His theoretical framework for interpreting his data begins with the assumption that social cohesion in any society at any particular moment can be either normal or pathological. With that assumption, he identified four pathological states that could account for heightened suicides – in part previewed in his earlier account of abnormal forms of the division of labor. Underpinning the typology he develops is a conception of humans, who he depicted as homo duplex, by which he meant that they are creatures divided between a social and an asocial side. The insatiable asocial drives need to be limited and contained by society, but they cannot be eliminated. Rather, a delicate balancing act is required to achieve a relative harmony between fulfilling individual needs and desires while simultaneously meeting the obligations and responsibilities demanded by society. Any harmony achieved between the individual and society must be derived from external social forces, specifically from a morality shaped by particular societies that inculcate values that are perceived to be both desirable and obligatory (Durkheim, 1951 [1897]; 1961; 1974 [1924]). Durkheim identified four types of suicide: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic, which create two binaries, related respectively to integration and regulation. Regarding integration, egoism and altruism refer to ways that individuals are connected to or bonded with others, and the extent to which they identify with and see

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themselves as a part of their society. Jack Douglas (1967: 36) succinctly describes integration as referring to “the strength of the individual’s ties to his society or to the stability and durability of social relationships within populations.” An egoistic imbalance between the individual and society occurs when an individual’s activities and beliefs take precedence over collective bonds. In this situation, the level of integration is too low. Altruism, in contrast, refers to situations in which individuals are not sufficiently individuated from the collectivity and the obligations it imposes on them. People do not have sufficient autonomy. In this case, the balance is upset in favor of society because the level of integration is too high (Douglas, 1967; Durkheim, 1951 [1897]: 152–240; Pope, 1976). Durkheim offered several examples of conditions and situations conducive to egoistic suicide. For example, he found that Protestants have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, who in turn have a higher rate than do Jews, the reason being due to differing belief systems and institutional structures. The higher propensity for egoism among Protestants is a consequence of a theological system that calls for individuals to have a direct relationship with God rather than a mediated one, and as part of what Luther called the “priesthood of all believers,” this encouraged thinking free from and critical of institutionalized authorities. In short, Durkheim saw Protestants as being more egoistic than Catholics and Jews because they shared fewer common beliefs and rituals, and thus were less integrated into an institutional church (Durkheim, 1951 [1897]: 157–160; Jones, 1986: 92). Second, Durkheim found that unmarried people commit suicide more frequently than their married counterparts, being more detached and thus less integrated. This likewise accounts for the fact that people in smaller families have a higher suicide rate than those in larger families. Pope (1976: 23) summarized the argument as follows: The lower the rate of social interaction, the weaker collective sentiments; the weaker collective sentiments, the weaker social integration; the weaker social integration, the less individuals act in service of social interests; the less individuals act in service of social interests, the less meaning they find in life and the higher the suicide rate.

The examples Durkheim mustered for his examination of altruistic suicide were of a different order than those for egoism. Many examples derived from ethnographic accounts of traditional societies, and when turning to the modern world, his focus was on military systems that are predicated on demanding that individuals abandon or limit their own interests in deference to the interests of the group. Altruistic suicides occur when the individual is sacrificed in the interest of the group, seen as a matter of duty (Durkheim, 1951 [1897]: 228–240; Lukes, 1973: 207). It is precisely this exaggerated sense of obligation to the organization and the social relations it establishes that result in over-integration. This is, in short, an uncommon type of suicide in the modern world, found instead more often in traditional societies or in crises such as is found on a battlefield. Turning to the couplet for regulation – involving the ability of society to control and channel human actions and aspirations – Durkheim again saw the possibility of

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Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity

either too much or too little, both producing pathological conditions. When there is too little regulation, anomic suicides result; when there is too much, fatalistic suicides occur (Graeff and Mehlkop, 2007; Pope, 1976: 25–27). Debates about the precise meaning of anomie have persisted, but there is general agreement that it involves a family of concepts such as alienation, normlessness, and rule-lessness. Stjepan Meštrović and Helene Brown (1985) claim that Durkheim used it as a synonym for dérèglement, which is often translated as disturbance, breakdown, or unsettling. All point to a pathological condition. Durkheim turned to two empirical examples to illustrate anomic suicide. One derived from the economy, specifically from periods of dramatic economic upheaval. This occurs not only during depressions or deep recessions in the business cycle, but also during boom periods. He reasoned that both the nadir and the zenith were conducive to anomic suicide because both caused people to become disoriented in a context in which anything goes and the ordinary constraints on conduct lose their efficacy. Those individuals who are no longer able to contain their drives and passions are candidates for this type of suicide. Similarly, people who live through divorce find themselves in a situation in which the regulative function of matrimony is lost, and they are therefore more likely than people who remain married to commit suicide. Because economic cycles and divorce are part of the fabric of modern life, anomic suicide is, like egoistic suicide, a prevalent type (Besnard, 1993; Durkheim, 1951 [1897]: 241–276; Lehmann, 1995). In stark contrast, fatalistic suicide is a largely inconsequential phenomenon in modern conditions. Durkheim (1951 [1897]: 276) confined his discussion of it to a single footnote located at the end of the chapter on anomie. It is the type of suicide caused by excessive regulation. Perhaps the best example is the traditional Hindu practice of sati, but Durkheim does not cite it. Rather, he points to slave suicides. His only contemporary examples are unconvincing: very young husbands and childless married women (for critiques, see Lehmann, 1993; 1995). The subsequent reception of the book has ranged widely. On the positive side, it is viewed as a model of research informed by a compelling theoretical model that has served a singularly consequential role in establishing sociology as a science. In contrast, critics have raised concerns about its use and interpretation of data and concerns about its conceptual adequacy (Besnard, 1993; Douglas, 1967; Jones, 1986; Lehmann, 1995; Pearce, 1989; Pope, 1976). The question at hand concerns its contribution to a theory of solidarity. If from the beginning of his career to the end Durkheim was concerned about this singular topic, this study should be seen as representing the beginning of a move beyond his original formulation. During its preparation, two developments in his thinking transpired. The first involves his conviction that individualism was a characteristic feature of modernity, and as such, any understanding of solidarity must be squared with this fact. The second revolves around his growing interest in religion, which took him in new directions and led to the publication hiatus between Suicide and The Elementary Forms. We turn to each of these below, suggesting that in the end Durkheim was unable to fully put the pieces together in a new theory of solidarity, but rather established a framework that subsequent theorists have taken up.

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The Cult of the Individual From the beginning of his career to the end, Durkheim was concerned with the development and implications of individualism in modern societies, which he took to be a fundamental given. It is this conviction that shaped his preoccupation with understanding the changing bases of solidarity necessary for contemporary conditions. He considered the roots of individualism to be located in the deep cultural structure of the Christian civilizational complex (Durkheim and Mauss, 1971; Giddens, 1971: 115–116; Nelson, 1973). However, individualism had further developed as an outgrowth of the republican aspirations reflected in the French Revolution, which Giddens (1971: 116) writes, “gave the most decisive impetus to the growth of moral individualism in modern times.” In the conclusion of The Division of Labor (1964 [1893]: 407), Durkheim introduced the idea of the “cult of the individual,” which he viewed as what the collective consciousness is in the process of becoming. He explained it as follows: “It only asks that we be thoughtful of our fellows and that we be just, that we fulfill our duty, that we work at the function we can best execute, and receive the just reward for our services.” Of course, the cult of the individual was only possible in a society where individualism has taken hold, but its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Alexis de Tocqueville introduced the idea of individualism into social thought, first in Democracy in America (1969 [1853]) and once again in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1955 [1856]). We know from Fournier (2013: 39) that Durkheim read both books in 1881. What we do not know is his reaction to Tocqueville’s discussions of individualism. However, what we do know, based most explicitly on “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969 [1898]), is that he had a different conception of what individualism meant in the modern world. Published the year after the publication of Suicide, Durkheim wrote it in the midst of the Dreyfus affair. Lukes (1973: 339) aptly describes this essay as “a Dreyfusiste manifesto and an eloquent defense of liberalism,” doing so by articulating a vision of a new mode of solidarity predicated on “a religion in which the human person becomes a sacred object.” The Dreyfus affair revealed the intellectual, moral, and political fault lines in French society, pitting secularists, liberals, and socialist intellectuals on one side and reactionary Catholics, monarchists, anti-Semites, and right-wing nationalists on the other. In a subsequent commentary, Durkheim (2008 [1899]) located this episode in terms of what he called an “acute social crisis” (see also the commentary by Goldberg, 2008). The affair began in 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French military, was arrested and accused of spying for Germany. Two years later, a member of the French general staff unearthed documents that clearly exonerated Dreyfus. Instead of freeing an innocent man, however, high-ranking military officials engaged in an elaborate plot to conceal the evidence. When the conspiracy was revealed to the public, a major conflict ensued between Dreyfus’s defenders and supporters of the military command, the former coming from the political and cultural Left and the latter from the Right.

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Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity

Although Durkheim thought that intellectuals should in general refrain from active engagement in political matters, and he usually stood clear of such involvements, this case proved to be an exception. Not a stirring condemnation akin to Émile Zola’s “J’accuse,” Durkheim’s essay was rather a nuanced manifesto on behalf of the embattled Dreyfus and of liberalism in general. He made his case by providing not simply an account of modern individualism, but in addition a robust defense of it. Individualism is the product of society. If the Division of Labor had placed special emphasis on the expansion of the division of labor in modern economic life, and thus on social structure, culture is not absent even in that early work. However, culture becomes more prominent over time. If Suicide appears to have caused Durkheim to become dissatisfied with his earlier argument about mechanical solidarity progressively giving way to organic solidarity, “Individualism and the Intellectuals” can be read as the beginning of a shift in Durkheim’s thinking in which he seeks to locate anew the proper place of culture. Rather than seeing him abandoning organic solidarity and further developing mechanical solidarity, as Pope and Johnson (1983) argue, Charles Marske (1987: 1) sees him struggling with the question: “what is the relationship between the moral specialization of diversity associated with organic solidarity and the morality of the collective conscience, which becomes focused on the ‘cult of the individual’?” In this struggle, Finn Bowring (2016) is undoubtedly correct that in the end we are left with loose strands, ambiguities, and contradictions. But it continues to be a starting point for contemporary efforts to theorize solidarity, as with Peter Thijssen’s (2012) attempt to achieve a synthesis of mechanical and organic solidarity by way of an engagement with Alex Honneth. The argument Durkheim advances begins with a critique of a version of an egoistic individualism that he associates with utilitarianism. He sees efforts to construe individualism solely in these terms as a failure, describing Herbert Spencer’s philosophy as “of such moral poverty that it now has scarcely any supporters” (Durkheim, 1969 [1898]: 20). An alternative he points to derives from Kant and Rousseau, and it is from these philosophers that he makes his case. In this version, the human person takes on a religious character. According to Durkheim (1969 [1898]: 21–22): It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keep them away from profane contacts and which draws them away from ordinary life. And it is exactly this feature which induces the respect of which it is the object. Whoever makes an attempt on a man’s life, on a man’s liberty, on a man’s honor inspires us with a feeling of horror, in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned. Such a morality is therefore not simply a hygienic discipline or a wise principle of economy. It is a religion of which man is, at the same time, both believer and God.

This vision could not be further from narcissistic love of self, predicated as it is on respect for the integrity of all individuals. The deification of the individual resulted in respect for and endorsement of human rights, a “sympathy for all that is human, a wider pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent desire to combat and alleviate them, a great thirst for justice” (Durkheim, 1969 [1898]: 24). The

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Dreyfus case served to illustrate the point, for his supporters were arguing in favor of the rights of the individual rather than a blind allegiance to established authorities. In a more general sense, Durkheim was claiming that the social structural changes brought about by the expansion of the division of labor were not, in and of themselves, sufficient to ground a new basis of social solidarity. What was also needed was a new basis for morality, and he found it in what Lise Ann Tole (1993: 21) called his “model of enlightened individualism.” This model would replace an outlived morality incapable of accounting for individualism, while at the same time serving as a check on the negative potential of an unbridled egoistic individualism (Callegaro, 2016; 2012).

Religion and the Foundations of a Normative Sociology for Democratic Politics Although Durkheim had been interested in religion as a sociological phenomenon from the beginning, it would increasingly shape his thinking from the mid1890s onward. He first offered lectures on religion in 1895 and around the same time became acquainted with the work of the Cambridge University professor of Arabic William Robertson Smith. Durkheim would later describe this period of his life as a watershed moment that caused him to rethink his earlier work (including the mechanical–organic distinction), without explaining precisely why. Recently Alexandra Maryanski (2014) has argued that the key to the mystery revolves around his coming to appreciate the significance of totemism. The cult of nature gave way in his thinking to the cult of totemism. Totemism was thus seen as the basis for solidarity and for the generation of rituals, practices, and beliefs. Maryanski (2014: 369) describes what this meant for Durkheim’s understanding of solidarity: If one looks at Durkheim’s adaptation of Smith’s ideas, what he came to realize was that the roots of solidarity underlying totemism are similar to the cultural basis of his organic solidarity. In both, individuality is preserved in a nonkin social matrix of structural interdependences, while the social whole generated by these interdependences is culturally integrated by totems signifying moral codes to which individuals develop collective attachments through emotion-arousing rituals – a mechanism of solidarity that, he believed, first appeared in the earliest societies. It also allowed for developmental changes over time without a break in social stability. By dropping his two types of mutually incompatible solidarity, Durkheim would resurrect the collective conscience that he once portrayed as slowly withering away and shifting its meaning to harmonize with what became a more favored term, collective representations.

This reorientation can serve to explain the shift of focus from modern societies to premodern, for rather than a disjuncture between past and present social worlds, he now sought to understand the cultural structures common to both. This is evident in his collaborative work with Mauss on primitive classification (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963 [1903]), culminating in The Elementary Forms (Durkheim, 1965 [1912]). Durkheim planned to follow up this work with a major study of morality, which

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would have returned him to analyzing the bases of solidarity reflecting the ideals of the French Revolution, furthering his moral commitment to the Third Republic. While leaving some preliminary work that was eventually translated into English, Durkheim’s overarching objective remained unfulfilled at his death (Durkheim, 1958a; 1961). Linked to this, he might have further specified what he meant by a version of socialism not defined around class conflict, but rather predicated on liberal democratic rule (Durkheim, 1958b). Goldberg (2017: 33–34) is right that his was not a “socialism of fools,” and Fournier (2013: 2110) is also correct to contend that Durkheim did not view socialism as a “scientific doctrine,” but rather as a “plan for the reconstruction of societies, a program for a collective life that does not yet exist.” As such, the centrality he attaches to education and morality must be understood in terms of their capacity to prod that reconstruction in beneficial ways. Alexander (1988a: 7) has made a case on behalf of Durkheim’s importance in broad terms for cultural sociology, deriving in no small part from the directions he took in his later work. He points to such seminal figures in mid-twentieth-century social science as Edward Shil and Clifford Geertz. One might add Erving Goffman to this group, but, as noted earlier, it is in Alexander’s own advocacy of a strong program in cultural sociology that the legacy of Durkheim has been advanced most systematically. When it comes to the specific topic of solidarity, as his imprint on Parsons’s (2007) idea of the societal community, Robert Bellah’s “civil religion” (Bellah, 1967), and Alexander’s “civil sphere theory” reveals, “Durkheim is good to think.”

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988a. “Introduction: Durkheimian Sociology and Cultural Studies Today.” In Jeffrey C. Alexander (ed.), Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (pp. 1–21). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1988b. Action and Its Environments: Toward a New Synthesis. New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith (eds.). 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96(1): 1–21. Benoit-Smullyan, Émile. 1948. “The Sociologism of Émile Durkheim and His School.” In Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.), An Introduction to the History of Sociology (pp. 205–243). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Besnard, Philippe. 1993. “Anomie and Fatalism in Durkheim’s Theory of Regulation.” In Stephen P. Turner (ed.), Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist (pp. 169–190). New York: Routledge. Bowring, Finn. 2016. “The Individual and Society in Durkheim.” European Journal of Social Theory 19(1): 21–38. Callegaro, Francesco. 2012. “The Ideal of the Person: Recovering the Novelty of Durkheim’s Sociology. Part I: The Idea of Society and Its Relation to the Individual.” Journal of Classical Sociology 12(3–4): 449–478.

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2016. “The Idea of the Person: Recovering the Novelty of Durkheim’s Sociology. Part II: Modern Society, the Cult of the Person, and the Sociological Project.” Journal of Classical Sociology 16(1): 37–52. Collins, Randall. 2014. “Durkheim: via Fournier, via Lukes, a Review Essay.” Theory and Society 43(6): 667–673. Douglas, Jack D. 1967. The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1938 [1895]. The Rules of Sociological Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1951 [1897]. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1958a. Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1958b. Socialism and Saint-Simon. Edited by Alvin Gouldner. Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch College. 1961. Moral Education. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1964 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. 1965 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. 1969 [1898]. “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” with an introduction by Steven Lukes. Political Studies 17(1): 14–30. 1972 [1889]. “Review of Toennies: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.” Revue philosophique 27. In Anthony Giddens (ed.), Émile Durkheim: Selected Writings (pp. 146–147). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1974 [1924]. Sociology and Philosophy. New York: Free Press. 2008 [1899]. “Anti-Semitism and Social Crisis.” Sociological Theory 26(4): 321–323. Durkheim, Émile and Marcel Mauss. 1963 [1903]. Primitive Classification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1971. “Note on the Notion of Civilization.” Social Research 38(4): 808–813. Filloux Jean-Claude. 1976. “Il ne faut pas oublier que je suis fils de rabbin.” Revue française de sociologie 17(2): 259–266. Fournier, Marcel. 2012. “Is There Anything New to Say about Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss?” International Sociology 27(2): 170–178. 2013. Émile Durkheim: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2014. “Les Formes Élémentaires comme Oeuvre Collective: Les Contributions d’Hanri Hubert et de Marcel Mauss à la Sociologie de la Religion Tardive d’Émile Durkheim.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39(4): 523–546. Gane, Mike. 1988. On Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method. London: Routledge. 1992. The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. London: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony. 1971. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, Chad Alan. 2008. “Introduction to Émile Durkheim’s ‘Anti-Semitism and Social Crisis.’” Sociological Theory 26(4): 299–321. 2017. Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Graeff, Peter and Guido Mehlkop. 2007. “When Anomie Becomes a Reason for Suicide: A New Macro-sociological Approach in the Durkheimian Tradition.” European Sociological Review 23(4): 521–535. Heilbron, Johan. 2015. French Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jones, Robert Alun. 1986. Émile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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1999. The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Karady, Victor. 1981. “The Prehistory of Present-Day French Sociology (1917–1957).” In Charles C. Lemert (ed.), French Sociology: Rupture and Renewal since 1968 (pp. 33–47). New York: Columbia University Press. Kivisto, Peter, and Giuseppe Sciortino (eds.). 2015. Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Lehmann, Jennifer M. 1993. Deconstructing Durkheim: A Post-Post-Structuralist Critique. New York: Routledge. 1995. “Durkheim’s Theories of Deviance and Suicide: A Feminist Reconsideration.” American Journal of Sociology 100(4): 904–930. Lemert, Charles. 2006. Durkheim’s Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lukes, Steven. 1973. Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. New York: Penguin. Marske, Charles E. 1987. “Durkheim’s ‘Cult of the Individual’ and the Moral Reconstitution of Society.” Sociological Theory 5(1): 1–14. Maryanski, Alexandra. 2014. “The Birth of the Gods: Robertson Smith and Durkheim’s Turn to Religion as the Basis of Social Integration.” Sociological Theory 32(4): 352–376. Meštrović, Stjepan G. and Helene M. Brown. 1985. “Durkheim’s Concept of Anomie as Dérèglement.” Social Problems 33(2): 81–99. Miller, James. 2018. Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to Our World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Muller, Jerry Z. 2002. Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. New York: Random House. Nelson, Benjamin. 1973. “Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters.” Sociological Analysis 34(2): 79–105. Nisbet, Robert. 1966. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. 1974. The Sociology of Émile Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action, Volume I. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2007. American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community. Edited and introduced by Giuseppe Sciortino. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Pearce, Frank. 1989. The Radical Durkheim. London: Unwin Hyman. Poggi, Gianfranco. 2000. Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press. Pope, Whitney. 1976. Durkheim’s Suicide: A Classic Analyzed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pope, Whitney and Barclay D. Johnson. 1983. “Inside Organic Solidarity.” American Sociological Review 48(5): 681–692. Riley, Alexander. 2015. The Social Thought of Émile Durkheim. Los Angeles: Sage. Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1908]. “How Is Society Possible?” In Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (pp. 6–22). Edited and introduced by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, David N. 2014. “Review: Slashing at Water with a Knife? Durkheim’s Struggle to Anchor Sociology in First Principles.” Contemporary Sociology 43(2): 165–171. Smith, Philip. 2014. “The Cost of Collaboration: Reflections upon Randall Collins’ Theory of Collective Intellectual Production via Émile Durkheim: A Biography.” Anthropological Quarterly 87(1): 245–254. Stedman Jones, Susan. 2001. Durkheim Reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Strenski, Ivan. 1997. Durkheim and the Jews of France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Thijssen, Peter. 2012. “From Mechanical to Organic Solidarity and Back: With Honneth beyond Durkheim.” European Journal of Social Theory 15(4): 454–470. Tiryakian, Edward. 1978. “Émile Durkheim.” In Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds.), A History of Sociological Analysis (pp. 187–236). New York: Basic Books. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1955 [1856]. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1969 [1853]. Democracy in America. Translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Toennies, Ferdinand. 1957 [1887]. Community and Society. Edited and translated by C. P. Loomis. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Tole, Lise Ann. 1993. “Durkheim on Religion and Moral Community in Modernity.” Sociological Inquiry 63(1): 1–29.

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6 What’s in a Name? The Sacred, Science, and the Collège de Sociologie Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

In the “Foreword” to his 1988 English edition of the volume on the Collège de sociologie, first published in French in 1979, Denis Hollier reported that three years earlier he had been “accused of (or perhaps congratulated for) having ‘invented’ . . . the College of Sociology” (Hollier, 1988: xxiii).1 Hollier’s perplexing statement, though unaccompanied by further explication, suggestively attests to the ambiguous nature of the reactions that followed the original publication of the Collège’s work. Not only did responses span the spectrum of opposites, from anger to admiration, they also seemed to question the veracity of the whole enterprise: the Collège was a fable masterfully concocted by Hollier’s creative genius. To be sure, his astounding interpretive and research abilities enabled Hollier to painstakingly reconstruct the history and substance of a 1930s group of which few tracks remained after the fact, and whose existence seemed to have slipped from the memory of most protagonists of the time. Through a meticulous labor of detective collage and puzzle-solving, Hollier gave flesh and bones to an experiment that, under the leadership of Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois, rose and fell without much fanfare between 1937 and 1939 – one of several intellectual initiatives sprouting in the interwar period. And yet, even though the coming to light of the Collège’s existence owes a great debt to Hollier’s work, the insinuation that he invented the Collège by resurrecting it from oblivion is ill placed, a mere sign of the general resistance against recognizing the Collège’s intellectual contribution to this day. The persistence of a fictional halo surrounding the group confirms the mark of illegitimacy through which the Collège has been perceived ever since the publication of its collected works. Allusions of its link to a secret society that was ominously planning human sacrifices, or, alternatively, evocations of legendary intellectual figures of the caliber of Walter Benjamin attending its lectures have excited people’s interest more than the Collège’s actual theorizing. For sociologists, assessing the Collège presents a particular challenge as its unorthodox approach to the discipline, although rooted in the teaching of the Durkheimian school, defies familiar norms and categories.2 The question arises: Should one care about a group of original intellectuals only because they named themselves a “college of sociology”? Of course, the answer to such a question should be negative, unless the social insights generated by the Collège’s heterodox collective matched the intentions suggested in its self-appellation. My argument is that, not only did the Collège seriously engage in sociological thinking: it did it by embracing Durkheim’s lifelong ambition of making sociology into the leading science among 103

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sciences, the science that truly matters. The Collège’s pursuit of this goal no doubt unfolded through unconventional methods and discordant perspectives; its theoretical twists and turns traversed times and places, crossing disciplines, while also advocating an activist stance. Nevertheless, the Collège pushed the limits of sociological analysis during the 1930s – a time when diagnoses of the social ills confronting modern societies were urgently needed. It adopted a sweeping view of the historical crisis faced by contemporary democracies and sidelined narrow interpretive evaluations. It also exposed the enormous stakes at play in the analysis of that which glues society together: community. At a historical juncture when competing claims to social bonds were being advanced in the name of race, blood, or national ties, the Collège’s reflections on the nature of human relations hit at the heart of the matter. They brought to the fore the need for affective manifestations as a core condition of human sociality, and they addressed the actual reality of yearnings for togetherness evident in the contemporary political arena. The Collège saw sociology as the means to diagnose the modern crisis as well as mend it. Although shattered, its grandiose aspirations assigned the ascendant sociological science a primary role in the reconstitution of the social whole.

A Name Is a Name The Collège de sociologie was founded by a small group of intellectuals in March 1937 during a meeting held at the Parisian café Le Grand Véfour. At that time, the original members redacted a “Note” that laid out the Collège’s program and rationale. Later published in the journal Acéphale in July of that same year, the “Note” specified that the group’s activities, in the form of weekly lectures, would begin in October (Hollier, 1988). Among the signatories of the “Note” were the two main leaders of the Collège, Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois. In addition, the list comprised Georges Ambrosino and Pierre Klossowski, who continued to gravitate around the Collège throughout its short-lived existence; Pierre Libra, about whom little is known besides the fact that he signed the “Note”; and Jules Monnerot, who apparently disavowed the Collège and did not participate in any of its gatherings.3 Eventually, the Collège’s leadership became a triumvirate with the inclusion of Michel Leiris. In substantive terms, however, Bataille and Caillois continued to hold the scepter of the group, and between the two of them delivered the majority of the lectures sponsored by the collective. Regardless of the speaker, all talks, which actually took place every other week (except for a long break in the summer of 1938), were meant to address the central topic of the Collège’s concerns: the fate of the sacred in the contemporary world. Bataille made the group’s intentions very explicit in his inaugural lecture of November 20, 1937.4 The Collège engaged in the particular domain it called “sacred sociology,” which, as Bataille specified, was “not just a part of sociology” in the way religious sociology might be; it was not limited to the study of religious institutions. Sacred sociology studied “the entire communifying movement of society,” including power. It was concerned with “all human activities . . . insofar as they have

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What’s in a Name?

a communifying value, in the active sense of the word, that is to say, insofar as they are creators of unity” (Hollier, 1988: 74). Bataille espoused a comprehensive view of sociology that both bypassed specialization and advocated the need for sociology to play a critical role as the science of the social, that which holds people together. In the spirit of Durkheim, the Collège upheld the notion that society is more than the sum of its parts and that its sacredness resides in the power of unity.5 Society creates the sacred and is at the same time sacred. To be sure, Bataille was aware of the semantic and actual indeterminacy of the notion of “unity.” He made a distinction between traditional, de facto communities and elective communities, and although he denounced individualism and recognized the tendency to dissociation within wholes, he would not support a community based on blood. The challenge for the Collège was how to avoid individualism without falling prey to totalizing systems, an issue that Marcel Mauss eventually acknowledged had been underestimated by Durkheim and his followers. The historical reality of fascism and Nazism indeed facilitated the Collège’s awareness of the liabilities inherent in an uncritical notion of community. The attraction fascism exercised over its audiences further motivated the Collège to illuminate the modalities and articulations of sociality. How could one expose fascism’s inauthentic invocations of community and rebuff Mussolini and Hitler’s regimes as mere simulacra of the sacred? That was the question. To address the issue, the Collège exploited sociology’s insights. In particular, as Caillois explained in his first “Note” (and especially its expanded version published in the summer of 1938), one needed to duplicate anthropology and sociology’s analyses of the “primitives” and apply them to the modern context.6 The Collège deemed it necessary to penetrate the “interplay of instincts and ‘myths’” in contemporary societies. It wished to understand “the deep strata” of modern collective life, those “vital elements” that remained elusive because confined to groups and situations considered to have been surpassed by historical processes of rationalization (Hollier, 1988: 10). Durkheim’s study of the Arunta and other totemic clans in Australia especially exercised a powerful influence on the Collège’s imagination and inspired its members to pursue a sort of psychology of the social (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]). “This preoccupation with rediscovering the primordial longings and conflicts of the individual condition transposed to the social dimension is at the origin of the College of Sociology,” Caillois wrote (Hollier, 1988: 10). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim had addressed the role of myths and rituals as elements that contribute to the emotional building of the social. Likewise, the Collège focused on those mythical and ritualistic activities that may help enact the sacred in the contemporary world. The Collège’s idea, which solidified as the group proceeded in its studies, was to bring to the surface and explode the emotional and often violent states that punctuate and give meaning to social existence. In the Collège’s understanding, one should not shy away from digging deep into the affective forces driving the formation of community, no matter how disconcerting those findings may be. The simultaneous movement of attraction and repulsion that Bataille tackled in the lecture of January 22, 1938, and then again on February 5, indicated the Collège’s willingness to confront the unspeakable.7 It also

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made evident the Collège’s interpretive move toward adopting a view of the sacred as fundamentally ambiguous – a view that shaped the Collège’s theory of society and became the leading thread for its sociological analysis of communifying movements.

Ambiguity and the Sacred The notion of “sacred sociology” originally appeared in a draft Bataille wrote for his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.”8 In the wake of Freud’s psychoanalytic discoveries and his focus on the unconscious, the essay aimed at defining an approach to fascism that drew from social psychology. At first, Bataille theorized the differentiation between “homogeneous” and “heterogeneous” segments in society. He took “homogeneity” to mean everything that is measurable, exchangeable, and likely to be assimilated: “homogeneous” society was based on production and a money economy. In contrast, “heterogeneity” signaled the presence of irreducible, incompatible – disruptive – forces. Bataille then categorized the sacred as a form of the heterogeneous, argued that the realm of heterogeneity tended to be excluded from social analysis, and denounced science’s reluctance to consider the nonhomogeneous as a source of legitimate knowledge. As he stated, “the object of science is to establish the homogeneity of phenomena” (Bataille, 1985: 141); it thus omits heterogeneous elements, including the sacred, from methodical observation. Durkheim’s failure to provide a positive definition of the sacred, and his ultimately “negative” characterization of it as the opposite of the profane, demonstrated the scarce, besides elusive, nature of knowledge in this area. For Bataille, however, one could still draw a number of considerations about the heterogeneous world in relationship to the sacred that could help to shed light on both. First, the heterogeneous realm is largely made up of the sacred world; second, all heterogeneous things provoke human reactions similar to the ones experienced when facing the sacred. Bataille deduced that “properly sacred things” (Bataille, 1985: 142) such as religion and magic, because they are part of the heterogeneous world, share the feature of unproductivity assigned to waste or poetry and are equally rejected by homogeneous society. As the sacred overlaps with the heterogeneous, both cause a person’s strong affective reactions spanning from attraction to repulsion, sometimes simultaneously. Characterized by violence and excess, heterogeneity indeed presents itself as a shock, a force that could move from object to object, spreading like in a contagion. That is why, once an “unknown and dangerous force” is believed to inhabit the sacred, it requires that contact be prohibited to keep the sacred separate from the profane. The same happens to “everything resulting from unproductive expenditure” (Bataille, 1985: 142). As constitutive of the heterogeneous, unproductive expenditure elicits prescriptions.9 Bataille had obviously made precious use of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms as well as of Henri Hubert and Mauss’s work on religion (Hubert and Mauss, 1968–1969, in Mauss, 1968–1969a, vol. 1). On the basis of those teachings, he suggested that “the mystical thinking of primitives” (but also dreams and the

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What’s in a Name?

unconscious) provided the ideal venue for knowing heterogeneous reality (Bataille, 1985). Anthropology, in other words, showed the way to the domain of heterogeneity. Analyses of the duality of the sacred, and in particular its pure and impure sides, seemed to reflect the movement of attraction/repulsion characterizing the heterogeneous realm. Bataille concluded that as a branch of “heterology”– the science of that which is the other of useful, productive society – sacred sociology should apply the findings of anthropology to the contemporary world and thus address the predicament of a social existence reduced to functionality. In his role as main inspirer of the Collège, Bataille highlighted the ability of the French school of sociology to single out the dilemma at the heart of modern living, that is, the disconnection between personhood and social function. He particularly admired the school’s approach to phenomena seen as wholes. In tune with the muchrevered Mauss, who talked about “total social facts” (Mauss, 1990),10 Bataille evoked the “totality of existence” and challenged sociology to take up the responsibility of answering fundamental questions about humans’ social condition (Hollier, 1988: 12). More existentially based than Mauss’s, Bataille’s invocation of the sacred nonetheless aimed at reinforcing sociality. Caillois’s 1938 “Introduction” to the Collège, published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, confirms this orientation: “There are certain rare, fleeting, and violent moments of his intimate experience on which man places extreme value. From this given the College of Sociology takes its departure, striving to reveal equivalent processes at the very heart of social existence” (Hollier, 1988: 11).11 Although Bataille and Caillois disagreed on the exclusive character of human sociability (for Caillois, and contrary to Durkheim, animal societies shared this feature),12 both concurred that human sociality was rooted in disinterest and sprouted from strong affective sentiments as generated by the awareness of death.13 Sacred sociology explored those apparently contradictory forces that drew humans to feel both repelled and attracted; it examined nodes of sacred things that, by reminding us of our own mortality, terrify but also exalt and empower us. Bataille offered the example of the church at the center of a typical French village to explain this process. In his second lecture on attraction and repulsion, on February 5, 1938, he described the church as the nucleus around which activities and edifices develop. He argued that the village inhabitants consider the church a sacred place independently of their religiosity, so much so that they would experience its destruction as an injury whether or not they adhered to the Christian faith. For Bataille, the force of concentration exercised by the church was not linked to the aesthetics of the building or other external factors; it was instead the result of a simultaneous movement of attraction and repulsion based on the power of the sacred to provoke collective human reaction. While the sense of the sacred partly derived from the spiritual figures (priests) at the head of the congregation and from the events (Eucharist) taking place inside the church, it most often emanated from negativity, a taboo: profane activities stopped at the perimeter of the church. The small cemeteries adjacent to the church, in particular, kept people away and commanded respect; the horror of death, a source of disgust, repelled the villagers. Also, silence surrounded wakes and funerals, and the living kept their distance from the

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coffin during mass. At the same time that it repulsed, however, the church undeniably constituted a force of attraction. Feast days and Sundays saw an array of activities around it, such as markets and fairs, that testified to its vital function. The church, in sum, definitively ensured a movement of agglomeration and demonstrated the power of the sacred to create a community. And it did so through a process that implicated both repulsion and attraction. If one considered other religions than Christianity, even those lacking a central edifice, the same movement of concentration could be observed. And that movement was similarly accompanied by opposite reactions often conveyed through a much richer array of rituals than the Christian ones. For Bataille, religious examples demonstrated that ambiguity was fundamental to understanding the sacred. Whether characterized as left and right, following Robert Hertz’s studies (1960 [1909]), or impure and pure, in William Robertson Smith’s classification (1889), duality was intrinsic to the sacred realm and accounted for the conflicting reactions the sacred generated. Most importantly, this duality was not fixed and irrevocable. Every object could have both a left and right side, and the predominance of either of the two could easily shift in the course of rituals (although the transformation of the left sacred into the right sacred was a constant). Studies of archaic groups made this reality evident, as in the practice of double burial studied by Hertz (1960 [1907]). Initially surrounded by taboos and considered a threat, the dead body ascends to the role of good spirit once the corpse completes the process of putrefaction and is reduced to a collection of clean bones. At that point, it can be buried definitively. The left sacred, that which repels, then turns into the right sacred and becomes a source of attraction.14 The dual nature of the sacred was fundamental to the Collège’s examination of “communifying movements.” Leiris’s influential lecture of January 8, 1938, on the sacred in everyday life, revolved around the notion of ambiguity that particular objects, places, and occasions evoke in us through a mixture of fear and fascination, terror and desire (Hollier, 1988). From his father’s top hat and revolver to the parental bedroom and the bathroom and, finally, to the racetrack, Leiris experienced the sacred as something prestigious and forbidden, breathtaking and dangerous, secret and exhilarating. But it was Caillois’s address of November 15, 1938, specifically titled “The Ambiguity of the Sacred,” that more comprehensively addressed the topic. Caillois was on the verge of publishing an entire volume on the “syntax” of the sacred, L’Homme et le sacré (1939).15 Following Rudolph Otto’s (1958) characterization of the numinous as fascinans and tremendum (fascinating and terrifying), one of the forthcoming book’s five chapters addressed the dialectical responses the sacred elicits from us; it emphasized the inherent ambivalence of the sacred as reflected in the categories of pure and impure. Drawing from this chapter, and featured as the inaugural lecture of the Collège’s second cycle, Caillois’s presentation summarized a few of the main theoretical perspectives the group had developed in the first year of its workings. Most importantly, it gave a systematic overview of the sacred’s polarity and paved the way to recognizing the vital role transgression plays in the process that reaffirms the sacred and recreates it anew.

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What’s in a Name?

Expenditure, Power, Tragedy The Collège had made no secret that one of its differences from more conventional scholarly enterprises was the desire to take on an activist stance, or in other words to reignite the sacred as a potential source of regeneration in contemporary societies. Caillois’s “Introduction” to the Collège’s work could not have been more explicit. After stating that the group intended to produce serious and respected research, he concluded: However, there is hope of an entirely different order hidden here – one that gives the project all of its meaning: the ambition that the community thus created exceed its initial plan, swing from a will for knowledge to a will for power, become the nucleus of a wider conspiracy – the deliberate calculation that this body find a soul. (Hollier, 1988: 11)

The Collège’s orientation toward activism was a given, albeit the terms in which its active stance would unfold remained to be explored. Bataille and Caillois had different visions of the form the “conspiracy” would take. This said, they both saw elective communities as the only means for shaking up societies that had lost their lifeblood. The topic of brotherhoods and secret societies, taken up by Caillois at the meeting of March 19, 1938, specifically focused on the characteristics necessary for small groups to “rejuvenate a society grown old” (Hollier, 1988: 153).16 Caillois evoked Dionysian features and ferment, a kind of turbulence that was irregular and continuously dynamic, never settling.17 For Bataille, one needed to distinguish between conspiratorial societies strictly speaking, and “existential” groups.18 The latter were not confined by a particular action or a restricted goal but counted instead on a limitless outburst of energy that spends itself with no purpose. The Collège wished to escape the functional logic of societies dominated by the values of production and usefulness. It realized, however, that one could not avoid that logic by merely substituting one goal for another: a complete overcoming of the perspective presiding over the administrative world of profane society was necessary. In Bataille’s vocabulary, that meant to expend and waste as opposed to accumulating and saving. The Frankfurt School’s initial interest in the Collège’s work may partly be explained by their shared critique of formalistic reason and calculability.19 In the Collège’s case, this critique involved rejecting the viability of movements that were trying to subvert the established order only in appearance. Bataille especially denounced the “servile nature” (Hollier, 1988: 149) of military domination and nationalism: driven by petty interests and purposes, they constituted examples of a fake sacred. Analyses of power, and of the army as one of power’s manifestations, were central to the Collège’s examination of the overall communifying movement of society (Hollier, 1988: 11, 36) and helped it confront the dilemma posed by the ambiguity of the sacred.20 Was unity the ultimate test for assessing the presence of the sacred? If the pure and impure together opposed the profane and in this operation minimized their internal differences, how did their antagonism fare when viewed exclusively within the domain of the sacred? Did the modalities of the sacred change as the

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relation between the two poles of pure and impure changed? In more concrete terms, how should one evaluate the right sacred? These questions hit at the core concern of the Collège in the face of the historical surge of fascist movements and totalitarian regimes. Durkheimian sociology had scarcely engaged with the question of power, focusing instead on social cohesion as guaranteed by an emotionally charged collective consciousness or its equivalent. By rejecting a model of social unity based on force, Durkheim’s notion of sociality relied on the affective drives that motivate individuals to feel connected with the community; it generally ignored the power implications underlying social bonds. Bataille and Caillois, in contrast, viewed power as sacred, that is, able to generate communifying movements. Because confronted with the strong affective reactions prompted by fascist regimes, the Collège directed attention to the ambivalent facets of the sacred, its force and energy, as well as its ability to provoke opposite reactions, from awe to terror. How was one to reckon with the sacred’s ambiguity when it came to power? Could one differentiate between “creators of unity” (Hollier, 1988: 74)? Did the sacred have any valence? Bataille was keenly aware of the risks implicated in a nonbinding acceptance of the sacred. The contrast he drew between military and religious sovereignty aimed at qualifying the forms of the sacred by raising questions about autocratic systems and the “concentration of power,” such as in the cases of Mussolini and Hitler. The Collège’s ultimate challenge indeed involved how to explicate the transformation of the left sacred into the right sacred.21 In his complex account of the repulsion/attraction dynamics underlying the sacred, Bataille had concluded that expenditure leads to prohibitions. Or, as Caillois wrote in L’Homme et le sacré, the sacred of respect is the counterpart to the sacred of transgression. When sacred force merges with military strength as in the instance of royal domination, power becomes an institutionalized authority in charge of regulating, administering, and policing; it turns into a conservative force. The king pursues his own individual interests and in so doing alters the principle of the “overall movement,” that which normally opposes personal benefit. In Bataille’s lexicon, power escapes tragedy:22 it alienates the original energy of the sacred by denying the possibility that the king be susceptible to death. In other words, the king’s reliance on the military shows his unwillingness to take on the sacrificial responsibility that comes with embodying the sacred; he deflects onto others, the “enemy,” the violence he should be taking upon himself and in so doing renounces tragic spirit in favor of functionality – the ultimate sign of subservience.23 Didn’t fascist leaders constitute examples of the tragic-less figure of the modern state’s king, especially considering their militarization of Europe? Bataille’s comments suggested that much.24 Militarization and war offered the Collège a critical angle from which to address the ambiguity of the sacred in contemporary societies. Wars, after all, reinforce the unity of the group and promote bonding. Moreover, the army itself as a constituted body forms a community within a larger human community, a whole within a larger whole. How should one evaluate the army’s sacred dimensions against the reality of 1930s Europe? In “existential” terms, Bataille’s style, the army approached the

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What’s in a Name?

sacred through its subscription to glory in the face of death: the bond uniting soldiers was founded on sharing destiny as opposed to private, utilitarian ends. The growing nationalist militarism in Europe, however, demonstrated that the religious side of the army had lost out to “functional movement.” For Bataille, military conflicts externalized the sacrificial spirit of the army by transposing it onto the efficient decimation of enemies. At that point, the military could not but fall prey to the equalizing power of calculability that leads to an enslaved existence. Fascism, but also the militarization of daily life in the Soviet Union, exemplified the triumph of the right sacred, of servitude over tragedy. Although Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism appeared to be stopping social disaggregation and facilitating the resurgence of society’s overall movement, they lacked the tragic spirit that made community authentically sacred. They were an imitation. Aware of reactionary formations’ ability to incite affective movements and dominate “hypnotized human masses” (Hollier, 1988: 147), the Collège’s mission was to research forms of sociability that reignited the sacred without following specific ends or subscribing to the principle of necessity. As Bataille wrote: If there existed a virulent religious organization, new and uncouth from head to toe, one sustained by a spirit incapable of a servile structure, a man might yet learn – and retain – that there is something else to love other than this barely conceived image of financial necessity that one’s country is when up in arms. There is something else worth living for, something else worth dying for! (Hollier, 1988: 149)

Of Rituals and Myths Both Bataille and Caillois believed that ambiguity was fundamental for maintaining the sacred’s creative potential and its ability to generate social cohesion in modern society. Following Durkheim and other anthropological research, Caillois specifically defined the sacred as dominated by forces (mana) that, because dynamic and highly mobile, can change valence. Thus the same force can be malevolent or benevolent, filthy or saintly, according to places and circumstances and elicits parallel ambivalent reactions from those who feel its effect. Lest one forgets, the word sacer in Latin designates “the person or thing that cannot be touched without being dirtied or making dirty” (Caillois, 1939: 40; 1959: 35).25 For Caillois, losing either pole of the duality, the pure or impure, would lead to unraveling the essence of the sacred, as in the case of individualized power. Once the sovereign is recognized as the holder of authority, and prescriptions are set in place to preserve his rule, the imposed new order eliminates the oscillation between cohesion and dissolution. The loss of ambiguity results in the diminished vital energy of the sacred, a premise to desacralization. To stop the profane from prevailing, Caillois but also Bataille believed that the sacred ought to be violated; transgressions need to counter prohibitions. In their mind, extreme behavior founded on the expenditure of energy is actually part of existence: “as human beings we cannot live without breaking the barriers we must give to our need to expend,” Bataille declared (Hollier, 1988: 123). Durkheim’s

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evocative discussion of the corroboree ceremony among the Arunta clan had highlighted the role of excess in processes that enhance the sense of the social. During the Arunta’s periodic gatherings, all forms of extreme rituals and activities generated a collective effervescence among its members and promoted awareness of the group’s moral power. Screams, dramatic performances, and furious dancing, but also fierce infighting and ritual promiscuity all concurred to inspire in the Arunta a feeling of the clan’s sacredness. For Durkheim, the capitulation of ordinary activities to predominantly frenzied behavior at highly emotional events marked the rise of the religious spirit, the birth of the social as well as its reaffirmation. Seeking to reenergize social ties, the Collège focused its investigations on rituals and transgressive acts. It particularly looked at festivals and their incalculable waste, destruction, and excess. On May 2, 1939 Caillois delivered a critical lecture with the simple title: “Festival” (Hollier, 1988). He had written a whole chapter on the topic in the just completed L’Homme et le sacré, where he had discussed the relationship between festivals and the sacred under the heading “The Sacred of Transgression: Theory of the Festival.” His address at the Collège illustrated the ways in which prohibitions and transgressions work in tandem to ensure society’s vitality.26 While order and regularity maintain the social world, Caillois argued, they hamper its renewal, that is, its ability to regenerate itself and tap into a new lymph of life. The fact is: the social world, like the natural world, needs to be born afresh periodically lest it risk declining inexorably into the static condition of the profane. According to Caillois, rules that are supposed to be inviolable and “sacred” actually hide the sacred. Therefore, to reconnect with the sacred one needs to break those rules, contravene limits, and defy conventions. Festivals constitute moments in the life of a society that allow chaos and the unleashing of instability. During festivals, transgressions and violations become the norm and everything is done the opposite way to that which the rules command. Marked by excess, disorder, and uncertainty, festivals revive the world and give it new life, even if only temporarily. Their roots in the myths of origins prove the point. Myths of origins celebrate the creation of the cosmos made possible by transforming chaos; they recount how life emerged out of an act of transgression that defied prohibitions. Sacrilege, they tell us, unleashed the sacred by purifying and renovating society. Caillois concluded that as a simulacrum of creation, festival is a necessary element for cementing collective sentiments. With their paroxysm and violence, festivals ultimately represent the culmination of social life. But would the reinstating of events that defied prohibitions usher in the return of the sacred? Could one artificially deploy the forces of attraction and repulsion and conjure the social bond? The Collège did not necessarily think so. As a study group, its primary role was to investigate the mechanisms and dynamics that subtended communifying movements. Only on the basis of those findings might the group eventually move into action. Thus, carnival and rituals of association were, unsurprisingly, among the topics taken up by the Collège in its second year of lectures. Others included democracy, Hitlerism, revolution, and monarchy.27 The Collège’s goal was to build structural knowledge of the different collective forms of affective life. Considering that bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism had recently made their

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appearance on the historical scene, seemingly reawakening passions and agitation, issues of politics rightly dominated the group’s debates over communal ties: “sacred sociology” aimed to address all human activities that create unity. Still, the Collège’s biggest challenge was to move past a mere warning of the sacred’s negative embodiments and propose ways for it to actualize a positive resurgence of affect in contemporary life. Having established the crucial role of rituals in forging sociality, the Collège’s analysis focused on rituals’ counterpart: myths. Myths, Caillois argued, bridged knowledge and action (Caillois, 1938: 13). Or, as Durkheim’s definition of religion implied, beliefs and practices are complementary. Bataille had already advocated the study of mythology while at the helm of the group Acéphale, which he had started in early 1936.28 At the time, he had just terminated his participation in the political collective Contre-Attaque, whose goal had been to counter fascism’s exploitation of emotions.29 Shifting from a militant position to a purely intellectual one, Bataille wished to pursue scientific knowledge of affective movements. He seemed to have given up hope that revolutionary crowds could reverse the historical course initiated by fascism. Disenchanted with revolution as well as politics’ prosaic nature, Bataille focused on building a small community “that creates values, values that create cohesion” (Bataille, 1999: 281), and he called for the results of ethnographic research to be applied to modern forms of existence via a “mythological sociology” (Bataille, 1999: 374). Once Acéphale had turned into a secret society and closed ranks, the Collège took up the work. And while it replaced “mythological sociology” with “sacred sociology,” it still looked at myth as the catalyst of communal life, the necessary element for explaining the affective structures of contemporary societies. The list of the Collège’s meetings for 1937–1938 mentions a series of lectures dedicated to mythology for the months of May and June 1938. Although the program changed and the lectures were not delivered, Bataille’s 1938 manifesto for the Collège, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” directly tackled the issue of myth. Reiterating his critique of functional life as a premise, Bataille accused science, art, and politics of impeding “man” from fulfilling human destiny; he claimed that only myth could help “men” reach the plenitude that fulfills existence.30 Considered anti-intellectual, outmoded and a signifier of ignorance, myth, when extended to the whole community and ritually lived, binds people together and shows the strength of the community it helps enliven. “A community that does not succeed in the ritual possession of its myths possesses only a truth that is on the wane,” Bataille stated (Hollier, 1988: 22). Myth defied contingent reality and useful ends; it expressed and actualized communal yearnings during ritual processes of self-recognition. Myth also presided over festivals, where the logic of accumulation and conservation typical of functional movements was blatantly undermined through expenditure and waste. The problem of modern societies was that myths had lost their role; they had become fictions and distractions. Bataille dreamed of a sorcerer’s apprentice who, with his magic tricks, would be able to conjure new myths and thus recoup the “wholeness of existence” (Hollier, 1988: 23). Bataille’s approach lacked any practical indication of how myths could be genuinely activated. As Hollier comments, citing resistance from other members

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of the Collège to Bataille’s position, one “cannot regress from science to magic” (1988: 13). Truth be told, the Collège did not disdain learning of and from magic practices. Two lectures delivered by Anatole Lewitzky on March 7 and 21, 1939, were completely dedicated to shamanism.31 An ethnographer and student of Mauss, Lewitzky presented the shaman as a sort of magician able to enter into contact with the higher spirits. Considered spirits themselves, shamans interceded for the community of humans they represented and, if necessary, even fought to defend them against the invisible spiritual powers. Caillois found shamans’ aggressiveness particularly relevant: in his mind the closed community that would counteract social disintegration needed to rely on morally strong individuals, a “new aristocracy” not afraid of taking on power. Aggressiveness was a virtue that defined the “Luciferian” spirit and would lead to legitimate conquest. As the demon of lucidity, and differently from Satan, Lucifer “accepted that force was the law of the world” (Caillois, 2003: 171) and exercised it in order to make sacred not to profane. Ultimately, “It is healthy to desire power, whether over souls or bodies, whether prestige or tyranny,” Caillois proclaimed (Hollier, 1988: 41). A common will would unite strong individuals into an elective community engaged in the fight against a profaned social. In contrast to Bataille, Caillois added a strategic element to his notion of a restricted group, the brotherhood in charge of reenergizing the sacred in the modern world. But not unlike Bataille, he upheld the creative role of magic and indeed identified magic with those same characteristics that defined his ideal of elective communities: “conquest,” “intelligence,” and “will to power” (Caillois, 1938: 11). Caillois’s activism opposed Bataille’s existential anguish. In the end, though, both looked at elective communities as the paragon against which the Collège evaluated all other attempts at building the social bond. And both failed to indicate how these communities would emerge and take shape.

Against Politics From a theoretical point of view, the dilemma the Collège faced was the extent to which data gathered from the study of the sacred in “primitive” societies could be applied to modern reality. Durkheim had left the question open in his study of religion’s elemental forms, but he seemed to believe that the same dynamics guaranteeing the well-being of the social among Australian clans would ensure results in contemporary contexts. His references to the French Revolution could not be more unequivocal: Nowhere has society’s ability to make itself a god or to create gods been more in evidence than during the first year of the Revolution. In the general enthusiasm of that time, things that were by nature purely secular were transformed by public opinion into sacred things . . . (Durkheim, 1995: 215–216)

A few pages earlier Durkheim had made the same leap in reference to the violent element of sacralization processes:

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Under the influence of some great collective shock in certain historical periods, social interactions become much more frequent and active. Individuals seek one another out and come together. The result is the general effervescence that is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs . . . . [M]an himself becomes something other than what he was. He is stirred by passions so intense that they can be satisfied only by violent and extreme acts: by acts of superhuman heroism or bloody barbarism. This explains . . . so many sublime or savage moments in the French Revolution. (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 212–213)

Durkheim did not only apply knowledge of the Arunta to historical phenomena. Within his schema, both the identification of the sacred with the social and the processes that brought that identity to light became equivalent among archaic societies and modern ones. Violence, in particular, as the source of festivals, played a regenerating role. It constituted the necessary element for the construction of a new order.32 The Collège seemed more hesitant than Durkheim to identify “primitives” with moderns without further studying the relationship between the two.33 If ethnographic works revealed the centrality of “primordial longings and conflicts” (Hollier, 1988: 10) in constructing the social, the Collège’s task was to review the way affective elements played out in modern social formations. Despite its best scholarly intentions, however, the Collège often blurred the border separating “primitives” from moderns. Granted, the relationship between “primitive” and historical societies troubled the Collège’s work more than it had Durkheim’s, but both master and disciples suffered from a kind of myopia when it came to the concrete implications of the ethnographic material on which they built their understanding of the social/ sacred. Because both Durkheim and the Collège wished to eschew politics, they underestimated the relevance of their theoretical projects to contemporary social reality. Durkheim eventually paid a price for this lack of historical sensibility. During the 1930s and at the height of National Socialism, his theory was accused of being a forerunner of fascism due to its deification of social effervescence and its idealization of the past (Ranulf, 1939). As the almost lone survivor of the Durkheimian school, Mauss acknowledged the problem: That great modern societies, and ones that had anyway emerged from the Middle Ages, could be subject to suggestion as Australians are by their dances, and made to turn around like children in a ring, is something we had not really foreseen. (Ranulf, 1939: 32)

Failure to account both for historical trajectories and different forms of social organizations had left Durkheim’s theory of the sacred vulnerable to generalizations. Its emphasis on community failed to discriminate among kinds of social bonding (Falasca-Zamponi, 2014). The members of the Collège operated within a different historical context from Durkheim: totalitarian turns were a reality they experienced directly. The Collège’s motivation to work on the sacred recognized and drew upon fascism’s ability to produce affective reactions and attract multitudes into its orbit. Thus, the main question the Collège raised was how to counteract fascism’s attraction without falling back into functional movements – a soulless administered world founded

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on work. This background notwithstanding, the Collège struggled to theorize the sacred in a way that would avoid political equivocation: it could not escape Durkheim’s own predicament. One reason for the impasse derives from the constitutional ambiguity of the sacred: the sacred is inherently ambivalent. Another reason, however, which aligns the Collège with Durkheim, is that, despite denouncing specialization and compartmentalization, the Collège refused to theorize the political implications of its idea of community. On the one hand, it regarded the sacred as destined to counteract fascism’s emotional offerings. On the other hand, it envisioned the sacred as anti-political. For the Collège, rejecting profane society involved a refutation of politics in its restricted meaning of petty interests, maneuvering, and bureaucratic administration. Bataille’s call for virility in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” made this clear.34 One needed to oppose existence to function, destiny to prophecy, and ultimately “men” to scientists, artists, and politicians, because “[r]enunciation of existence in exchange for a function is the condition to which each has subscribed” (Hollier, 1988: 17–18). Politics did not fit into the Collège’s vision. In reality, the Collège unfashionably hung onto a conventional and restricted notion of politics that, when combined with a larger-than-life valorization of the social, blinded it from recognizing the deeply political nature of its enterprise (Falasca-Zamponi, 2011).35 No wonder, like Mauss, the Collège ended up surprised at the actual unfolding of historical events. In a 1970 interview, Caillois confessed: The war had shown us just how inane the College of Sociology’s endeavor had been. The dark forces we dreamed of setting off had unleashed themselves entirely of their own accord, with results quite different from what we had expected. (Caillois, 2003: 145)

Granted, this was an a posteriori declaration that should be evaluated against Caillois’s post-Collège contradictory and highly ambiguous political stances (and there were several) (Falasca-Zamponi, 2011). Nevertheless, it points to a disconnection between will and reality, and the question of whether or not the Collège could do anything to bridge the two without losing its direction.

Sociology as Queen The Collège’s political near-sightedness was partly the result of theoretical inconsistencies. On the one hand, the Collège subscribed to Durkheim’s magnified version of the social as an autonomous organism free from the fetters of other value spheres. On the other hand, it supported Mauss’s view of sociology as a science of relations.36 Mauss’s notion of “total social fact” underlined the interdependence within a phenomenon of different types of institutions, whether political, economic, religious, or other. In principle, his notion reincorporated the political into the social by surmounting artificial separations. Although the Collège recognized the importance of overcoming divisions, however, it was unable to put precept into practice. Leiris raised this specific critique when the group broke up: he accused Bataille of having disregarded the main tenets of the French school of sociology. In particular,

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he cited “the rules of method established by Durkheim” and “the Maussian idea of ‘total phenomenon’” (Hollier, 1988: 354, 355). For Leiris, either the Collège’s members decided to pursue their work more rigorously or they should stop calling themselves sociologists. A name, after all, counted for something. Why invoke sociology if unwilling to follow its rules? This brings us back to the question posed at the beginning of the essay. Methodologically speaking, as noted by Leiris, the Collège was doubtlessly at fault for “working from badly defined ideas, comparisons made between data taken from societies of profoundly different natures, etc.” (Hollier, 1988: 354). Yet the Collège’s reasons for embracing sociology were not methodological. As Bataille explicated in his early lectures, Durkheim’s notion of the sacred as what holds a society together inspired the Collège’s pursuit of reviving strong social bonds in the contemporary world. Durkheimian research had made it possible to assess the centrality of the sacred in “primitive” societies and promised to achieve similar results when applied to modern reality. That was the lure of Durkheimian sociology. The Collège shared Durkheim’s vision of the discipline’s core mission: to have an impact on society and transform it. For Bataille, in particular, this goal superseded any other concern, be it of a methodological or theoretical nature: sociology was the science that really mattered. On several occasions, in lectures, letters and other writings, Bataille argued for sociology’s “existential” status even as he recognized the peculiarity of his position. “The sociological domain is the domain, in fact, the only domain, of life’s major decisions,” he declared at his talk on brotherhoods (Hollier, 1988: 156). In his mind, one could not separate research from existence, nor should sociology limit its interpretive reach by adhering to strict rules. Neutrality would only turn investigations of issues into mere exercises of little use. In other words, science might trump destiny. By excluding “any human interest outside of the desire for knowledge” (Hollier, 1988: 14), science offered false security. Even more damning, science ignored the interconnectedness of different life elements by focusing on the part instead of the whole. Science’s mode of procedure was antithetical to Bataille’s vision of sociology as able to illuminate the meaning of existence beyond functional goals. In Bataille’s framework, similarly to Durkheim’s own vision, sociology was uniquely positioned to go beyond a “specialized scientific preoccupation” (Hollier, 1988: 12) and to address totality. Having crucially posited the correspondence of social and religious phenomena, sociology already showed its difference from other disciplines that pursued knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Sociology’s coronation as the only science that truly counted was guaranteed as long as it renounced the temptation of becoming another “pure” science concerned with aspects “dissociated from nature” (Hollier, 1988: 12). Furthermore, sociology should not be afraid of asking fundamental questions. Regardless of other issues pertaining to method or doctrine, for Bataille it all came down to this point. Speaking at the last meeting of the Collège on July 4, 1939, he could not have been more eloquent. As he responded to the several critiques raised against him by different members of the group, Bataille dramatically reaffirmed what in his opinion was the essence of knowledge and of sociology: nothing short of “CONFRONTATION WITH DESTINY” (Hollier, 1988: 334 [capitalized in the

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original]). The science of the sacred had shown human beings how they had been escaping community in favor of isolation. By focusing on the sacred, the Collège took up the task of reacquainting humans with their core being. It incited in them the courage to face ultimate questions, that is, of agreeing “to be questioned by the sociological sphinx” (Hollier, 1988: 340). There could be no grander (and also no more hazardous and consequential) role assigned to sociology than the one conceived by Bataille. Even in Durkheim’s wildest dreams (or Comte’s for that matter), sociology had never stood as the sphinx allowing access to essential knowledge. Granted, Bataille was aware of the risks involved in an “inexhaustible interrogation” (Hollier, 1988: 340). In his estimation, however, the enterprise was worth the risk. No doubt, under the Collège’s spell, sociology was transformed, its boundaries redrawn and its aspirations reconfigured. On the one hand, and in spite of elevating Durkheim and his school to a privileged position, the Collège strayed from key tenets of Durkheim’s teachings. The question of objectivity, in particular, fell outside its purview, as did a more general concern with methodological rules: those issues had not attracted the Collège to the French school of sociology in the first place. On the other hand, the Collège recast the mostly negative views of Durkheim held by intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s by promoting attention to what it saw as the most outstanding accomplishment of Durkheim’s work: the centrality of the sacred in social existence.37 Thus, if it is paradoxical that these “sorcerer’s apprentices” embraced Durkheim, it is indisputable that by calling on sociology to revitalize the social bond the Collège’s members injected new life into a discipline that many felt had lost its attraction. The concrete effects of the Collège’s endeavors might be hard to assess. Yet there is evidence that the Collège was not insulated from the larger historical and intellectual milieu in which it operated. Its lectures, even if by invitation only, were attended by key figures in French cultural life, as well as the émigrés community, and the group was less obscure than one might be led to believe.38 Claude Lévi-Strauss included the Collège de sociologie in his survey of twentieth-century French sociology published in 1947. He described it as a typical branch of the French school for its ability to collaborate with “all the tendencies or currents of thought that have as their object Man and the study of Man . . .” (LéviStrauss, 1947: 517).39 In 1950, Armand Cuvillier mentioned the Collège in the section on “teamwork” (travail en équipes) of his Manuel de sociologie. Even more surprising, the Collège was cited as a badge of honor for Caillois in the 1959 English translation of his book L’Homme et le sacré.40 It would seem that the Collège was more than a fleeting moment in France’s interwar cultural life, and it certainly did not constitute a mere after-the-fact “invention.” No doubt, one could view its work as extreme theorizing (and there were plenty of criticisms of it circulating at the time, just as there are current skeptics41). The Collège’s influence, whether positive or negative, was, however, palpable among all those who came in contact with it. Today, the Collège still encourages us to interrogate the meaning of community and our vision of togetherness.42 Led by a wish to charge sociology with the utmost task of taking those risks upon itself, the Collège challenges practitioners of the science to address “burning” issues and overcome narrow objectives. Sociology, the Collège suggests, could truly matter.

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References Bataille, Georges. 1970. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. Vol. 1. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1999. L’Apprenti sorcier: Du cercle communiste démocratique à acéphale. Edited and annotated by Marina Galletti. Paris: Éditions de La Différence. 2004. La sociologie sacrée du monde contemporain. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi. Paris: Lignes-Manifestes. Blumenson, Martin. 1977. The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Caillois, Roger. 1938. Le Mythe et l’homme. Paris: Gallimard. 1939. L’Homme et le sacré. Paris: Gallimard. 1959. Man and the Sacred. Translated by Meyer Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. 2003. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Edited by Claudine Frank. Translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Naish. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clark, Terry N. 1973. Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cuvillier, Armand. 1950. Manuel de sociologie. Paris: Colin. Durkheim, Émile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated and with an introduction by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Esposito, Roberto. 1998. Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità. Turin: Einaudi. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. 2011. Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie. Montreal and Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queens University Press. 2014. “Society as Representation: Durkheim, Psychology and the ‘Dualism of Human Nature.’” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 20: 43–63. Ghrenassia, Patrick. 1987. “Anatole Lewitzky: De l’éthnologie à la Resistance.” La Liberté de l’ésprit 16: 237–253. Hertz, Robert. 1960 [1907/1909]. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham. Introduction by Edward Evans-Pritchard. Aberdeen: Cohen and West. Hollier, Denis (ed.). 1988. The College of Sociology 1937–39. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hollier, Denis. 1995. Le Collège de Sociologie 1937–1939. Paris: Gallimard. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Translated by W. D. Halls. Foreword by E. E. Evans Pritchard. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1968–1969. “Introduction à l’analyse de quelques phénomènes religieux.” In Mauss, Oeuvres, 1: 3–65. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1947. “La sociologie française.” In La sociologie au XXe siècle. Vol. 2, Les études sociologiques dans les différent pays. Edited by Georges Gurvitch with Wilbert Moore (pp. 513–545). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mauss, Marcel. 1968–1969a. Oeuvres. Edited by Victor Karady. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 1968–1969b. “Divisions et proportions des divisions de la sociologie.” In Oeuvres, vol. 3: 1–734.

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1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Foreword by Mary Douglas. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton. Miami Theory Collective (ed.) 1991. Community at Loose Ends. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Foreword by Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Otto, Rudolph. 1958. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press. Pierre, José. 1980. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 2 vols. Paris: Éric Losfeld. Ranulf, Svend. 1939. “Scholarly Forerunners of Fascism.” Ethics 50: 16–34. Richman, Michèle. 2002. Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Riley, Alexander. 2005. “Renegade Durkheimians and the Transgressive Left Sacred.” In Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Robertson Smith, William. 1889. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Short, Robert. 1966. “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–1936.” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (2): 3–25. 1968. “Contre-Attaque.” In Ferdinand Alquié (ed.), Entretiens sur le surréalisme (pp. 144–176). Paris: Mouton. Weingrad, Michael. 2001. “The College of Sociology and the Institute for Social Research.” New German Critique 84: 129–161.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

The 1979 volume was reedited in 1995 with augmented material. See Hollier (1995). Two other interpretive challenges should also be considered: (1) The Collège was composed of multiple voices that did not always find themselves in agreement. Also, strong individualities emerged from within the group and affected its directions. (2) The Collège based its activity on lectures and produced a minimal number of publications in its name. What we know about its theory is mainly drawn from the lectures that have been recovered and from works that group members wrote outside the Collège. Ambrosino, an atomic physicist, was a close collaborator of Bataille and worked with him on several political and intellectual initiatives, as did Klossowski. Klossowski had translated Benjamin’s essay on the work of art, as well as other German authors. He was the link between the Frankfurt School and the Collège. Monnerot had collaborated with Caillois on a Surrealist review and was presumably responsible for naming the Collège. The lecture’s title was: “Sacred Sociology and the Relationship between ‘Society,’ ‘Organism,’ and ‘Being.’” Hollier (1988: 406) claims that although the Collège followed Durkheim in seeing society as cohesive, it used the less “objective” language of German sociology to express its ideas of unity. The extended version of the “Note,” now in Hollier 1988, was published as “Introduction” in the July 1938 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française.

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Those lectures were: “Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter and Tears”; and “Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure.” In the notes Bataille compiled for the essay, he wrote on the margins “Define sacred sociology – = heterology” (Bataille, 1970: 636). Also see “The Notion of Expenditure” in Bataille (1985). Mauss defined them as phenomena whereby “all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time – religious, juridical, and moral, which relate to both politics and the family; likewise economic ones, which suppose special forms of production and consumption, or rather, of performing total services and of distribution” (Mauss, 1990: 3). Only four texts by the Collège were written for publication and they all appeared in the July 1938 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française. They were: “Introduction” by Caillois, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Bataille, “The Sacred in Everyday Life” by Leiris, and “The Winter Wind” by Caillois. See his “Animal Societies” (Hollier, 1988: 94–97). The theme of death was also the fulcrum of Bataille’s talk of January 17, 1938 at the shortlived Society of Collective Psychology, which he had cofounded with Pierre Janet, Adrien Borel, Michel Leiris, and others. On the left sacred and the Durkheimians see Riley (2005). Translated into English as Man and the Sacred (1959). The lecture was titled “Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches.” On Caillois’s view of Dionysianism see “Dionysian Virtues” (Caillois, 2003). Among the leaders of the Collège, Bataille was the least orthodox in terms of sociological orientation, and his penchant for mysticism often caused intellectual tensions between him and Caillois. But Caillois, who had been formally trained in the history of religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, was often absent from the Collège. On the date his lecture on brotherhoods was scheduled, he sent notes to Bataille for delivery on his behalf. Caillois’s absences amplified Bataille’s voice and gave more prominence to his interpretive stance. See Weingrad (2001). See the lectures “Power” by Caillois and “The Structure and Function of the Army” by Bataille (Hollier, 1988: 125–137 and 137–144). The lecture of February 19, 1938 on power was supposed to be delivered by Caillois, but Bataille had to present it in his place acting, as Hollier remarks, as a ventriloquist. Tragedy is a critical theme in Bataille’s work: it qualifies human existence in opposition to functionality and interest. Tragedy figures prominently in the writings Bataille published in the journal Acéphale (Bataille, 1985) and was central to his lectures at the Collège on the army, brotherhoods, and sacred sociology in the contemporary world. Klossowski also delivered a lecture on tragedy at the Collège on May 19, 1938. Sacrifice as a means for entering the sacred is a fundamental theme in Bataille. As he wrote in “The Notion of Expenditure,” etymologically sacrifice “is nothing other than the production of sacred things” (Bataille, 1985: 119). Hubert and Mauss’s influential essay on sacrifice is critical here (1964). Following Robertson Smith, the essay defined sacrifice as the ultimate social act, thus identifying the sacred (and one should add, violence) with the social realm. Hubert and Mauss argued that through the sacrificial ceremony, the profane enters into relation with the divine: sacrifice makes possible a communication between the profane and sacred worlds through the intermediary of a victim. Their theory differed from Robertson Smith on one crucial point: they saw the victim as acquiring sacredness through the act of sacrifice, while Robertson Smith postulated the religious nature of the victim prior to the sacrifice.

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Also see Bataille’s lecture of April 2, 1938, “La sociologie sacrée du monde contemporain” (2004). The text of the lecture had not been found at the time Hollier published his collection on the Collège. 25. In the original French, “Celui ou ce qui ne peut être touché sans être souillé ou sans souiller” (Caillois, 1939); in the English translation, “the one or that which cannot be touched without defilement” (Caillois, 1959). 26. Following his teacher Mauss, Caillois saw festival as a “total social fact”: it embodied a cluster of social relations and institutions that displayed and magnified the value of the collectivity. 27. See “The Structure of Democracies” and “Hitler and the Teutonic Order” by Bataille; “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution” by Klossowski; “The Rituals of Political Associations in Germany of the Romantic Period” by Hans Mayer; “The Myth of the English Monarchy” by Georges Duthuit (Hollier, 1988). Also see “Arts d’aimer et arts militaires” by Denis de Rougemont and “Commemoration du mardi gras” by Bataille (Hollier, 1995). 28. On Acéphale see Bataille (1999). The English translation of Bataille’s writings for the journal Acéphale affiliated with the homonymous group are in Bataille (1985). 29. On Contre-Attaque see Short (1966); Short (1968); Bataille (1999). For Contre-Attaque’s manifesto see Bataille (1970). Writings by the Contre-Attaque movement are gathered in José Pierre (1980). The English translation of Bataille’s article for the journal affiliated with the movement, Cahiers de Contre-Attaque, is in Bataille (1985). See “Popular Front in the Street.” 30. For both Bataille and Caillois, virility equated power, which raises the issue of their masculinist approach. 31. See “Shamanism” in Hollier (1988). On Lewitzky, who worked at the Musée de l’Homme and was executed by the Germans in 1942 as a member of the Musée’s resistance network, see Ghrenassia (1987) and Blumenson (1977). 32. On the link between Durkheim and the Collège via the notion of collective effervescence see Richman (2002). 33. Bataille thought that the same regenerative effects of a king’s execution among the “primitives” applied to regicide in historical societies. Caillois was skeptical about this inference and seemed generally more aware of the theoretical impasse the Collège faced. His several attempts at finding the modern equivalent of primitive festivals reveal that for him merely reinstituting festivals in historical societies would not do the trick; more ought to be done to surmount the contemporary dissolution of social ties. 34. See note 30. 35. The Collège’s anti-political stance was coupled with a strong anti-aesthetic perspective that shows its misrecognition of aesthetics’ political essence (Falasca-Zamponi, 2011). 36. See Mauss, “Divisions et proportions des divisions de la sociologie” (Mauss, 1968–1969, vol. 3: 204). 37. One indeed wonders why an unusual group such as the Collège was driven to Durkheim, considering that his sociology was bashed among French intellectual circles of the 1920s and 1930s and accused of sectarianism, tyrannical thought, conservatism, and reductive scientism (Clark, 1973). 38. Among figures believed to have attended (and in some cases also to have lectured at) the Collège’s meetings are the already mentioned Walter Benjamin and Hans Mayer (both affiliated with the Institute for Social Research), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alexandre Kojève (a Russian émigré whose lectures on Hegel at the École des Hautes Études influenced a whole generation of French intellectuals), Julien Benda, Drieu la Rochelle, Jean Wahl, Jean Paulhan, and Paul Landsberg. 24.

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What’s in a Name?

39. 40.

41. 42.

It was Lévi-Strauss who, in particular, linked the Collège to the Surrealist movement. Among key biographical references, Meyer Barash’s Introduction cited Caillois as founder of the Collège: “Caillois comes by his interest in the sociology of religion through the direct inspiration and teaching of such masters as Durkheim and Mauss, and has contributed to the future training of scholars in this field by founding the Collège de Sociologie pour l’Étude du Sacré at the University of Beauvais” (Caillois, 1959: 7, italicized in the original). Barash’s curious glorification of Caillois has some facts wrong. It is doubtful Caillois trained scholars in the religious field at the Collège. No University of Beauvais exists, although there is a lycée at Beauvais where Caillois actually taught for a short time. Finally, Barash’s appellation of the Collège as Collège de Sociologie pour l’Étude du Sacré, although quite accurate in substance, is not the one most widely circulated. See Hollier (1988), Appendixes, “Marginalia.” See among others Nancy (1991); Miami Theory Collective (1991); Esposito (1998).

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7 Max Weber Lawrence A. Scaff

Max Weber, the work and the man, has become a subject of endless allure. The “fascination of Max Weber,” a recent book title (Ay and Borchardt, 2006), captures the theme. There are a number of complicated reasons for this appeal, which was actually present from the beginning, as witnessed by observations about the “myth of Heidelberg” from contemporaries, and then after his death in 1920 by the commentaries and assessments starting in the Weimar era. Karl Jaspers’ tributes to his friend and mentor who, as he claimed, embodied the “fate of the times in his soul” and “was a philosophy” (1926: 10; 1958: 65), may sound exaggerated to modern sensibilities. But such comments were matched at the time and then later by the conviction of others, such as émigrés like Albert Salomon and Franz Neumann, that Weber was the greatest thinker of the age, an intellect whose ideas demanded close attention and mastery (see Scaff, 2014: 14–17). Some of these evaluations had to do with Weber’s voluminous and original work, the forceful presence of his public persona, and his insistence on intellectual integrity. In the interwar years other considerations began to come to the fore as well, particularly the view that Weber’s work offered a critical orientation to the dynamics of modern capitalism, and the accompanying sense that if there was a compelling alternative to Marxist critique of society, then it was to be found in the pages of Weber’s texts. The sense of Weber as the great alternative has never really disappeared. This view has been conditioned, of course, by what he actually wrote and said. Moreover, in the twenty-first century with the end of the Cold War and the concomitant eclipse of Marxism, together with the fading legacy of Freud and his disciples, Weber has become a figure to conjure with and to invoke, not only in the academy but in public discourse. Today another quite different consideration has become important: thanks to the exhaustive efforts of the editors of Weber’s collected works, the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG), now nearing completion at some forty-two volumes, we know much more than we have ever known about Weber’s ideas, texts, lectures, letters, interests, and passions. The results have been, in some ways, electrifying, as scholarship struggles to catch up to a cascade of knowledge. In these circumstances it is important to ask what we have learned. Who is this thinker from the past, and what is it about his work and ideas that give them significance today and allows us to speak of a distinctive form of thought – Weberian thought – that carries his imprimatur? 124

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Weber Redux Publication of the collected works has proved to be an authoritative source for rethinking Weber’s intellectual biography and the relationship between his life and work, or the biography of the work itself. Along with the major reedited texts, the two unquestionably new contributions – the ten volumes of correspondence, and the seven of academic lectures and lecture notes – now provide the basis for reframing the evolution of Weber’s thinking, relationships, and concerns. Considering life and work, three recent studies (Kaesler, 2014; Kaube, 2014; Radkau, 2005; 2009) have taken on the challenge of reinterpretation, with Radkau’s critical biography attuned especially to the dynamics of Weber’s personal life and intellectual productivity. The previous essential narrative line was established by Marianne Weber’s protective biography of her husband (1926; 1988): namely, Max’s journey from youthful brilliance and success to collapse and despair, followed by redemption, rebirth, and hard-won accomplishment. The moment of collapse was the bitter falling out with his father in 1897, easily depicted as an assault on patriarchal domination with oedipal overtones. But as Radkau and Kaube have shown, even to Marianne the inner workings of Weber’s path to recovery remained partially obscured. Radkau in particular has succeeded in demolishing the picture of Weber as simply an obsessive workaholic driven to depression by overwork and family conflict, an exemplar of the methodical and disciplined ascetics described in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Instead, a far more interesting and complicated Weber has emerged, caught up increasingly in the cultural currents of modernity and attuned to the searing conflicts of modern life, the radical fragmentation of what he called the different “orders of life” and “spheres of value.” Indeed, as others have been persuaded, Weber’s most inspired work was made possible only because of such an expansive existential horizon (Lepsius, 2016: 125). Considering the work itself, the MWG has revealed to us two essential features of Weber’s thought and legacy. The first is the remarkable continuity of his intellectual preoccupations from an early age, defined by a fascination with (a) human values and beliefs in their practical consequences for everyday life, and (b) the culture of modern capitalism and its dynamics, institutions, and origins. These preoccupations are then reflected in the two great themes of his published lifework: the practical effects of religion on economic and social life, and the relationship between economy and society. The former theme can be traced to his lectures in the 1890s and to youthful letters even earlier, and it appeared in published form when Weber brought together a three-volume collection of essays just before his death. The text opens with a sweeping introduction from 1920, continues with the famous essays on The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, first published in 1904 and 1905 (Weber, 2002) and later revised (Weber, 1930), then proceeds to discuss Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and Ancient Judaism (Weber, 1951; 1952; 1958), always with the comparative historical question in mind: why did a modern, dynamic “rational” capitalism emerge in the West rather than in other civilizations? What explains that unusual “combination of circumstances” which produced “the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western

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culture” (Weber, 1930: 13, 26)? These studies remained unfinished, as Weber wanted to extend his inquiries about the world religions and economic action to Islam and to all of Christianity. On these topics only scattered remarks are found in the materials he left behind. But the question he asked about modern capitalism did surface again in other parts of his work as well, notably the writings on Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, and, at the end of his life, the lectures on economic history (Weber, 1927; 1976; 2003). The other great theme is expressed in the work published posthumously as Economy and Society (Weber, 1978) a text that many have considered the greatest contribution to social theory in the twentieth century. It is an unusual accolade in view of the nature of the text itself, which is actually a compilation of chapters written at two different times for a multivolume handbook Weber was editing, interrupted by World War I, and supplemented by notes and incomplete drafts left on Weber’s desk. The uncertainties of the posthumous text, never seen or edited by Weber himself, have generated endless controversy about its organization, contents, and purpose. The editors of MWG have made an effort to settle such controversies once and for all by dividing the text into five subheadings – communities (Gemeinschaften), religious communities, law (Recht), domination (Herrschaft), and the city – and revising the title in line with Weber’s intentions as Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte) (Weber 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2005; 2010). The conceptual terminology is important: rather than referring simply to “society” as a unified concept, Weber preferred a much more differentiated view of processes of sociation or association (Vergesellschaftung) consisting of “orders” in the sense of institutions and conventions as constraining determinants of action, and “powers” as institutions and organizations that shape the world in which social action takes place (see Swedberg, 2005: 185–186). The terminology can be viewed as approximately analogous to the way Douglass North writes about the interaction between “rules of the game” (institutions) and “players of the game” (organizations) (North, 1991). The two process-oriented verbal nouns – (as)sociation (Vergesellschaftung) and, roughly translated, communalization (Vergemeinschaftung) – that Weber used extensively in Economy and Society, point to his interest in social interactions unfolding through time and space, either through the elaboration of impersonal social roles or through the articulation of personal face-to-face relationships. The chapters of Economy and Society are really about these complex processes and the “orders” within which they operate and have an effect from the micro- to the macro-level of the individual, the group (e.g., family, sib, clan, ethnic group, caste), and the larger community and society (e.g., economic class, status order, nation). One of Weber’s most famous and original texts, the section distinguishing among different kinds of power relations and the conflicts among them based on class, status, and party in political communities (Weber, 1946: 180–195; 2001a) illustrates perfectly the kind of analysis he championed. The second general feature of Weber’s thought that the editing of the collected works has revealed is the extent to which his work is indebted to the canon of historical and theoretical economics and political economy, starting with Adam Smith and David

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Ricardo and continuing to contemporaries like Alfred Marshall and Léon Walras. Previously Weber had been considered a follower of the German Historical School of economics, identified with economists like Gustav Schmoller or his Heidelberg teacher, Karl Knies, the man he replaced in 1897 as Professor of National Economics and Public Finance. But this view is mistaken. As a young scholar Weber instead learned from a variety of schools of thought and synthesized them in a new way. His line of thinking emerges especially in the early lectures at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg, where his immersion in the debates of the time becomes apparent. These debates, sometimes referred to as the quarrel over methods, the Methodenstreit, pitted the German Historical School against Marx and the socialists on the one hand, and on the other the Austrian school of marginal utility theory propounded by Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. From the latter Weber accepted the idea of using formal models of rationality for gauging economic action that had been advanced by the marginalists, though he had little use for their mathematical models. In addition, he also insisted on the social and historical conditioning of economic action, or the embeddedness of perceived “utilities” and “needs” in a sociohistorical context. Charting a course between the different sides of a protracted debate, Weber adopted a mode of analysis that used both fictitious formal models of rational action, such as the postulate of a utility-maximizing homo economicus, and the investigation of actual particular socioeconomic and historical configurations. His methodological device for bridging the logical and the empirical was the “ideal type,” that is, a logical construction based upon observable phenomena that performed a useful heuristic purpose in forming concepts and developing explanations. Some ideal types were purely formal and abstract (e.g., the rational actor, the rational market), whereas others were historical and concrete (e.g., feudalism, capitalism, socialism). In his critique of political economy, Weber even assimilated the sociohistorical constructions found in Marx’s writings to the logic of ideal-typical conceptualization, a point argued at some length in his programmatic essay of 1904, “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy” (Weber, 2012: 100–138). Seen in this light, Weber maintained, Marx’s contributions could be assessed not as dogmatic assertions, but as fruitful hypotheses open to criticism and revision. Weber’s path to the kind of sociology that emerged in Economy and Society then ran through the debates within national political economy. This is why texts in the collected works like those edited by the economist Knut Borchardt (see Weber, 1999) attracted such attention. They revealed an unknown Weber engaged with the economic issues of his time, both in economic theory, and in the world of national economic policy, especially regarding stock exchanges and commodity markets. These engagements are the hidden sources for what later became Weber’s ambitious and unfinished master text, Economy and Society.

The Problem of Modern Capitalism Max Weber considered capitalism “the most fateful force in our modern life” (Weber, 1930: 17), an inescapable and irreversible condition that would persist

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until the last ton of fossilized fuel was consumed. He devoted much of his work to puzzling over this condition, its sociocultural significance, and its practical meaning for modern and traditional societies. Interestingly, his starting point was not industrial or finance capitalism, but rather the emergence of commercial forces and market-oriented production in agrarian economies. The first full-scale investigation of this kind involved Roman antiquity, the subject of his “habilitation” of 1891 (the second dissertation required at German universities), Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law (Weber, 1986). Two years earlier Weber had used his dissertation, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages (Weber, 2003), to explore the emergence out of Roman law in cities like Florence of a legal structure and type of general or limited partnership that was essential for the development of sustained capitalist enterprise. Building on his legal expertise, Weber used the Roman Agrarian History to consider the prehistory of medieval legal and institutional innovations. The study was ostensibly about the effect of Roman law on the agrarian economy of the Roman Republic and the Empire. But Weber gave the investigation an unexpected turn by defending a double thesis: first, he argued for the emergence of a kind of capitalism in Rome based on the commercialization of land and production for an extensive market, though anachronistically supported by conscripted slave labor. Second, he showed why this nascent form of capitalism collapsed rather than developing into rational entrepreneurial capitalism. Instead, it led to something radically different: feudalism. The Achilles heel of the Roman agrarian economy was lack of formally free labor regulated by legal contracts. In order to survive, the system required continuous expansion of Roman lands and exploitation of the spoils of conquest, especially acquisition of newly enslaved populations. When the Empire began to falter and disintegrate, agrarian capitalism was doomed, and it was slowly transformed into autarchic latifundia in the conversion to the feudal practices that would last for centuries in medieval Europe. The question behind Weber’s inquiry was, did a kind of modern capitalism ever emerge in antiquity? Some contemporary scholars answered affirmatively. Weber strongly disagreed. In his view the politically conditioned agrarian capitalism of Rome, although producing for a market and using land for commercial exchange, still lacked some of the essential features of modern entrepreneurial capitalism, especially formally free labor, continuous technological innovation, and full appropriation of the means of production by the enterprise. Weber’s point of view can be clarified by using a simplified typology (see Table 7.1) that draws upon distinctions he made. In his analysis, the distinctive characteristic of modern capitalism was its rational entrepreneurial dynamic: an ever renewed search for profit as a source of capital investment in the enterprise, and a continuous search for economic opportunities provided by a rule-governed and relatively free market. By contrast, so-called “crony” capitalism, much discussed today, is obviously a form of rent- and profit-seeking economic action conditioned by political factors, such as the exercise of power, privileged access, or state intervention. For Weber it is not a form or system of “rational” capitalist enterprise that can be sustained over generations.

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Table 7.1 Types of capitalist economy Seeking Rents ACCUMULATION OF WEALTH

Politically Conditioned Economically Conditioned

UTILITIES Maximizing Profits

Manorial or Landlord Adventure or Robber Capitalism Capitalism (Beutekapitalismus) Rentier Capitalism Entrepreneurial Capitalism

While these two studies were important in launching Weber’s career, the truly singular investigation that attracted widespread attention, and won his appointment as a full professor at the University of Freiburg at the unheard of age of twenty-nine, was his massive publication on the agrarian question in Germany. Commissioned by the influential Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) and based on interviews and statistical analysis, this two-volume tome of over 1,000 pages took a close look at labor conditions, social structure, patterns of migration, political organization, and especially the clash between traditionalism and incursions of a capitalism driven in part by globalization in Germany’s seven grain-producing eastern provinces (Weber, 1984). The study was unique and politically explosive because Weber succeeded in showing that the settled traditional economic and political condition in the east that had persisted for centuries, securing the dominance of the Prussian landed aristocracy, the Junkers, was being rapidly undermined and transformed by capitalist forces. These forces were driven by increasing global competition over grain, changes in the mode of production, and changes in the labor market that favored wage labor over semifeudal labor relations. Commercialization of the enterprise and increasing reliance on wage labor then encouraged using migrants from Poland and Russia, which in turn encouraged German migration into the cities, upsetting the traditional class structure of the East and challenging the Junkers’ authority, which in any case rested increasingly on the commercial viability of their estates. These dramatic changes had become more and more visible after the unification of Germany in 1871 under Prussian hegemony, led by the most famous Junker of all, Otto von Bismarck. The problem for the nation, Weber aimed to show, was that the basis for Prussian hegemony in the new German state and the social compromises it entailed were being rapidly undermined. Socioeconomic change, driven by capitalism, was altering the political landscape and unleashing forces that would threaten the integrity of Bismarck’s creation. The grounds for Weber’s later sharp critique of Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Reich are already visible in this early analysis. With respect to national policy, Weber was on the losing side in these disputes over agrarian capitalism and its consequences. The German government responded to the changes in the eastern provinces by imposing a tariff on imported grain, affecting producers in North America and Argentina. Its other response was to ban trading in grain futures on the German commodity markets. Because of his expertise as an agrarian economist, Weber actually had a seat on the first government commission

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charged with investigating these issues. He vigorously opposed both the tariff and the futures trading ban, thereby ensuring that he was denied a seat on the commission when it reconvened. He reasoned that the ban on futures trading would only shift decision-making to the North American stock and commodity exchanges, which of course was exactly what happened. It would not be the first time that protectionist sentiment would have the unintended consequence of weakening a nation’s standing and paving the way for ambitious rivals.

Religion and Economic Action Weber’s early studies left an important question unanswered: how, why, and under what circumstances did modern capitalism come into being? Was there a set of beliefs, a value system, an “ethos” that had to be present for the type of modern, rational entrepreneurial capitalism to arise, spread, and thrive? These questions begin to emerge in Weber’s early lectures, just as they had been broached in Karl Knies’ lectures, which Weber would have heard as a university student. At the turn of the century the questions were restated more forcefully in Weber’s colleague Werner Sombart’s Modern Capitalism of 1902, giving impetus to Weber’s own reflections. Weber’s answer to the question about the origins of modern capitalism was then presented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the work that in Talcott Parsons’ translation of 1930 established Weber’s early reputation among English-speaking scholars. For Japanese scholars, the same can be said for Kajiyama Tsutomu’s 1938 translation of this “sacred” text, as it has been called. In the five chapters that compose The Protestant Ethic Weber set forth a carefully qualified argument about (as he said) one side of the causal chain, a cultural or as he wrote to his colleague and friend, Heinrich Rickert, “a sort of ‘spiritualist’ construction of the modern economy” (Weber, 2015: 448). The word “spiritualist” should be used cautiously, though it signals Weber’s intention to refute the mono-causal historical materialism associated with Karl Marx. To do so, Weber focused attention on a particular type of Protestant asceticism, a product of the Reformation, and its bourgeois social carriers as one possible factor, though not the only factor, contributing to the rise of modern capitalism in the West. This was a daring claim, for it was counterintuitive, linking two apparently disparate spheres of life: religious belief and economic action. The claim, the so-called Weber thesis, has provoked endless debate, accompanied by confusion and misunderstanding. What exactly did Weber have in mind? Most of the discussion has revolved around questions concerning causal inference, levels of analysis, and historical evidence. Weber characterized his explanation not as an instance of constant conjunction, but as an “elective affinity” between the “capitalist spirit” and a particular ethos, the inner- or this-worldly asceticism typical of the Protestant sects. He found it useful to illustrate the “spirit” of capitalist enterprise with Benjamin Franklin’s famous homilies about thrift, honesty, work, and accomplishment, many of them found in Franklin’s Autobiography, a gift Weber

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had read as a teenager. The “Protestant Ethic” was illustrated through popular writers like John Bunyan and Richard Baxter, and it focused attention especially on the idea of the “calling” or “vocation” that provided a moral justification for worldly success. The duty to work in a calling, aimed at mastering self and world, and applied methodically and rigorously to the totality of everyday life, was the essence of ascetic Protestantism. In Weber’s formulation, the drive for religious salvation, following this-worldly ascetic precepts, promoted the type of person, the “vocational person” (Berufsmensch), who became an exemplar and carrier of the capitalist spirit. What could be said for the individual could then also be said for the bourgeois social class as a whole. We can grasp more clearly the thesis Weber advanced by comparing it with the world religions oriented toward salvation for believers. In essence, Weber distinguished between the means and the ends of the religious life, conceptualized as paired concepts that were existential choices: either ascetic self-control in order to achieve a higher purpose, or mystical possession and quiescence; and either active engagement with the actually existing world, or flight from the actual to search for salvation beyond the present world. These conceptual opposites yield one of the most important basic typologies for the comparative sociology of religion (see Table 7.2). The logical exercise is also a model illustration of Weber’s use of the “ideal type” as a methodological heuristic for clarifying logically consistent action-orientations. The typology succeeds in identifying both the subject of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – namely, the significance for economic life of only one type of religious orientation: this-worldly asceticism – and the main question that motivates the succeeding essays on the world religions: why, if we consider belief systems, did modern rational entrepreneurial capitalism emerge only in the West? In The Protestant Ethic Weber gave one kind of answer, centered on cultural differences. Reflecting on his work as a whole, however, the complete answer was far more complex and included an array of institutional and structural factors, such as the uniqueness of the autonomous Western city, the institutionalization of the rule of law, the rationalization of production, and the role played by the Western bourgeoisie. It is a mistake to suppose that subsequent analysis, such as his investigations of Buddhism and Daoism in China, could in principle not include institutional constraints (Barbalet, 2016). His last lectures on the subject, recorded in General Economic History (1927, Part 4), present this more comprehensive account. Table 7.2 Weber’s typology of salvation religions The Ends or Purposes of the Religious Life This-Worldly Other-Worldly Asceticism Mastery of the World: The Means for Seeking Protestant Sects Salvation & Relating to the World Mysticism Accepting Fate in the World: Ancient Judaism Early Christianity

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Contemplation of the World: Christian Monastic Orders Flight from the World: Hinduism Buddhism

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Sociologists have generally maintained that The Protestant Ethic deserves special attention because it combines a “macro-” (social) and a “micro-” (individual) level analysis in an instructive way. Weber’s thesis really makes two mutually reinforcing claims: at the macro-level it demonstrates that the religious doctrine of the reformed church (this-worldly asceticism) has an “elective affinity” with the “spirit” of modern capitalism and thus with the widespread practices associated with modern “rational” market-oriented, profit-seeking entrepreneurial capitalism. Yet at the micro level the thesis holds that this-worldly ascetic doctrine penetrates individual consciousness and forms the core values, such as honesty or duty to a vocation, that define human character. These values then have an “elective affinity” with a specific economic action-orientation in individuals, the “spirit” of capitalism, which is itself a requirement for sustained entrepreneurial capitalist development. The causal chain is thus complete: individual action has been linked to large-scale sociohistorical outcomes. It is because Weber insisted on preserving the individual or micro level of explanation that he is sometimes referred to as a “methodological individualist.” But is Weber’s thesis correct? Excavating historical evidence alone has never settled this question. One reason is that there are numerous instances supporting the plausibility of Weber’s argument on the European continent, in Britain, and in the colonies of North America. Localized counterexamples, such as the immense wealth of Jakob Fugger, a Catholic contemporary of Martin Luther, are not enough to overthrow the general hypothesis. The other reason is that Weber’s actual argument is often misstated and exaggerated by critics, who tend to conflate a limited and specific historical thesis with the condition of modern capitalism in its various forms, reading the present back into the past, a temptation Weber warned against. Thus, notwithstanding such controversy, the connection Weber proposed between religious belief and economic action has taken on an instructive life of its own, for example encouraging scholars to search for a moral basis for the transition from traditionalism to modernity. In this spirit Robert Bellah (1985) suggested that in Japan the ascetic ethic of Bushidō supplied a useful equivalent for the ethos of this-worldly asceticism in the West, providing the cultural basis for extraordinary economic modernization after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Especially when taken together with institutional and structural factors, as Weber did in other parts of the comparative sociology of religion, the cultural explanation of the “capitalist spirit” and its material embodiments is likely to survive and reappear in other unanticipated contexts.

Rationality, Rationalization, and Social Action Weber’s work on capitalism and religion was replete with assumptions about the alleged “rationality” of an economic system and the purported “rationality” of a course of action. Weber was acutely aware of ambiguities and paradoxes hidden in the use of the word “rational,” noting at one point in The Protestant Ethic that the distinction between rational and irrational had to be clarified with reference to particular viewpoints: “[Some]thing is never irrational in itself, but only from a particular rational point of view,” he remarked, suggesting that if his investigation

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accomplished anything, it would be “to bring out the complexity of the only superficially simple concept of the rational” (Weber, 1930: 194). This is an impressive claim. How did he clarify the concept in his work? The answer leads to one of the most fundamental generalizations of Weber’s mature thought in Economy and Society. At the level of theoretical abstraction, Weber proposed that the logic of social action-orientations dictated four possible “ideal” or pure types of social action (Weber, 1978: 24–26), defined in the following way: 1. 2. 3. 4.

instrumental, goal-oriented, or purposive-rational (zweckrational) action; value-rational (wertrational) action; affectual action; and traditional action.

Weber thought of these four types as a comprehensive statement at the individual level of possible orientations of human action. To be sure, these are logical ideal types that may appear only partially or in combination in the actual world. They are only a useful heuristic, helpful in illuminating a real course of action or meaningful choices made by a social actor. True social action always has intentions and meaning for the actor, Weber maintained; it is never simply reactive behavior. The precise definitions of the terminology are important. Indeed, modern social theory would hardly have been possible without Weber’s specification of the logic of the distinction between purposive-rational and value-rational action-orientations. For the former it has become commonplace to substitute “instrumental” rationality, perhaps because of the concept’s centrality in translations of Jürgen Habermas’ widely read work. Weber’s noun was Zweckrationalität, derived from the word for purpose or end (Zweck), and conveying the idea of strategic practical action oriented to attaining a desired end, purpose, or goal through calculation of risk, uncertainty about what is known and unknown, probability of success, and intended or unintended consequences. Instrumental action describes the ideal actor of rational choice theory, whose action is pragmatic, strategic, and utility maximizing. It is the kind of action typical of homo economicus. The economic and political spheres are its natural home. Value-rational action is entirely different. Weber proposed the noun Wertrationalität to suggest that expression or demonstration of a value (Wert), belief, or conviction was the hallmark of this kind of action. Rationality consisted in acting so as to promote a specific substantive or procedural value, such as “fairness” or “social justice,” rather than attempting to maximize individual utility. Each action standpoint was “rational” in and of itself, though perhaps “irrational” from its competitor’s point of view. Affectual and traditional action-orientations resided at the margins of meaningful social action, although it surely is the case that we often act based on emotions, such as love and fear. There can be a sociology of the emotions, just as there can be a sociology of mob violence and panics. But for Weber such a sociology required that we tease out the conscious or intentional mechanisms that motivate action. The same might be said for action oriented by tradition or belief in the sanctity of age-old

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norms of conduct, which often only reflects unconscious habits. Not all traditional action is meaningfully rational. Only when it rises to the level of traditionalism as a conscious defense of received ways of acting can that be the case. Armed with these distinctions, Weber could bring greater clarity to the meaning of “rationality” when it was used to talk about individual choice and social action. This advantage became especially evident in the volume on law in Economy and Society (Weber, 2010). Instrumental- and value-rational action types were logically consistent with a further, more focused distinction between “formal” and “substantive” rationality, a conceptual opposition that Weber had used so effectively in mapping the sociology of law. The reason is that formal rationality, a hallmark of Western legal systems, is defined as following a prescribed general rule (e.g., three felony convictions require imprisonment). The contrasting concept of substantive rationality is instead defined as promoting a particular norm (e.g., embracing “affirmative action” in order to rectify perceived social injustice). In other words, formal rationality tends to emphasize procedure, whereas substantive rationality emphasizes content. Now rationality as a problem must be distinguished from the closely related conception of “rationalization” in Weberian thought. Rationalization is indeed a master concept, and it appears in quite varied contexts to address the rise of the West, scientific and technological progress, the development of Western art and architecture, the articulation of a rational theology, and numerous other applications. But the most concentrated discussion is in the justly famous “Intermediate Reflection” (Zwischenbetrachtung) placed at the end of the discussion of the Protestant ethic, Confucianism, and Daoism in the Sociology of Religion (Weber, 1946: 323–359). In this text Weber developed a complex set of ideas about the way in which human life is separated into different “orders” or “value spheres,” among which he identifies the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, intellectual, and moral or spiritual. Each is autonomous and subject to an internal logic in relation to the others, which means there is unavoidable conflict and struggle as we confront and try to choose among them. Each order is “rationalized” in its own way, with historically conditioned variations in direction and tempo. The task for analysis is to discern these directions, with rationalization having two senses: either long-term social processes of development, or a logic of beliefs, actions, or processes that are becoming more consistent, coherent, systematic, or goal-oriented. This perspective allows us to investigate the ways in which, for example, the economic, political, or aesthetic orders and spheres of value (utility, power, beauty respectively) are rationalized, and to consider the forces that operate on an individual who enters one of these orders. No order is exempt from rationalization. Even the Western musical aesthetic has been rationalized in dramatic ways, from the Greek five-note scale to tempered harmonics, from four-part harmony to twelve-tone dissonance, from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Cage (Weber, 2004). The process of rationalization thus reveals a paradoxical record of constraint, but also innovation and possibility. For Weber the process is a feature of the fragmentation of life, especially the modern life-world. It affects the very conduct of life, the

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way we lead our lives, the Lebensführung. So it is a reality, but also a provocation that can elicit resistance, as becomes apparent when we consider Weber’s wellknown theory of bureaucracy.

The Specialized Sociologies: Bureaucracy The general Weberian categories in the theory of social action pave the way into the particular kinds of sociological investigations that Weber pioneered: the sociology of religion, bureaucracy and organizations, law, the state, groups (intellectuals, professions), the city and urban life, the sources of identity-formation (ethnicity, race, nationality), and the sociology of culture (art, music, communications media). It is remarkable that in his brief lifetime Weber contributed something to each of these areas of inquiry. Leaving aside the sociology of religion, the best known work because of its wide applicability is undoubtedly Weber’s discussions of bureaucracy, though the MWG has also devoted independent volumes to law, music, the city, and the state (Weber, 1999; 2004; 2009; 2010). Only with Weber’s writings did bureaucracy and formal organizations become a major subject of investigation and an autonomous field of inquiry. Viewed as a distinct subject matter, it is essential to note that bureaucracy appeared in Economy and Society as an organizational embodiment of instrumental rationality, then formulated by Weber as a model or “ideal type” emphasizing the major features of bureaucratic action. Among the distinguishing features were specialization of tasks, hierarchic commands, fixed jurisdictions, general decisionmaking rules, permanent written files, specialized career training, achievementoriented norms, and administrative impartiality. Bureaucracy was governed by impersonal rules and norms. For that reason it operated in tension with the political order, and the bureaucrat as a professional acted often in tension with the partisanship and public accountability of the politician (Weber, 1946: 196–244; 1978: 956–1005). Bureaucracy thus conceived was a permanent administrative entity, a meritocracy composed of appointed career employees, monopolizing information and functionally indispensable for the ongoing operations of any large and complex human association, whether public or private: the modern state and its agencies, the business enterprise, multinational corporation, political party, labor union, church, interest group, or voluntary association. Bureaucracy had become indispensable and ubiquitous in modern life because of the demand for administrative efficiency in increasingly complex, differentiated societies and economies, regardless of regime type or ideology. Its growth and extension was an historical development, tied to unavoidable long-term trends: industrialization, population growth, urbanization, and the expanding reach of the modern state. Following his own methodological precepts, Weber wanted the characterization of bureaucracy to be used analytically and comparatively to test actual cases. The ideal type was not to be confused with actual bureaucratic practices, a qualification that is too-often ignored. Instead it was intended as a scientific tool for investigating real

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phenomena. Nor did Weber consider the ideal type a prescription for the optimal approach to organizing an association, managing a group, or reaching decisions. On the contrary, in his public statements Weber delivered a pointed critique of bureaucracy and the penchant for turning all decisions into matters of administrative correctness, on occasion despairing over the threats bureaucratization posed for civil society, the freedom of the individual, and democracy itself. A major source of the challenge posed by bureaucracy was the technical advantage of its instrumental rationality and efficiency, that is, the way it adapted means to ends, but at the expense of individual initiative and unfettered discussion of the ends of policy. After all, bureaucracy was a form of control, rule, or domination, both internally and externally – a potent instance of “congealed spirit” or mind objectified (Weber, 1994: 158). Weber worried that for the individual the proliferation of bureaucratic rule meant an increasing mechanization of life, ending with humanity trapped in an iron cage of its own making. The problem became one of preserving a modicum of individual freedom in an age confronting the seemingly irresistible march of bureaucratization, a source of alarm everywhere, including in the reform institutions of a new Russia (Weber, 1995: 108–110). In his constitutional thinking and defense of representative democracy Weber struggled to resolve the problem of bureaucracy, never quite finding an adequate solution. But his observations and criticisms pointed in directions that have animated discussions of organizations to the present day. For example, some have looked to the emergence of informal patterns of communication that create networks operating outside the normal channels as a counter to bureaucratic rationalism. Others have suggested that certain nonhierarchical modes of decision-making – collegial, consensual, participatory, even bargaining – can be as effective as bureaucracy as a means of democratic governance, at least in settings of an appropriate scale. Sometimes such arrangements have even been tested, as with Germany’s Green Party. But the larger challenge of bureaucratization that Weber identified will surely remain in our world of massive organizations and the omnipresent national security state.

The Political Weber As the critique of bureaucracy suggests, Max Weber was a lifelong engaged political thinker. But his incisive analysis of the bureaucratic phenomenon also demonstrates his unshakable belief in the value of scientific investigation. Indeed, the tensions and conflict between science and politics, between the search for scientific truth and the pursuit of power, was one of the most enduring motifs of his life and work. As a young man Weber considered pursuing a political career, like his father, a lawyer who as a National Liberal held positions in the national Reichstag and the Prussian legislature. But the possibility receded with his professorial commitments and then disappeared altogether in the years of personal crisis from 1898 to 1902. But his political interests never faded, returning during World War I with renewed intensity and an outpouring of political essays, mostly published in the Frankfurter

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Zeitung, and culminating in the speech on “Politics as a Vocation” in January, 1919, shortly after the armistice ending the war. His critique of Wilhelm II’s authoritarian regime and his compelling defense of a new democratic constitutional order led to his appointment to the German delegation sent to Versailles to negotiate a peace settlement, and to the select committee that drafted the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. Weber’s political thinking followed two paths, both of which have attracted considerable attention. The first is found in its most accessible form in the major sections of Economy and Society that are concerned with domination or authority (Herrschaft). The MWG highlighted this discussion by bringing it together in a single volume (Weber, 2005). At the center of Weber’s reflections is his well-known typology of “legitimate domination” that proposed an answer to the age-old question about the basis of authority: Why are individuals willing to obey authority and regard it as “legitimate?” (Posing the question in terms of legitimacy rules out other kinds of commonplace “reasons” to obey authority, such as coercion, force, violence, fear, or terror.) Weber maintained there are essentially three grounds for legitimate authority or domination (Weber, 1978: 215): 1. Rational-legal: belief in the legality of rules and the right of those in authority to rule, to issue commands, and to have commands obeyed; 2. Traditional: belief in the inviolability and sanctity of traditions and the legitimacy of those in authority, whose actions are justified by tradition; 3. Charismatic: Weber’s concise definition is worth quoting: “devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” Much has been written about the terminology Weber introduced. What is important to emphasize is that the three types of domination or authority are in conflict with each other, and institutions that embody one type or another are likely to engage in a competitive struggle for mastery and control. The tensions among the types may seem most obvious with traditional authority, discussed at length by Weber in his investigation of patriarchal and patrimonial systems of rule. But the most consequential conflict is between rational-legal and charismatic authority. Charisma for Weber is a specifically “revolutionary” force, bent on uprooting tradition, overthrowing rational-legal norms of authority, and establishing a new order. The term itself has theological origins, meaning “gift of grace.” As an illustration of charismatic appeal, Weber could cite Jesus of Nazareth intoning, “It is written . . . but I say unto you” (Matthew 5: 21–43) – that is, Mosaic Law prescribes one kind of conduct, but I tell you to ignore it and follow me along a contrary and better path. The saying captures the essence of charismatic authority as a deeply personal relationship between leader and followers that is aimed against the established order. Transferred to a secular political context, the clash between charisma and other types of legitimate domination becomes most apparent when we think about leadership in the modern state, where rational legality is enshrined in rule-governed

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bureaucracies and constitutional norms. What if political leadership falls into the hands of a charismatic demagogue? Weber pointed out that the first demagogos was Pericles, remembered in the pages of Thucydides for his democratic instincts, private sobriety, public eloquence, and special emotional connection with the Athenian demos. But the problem with charisma as an extraordinary personal quality is that it is substantively amorphous and ideologically neutral. Plebiscitary charismatic leaders are not always a Pericles, but sometimes far more sinister and malevolent figures, such as a Stalin or Hitler. Charisma can meet democratic conditions, but it can also take a decidedly authoritarian turn. Weber’s political sociology can clarify this dilemma, but its resolution requires a different approach. It was along a second path that Weber moved to assess the dilemmas of power, authority, and leadership. In his political writings about Germany he wrestled with the problems of representative democracy, constitutional structure, political leadership, and the relationship between the state and civil society, typically in a comparative context that included Britain, the United States, and Russia. In the lecture hall he took up the sociology of the state, the subject of his last course at the University of Munich (Weber, 2009), one he did not live to complete. Given that loss, his most definitive statement on these topics remains “Politics as a Vocation,” the indispensable text and tour de force of Weber’s deepest thinking about politics. Weber is usually identified as a “realist” in the tradition of Machiavelli because of his conception of politics as “striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state,” and his famous definition of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1946: 78). The development of the modern nation state for Weber was a lesson in governance through the expropriation of the means of administration. Much could be explained from this process alone: the growth of bureaucracy, the appearance of professional politicians, the prominence of lawyers, the importance of journalists, the rise of elite and mass political parties, and the party as an electoral machine. Weber’s critique of the existing authoritarian state of Wilhelm II was oriented by these institutional factors. In the end he was a critic of bureaucratic ossification and a liberal constitutionalist, favoring a balance among competing institutions and parliamentarism as a setting for selecting leaders. He worried that alternative political solutions at the time, such as those associated with socialism and state appropriation of the means of production, would only end up strengthening the statist trend toward bureaucratic centralism. Weber’s apparent realism needs to be qualified, however, because of his repudiation of the power politician who only seeks power for its own sake, and because of the extended discussion in “Politics as a Vocation” of the question that mattered most to him: What is the relationship between politics and ethics, or in his own words, “What kind of a man must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history” (Weber, 1946: 115), a question that has haunted Western political philosophy from Plato onward. Weber answered the question in a novel way that has resonated ever since. While he agreed with the more commonplace view that political action and leadership

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required a sense of matter-of-fact proportion and distance, but also commitment to a cause, the really essential questions revolved around the old categories of means and ends. Weber suggested that for all political action there were two diametrically opposed ethical possibilities: either an “ethic of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik) or an “ethic of conviction” or “ultimate ends” (Gesinnungsethik). The ethic of responsibility was oriented toward practical consequences, recognizing the “ethical irrationality of the world,” that is, the historical lesson that choosing morally appropriate means did not invariably lead to desirable good ends. Choices in political action had to be guided by responsibility for consequences, especially unintended consequences, and by responsibility for the unfolding of history and the future. Such responsibility demanded struggle with opposing views, but also compromise to attain a beneficial end and achieve the possible. By contrast, the ethic of conviction insisted on the absolute purity of action based on ultimate beliefs as an end in itself, regardless of consequences. It was self-justifying, exemplary action, undisturbed by prudential or pragmatic considerations, or the probability of negative, destructive, or inhumane outcomes. Politics became the art of expressive self-assertion, rather than the art of the possible. Weber thought there was an unbridgeable chasm separating the two ethics, an absence of possibility for constructing a common ground, though he also reasoned that an exceptional leader could forge a synthesis of responsible and principled action. Lest we regard Weber’s thinking as too esoteric, it is his juxtaposition of the two conflicting political ethics that has continued to provoke and prove useful in current public discussion. Searching for adequate explanations of the heightened partisanship, gridlock, ungovernability, and general dysfunction in Western democracies today, commentators and journalists have turned to the irreconcilable standpoints described in Weber’s distinction (Brooks, 2015; Nuttall, 2016; Packer, 2011). The difficulty is that pressed to an extreme, the ethic of ultimate conviction becomes apolitical or unpolitical, in the sense that it gives up on the civil conversation and art of compromise that makes politics possible. Weber sided with politics, and that meant a politics of responsibility and an ethic moored to consequences, setting a standard for statecraft and giving a definitive answer to the question of the relationship between politics and ethics.

The Meaning and Value of Science In another lifetime Weber might have entered the fray as a politician. But by temperament he was always a teacher and scholar, a partisan of the community of science or what he called the “unbrotherly aristocracy of the intellect” (1946: 355) with its categorical demands for rational inquiry and intellectual integrity. Time and again, Weber revealed his unquenchable thirst for scientific knowledge, his primary commitment to the life of the mind, and his unwillingness to sacrifice scientific principle on the altar of political power. “Science as a Vocation,” the wartime speech of November, 1917, is Weber’s master statement of this lifelong engagement with science (Weber, 1946: 129–156).

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We should remember that in German, “science” or Wissenschaft (from wissen, to know), had broad connotations and signaled the pursuit of knowledge in any domain of inquiry, not simply empirical or experimental science in the narrow sense. From this point of view science was one of the crucial orders of life or spheres of value in human experience, especially in the modern world. It was a crucial life order because modernity and modern development were fully dependent on knowledge and the prospects for scientific and technological innovation. Modern life was inextricably bound together with science and the promise of “technological progress.” The challenge for the scientific vocation, however, was that it rested on certain presuppositions: the value of acquiring specialized knowledge for its own sake, for example, or belief in the validity of its methods, or a conviction that scientific knowledge or “truth” was worth knowing. Science’s protected autonomy was the product of culture and political struggle, witness to a long historical development beginning in Greek antiquity that was always open to dispute. Contestation about the nature and value of science could become heated because in modernity it was the instigator of the process of increasing intellectualization and rationalization. Furthermore, it was the main force driving the process Weber called the disenchantment (Entzauberung) or literally “de-magification” of the world. Science put an end to the idea of a world explained by spirits, mysterious forces, and magical powers. It monopolized the possibilities for explanation and understanding. Yet access to specialized knowledge was strictly limited, requiring rigorous training, a province guarded by the modern university and research institute. So disenchantment did not mean the individual’s comprehensive knowledge had increased or that knowledge would be progressively universalized (Weber, 2012: 300–301). On the contrary, the forces that shape our lives may seem even more distant and mysterious than ever. The sense of distance then creates a space for denial, nostalgia, and reversion to efforts at re-enchantment. The modern world can appear overrun with this dialectic of enchantment versus re-enchantment. Under these conditions Weber’s most urgent question became, what is the meaning of science? He answered this question in an interesting way, agreeing that the pursuit of knowledge can only be self-justifying, but then insisting that in the total economy of life, science can serve moral purposes. It can encourage logical clarity, recognition of “inconvenient facts,” and the coherence and integrity of choosing ends aligned with appropriate means. As with the political actor, these practical contributions stood in the service of personal responsibility and self-clarification. In Weber’s phrasing, “we can force the individual, or at least we can help him, to give himself an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct” (Weber, 1946: 152). The vocation of science is meaningful for this reason. It fashions a counterweight to the demons of disenchantment and the temptress of re-enchantment.

The Weberian Legacy Almost a century has passed since Weber’s death, during which his work has been consolidated, interpreted, extended, and reframed in a variety of disciplines.

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Today in the social sciences and social theory it has become possible to speak of a distinctive Weberian perspective, approach, or even paradigm – that is, an enduring set of model problems and questions, and a distinctive set of concepts and ways of thinking about human action and sociocultural phenomena. The leading characteristics of Weberian analysis can be summarized concisely in three general orienting principles: first, a focus on historical configurations and configurational analysis that emphasizes the socially embedded nature of economic and political phenomena, often from a comparative perspective; second, an awareness of the importance of developing explanations that are multicausal and multilevel; and third, an approach that is problem-oriented, using ideal types as an important heuristic, while avoiding abstract theory for its own sake or grand metanarratives about society and history. This means that Weberian analysis is not dogmatic about causation in social life, but will typically look for multiple causes of a determinate event, as well as proceed at different levels of explanation, from the individual to the social group or social order. It should also be apparent, as in Weber’s own work, that different modes of analysis and types of explanation are available to us, employed depending on the problem under investigation. Stated conceptually, some explanations are structural or institutional: that is, they rely on factors like social status and economic class, or the rules and constraints that affect social action. Other explanations are essentially cultural, relying for their potency on values, beliefs, symbols, and meanings that orient and guide human action. Finally, still others employ models of rationality, as in the case of the ideal-typical homo economicus viewed as an efficient, instrumentally oriented maximizer of utilities – a model “rational actor” who can be transported into any number of different contexts. But the Weberian legacy is about much more than these kinds of guidelines for the social sciences. A major source of attraction for Weber’s ideas has come to depend importantly on quite different considerations. In today’s larger public discourse, for example, his ideas have found resonance in connection with some popularized concepts, such as charismatic leadership, the notion of an economic “work ethic,” the features of a “disenchanted” world, or the fundamental distinction in political ethics between “responsibility” and pure “conviction.” At a deeper level there has also been appreciation of Weber’s thinking providing a model for rational political judgment, aligned to be sure with his defense of the scientific calling and its search for truth (Scaff, 2013; 2015; 2017). The incisive proponent of “intellectual integrity” has cast a long shadow over these kinds of discussions. Furthermore, Weber’s central preoccupation has never seemed more germane, namely his questioning of the contemporary world, the world of modernity created by modern capitalism with its distinctive rationalized culture of work, production, exchange, and consumption. This world may have been anchored in the West with its “specific and peculiar rationalism” (Weber, 1930: 26), but today in the twentyfirst century capitalist-inspired modernity in one form or another has been extended everywhere. The cultural problems of modernity have become universal, provoking all manner of responses, from affirmation to resistance, adaptation, denial, and flight. Weber analyzed the condition and foresaw the responses that

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would persist until “the last ton of fossilized fuel has been consumed” (1930: 181; 2002: 121). In the last analysis that is why he is still read in settings far removed from his own time and place, in Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Reading Weber in new and different contexts has surely been a quest for historical understanding and orientation in the present. But it also represents an urgent personal quest, a way of coming to terms with the disappearing “magic garden” of a past replaced by the dynamic present of a rationalized and disenchanted modernity; Japan has been given as an example of such a society (Schwentker, 1998: 15). The generalization applies broadly everywhere, even today in the settled societies Weber knew so well in Europe and North America. So long as these conditions persist and the circumstances that provoked Weber’s most inspired work are evident, we can be sure that new readers will again turn their attention to the Weberian legacy.

References Ay, Karl-Ludwig, and KnutBorchardt (eds.). 2006. Das Faszinosum Max Weber. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Barbalet, Jack. 2016. “The Religion of China and the Prospects of Chinese Capitalism.” In Alan Sica (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Max Weber (pp. 207–229). New York: Anthem Press. Bellah. Robert. 1985. Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan. New York: The Free Press. Brooks, David. 2015. “The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus.” New York Times, October 13, 2015. Jaspers, Karl. 1926. Max Weber. Rede bei der von der Heidelberger Studentenschaft am 17. Juli 1920 veranstalteten Trauerfeier. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Jaspers, Karl. 1958. Max Weber: Politiker, Forscher, Philosoph. Munich: Piper. Kaesler, Dirk. 2014. Max Weber: Preuβe, Denker, Muttersohn. Eine Biographie. Munich: C. H. Beck. Kaube, Jürgen. 2014. Max Weber: Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen. Berlin: Rowohlt. Lepsius, M. Rainer. 2016. Max Weber und seine Kreise: Essays. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. North, Douglass C. 1991. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nuttall, Tom. 2016. “A Tale of Two Ethics.” The Economist, October 1, 2016. Packer, George. 2011. “Empty Wallets.” The New Yorker, July 25, 2011. Radkau, Joachim. 2005. Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens. Munich: Carl Hanser. 2009. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Scaff, Lawrence A. 2013. “Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber, and the Charisma of Political Thinking.” In Andreas Anter (ed.), Wilhelm Hennis’ Politische Wissenschaft (pp. 307–325). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2014. Weber and the Weberians. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. “Jenseits des heiligen Textes: Max Webers Fragestellung und die Perspektiven für ein weberianisches Denken.” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 24(4): 469–486. 2017. “Political Leadership and Political Education in a Subverted World.” Max Weber Studies 17(1): 12–23.

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Schwentker, Wolfgang. 1998. Max Weber in Japan. Eine Untersuchung zur Wirkungsgeschichte 1905–1995. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Swedberg, Richard. 2005. The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weber, Marianne. 1926. Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 1988. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Weber, Max. 1927. General Economic History. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New York: Greenberg. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner’s. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford. 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Translated by Hans H. Gerth New York: Macmillan. 1952. Ancient Judaism. Translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: Free Press. 1958. The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: Free Press. 1976. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. Translated by R. I. Frank. London: New Left Books. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1984. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/3. Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland 1892, 2 vols. Ed. by Martin Riesebrodt. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 1986. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/2. Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht. Edited by Jürgen Deininger. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 1994. Political Writings. Edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1995. The Russian Revolutions. Translated and edited by Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1999. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Teilband 5: Die Stadt. Edited by Wilfried Nippel. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2001a. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Teilband 1: Gemeinschaften. Edited by Wolfgang Mommsen. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2001b. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Teilband 2: Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Edited by Hans G. Klippenberg. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Modern Capitalism and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin Books. 2003. The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages. Translated by Lutz Kaelber. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2004. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/14. Zur Musiksoziologie. Nachlass 1921. Edited by Christoph Braun and Ludwig Finscher. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck).

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2005. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Teilband 4: Herrschaft. Edited by Edith Hanke. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2009. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe III/7. Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik (Staatssoziologie). Mit- und Nachschriften 1920. Edited by Gangolf Hübinger. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2010. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Teilband 3: Recht. Edited by Werner Gephart and Siegfried Hermes. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). 2012. Collected Methodological Writings. Edited by H. H. Bruun and Sam Whimster, translated by H. H. Bruun. London: Routledge. 2015. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe II/4. Briefe 1903–1905. Edited by Gangolf Hübiniger and M. Rainer Lepsius. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck).

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8 Weberian Social Theory Austin Harrington

In the century since Max Weber’s death in 1920, virtually no area of the discipline of sociology and related social-science disciplines has been left untouched in some way by concepts bequeathed to us today by this great German thinker of the last years of the Prussian empire. In a multitude of ways, Weber’s protean analyses have shown themselves to be almost infinitely adaptable across a plethora of zones of inquiry, whether as self-sufficient reference points in their own right or, frequently, in focused combination with other sources – from Marxism to sociological phenomenology, to comparative historical studies of political systems, to contemporary global social inquiry. Famously, Weber sought to define sociology – and, by extension, all disciplines of the ‘sciences of culture’ or Kulturwissenschaften – as an ‘interpretive’ project, centred on the interpretation or ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) of historically specific contexts of social action and meaning. Little doubt can exist today that this broadly interpretive or ‘hermeneutic’ thrust of Weber’s thinking distinguishes the kind of social theory and analysis termed ‘Weberian’. In distinction to styles of inquiry stemming from Marxism or psychoanalysis, or Durkheimian sociology or behaviourist and functionalist analysis, economic rational-actor modelling, structuralist or post-structuralist discourse analysis, or cybernetic social systems theories, Weberian theory tends to accord primacy to historically particular phenomena of culture, mind, and normatively oriented action, relative recurring typical structures of social power and causation. But many different emphases and topoi of Weberian research stand out within this broad characterization, each requiring attention in their turn. The following survey highlights four loosely distinctive areas of Weberian inquiry of the past 100 years – beginning with themes of epistemology and methodology (1), then turning to topics in economic sociology and to the Weberian concept of ‘rationalization’ (2), to the sociology of culture and religion (3), and lastly to debates in political sociology (4).1 A concluding section presents a critical statement of the contribution of Weberian ideas to disputes concerning the rise and place of ‘the West’ in world history.

Action, Interaction, and Interpretation A first cluster of distinctively Weberian themes in social theory of the past century can be as seen as spanning problems marked out by the terms ‘action’, 145

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‘interaction’, and ‘interpretation’. These in turn can be linked to evolving contexts of Weberian thinking in early-twentieth-century European phenomenological schools of sociology and philosophy, in early-twentieth-century North American social research in the orbit of the Chicago School, and in general in debates about value, meaning, and objectivity in the philosophy of the social sciences. In The Structure of Social Action (1937), his great synthesis of movements and modes of analysis in European post-nineteenth-century sociology, Talcott Parsons spoke influentially of the need for sociologists to begin analysis from the ‘action frame of reference’. Social life consisted of structures of organization governed by functions of integration and differentiation among different component parts or systems or subsystems of the social body, but these structures resisted analysis other than first of all from the perspective of the ‘unit-act’ of interacting human agents. In naming ‘action’ in this way as constitutive for any investigation of complex macro-contexts of social order and behaviour, Parsons reinforced a now long-established consensus of researchers that social life lends itself most effectively to analysis in terms of patterns of ‘structure and action’ or ‘structure and agency’ – in which a basic Weberian understanding of the meaning of ‘action’ has long loomed large (Parsons and Shils, 1951). Arguably the single most systematic statement of the place of concepts of ‘action’ and ‘social action’ in European sociology between the two World Wars can be seen as stemming from the work of the Austrian émigré author Alfred Schutz, drawing on Weber. In The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967 [1932]) and subsequently in essays written in English in the USA, Schutz pinpointed Weber’s concentration on action in its character of being ‘meaningfully oriented’ towards the behaviour of others and as therefore carrying states of ‘subjective meaning’, coloured by degrees of feeling, affect, belief, and intentionality (Schutz, 1962; Weber, 1968: 4). Action of this type made social phenomena impossible to comprehend exclusively in terms of law-like relations of cause and effect between observed events, after the fashion of the natural sciences. But in drawing additionally on motifs in the thought of Henri Bergson and the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Schutz also sought to emphasize that relevant ‘typifications’ or ‘type-constructs’ of social life had to be seen as stemming not only from the researcher – in the sense of Weber’s influential concept of analytical ‘ideal-types’ – but rather primordially from the observed actors themselves in their own everyday interactions or ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt). Schutzian ‘phenomenological sociology’ rested in this sense on disclosure of the meaningfully constructed social world of complexly interacting individuals. In The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann reaffirmed this core phenomenological conception of the construction of social worlds, combining Weberian categories of action with Durkheimian categories of ‘social facts as things’ and defining social reality as the objectively reproduced totality of subjectively produced contexts of action. Before the influx of refugee intellectuals from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Weber’s oeuvre remained largely unknown in the United States at the outset of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in the wake of the many pioneering studies

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of the well-established Chicago School, themselves shaped significantly by the work of Weber’s contemporary Georg Simmel, Weberian concepts found ready reception in the rigorous empirically driven climate of US social research in the early postwar period. The translations of Weber’s core essays in sociology and social-science methodology by Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mill, and Edward Shils, followed in 1968 by Economy and Society, by a team of translators led by Parsons, secured Weber’s place in the scientific mainstream of anglophone sociology of the twentieth century (Weber, 1948; 1949; 1968). Even as the structural-functionalist orthodoxy of US sociology, led pre-eminently by Parsons and Robert Merton, concentrated primarily on macro-systems of social evolutionary change at high levels of holistic abstraction (if attenuated in Merton’s advocacy for ‘theories of the middle range’), Weber’s principles of methodological individualism and rational-actor analysis found numerous productive iterations and developments in the work of authors from Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Peter Blau to Randall Collins and James Coleman (Blau, 1964; Coleman, 1991; Collins, 1975; 1986; Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1959; Merton, 1957). For many years now, the import of Weberian methodological has rested on the insight it formulates in the wake of developments in European philosophy after Kant – the insight namely that integration in social life is impossible to comprehend other than under the supposition of some content of normatively directed consciousness on the part of observed actors. As much as social life may today appear to consist increasingly predominantly of systemic relations of functional integration, of self-regulating ‘autopoietic systems’ – in the phrase of Niklas Luhmann (1982) – the supposition of normatively guided conduct of life remains at least at some level ineliminable. Pervasive contemporary features of the information society, of complex non-human flows, networks, and mobile planes of transaction on mediated surfaces and interfaces certainly put an end to all last traces of metaphysical mind/ body dualism in European thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, these features do not cancel at root the insight that runs throughout interpretive thinking from the thought of Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Wittgenstein to Peter Winch (1958), Clifford Geertz (1973), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975 [1960]), and others. At base, social life cannot be conceptualized in any other fashion than by reference to some form of dynamic duality of ‘structure and agency’, of ‘system and lifeworld’, of ‘social physics and social phenomenology’ – in the sense set down by numerous theorists from Giddens (1976, 1984) to Habermas (1984–1987), Bourdieu (1972), Alexander (1983, 2003), and others, in ongoing reconfiguration of Weber’s precepts.

Class, Economy, and Rationalization A second wide-ranging plane of relevance of Weberian social theory today can be seen as bearing on the domain of economy and class in social life – including, notably, in confrontation with Marxian thought and analysis – and, in tandem with

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this, on the broad impact of Weber’s master concept of ‘rationalization’ in social change. A broad acceptance today that market regularities, as robust and open to predictive statistical analysis as they may appear be, are not law-like structures but indeterminate phenomena variant across social-historical time and space rests in large degree on Weber’s impact on the emerging disciplinary sources of the early twentiethcentury social sciences. Weber’s project of a ‘social economics’ in Economy and Society, drawing on precepts of German late nineteenth-century ‘historical economics’, stands in many respects the ancestor of contemporary analyses that emphasize sociocultural diversity of relations of economic values, ethics, and behaviour – from the so-called ‘new institutionalism’ to studies of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘worlds of welfare’, to studies of trajectories of commercial ‘disembedding’ of exchange relations from traditionally received contexts of social norms (Beckert, 2002; Esping-Anderson, 1990; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Polanyi, 1957 [1944]). Weberian understandings of historical flux and plurality in economic life develop in these terms from Weber’s critical remarks on both British and French classical political economy and Marxian historical materialism (Weber, 2012). Behind them stand Weber’s separation of the Marxian category of class from the term Stand, or estate or ‘status group’, denoting categories of actors able to wield social power and authority independently of any pure economic relation, such as clerics, intellectuals, and professional and administrative staff in the orbit of centres of political power (Weber, 1946: 180–195). The state is not a mere ‘committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848]), and, together with the church and other equivalent bodies of religious institutional authority, the state operates as a relatively autochthonous power source and structure of domination, driven as much by ‘value ideas’ and ‘worldviews’ as by the pursuit of the material interests of ruling personnel. Weber in this way establishes the main line of departure from Marxian economic power-analysis towards manifold theorizations of status, honour, prestige or ‘cultural capital’ as co-primordial vectors of power, manifest in ‘social fields’ of authority monopolized by accredited ‘habitus groups’, as key frameworks of power reproduction and legitimation (Bourdieu, 1979; Lamont, 1992). Many of these precepts in Weber’s thinking also lead over the course of the early and middle decades of the twentieth century to an escalation in conceptions of modern advanced industrial bureaucratic power and administration over large masses of populations. On the political left as much as right, Weber’s understanding of an ever-growing modern predominance of ‘purposive’ or ‘instrumental’ reason, oriented to the maximal pursuit of desired ends with available means, enters into generalized accounts of the ineluctable ‘iron cage’ of modern technocratic total social administration. Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1972 [1944]) influential vision of modern mass culture and society, driven by logics of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ founded on Weber’s conception of irrational consequences of rational structures of control and mastery, is but one instance of a distinctive idiom of analysis of modern nihilism and totalitarian order, formulated against the background of the rise of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships (Scaff, 1989; Weber, 1930: 181). Others include

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numerous powerful statements by authors from Löwith (1982) and Lukács (1980 [1952]) to Arendt (1959), Voegelin (1951), and Aron (1968 [1936]), drawing equally on impulses in the thought of Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In the world of literature and cultural criticism, in novels such as Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and most spectacularly Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus of 1947, metaphors of the story of Faust register themselves for many writers in a code of the spectral return of myth after its banishment from the world by reason and enlightenment. ‘Disenchantment’ in Weber’s sense (Entzauberung) calls into being a new demonic ‘re-enchantment’ or ‘bewitchment’ (Verzauberung) of the world, where – in Weber’s celebrated dramatization – irrational unintended consequences of rationally intended action resemble ‘dead’ ‘old gods’ ‘rising from their graves’ as ‘impersonal forces’ (Goldman, 1992; Harrington, 2016; Weber, 1946: 149). Variations on this same frame of reference continue to pervade understandings of the travails of the first half of the century in strands of thinking originating in France in the 1960s and re-emerging in certain respects under the thematic of postmodernism in the 1980s. In these and other instances, a theme of the essential ‘ambivalence’ of reason and unreason stands forth as deeply emblematic of European high-modern historical experience. Notably drawing on themes of social technocracy in Weber, Schmitt, Arendt, and others, the German sociological historian Detlev Peukert argued in this sense that Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s found itself locked into a vicious circle of attempts to control, contain, and pre-emptively dominate over social problems of disorder that in turn only triggered further problems in an endless spiral (Peukert, 1987; 1989). Disarray in this instance provided the occasion for fantastic experiments in social engineering driven by projects of rationalization that unleashed only further reactions of irrational revolt, requiring, in their turn, yet further efforts of control and containment. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of the so-called ‘positivist dispute in German sociology’ (Adorno, 1976 [1969]), unfolding against the background of rapid sociocultural change and the ‘new social movements’ of the US civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, and European decolonization, Weber’s presence in sociology appeared to reach a crossroads. On the one hand, Weber’s work offered unprecedented insights into structures of domination and trajectories of modernization. On the other, his precepts of impartial scientific analysis seemed to represent, from the point of view of Adorno and other Marxian ‘critical theorists’ working within the ambit of the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research or ‘Frankfurt School’, a capitulation to ‘bourgeois-liberal’ norms of academic ideology, on a par with the same charges levelled in the United States at Parsons by authors such as Gouldner (1971) and by conflict theorists. Yet Weber’s filigreed methodological considerations and meticulously argued historical studies essentially survived these challenges, re-emerging in the 1980s and thereafter onwards as a major reference point for multiple waves of sociological inquiry focused particularly on phenomena of culture, religion, and civilizational form in global social change. It is to this more recently evolved body of Weberian social theory to which we can turn now.

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Religion, Culture, and Social Change The zone of analysis represented by the role of religion in Weber’s work and its relevance for general comparative historical sociology has seen a significant renaissance of attention over the past three decades, partly as a consequence of shifts in international cultural, intellectual, and political relations since the end of the Cold War and the broad pattern of realignments now commonly understood under the rubric of ‘globalization’ (Arjomand and Tiryakian, 2004; Arnason, 2003; Eisenstadt, 2000). Renewed interest has grown in Weber’s investigations of long-term religious civilizational lineages of historical change in the wake of stages of erosion of credibility in Marxist constructs and classical mid-twentieth-century Western liberal modernization and development theories, parallel in turn to a receding salience of the secular nation state and ethno-national identities at various levels of societal order. Few commentators now dispute that Weber’s intentions in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism were not to promulgate religious consciousness as an entirely privileged causal variable in the emergence of early modern capitalist enterprise, relative to factors of a more economic-material, legal-political, and secular-intellectual standing (Schluchter, 1981, 1989; Swatos and Kaelber, 2005; Weber, 1946: 396–444). Accepted is rather that for Weber, and for any productive extension of his approach to comparative historical studies of religion and economy, a salient focus of analysis lies on exemplary but non-law-like ‘elective affinities’ between religious confessional mentalities and particular social carrier groups in the spread of structural pathways of socio-economic change. An affinity between Puritan ethics of industrious labour in worldly callings and early entrepreneurial forms stands merely as one significant conjuncture alongside others, such as Confucianism and the mandarins in ancient China, or merchants and warrior ethics in the spread of early Islam and so on (Whimster, 2007). Research on economic behaviour in the light of the diversity of customary moral norms draws in these regards on Weber’s panoramic vision of the ‘economic ethics of the world religions’, as the unifying title Weber gave to his unfinished series of studies on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, alongside modern northern-western European Christianity and ancient Judaism (Weber, 1968: 399–644). Constitutive for this vision is that while global processes of systemic rationalization in relations of trade increasingly remove economic life from embedded contexts of received normativity and create an ever more uniform structure, significant residues of moral and religious restraint remain and persist in their influence over diverse regional policies of regulation of tax, finance, welfare, property, ownership, and the general interrelations of state, market and society. Numerous recent contributions to the sociology of religion take their point of departure in these regards from a Weberian insight into the colouration of forms and processes of institutional modernity by different legacies of religious tradition (Bellah, 2011; Bellah and Joas, 2012; Eisenstadt, 2000; Eisenstadt, Schluchter, and Wittrock, 2001; Taylor, 2007). Historically specific relations of separation between church and state or between religious and political institutional authorities, and between state-supported religious bodies and non-state-supported bodies such as

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sects and non-conformist groups, are shown to play an important determining role in the overall character of political and public cultures in different national arenas, in some cases accelerating processes of secularization, in other cases restraining or qualifying them (Casanova, 1994). The result is a questioning of any simple equation between processes of modernization and processes of secularization. The Western European picture of a steadily advancing global pattern of secularity stamped by processes of the retreat of belief and religious culture from the public sphere to the private consciousness of individuals can no longer be seen as the norm (Davie, 2000). ‘Disenchantment’ in Weber’s general sociology of cultural and religious change can in this sense be understood to signify more a process of the disappearance of supernaturalist elements in religious life (‘magic’, in the literal sense of the German Zauber), rather than any disappearance of religious life tout court from public and political life in the global arena (Joas, 2017). In these and many other connections, the thrust of Weber’s emphasis on ‘worldpictures’ as supervenient directive aspects of the otherwise constant economic character of class struggle has been decisive. With the decline of both Marxian and structural-functionalist and other general unilinear evolutionistic conceptions of change, attention has turned repeatedly to Weber’s sensibility for multiple civilizationally distinctive trajectories of change, without determinate total global unity. ‘Charisma’, in Weber’s seminal understanding of types of religious and political leadership and domination, can be shown to play a key part in events of contingent rupturing and reconfiguring of otherwise seemingly intractable orders of power (Mommsen, 1984 [1959], 1989); and further, in the sense of dynamics of ‘axial’ change, first theorized in the 1940s by Karl Jaspers under Weber’s influence and subsequently elaborated in more empirical terms by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and others from the 1980s onwards, such events can be seen as formative rather than merely secondary effects of systems of organization (Bellah and Joas, 2012; Eisenstadt, 2000). Equally, the Weberian thesis of a culturally legitimized and legitimizing ‘spirit’ or mentality of engaging in economic life in a capitalist market has continued to play a major part in studies of post-religious arenas of contemporary capitalist production. Responses to shifts in organizational forms and cultures of business enterprise in the wake of moves towards neoliberal economic policy in global relations have extensively developed Weberian motifs of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’, allied to norms of the ‘entrepreneurial personality’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Sennett, 2000). Such work has drawn in turn on earlier mid-century accounts of a shift from ‘innerdirected’ to ‘outer-directed’ outlooks of the self in the sociology of David Riesman, concomitant to dominant forms of creative niche capitalism and networked social relations, seen in Weber’s sense as requiring a type of animating ethos or ethic of persistence (Bell, 1976; Campbell, 1987; Granovetter, 1973; Riesman, 1950; Ritzer, 2000). These commentaries synthesize Weberian impulses from across the domains of economic, religious, and cultural sociology and at the same time draw attention to a key role occupied in Weberian analysis by concepts of power, legitimacy, and politics – which can be seen as composing a fourth major zone of engagement with his work in social theory of the past century.

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Politics, Nation, and State Anchored in a deep fascination on Weber’s part with Bismarck’s Realpolitik, Weberian conceptions of power have long been understood to be in an important sense ‘realist’ conceptions. Accordingly, these conceptions have been seen as playing a part in the rise of international relations ‘realism’ in political science since the Second World War (Factor and Turner, 1984; Lukes, 1979; Turner, 2009). Tied closely to Weber’s influential definition of the state as the ‘institution in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence’, the drive of Weberian political sociology has been to approach legitimacy in politics as a function of the capacity to produce and sustain social order by means of power (Parsons, 1937; Weber, 1946: 78). Even as Herrschaft or ‘domination’ finds its mode of articulation in such non-material sources as charisma, tradition, and rational-legal form, legitimacy in domination gains its only ultimate foundation from the ability to secure stable reliable structures of life (Mommsen, 1974, 1984 [1959]; 1989). It is in this framework that that Weberian sociology has typically attached importance to the role of elites and forms of effective leadership that master and manage power on behalf of mass quantities of populations. Notably beginning with the work of Weber’s student Robert Michels (1962 [1911, 1915]), attention has turned to the pivotal position of the warlord, the religious prophet and theocrat, privy counsellors to the sovereign, parliamentary representatives, and the modern democratic presidential or ‘plebiscitary’ leader. Much debate has arisen over the decades as to the precise nature of Weber’s own professed commitments to parliamentary democracy and to the ambivalence of his statements on the topic in the wake of German defeat in the First World War and the chequered climate of the early years of the Weimar Republic. On the one hand, some have seen Weberian political analysis as somewhat disturbingly close to doctrines of apologia for dictatorship, most notably as first set down in the 1920s under Weber’s influence by Carl Schmitt (Habermas, 1991; Mommsen, 1974). Weber’s own nationalist outbursts during the war and pronounced hostility to the Treaty of Versailles and to the Wilsonian programme for a League of Nations – rooted in a belief in the power-political prerogatives of ‘great-power states’ over smaller ‘minority’ nations – tend to lend credence to this linkage (Harrington, 2016: 166–179). On the other hand, others have pointed to Weber’s more evidently liberal emphases on the formative role of burghers and urban political cultures of the middle classes and merchants as carriers of norms and ideas of responsible national citizenship, each in contention with landed Junker interests and with phenomena of monarchical-ecclesiastical tutelage or ‘Caesaro-papism’ (Baehr, 2008; Bendix, 1964; Breiner, 1996). It can be said that much of the rich body of Weberian historical-political sociology that developed largely in the US in the 1950s onwards takes its point of departure from this second broad impulse of Weber’s political thought. Thus Reinhard Bendix in Nation-Building and Citizenship drew on Weberian precepts of multiply interconnected institutional forms to explain processes of the formation of states and state cultures of citizenship and public life in the comparative historical arenas of modern Germany, Japan, Russia, and India. Robert Bellah in Tokugawa Religion (Bellah,

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1985 [1957]) and Shmuel Eisenstadt in The Political Systems of Empires sought ways of extending and refining Parsonian structural-functionalist analyses of societal differentiation and modernization by means of a more distinctively Weberian focus on features of cognitive and institutional diversity and historicity of social change. Where Japanese tokugawa religion suggested for Bellah a functional analogue to Weber’s vocational ethic of work in northern-western European Protestant religious cultures, action orientations fostered by religious ethics in Weber’s sense formed for Eisenstadt only one key consideration alongside other factors in the rise and consolidation of complex imperial political structures of the ancient world – notably including processes of bureaucratic rationalization of organization and control over land, resources, people, and labour. Following Shils (1981), other scholars have developed Weberian conceptions of tradition, patrimonialism, and patron–client relationships to interrogate historically salient path-dependencies of political rule in developmentally troubled regions of the world such as Latin America and Africa (Taylor, 2012). For many authors writing today on the sociology of the state; on historical processes of state formation; bureaucracy; on forms of national consciousness and ethnic identity; on types of sociocultural habitus and discipline; and on diverse structural forms, frameworks, and vectors of power beyond pure economic class relations, Weberian analyses continue to provide a major frame of reference (Blau, 1956; Brubaker, 2004; Du Gay, 2000; Gorski, 2003; Mann, 1986–2013; Tilly, 2004). Similarly, Weber’s anxieties over the bureaucratizing tendencies of modern social states continue to animate sociological and political commentary of the past four or five decades. In certain instances, these responses reflect hostile Weberian attitudes to the early stages of state socialism, as shared by figures from Michels to Joseph Schumpeter, and show signs of affinity to later twentieth-century neoliberal discourse in the Anglo-American and German ordo-liberal traditions (Swedberg, 1991). In other instances, the style of inquiry draws Weberian thinking into dialogue with the critique of forms of technocratic administration and their transmutation over the course of the rise of global neoliberal economic governance into privatized structures of individual ‘governmentality’, in the sense of the kinds of reflections developed in the later work of Michel Foucault (Owen, 1994; Szakolczai, 1998).

Modernity, the West, and Weberian Social Theory In the light of these four broad domains of engagement, it is fitting to conclude with a few words of critical assessment on a thematic often seen as in some respects the most encompassing element in Weberian thinking over the decades – the thematic, namely, of the place and ‘rise’ of the West in modern global social change. One concern relates generally to questions of the causes, contingencies, and consequences of crises of rationality and irrationality within Western societies since the twentieth century. Another bears on questions of the relative place of modern Western historical experiences on the world stage as a whole.

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In his last writings and speeches, Weber spoke of outcomes of accelerated separation between different spheres of ‘ultimate value’ resulting from processes of generalized societal differentiation. Increasingly, he held, science, morality, aesthetics, politics, Eros, and religious belief related to one another as spheres of life only under conditions of mutual ‘antinomic’ repulsion. Aspects of rationality and irrationality of orientations to values became more and more matters of fundamental perspectival choice, such that some commitments could appear entirely rational from one viewpoint and entirely irrational from another (Lash and Whimster, 1987; Weber, 1946: 323–362). From the outset, however, a bundle of unanswered questions remained with Weber’s assessment. As several German critics urged at the time, it was questionable whether modern societal dynamics of rationalization meant that a tendency towards autonomous differentiation of spheres was, as Weber tended to imply, inexorable and implacable, culminating everywhere in each sphere’s banishment of the claims of the other (Harrington, 2016: 28–35, 94–140; Troeltsch, 2018 [1922]). Even after the demise of the earlier nineteenth-century philosophical idealist and theological systems of thought that had tended to order these different registers of mind into neat logico-developmental totalities, questions still remained as to whether, even under conditions as radically fragmented as European industrial modernity since 1914, a choice for one register of values necessarily implied an attitude of mistrust or enmity to another or to every other. Though it may have been the case that a societal world as profoundly transformed as modern Europe no longer enjoyed any total substantial unity of the true, the beautiful, and the good in the sense of Greek antiquity or the Christian Middle Ages, it did not follow that science, ethics, aesthetics, and religious faith all spun off irrepressibly from one another on their own axes. It is in this light that some works of Weberian diagnosis of European societies in the twentieth century can be said to evince a tendency to overextend and overgeneralize too indiscriminately from a theme of systemic ‘ambivalence’ in modern industrial social transformation (cf. Bauman, 1989; 1991). Key attention should be given to a sense of contingency of directions of historical change in the interwar period and in particular to problems of the complexity and questionability of any total or systemic ‘crisis of classical modernity’ (Harrington and Roberts, 2012; Peukert, 1987). Open to question is whether experiences of fragmentation had to bring in their train some kind of forcible grasping after total order or could be handled only through a range of social-technical projects of administrative mastery. Important to underline in this light is that the victory of Nazism in 1933 is not in itself testimony to the prescience of the Weberian conception of rationalization and its consequences. According to interventions by other notable figures in German thought of the interwar period, from Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Mannheim to (later) Hans Blumenberg in his important work of 1966, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, modern twentieth-century European interrelations of liberal rational culture on the one hand and mythos and religion on the other could always in principle have been symbiotic, not necessarily demonic, in character. ‘Nihilism’ in Europe could have been seen as denoting not an end, a nothingness, but more precisely a beginning of

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something, the onset of a possibility. Conditions of disorder could have been grasped as openings: as moments of possibility, options for reorientation and renewal (Mannheim, 1936). It is instructive to note in this light that for other German liberal social-science voices of the 1920s, it was not out of the question that within the West other civilizational developmental sequences might be significant, besides the one at the forefront of Weber’s Protestant Ethic study, and might retain capacities to release still undepleted resources of normative orientation for a disordered age (Harrington, 2016: 211–227). It was possible that the particular kinds of experiences of spiritual dereliction that Weber pinpointed in the contemporary post-Protestant conditions of the North Atlantic coastal states did not have to be seen as grimly paradigmatic for all imaginable horizons of future socio-economic administration in the rest of Europe and the world beyond. It was conceivable that a range of alternative spiritual negotiations of the directions of secular-societal modernity could be descried and that the West could appropriately reinvigorate its own resources of spiritual selforientation by looking to the East in intelligent and discriminating ways. But turning now to the second of the two main concerns in Weberian thinking about the place of the modern West in global change, it appears fair to conclude that while a certain Anglo-Protestant-centric bias does tend to colour Weber’s picture of pathways to modernity on the intra-European stage, his and Weberian contributions in general nonetheless repel charges of European ethnocentrism on the more extraEuropean stage of global comparative historical sociology. Important to underline is that in his famous Preface to ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (alias Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion), it was with an acute sense of epistemic relativity and perspectivity that Weber raised the issue of universality in modern Western societal development (Weber, 1930 [1920]: 13–31). Just as crucial for Weber as any question of explaining an apparent fact of ‘universal significance and validity’ in recent Western capitalist development was the more epistemological challenge for Westerners of indicating how scholars might set about arguing for this universal significance and validity, even as the content of the claim remained something Westerners themselves characteristically ‘like to think’. The importance of Weber’s key parenthetic clause in this Preface – ‘at least as we like to think’ (wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen) – cannot be overstated in this connection. Admittedly, a number of questions arise with Weber’s, and in general with Weberian presentations of the ‘rise of the West’ on the modern world stage (Hall, 1985; McNeill, 1963). Some scholars have argued that the causes of Western economic dominance in his time may have rested on more contingent conditions that could have been at the disposal of other world regions or that had or could have had counterparts and equivalents elsewhere. Notably for Pomeranz (2000), economic growth in China maintained parity with the West for much longer than hitherto believed and only fell behind the West from around 1800 onwards – suggesting that the effective causes of Western dominance may have had little to do with the Reformation-period factors at the forefront of Weber’s analysis (Wong, 1997). Other scholars have also raised questions about aspects of selectivity in Weber’s writings on Oriental social forms and their place in world history.

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Noticeable is that much of the conceptual architecture of Hegel’s Lectures on The Philosophy of History reappears in Weber’s classification and interpretation of Oriental religions and civilizations in the series of studies he compiled from 1910 onwards, wherein Confucianism and Puritanism tend to stand as ideal ciphers of East and West, and, by extension, of tradition and modernity tout court. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to assert that Weber’s interest in Eastern religions and civilizations only extended to the degree that he could present them as mere negative controls for the thesis of the world-transforming effect of occidental rationalism. It is not possible to view Weber’s comparative historical studies of religions as motivated by any overriding scientific plan or system of analyses in the sense of a project of establishing dependent and independent causal variables across sets of exhaustive multiple cases. Repeatedly, scholars have emphasized that in Weber’s thinking, in place of unified philosophies of history and social theories stands the project of inter-civilizational typological comparison, in which no one single theme can be picked out as the essential secret of history and in which no single motif could be absolutized in its importance and given synoptic centre stage. Civilizations of the world, in Weberian thinking, cannot be ordered into any rationally directed, unified, and overarching scheme of total historical unfolding. It was in this sense that Weber repeatedly criticized both classical British and French political economy and Marxian materialist historical theory, speaking of world history as a thoroughly open-ended totality, shot through with contingency, plurality, and indeterminacy (Weber, 1946: 280). Again and again Weber’s presentation returned to an understanding that any ostensibly scientific investigation of comparative world cultures remained subservient to no more than a Western narrative work of critical normative self-explication. The ultimate framework of Weber’s project in this respect was no more than, and no less than, a work of Western philosophical selfreckoning in the face of other rival cosmological systems on the stage of world history. It is in this sense that Weber’s vision of the place of the modern West in world history is arguably best read as a view that the universality claims of modern Western civilization held not abstractly ‘above’ concrete particular locations in history but in these locations – not in ‘subsuming’ historical particularity under themselves like indifferent covering laws or sets of cases but in uniquely ‘disclosing’ themselves in definite contexts of historical particularity. Universal ‘validity’ in this proposition has the sense of ‘affecting all’ but not ‘binding on all’. What happened in the West has affected all societies of the world and will probably continue to affect them in some way, but this impact does not imply, at present and in future, that all societies of the world, insofar as they become modern, either will or need or ought to adopt structures of development identical to those experienced in the West. To think of societies as evolving towards conditions of modernity requires presupposing no single schema through which all societies can be deemed sooner or later pass. Behind Weber’s and related Weberian conceptions stands in these respects a will to criticize European conceptions of universal history (Universalgeschichte) not by jettisoning such conceptions in toto but by seeking to redeem them ever more searchingly and truthfully. At once a vice and a virtue for European thought,

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universal history stands as the medium in which European consciousness aspires to an ever more honest sense of its essential relativity on the world stage and thereby reaches an ever more credible platform from which to seek potentially universally valid propositions about humanity and its moral ends. It persists as an ideal to which European thought can strive to respond ever more profoundly, even and precisely as its previous claims fall short of its true challenges.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (ed.). 1976 [1969]. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by G. Adey and D. Frisby. London: Heinemann. Alexander, Jeffrey. 1983. The Classical Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber. Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume Three. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Arjomand, Said Amir, and Tiryakian, Edward A. (eds.). 2004. Rethinking Civilizational Analysis. London: Sage. Arendt, Hannah. 1959. The Human Condition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute. London: Sage. Aron, Raymond. 1968 [1936]. German Sociology. Translated by M. Bottomore and T. Bottomore. New York: Free Press. Baehr, Peter. 2008. Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beckert, Jens. 2002. Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bellah, Robert N. 1985 [1957]. Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan. New York: Free Press. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bellah, Robert, and Hans Joas, 2012. The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bendix, Reinhard. 1964. Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Blau, Peter M. 1956. Bureaucracy in Modern Society. New York: Random House. 1964. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by G. Elliott. London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. London: Routledge.

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Breiner, Peter. 1996. Max Weber and Democratic Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coleman, James. 1991. The Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Collins, Randall. 1975. Conflict Sociology. New York: Academic Press. 1986. Weberian Sociological Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Davie, Grace. 2000. Religion in Modern Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Du Gay, Paul. 2000. In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber – Organisation – Ethics. London: Sage. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities.’ Daedalus 129(1) (Winter): 1–29. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., Wolfgang Schluchter, and Bjorn Wittrock. 2001. Public Spheres and Collective Identities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Esping-Anderson, Gosta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Factor, Regis, and Stephen Turner. 1984. Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value. London: Routledge. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975 [1960]. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffes, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Goldman, Harvey. 1992. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gorski, Philip S. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gouldner, Alvin. 1971. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann. Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. ‘The Strength of Weak Ties.’ American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360–1380. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984–1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1991. ‘Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany.’ In The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated by S. Weber Nicholson (pp. 71–99). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, John A. 1985. Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hall, Peter A., and David Soskice (eds.). 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. New York: Oxford University Press. Harrington, Austin. 2016. German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harrington, Austin, and David Roberts. 2012. ‘Introduction: Weimar Social Theory: The “Crisis of Classical Modernity” Revisited.’ Thesis Eleven 111: 3–99.

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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 1972 [1944]. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder. Joas, Hans. 2017. Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Manners, and Morals: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Classes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lash, Scott, and Sam Whimster. 1987. Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen & Unwin. Löwith, Karl. 1982. Max Weber and Karl Marx. Translated by T. Bottomore and W. Outhwaite. London: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas. 1982. The Differentiation of Society. Translated by S. Holmes and C. Larmore. New York: Columbia University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1980 [1952]. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by P. Palmer. London: The Merlin Press. Lukes, Steven. 1979. ‘Power and Authority.’ In Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds.), A History of Sociological Analysis (pp. 633–676). New York: Basic Books. Mann, Michael. 1986–2013. The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. London: Verso. McNeill, William. 1963. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe: Free Press. Michels, Robert. 1962 [1911, 1915]. Political Parties. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: Collier Books. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1974. The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. 1984 [1959]. Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920. Translated by M. S. Steinberg. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1989. The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Owen, David. 1994. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. New York: Routledge. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils (eds.). 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. New York: Harper & Row. Peukert, Detlev. 1987. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Translated by R. Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang. 1989. Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Polanyi, Karl. 1957 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ritzer, George. 2000. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Scaff, Lawrence A. 1989. Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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2012. Weber and the Weberians. London: Palgrave. Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1981. The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History. Translated by Guenther Roth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1989. Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective. Translated by Neil Solomon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected Papers, vol. 1. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1967 [1932]. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sennett, Richard. 2000. The Corrosion of Character. New York: Norton. Shils, Edward A. 1981. Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Swatos, William H., and Lutz Kaelber (eds.). 2005. The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Swedberg, Richard. 1991. Joseph A. Schumpeter. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Szakolczai, Arpád. 1998. Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Scott D. 2012. Globalization and the Cultures of Business in Africa: From Patrimonialism to Profit. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tilly, Charles. 2004. Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst. 2018 [1922]. Historismus und seine Probleme. Sydney, Australia: Wentworth Press. Turner, Stephen P. 2009. ‘Hans J. Morgenthau and the Legacy of Max Weber.’ In Duncan Bell (ed.), Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (pp. 63–82). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Voegelin, Eric. 1951. The New Science of Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. London: Routledge. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press. 2012. Collected Methodological Writings. Edited by H. H. Bruun and Sam Whimster, Translated by H. H. Bruun. London: Routledge. Whimster, Sam. 2007. Understanding Weber. London: Routledge. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wong, Roy Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Notes 1. For an excellent and more comprehensive survey of Weberian currents of social theory, see Scaff (2012).

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9 Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life Vincenzo Mele

Georg Simmel was born on 1 March 1858 in Berlin, the seventh child of Jewish parents who converted: his father to Catholicism and his mother to an evangelical cult in which Georg was brought up as well. Upon the death of his father in 1874, Julius Friedländer, the founder of the Peters musical editions, became his guardian and would later adopt him. After attending the Friedrich Werder Gymnasium, he enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1876. He attended the history courses and seminars of Theodor Mommsen, studied psychology under Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, the founders of the Völkerpsychologie, and philosophy under Friedrich Harms and the historian of Greek thought, Eduard Zeller. In 1885 he achieved the qualification of Privatdozent (lecturer) and took on his university teaching duties. His lectures stimulated great interest and were hence attended more than the official courses. In 1890 he published his first book, Über soziale Differenzierung. Soziologische und psychologische Untersuchungen (Social Differentiation: Sociological and Psychological Research), in which he addresses the issue of the foundations of sociology as a science. In the same year he married Gertrud Kinel, who published several philosophical essays under the pseudonym of Marie Luise Enckendorff. From their union Simmel’s son Hans was born. He later fathered a daughter, Angi, with Gertrud Kantorowicz; and they were persecuted by the Nazis, as was his son Hans. After a series of brief essays on money, in 1900 Simmel published the important work Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money), in which is contained the core of his philosophy on culture. One year later the University of Berlin named him professeur extraordinaire of philosophy. His lectures here were very popular, especially with Russian, Polish, and Jewish students, as well as with many women (he was amongst the first teachers to allow them to audit university lessons, a policy frowned upon within conservative Berlin academic circles). In 1909 with Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Werner Sombart he founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Society of Sociology), becoming a member of the managing/executive committee (he would step down some years later, explaining his resignation by the fact that his interests had by then turned purely philosophical). In 1910, he opened the first conference of society in Frankfurt am Main with the report Soziologie der Geselligkeit (Sociology of Sociability). In 1914 (at the age of fifty-six) he was nominated for the tenured post of professor of philosophy at Strasburg, reluctantly leaving his beloved Berlin, which honoured him by publishing a newspaper article entitled ‘Berlin without Simmel’. For Simmel, 161

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World War I, which broke out that very year, symbolized the gravity of the crisis in modern culture and the possibility of overcoming it. Therefore, at the beginning of the war he espoused nationalistic positions and, together with Max Weber, committed himself to the ‘internal front’, even holding lectures for soldiers. His decision was bitterly criticized by his ex-students György Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel (The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays), considered to be his philosophical testament, was published in 1918. He died on 28 September of the same year in Strasburg.

Historical Context: ‘Classical German Sociology’ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries German social thought considered the metropolis a model in miniature of Western civilization. For thinkers such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel, it surely represented the social organization that most clearly revealed modernity in all its most extreme and paradoxical manifestations, and provided the best sociological vantage point to grasp the ongoing formidable transformations of the urban landscape: the birth of the boulevards; the spread of iron and glass architectural structures dedicated to economic consumption (such as the passages and department stores) and transport (railway stations); changes in the field of aesthetics, culture, and customs thanks to the spread of fashion, advertising, and daily newspapers; and profound changes in the perception of space and time consequent to great technical innovations such as railroads, artificial lighting, radio, telephone, photography, and cinema. Georg Simmel and the founders of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie contributed to interpreting and elaborating on this new form of metropolitan culture. The metropolis as a general social form of modernity had fundamental importance in both their works and their lives. At the turn of the twentieth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, albeit in different ways, cast doubt on the idea of progress as the explanation for the social changes under way, and once again posed the question of what was to be the subject matter and basis of sociology. Whether considering Comte and SaintSimon’s law of three stages, Marx’s historical materialism, or Herbert Spencer’s general law of evolution, what was knowable was the (presumed) certainty that society would progress to the next development stage. This form of knowledge, though founded on various forms of philosophy of history, enabled an analysis of the present: it was believed that by means of such knowledge it was possible to understand the fundamental social structures that were in place, the dominant social forces in the future, and the social problems that would develop, with potential catastrophic consequences for society. Whereas during the nineteenth century sociology represented the Queen of Sciences, in that it set its sights on the most complex subject, that is society, certainty about the future served the function of considerably reducing such complexity. Sociologists’ doubts about progress were not an isolated phenomenon, but rather reflected widespread pessimism in all social layers of German society and found

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expression in philosophical, cultural, and artistic circles. This arose firstly for economic reasons, that is, because of the ‘Great Depression’ in Germany (1873– 1896), which had eroded the trust and optimism of preceding years, especially amongst the economically active segments of the population. Within élite intellectual circles such pessimism could be partly explained as a reaction to the optimism of the period immediately following the unification of Germany, and to the workers’ and feminist movements, as events that upset the traditional social order. More specifically, there are three fundamental orientations that characterize ‘modern sociology’, and that involved Simmel, Weber, and Tönnies, as well as Durkheim in an analogous manner (Rammstedt, 1988: 280). First, modern sociology espouses the positivistic apology of reality. No longer does current social reality need to be viewed as mere appearance waiting for the advent of a truer form of social coexistence that the sociologist must be able to foresee. Limiting all investigation to that which is, rather than that which might be, raises the issue of how to classify, collect, and choose the social phenomena that present themselves, which are chosen based on their modernity ‒ thereby describing sociology’s second fundamental orientation as a discipline seeking to institutionalize itself. Placing that which is ‘modern’ at the core of its research interests ‒ explicitly ‒ signifies recognizing the autonomous sufficiency of now as a specific quality of the present that is historically non-investigable, in that it is essentially characterized by the attribute of novelty. For Simmel this limiting of research and assessment to the phenomena that characterize the essential aspects of the concept of modernity leads to that perspective which he defines as the ‘aesthetic perspective’ (ästhetische Betrachtung), according to which ‘the typical must be uncovered in that which is unique, that which follows a law in that which is random, the essence and meaning of things in the superficial and the transitory’ (Simmel, 2004: 178). Lastly, there is the reiterated, emphatic issue of the true subject of sociology, on whose basis sociology itself should be able to establish its legitimacy as an academic discipline. All the ‘modern classics’ of sociology dismissed ‘society’ as the subject of sociology and presented other concepts in its place: Simmel refers to the ‘association’ (Vergesellschaftung), which better expresses the dynamic element and relations in social life; Weber addresses the category of ‘social action’; Durkheim, the ‘collective conscience’; even Tönnies, while remaining attached to the concept of ‘society’, defined it as a system of exchange relationships. An overview of sociology at the turn of the century therefore reveals how the semantically ambiguous, excessively comprehensive concept of ‘society’ came to be replaced by other conceptions deemed more suitable to express the specifically ‘modern’ modalities of social life.

The Metropolitization of Society: The Problem of Sociology A sociology with these characteristics could not but take on the ‘metropolitan reality’ as its priority subject, the melting pot for the production of the ‘new’ par excellence. Although all of Simmel’s work is pervaded by a ‘metropolitan spirit’, he expressly devoted only one essay to the topic, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’

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(1903), which is the transcript of a lecture presented at the Gehe-Stiftung in Dresden. This small essay sums up the main topics of Social Differentiation (1890) and, especially, of the Philosophy of Money (1900), wherein Simmel completes a wideranging philosophical, sociological and aesthetic analysis of the monetary economy, which for the most part coincides with the metropolitan culture. Moreover, as we will see, many of his essays address metropolitan life, either directly or indirectly. His most important ones, published as a collection in the 1911 book entitled Philosophical Culture, in fact include his famous essays on ‘Fashion’, ‘Adventure’, ‘Coquetry’, ‘Female Culture’, and ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’. No less important are his essays on ‘Discretion’, ‘Gratitude’, ‘Ornament’, ‘Shame’, and ‘Sociability’. Naturally, for reasons of space, it is impossible to delve into or even provide an overview of all the sociological insights offered by these essays. However, in the pages that follow I will try to show that, to a large extent, the metropolis represents a coherent development of Simmel’s philosophical and sociological thought. In 1908 Simmel published his major sociological work, Sociology (frequently also called große Soziologie to distinguish it from the 1917 kleine Soziologie). The first, fundamental chapter of this work is entitled ‘The Problem of Sociology’. Simmel’s sociological proposition stems from the need for conceptual clarification: he believes that sociology can establish itself as a specific science only if it gives up the goal of having new subject matter ‒ one that is not already dealt with by one of the many existing human sciences ‒ and seeks instead only a new point of view that can trace a ‘new line through historical facts’ so as to highlight within them some specific determinations that are not considered by the other sciences. According to such a perspective, ‘sociology . . . is a new method, an auxiliary to investigation, a means of approaching the phenomena of all these areas in a new way’ (Simmel, 1909: 293). Such a perspective can be achieved provided that the concept of society is subjected to differentiation to distinguish between its form and its content. The ‘reasons’ that prompt individuals to form a society can be defined as the ‘contents’: they compel individuals to exert ‘reciprocal action’ on each other, which may be of a very different order and can take on various forms, from the most transitory to the most stable and long-lasting. The concept of ‘reciprocal action’, which is a translation of the German term Wechselwirkung (also referable to as the ‘effect of reciprocity’), has fundamental importance throughout the entire corpus of Simmel. It indicates a general conception of reality as a network of reciprocal influence between a multitude of elements. It is both a philosophical and metaphysical conception, by which all life’s phenomena ‒ not only social ones ‒ are interconnected by a relation of interchange and reciprocal causation: no single element can be isolated and comprehensive in its oneness, but only by being in dynamic interaction with all the others, in an endless series of action and retroaction. This dynamic-process conception of reality opposes mechanistic application of the principle of cause and effect in order to understand life phenomena. Domination and subordination, competition and cooperation, imitation, the division of work, and the formation of parties are merely some of the infinite forms that reciprocal action between people can take the moment they meet and

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come together in a unit. The individual forms of reciprocal action make up what can be defined, in general, as ‘association’ (Vergesellschaftung). Society as such does not exist. Simmel judges it as a ‘mystical’ entity: it is but the product of reciprocal influence relations between human beings. As he wrote: ‘society is the name by which we indicate a circle of individuals tied one to the other by various forms of reciprocity’ (Simmel, 1984b [1917]: 42). Moreover, the various forms of reciprocity tend to settle over time and to become stable for a certain period of time: the great systems and organizations that we think of when we speak of ‘society’ (the state, in first instance) can be conceived of as ‘forms of reciprocity between individuals, prolonged in time and transformed into stable, self-sufficient formations having a well-defined physiognomy’ (Simmel, 1984b: 41–42). This image of society, viewed as the ‘sum of reciprocal interactions’ – from the longer-lasting ones that crystallize into configurations such as the family or the state to the more ephemeral and transitory ones, such as a simple exchange of glances – can be linked to the metropolitan milieu.

How Is Society Possible in the Metropolis? The A Priori of Social Life The first chapter of Sociology contains an excursus with an expressly Kantian title: ‘How Is Society Possible?’ Simmel was not satisfied to simply shift the focus of his interests to the ‘association’ (Vergesellschaftung) amongst individuals and study its manifold forms, but sought to delve into its transcendental conditions of existence. As already stated, the question that he poses is a phenomenological one concerning the make-up in individuals of that subject that is the world of others (Dal Lago, 1994: 173). According to Simmel the point of departure for the theory of social experience lies in the relation of the ‘me’ with the ‘you’ in social interaction; this represents the fundamental epistemological problem of the process of association. Given that the individual is faced with the presence of the ‘you’ in social reality, he must equip himself with a clear and constant ‘image’ (Bild) in the context of three fundamental elements of his associative bonds. First, an image of the other must be formed, that is an image of the ‘you’ that he associates with. Then, he must understand the image that the other has of himself. Lastly, he must develop an image regarding his own position in the objective structure of society. For Simmel these represent the three a priori of social experience based on which all social relations are structured.

The Other as a Social Type The first of the sociological a priori stems from the realization that in social relations the ‘you’ can only be knowable partially. It is only the formation of ‘type images’ of the other that enables the existence of society as an ‘objective representation of several subjective consciences’. Through his analysis of this first a priori Simmel introduces a concept of ‘social type’ that recalls the famous notion of the ‘ideal type’ formulated by Max Weber. As for the latter concept, here we are also dealing with

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a ‘necessary pretence’ to aid understanding, which comes through an exaggeration of some features present to the detriment of others, and which, in its totality, would otherwise remain unfathomable. The other therefore always remains an incomplete, somewhat ‘virtual’ representation, as does our own Ego: ‘we are all only fragments not only of man, in general, but also of ourselves. We are all rough sketches not only of the type man, in general, but also of that individuality and uniqueness of that which is ourselves . . . which surrounds, nearly drawn with ideal lines, our perceivable reality’ (Simmel, 1998: 31). For Simmel the individual is a fictitious unit, a conventional conceptual creation, as are the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘history’. This also explains the attention Simmel dedicated to the analysis of the ‘connection’ between the psychic life of individuals and its visible manifestations: his analyses of fashion, ornaments, and the aesthetic significance of the face. The knowledge a person possesses can be gleaned not only from one aspect (the intellect foremost), but from the whole of the body and soul. In this regard Simmel refers to ‘a circle’ between the internal aspect and the external, of a ‘comingling’ between man’s interiority and his external aspect, as well as of the ‘necessity’ that his mediation be able ‘to cast a bridge over the abyss that separates the self from the not-self’ (Simmel, 1996: 53). Every relation between one individual and another is premised by the relation between the individual’s psychic life and its external manifestations, such as gestures and facial expressions, but obviously also attire and body language in general. These, as well as other aspects of his social analysis, highlight Simmel’s contribution to a realistic theory of everyday interaction, in that it seeks to describe the actual dynamics of the social world, as manifested in lived (not merely rational) reality (both bodily and spiritual).

Partial Knowledge of the Other The second a priori concerns the relation of the individual to the ‘type’ images that others make of him, or to apply a term that Simmel never used, the individual’s relation to social ‘expectations’ or ‘roles’. In particular, as Simmel observed, every one of us is something more than the role that society has assigned us, and this ‘something more’ does not remain inert while we are being socialized but is equally determinant in our socialization. This a priori, which can be summed up by the apparently banal assertion that ‘life is not entirely social’ (Simmel, 1998: 33), is at the basis of his analyses of the forms of social exclusion set forth in his Sociology, as well as those described in ‘The Poor’, ‘The Enemy’, and especially ‘The Stranger’. Indeed, all these figures have in common the fact that their position in society is inexorably determined by that which is in no way socializable in them. The stranger (like the poor, the alienated, and in general all those who have, for various reasons, been excluded from social relations) is one of the most interesting cases of human relations with others. Indeed, the stranger is to a certain degree the other par excellence; someone who for objective reasons (geographical origins, belonging to a different culture) eludes relations, but is necessarily situated within them (we necessarily associate with strangers; strangers are strange only by virtue of their relation to us). ‘The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and many “enemies within” ‒ an element whose immanent position as a member

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implies simultaneously out of and in front of’ (Simmel, 1998: 580). The basic definition that Simmel gives of the stranger is simple, but suggestive: the stranger is not ‘the pilgrim who comes today and is gone tomorrow, on the contrary . . . he is he who comes today and remains tomorrow ‒ in a manner of speaking the potential pilgrim who, though not having kept on moving, has not entirely overcome the absence of bonds of coming and going’ (Simmel, 1998: 580). Such a definition confirms the liminal nature of the stranger’s situation, their being a borderline figure, or in other terms, their situation of ambiguity: they are not a social type that has totally eluded bonds (as in the case of the pilgrim, who sociologically would seem inert, in that they are indifferent to the social group), nor are they a stable element, organic to the group. The social type of the stranger therefore involves both spatial and temporal uncertainty: they are nearby, and at the same time distant, present bodily, but absent in their social and cultural determinateness. The stranger is therefore a cognitive category, necessary for the identity of any social group. An analogous problem in cognitive sociology is the focus of the chapter on ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’, whose underlying assumption is precisely the incomplete (in the end, impossible) knowability of the other, together with the possibility that he can lie: ‘if human association is influenced by the ability to speak . . . it is determined by the ability to keep silent’ (Simmel, 1998: 323). Here Simmel highlights an essential factor on which contemporary society is based: trust. It is in fact a social practice founded on the uncertainty and incompleteness of the information available about partners in any interaction. Moreover, the advancement of rationality and knowledge does not necessarily involve a reduction in uncertainty, but on that of trust (and faith) that the surrounding world is predicated on knowledge and competence. In other words, through his sociology of the secret, Simmel lays the bases for a sociology of common sense/consensus that accounts for the necessary opacity of social forms.

The Universality of the Individual The third and last a priori is generally called ‘profession’, and it echoes the topics also evoked by Weber’s reflections on Beruf, the professional ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ that characterizes the biography of modern man as if it were an inalterable fate. Simmel maintains that individuals only establish social interaction because they are to some extent aware that the very society whose existence they favour provides the possibility of finding a place where their individuality can adapt most harmoniously: that every individual is, in and of himself, directed by his character toward one determined position within his social milieu; that this position, which ideally belongs to him, is also actually present within the social complex ‒ this is the presupposition based on which the individual lives his social life and which can be defined as the value of universality inherent in individuality. (Simmel, 1998: 37)

Therefore, from the individual’s perspective, society takes on a teleological role and is viewed as a sensible goal for the expression of his possibilities. Various interpretations have been offered of this last statement ‒ and more generally of the passages in Sociology that Simmel devotes to discussion of his

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third a priori ‒ to insert it within the framework of functionalism. In this regard, it is worthwhile stressing that Simmel’s a priori does not necessarily seek to claim that society has certain positions and roles, essential for its proper functioning, that individuals are called upon to take on, and that the duty of the individual would therefore be exclusively to answer this ‘calling’ (Beruf), slavishly conforming to society’s functional and reproductive needs.

The ‘Grey Zone’ of Social Action Amongst the sociological a priori that Simmel envisioned as governing the relations between individuals and society, there is another, albeit less known, more concealed one, intimately connected to the others: that which considers that the social actor can also be a non-actor. Twentieth-century sociology (Max Weber above all) was characterized by the loss of trust in progress and rejection of the idea that the aim of sociology is to study ‘society’. Simmel realized that centring study on the ‘actions of man’ serves to maintain a ‘progressive’ perspective, because the tacit assumption underlying the fact that people act is that they do so because they believe in a future different from the present. In this sense, sociology, conceived of as a theory of action, precludes access to what is instead, in a certain sense, the very opposite of the idea of action (necessarily directed towards the future): pessimism, which manifests itself through the ‘suffering’ (leiden) of society. Leiden literally means to suffer, endure, passively bear: this term is as present in Nietzsche as in Max Weber. Simmel describes it in terms of its consequences for social action (Simmel, 1978 [1900]: 71). For Simmel ‘suffering’ is the individual’s balance sheet, which shows that life’s disbursements vs. its earnings are just not worth it. Pessimism is the reflex of social alienation and is manifested through suffering, the counter-concept to acting. Pessimistic suffering, the feeling of being estranged by one’s own self, is inaccessible to the theory of action: it only becomes comprehensible as ‘actions’ (albeit desperate ones), and hence as suicide, aggression, violence, and so on, and is thus deemed dysfunctional. The sociological importance of this intuition is vast and highly relevant. It can help understand the deep motivations for ‘negative actions’, or more properly, ‘nonaction’ (such as for instance, wilful unemployment, not having children, not being committed politically to changing society’s power relations, etc.) from a sociological point of view as social situations determined by the lack of trust that the future holds the promise of a different social condition from the present: all present actions are influenced and determined by expectations for the future.

Metropolis, Monetary Culture, and the Intensification of Nervous Life Although his entire work is pervaded by a ‘metropolitan spirit’, if we wish to understand the experience of the metropolis according to Simmel, we cannot but focus our attention on the famous essay ‘The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit’

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Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life

(1903). As stated in the beginning of the essay, Simmel’s intent is to try ‘to investigate the products of specifically modern life with regard to their interiority’ (Simmel, 1995: 35–36), in such a way as to discover ‘the equation between the individual and supra-individual contents of life’ to which the metropolis as a social formation gives rise. It is important to stress the originality of Simmel’s approach, as the metropolis he considered is truly and fundamentally an experience, in the sense expressed by the German term Erleben. This has a consequence for a more strictly sociological analysis: in this perspective the metropolis is neither a purely objective formation, nor an exclusively subjective experience. It is rather set midway between individual and object, where individual subjectivity and objective social formation coincide. This is immediately evident from the extreme points of the analysis that Simmel conducts in the essay, which correspond to ‘intellectualism’ and the predominance of the monetary economy. Intellectualism and money are two, respectively subjective and objective, aspects of the metropolitan Erleben. The psychological trait on which the metropolitan personality is based is in fact represented by the ‘intensification of nervous life’ (Steigerung des Nervenlebens) produced by the rapid, relentless alternation of external and internal impressions, the result of which is that the individual cannot react with the deepest layers of his psyche, but has to create a sort of defence organ, the ‘intellect’ (Verstand). The intellect is the sum of the more conscious, transparent, and higher faculties of the psyche and is hence further removed from the deep layers of the personality. It is essentially based on deliberation and objective neutrality when approaching things and relations. It is precisely for this reason that intellectualism and money are strictly linked. Money, like the intellect, is indifferent about all that is purely individual. By its exchange value, it becomes the means through which to express both the highest creations of the spirit, and the rawest, material things, in terms of their lowest common denominator ‒ their price (Simmel, 1995: 43). Intellectualism and the rule of the monetary economy are epitomized in the characteristic metropolitan psychological type ‒ the blasé individual. Blasé means bored, uninterested, detached. Such an attitude stems from the concentrated effects of the contradictory nervous stimuli characterizing the metropolitan milieu. The nerves are subjected to such strong inputs that they eventually stop reacting to the stimuli with the vigour that they would normally. In addition to this peculiarity: ‘The essence of the blasé being consists of the numbing of sensitivity to the differences between things’ (Simmel, 1995: 43). Simmel considers the metropolis to be the culmination of the process of ‘differentiation’, to which he devoted his first study in 1890. In this work he adopted Herbert Spencer’s fundamental theorem of the law of evolution: in nature, just as in human societies (even at the level of the individual personality), a process of differentiation occurs from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from a simple unit of homologous elements to a multitude of functionally diversified elements. Functionally diversified organisms manage to attain their goals, amongst which is the primary one of survival, with lower energy consumption, and thereby representing a superior stage of evolution.

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Money is the most representative symbol of this process: it is pure energy (Kraft). At the same time, it is also a symbol of energy saving, which enables the reduction of friction and conservation of strength. Indeed, the sole fact that all economic transactions are made in money affords energy saving with respect to the traditional practice of exchanging goods. Nevertheless, for Simmel this process is neither wholly positive nor wholly painless but involves that which he defines as the ‘tragedy of modern culture’, for which, once again, the metropolis is the primary setting. In the essay considered here he describes it as the ‘preponderance of the objective spirit over the subjective spirit’: the greater perfection and efficiency of the process of differentiation does not translate into an equally great increase in the differentiation and refinement of individual culture (Simmel, 1995).

The Intersection of Social Circles In Simmel’s experience of the metropolis one principle, which he formulates at the beginning of the essay, is foremost: ‘The most profound problems of modern life stem from the individual’s presumption to preserve independence and the particularity of his being determined against the preponderant forces of society, of historical inheritance, external culture and technique’ (Simmel, 1995: 35; see also D’Andrea, 1999, De Simone, 2002, and Rammstedt, 1988). The problem of individuality, ‘concern over the survival of a differential subjectivity in modern society’ (Lichtblau, 1997: 83), had represented a constant source of worry for Simmel since his earliest works. However, rather than the survival of individuals, Simmel’s aim for the individual is to avoid ‘subvival’: to be able to realize the possibilities offered by the ‘luxuriant development of objective culture’ (Lichtblau, 1997: 83). Simmel formulated a concept that can be considered key for the sociological analysis of individuality: social entourage (sozialer Kreis). In its native state every social formation is set up as a relatively narrow circle, strictly closed against other nearby circles, but with such tight internal cohesion as to grant individuals only a very limited range of action with regards to both the development of their qualities or their free, responsible movements. Beginning with this stage, social evolution moves simultaneously in two different, though nonetheless complementary, directions. As the social group grows ‒ in number, size, importance, and life contents ‒ its internal unity is promptly loosened; the clarity of its original borders is mitigated by relations and connections with other groups. At the same time, individuals gain freedom of movement that goes well beyond the ties initially set by strict affiliation with the group and develop a specificity and a peculiarity that are made possible and necessary by the social division of work within the extended social group. A particularly emblematic case of this developmental scheme of individuality is represented by urban life. Life in small cities, in antiquity as in the Middle Ages, imposed such limitations of movement and relations with the outside on individuals that modern man would feel suffocated. On the other hand, thanks to the expansiveness of its territory and the size of its population, the metropolis offers incomparably greater space for development of the personality. It is in these social

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spaces that we can properly speak of individuality: ‘the determinateness of the personality becomes greater when the circles determining it are found near each other than when they are concentric’ (Simmel, 1995: 123). In the metropolis it is in fact possible that the circles to which an individual belongs are relatively or completely independent; it is also possible for them to be in competition or in contrast with each other, thereby furnishing the maximum space for realization of personal peculiarities. At the same time, this process of social differentiation ‒ which constitutes the sociological premise of modern subjectivity ‒ also turns out to be disorienting for the individual. Modern society presents itself to the individual in a profoundly ambivalent fashion: on the one hand, it offers room for growth, on the other it takes away centredness and ‘character’ from the individual, fragmenting the personality amongst various spaces for its realization. Multiple groups of affiliation seem to create a situation in which none becomes truly binding or influential, making social life more and more attenuated ‒ a pure game in which to participate for the hedonistic and play purposes of distinction. As we will see in the following passage, Simmel delved into the aesthetical mechanisms that individuals use in the difficult art of distinguishing themselves and (at the same time) imitating others, above all through the analysis of phenomena such as fashion, style, and ornament, and in general all his writings that can be collected on the issue of the defence of personal intimacy. In the social circle individuals both recognize and lose themselves. ‘Recognition because it provides a way to differentiate oneself, to affirm one’s own identity; loss, nonetheless, because those symbolic means of differentiation are not individual, but rather common to a wide circle of individuals’ (Simmel, 1995: 123).

The Two Forms of Individualism In the essay on the metropolis Simmel summarizes previous thinking by initially referring to two forms of individualism. The metropolis is in fact the arena, the birthplace of the contrast between and the attempts at conciliation of these two patterns. They can be defined as the individualism of independence (or of equality) and the individualism in the development of originality and personal peculiarity (or of difference). The individualism of equality stems from the assumption that all individuals are by nature equal and have equal rights to liberty. This harks back to the tradition of natural law and its victory against the political inequalities imposed by nature. The individualism of difference, in contrast has its roots in romanticism (e.g., Goethe), and maintains the value of the uniqueness of the individual and the right to be distinguished and not confused with all others. While the foundations of the individualism of equality lie in the universal man and are present in every single individual, in case of the individualism of difference it is the qualitative irreplaceability of the individual that is at its basis. The originality and the importance of Simmel’s conceptions consists precisely in his having introduced and analysed this second type of individualism. Far from being romantic nostalgia or a problem specific to the ‘absolutely great’, such as Goethe, Rembrandt, or other exceptional artistic personalities, the philosophical and sociological

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problem of distinction and the upholding of individual peculiarity is established as one of the essential characteristics in the cultural setting of modernity. Such conceptions reveal the profound affinity between the cultural climate of Simmel’s time and our own. The spread of mass individualism seems to be a fundamental trait of contemporary society. It is manifest and analysed in an extremely varied and heterogeneous manner: the obsessive search for distinction through extremely stylized consumer goods; the trying out of new lifestyles inspired by (aesthetic, ethical, religious) principles; and more generally through expressive manifestations of personality that can be traced to the psychological complex of narcissism. In his ‘metropolitan scene’ Simmel seems to have observed an aspect that was later to become a characteristic trait of our highly diversified society: individual personality and social personality can no longer coincide entirely with work. Simmel’s categories of metropolitan individualism have been applied creatively – if often without reference to Simmel – to the current cultural setting, examining how individuals seek to manage to preserve the independence and the particularity of their individuality. Their relevance is felt, for example, because of the transformations of production practices and the ever more important role of consumption in building an individual identity. Much recent attention has been devoted to rethinking the link between work and identity, exploring the increased salience of social roles outside of work. Whether or not it is acknowledged, the effort is being made to address both forms of individualism. Viewing the metropolis as the problem of the reconciliation and the contrast between quantitative individualism and qualitative individualism is a current, fundamental aspect of Simmel’s experience of the metropolis in a setting such as contemporary culture ‒ one that can be defined as the ‘metropolitization of society’ (Jonas, 1995), that is, the extension to the entire social structure of the peculiar cultural characteristics of the large city. Obviously, Simmel never proposed a specific, unequivocal solution to such problems. Faced with the tragedy that necessarily arises for the individual, torn between being like everybody else and at the same time being above all and incomparably one’s own self, he did not find any arrangement, whether ideological or utopian, to achieve a resolution in a future socialist societal order. Nor did he view the irreversible individualism of his time with optimism or peace of mind. Especially in the final phase of his thought, Simmel seems to have given up on this contradiction as insoluble and to entrust the solitary, detached construction of an individual lifestyle with the realization of a self that can also have general value and social recognisability. In this sense, as has been observed, ‘the blasé, the dandy, or the individual who looks for peace of mind in the aesthetics of detachment are the variants or the possibilities of an individual who is above all philosophical, in short, someone in whom even Simmel can recognize himself’ (Dal Lago, 1994: 122).

The Problem of Style: Fashion and Sociability The concept and the problem of style constitutes a fundamental element in Simmel’s aesthetic and social analysis, one with which he foresees some

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contemporary sociological trends in the cultural processes of urban phenomena. The specifically modern need for an individual lifestyle, which Simmel placed at the centre of his diagnosis of the time, stemmed from the ever-increasing manifestations of subjectivism, which at the turn of the century was fed by the loss of meaning of tradition, the waning strength of conviction in the world’s great conceptions, and in the manifold offerings of new cultural models for self-realization. It was precisely this ‘multitude of styles’ that gave ‘style’, as an external formal principle, its impelling strength over the behaviour in individual life (Simmel, 1984a: 652–653). This limitation of possibilities due to the predominance of a formal principle, however, represents the consequence of the fact that individuals in modern society do not feel capable of adequately shaping their own personalities to the possibilities offered them to create a unique, distinct way of life. Modern culture is perceived by the individual as something ‘excessive’ in its offerings of possible paths to selfrealization, so much so as to prompt a search for ‘support’ in shaping their behaviour according to a rigorous formal principle. It is here that we see the true ‘dictatorship’ that style exerts over modern life; it is the objective principle governing the most varied circles of daily life, from furnishings, to table manners, to attire. In modern settings, the greater number of possibilities when it comes to choosing how to shape one’s personality according to a principle requires an explicit ‘counterweight’, which is expressed through the need to shape oneself according to a formal aesthetic principle (Simmel, 2006: 47). The increasing importance of the external aesthetic aspect in one’s own life conduct is also a consequence of the waning influence of the ethical and moral values transmitted by the community, and which were characteristic of pre-industrial society. Simmel devoted himself to analysing the day-to-day forms of ‘stylization’ in one of the more typical manifestations of modern metropolitan life ‒ fashion. ‘Fashion’, one of Simmel’s masterpiece essays, offers a rare insight into an essential feature of modernity: the ‘the modification and opposition of life forms’, on the one hand, satisfies the fundamental need for social distinction, and on the other, fosters the egalitarian trend towards the need for belonging. Fashion combines a tendency towards ‘distinction’ together with a propensity for ‘imitation’, expressing the fundamental opposition of ‘individualization’ and ‘association’ (Vergesellschaftung) that characterizes modernity through a form of stylization of daily life. Moreover, because it incorporates the unconditional search for the fascination of novelty, together with the tendency to refer to re-actualized past forms, in terms of time, it is set at the midpoint between past and future, precisely by virtue of its characteristic dynamics, by which the spread of a new fashion to the masses automatically leads to its becoming outdated and hence its replacement with a ‘new’ fashion, initially for the few, but in reality destined to suffer the same fate. This inner self-contradictory mechanism is also the real reason why fashion succeeds, as few other phenomena can, in communicating a feeling of ‘topicality’. As compared to the true dynamics of historical processes, fashion represents a ‘movement without time’, a sort of ‘eternal return of the same’, mythical timeliness that turns up in the heart of most modern phenomena and that embeds its deepest

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roots in the workings of the economy based upon the production of goods. This unreconciled form of opposition between the individual and the general, which finds suitable expression in the phenomenon of fashion, provides the arena for the struggle between ‘being for oneself’ and ‘being for others’, in which the objectivity of lifestyle is made valid and perceptible for individuals. It is therefore impossible to shape one’s own behaviours and attitudes towards the world according to subjective desires. Simmel attributes analogous importance to other ‘social games’, such as modesty, discretion, tact, and especially, sociability (Simmel, 1984b). Sociability represents a ‘play form of association’ (Spielform der Vergesellschaftung), in that it represents a ‘social game’ with no immediate stakes or specifically defined purpose if not the simple pleasure of being together. The main feature of sociability is its autonomy from reality, in the sense of both the objective position that individuals have within the social framework, and their independence from the interests and the material motivations that they come to express. According to Simmel, the essential characteristic of any form of sociable ‘association’ is that, as a matter of principle, it tends to exclude that which, for the personality, has objective importance, but at the moment, does not directly unite the interested parties. Wealth, social position, erudition, fame, the person’s exceptional qualities and worth no longer have any function and represent, if anything, traces immaterial of a reality that can always insinuate itself into every form of sociability [. . .]. The only dominant reason is represented by reciprocity as a pure and simple action. (Simmel, 1984b: 81)

For Simmel, meals, social games, and all forms of ‘sociable’ interaction, in general, can be considered the frames for subjectivity, forms of the stylization of individuality, through which the tragic weight that bears on it is lightened and alleviated. Style and such forms exonerate the individual from that which, faced with the increasing anonymity inherent in modernity, paradoxically seems to have become a performance principle: be original at all costs. For the individual, these are not ‘superficial’ phenomena: Simmel views ‘the surface’ as ever in contact with the depths of life and the personality. Therefore, participating in social games (sociability first and foremost) relieves the individual from the obligation to differentiate, to be serious, from the tragedy of modernity: which is expressed by the fact that the individual, according to the terminology adopted at various times by Simmel, though being entirely a social part, aspires just the same to be an all. In other terms, the individual gets caught up in the differentiating gears of the division of labour, and at the same time (tragically) aspires to realizing himself as a totality, that is, to developing his own personality in a non-unilateral manner. Sociability, which in the broad sense can be considered within the sphere of leisure ‒ the variegated potential sphere of social interactions lacking any immediate practical goal, which can occur within the context of hedonistic and consumer practices in the narrow sense, but also in social ‘associationism’ and disinterested volunteerism, as well as in the practice of sport ‒ offers the aesthetic possibility of lightening, generalization, and stylization of the personality.

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Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life

Cash Inheritance A well-known aphorism contained in Simmel’s Posthumous Diary goes: ‘I know that I will die without spiritual heirs (and this is fine). My inheritance resembles cash to be divided among many heirs, each of whom invests his share in a manner according to his nature, without concerning himself with the origin of such inheritance’ (Simmel, 1970: 11). Tracing the influence of Simmel on contemporary culture and sociology is therefore a very difficult (not to say impossible) enterprise. Nor does concentrating particularly on urban sociology make the task any easier. It is however possible to seek to at least establish the topicality and adaptability of his thought about the analysis and study of contemporary urban realities. In general, Simmel’s focus on individuality in the ambivalent game of interaction in the context of the metropolis certainly constitutes an element that is amongst the most topical in classical sociology. The culture of individualism seems to be a fundamental trait of so-called ‘post-modern’ society. However, unlike many sociologists and Kulturkritiker of the early twentieth century, Simmel does not limit himself to issuing the umpteenth lament on the end of the individual or the dominion of techné, but inquisitively analyses what individuals do to live up to the possibilities offered by the ‘luxuriant development of the objective culture’. Also, unlike the other classical sociologists (Weber, Durkheim, Marx) Simmel understood that is not possible to come to terms with modernity without considering the dialectics between work and play, between the realm of necessity and that of leisure. Shortly after his death, Simmel became one of the greatest inspirers of that which undoubtedly remains the twentieth century’s foremost school of urban sociology: the Chicago School. The Chicago School is still remembered for its contributions to the field, particularly for its ecological approach to the study of change in the social and cultural composition of the city and the formation of ethnically and socially homogeneous urban districts, which its members referred to as ‘natural areas’. Thanks to the mediation of Robert E. Park, who had been his student in Berlin, and the translations of his work that appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Simmel became much more widely known and influential in America as a sociologist than as a philosopher in Germany. Whereas Park and his student Everett Stonequist took inspiration from the figure of the stranger, and in general the sociology of social space for their analyses of marginality and social migrations, Louis Wirth (in ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’) focused instead on the impact of metropolitan culture on lifestyle and the personality of large-city dwellers (Segre, 2007). In general, the Chicago School inherited from Simmel his focus on reality as a social construct, based on the reciprocity processes taking place in everyday life. In the context of urban reality, which tends to overlie the individual element, what takes on importance is the realm of everyday interactions, evident for example in former Chicago student William Foote Whyte’s ‘street corner society’ (1993). Simmel was an unparalleled master in promoting a keen awareness of this form of ephemeral, transitory, yet fundamental interaction, anticipating contemporary currents of urban ethnography. To this end, he placed at our disposal various operational concepts such

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as the stranger and social space, flirtation, and ornament, and especially sociability. As has been observed in this chapter, Simmel laid the foundation for a sociology of play and leisure, just as he opened the discipline up to the analysis of the ‘third space’ (Oldenburg, 1989: 20–42): the places, such as bars, cafés, arcades, and hairdressers, that are neither home nor workplace, where the actions and interactions fundamental to understanding metropolitan society come about. In an environment generally hostile to socialization, as cities often are, these places represent islands of disinterested, informal sociality, integral to building a sense of community. Much water has passed under the bridge since the spirit of the time walked along the boulevards in Paris or the crossroads between Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse in the heart of Berlin, where Simmel was born. After over a century urban reality has undergone profound changes and we may even question the very existence of the subject of analysis: what is the city, the metropolis, in today’s context of globalization and capital flows? ‘The intensification of nervous life’ caused by the rapid alternation of internal and external impressions, which in Simmel’s opinion was the distinctive psychological characteristic of metropolitan life, seems to have been transferred from the boulevards to the ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992) of contemporary consumer culture: shopping malls, airports, motorways, TV, and computer screens. The rapid flow of the signs, images, and goods that saturate day-to-day life in contemporary society have become the constitutive trait of the ‘aestheticization of daily life’ of ‘post-modern culture’ (Featherstone, 2007). Simmel’s metropolis has thus become one big ‘endless city’ (Bonomi and Abruzzese, 2004), which extends beyond the physical and geographical confines of urban reality.

References Augé, M. 1992. Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Böhringer, H., and K. Gründer (eds.). 1978. Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Bonomi, A., and A. Abruzzese. 2004. La città infinita. Milan: Bruno Mondadori Editore. Bourdieu, P. 2001. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dahme, H. J. 1981. Soziologie als exakte Wissenschaft. Georg Simmels Ansatz und seine Bedeutung in der gegenwärtigen Soziologie, 2 vols. Stuttgart: Enki. Dal Lago, A. 1994. Il conflitto della modernità. Il pensiero di Georg Simmel. Bologna: Mulino. D’Andrea, F. 1999. Soggettività e dinamiche culturali in Georg Simmel. Rome: Jouvence. D’Anna, V. 1996. Il denaro e il Terzo Regno. Dualismo e unità della vita nella filosofia di Georg Simmel. Bologna: Clueb. De Simone, A. 2002. Georg Simmel. I problemi dell’individualità moderna. Urbino: Quattroventi. Featherstone, M. 2007. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Foote Whyte, W. 1993. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, 4th ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life

Jonas, S. 1995. ‘La metropolisation de la société dans l’oeuvre de Georg Simmel.’ In Jean Rémy (ed.), Georg Simmel: ville et modernité (pp. 51–60). Paris: L’Harmattan. Lichtblau, K. 1997. Georg Simmel. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Oldenburg, R. 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House. Rammstedt, O. (ed.). 1988. Georg Simmel und die frühen Soziologen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Segre, S. 2007. ‘Simmel e la scuola di Chicago. Elementi di continuità e di discontinuità nelle rispettive sociologie dello spazio.’ In V. Mele (ed.), Le forme del moderno. L’attualità di Georg Simmel (pp. 112–119). Milan: Franco Angeli. Simmel, G. 1909. ‘The Problem of Sociology.’ American Journal of Sociology 15(3): 289–320. 1970. Saggi di estetica. Edited by M. Cacciari. Padua: Liviana Scolastica. 1978 [1900]. The Philosophy of Money. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Originally published 1900 as Philosophie des Geldes (Leipzig).] 1984a. Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality and Love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1984b [1917]. Grundfragen der Soziologie. Berlin: deGruyter. 1995. La differenziazione sociale. Introduced and edited by B. Accarino. Preface by F. Ferrarotti. Bari: Laterza. [Originally published 1890 as Über soziale Differenzierung. Soziologische und psychologische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot).] 1996. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London: Sage. 2004. ‘Estetica sociologica.’ Translated by V. Mele. In Antonio De Simone (ed.), Leggere Simmel (pp. 178–192). Urbino: Quattroventi. [Originally published 1896 as ‘Soziologische Ästhetik.’ Die Zukunft 17: 204–216.] 2006. Sul Pessimismo. Edited by D. Ruggeri. Rome: Armando.

Further Reading Bauman, Z. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bouchet, D. 1999. ‘Information Technology, the Social Bond and the City: Georg Simmel Updated about the Changing Relationship between Identity and the City.’ Built Environment 24(2/3): 104–133. Cavalli, A. 1984. Introduzione a Georg Simmel, Filosofia del denaro, a cura. Torino: Edizioni di Comunitá. De Simone, A. (ed.). 2004. Leggere Simmel. Itinerari Filosofici, sociologici ed estetici. Urbino: Quattroventi. Donati, P. 2004. Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Elias, N. 1978. The Civilizing Process. Vol 2: State Formation and Civilization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 1982. Power and Civility. New York: Pantheon Books. Frisby, D. 1985. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2002. Georg Simmel. Revised edition. London: Routledge. Gassen K., and M. Landmann (eds.). 1958. Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot.

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Jonas, S. 1992. ‘G. Simmel. Sur l’estetique des villes historiques italiennes.’ In O. Rammstedt and P. Watier (eds.), G. Simmel et les sciences humaines (pp. 163–179). Paris: Mêridiens Klincksieck. Leyendecker, B. 2000. ‘“Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” Einige Hintergrund informationen zu Georg Simmels Vortrag in der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden.’ Simmel Studies 10(1): 128–142. Nedelmann, B. 1980. ‘Strukturprinzipien der soziologischen Denkweise Georg Simmels.’ Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 32 S: 559–573. Piselli, F. 2001. Reti. L’analisi di network nelle scienze sociali. Rome: Donzelli. Rammstedt, O., and H.-J. Dahme (eds.). 1984. Georg Simmel und die Moderne. Neue Interpretationen und Materialen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Simmel, G. 1955. Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations. New York: Free Press. 1971a. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ In On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine (pp. 324–339). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1971b. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Originally published 1917 as Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaft (Berlin and Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung GmbH).] 1977. The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay. New York: Free Press. [Originally published 1892 as Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Studie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot).] 1980. Essays on Interpretation in Social Science. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Squicciarino, N. 1999. Il profondo della superficie. Abbigliamento e civetteria come forme di comunicazione in Georg Simmel. Rome: Armando. Stiegler, B. 2003. ‘Georg Simmels “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben” als Programmschrift der Kulturwissenschaft und Medientheorie.’ Simmel Studies 13, (1): 281–291.

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10 Pounding on Parsons: How Criticism Undermined the Reputation of Sociology’s Incurable Theorist A. Javier Treviño

The history of criticism is, in large measure, a history of struggle among various factions, positions, and personalities, of schisms arising from differences of taste, temperament, and ideology. A. O. Scott, Better Living through Criticism (Scott, 2016) Criticism is ultimately concerned with what can be said and hence with the coherence, scope, and presuppositions of any discourse. Bryan S. Turner, “Parsons and His Critics” (Turner, 1986) The unfairness of Parsons’s early critics is now such common knowledge that it is often referenced with a note of resignation by sociologists who perhaps wish it to be remembered as part of the historical record but are sick of contesting it. Robert Owen, “Producing Parsons’s Reputation” (Owen, 2010)

Talcott Parsons is widely regarded as the most important and influential American sociological theorist of the twentieth century. This is no whimsical claim; rather, it is one, as Turner (1991a: 239) points out, made on the basis of the scope, relevance, and coherence of Parsons’s work, as well as on the impact that it has had on the global sociological stage. To be sure, his standing in American sociology, and indeed in world sociology, cannot be overstated. Beginning with his first major opus of 1937, The Structure of Social Action, Parsons played a crucial role in maintaining and promoting a commitment to classical sociological theory. By 1951, on the dedication page of The Social System, he had famously declared himself to be “an incurable theorist.” That same year, in Toward a General Theory of Action, Parsons boldly proposed a grand theoretical program for all forms of human action. In the last volume published during his lifetime, Action Theory and the Human Condition, he went further and articulated a unified theoretical scheme beyond the social action system which also considered the human-organic, physico-chemical, and telic systems. Parsons’s functionalist analysis of systems became the most prominent theoretical paradigm of American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, he made important and lasting contributions to the development of almost every area of modern sociology including the sociology of religion, medical sociology, the 179

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sociology of the professions, the sociology of the family, and the sociology of education, as well as to certain crucial themes and issues such as social change, social control, and social order. The scale of his scholarly contributions notwithstanding, by the time of his death in 1979, Parsons’s reputation as a theorist and the scientific value of his work had been subjected to incessant onslaughts from inside and outside the sociological community – to a much greater extent than that of any other sociologist. As a former student of his correctly noted a few months after Parsons died: “Talcott Parsons will probably take his place among the very great of our discipline, . . . Yet, it is unlikely that any of these great men had to endure in their lifetime so much incomprehension, so much abuse” (Pitts, 1980: 62). It was at the zenith of his influence, in the late 1950s, that Parsons’s programmatic ambitions began to incur sustained and antagonistic denunciation. Indeed, the sociological enterprise, represented at the time by such major figures as C. Wright Mills, Ralf Dahrendorf, and somewhat later, Alvin W. Gouldner, first simplified and then rejected Parsons’s theoretical program. And although few of Parsons’s critics would question the impact of his writings on the discipline, they nonetheless largely dismissed or neglected them without a fair consideration of their range and scope or a proper evaluation of their content. Indeed, the majority of them ignored the totality of his intellectual output, which covered over four decades of continuous productivity, and assumed that his theoretical project did not advance after 1951 when he published what became his most maligned book, The Social System. But as Peter Hamilton has stated, “a criticism that fails to take account of the dynamic advances in Parsonian theory simply distorts its subject matter” (Hamilton, 1992: n.p.). The upshot of all this was that “few sociologists . . . have been more subjected to stereotyping, to careless ad hoc readings, and to selectively distorted interpretations” than Parsons (Williams, 1980: 66). By the 1960s and 1970s the hostile reception of Parsons’s systems theory had reached a fevered pitch. The end result was “a total critique of Parsons that insisted his work was not only wrong but an impediment to the sociological endeavor” (Owens, 2010: 166). As frivolous as some of these negative commentaries were, they nonetheless contributed to a steady stream of anti-Parsons invectives and raised the professional profiles of detractors, such as, for example, those three who, in a series of exchanges, accused Parsons of misinterpreting and misrepresenting Durkheim (Cohen, 1975; Pope, 1973; Pope, 1975) and Weber (Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope, 1975a; Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope, 1975b) and then Durkheim and Weber together (Pope, Cohen, and Hazelrigg, 1975; Pope, Cohen, and Hazelrigg, 1977). The criticisms eventually passed “into the folklore of sociology, and have become part of the taken-for-granted baggage of assumptions of modern sociologists” (Holton and Turner, 1986: 10). Today, the terms Parsonian and structural-functionalism (the theoretical perspective with which Parsons’s name became synonymously and perpetually associated) continue to operate as opprobrious epithets in many quarters of the discipline – both designations being associated with excessive abstractionism, political conservativism, and jingoism.

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Pounding on Parsons

Critiquing the Critics The concept of criticism harks back to the origins of Western philosophy and the term is derived from the Greek verb krinein, which means “to distinguish, discern, or judge.” The Greeks applied criticism to various areas of knowledge – including philosophy, ethics, politics, and law – as a way of cutting through illogical statements to arrive at the truth. During the Hellenistic period the Greeks developed textual criticism, which later established and encompassed biblical exegesis as well as literary and art criticism (Berghahn, 2003: 312). But it was the Enlightenment that, as Kant put it in The Critique of Pure Reason, was “the true age of criticism.” And it is to criticism, as free and open examination, Kant noted, that everything, including reason itself, must submit. In considering a priori knowledge, Kant’s critical philosophy was focused on revealing that, in the making of an argument, something has been presupposed that is vacuous and false (Caygill, 1995: 138–139). By the nineteenth century, especially in the hands of Hegel, critique (Kritik) generally referred to assessment and judgment, not of epistemology as in the case of Kant, but of philosophers, in order to distinguish between those who were doing good philosophy and those who were doing “unphilosophy” (Inwood, 1992: 65–66). It is in these senses of criticism – involving Greek logical argumentation, Kantian epistemological examination, and Hegelian quality determination – that Parsons and his critics are considered here. But I also want to consider the term in its medieval, and medical, sense of “crisis” – as when an illness takes a critical turning point, for better or worse (Berghahn, 2003, 312; Wellek, 1963: 23). In this case a diagnosis of crisis in theoretical knowledge implies the necessity of criticism. Thus, a strong diagnosis of crisis means that a given theory is found to be incapable of dealing with aspects of social reality with which it does or “should” concern itself. In a somewhat weaker form the diagnosis of crisis identifies pertinent problems which, it is claimed, the theory cannot adequately handle (Merton, 1976: 112). Finally, it must be noted that there is a more indeterminate and moralistic way in which criticism was applied to Parsons’s sociology by his rivals, many of whom had been deeply inspired by Marxian analysis: criticism merely for the sake of criticism. This chapter may rightly be regarded as a critique of Parsons’s critics – of those at whose hands his sociological inquiry, and even his character, have received an indefensible excoriation. Because criticism involves infinite regression, my critique may also be critiqued. Mine, then, is a considered defense of Parsons’s work, not only against those justified arguments that are substantive and constructive, but also against those onslaughts that are specious, simplistic, and downright scurrilous. This is not because Parsons is in need of a champion; indeed, he did rather well defending his ideas in various published “replies,” “rejoinders,” and “commentaries.” At least in print, Parsons gave as good as he got. Rather, the aim of this chapter is to render a sympathetic apologia of his theoretical program as a corrective to his sullied reputation. While Savage (1981), Holton and Turner (1986), Turner (1986, 1991a, 1991b), Robertson and Turner (1991), and Gerhardt (2002, 2011) have each provided cogent defenses of Parsons’s oeuvre, my apologia is offered with the rising generation of

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social theorists in mind. In other words, it is directed at those who played no part in the collective caricaturing of Parsons’s legacy but whose reception of his image and substance has been unfairly influenced by that legacy. In short, academic cohorts subsequent to the so-called disobedient generation (Sica and Turner, 2005), which was largely (though not wholly) responsible for the denigration and dismissal of Parsons’s writings, must no longer accept unquestioningly this negative reception that was bequeathed to them. It is crucial that the new coterie of social theorists earnestly and fairly engage with all aspects in Parsons’s theoretical venture and determine what it can offer sociology in the twenty-first century. Beginning with The Structure of Social Action through his posthumously published writings, polemics against Parsons have spawned a virtual cottage industry. Indeed, they are so numerous that only a few of the most notable, and damaging, can be considered here. At the other end, and as I have already indicated, there have, at least since the so-called Parsons revival of the 1980s, appeared some defenses of him by his supporters. Thus, my attempt at an interpretation of Parsons’s critics’ criticisms is not new, but it may well be justified for two main reasons. First, since the turn of the century there have appeared a good number of Parsons’s previously unpublished writings (Parsons 2006a; 2006b; 2010; Parsons and White, 2016; Parsons and White, in press) and also writings about his intellectual productivity and biographical experiences (Best, 2015; Fox, Lidz, and Bershady, 2005; Gerhardt, 2002; 2011; Hart, 2010; Segre, 2012; Treviño, 2001; 2008; 2016), with more to come. Second, and more to the point, the sociological thinkers currently coming of age professionally now have sufficient perspectival distance and published material, compared to the heyday when pounding on Parsons was the vogue, to allow them a more comprehensive and equitable examination of his sociology than had previously been possible.

Types of Criticism and Critics Simply put, there exists no theory of criticism by which a disinterested commentator can make meaningful judgments – in film, literature, sociology, or any other hermeneutic endeavor. What Northrop Frye said about literary criticism as far back in 1957, also applies to the critique of sociological theory today: If criticism could ever be conceived as a coherent and systematic study, the elementary principles of which could be explained by any intelligent nineteen-yearold, then, from the point of view of such a concept, no critic now knows the first thing about criticism. (1957: 14)

Frye therefore advocated for a systematic form of literary criticism, one that could be conducted only after the study of literature was itself given systematic form. But given that ontological and epistemological monism – a grand narrative – is today as unpopular in sociology as it is in literature, the study of sociological theory, and for that matter its teaching, will not soon be systematized, formalized, or “codified” in the sense of Merton (1968). Few courses and even fewer textbooks in sociological

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Pounding on Parsons

theory expound its fundamental principles or even consider what it is, much less how to assess it. Even among those who teach theory in the leading US graduate programs in sociology, there is little interest in promoting shared standards for evaluating sociological theories (Markovsky, 2008). This is perhaps due to the fact that these theories are increasingly being expressed by proliferating and often competing small narratives. Thus, as Frye noted about literature, sociological theory is not a subject of study, but an object of study. All this notwithstanding, various forms of criticism can be classified on the basis of their objectives, and superb applications of some of these forms in reference to Parsons’s theoretical program have been provided by Savage (1981) and Turner (1986), in particular. Though they differ in their strategy and conclusions, both Savage and Turner identify distinct varieties of critical analysis used in evaluating the logical structure of Parsons’s conceptual arguments. My organizational scheme of three types of critiques, which I present below, is somewhat different in that it not only considers the broadsides leveled against Parsonian theory as text – those intended to assess the analytical and semantic consistency of his writings as well as the style of their presentation – but also against Parsons as person – his character and reputation. For it is this wholesale attack on both, the person and his writings, that produced the tarnished legacy we have today. While Savage and Turner propose types of criticism that have been directed at Parsons’s theory, they say nothing about his critics, and any robust analysis of criticism must consider these, as social types. Furthermore, to fully understand the critic’s criticisms we must first understand their perspectives and motivations. Critics of sociological theory routinely perform their task unmethodically, even haphazardly. This is mostly because the very meaning of the word “theory” in sociology is rife with sematic confusions – confusions that have led to countless disagreements, conceptual muddles, and miscommunications (Abend, 2008). Given this anomic state of sociological theory – which includes its feuding intellectual camps to say nothing of its diverse referents, “ranging from summarized observations to chains of mathematical formulae, from broadly received classics to newly minted speculations” (Markovsky, 2008: 424) – those appraising it tend to do so with a kind of lawlessness figuratively reminiscent of the Wild West. Thus we find the critic-as-gunslinger, who takes sure-shot aim at the target with lethal results. There is also the critic-as-squatter, who defends claimed territory and is ready to open fire at any perceived threat. The most common of the deprecators, however, is the critic-asrowdy outlaw, who shoots erratically and causes much mayhem, but makes no meaningful or productive contribution. To one degree or another, these three types are to be found among Parsons’s many detractors. The first two modes of criticism that I examine in this chapter – which I call critiques of commission and critiques of omission – are generally consistent with Savage and Turner’s analysis of those critics who endeavored to reveal the “anomalies” and “crises,” in the Kuhnian sense of the terms, of Parsons’s theoretical agenda. The third type, not considered by either Savage or Turner, which I refer to as characterological critique, involves extra-theoretical and non-exegetical allegations of defamation made against Parsons himself. Though I distinguish between these

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three varieties of negative polemical attitudes for analytical purposes, they are not mutually exclusive of each other and their combinations are frequently found in any critic’s arguments. I concur with Bryan S. Turner (1986: 183) that criticism of a theory basically involves uncovering the crisis that threatens its argument – its “flow of discourse” – in terms of conditions that are either internal or external to it. Revealing inconsistencies between a theory’s presuppositions and conclusions is the goal of internal critique; rejecting a theory because the ideological and epistemological premises that inform it are incompatible with those held by the critic, is a matter of external critique. I also agree with C. Wright Mills’s (1940) contention that situated discourses inspire people’s actions, including, in this case, the overly-negative responses to Parsonian theory by a number of commentators. Following Mills, I argue that depending on the social context, some criticisms – internal ones to be sure, but chiefly those that are external – become more dominant and are seen as more justified than others. In this chapter I show how social conditions and their associated discourses motivated critics to instigate and affirm the polemical orientations of commission and omission concerning Parsons’s work. From this sociology of knowledge approach, I consider both the textual and the contextual aspects of the Parsons criticism industry. All academic disputations contain critiques of commission and omission. And rather like Rubin’s vase that presents the viewer with two asynchronous interpretations of a figure – depending on whether the focus is on the foreground or the background – it is often difficult to discern between these two types of evaluative analysis. The distinction is a matter of perspective. Nonetheless, critical comments of commission and of omission constitute the universal benchmarks for assessing all theory-performance. As such, the operative question is: does the theory accurately describe and adequately explain social reality? Since no theory can account for everything, it will always be found deficient in its performance. Under such criteria no theory’s conclusions can ever measure up to critics’ expectations. In Parsons’s case this is especially true despite, or perhaps because of, his effort to construct such an expansive conceptual scheme – the general theory of action – intended to simultaneously account for the social, cultural, and personality systems. Two subtypes of commission and omission arguments are also frequently made. The first exploits the dialectical tensions between commission and omission. It involves a double bind in which the theorist is taken to task for doing too much of something and also called out for not doing enough of that same thing. For example, Homans (1964b) and Dennis H. Wrong (1961), each in their own way, accused Parsons of developing a theory that was too abstract to take into consideration the individual characteristics of human subjects, while Niklas Luhmann (1982) charged him with proposing a theory that was not sufficiently abstract to avoid psychological reductionism. The second critique, which is a subtype of critical omission that I will call the short shrift argument, reasons as follows: While Parsons did not totally neglect an important consideration of “good” theory – be it social change, social conflict, empirical verification, or whatever – he also did not make that consideration

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a part of the core of his conceptual explanation. Thus, in relegating it to the periphery or “giving it short shrift,” the argument continues, Parsons has produced a theory of compromised quality. On the face of it, it seems unfair to evaluate any thinker’s endeavors – whether Einstein’s, Freud’s, or Parsons’s – only on what they did wrong or failed to do. But so long as the assessment remains within the discourse intrinsic to the effort – that is, provided that it is an internal critique – it must be regarded as valid. However, to reject, for example, Copernicus’s heliocentric theory on the scriptural basis that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth, is unfair and constitutes external critique. So also, as another example, is condemnation of Parsons for failing to incorporate into his evolutionary theory of societal change an extraneous referent such as, say, the materialist conception of history. External critique is delivered in a different idiom and discharged from outside of the existing theoretical discourse, and this makes it ideological; it is also established prior to the theoretical discourse, and this makes it epistemological. In both cases, the critic relies on an extrinsic guarantee and assessment of knowledge. In what follows I will endeavor to interpret critiques of commission launched by several of Parsons’s adversaries; in the section after that I do the same with critiques of omission.

Critiques of Commission Above all, critiques of commission indict a theorist for presenting a false or unrealistic characterization of the nature and structure of theory and/or of the nature and structure of social reality. Some scholars attribute Parsons’s initial misconception of the social to his involvement in the founding, in 1946, of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations and his subsequent attempts to forge a general theory of action – a grand design with the most far-reaching implications possible. Parsons (1950) advocated for general theorizing on the basis that the cumulative development of knowledge is based on the degree of abstraction by which different findings and interpretations in the various sciences of action – namely, sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology – can be treated as correlative. Moreover, he insisted that this scientific knowledge be organized, converged, into a single conceptual structure. Consistent with the epistemological principle of analytical realism – the notion that “facts” are statements about experience in terms of a specific conceptual scheme that provides a meaningful ordering of that experience – Parsons (1945) contended that science must formulate propositions about empirical phenomena and that these propositions be interrelated so as to constitute “a logically closed” system. Thus, for him, it was crucial that sociological theory always be general and systematic in form. The conceptual edifice that Parsons constructed – whether envisaged as action theory, structural-functionalism, or systems theory – was, to be sure, an imposing one. But what made it a prime target for disparagement was its audacious goal of analyzing and ultimately explaining all the components of social action, and

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ultimately of human existence itself. As one Harvard professor reported about Parsons in 1956 when Parsons’s career was in ascendance: “He’s groping for a comprehensive theory of the universe with Newton’s Principia as his ideal” (Breggin, 1956: n.p.). Whatever Parsons’s intensions and whatever his detractors’ concerns, his work never came close to achieving a revolution in scientific knowledge akin to that of Newton’s. Nevertheless, Parsons’s grandiose endeavor in the social sciences could not go unchallenged – either at Harvard or in the discipline in general. Indeed, the overriding opposition to his analytical program, to his “theory of everything,” as it were, is that it had misconstrued the very nature of theory. It was too abstract, too general, and too abstruse to adequately explain social reality – to say nothing about its supposed lack of empirical referents and practical application to contemporary issues.

Merton The earliest critical commentary of this kind, albeit one that was relatively sympathetic, was presented by Parsons’s erstwhile student Robert K. Merton as a response to Parsons’s paper of 1948, “The Position of Sociological Theory,” in which Parsons advocated for the collective development of one major theoretical framework in sociology. In direct opposition to Parsons’s proposal, Merton cautioned that, “[t]o concentrate solely on the master conceptual scheme for deriving all sociological theory is to run the risk of producing twentieth-century equivalents of the large philosophical systems of the past, with all their suggestiveness, all their architectonic splendor, and all their scientific sterility” (Merton and Newcomb, 1948: 166). Merton argued that progress in the sciences depended not on one general systematic theory, but on the formulation of various theories of specific types of phenomena. Later, Merton (1968) famously proposed a different type of sociological theory distinct from that of his former teacher’s broad conceptual model, which Merton, though he should have known better, pegged as being far removed from empirical confirmation. For Merton, theorizing should be done at mid-range – at an intermediate level between, on the one hand, Parsons’s unified theory of social systems and, on the other hand, the burgeoning development in sociology that, in the late 1960s, was beginning to emphasize greater statistical analysis and the use of large-scale data sets, and that would override efforts of theoretical significance. Middle-range theory, and for that matter sociological theorizing in the main, must not be about broad abstractions or trivial details; rather, Merton insisted, it must consist of logically interconnected propositions that can be empirically investigated. This quest for a set of propositions informed by research findings was pushed to its furthest, and most caustic, expression by Parsons’s chief nemesis at Harvard, George C. Homans.

Homans Homans’s offensive against Parsons, which Homans used to foment his own identity as a theorist, was two-pronged. First, whereas Parsons saw theory as taking the form of a generalized conceptual scheme, Homans countered that theory was nothing

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more than explanation. Second, whereas Parsons advocated for the study of analytical systems, Homans retorted that sociology’s task was to explain simple behavior. Homans’s jabs at Parsons – justified on the basis that “because he is the most famous of contemporary theorists, . . . I cannot be accused of hitting a man when he is down” (1964a: 957) – were seemingly motivated by a reaction formation to his more illustrious colleague’s achievements. Greatly influenced by R. B. Braithwaite’s philosophy of science, Homans (1967) professed that any science, including sociology, has two main goals: discovery and explanation. A discovery takes the form of a proposition, or a statement of an empirical relationship between two or more different variables. But in science, discovery must be accompanied by explanation; there has to be a statement saying why, under given conditions, the relationship holds good. In other words, if there is some change in one of the variables, the proposition must specify what the change in the other variable will be; or if one of the variables increases in value, it must say how the other will too. An explanation, therefore, takes the form of “x varies as y.” Thus, for Homans, an explanation of an empirical phenomenon can only be a theory of the phenomenon, and theory is produced through deduction. The proposition is explained when deduced from more general propositions. These latter for Homans were based on the principles of behavioral psychology – the principles that, premised on the stimulus-response model, explain the elementary behavior of all animals, from pigeons to people. Pushing to their fullest the epistemologies of methodological individualism and deductive-nomothetic reasoning, Homans alleged that Parsons was not explaining social action, but was merely generating concepts about other people’s concepts. His AGIL (adaptation, goal-attainment, integration, and latency) schema (which admittedly had its origins in Robert F. Bales’s study of equilibrium in small groups) and pattern variables (which were also derivations, from Tonnies’s Gemeinschaft– Gesellschaft dichotomy) amounted to no more than category-mongering. Thus, for Homans, Parsons’s sin of commission was that he was producing something other than theory – worse than that, he was passing it off as theory. Homans’s animus toward Parsons reached its pinnacle at the American Sociological Association (ASA) meetings in Montreal in 1964, when Homans, while giving his Presidential Address, launched a frontal assault charging that the functionalists, but Parsons particularly, had failed in their theoretical endeavors: If a theory is an explanation, the functionalists in sociology were, on the evidence, not successful. Perhaps they could not have been successful; at any rate, they were not. The trouble with their theory was not that it was wrong but that it was not a theory. (Homans, 1964b: 813)

For his part, Parsons (1964) rejected Homan’s deductionism–reductionism and charged him with violating Homans’s own mentor’s – the philosopher of science, Alfred North Whitehead – admonition against denying the validity of theoretical abstraction. Further, Parsons took Homans to task for ignoring cultural morality in favor of individual gratifications. Human culture, Parsons pointed out, is “quite different from the behavior of rats and pigeons”; indeed, “only in very limited

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respects can one deduce the phenomena of the former from the uniformities of the latter” (Parsons, 1964: 215–216). Ultimately, Homans’s (1967) claim to fame was in deriving propositions from Skinnerian psychology to explain the basic situation of an exchange between at least two persons in which the action of each rewards or punishes the action of the other. Though Parsons had already analyzed this interactive process several years earlier with his concept of “double contingency” (1951: 36ff.; Parsons and Shils, 1951: 14–15) – the view that in social interaction people seek approval from one another by conforming to social norms – he had moved on to examine double interchanges, not between actors but between action systems (Parsons and Smelser, 1956). But because Homans staked his reputation in the theoretical terrain of social exchange, much like a squatter defending reclaimed territory by discharging at trespassers, he made sure, through a barrage of invectives, that Parsons’s conceptualizations of action in no way encroached upon his own analysis of interaction.

Mills One of the most sarcastic and satirical evaluations of Parsons’s abstract style of theorizing was deftly executed by C. Wright Mills in his polemical treatise, The Sociological Imagination (1959). No doubt bolstered by opposition to Parsons’s “consensus” model of society that appeared around the same time – opposition most notably instigated by Lockwood, Coser, and Dahrendorf, which we will examine in more detail below – Mills’s onslaughts against Parsons succeeded for several reasons. To begin with, his brand of humanistic-critical sociology was gaining ascendency, particularly in New Left circles, achieving its foremost political expression in one of the key radicalizing texts of the 1960s generation, The Port Huron Statement (Miller, 1987). This newly emerging conflict-coercion discourse in sociology was to fix the discipline’s largely leftward leanings, from the 1960s and beyond. In addition, there was, to be sure, a growing frustration with the abstrusity and abstract formalism of Parsons’s work. Many who had thus far been following his theoretical development reached a saturation point, a kind of theoretical fatigue, that discouraged them from continuing to track Parsons’s later achievements; these would include even more and higher technical elaborations such as the generalized symbolic media of interchange, the cybernetic hierarchy of control, and the much larger complex that he called the human condition paradigm. Such abstractions seemed far removed from the student activism and ideological fervor – the “expressive revolution,” in Parsons’s phrase – that was taking shape, and a new language of subversion and resistance brought to the fore terms such as ideology, hegemony, and false consciousness. Even if no less ideational, the emerging sociological narrative nonetheless instigated the shift away from Parsons’s focus on common valuesystems to one that underscored conflict and coercion. But there is another rationale that explains the growing anti-Parsonian sentiment of the time, and it had to do with Mills’s “compelling personal image and the urgency with which he expressed his hopes for a public and political sociology” (Owens, 2010: 178). As I have argued elsewhere (Treviño, 2012: 161), Mills epitomized the

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American version of the “angry young man” of 1950s. Along with other angry, or at least restless, young men – Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, Dwight MacDonald, Allen Ginsberg – Mills found himself at center stage in upending the conservative mood of the time. Indeed, his charismatic personality, depicted through a cultivated representation of the radical and expressed through the urgency of his message, was routinized in the sociology discipline’s culture soon after his death in 1962. This “outlaw persona or renegade figure that the New Left adopted for themselves” (Chriss, 1999: 124) has since inspired scores of sociology students in a way that Parsons never did. Whatever the reasons, the result was that sociology too readily accepted as the definitive statement Mills’s negative assessment of Parsons’s theoretical program; an assessment that was based solely on The Social System, and then only on selections taken from some 3 of that book’s 550-plus pages. It is largely on this evidence, which would be considered flimsy by any standards of textual analysis, that Mills brought several inflated indictments against Parsons’s style of theorizing on four fronts. First, Mills accused Parsons of engaging in the “fetishism of the concept” – of being so preoccupied by a theoretical style of discourse that he could not clearly and in an orderly manner identify the empirical issues that were pressing for recognition, much less guide efforts to solve them. In actuality Parsons was more than a theorist of abstract generalizations; he was also a major contributor to substantive insights on empirical concerns relating to the family, medicine, the state, the university system, and citizenship, to name only a few. Had Mills considered some of Parsons’s other writings – even if only those published between 1951, when The Social System appeared, and 1957, when Mills was preparing his critique of it – he would have found that Parsons had written on such practical and important matters as illness and the role of the physician, religious perspectives of college teaching, the workings of the legal profession, the socialization of the child, McCarthyism, and, not least of all, the distribution of power in US society. This last is important because it was a critical review of The Power Elite in which Parsons (1957) charged that Mills’s “zero-sum” (coercion) concept of power led him to fundamentally misunderstand the pluralist liberal democracy of the United States. Gerhardt (2011) sees Mills’s mockery of Parsons’s “grand theory” in The Sociological Imagination as his revenge for this negative appraisal. In any event, had Mills or similar commentators bothered to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of Parsons’s writings, they could not have denied “that Parsons contributed empirically grounded analyses of actual societies or that Parsonian sociology gave rise to an empirical research tradition or that Parsons’s sociological theory can be successfully operationalized in a number of areas to make it, at least potentially, exposed to empirical discourse” (Holton and Turner, 1986: 23). Mills’s second attack against Parsons’s general theory is that it presented a static view of society – a view that Mills found particularly misleading given that, Mills, together with Hans Gerth (Gerth and Mills, 1953), had previously proclaimed that structural integration depended fundamentally on sociohistorical change. Mills charged Parsons’s systems theory with not only failing to consider the historical development of social structures, but with being unable to account for social change and societal development. This criticism was well aimed, given that Parsons’s

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explicit discussions on sociocultural evolution were still in the future and that he was, at the time, principally focused on the problem of order. But in taking Parsons to task for neglecting social change Mills was also guilty of negligence; for it was in the very text on which Mills based his criticism, The Social System, that Parsons devoted an entire chapter to the processes of change in the social system. And though Parsons (1951: 468) admitted that, due to a lack of “complete knowledge of the laws of process of the system,” a general theory of social change was not yet possible, it was possible to identify some of the empirical sources and mechanisms of social change, which he did. Thus, Mills’s declaration that Parsons’s theory considered only static equilibrium was inaccurate. Whatever resistances to change the social system tended to confront, for Parsons, the social system was always a moving equilibrium, one that was continuously making readjustments. All this notwithstanding, the change that Mills was promoting – the structural transformation of the cultural apparatus of mass society by public intellectuals (1958) – was different in kind and degree from that advocated by Parsons: the cumulative development of the cultural tradition of a social system (1951: 498). For Parsons, as for Comte before him, order and progress, statics and dynamics, can be explained correspondingly. “If theory is good theory,” Parsons noted in the “Change” chapter in The Social System, “there is no reason whatever to believe that it will not be equally applicable to the problems of change and to those of process within a stabilized system” (1951: 535, emphasis in original). Despite Parsons’s concern with the quality and efficacy of theory, in his third assault Mills rejected the notion that a master conceptual framework – which Parsons had presented in outline in The Social System and expressed more fully in the concurrently published companion volume, Toward a General Theory of Action – could be used to understand the entire unity of the social structure. Mills was averse to conceptualizations that took the form of universal schemes and instead favored a pragmatic “working model” – a more-or-less systematic inventory of findings that can be used to understand something of social significance (Mills, 1959: 223). While Mills’s appraisal in this regard was convincing at the time, given the intellectual drift away from highly abstract theorizing (whether of Pareto, Sorokin, or Parsons), it was a matter of external critique. Such an extraneous argument was premised not on assessing the logical coherence in Parsons’s theory, but on elemental presuppositions that reveal nothing more than a thinker’s preferred method for sociological analysis. Having been influenced by the pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey, Mills (1959) sought knowledge through “intellectual craftsmanship,” a practical style of work for ordering facts and ideas; having been influenced by the Paretian sociologist Lawrence J. Henderson, Parsons (1937) sought knowledge through a “conceptual scheme,” a theoretical frame of reference for systematically relating the empirical facts of social phenomena. The fourth, and perhaps the most damaging, of Mills’s attacks against Parsons was also a matter of external critique and personal foundational preferences. This one, however, stemmed not from preferences of epistemology, but of ideology. Here Mills insisted that owing to Parsons’s preoccupation with the problem of order, coupled with his unwillingness to accept any radical analysis of American society, his grand

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theory provided ideological support for the status quo in that it legitimated stable forms of domination and maintained established social institutions. It must be noted that both men were deeply devoted to the democratic tradition in the United States. The difference was that Mills believed that the United States had not yet achieved a genuine democracy (Mills, 1948); that the democratic process that did exist was being threatened by a power elite (Mills, 1951); and that the United States, as an overdeveloped society, was in danger of becoming a mass society that subverted democratic principles (Mills, 1956). Moreover, though Mills remained the quintessential American throughout his life, he had an obvious disdain of everything Made in America (Swados, 1963). He was especially indignant toward liberal intellectuals – most of whom were part of the end-of-ideology movement in the 1950s, particularly Edward A. Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell – for partaking in what Mills (1956: 25) called the new “American Celebration,” the self-congratulatory trend that viewed the United States as the ideal contemporary manifestation of democracy, without addressing its cultural deficiencies. Parsons, in contradistinction, considered US society, with its strong societal community, to be the archetypal representative of the most advanced type of society and the most promising alternative to the authoritarian regimes that had been evident at the time: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Though Parsons (1955) always feared a possible return of McCarthyism and its undermining of democratic principles, he nonetheless remained optimistic that the United States, with its combination universalism–achievement pattern variables, would resist such regression and retain its democratic spirit, its “American ethos” (Parsons, 1951: 107–108). Parsons (1957) believed that Mills was wrong to assume that decision-making power was consolidated in the hands of a political–business– military elite with “the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men” (Mills, 1959: 40). Rather, in a differentiated and polycentric structure like that of the United States, power, Parsons averred, was not concentrated in the hands of a tripartite ruling stratum; it was instead subject to checks and balances and diffused throughout the social system. Parsons, the liberal democrat, with his support of the American ethos, and Mills, the “plain Marxist,” with his condemnation of the American Celebration, took stridently different positions on the spectrum of theoretical ideology. In personal image and professional style, Mills has been likened to a cowboy by more than one commentator (Kerr, 2009; Shils, 1960) – “ à la ride and shoot” (Horowitz, 1983: 72). Indeed, Mills, the native Texan, much admired the cowboy figure with his “great guns hanging” (Mills and Mills, 2000: 25). And while as social critic Mills resembled a professional gunslinger, taking deadly aim in analyzing the US class structure and its power system, in his critical evaluation of Parsons he acted more like a rowdy outlaw firing at will, with much commotion, and frequently hitting wide of the mark.

Critiques of Omission Critiques of omission directed at Parsons do not find fault with the substantive accomplishments of his theoretical framework; rather, as David Lockwood

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readily admitted, this type of criticism “concerns what has not, rather than what has been done” (Lockwood, 1956: 134, emphasis added). Omission critiques highlight the fundamental exclusions and oversights of a theory that purportedly cause it to distort crucial features of the social world. And while it is true enough that, as Savage (1981: 15) puts it, “there is, of course, no limit to what has not been said,” a theory that ignores or fails to expand upon certain aspects of social reality renders a depiction of that reality that is incomplete, biased, or “utopian.” The main argument in critiques of omission is that the array of concepts on which Parsons’s system-theoretical paradigm relies – value consensus, system equilibrium, and societal integration – precludes recognition of the other aspect of society – the one that expresses constraint, conflict, and disorder. While this argument is true as far as it goes, the critics who make it also tend to be one-sided in not paying sufficient attention to social order. In what follows I first examine the critiques of omission made against Parsons by the post–World War II conflict theorists, David Lockwood, Lewis A. Coser, and Ralf Dahrendorf, all of whom, it is significant to note, had been influenced by a Marxian, and a particularly European, analysis of social class. I then turn to the diagnosis of crisis that “the Marxist outlaw,” Alvin W. Gouldner, made of Parsonian functionalism.

Lockwood, Coser, and Dahrendorf In his “remarks” on The Social System Lockwood (1956) criticized Parsons for ignoring the “nonnormative” elements of social action that contribute to deviance, conflicts of interest, and system instability. Parsons’s mistake, according to Lockwood, was that he selectively focused on social order and solidarity and failed to explain key aspects of social conflict and constraint. Because normative and nonnormative structures are interactive elements of the social world, the two conceptual models that separately study them are, in fact, complementary. However, in avoiding nonnormative variables, Parsons’s theory of social systems had basically ceded the analysis of such “factual” phenomena as “power” and the “differential opportunities created by the division of labor” to political science and economics. As such, Lockwood maintained that Parsons had assigned to sociology exclusive concern with the normative – that is to say, with the stable – dynamics of social systems. While Lockwood aimed his comments at Parsons’s theoretical statements as informed by the action and systems frames of reference, Coser (1956) largely directed his appraisals at Parsons’s structural-functional level of theoretical analysis, which above all emphasized the integrative capacity of social structures. Coser’s primary focus on doctrinaire structural-functionalism – on one narrow and limited approach that Parsons (1970) claimed was an inadequate characterization of his theory – influenced all subsequent challenges to Parsons’s sociology, which came to be naively, and widely, dubbed Parsonian functionalism. Contrary to Lockwood, Coser didn’t see Parsons’s purported disregard of social conflict as a matter of mere negligence. Rather, he attributed it to intentional and perverse motives that compelled Parsonian functionalism to insidiously replace

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conflict analysis with the presumably more innocuous terms of “tension” and “strain” – all in an attempt to treat conflict as a secondary (or better yet, a tertiary) matter and cast it solely as a dysfunctional and disruptive force of social structure. Endeavoring to drive home his point about Parsons’s nomenclature selectivity and conceptual prioritizing in the strain/tension-versus-conflict problematic – and reveal Parsons’s supposed theoretical duplicity – Coser undertook a content analysis of the indexes of Essays in Sociological Theory: Pure and Applied and The Social System. He found that the Essays contained sixteen entries under “strain” and twenty entries under “tension.” As for The Social System, he found that there were no fewer than seventeen entries under “strain” while the entry “social conflict” was completely absent. This simplistic exercise reveals more about Coser’s methodological shortcomings and disputational conveniences that it does anything else. First of all, Coser did not define what he meant by “entries.” If he was referring, as would be expected, to the number of times that “strain” is listed and cross-referenced in the index of The Social System, that number is seven, not seventeen. (There does not seem to be any discernible pattern as to how he arrived at seventeen.) Further, Coser didn’t explain why he limited his research to only two of Parsons’s texts given that there were six books published by Parsons between the time that Coser began his indexical analysis with the Essays in 1949, and the time that he published his critique in 1956. However, if we consider the four books that Coser ignored, we find that three of them would not have yielded much information for his purposes: Toward a General Theory of Action has no entries on “strain,” “tension,” or “social conflict”; Working Papers in the Theory of Action does not provide an index; and Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process contains no entries for “strain” or “social conflict” and only one for “tensionmanagement.” However, as to why Coser did not consider in his analysis the revised edition of the Essays, released in 1954 and thus available to him, we can only conclude that it was because it would have thoroughly undermined his argument. In that index we find one entry for “strain,” one for “tension,” and a lopsided seven for conflict! Thus, it is difficult to ascertain what exactly Coser intended to demonstrate with his restricted and controlled inquiry other than that Parsons exhibited a theoretical bias for strain/tension and against conflict – because Coser said so. As for the all-important matter of Parsons’s alleged primary interest “in the conservation of existing structures,” Coser turned to the short shrift argument to make his negative evaluation. Coser admitted that while it was true that Parsons didn’t completely ignore social change (indeed it would have been difficult for Coser himself to have ignored the fifty-five-page “Change” chapter in The Social System), given Parsons’s preoccupation with the Hobbesian problem of order and the Durkheimian quest for social cohesion, Coser maintained that social change was, as he put it, “peripheral” to Parsons’s theoretical endeavors. This assertion is as scientifically unproductive as saying that Coser’s functions-of-conflict thesis is deficient because he failed to earnestly consider the coercive uses of propaganda – an issue that he mentioned once or twice, and only in passing. In summing up his

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spurious attacks against Parsons, we must conclude that while Lewis Coser as rowdy outlaw discharged much, he hit little. As for Dahrendorf’s (1958) famous diatribe, it basically echoed the same argument previously made by Lockwood and Coser: that Parsons spurned social conflict and shortchanged social change. Concerning the latter, Dahrendorf, like Coser before him, avoided any full-throated accusation that Parsons neglected social change outright. It is, however, noteworthy that he summarily dismissed Parsons’s “Change” chapter with the rather lame admonition that, among the pages of The Social System, it was “curiously out of place” – whatever that may mean. Dahrendorf, however, was at his argumentative best when he reprimanded Parsons for excluding conflict from his theory. He chided Parsons for erroneously depicting – misrepresenting – society as a “utopia,” a system held together by a consensus of moral values. This representation of society as an integrated and equilibriated social system, Dahrendorf maintained, prevented structural-functionalism from considering, much less explaining, real-world problems. All real societies, he argued, have dissensus and disagreement about values, and as such they all allow for structurally generated conflicts. Dahrendorf’s argument was compelling, but also self-serving: The core contention of the sociology that he was building was that conflict is a ubiquitous feature of human existence. The problem with the equilibrium model of society, Dahrendorf continued in barbed fashion, was its signal concern with spelling out the conditions, not of a real society, but of a utopian one – or, what Dahrendorf did not recognize but what in grand theorizing amounts to the same thing, an analytical one. It is at this point that Dahrendorf misses the point of Parsons’s conceptual scheme. Though he had written and would continue to write expressly about American society – including its kinship, political, economic, and academic systems; its power relations; its religious and medical organization; its societal community – Parsons had frequently, though not solely, worked with abstract illustrative models, with “total” societies as the most comprehensive social entities. In this regard, he had, at least as far back as The Structure of Social Action, heeded Alfred North Whitehead’s injunction that the aim of science was not to produce a copy of reality, but to generate meaningful interpretations of its order. He also relied on Whitehead to warn of the trap that now ensnared Dahrendorf, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” or the illusion that a conceptual scheme reproduces the full reality of the concrete object. Supposing, therefore, that Parsons was describing familiar reality, Dahrendorf charged him with a “conservatism of complacency” and with “not wanting to worry about things.” But this is rather like accusing a meteorologist of inaction and unconcern when analyzing a computer model of a storm system: it is of no relevance to the matter. Dahrendorf’s dispute with Parsons was, in this sense, an external critique. Condemning him for taking a conceptual or “unrealistic” approach and not a practical one is a matter of epistemological disagreement and it is simply unfair to denounce Parsons for adopting a metaphysical premise intrinsically at variance with the one Dahrendorf would have preferred. Dahrendorf’s external critique was also motivated by a partisan viewpoint. Notwithstanding his repeated assurances to his readers that his proposed path out

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of utopia, his so-called conflict model of society, was not politically inspired (“Let me repeat that I am not advocating a sociological science that is politically radical in the content of its theories”), his overweening emphasis on coercion – on power differentials – invariably implied a sociology of power politics, irrespective of any “radical,” or for that matter, any “conservative,” agenda. Yet, for all his denunciations Dahrendorf recognized that his critique had to be helpful and productive and to his credit admitted that, “it is easy to be polemical, hard to be constructive.” In the end Dahrendorf was constructive, if only in proposing that sociological theory had to be “problem conscious” and critically engaged – initiatives that Parsons’s sociology had yet to refine, particularly in light of the social issues that the coming decade, the turbulent 1960s, would bring to the fore.

Gouldner Any examination of Parsons’s critics would be remiss in failing to consider the searing diatribes made by Parsons’s staunchest and most vociferous vilifier, Alvin W. Gouldner, particularly in his controversial and best-known book, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. Indeed, no fewer than half of the tome’s 500-plus pages are devoted to a merciless denunciation of Parsons and Parsonian functionalism. A completely vituperative work, something heretofore unknown in the critical literature in sociology, it was nothing short of a “book-length assault” against Parsons, an “attack of unrelenting fury.” As Harold Bershady put it, “If his words had been translated into physical action, Gouldner would have been charged with assault and battery” (2014: 176–177). The question of what motivated Gouldner’s rancor toward Parsonianism can only be answered in part. Gouldner’s belligerence and hostility was, in some measure, due to his belief that a necessary part of the sociological endeavor must involve vigorous criticism of social theory and social theorists. As he had previously remarked in his book on the origins of social theory: “The task of the historian of theory is to assist us in taking possession of our own intellectual heritage, past or present, by appraising it actively – which is to say, critically – in terms of our viable interests” (Gouldner, 1965: 170). Gouldner’s objective then was to fashion a critical social theory of social theorists accomplished through a sociology of knowledge approach. This was to be a “reflexive” sociology that would provide theorists with a heightened level of selfawareness and compel them to make explicit their existential beliefs about the nature of social reality – what Gouldner called their “domain assumptions” – and reveal how these influence the theories they produce. Additionally, because domain assumptions are shaped by the cultural, historical, and biographical circumstances in a theorist’s life, these contextual events are also subject to scrutiny. Further, social theories arouse certain sentiments in the students who study them. Whether students accept or reject a theory is based on the feeling – of satisfaction or discomfort, optimism or pessimism – that the theory evokes in them. Depending on which sentiment structure it produces, the theory will also take on different political meanings and be regarded as progressive or conservative, as idealistic or practical. In sum, only through a reflexive and critical sociology can we hope to “illuminate the

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manner in which theory-products and theory-performances are generated and received” (Gouldner, 1970: 483). With this reflexive approach, Gouldner documented how Parsons’s “bourgeois” background and professional association with elitist Harvard forged and developed, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, his structural-functional theory, which Gouldner believed was intended as a response to Marxism. However, in the mid-to-late-1960s when Gouldner was formulating his “crisis” thesis, he proclaimed that Parsonian structural-functionalism had taken a critical turn for the worse; it had, as it were, been afflicted with a terminal illness. The growing crisis of functional sociology, with its supposed preference for laissez-faire capitalism, was related to the present societal unrest and political upheaval in American society – rife, as it was, with revolts, uprisings, and protests, and the emergence of issues such as civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. Gouldner noted that the New Left students, raised within the milieu of the university revolt, found Parsons’s overemphasis of the status quo to be deeply at odds with their newly formed sentiment structure and community of discourse. In addition, Gouldner looked to the “psychedelic” counterculture of disaffected youth, who purportedly sought goodness, authenticity, and communitarianism, to construct “radical” theories that would more properly address issues of human freedom. But such a construction would be possible only after thoroughly critiquing and dismantling the old theories, including and especially Parsonian functionalism. As Gouldner sarcastically remarked, “the mind boggles at the thought of a Parsonian hippie” (Gouldner, 1970: 160). All these occurrences, Gouldner prognosticated, would ultimately terminate Parsons’s theoretical hegemony in sociology, thus signaling a crisis in the discipline. But Gouldner’s assessment was wrong, his diagnosis overblown, and his message needlessly alarmist. To begin with, Parsonian functionalism was never the regnant paradigm in sociology that Gouldner claimed it to be. Additionally, neither the United States’s long hot summer of 1967 nor the worldwide protests of 1968 – the time when Gouldner was in the thick of writing Coming Crisis – were signs and symptoms of impending existential catastrophe for Western civilization. Further, academic sociology was not in acute crisis as Gouldner insisted; rather, the discipline has always been, to use Merton’s serviceable oxymoron, in a state of “chronic crisis.” Such historical times of trouble during the late 1960s as Gouldner was writing about, Merton explains, “transform chronic sociological aches into acute sociological pains. It is then that observant doctors are apt to advance their diagnosis that sociology is in deep crisis” (Merton, 1976: 112–113). Harold Bershady, who was a student of Gouldner and Parsons, and knew them well, contends that Gouldner’s animus against Parsons was neither rational nor even political; instead it derived from some unknown source, a source that Bershady has never clearly understood. “The case Gouldner was making against Parsons,” Bershady writes, “was too ferocious, too personal, too laden with appeals for an empty ‘freedom’ to be considered rational” (Bershady, 2014: 178). This was the more perplexing given that Parsons’s political orientation was decidedly liberal. As such, he had been the subject of an extensive security-type investigation by the FBI, during 1952–1954, when he was accused of being the leader of a Communist cell at

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Harvard (Keen, 1999: 1). In 1961, Parsons was a signatory to an American Civil Liberties Union petition advocating the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Lottman, 1961). He had publicly endorsed multicultural integration in the Boston suburb where he lived (Treviño, 2016: 9) and opposed the Vietnam War (Nielsen, 1991: 226). Parsons had also been an outspoken advocate of equal rights for African Americans, having written about the need for their full civic inclusion into the societal community (Parsons, 1965) and coedited a volume, The Negro American, with the prominent African American psychologist, Kenneth B. Clark. What is more, Parsons was not unsympathetic to the student radicals that Gouldner tried to turn against him. In his magisterial The American University, which Parsons coauthored with Gerald M. Platt, they gave due consideration to the “dynamics of student dissent” and identified several of their discontents as stemming from university complicity in societal involvements judged to be immoral, the competitive character of academia, student powerlessness, and the preventing of self-expression and self-fulfillment (Parsons and Platt, 1973: 217). In the end, Bershady states exasperatedly that he couldn’t find anything in Parsons’s work that merited the intense criticisms leveled at him by Gouldner and the other radical sociologists, “other than the fact that he wasn’t a Marxist” (Bershady, 2014: 186). This then was Parsons’s unpardonable theoretical omission that led to his downfall: that he refused to engage with contemporary Marxian analysis at a time when the discipline expected him to do so – a time when the discipline was deeply mired in the Marxian praxis of a ruthless criticism of everything existing.

Characterological Critique The critical responses of commission and omission restrict their analyses to Parsons’s intellectual thought. As such, they interrogate his concepts, presuppositions, and perceived incoherencies and contradictions – whether these are informed by epistemological, methodological, or ideological considerations. Assessments of commission and omission are therefore idea-focused. The critics, having zeroed in almost exclusively on Parsons’s structuralfunctionalism, did much to subvert it as a sociological paradigm. Targeting this narrow (and in the context of Parsons’s larger oeuvre, relatively negligible) perspective, laden with the fatuous appellation “Parsonian functionalism,” served to unjustly distort and parody Parsons’s larger conceptual apparatus. Indeed, such a depiction “obscured the essential character of Parsonian sociology as a contribution” to the general theory of action that was his lifework (Robertson and Turner, 1991: 10). The critics’ reductive treatment of Parsons’s sociology coupled with their ideological fixations of the 1960s – regarding the issues of change and conflict – meant ignoring his evolutionary perspective on total societies, his analysis of Western civilization, to say nothing of his “final concerns with the ‘human condition,’ where he addressed the sociological perspective to the problems of death, health and disease, and ‘the gift of life’” (Robertson and Turner, 1991: 10). Thus, all the while that his detractors petrified their polemics against

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functionalism (directed almost exclusively at The Social System), Parsons continued to expand his intellectual system and make theoretical breakthroughs until his death. But even death could not provide him with immunity from criticism – particularly from critiques that were primarily person-focused. These were ad hominem attacks intended to denigrate Parsons’s scholarly contributions by besmirching his reputation. Interpersonal affronts and slights against intellectual rivals, while today relatively rare, are not unheard of in academic sociology. What distinguishes them from printed salvos is that without a mediating agent – publisher, editor, written document – they are experienced in the full force and style of their oral and corporeal delivery. Such was the case, as has already been reported, with Homans’s theatrical performance (Stark, 1997: 6) during his 1964 ASA Presidential Address, when he severely lambasted Parsons, who was in the audience. It happened again in 1970 at the International Sociological Association (ISA) meetings held in Varna, Bulgaria, when Norbert Elias assailed Parsons directly and at length at a round-table discussion in which both were participating. Fashioning himself an academic gunslinger, Elias challenged Parsons to an “intellectual duel,” setting up a scenario that Dennis Smith (2001: 71) has described as “high noon at Varna.” During the ISA discussion Elias publicly presented a litany of Parsons’s theoretical shortcomings: proposing a static theory; assuming that institutions contribute to the smooth functioning of the social system; putting actions and not people at the center of his theory; devising a conceptual scheme that was abstract, idealistic, and misleading; and so on. Parsons, however, did not take the bait. So, instead of displaying his talents as an academic sharpshooter, Elias had to settle for a less melodramatic performance, that of critic-as-squatter – “claiming intellectual territory,” as Smith puts it, “and telling his chief rival, the man in possession, to move aside” (Smith, 2001: 72). Yet another instance of a public discourtesy against Parsons occurred in 1978 when the Harvard sociology department sponsored a conference, allegedly in his honor, dedicated to leftist interpretations of history. The conference featured as speakers Marxist historians Christopher Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and, again, Elias. The latter, much as he had done at the ISA conference eight years before, launched a direct personal attack in Parsons’s presence, charging that only those in power would support Parsons’s “voluntaristic” view of history. Parsons recognized the forum for what it was, a unilateral and unidimensional assault on his ideas – and indeed on his character – and in a brief address to those in attendance bluntly stated: “I am rather an interloper in this conference, because I had no part in its planning, nor have I been scheduled as a speaker” (Chira, 1978: n.p.). Thus, in one of the supreme ironies toward the end of his long and illustrious career, Parsons was denied the opportunity to defend his ideas on his own home turf. Such personal provocations and confrontations, while undoubtedly unpleasant and perhaps unfair, were nonetheless carried out, if only just, at the borderlines of accepted intellectual discourse. But there was another type of characterological critique to which Parsons was subjected that was intentionally malicious: public libel through critical commentary disguised as investigative reporting. This involved a case of journalistic character assassination that ensued a full decade after his death.

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An article with the provocative headline, “Talcott Parsons’s Role: Bringing Nazi Sympathizers to the US,” which appeared in The Nation magazine, openly accused Parsons of having been involved in recruiting to Harvard a group of alleged former Nazi collaborators shortly after World War II. Though the efforts to consider a particular scholar for a position at Harvard were not successful, Parsons was supposed to have had full knowledge of this scholar’s Nazi past. The evidence that Parsons knew of the refugee’s nefarious connections is allegedly contained in a series of letters that Parsons wrote to his Harvard colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn. Those letters have never been made public. The Nation story was condemned by several sociologists as “a disgraceful political hatchet job” nothing short of “left-wing McCarthyism” (Wrong, 1996), a “misconception” and “a particularly sad tale” (Gerhardt, 1996). In the dubious tradition of linking one’s theories with the lives of theorists – however distorted and fabricated the historical telling of those lives may be – the writer of the Nation article predicted, indeed hoped, that the Parsons controversy he helped to create, “is likely to inflame the debate over the political significance of his sociological theory. . . . His theory was ahistorical . . . his claims to ‘value-neutrality’ masked a commitment to the status quo and to cold war ideology. The discovery of Parsons’s recruitment of Nazi collaborators will strengthen that critique of his work” (Wiener, 1989: 307).

Conclusion My attempt in this chapter has been to refute the inimical folklore that has surrounded Parsons and his sociological theory during the past two or three academic generations. I am in favor of critique, of skeptical inquiry, and intellectual sparring that makes a meaningful contribution to the acceptance or rejection of a theoretical statement. But efforts that impugn a theorist’s integrity or that are intended to deter interest in the theory are unacceptable. So too are endeavors that intentionally misrepresent and delegitimate a theory by any means necessary, including on extratextual grounds or worst of all, on a selective consideration of writings. Though Habermas faulted (rightly I think) Parsons’s theoretical program for its lack of intersubjective communication between actors, he nonetheless believed that any theoretical work in sociology that failed to take account of Parsons’s theoretical contributions could not be taken seriously. Habermas also cautioned about a danger that sociology faced in regard to Parsons: “I refer to the danger of a premature judgment, one that rejects Parsons even before coming to know his work, to say nothing of comprehending it” (Habermas, 1981: 174). This knee-jerk rejection of Parsons’s insights has its origins in the community of arguments that dominated during the late 1960s, when Western societies encouraged a revival of Marxist social theory (Outhwaite, 2005: 212), with the historic events of 1968, in particular, having the effect of pushing sociology strongly to the Left (Jedlowski, 2005: 149). Parsons, whose work was neither Marxist nor radical, was, given the social and sociological crises of the time, repudiated and vilified in this dramatic generational transition in vocabularies of motive.

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The critical discourse in sociology during the late 1960s involved not just social criticism, the negative analysis of society, but also criticism of the discipline from within, a kind of negative self-analysis. In this latter regard the judgments of sociologists and other social critics were principally directed at Parsons, who by endeavoring to transform sociology into a legitimate science of social action, became the chief representative – and the straw man – of theoretical sociology. The result was that the strident renunciations of Parsons and his texts have largely been accepted unquestionably. But there is another potential and more damaging result, and that is that we must question whether we in sociology “have been so deeply involved in self-criticism that we are in danger of self-destruction” (Turner, 1991b: xxiii). Stephen Turner explains that at the end of the 1960s, “like everyone around me, I was against the baneful influence of Talcott Parsons and positivism. One hardly needed a political motivation for this – both were clearly wrong” (Turner, 2005: 294). But if not a political motivation, then what compelled Turner and similar others of the disobedient generation to conclude that Parsons was wrong (as well as positivism, which represents a kind of quantification at odds with Parsons’s project)? It must be, then, that their impetus was a moral one, and this is implied in the very next sentence, where Turner states: “And there was a strong elective affinity between what was wrong with them [Parsons and positivism] and what was wrong with the war in Viet Nam.” Thus, we are left with the conclusion that Parsons’s sociological theory (like the issue of the Vietnam War) had to be opposed because it was morally wrong. While it is quite acceptable, indeed imperative, that we apply a moral evaluation to political events and movements, and even to the principled interests of a theorist, this should not be our standard for determining the utility of scientific theory. Future critical analyses must replace such extraneous judgments with logical arguments that focus on the more technical (intratextual) faults with Parsons’s theoretical discourse. Only on undertaking an earnest comprehension of Parsons’s entire sociological production and assessing its conceptual value and promise for extending knowledge, all of which require a close reading of his writings, only then can we fairly assess the reputation of sociology’s incurable theorist.

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11 Symbolic Interactionism Lawrence T. Nichols

The intellectual orientation known as symbolic interactionism can be characterized as one of the “most American” approaches in sociology. It developed in the United States and it builds on earlier intellectual traditions there, especially the philosophy of pragmatism. Symbolic interactionism has affinities with major intellectual approaches in Europe, including both the cognitively oriented French Cartesian perspective and also the Germanic tradition of “interiority” or “consciousness,” but it is distinguished from these by a fundamental emphasis on “doing” and on “making” and on the consequences of abstractions or categories. Like the “verstehen” (“understanding”) view that is usually associated with Max Weber, symbolic interactionism assumes that shared meanings are prerequisites for social relations, and also that interaction always involves an interpretive process among participants. But it focuses especially on the ways in which such meanings are created in, or emerge from, contexts called “situations,” as well as the consequences of particular meanings, especially through their incorporation into individual identities or “selves.” At the same time, it stops short of phenomenology, which radically questions the validity of all conventional meanings. Symbolic interactionists acknowledge an external world, even if it is one in which meanings are never settled with finality, and they have contributed much to an understanding of “the sociology of everyday life.” The question of how to date the historical emergence of symbolic interactionism is either very easy or very difficult, depending on one’s initial assumptions. The fact that Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) introduced the name “symbolic interactionism” in 1937 is beyond dispute. But he did so largely with regard to earlier work, especially that of philosopher–social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1868–1931), who did not use this term. Therefore, the question arises as to whether symbolic interactionism is really “Blumerism” or “Blumer’s reading of Mead,” and also whether Blumer should be considered, as it were, its “rightful owner” and most authoritative interpreter. An imposing presence with a sharp critical mind, Blumer seems at times to have presented himself in these ways, especially in polemical exchanges. Eventually, however, sociologists moved far beyond Blumer, while retaining the name he had invented (Reynolds and Herman-Kinney, 2003).

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Earlier Currents of Thought At the time Mead was developing ideas that would become foundational to the symbolic interactionist perspective, social scientists in the United States were still very much influenced by European intellectual schools of thought. In France and England, positivism dominated through the writings of Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer, all of whom mostly ignored the issue of interpretation that is central to symbolic interactionism. As a caveat, however, it should be noted that Comte’s famous “law of three stages” did involve consciousness, as did the “collective representations” discussed by Durkheim in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1905). And in 1913–1914 Durkheim gave a course of lectures (Prus, 2009) that appeared, posthumously, as Pragmatism and Sociology (Durkheim, 1983). By contrast, German intellectuals developed ideas very much in accord with the symbolic interactionist perspective. Idealist philosophers such as Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans create the worlds they inhabit through the operation of mind (Reynolds, 2003). Interestingly, Karl Marx – despite his famous critique of Hegel and his advocacy of “dialectical materialism” – also deserves recognition here. For Marx asserted that human beings “make their own history,” and he placed great emphasis on states of mind, including both true and false consciousness, and especially “class consciousness,” the key to revolutionary change and a future just society. There is thus no inherent contradiction between symbolic interactionism and Marxism or other conflict-oriented approaches. Informed by, and responding to, the writings of the idealists and of Marx, the economist-historian-sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) produced influential works rooted in the idea of meaningfulness. All personal interaction, in Weber’s view, became “social” through a mutual orientation of participants toward a set of shared meanings. Weber also emphasized the role of ideas in producing history, including systems of economics, as illustrated in his 1905 essay, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Like later symbolic interactionism, Weber’s approach was also deeply social psychological. He examined both the cognitive states of minds and the emotions of actors, that is, their “spirit” (Geist), an attribute that later symbolic interactionists would call an “attitude.” Protestant Christians in the Calvinist sphere, Weber argued, defined successful work in the world as an indication of being chosen for eternal life. They freely created this definition and developed an identity in accordance with it, experiencing a deep anxiety as a consequence of their theology. Interestingly, W. E. B. DuBois, a historian, sociologist, and civil rights activist, studied in Germany while Weber was teaching and writing, and the two scholars met and carried on a limited correspondence. Weber praised DuBois as the foremost authority on race relations in the American South, and DuBois contributed an article to a journal edited by Weber (Hughey and Goss, 2018). Most significantly for present purposes, DuBois (1868–1963) subsequently published a famous work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that can be considered “Germanic” or “verstehende” in that it featured the idea of consciousness, indeed a “double consciousness” that characterized the knowledge of blacks living within an oppressive white-supremacist social

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order. Consistent with the approaches of Marx and Weber, and similar to symbolic interactionist analyses that would appear decades later, DuBois illumined how people create their own worlds of shared meaning. Souls likewise anticipated later work by Erving Goffman about “the wise,” that is, those with special insider knowledge. In the United States, meanwhile, two relevant approaches were developing: the philosophy of pragmatism, and social psychology. William James (1842–1910) introduced the term “pragmatism” in his 1889 Union Address, and John Dewey subsequently became the perspective’s best-known advocate. But James and others credited Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) as pragmatism’s founding figure. A key event was the publication of the 1878 article, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in which Peirce discussed three degrees of clarity of concepts. The highest of these occurred when people considered the effects and “the practical bearings” of their ideas. An understanding of consequences, Peirce argued, becomes “the whole of our conception of the object.” Thus, abstractions are most fully grasped in terms of behavior and actual experience, that is, in terms of the difference they make in people’s lives. Later symbolic interactionists would closely adhere to this principle in their treatments of language. Social psychology, as it developed in the United States during the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, placed special emphasis on the ideas of “social control,” “the self,” and “attitudes.” Thus, Edward A. Ross published a widely influential series of articles on “social control” in early issues of the American Journal of Sociology, basing these largely on French sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s discussions of “imitation” but also following Emile Durkheim’s definition of “social facts” as possessing externality and exercising constraint. Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), at the University of Michigan, subsequently contributed the influential idea of the “looking-glass self” that referred to seeing oneself through the eyes of others. Cooley (1902) thus posited an ability of humans to get outside themselves and to observe and evaluate their own actions from the perspective of others – a conception that some would trace to the eighteenth-century writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, and other Scottish moralists on “the impartial spectator.” Such “reflexivity” or making the self into an “object” would be central in Mead’s thought. Cooley also did an influential analysis of experience in “primary groups,” by which he meant those that were both relatively early and also especially important, in particular families, playgroups, and neighborhoods. In a manner similar to German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, who had contrasted “Gemeinschaft” (“community”) with “Gesellschaft” (“society”), Cooley argued that primary group experiences differed from those in “secondary” groups. Importantly, primary groups were thought of as relatively small, with face-to-face interaction. Later symbolic interactionists would tend to focus on exactly this type of experience, and Erving Goffman would attempt to make face-to-face interaction a recognized special field within sociology.

George Herbert Mead Generally considered the most important source for what became known, via Blumer, as symbolic interactionism, Mead was a philosopher interested in the

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nature of mind who also taught an advanced course on social psychology at the University of Chicago. In an early article on “The Social Self,” Mead (1901) sought to articulate how persons acquire social identities by regarding themselves as objects. Humans, he argued, are capable of acting as “observers” of their own experience, including their sensations and their behavior, which they control through “vocal gestures.” These become an “inner conversation.” As persons develop in childhood and adolescence via these processes, they “play all the roles” in their group, at least vicariously, in imagination. Over the course of the next three decades, Mead developed these ideas further. Working within an evolutionary perspective, Mead (1910) characterized social interaction as a “conversation of gestures.” Each participant acts as both stimulus and response to another, with gestures enabling “mutual adjustment” throughout encounters. “Consciousness of meaning” refers to a “consciousness of attitudes” that participants adopt toward one another, a consciousness of response or readiness to respond. All these dynamics take place within a “social situation.” A decade later, Mead presented a “behavioristic account of the significant symbol.” All living organisms, he asserted, respond to their environments selectively, by “creating objects” out of them. All “selves” arise in “conduct,” which is “the sum of the reactions of living beings to their environments.” Human children become “social beings” by means of a “play life” in which they act toward themselves as they would act toward others. They thus develop the ability to “be the other” while also being themselves. A fundamentally important transition occurs when children pass from the initial play period into participation in organized “games” which involve formal rules and which require that children see themselves as all other participants in the game – called the “generalized other” – would see them. This leads Mead (1922: 163) to conclude that “mind” is actually “a field” that is not confined to individuals nor located in enclosed brains. “Significance” belongs to “things in their relation to individuals.” Mead continued to develop these various arguments and insights in his university courses, but he published relatively little about them. They subsequently appeared, three years after Mead’s death in the volume Mind, Self and Society, which was compiled by graduate students in philosophy on the basis of transcribed notes of Mead’s lectures. Later commentators have sometimes argued that the title presents Mead’s emphases in reverse order, that he really began with society or the group and tried to show how human minds and selves could arise within it. Despite his undisputed brilliance, Mead was not a prominent figure in sociology until the process of “becoming Mead” (Huebner, 2014) took place, in which later scholars developed and applied Mead’s ideas.

Blumer’s Approach In the volume of essays, Symbolic Interactionism (1969), Herbert Blumer articulated three guiding assumptions which he drew from Mead’s works. First, humans act toward things on the basis of meanings that they attribute to those things. Second, the meaning of things is always derived from, or arises out of, social interaction among individuals. Third, the meanings attributed to things are handled

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in, and also modified through, an interpretive process used by those dealing with the things in question. This mature statement distilled ideas that had developed over several decades. Blumer had introduced the term “symbolic interaction” in a 1937 essay where his purpose was largely to combat several alternative approaches, especially the doctrine of instincts, the stimulus-response view, and cultural determinism. In this formulation, Blumer (1937: 158) located his conceptualization within the field of social psychology: A third view of human group life is that held by those social psychologists we have termed the symbolic interactionists. They . . . do not regard . . . forms of culture as consisting merely of so many different ways of acting. Instead, they believe that these forms of culture consist of common symbols, which are mutually shared and possessed by the members of the group.

Like Mead before him, Blumer discussed the development of social conduct in childhood, with particular emphasis on how children learn through patterns of reward (“satisfactions”) and by internalizing “definitions of situations.” The latter refer to “indications” about how young children should act (e.g., gestures of approval), that is, a language-based process of communication. A “definition” is thus the means by which the attitudes and values of the group are conveyed to the individual. . . . a set of symbols to direct . . . behavior; this body of symbols represents the activities that make up social conduct. (Blumer, 1937: 165)

Again following Mead, Blumer summarized the process by which children develop “selves” through the stages of “play” and “the game” so that ultimately they are able to act toward themselves from the point of view of “the generalized other.” Blumer’s formulation reflects the popularity of the idea of the “definition of the situation” among University of Chicago sociologists, an idea that formulated in works by W. I. Thomas (1923) and by W. I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1928). The key principle is that, if people define situations as real, they thereby acquire a sort of reality, at least in terms of actual consequences. Robert K. Merton later referred to this as “the Thomas Theorem,” and it is fair to say that the Theorem – which is a pure expression of American pragmatism – has inspired a great deal of symbolic interactionist work. In 1962 Blumer published a chapter on “society as symbolic interactionism” that was reprinted in his 1969 collection of essays. Here Blumer asserted that society was composed of “acting units” that might include individuals, collectivities, or organizations, which, by means of an interpretive process, develop “acts to meet the situations in which they are placed” (Blumer, 1969: 85). Group action, he argued, consists of the fitting together of individual lines of action. Overall social organization provides a “framework” within which individuals act, but it does not determine their actions. Importantly, people “do not act toward culture, social structure or the like; they act toward situations” (Blumer, 1969: 88). Moving beyond Mead, Blumer also devoted much time and energy to advocacy of the appropriate method for those working within a symbolic interactionist perspective. Very much in keeping with the classic Chicago school approach in which he

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trained, and which he helped to develop further, Blumer defined meaning-making and the modification of meanings as “naturalistic” events in the world. He therefore argued strongly for an observational or “field” approach in research that might be considered akin to social anthropology. This involves an identification with groups being studied, because sociologists must “catch the process of interpretation through which [acting units] construct their actions,” and they can only do so by “taking the role” of those they examine (Blumer, 1969: 86). This has strong affinities with the approach of “grounded theory” advocated by other sociologists connected with the University of Chicago (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Interestingly, Blumer’s early research (1933; 1935) included studies of the effects of popular movies on conduct, work that arguably relates to the more recent “cultural studies” genre.

Chicago Versus Iowa Manford Kuhn (1911–1963), a professor at the University of Iowa, developed Mead’s ideas in other directions. Influenced by recent developments in quantitative methodology, Kuhn approached the analysis of interaction through the “operationalization” of concepts and variables. Also, in contrast to the Chicago emphasis on process, Kuhn accepted the idea of structure, which meant that selves and meanings could be regarded as relatively constant across situations. Committed to the ideal of precise measurement, Kuhn and his student Thomas McPartland developed an instrument called the “Twenty Statements Test” as a means of identifying components of the self (or of that part which Mead called the “me”). Each statement responded to the same question, “Who am I?” Kuhn and his collaborators found that respondents tended to prioritize aspects of selfidentity, beginning with elements such as family membership and nationality and ending with elements such as hobbies and personal habits. This approach enabled the Iowa-based collaborators to formulate hypotheses that could be tested by means of inferential statistics. After Kuhn’s death, another Iowa sociologist, Carl Couch (1925–1994), carried on the same approach under the rubric of “behavioral sociology” (Couch and Hintz, 1975). Additional work within the same theoretical paradigm and methodology – sometimes called the New Iowa School – was carried out by Michael Katovich and other collaborators (Couch, Saxton, and Katovich, 1986). These investigators created a specialized laboratory (Couch, 1987), complete with auditory and visual recording technology, in which interaction could be studied via the isolation of selected variables. In contrast to observation in natural settings as favored by Chicago sociologists, the laboratory approach also allowed researchers to examine interactional data repeatedly as a means of gaining further insight into its dynamics (Katovich and Chen, 2014). The Iowa School symbolic interactionists also sought to create links between their own work and that of the emerging field of communication studies. The continuing relevance of this interactionist variant is reflected in a recent issue of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Katovich, 2017), which was devoted to “Carl J. Couch and the Iowa School.”

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Goffman’s Dramaturgical Approach One of the most distinctive approaches that can be considered symbolic interactionist appeared in Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Taking a cue, perhaps, from the famous Shakespearian saying that, “All the world’s a stage,” Goffman examined social interaction as theatrical performance by both individuals and “teams.” The traditional “self” of both the Chicago and Iowa schools gave way to appearances and impression management. In order to be effective, teams had to maintain “dramaturgical discipline,” and there was always a danger of betrayal, or that a team member might “give away the show.” A Chicagotrained sociologist, Goffman followed that tradition also by “locating” performances in what might be considered an ecological manner, especially “frontstage” and “backstage,” and he paid particular attention to the changes in self-presentation that occurred when actors moved from one realm to the other. Other works, including Encounters (1961), Interaction Ritual (1967), and Relations in Public (1971), further developed the micro-sociology of face-to-face interaction. The 1961 book Asylums provided a dramaturgical ethnography of a large mental hospital, an environment that Goffman designated as a “total institution.” A particular focus was the “moral career” of patients, another idea with deep Chicago roots in works such as Edwin Sutherland’s The Professional Thief. The “career” resulted from shifting evaluations of selves, often in a negative direction, by powerful audiences. In other work that was perhaps influenced by Mead’s famous discussion of organized games and role taking, Goffman examined risk and risk-taking. An influential essay, “Where the Action Is,” which appeared in Interaction Ritual (1967: 149–270) examined events in casinos. Subsequently, Goffman (1969) published essays on “strategic interaction” and “expression gaming” that further extended the dramaturgical metaphor, with particular attention to espionage literature, in which false identities were commonplace. Goffman focused on how “gamewise” players interpreted problematic and dangerous situations and chose lines of action. More recently Dmitri Shalin (2016) has continued to explore these ideas, with a focus on gambling as a stigmatized activity and the “commodification of risk.” These various writings by Goffman, along with his later volume, Frame Analysis (1974), provided the basis for a great deal of symbolic interactionist research. Goffman also contributed to the emerging sociology of gender in his 1979 book Gender Advertisements, which moved in the direction of cultural studies, as did his 1981 volume, Forms of Talk.

Labeling, Deviance, Social Control One of the most influential applications of symbolic interactionist principles appeared in what is generally called the labeling or “social reaction” perspective on deviance and crime. This model flourished especially in the mid-to late 1960s, when it also influenced public policy, especially the “diversion” from the criminal justice system of nonviolent or first-time offenders and juveniles (President’s Commission

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on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967). The social reaction perspective continues to be presented in textbooks and courses on criminology, juvenile delinquency, and deviance. Historians have generally traced the origins of the labeling approach to work by criminologist Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) shortly before World War II, especially the concept of the “dramatization of evil” (Tannenbaum, 1938). This analysis, like others that would follow, identified stages in the transformation of identities, including: (1) participation in deviant or criminal acts due to maladjustment; (2) being “tagged” as an evildoer for doing evil deeds; and (3) acting in accordance with the newly imposed definition as self-concept changes. The approach thus combines several elements: behavior that violates norms; a negative response from an organized group; and a change in the self that reinforces further violation of norms. More widely recognized as a precursor to the labeling approach is the work of social psychologist Edwin Lemert (1912–1996), who approached the issues in terms of “primary” and “secondary” deviance. In Lemert’s (1951) view, most people engage in primary deviance, usually minor, but their violations of norms go unnoticed. Others, however, come to the attention of authorities and are officially designated as deviants. Such designations cause those involved to redefine themselves and then to engage in careers of “secondary” deviance and crime, that is, violations due to official processing. Lemert’s approach, as well as that of Tannenbaum, has strong affinities with Robert K. Merton’s influential discussion of “the self-fulfilling prophecy,” in which “a false definition of the situation [evokes] a new behavior which makes the original false definition come true” (Merton, 1948). The difference is that Merton does not address the issue of selfhood and identity that is central for symbolic interactionists. The emerging social reaction approach also incorporated influential writings by Harold Garfinkel and by Erving Goffman. Thus, in a short but widely influential article on “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies” Garfinkel (1956) pointed to the importance of a “dramatic contrast” being drawn between publicly designated deviants and conforming members of groups. Goffman (1962) subsequently examined the social phenomenon of “stigma” and how persons designated as rule violators struggle to manage “spoiled identities.” Howard Becker then did the most to popularize the social reaction perspective in two bestselling books, Outsiders (1963) and the edited volume The Other Side (1964). Becker’s major contention was that behaviors are not inherently deviant, but only become so as a result of the responses of organized groups. There was also much emphasis in Becker’s two volumes on differential risk of being processed officially, with members of lower classes and racial minorities being much more vulnerable than others. The overall portrait presented in the various essays was the genesis of deviance and crime by authorities responding to violations of norms – a portrait comparable to more recent discussions of hospitals causing illness as a result of treatment. Consequently, many sociologists began to think in terms of rule violators and norm enforcers as co-offenders, or even to view the enforcement system, which was more powerful than individual offenders as “the real problem.”

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Shortly after the appearance of Becker’s books, sociologist Kai Erikson (1967) brought out another bestseller, Wayward Puritans. This volume included case analyses of three sets of events in which labels were imposed on perceived norm violators, namely: Anne Hutchinson and the “antinomialist” theological controversy of the 1730s; the “Quaker invasion” of Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly thereafter; and the “witchcraft hysteria” in Salem Village in 1692. Erikson also argued that law enforcers would tend to define enough people as deviant to fill all available space in punitive facilities. In this way, over the course of three decades, sociologists working in accord with the principles of American pragmatism, as well as those of Mead’s sociology and Blumer’s formulations, portrayed deviance and crime as fundamentally “matters of definition,” not only in laws but, even more importantly in power-based, arbitrary, and often biased practices of enforcement. This approach elicited a critical response from other social scientists such as Ronald Akers (1967), Walter Gove (1970), and Jack Gibbs (1966; 1971). Interestingly, in the development of the social reaction perspective, sociologists created their own “definition of the situation” by portraying rule violators, to a significant degree, as victims of oppressive systems and their agents – an approach that would take root in the field and help generate what more recent critics have called a “victimhood culture” (Campbell and Manning, 2018). Meanwhile, a rich literature emerged on processes by which persons accused of deviance can avoid formal labeling or self-labeling. The key ideas were “neutralizations” and “accounts.” Thus, in a relatively short but widely influential article, Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957) offered a theory of juvenile delinquency based on “techniques of neutralization” by which those about to violate social norms gave themselves, in effect, a “time-out” from ordinary obligations. The authors identified five rhetorical techniques that allowed violators to sustain their established self-concepts: denial of responsibility; denial of injury; denial of victim; condemning the condemners; and appeal to higher loyalties. A decade later, Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman provided a related analysis grounded in what they called the “sociology of talk.” Thus, participants in interaction whose behavior is “subjected to valuative inquiry” may employ self-defensive means called “accounts.” These “linguistic devices,” the authors assert, “are a crucial element in the social order since they prevent conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation” (Scott and Lyman, 1968: 46). Two basic types were examined, called excuses and justifications. Excuses involve admissions that an action was wrong, but the participants deny responsibility for it. Justifications admit responsibility but deny that actions (e.g., self-defense) were wrong. The Scott–Lyman article inspired a large body of empirical work that examined how excuses and justifications were employed by those accused of, or even found guilty of, offenses ranging from student absences to sexual assault and white-collar crime. Most were case studies that analyzed how accounts were used in a “remedial” manner, though a review of the literature (Nichols, 1990) also pointed to “preventive” uses, and also to the presentation of accounts by groups and organizations. The underlying symbolic interactionist insight was that identities are always at risk, a point made perhaps most forcefully by Erving Goffman.

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Constructionism The symbolic interactionist perspective was also a fundamental component of an approach to the study of social problems known as constructionism. Launched by Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse in 1977, this was initially a reform movement that sought to overthrow dominant approaches, especially functional analysis and value conflict. The authors’ key assertion was that social problems should not be understood as “conditions,” but rather as the “definitional activities” of those making “claims” about “putative conditions.” This argument echoed the earlier statements of labeling theorists about behavior and deviance. And they accorded well with Blumer’s contention that people act toward objects on the basis of meanings assigned to objects. Interestingly, Kitsuse had made contributions to labeling theory, and so his effort to introduce the constructionist model was a rather natural and logical step. In keeping with the long-standing focus on language dating back to Mead’s writings, Spector and Kitsuse placed great emphasis on terminology and the creation of new categories, such as types of mental illness recognized in the Diagnostic Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Peter Ibarra and John Kitsuse (1993) subsequently expanded on this point by introducing the idea of “conditioncategories” as units of social problems discourse. They took the position that “claims never leave language,” which became known as “strict” constructionism or the “strong reading.” This provoked a debate about whether sociologists could legitimately presume to know anything at all about actual conditions in the world, versus “putative conditions.” A majority view gradually emerged that focusing on claims and claimsmaking was too narrow an approach, since the purpose of sociology was to provide understanding of the actual social world (Best, 1993). This view became known as “contextual constructionism,” and it accords with the emphasis dating back to Mead and Blumer that interactions are always “situated” and can only be understood via knowledge of situations. Later commentators (e.g., Nichols, 2003) pointed out the impossibility of a contextless, language-only approach, on the grounds that words have different meanings in different contexts and therefore the language of claims cannot be decoded without presumed contextual knowledge. The “weaker” or contextual reading was more fully in accord with traditional symbolic interactionist principles, while the “strong” or “strict” reading was more phenomenological. The constructionist movement generated a large research literature, much of it organized in terms of case studies of the creation of a particular social problem (e.g., Best, 1989; 1995). For instance, Joel Best and Kathleen Lowney (1995) traced the emergence of the problem of “stalking,” including the process by which this term came to be favored over earlier ones such as “psychological rape.” The existence of the “problem of stalking” was demonstrated, in the authors’ view, by the passing of anti-stalking laws in virtually all US states within a period of several years. Best (2015) has recently criticized what he regards as an overemphasis on case studies, a pattern, one might say, that reflects Blumer’s earlier emphasis on the singularity of definitional processes.

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The constructionist literature also includes treatments of larger dynamics, which accords with the long-established Chicago tradition of examining “collective behavior.” Indeed, there is a widespread tendency to think of social problems in terms of social movements, as though each problem arises from a particular movement. Joseph Gusfield’s (1986) influential book, Symbolic Crusade, a study of the temperance movement, provides an example, as does Making It Work by Valerie Jenness (1993) which analyzes the “prostitutes’ rights” movement. Constructionists have also considered collective behavior from the critical perspective of “moral panics” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994), that is, as largely irrational overreactions to perceived threats. Thus, historian-sociologist Philip Jenkins (1995) in his study, Using Murder, attempted to trace two phases of a moral panic over serial killing, in which officials asserted the occurrence of several thousand such murders each year. Similarly, Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (1995) critiqued what they regarded as a panic over the use of “crack” or “rock” cocaine, and they combined the traditional symbolic interactionist emphasis on the imposition of definitions with a conflict-oriented concern over how these were applied to vulnerable racial minorities – a view reminiscent of labeling theorists’ portraits of deviants as society’s victims. Over a period of several decades, constructionism spread and prospered, but it gradually lost its novelty and it became the target of sharp criticism from conflictoriented sociologists who reflected a perspective increasingly hegemonic in the field since the late 1960s. For example, a recent conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, an organization that had long nurtured constructionism, was devoted to the theme “beyond constructionism.” And at that event the organization’s president launched a direct assault on the perspective, on the grounds that it was largely disconnected from reality and lacked both a concept of power and a sense of actual human suffering (Della Buono, 2015). Similarly, Sarah Crawley (2018) accused constructionists as a group of being “encamped” and cut off, due to their own separatist tendencies, from other important sociological orientations such as feminism.

Structuralism and Indiana From its earliest days in the thought of Mead and Blumer, symbolic interaction framed social reality in terms of process, rather than structure. The emphasis was mainly on fluidity, creativity, emergence, uniqueness, and unpredictability. But there was also some recognition of stable elements, including human persons, the components of the “me” (i.e., defined roles), collectivities, and what Mead called the “generalized other.” In other words, early symbolic interactionists never claimed (as later radical ethnomethodologists tended to do) that the world had to be, in effect, “created all over again” each and every day. In the 1980s, building on such recognitions of stability, a number of sociologists, among whom Sheldon Stryker (1924–2016) was the most influential, worked to create a “structural” variant. The programmatic statement for this initiative was Stryker’s 1980 book, Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version, which accepted the

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existence of patterned interactions that were durable, resistant to change and able to reproduce themselves. There was, in other words, a framework for the dynamics that Mead, Blumer, and their successors had examined, including: “organized systems of interactions and role relationships and . . . complex mosaics of differentiated groups, communities, and institutions, cross-cut by a variety of demarcations based on class, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.” (Stryker, 2008: 19; see also Stryker, 1982). Stryker had come into sociology and had enthusiastically embraced Mead’s work in the 1950s, a time when quantitative measurement, the operationalization of variables and the testing of hypotheses via inferential statistics were widespread in the social sciences and when “fieldwork” of the “classic Chicago school” variety had become less common. In this setting, it was natural for Stryker to adopt the attitude, as he reports, that Mead’s ideas should be tested empirically. Like his “Iowa School” counterparts, Stryker (2008: 16) felt strongly that “meaningful operational measures of concepts of the theory could be developed, the derived hypotheses could be empirically examined, and decisions about the validity of the hypotheses could be reached.” Description, in other words, was not enough. A strong and valid theory in the symbolic interactionist tradition also had to be able to predict outcomes accurately. Stryker (1968) had long been interested in “identity theory,” with particular reference to differential commitment (at various points in time) to various components of the self, which was understood as multifaceted. Following the formulation of the “structural symbolic interactionist” model, he, along with Richard Serpe (1987; Serpe and Stryker, 2011) and other collaborators, sought to link the two issues conceptually and to examine them in empirical research. Stryker also viewed identity theory as an important “bridge” to other closely related approaches, especially affect control theory (e.g., Smith-Lovin, 2007), identity control theory (e.g., Burke, 2004) and identity accumulation theory (e.g. Thoits, 1983), all of which had roots in Mead’s thought. Working within the same conceptual matrix, Jan Stets and her collaborators linked identity theory with environmental sociology (Stets and Biga, 2003), the sociology of emotions (Stets, 2010), and the sociology of morality (Stets and Carter, 2012).

Narratives and Narration Although some might regard narrative analysis as part of postmodernism or cultural studies, there is a considerable body of empirical research that operates within a symbolic interactionist framework in order to examine how narratives are made and how they are used, with significant consequences for both individual and collective identities. Such work has sometimes connected with studies of mass media, as in research on how news organizations produce “landmark narratives” of crime and deviance through selective coverage of events (Nichols, 1997). Researchers have likewise examined the production and uses of “flawed landmark narratives” including “amoral calculation” in the Ford Pinto case (Lee and Ermann, 1999). More recent work has considered how universities use and sustain narratives about date-rape drugs such as “roofies” (Weiss and Colyer, 2010).

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Some studies of narrative have focused on how official investigations interpret problematic events. These include the application of Goffman’s idea of “expression games” to the Congressional investigation of the E. F. Hutton investment firm (Nichols, 1989), as well as an analysis of conversational exchanges in the IranContra affair (Cavender, Jurik, and Cohen, 1993), and Vaughan’s (1997) book-length study of the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the “failed O-rings explanation.” A key point has been the struggle over interpretations in “definitional contests” (Nichols, 1991) that are sometimes organized around political factions.

Trends and Future Prospects Several published analyses have examined the position of symbolic interaction in sociology, as well as its historical development and its future prospects. Thus, in 1962, Manford Kuhn, the leading proponent of the “Iowa School” discussed above, considered the events of the preceding quarter-century in a presidential address (Kuhn, 1964) to the Midwest Sociological Society. In Kuhn’s view the overarching dynamic had been a shift from “the oral tradition” to an “age of inquiry.” In the earlier period, a number of highly interesting and provocative ideas had circulated widely, especially in university coursework, but they had seldom found their way into written form, and had very seldom been presented in well developed, “rounded” theories. The posthumous publication in the mid-to-late 1930s of three of Mead’s works (Mind, Self and Society; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; The Philosophy of the Act), Kuhn said, could be regarded as an approximate boundary between the eras. The more recent period was marked by numerous attempts to develop the perspective by building on various elements of Mead’s thought – often ambiguous and even contradictory – and to measure and test concepts, to formulate hypotheses and explanations of selected problems. These various efforts, Kuhn asserted, could be conveniently categorized as taking either a more “indeterminate” or a more “determinate” approach, both of which could be justified on the basis of Mead’s writings. Kuhn then specified and examined each of the following variants: role theory; reference group theory; social/person perception; self theory; the dramaturgical school; longitudinal studies of socialization and careers; the interpersonal theory of psychiatry; and the Sapir-Whorf-Cassirer approach toward language and culture. Overall, Kuhn concluded, symbolic interaction had succeeded, though he faulted it both for failing to conceptualize functional relations between selves and others, and also for failing to explain how self-conceptions change over time. Looking toward the quarter-century to come, he predicted an accelerated development of research techniques and a coalescing of the separate sub-theories in the field. Kuhn (1964: 79) felt confident that the interactionist approach “will hold its own against the competition of such major theories as psychoanalysis, the learning theories, and field theory.” Three decades later, Norman K. Denzin made a case for developing symbolic interaction by linking it to cultural studies and “the politics of interpretation.” Well

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versed in the history of the perspective, Denzin summarized its past as well as the major debates among its proponents. His own variant, which he called “interpretive interactionism,” was said to rest on three assumptions: (1) that the perspective needed to incorporate elements of poststructural and postmodern theory (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Foucault); (2) that the interactionist imagination should be merged with critical, feminist, and cultural studies points of view; and (3) that a politics of interpretation must be developed, in order to link the worlds of theory and of practice (Denzin, 1992: xvii). Working with this approach, scholars have addressed the nature of cultural studies; communication as a problematic for interactionists, cultural criticism, and politics. Denzin has nurtured this project through a series he edits, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Articles published during the past decade sometimes have a more traditional framing, as with Jane Hood’s analysis of “parenting a youthful offender,” Susie’s Scott’s discussion of “intimate deception in everyday life,” and Jeffrey Nash’s examination of women as barbershop singers. There were also contributions on Mead’s field theory, by Norbert Wiley, and on Jane Addams and symbolic interaction, by Mary Jo Deegan. Other recent articles are more reflective of cultural studies, postmodernism, and communication studies. Examples include Anthony Puddephatt’s discussion of Mead in the light of Chomsky’s linguistics, Scott Currie’s analysis of the “semiotics of jazz improvisation,” and Bryant Alexander’s account of a “performative film autocritography.” Shortly after Denzin’s call for interpretive interactionism, Gary Alan Fine (1993) provided an extensive examination of what he called “the sad demise, mysterious disappearance and glorious triumph” of the approach. Fine attributed symbolic interactionism’s decline to four major processes: fragmentation, expansion, incorporation, and adoption. Fragmentation due to competition between intellectual centers (Chicago, Iowa, University of California at San Diego) and rival paradigms and methodologies (e.g., participant observation versus controlled laboratory experiments) made it hard to identify a core in the perspective. Expansion via linkage to choice theory, gratification research, social ecology, and the development of civilization had a similar effect. Meanwhile, interactionist ideas were blended into movements such as cultural studies. And the widespread adoption of ideas that were symbolic interactionist in their origins made it difficult to distinguish between those who were, or were not, proponents of the approach. In Fine’s view, the period under consideration had been marked by three fundamental debates: between micro and macro approaches; between an emphasis on agency or on structure; and between realist and interpretivist understandings. Meanwhile, interactionists had made important contributions in several “domains,” including social coordination theory, emotion work and experience (e.g., affect control), the construction of social problems, and the creation of selves (identity theory). He concluded: “if the ultimate goal is to develop the pragmatist approach to social life – a view of the power of symbol creation and interaction – then symbolic interactionism has triumphed gloriously” (Fine, 1993: 81). A decade later, Fine and Kent Sandstrom offered a related analysis. On the positive side, the authors (2003: 1041) asserted that symbolic interactionism had

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“become one of the cornerstones of contemporary sociology.” Despite this success, and actually because of it, however, the approach had lost something of its former distinctiveness. In the final decades of the twentieth century the perspective had been expanded and enlivened by works in feminism, neo-Marxism, and postmodernism. It could still enjoy a bright future in the twenty-first century, if its proponents accepted the limited mission of developing a pragmatist understanding. And with such a strategic focus the paradigm would very likely continue to influence related disciplines, including psychology, communication studies, cultural studies, and education. More recently, Jonathan Turner (2011) has presented a “conceptual outline” for how sociologists might fill in and extend Mead’s approach. In particular, he offers a “more robust” conceptualization of the self, as well as a hierarchical model of “transactional needs.” The self should be seen as including four levels of identity: role identity (the least encompassing); group identity; social identity; and core identity (the most encompassing, and always salient). The hierarchy of transactional needs includes the following: verification of identities; making a profit in the exchange of resources; group inclusion; trust; and facticity (sharing a common intersubjectivity). The development of these proposed ideas will, Turner believes, help to close the conceptual gap between processes operating at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Lonnie Athens, meanwhile, has developed a more dissident approach that he calls “radical interactionism,” which discard’s Mead’s notions of “the I and the me” and “the generalized other” altogether. Its main premise is the need to go beyond Mead’s view of sociality in order to recognize “domination” as the key process in social life – a view said to be in accord with that of Robert Park. Athens (2007: 141) understands domination as “the construction of social actions through some participants in the social act performing super-ordinate roles, others performing subordinate roles, and everyone assuming the attitudes of ‘others.’” Domination is “a necessary evil,” because social life always involves a division of labor, and it is therefore sheer utopian thinking to imagine social life without compulsion. The best that can be hoped is that domination will be restricted to democratic forms. On the positive side, there is always room for creative activity by individuals that can eventuate in social change. Initially, this consists simply in “soliloquizing” mentally, with an orientation toward a “phantom community,” about new “maxims” to deal with unmet needs. But over time a phantom community can become “customary,” with formerly novel maxims internalized. The history of symbolic interaction, as well as its future prospects, has also sometimes been presented as autobiographical reminiscences and reflections. Thus, Helen Znaniecka Lopata (2003) has written about the process of becoming a symbolic interactionist gradually, through several phases. As the daughter of Florian Znaniecki, a major figure in the “classic Chicago school,” Lopata became familiar with literature that created a readiness for her subsequent development (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918–1920). During doctoral studies she participated in the “second Chicago school” (Fine, 1995) whose prominent faculty members included Herbert Blumer, Everett C. Hughes, Louis Wirth, Ernest Burgess, Philip

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Hauser, Evelyn Kitagama, Nelson Foote, David Riesman, Peter Blau, and Anselm Strauss. This led to an expanded professional network largely anchored in the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI), and to a series of researches organized around the ideas of social roles, sentiments, identities, and self-concept. Reflecting on this journey, Lopata argued for a broadened vision that would go beyond examinations of classic texts and beyond individualized auto-ethnographies to “look carefully at what is happening to other people, not from our own point of view, but from theirs.” The challenge, in her view, is cross-cultural: to listen, for example, “to the voices of the women of Afghanistan and Iran, to learn what meanings they give to what is happening in their homelands” (Lopata, 2003: 167), rather than to assume, from a Western perspective, that wearing traditional costumes is inherently oppressive and that a desire to be liberated from it must be a top priority for those involved. Symbolic interactionists cannot “take the roles” of such others without first understanding the very different worlds of meaning in which they live. Sheldon Stryker has likewise contributed a brief memoir. Unlike Lopata, however, Stryker recounts a process of competition, conflict, and estrangement between himself as an advocate of a “structural” approach to symbolic interactionism and others with a more orthodox, Blumerian, and processual view. Happily, a reconciliation was eventually reached, and Stryker became a member of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism, as well as a member of the editorial board of the Society’s journal. The rapprochement culminated in Stryker’s receipt of the Mead Award from the SSSI. Reflecting on these events, Stryker speculates that the competing wings might have been drawn together by the appearance of a common adversary, namely, “symbolic interactionists who, enamored of postmodernism, have come to reject the possibility of objective knowledge and study texts rather than behavior” (Stryker, 2003: 105). But with the newfound openness and trust, he concluded, symbolic interactionists have the opportunity to learn from one another and to enrich and improve their work. In 2012, Norman Denzin’s series, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, devoted an entire issue (volume 38) to “autobiographies of leading symbolic interactionsts.” Its eleven contributors included Lonnie Athens, David Altheide, Paul Atkinson, Kathy Charmaz, Adele Clarke, Gary Cook, Carolyn Ellis, Martyn Hammersley, John Myrton Johnson, Joseph Kotarba, and Laurel Richardson. Cook sounded a traditionalist note in a discussion of “becoming a Mead scholar,” while Ellis spoke of combining “a communicative heart with a sociological eye,” and Johnson recounted “an activist path.”

Conclusion The distinctively American perspective of symbolic interactionism has developed in a multitude of directions over the past century. It continues to be widely taught, in introductory sociology courses, as well as in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on theory and the history of theory. In addition, the interactionist approach retains a prominent place in the fields of criminology, juvenile delinquency,

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and deviance. Meanwhile, the SSSI, along with its journal Symbolic Interaction and its annual national conference and Couch-Stone symposium, as well as Norman K. Denzin’s long-running series, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, provide institutional support and continue to nurture the perspective. It’s also important to note that the perspective has spread internationally, and it is in the international sphere that its potential for growth may be greatest. In Europe, British sociologist Frank Furedi has published on bullying and on “risk and fear” (2018). In France, Veronique Campion-Vincent (2001) has examined narratives of organ theft. In Finland, Tarja Poso (2001) has written about “child protection without children.” Denzin’s series, Studies in Symbolic Interaction (2015), featured “contributions from European symbolic interactionists” including Viola Abernet, LarsErik Berg, Danielle Chevalier, Caroline De Mann, Thaddeus Muller, and Roel Pieterman, among others. The perspective has also gained popularity in Asia. For instance, in Japan, Jun Ayukawa has applied interactionist ideas to the issues of smoking and human rights violations (2015), while Takashi Suzuki (2001) and Manabu Akagawa (2015) have published on pornocomics as a social problem. All of these events seem to justify the optimism expressed by Manford Kuhn, Gary Alan Fine, Kant Sandstrom, Sheldon Styker, Helen Znaniecka Lopata, Michael Katovich, and other well-informed practitioners that symbolic interaction will not only survive, but will continue to flourish in the decades ahead. And, based on the intellectual and social history sketched out here, that flourishing will be dramatically diverse.

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12 Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology Philip Manning

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts [. . .] William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, lines 139–142 No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – Almost, at times, the Fool. T. S. Eliot. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917)

Introduction Jaques’s memorable speech in As You Like It anticipated many of the themes that occupied Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, and a wide range of dramaturgical theorists. The central characters in the play are thoroughly deceptive – and to makes matters more complicated, some of their sexual identities are unclear. Against this backdrop, Jaques argued that we must accept the conventional roles we are asked to play. By contrast, T. S. Eliot presented Prufrock to us as someone who had shed his own self-deceptions: his self-identity and his social role are finally one and the same: the Fool. And although Prufrock began by recognizing that there would not be a Shakespearean starring role for him, his recognition that he might “at times” be the Fool suggests that he is not even the ambiguous Fool of the theater but just an ordinary fool of the non-theatric variety. Sociology does not have its own Shakespeare or Eliot – although few deny that Erving Goffman was a fine wordsmith. However, sociologists have embraced the concept of role and to a lesser extent the metaphor of the theater. After the Chicago School moved away from case studies of criminals and delinquents in the late 1920s, and inspired by George Herbert Mead’s somewhat quirky use of role to describe 226

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broad community standards, role as a concept became embedded in sociologists’ understanding of social structure. In the early 1950s, Talcott Parsons had developed his own role analysis (as had Robert Merton) that was conventional perhaps in the way prescribed by Jaques. By the mid-1950s, Erving Goffman had offered his own more existential, more deceptive, alternative version of impression management, one that Jaques had been eager to disavow. This unpacking of the theatrical metaphor has taken dramaturgical sociology down three roads. The first assumes its destination to be a theory of personal identity; the second more modestly assumes its destination to be a theory of communication; the third a rational choice explanation of the costs and benefits to performers as they signal their intentions to others. In my view, Goffman advanced all three positions without clarifying what he was doing – an omission that was bound to lead to confusion. Philosophers who have responded to Goffman’s sociology have generally found his dramaturgy to presuppose an inadequate theory of identity rather than a theory of communication. Philosophers often think that this theory is worth considering, even if ultimately they find it lacking. A version of this response to Goffman can be found the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Jonathan Glover, Bruce Wilshire, Jürgen Habermas, and others. MacIntyre has complained that Goffman “liquidated the self into its roleplaying” and that he made the social world “everything” – leaving us with only a “ghostly ‘I’ and hence almost no selfhood” (1982: 31). For sociologists, this might suggest that Goffman favored Mead at the expense of Cooley. Glover has portrayed Goffman in similar terms, complaining that Goffman’s tendency to see “the things we do which seem to escape from social roles . . . [as] refinements to these roles” (1988: 171) leaves us with “no inner story” (1988: 175). This is reminiscent of Richard Sennett’s insightful observation that Goffman’s descriptions of the social world contain scenes but no plots (1970: 36). Wilshire makes a similar point to Glover when he rejects Goffman’s distinction between “who the self really is and the sense it gives others of who is behind the ‘roles’ it is playing” (1982: 293). Habermas emphasized that dramaturgical action and strategic action are not the same, distinguishing presentations of self that contain beliefs from those that contain desires or feelings. When we think about the beliefs that people express, we often wonder whether people mean what they say, or are simply feigning. However, when presentations of self reveal desires, we wonder instead about whether people are being sincere or are inauthentic. Because dramaturgical action presupposes “two worlds” – an internal and an external – Habermas suggested that there is always the risk that audiences will be transformed into opponents, to be handled only strategically. However, dramaturgical action is never identical to strategic action and whenever dramaturgical action is understood strategically, it must fail. This is because dramaturgical action requires both purposive-rational action and subjective expressions to be combined – it has to be more than just a calculated decision (1984: 93–94). I think that it is wise to assume that Goffman did not have a well-worked out philosophical view of selfhood and personal identity, although he certainly made comments and asides about the nature of selfhood throughout his work. In a way,

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philosophers have successfully blown up a building, but it turns out that Goffman rarely lived there. Goffman’s work is primarily a set of tentative generalizations about aspects of ordinary social interaction. These tentative generalizations and conceptual schemes are there to facilitate case studies of the social world, not to settle age-old philosophical disputes. I therefore doubt that Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis is a powerful contribution to a broader understanding of personal identity. Its strength lies in its contribution to our understanding of communicative conduct and strategic interaction, terms that were near and dear to Goffman throughout his career. If we understand dramaturgical sociology to be about strategic interaction and communication, we can skate on the thick ice of Goffman’s writing, rather than on the thin ice of his philosophical asides. Goffman often indicated that this was what he was primarily interested in and it is the version of dramaturgy that I believe has the most promise. It also connects Goffman’s most explicitly dramaturgical work – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (hereafter PSEL) (1959) – to his dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community” (1953). The dissertation is dramaturgical avant la lettre, while PSEL is implicitly a theory of communication. In the end, it is easy to understand why the two projects are often mistakenly thought to be one and the same (see Smith, 2013: 59). Goffman, influenced by Thomas Schelling, later analyzed social interaction in game theoretic terms, and the intersection of game theory and dramaturgy is one pathway into the contemporary signaling theory associated with Diego Gambetta (see Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013: 28). In Goffman’s hands, dramaturgical analysis was, in the language of its time (the 1950s), a “conceptual scheme,” one of many possible schemes, each with its own vocabulary (Goffman, 1963; 1971; 1983a; 1983b). In his day, of course, Talcott Parsons (1949 [1937]; 1951; Parsons and Shils, 1951) was working hard to develop the conceptual scheme for sociology as an offshoot of existing economic theory. Goffman’s dramaturgy might therefore have been doubly challenging for Parsons, as Goffman proposed both a rival sociological vocabulary and a rival philosophy of social science, in which there can never be a final victor in the war of conceptual schemes. Since the 1960s, Goffman’s many dramaturgical concepts have found their way into the language and structure of a vast number of sociological projects, many of which are only incidentally dramaturgical. The same can be said of Parsons’ work. But beyond this general appropriation, signaling theory has adopted a clear dramaturgical approach in its own theory of rational, communicative action. The success of signaling theory supports the idea that the value of dramaturgical analysis is linked more to our understanding of communication than to our understanding of identity. Rational choice has its roots in economic theory, and signaling theory is specifically and consciously linked to microeconomic theory. I want to emphasize that an intellectual history of dramaturgy has to locate it in the context of sociology’s own attempt to emerge from the domination of neoclassical economic theory. The recent successes of signaling theorists to show the continuing vitality of dramaturgical sociology reassert this traditional link between sociological and economic theory.

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Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology

Even though Goffman understood that his dramaturgy was a conceptual scheme that could not be tested by case studies, he believed that they could vindicate it. That is, case studies could show that dramaturgical ideas had practical applications. However, the many ways by which actors in their everyday roles signal information to their audiences can only be shown by intricate description. This will require a shift from Goffman’s general focus on the vocabulary of impression management to the micro-sociological concentration on the precise techniques used to signal information. This transition will often involve what sociologists understand as an ethnomethodological appropriation of a dramaturgical framework. A useful – albeit controversial – test case for this transition is Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) study of Agnes’ efforts to pass in her everyday interactions as an unremarkable woman, despite her upbringing as an unremarkable boy. Influenced by James Coleman’s (1968) scathing critique of Garfinkel’s methodological mistakes, sociologists often overlook a telling criticism of this project: Garfinkel failed to describe with any precision the ways in which Agnes successfully portrayed gender. Coleman emphasized Garfinkel’s sociological rather than his ethnomethodological failings. From my point of view, the missing part of Coleman’s critique is the recognition that Garfinkel did not move our understanding of gendered performances very far beyond Goffman’s earlier dramaturgical conceptual scheme. In part, Garfinkel failed because he switched out a dramaturgical metaphor and put in a game metaphor without offering a detailed empirical description of Agnes’ passing practices. Thus, Garfinkel left the necessary, detailed, ethnomethodological analysis largely untouched.

Intellectual Context Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis was a product of its own time, with its own post–World War II intellectual history. The world of American sociology in the 1950s was heavily influenced by Talcott Parsons’ grand theoretical ambitions and so perhaps this is the clearest intellectual context for PSEL. Goffman had already indicated this in the second chapter of his dissertation, where he indicated that his understanding of social order and social interaction had been heavily influenced by Parsons’ The Social System (1951). Greg Smith has an excellent summary of the steps by which Goffman incorporated Parsons’ framework into his dissertation (2006: 25–27). Although Parsons’ early work, culminating in The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]) was framed as a corrective to some of the limitations in neoclassical economic theory, The Social System (1951) gave a prominent place to role analysis. In Parsons’ increasingly equilibrium-centric analysis, roles were constitutive: they consisted of behavioral expectations that were useful to their social systems. By contrast, for Goffman, roles were performances that were communicative actions. In the language of rational choice theory, his dramaturgy is a set of signaling devices. In this sense, performances claim to authenticate underlying competences and/or memberships. And as a result, dramaturgy and signaling theory (unlike Parsons’

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action theory) are very much concerned with both trust and deception. Goffman’s immersion in game theory came later, in large part through his friendship with Schelling. However, in the 1950s he was more influenced by existentialism – and Sartre in particular (1959: 42; 81–82). This claim is supported directly by the telling references to Sartre in PSEL and indirectly by our knowledge that Goffman spent most of 1952 living in Paris, then a hotbed for existential thought (Burns, 1992). One thread running through these different influences and extensions is a concern for motive. Goffman’s dramaturgy was a way of explaining behavior. Dramaturgy is a form of communication and signaling: it is therefore goal-directed. As he put it later in Frame Analysis (1974), we offer both benign and exploitative fabrications for our audiences, each of which presupposes that planned, strategic, rational action has been carried out with particular time horizons and audiences in mind. In the 1950s, academics of all persuasions were affected by Sigmund Freud’s accounts of people’s inner conflicts. Goffman was no exception to this trend. The title The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life resonated more clearly then than now with Freud’s popular and accessible The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1956). Even before his ethnographic project at Saint Elizabeth’s hospital, Goffman had been close friends with Elizabeth Bott, who was to become a prominent psychoanalyst in the object-relations tradition (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013: 7). Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis – and his sociology as a whole – can be profitably read as a knowledgeable response and a reasoned alternative to Freud. However, reading PSEL with Freud in mind is likely to lead to the conclusion (false by my account) that Goffman is primarily a theorist of the self rather than a theorist of social interaction. To safeguard against this, it is helpful to think of Goffman’s sociology as an attempt to develop conceptual schemes to be used in ethnographic studies not in clinical cases. Goffman was personally influenced by his advisors in graduate school, some of whom were impressed by Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic approach with its “perspective by incongruity” (P. K. Manning, 1980: 262; Smith, 2006: 21). Other advisors, such as Everett Hughes, emphasized the power of fieldwork legitimized by the earlier German influences on the first generation of Chicago sociologists. This connected Goffman directly to Georg Simmel and indirectly to Max Weber. It is also likely to have influenced his neo-Kantianism, which led him to believe that sociology has to develop its own model of science. It is clear from PSEL that Goffman claimed Simmel as an important precursor and source of legitimation for his project. Goffman described dramaturgical analysis as a framework (presumably just one among many) to be valued because of (though not validated by) its usefulness to empirical researchers and their case studies. Although Goffman’s inclination was to approach methodology and philosophy “sideways” rather than head-on, his approach implied the kind of neo-Kantian and ideal-typical approach that we now associate with Weber (see P. D. Manning, 1992; 1998: 151–162; Smith, 2006; Velody and Williams, 1998). It is also true that Goffman was influenced by the ordinary-language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle (1995, 1998), and Grice. Throughout Goffman’s work there is an appreciation for this approach, perhaps most clearly in his (sometimes

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Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology

jokey) references to Austin’s examination of everyday language use. In the 1960s, Goffman and Searle team-taught a class at Berkeley. The preface to Frame Analysis (1974) shows the great extent to which his thinking was influenced by this tradition, as of course does the posthumously published “Felicity’s Condition” (1983a), with its veiled reference to Austin.

The Emergence, Specification, and Re-emergence of Dramaturgy Although we often associate Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis with just one of his books, PSEL (1956 and 1959), the underlying idea was in his work before then and, after a respite, it made a significant reappearance in his later work, most noticeably Frame Analysis (1974) and Gender Advertisements (1976). It’s possible, therefore, to see – textually – how Goffman initially developed dramaturgical analysis and then how he came to re-evaluate it later. Jason Ditton (1980) has pointed out that the first indication of Goffman’s interest in dramaturgical sociology occurs in chapter 10 of his 1949 MA thesis concerning a radio soap opera. The beauty of dramaturgical analysis is that everyone understands it immediately: people in their everyday lives play roles, follow scripts, live on and off stage, and manage the impressions that they give to others while decoding the impression management of others. The limitations of dramaturgical analysis are the limitations of the metaphor itself. Theatrical performances are make-believe and therefore require their audience to suspend disbelief, thereby treating a performance as something real while knowing that it is not. By contrast, our everyday performances are often quite real because what people do is either constitutive of the performance itself or an accurate symbolization of an underlying competence or legitimacy. Analytically, as Alan Ryan has pointed out (2012 [1978]), there is an important difference between “depicting” and “pretending.” When I depict something, I do it as it should be done, and the doing has real consequences. When I pretend to do something, I do something else that only looks like the thing it copies and either has no real consequences or different consequences. Thus, saying “I do” in front of a priest in a wedding ceremony depicts getting married in a way that a play with a marriage scene only pretends to do. In our different spheres of activity, we must all learn to display competence in myriad ways. Early in any socialization process we will likely not be good at these activities, but that is different from saying that initially we only pretend to do them and then later we just do them. Consider Ryan’s example of a surgeon. Someone who pretends to be a surgeon is claiming two separate things: (1) a medical credential and (2) medical competence. They are separate in that you could have one and not the other: a member of the American Medical Association could be an incompetent surgeon and a carpenter who has watched a lot of YouTube videos of surgeries could be able to do a surgical procedure. The carpenter is pretending to be a surgeon but is depicting surgical skills.

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In “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1971 [1903]: 324–339) Simmel discussed the role of the Parisian “quatorzieme” who dresses for dinner every night in order to fill in for a missing dinner guest. The quatorzieme pretends to be a dinner guest (he or she is actually a paid employee) while accurately and successfully depicting a dinner guest. And yesterday’s quatorzieme is the structural forerunner of today’s shill (Goffman, 1959; 1967), who both pretends to be and also depicts a casino gambler. So, the challenge for dramaturgical analysis is to recognize that the legitimate and the illegitimate portrayer of a role depict a role in the same way even though one may also be pretending to do so. The depiction is both material and skill-based, whereas the pretense occurs because the role player either lacks an external credential and/or the requisite skills demanded of the role. However, this description suggests that the signaling and authenticating mechanisms that are the subject matter of dramaturgical analysis are, in a way that sounds paradoxical, sometimes identical to the real thing without being the real thing (if the missing element is an external credential). Goffman alternated between accounts of everyday interaction that emphasized trust and ritual accommodation and those that emphasized deception. This alternation makes good sense once we accept that the signaling mechanisms are the same for both. When Goffman emphasized the ways in which dramaturgy is deceptive he contributed to what Ricoeur (1970: 30) called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This was clearly present in his writings before PSEL. For example, in one of his early papers, “Symbols of Class Status” (1951), Goffman analyzed the ways in which symbols can be misused. Goffman argued that class symbols represent a “complex of social qualifications” (1951: 296) that are often hard to substantiate and therefore particularly vulnerable to misuse. As a result, legitimate holders of status have to find ways to authenticate the symbols they rely on in order to distinguish bona fide members of their group from imposters. Goffman outlined six devices that are intended to prevent a person from misrepresenting his or her class (1951: 297–301). He also described the role of “curator groups” that maintain the “machinery” of status. However, as Goffman emphasized, imposters can use the same devices that legitimate stakeholders use to maintain class symbols. As a result, the “circulation of symbols” (1951: 303) cannot be stopped and a “sign which is expressive for the class in which it originates comes to be employed by a different class – a class for which the symbol can signify status but ill express it” (1951: 304). Deception is also integral to the world of the confidence trickster, as explored by Goffman in “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952). This paper took the structure of the confidence trick and showed that it can be applied to any situation in which a person suffers a loss of status. In this sense the paper is an introduction to the sociology of failure. The “mark” is robbed of something and in return is given “instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss” (1952: 452). Michael Pettit explained this in a memorable phrase as the “normalization of insincerity” (2011: 147) and tracks Goffman’s arguments back to the work of David Maurer (2011: 147–149). As reflected in his dissertation, Goffman did not use dramaturgical language explicitly. Rather, he analyzed the communicative resources and social norms that preserved an intersubjective sense of social order. However, some of the elements of dramaturgical analysis are in the dissertation and it is easy to see how Goffman could

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build PSEL out of it. For example, in the conclusion to the dissertation Goffman identified three “inhibitory norms” that contribute to a continuing sense of social order: considerateness, self-control, and projective circumspection. For the last of these, Goffman commented that “the individual is obliged to conduct himself so that the impression he initially gives of himself, and which others use in building up a framework of response to him, will not be discredited later . . .” (1953: 352). Here Goffman has a fully dramaturgical view without deploying the dramaturgical concept. Insofar as PSEL emphasized pretense over depiction (to return to Ryan’s helpful distinction) it could more appropriately have been titled The Misrepresentation of Self in Everyday Life. Understood in this way, Goffman wrote a how-to textbook of deception. Particularly in the chapter on “Performances,” Goffman’s descriptions of the techniques for the “dramatic realization” of presentations of self are built out of impressions and fronts that are intentionally meant to mislead. Goffman defined a performance as “all the activity of a given participant, on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (1959: 15). He showed this using, among others, the example of a baseball umpire who must make his decisions immediately in order to give the impression that he is sure of them, thereby forgoing the moment he needs to confirm his judgments to himself (1959: 40). What is true of the individual performer is also true of the “team” that has the “character of a secret society.” Team members share the “sweet guilt of conspirators” (1959: 108). This conspiracy is confirmed in the back regions away from public view, where the team members’ front-stage performances are “knowingly contradicted” (1959: 114). PSEL was first published by the University of Edinburgh in 1956 and later expanded in readiness for publication in the United States in 1959. The two versions are substantially the same but there are two notable additions to the 1959 version: a new section to the “Performances” chapter and a revised conclusion. Both versions of the book investigate six dramaturgical principles. The first principle is the performance. There is usually a shared “belief in the performance,” as both performers and their audiences believe that what is being staged is the “real reality” (1959: 28). This belief is bolstered by appropriate “fronts,” consisting of “settings,” “expressive equipment,” and “manner” (1959: 32). Collectively, fronts present and preserve our “abstract stereotyped expectations” for particular performances (1959: 37). Fronts must be capable of “dramatic realization.” This involved a paradox in that making something appear spontaneous and relaxed is usually quite demanding. Goffman gave the example of a Vogue model whose efforts to appear cultivated left little time for reading (1959: 42). Performances are also idealizations of themselves, requiring the maintenance of expressive control in order to protect our often fragile impressions of reality (1959: 63). Idealizations are distinguishable from “misrepresentations” because performers have a legitimate claim to the performances that they idealize but not to the ones that they misrepresent (1959: 66). Goffman’s formula here is the same as Ryan’s distinction, discussed earlier, between depiction and pretense. Goffman also discussed the ways in which performances undergo “mystification.” This is achieved by keeping audiences at a distance, from which vantage point they can give credit where credit is not due. As an example,

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Goffman mentioned the advice given to the King of Norway: keep the “people” at a distance or they will be disappointed. The mystery, it turns out, is only that there is no mystery; the dramaturgical challenge is to keep this fact a secret (1959: 75–76). The 1956 “Performances” chapter ends here – but the 1959 edition contains a new section called “Reality and Contrivance” (1959: 76–82). Goffman begins by rejecting our intuitive sense of what I have previously called the “two selves thesis” (P. D. Manning, 1992). What Goffman wants to reject is the strict split between a “real, sincere” performance and a false one (1959: 77). In its place Goffman suggests that because we approach all our performances with what Merton called “anticipatory socialization” we play our roles not sincerely or falsely but by coloring in preexisting outlines of appropriate performances. To show this, Goffman pointed out that although stage acting is highly skilled and takes years of training, amateur actors with limited rehearsal time can often produce a passable “Hamlet” or “King Lear.” That they can do so suggests that “ordinary social intercourse is put together as a scene is put together” (1959: 78). As a result we are not choosing between real and false performances. Instead we are watching blended performances with both real (practiced) and false (imagined) elements. And by extension, stage acting works in the same way. In a second response to what I’ve called the two selves thesis, Goffman rejects it by suggesting that we are often unaware of elements of our own performances. He gave the following instructive example: “And when we observe a young American middle-class girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boyfriend, we are ready to point to items of guile in her behavior. But like herself and her boyfriend, we accept as an unperformed fact that the performer is a young, American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the greater part of her performance” (1959: 81). It is instructive to remember Goffman’s comment here, as Garfinkel (1967) later claimed that Goffman’s shortcoming was his inability to analyze the “nine-tenths” (1967: 173) of interaction that is not instrumentally rational. Here we can see that between the 1956 and 1959 editions of PSEL Goffman was wrestling with exactly this issue. Goffman then introduces the concept of the “team,” which he uses to show that performances are cooperative endeavors. The team has “something of the character of a secret society” (1959: 108) because its members know what is hidden from their audiences. This information is often kept in the “back regions” or “backstage,” where “front stage performances are knowingly contradicted” (1959: 114). These places must be protected from people holding “discrepant roles” who are in a position to discover and expose backstage secrets. Goffman identified five types of secret (1959: 141–143): 1. Dark secrets: Secrets incompatible with a team’s image. They are “double secrets” because they are both hidden and not admitted as possible by the team; 2. Strategic secrets: Information about what the team plans to do; 3. Entrusted secrets: Facts kept as a demonstration of trustworthiness; 4. Inside secrets: Facts which, when known, identify a person as a team member; 5. Free secrets: Facts that can be disclosed by a person without discrediting his or her performance.

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Goffman identified nine discrepant roles, the occupiers of which are in positions to discover these secrets. They are: the informer, the shill, spotters, shoppers (members of rival teams), mediators, “non-people” (such as servants), service-specialists (such as hairdressers), confidants, and colleagues (1959: 145–159). Most of these roles suggest some legitimate access to a team’s backstage. Very concisely, then, Goffman presented a conceptual scheme to be used in many empirical case studies of the ways in which we protect and destroy both highly consequential and almost inconsequential performances. We all practice “impression management” in order to protect the integrity of our performances. This is an umbrella term from his dissertation, which covers a very wide range of activities. Goffman approached it by considering occasions when impression management fails. This can occur because the performer commits an embarrassing “faux pas” that reveals something that the performer wanted to keep hidden. Impression management can also break down because an audience member decides to create a disruptive “scene” (1959: 205). At these moments, the “whole dramaturgical structure of social interaction is suddenly and poignantly laid bare” before performers rapidly retreat into their “appointed characters” (1959: 227). The 1956 version of PSEL concludes with a very cynical view of performances. In 1956 Goffman suggested that we only appear to be living in a “moral world,” when in fact we are largely concerned with the “amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized” (1956: 162; 1959: 243). The implication here is that these standards are not being realized and audiences are only duped into thinking that they are. The 1959 version has an additional conclusion called “Staging and the Self” (1959: 244–247). This section contains some of the wording that Goffman’s detractors have seized upon to criticize his account of the self, most notably his phrase suggesting that the “self is a peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung” (1959: 245). What can be missed in a rush to judgment against Goffman’s homo sociologicus is that he says later on the same page that the individual really is a reflexive being, capable of learning, with fantasies, dreams, anxiety, and dread; someone who is often in need of supportive teammates, who can be tactful, and who can be shamed. But Goffman immediately adds that such a view of the self is “psychobiological” and hence is something that is true without being a sociological concern. Goffman’s sociological view has nothing to say about this, as it is limited to the “contingencies of staging performances” (1959: 246). I take away from this clarification in the 1959 edition that the dramaturgical model is primarily a theory of communication, as it plainly was in his dissertation. We are misled when we think that Goffman has a theory of the self that is anything more than something we can find in Cooley or Mead (more so the latter). Goffman certainly thought that we act intentionally but he did not want to find a way of combining psychoanalytic and sociological theory (P. D. Manning, 2005). He was, however, very happy to think of his work as a contribution to the study of strategic interaction. Smith (2013) is right when he claims that after the publication of PSEL in 1959 it had a “shadowy existence” (2013: 67) in Goffman’s writings for a decade and a half, until the publication of his intended magnum opus, Frame Analysis (1974). Smith

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suggests that, after a long hiatus, Goffman’s frame analytic ideas contribute to what he calls “Dramaturgy2” (2013). The goal of Dramaturgy2 in this new book was not very different from the goal of PSEL: Goffman wanted to understand how we decide “what is going on here?” in our everyday encounters (1974: 8). His answer, roughly, was that we put a frame around a strip of interaction and then interpret whatever is inside the frame in such a way as to make both the frame and the strip of interaction consistent. Goffman had often used espionage examples to show the significance of getting the answer right about what is going on, and frame analysis was the end product of those reflections. In Encounters (1961b) he had argued that successful spies have an uncanny ability to identify seemingly irrelevant facts that actually cast doubt on the prevailing definition of the situation. However, Goffman did not introduce the concept of frame in Dramaturgy2 by retelling World War II espionage stories, but by describing the behavior of otters at Fleishhacker Zoo. Goffman had throughout his career made it clear that he was impressed by the detailed observations of animal behavior made by ethologists (see Smith, 2006: 52 for a useful commentary on this). In this instance he drew on the work of Gregory Bateson, but it is worth noting that Mead had also been drawn to the studies of animal behavior by his former student, John Watson. In Frame Analysis, Goffman develops an elaborate conceptual scheme out of Bateson’s observation that otters in the zoo both fight and pretend to fight in ways which are very similar but not quite the same, and that they can transfer the meaning of one situation to another (1974: 40). Switching to human behavior, Goffman argued that we make sense of any strip of interaction by using “primary frameworks.” These are either “natural” or “social.” The first assumes that what is happening is unguided by human hands and the second assumes human intervention (1974: 22). Primary frameworks can also be “keyed.” This occurs whenever the meanings of a primary framework are transformed into something that is patterned on, but independent of that framework. Keyings take at least five forms (1974: 40–82): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Make-believe: We transform a serious frame into a non-serious one. Contests: We transform danger into manageable conflict. Ceremonials: We transform an event into a representation of an event. Technical redoings: We simulate future interaction, as in a rehearsal. Regroundings: We substitute one motive for another.

Keyings can themselves by rekeyed or “laminated.” Our basic answer to the question “what is going on here?” is provided by the outermost lamination (essentially, the rim of the frame). Nevertheless, keyed and rekeyed frames are likely to cause people to doubt that they fully understand what is happening. This is further complicated because frames can be “fabricated”; that is, constructed in such a way that participants will have the wrong idea about what is going on. Fabrications can be “benign” – that is, when they exist for the benefit of the audience – or “exploitative,” when they benefit the fabricator. The first encourages, for example, a well-meaning but struggling musician by giving applause normally reserved for virtuoso performers; the latter exploits a targeted mark in a carefully rehearsed confidence trick (1974: 87–109).

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Given these vulnerabilities, Goffman argued that people have developed ways to “anchor” frames in order to ensure that a frame’s purported meaning is also its actual meaning (1974: 247–251). His analysis of the anchoring of frames anticipated the work of signaling theorists who want to explore how actors demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims by showing how expensive it was for them to signal them. And the receivers of signals count this cost when deciding whether to believe performers. However, it is also true that there is a cost to determining the cost. This means that people will often opt to believe that a frame is heavily anchored so that they can experience a strip of interaction as something uneventful, routine, and predictable. Goffman identified five such anchors, with varying degrees of heaviness (1974: 260): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Bracketing devices: Marking devices for the beginning and end of a frame. Roles: Identification of roles defines the frames. Resource continuity: Existence of traces of the activity confirm the frame. Unconnectedness: Identification of the key elements of the frame. Assumptions about human nature: Assumption of the enduring nature of personal identity.

Although frames are routinely anchored by these five devices, that is not to say that frames are invulnerable. The reasons why we believe that we know what is really going on are also the means whereby we are deceived. Goffman defined deception as consisting of the work done to ensure that “incorrect assumptions are initially made” (1974: 440). In a manner reminiscent of PSEL, Frame Analysis contains a structural and almost textbook-like account of the resources available to those wishing to deceive. As he put it: “whatever we use as a means of checking up on claims provides a detailed recipe for those inclined to cook up reality” (1974: 445). Goffman’s idea that we “cook up reality” reconciles the apparent differences between his analyses of trust and deception by showing that both make use of the same mechanisms in order to succeed. The same resources whereby we appear trustworthy are the ones used when we betray. Elsewhere (P. D. Manning, 2000) I have suggested that Goffman was not primarily interested in trust, ritual accommodation, or deception; rather, he was interested in developing a theory of credibility. Put differently, Goffman analyzed the ways in which people make their performances convincingly real. In this sense, Goffman’s work attempted to understand the resources by which we maintain a shared sense of what the world is like – even if that sense of the world is wrong.

Signaling Theory: Reconnecting Goffman to Rational Choice Theory After the French Revolution, British aristocrats were understandably anxious to distance themselves from their French counterparts (Murray, 1998: 7–8). The British aristocracy were alarmed by the prospect of similarly dire class warfare on their own soil. As a result, and as their own inverted version of Marx and

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Engels’ 1848 declaration that there is a simple “us and them” class division, aristocrats wanted to be sure that they knew who was really part of the “us.” In 1826, the first publication of Burke’s Peerage offered the landed well-to-do with near definitive proof of membership. However, there are many situations when it is not practical to do a full background check on a recent acquaintance. As a result, extraordinarily elaborate clothing serves as a symbolic stand-in for Burke’s Peerage. Meeting someone by chance and without introduction, an aristocrat could quickly evaluate the likelihood that this person was one of his own by recognizing the cut and quality of his clothes. Getting dressed became so elaborate that it required costume changes during the day and full-time help. What better way to keep both the riff-raff and the revolutionaries out? There is no doubt that clothing then as now was also motivated by fashion, by class and gendered expectations, and by aesthetics, practicality, conspicuous consumption, and vanity. However, for my purposes, what was critical about the aristocracy’s nineteenth-century use of clothing and fashion was its role as a signaling and authenticating mechanism. Of course, any signaling and authenticating mechanism, like any code, can be broken or hacked. Today’s high-priced designer dresses are reproduced for the mass market with impressive speed. This counterfeit is possible because of an economy of scale: many people want to buy a knock-off of a dress that someone famous wore to the Oscars. To defend against this possibility, a reliable authentication mechanism has to present a high cost of entry for would-be copiers. In this sense, Burke’s Peerage is the gold standard: to get in you have to marry your way into a titled family and that will likely cost a lot of dowry dollars. But expensive clothing that someone could not easily have put on alone (such as a corset) is an approximation of this process. The development of signaling theory in the last twenty years has extended dramaturgical analysis by considering the structure of the situation that troubled these nineteenth-century aristocrats. In particular, Diego Gambetta has studied signaling theory in a manner that is reminiscent of Goffman at his very best. Like Goffman, Gambetta is able to generate a conceptual scheme and a vocabulary with which we are able to compare signaling strategies of apparently very different groups. Gambetta is able to move easily between examples of the behavior of mafia foot soldiers, taxi cab drivers, prostitutes, kidnap victims, and Internet child pornographers. Although he makes only occasional references to Goffman, it is difficult to read him without being reminded of both the style and the content of Goffman’s work. Just as Goffman’s own debt to Everett Hughes went largely unacknowledged, Gambetta has traced the origins of his own work to sources away from sociology – despite his own graduate training at the University of Cambridge where he worked with one of Goffman’s greatest admirers, Anthony Giddens. Also, like Goffman, Gambetta has taken inspiration for his work from both the detailed observations of animal behavior carried out by ethologists and from Schelling’s quirky, insightful analyses of strategic interaction. However, in an overview of signaling theory, Gambetta downplayed Goffman’s significance in both his own thinking and in the development of signaling theory more generally. In fact, Gambetta has dismissed the link as more or less a phantom that (only) sociologists think of whenever signaling theory is mentioned (2009a:

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191). However, it may be that he is less sure than he seems, as elsewhere he has praised Goffman, suggesting that he has cleverly explored the “fine line” between intended messages and those given off inadvertently (2009b: xvi). Gambetta goes on to distinguish his work from Goffman’s on the narrow grounds that his approach concerns only intended signals. This latter statement of Gambetta’s is very helpful. I want to suggest broadly that signaling theory is concerned with the same dramaturgical communication issues that Goffman emphasized, from his dissertation to Frame Analysis. That is, how can signalers and receivers of signals be confident that they have understood what is going on and have not been misled? In some instances, the dramaturgical problem is that signalers must demonstrate to the satisfaction of their audiences that a specific signal really does symbolize what it claims to symbolize. In other instances, the dramaturgical problem is for the receiver of the signal to smell a rat. Gambetta distinguishes a signal from a sign. Signals are purposive communication, usually but not always directed to a particular person or audience. Signs are anything in the environment that can be perceived and that by being perceived might modify someone’s beliefs, and as such they will normally not be directed to a particular person or audience (2009a: 170). I take signs to be equivalent to fronts in PSEL. Gambetta argues that the main discovery of signaling theory is that we should usually believe a signal if both (a) the emission cost to a legitimate signaler is low enough, relative to benefit, to make it rational to send it and (b) the emission cost to an illegitimate signaler is high enough, relative to benefit, that it is irrational to send it (2009a: 173). Or, put more simply, signals that we judge to be “too costly to fake” should be taken as genuine. To revert back to PSEL for a moment, I take Gambetta to mean that a presentation of self is real if the cost of faking that presentation of self to an imposter is judged to be too high for that given actor. In Codes of the Underworld (2009b) Gambetta presents two separate but interrelated theories. The first considers “costly signals,” the second “conventional signals.” In the first case, Gambetta argues that there are many instances in which signalers want to signal the fact that it is in their best interests to be truthful and/or that even if the signalers wanted to deceive, their hands are now tied and so they cannot deceive despite themselves (2009b: xvi–xvii). This describes the “too-costlyto-fake” scenarios mentioned earlier. Under ideal conditions, the prohibitive cost of a signal makes it discriminating, separating, and sorting. This means that the receiver of a signal can have absolute confidence that the signaler is the real deal. For example, when the leader of the opposing army drinks the wine first, the rival leader can believe that the chalice is not poisoned. However, most situations contain signals that are not discriminating, separating, and sorting, but are only “pooling.” These “semi-sorting” signals are evidence that the signaler is credible but the signal itself is not conclusive evidence. In the criminal underworld, the stakes are high enough that signalers will go to extraordinary lengths to convince people that what they claim is true. Gambetta showed this by discussing the conclusion reached by a former CIA operative that it is all but impossible to fake the signals needed to infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups (2009b: 25). By contrast, in the everyday world described by

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Goffman, the stakes are normally much lower and therefore it is necessary to evaluate the less-than-ideal semi-sorted signals that are both routinely encountered and routinely fabricated. It is the structure of too-costly-to-fake performances that underpins the decisions that people make in assessing what to believe and what to discount. Goffman had emphasized that receivers of signals are trying to determine whether particular elements of a performance have been “given off” – and hence credible – or “given” but in such a way as to create the illusion of being given off. These performances, of course, should be discounted. Gambetta makes the same observation very clearly: “What is ultimately being mimicked is a certain property, k, that the mimic does not possess. What is being lied about, imitated, copied or forged along the way are signs associated with k, which leave the impression of possessing k” (2009b: xvii). Of course, sometimes the sincerity of the performance or the truth of the signal is not at issue. The problem instead is the mundane one that we all face: we would like to signal something to someone in such a way that only the intended recipient can understand the transmission. In the everyday world, a transmission error might cause someone embarrassment: in the criminal world it may cause someone to be arrested, or worse. Gambetta distinguished three problems to be solved by what he calls “conventional symbols” (2009b: 149–150): (1) the communication problem, (2) the identification problem, and (3) the advertising problem. For the first, the solution is to make sure that only accredited team members can receive and understand the signal. For the second, the solution is to signal something that will enable the signaler to identify accredited but unknown team members while not alerting third parties to the transmission. For the third, the solution is to signal the availability of goods and services to an undifferentiated pool of potential consumers in such a way that people who are not potential consumers will either not receive the signal or not be able to understand it. Contingent signals are attractive because they are only arbitrarily connected to their signifieds and are therefore usually cheap to emit because the meaning of the signal is settled by private agreement. Contingent signals are also efficient as long as the receiver can detect the signal from background noise, discriminate one signal from another, and memorize the signal’s meaning easily (2009b: 153).

Ethnomethodological Applications: Agnes Harold Garfinkel (1967) intended his case study of Agnes to introduce ethnomethodological thinking with an appealing empirical demonstration of its approach. In so doing, Garfinkel was anxious to show the ways in which his approach improved upon Goffman’s dramaturgical theory. However, many of Garfinkel’s early critics, such as James Coleman (1968), were less interested in these nuances and more concerned to highlight what they saw as gross errors. In particular, Coleman was memorably uncharitable, concluding that Garfinkel’s labored writing and methodological naivety amount to a travesty of professional social science. Later evaluations by sympathetic readers have stayed clear of what we might think of as

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a “forensic” response to Garfinkel. Instead they have stressed Garfinkel’s insightful analysis of Agnes’ accomplishments as a practical methodologist. I would like to begin by presenting a summary and timeline of the Agnes case study before considering Garfinkel’s attempt to distinguish ethnomethodology from dramaturgy. Agnes was treated at UCLA medical center between November 1958 and August 1959. Agnes had been raised as a boy but as a teenager had developed secondary sex characteristics. She told the staff at UCLA that she was not seeking a sex change operation because she was already female. Rather, she had a penis – which she likened to a wart – that she wanted the surgeons to remove. Following castration, Agnes wanted the surgeons to harvest skin from her penis and scrotum to be used to make an artificial vagina. Her family physician had contacted Dr. Robert Stoller, seeking assistance with the case. At that time Dr. Stoller was a junior researcher at UCLA. When he first met Agnes he was thirty-four years old and beginning his professional career in clinical psychology. Dr. Stoller referred Agnes to his colleague, the psychiatrist Alexander Rosen. Dr. Rosen was himself at the beginning of a successful career at UCLA as a specialist in alcoholism and gender issues. He was thirty-five years old. Harold Garfinkel joined his two colleagues for a series of Saturday morning interviews, during which Agnes was interviewed extensively by them. Garfinkel was the most junior of the three, but actually the oldest (he was forty-one). These weekly sessions lasted from November 1958 to August 1959. Garfinkel reported that Agnes was not always cooperative during these sessions (1967: 175). This may have been because she thought that she was on trial, and any wrong answer could lead the hospital to deny her request for surgery. It is also possible that she resented being used as a guinea pig for Stoller, Rosen, and Garfinkel, all of whom wanted to use her experiences to help them theorize about the acquisition of gender. However, it was paramount for Agnes to obtain the surgery at no or little cost, and she seemed to accept that the Saturday morning interviews were part payment for the surgery (1967: 175). It is possible to construct a timeline for the events described in Garfinkel’s case study of Agnes: 1939 Agnes is born and issued a birth certificate as a male Jun. 1956 As a seventeen-year-old (boy), drops out of high school Aug. 1956 Visits her grandmother in the Midwest, arriving dressed as a boy and leaving dressed as a girl – the emergence of Agnes Dec. 1956 Starts work in her hometown as a typist Aug. 1957 Moves to Los Angeles with girlfriends. Lives in the suburbs while working downtown Dec. 1957 Moves downtown to be close to work Feb. 1958 Starts dating Bill Mar. 1958 Quits her job Apr. 1958 Moves to the San Fernando Valley to be close to Bill

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(cont.) Apr. 1958 Visits home and meets with her family physician Jun. 1958 Tells Bill “everything” about her condition Nov. 1958 First appointment at UCLA Medical Center. At some point she is diagnosed as suffering from “testicular feminization syndrome” Nov. 1958 Starts Saturday morning interview sessions with Dr. Stoller (clinical psychologist), Dr. Rosen (psychiatrist), and Harold Garfinkel (sociologist) Mar. 1959 Castration operation Aug. 1959 Saturday morning interview sessions end Oct. 1966 Agnes visits Dr. Stoller and tells him that her secondary sex characteristics were the result of her decision to take Stilbestrol – an estrogen replacement drug that had been prescribed to her mother. The initial diagnosis of testicular feminization syndrome was therefore wrong Feb. 1967 Stoller reports his meeting with Agnes to Garfinkel 1967 Garfinkel writes a short appendix to chapter 5 for his soon-to-be-published Studies in Ethnomethodology, where he briefly considers the implications of Agnes’ revelations for his argument

For non-ethnomethodologists, the decisive finding of this timeline is that it shows that three highly regarded researchers could be duped by a nineteen-year-old who had barely graduated high school and who worked as a typist. In fact, it shows that Agnes was able to hide the truth from them for about ten months, answering their many questions every Saturday morning in a manner which protected her presentation of self as an unfortunate young woman in need of a pro bono surgery to correct a rare congenital disorder. Upon learning that Agnes’ condition was actually caused by a medication, Stilbestrol, that she had stolen from her mother, Stoller commented: “My chagrin at learning this was matched by my amusement that she could have pulled off this coup with such skill” (reported by Garfinkel, 1967: 288). Many sociologists have not shared in Stoller’s amusement – instead they have been bewildered. How could Agnes have got away with so grandiose a deception? Were the three researchers just incompetent? It is now clear that they certainly accepted Agnes’ accounts as factual readouts of the world rather than as just a plausible account of it. Had Stoller, Rosen, and Garfinkel thought clearly about the case, I think it is obvious that they should have been concerned about the lack of corroboration for Agnes’ account. Significantly, Agnes forbade them to talk to her mother or her three older siblings. (Ironically, after her “confession” to Stoller in 1966, one of the first things she offered to do was to introduce him to her mother.) There is also no evidence that Garfinkel or his colleagues interviewed Bill, even though he was on hand and figured heavily in their deliberations. As the case study made clear, Garfinkel considered Bill to be an unremarkable workingclass boyfriend who just wanted to have sex with Agnes as a natural part of their relationship. Apparently, on discovering in June 1958 that his girlfriend had a penis and had grown up as an unremarkable boy, Bill, we are led to believe, was willing to wait and be supportive of Agnes, all the while training her in the

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finer arts of womanly behavior. Could Bill have existed as Agnes described him? Was he an accomplice, a mentor, a fiction Agnes invented to explain the need for expedited surgery? Garfinkel does reveal that in his interviews with Agnes, “Bill was discussed in every conversation” (1967: 157). However, Garfinkel’s lack of first-hand knowledge of Bill was revealed when he commented: “Following the operation we obtained an account of Bill’s appearance and manner from the urological intern and resident who had attended her case. The resident had encountered Bill one day when Bill was leaving her hospital room” (1967: 160). Tellingly, the resident had objected to the surgery, claiming that it was neither necessary nor ethical, since Agnes’ physical condition had likely been caused by an exogenous source of estrogens (1967: 160). At least with regard to the cause, the resident was right. Ethnomethodologists have generally been much more impressed by Garfinkel’s account of Agnes. For example, John Heritage’s (1984) well-known assessment downplayed the research team’s mistakes and emphasized the ways in which Garfinkel showed the importance of studying the details whereby a gendered identity is made “accountable” (i.e. intelligible). Heritage accurately conveys Agnes as a practical methodologist who learned to portray herself to her audiences as an unremarkable woman. Heritage therefore emphasized Garfinkel’s accounts of Agnes’ passing strategies: she learned how to act during group dates, how to live with a roommate, how to act demurely during physical exams, how to appear as a future daughter-in-law and so on (1967: 137–146). Critically, passing for Agnes was an ongoing accomplishment involving a delicate combination of doing and learning to do: “Agnes was required to live up to the standards of conduct, appearance, skills, feelings, motives and aspirations while simultaneously learning what these standards were” (1967: 147). Garfinkel emphasized that these passing strategies could not be accounted for by Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis. Goffman’s weakness, according to Garfinkel, was that he could only analyze the social world episodically. This allows people to have time-outs during which they can think about their actions and reconstruct them using an “inner time” (1967: 166). However, in real time, there are no time-outs with which to produce the masterful performances implied by Goffman’s dramaturgy. For Garfinkel, Goffman is a sociologist who always assumed that we are performing in a calculated, preplanned way. Garfinkel suggested, rather awkwardly as it turned out, that Goffman is always there, interviewing his subjects by asking “Why don’t you confess?” (1967: 174). Why didn’t Garfinkel question whether Agnes had anything to confess? It is true that he often commented that her appearance was “convincingly female” and this perhaps left him wanting to believe her story. Interestingly, it is also true that he recognized that Agnes was an “accomplished liar” (1967: 174) while still believing that Agnes wasn’t lying to him. However, the analytic reason why he didn’t push for a confession is that Garfinkel believed that in our everyday behavior we are less selfaware than Goffman suggested. Hence Garfinkel did not believe that people can confess to impression management: this is because much of what they do is part of a taken-for-granted substrate of practical knowledge. Impression management is not

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usually pure, strategic interaction but a blend of taken-for-granted knowledge and intentional behavior. But not so for Agnes: as Garfinkel put it, she was “not afforded that luxury” (1967: 175). Although Garfinkel presented himself as the antidote to Parsonian sociology (although Parsons had been his dissertation advisor), his account of the limitations of dramaturgical analysis owes a lot to Parsons’ argument in The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]). Garfinkel argued that the tip of the iceberg of the conduct of everyday affairs is the “one-tenth” of our behavior that is instrumentally rational, while the nine-tenths that remain invisible consist of “unquestioned” and “unquestionable” background assumptions (1967: 173). These background assumptions are relevant to strategic action without ever being noticed. Like Parsons before him, Garfinkel invoked Durkheim’s view that noncontractual elements of a contract are essential because the terms of a “binding contract” are “essentially unstatable.” As a result, if there was no recourse to solidifying general assumptions, all contracts would be constantly litigated. Garfinkel’s argument, made with explicit appeal to Durkheim and Weber, mirrored Parsons’ own view that the neoclassical economics found in Alfred Marshall’s work underestimated the prestructuring role of norms and values in otherwise instrumentally rational decision-making. The appendix to chapter five must have been very awkward for Garfinkel to write. Stoller could have helped him out by informing him of Agnes’ retraction in October 1966 rather than waiting until February 1967 to give him the bad news. By then, Studies in Ethnomethdology was going to press and it was presumably impossible to rewrite the seventy or so pages of the case study of Agnes. Instead, Garfinkel added a four-page appendix, drawing heavily on Stoller’s account of Agnes. He then added his own takeaway lessons. The first of these lessons was a reiteration of a theme of the chapter – that our performances are practical, ongoing accomplishments. The second was written in near-impenetrable prose. However, a free translation of Garfinkel at his obscurest is as follows: in order to deceive people we have to identify those features of the social world that they believe are stable and objective – and then manipulate those features to create a desired illusion (1967: 288). That does appear to be what Agnes did and that is what she had to confess. And her confession left Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology much closer to the action theory of Parsons and the dramaturgy of Goffman than he wanted it to be. However, perhaps Garfinkel’s criticisms of Goffman were wrong from the beginning – and wrong for a reason. Goffman, like Parsons, built conceptual schemes that implied an analytic dualism between concept and application (see P. D. Manning, 2016). Goffman’s dramaturgy was attractive because it was a pattern elaborative theory (what I have elsewhere called “PET proof”). That is, Goffman’s dramaturgical concepts – the performance, the front, impression management, the front stage, backstage, and guarded passageway and so on – are all off-the-shelf concepts that can be slotted into many sociological studies. Other sociologists can elaborate and exemplify Goffman’s conceptual scheme. What ethnomethodology brought to social science could be another conceptual scheme, more or less like action theory and dramaturgy – but it could be something very different. What I mean by this is that Garfinkel alerted social scientists to the possibility of doing highly detailed

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observational studies of the practical accomplishment of all aspects of everyday life. However, although he alerted social scientists to the need for this kind of research, he didn’t do it very well. His account of Agnes contains many thin descriptions of Agnes managing different social settings, but he did not analyze any of these examples in any detail. How could he? He had no data other than Agnes’ own carefully constructed verbal accounts of her own behavior. But Garfinkel did point us in the direction to advance dramaturgical analysis: by the close observation of the real-time realizations of the concepts that Goffman developed. This is the argument developed by Emanuel Schegloff (1988), who argues that Goffman’s dramaturgy and his sociology in general appear to be empirical when, on closer inspection, they turn out to contain little more than hundreds of clippings and “darting” observations. These are used to convince us that his many conceptual distinctions are important and useful (1988: 101). And, Schegloff adds, if a particular example fails to convince, we simply move on to the next one. Schegloff has correctly placed Goffman with the theorists instead of with the ethnographers. I think Schegloff is right in detail but wrong in implication. He is right in detail because one way to develop dramaturgical analysis is to use it in very detailed case studies. This is what I think Garfinkel had an opportunity to do but fell short. It is what Schegloff and his colleagues have done so well in their work as part of the second wave of ethnomethodology. However, I believe that we should not conclude that we can proceed without conceptual schemes – and my concern is that Schegloff’s insistence on detailed empirical description can be taken to mean that conceptual schemes are useless. This is not the case: they are important sets of tentative generalizations and tell-able stories that can be subjected to intense empirical investigation. Imagine trying to do ethnography without conceptual schemes: there would be no procedure for fact elimination and so all details of all observed occasions could be judged to be equally relevant. However, a dramaturgical conceptual scheme that is used in the empirical investigation of Agnes will need detailed descriptions of, for example, the impression management needed to display gender during cooking lessons with a possible future mother-in-law. In turn, this can lead to a reconstruction of dramaturgy. However, it is also possible that a smart theorist will reconstruct the conceptual scheme of dramaturgy in exactly the same way that Goffman initially constructed it. Garfinkel failed to deliver the first of these options, Gambetta the second.

After Goffman I have argued that as a result of Parsons’ centrality in the development of sociological theory, our understanding of sociological theory began as a response to the limitations of economic thought. Famously, in Parsons’ view, an agent’s norms and values decisively intervene to prevent ruthless instrumental rationality. Parsons later developed his own role analysis and soon after, Goffman offered an edgier version of role analysis himself, one that was more firmly embedded in a theatrical understanding of everyday behavior. Economists have traditionally been quite

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willing to develop conceptual schemes, as long as their central claims can be presented mathematically. More recently, economic-like conceptual schemes that owe a lot to Schelling have emerged that pose questions and conundrums without a sophisticated mathematical underbelly. Diego Gambetta, George Ainslie, and Jon Elster are three fine examples of this trend, as is the collective work of the members of the Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. Assuming varying degrees of rationality, these approaches have investigated instrumental and strategic decisionmaking under various time horizons. Their work often shows that a variety of factors or mechanisms intervene to prevent agents from maximizing their utility. Goffman’s own conceptual scheme – his dramaturgy – can be understood against this backcloth. Its development was consciously allied with Parsons’ work. Goffman wanted to analyze the strategic uses of performances to bring about certain preferred outcomes. That remained true whether the performances in question were sincere or cynical, their frames benign or exploitative. When understood dramaturgically, the social world contains many semiotically rich scenes in which agents signal to each other in order to bring about preferred outcomes. Those people who like to remember Goffman as a streetwise existentialist point out that dramaturgical performances can be deceptive and inauthentic. But the dramaturgical machinery that leads audiences to misinterpret some signs and signals turns out to be the same machinery that is used to inform them in a legitimate and true way. Since signaling theorists have been more impressed by rational choice ideas than by dramaturgical ones, they have been more drawn to the investigation of the payoffs of sincere and cynical performances. They have often concluded that, given a longer time horizon, it is often rational for agents to signal true information and to act honorably. Had they been more impressed by dramaturgical theory, they may have been more interested in the detailed examination of the techniques whereby signals and signs are circulated in environments containing very different audiences. In this chapter I have suggested that this detailed examination involves more than just a conceptual scheme: it requires detailed, often ethnographic and ethnomethodological observations. I suggested that for all its interest, Garfinkel’s pioneering ethnomethodological investigation of Agnes’ passing techniques was surprisingly short of finely observed descriptions of the many means by which Agnes persuaded her diverse audiences that she really was an unremarkable woman. Garfinkel’s case study is therefore very important because it indicated one promising direction for sociological research beyond Goffman’s dramaturgical conceptual scheme. But critically, it fell short, because it only indicated the direction: it did not demonstrate what ethnomethodologists could discover. That task fell to the ethnomethodologists who came after Garfinkel. For example, Max Atkinson’s Our Masters’ Voices (1985) is an ethnomethodological masterpiece that reveals the performance mechanisms of political speeches. Atkinson shows us – step by step – the theatrical nuts and bolts that are needed to produce an applause-generating political speech. There is a sentimental view that Goffman was a one-of-a-kind genius. This is a risky thing, as it can lead to theoretical defeatism. One of the things that is refreshing about reading Gambetta, someone I take to be a reluctant dramaturgical theorist, is that he has advanced our understanding of dramaturgy by working in

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a very similar way to the way Goffman worked himself: he developed a conceptual scheme, a vocabulary, and a rich set of suggestive examples that are now being subjected to detailed examination. Gambetta’s work has the added benefit of reconnecting sociological and dramaturgical theory to its beginnings in economic theory. After Goffman, therefore, we should find greater specification of the conceptual scheme of dramaturgy, an improved sense of the ethnomethodological specification of dramaturgical performances, and a better grasp of the signaling mechanisms whereby dramaturgical communication is evaluated.

References Atkinson, M. 1985. Our Masters’ Voices. London: Routledge. Burns, T. 1992. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Coleman, James. 1968. “Book review of Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology.” American Sociological Review 33(1): 126–130. Ditton, J. (ed.). 1980. The View from Goffman. London and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, S. 1956. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 6. Edited and translated by J. Strachey et al., 24 volumes. London: Hogarth Press. Gambetta, D. 2009a. “Signaling.” In Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology (pp. 168–194). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2009b. Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Glover, J. 1988. The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London: Allen Lane. Goffman, E. 1951. “Symbols of Class Status.” British Journal of Sociology (11): 294–304. 1952. “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.” Psychiatry 15 (4): 451–463. 1953. “Communication Conduct in an Island Community.” PhD. dissertation, University of Chicago. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. 1961a. Asylums. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row. 1983a. “Felicity’s Condition.” American Journal of Sociology 89(1): 1–53. 1983b. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48(1): 1–17.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. MacIntyre, A. 1982. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Manning, P. D. 1992. Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998. “Procedure, Reflexivity and Social Constructionism.” In Irving Velody and Robin Williams (eds.), The Politics of Constructivism (pp. 159–167). London: Sage. 2000. “Credibility, Agency and the Interaction Order.” Symbolic Interaction 23(3): 283–297. 2005. Freud and American Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2016. “Goffman and Empirical Research.” Symbolic Interaction 39(1): 143–152. Manning, P. K. 1980. “Goffman’s Framing Order: Style as Structure.” In Jason Ditton (ed.), The View From Goffman. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Murray, V. 1998. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. New York: Penguin Books. Parsons, T. 1949 [1937]. The Structure of Social Action, vols. 1 and 2. New York: The Free Press. 1951. The Social System. New York: The Free Press. Parsons, T. and Edward A. Shils (eds.). 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. New York: The Free Press. Pettit, M. 2011. “The Con Man as Model Organism: The Methodological Roots of Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Self.” History of the Human Sciences 24(2): 138–154. Ricoeur, P. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Ryan, A. 2012 [1978]. The Making of Modern Liberalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schegloff, E. 1988. “Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation.” In P. Drew and A. Wootten (eds.), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order (pp. 89–135). Cambridge, UK: Polity. Searle, J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. 1998. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Books. Sennett, R. 1970. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Free Press. Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1903]. On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited and introduced by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, G. 1997. “Incivil Attention and Everyday Intolerance: Vicissitudes of Exercising in Public Places.” Perspectives on Social Problems 9: 57–79. 2006. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. 2013. “The Dramaturgical Legacy of Erving Goffman.” In Charles Edgley (ed.), The Drama of Social Life: An Interactionist Handbook (pp. 57–71). New York: Routledge. Wilshire, Bruce. 1982. “The Dramaturgical Model of Behavior: Its Strengths and Weaknesses.” Symbolic Interaction 5(2): 287–298. Winkin, Yves, and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. 2013. Erving Goffman: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Velody, Irving, and Robin Williams (eds.).1998. The Politics of Constructivism. London: Sage.

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Further Reading Bulmer, M. 1984. The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Drew, P., and A. Wootten (eds.) 1988. Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Fine, G. (ed.) 1995. A Second Chicago School? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fine, G., and P. Manning. 2000. “Erving Goffman: Shifting Impressions and Tight Frames.” In George Ritzer (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (pp. 457–485). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Freud, S. 1926. On the Question of Lay Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 20 (pp. 177–258). Edited and translated by J. Strachey et al., 24 volumes. London: Hogarth Press. Jaworski, G. 2000. “Erving Goffman: The Reluctant Apprentice.” Symbolic Interaction 23(3): 299–308. Lyman, S., and M. Scott. 1970. A Sociology of the Absurd. New York: Meredith Corporation. 1975. The Drama of Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Manning, P. D. 1991. “Drama as Life: The Significance of Goffman’s Changing Use of the Dramaturgical Metaphor.” Sociological Theory 9(1): 71–86. Marx, G. 1984. “Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman.” Theory and Society 13(5): 649–662. Verhoeven, J. 1993. “An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 26(3): 317–348.

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This chapter on structuralism in the social sciences will be organized as follows. The various notions of the terms structure, social structure, and structuralism will be presented and discussed. It may be opportune to recall here Boudon’s distinction between two notions of structure, to which correspond two alternative definitions of this term (cf. Boudon, 1968). According to an intentional definition, the term refers to a set of consistent, interrelated, and interdependent characters of the study object. Alternatively, according to an effective definition the term of structure refers to a theory which is in principle verifiable; which is deemed useful to the literature on structuralism in keeping with an effective definition of these notions; and which accounts for these characters. Structural analysis – if structure is effectively defined – aims to “capture certain of the fundamental properties” of the study object (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 5), and impinges on the concepts of deep structure and transformational rules. In this sense of structure, the term points to the apparent consequences of a set of theoretical presuppositions. On the other hand, structure in the former sense (intentional definition) connotes what has been called traditional structuralism (Rossi, 1982: 12–13). It indicates a system of empirically observable relations between the members of a given collectivity, and focuses on surface structures. We shall here first consider the literature that abides by the notions of structure and social structure in the sense of systems of relations, and then dwell on effective definitions of structure.1

Intentional Definitions of Structure Most, if not all, of such definitions have been formulated by Anglo-Saxon or Anglicized social scientists of European origins. Sociologists have perhaps been more concerned than most anthropologists with attempts to elucidate this notion, but we shall here present formulations on the part of representatives of both disciplines. Homans’ contribution should be perhaps mentioned first as it explicitly builds on Boudon’s, and clarifies the different meanings of the notion of structure as intentionally defined (cf. Homans, 1976). This notion, according to Homans, refers to persistent aspects of social behavior which are deemed to be the fundamental characteristics of a social whole, conceived of as a system. Homans was apparently unaware of an earlier contribution by the French anthropologist Roger Bastide (1972 [1962]). 250

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Bastide presented several distinct definitions of structure by anthropologists and sociologists, and concluded that this concept has two quite different meanings, for it may refer either to real or to latent social relations. Accordingly, Bastide anticipated Boudon’s aforementioned distinction between intentional and effective definitions of structure. Merton, Lipset, Coleman, and Blau are thought to represent a perspective that seeks to combine “macrosociological and microsociological analysis while avoiding extreme versions of either” (Blau, 1976a: 19). In this connection we shall focus on Merton and Blau, and on a few other authors such as Coser and RadcliffeBrown, who have formulated notions of structure, and of social structure in particular, that are in keeping with an intentional definition. Merton is a structural theorist in – it has been remarked – “the distinctly sociological sense of structural analysis, in the tradition of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown” (Blau, 2012: 117). In his interpretation of Merton’s theory of social structure Arthur Stinchcombe has laid stress on “basic linking processes” (Stinchcombe, 2012 [1975]: 12–13) that connect structural factors to given alternatives of choice behavior. According to Merton there is, Stinchcombe argues, a twofold choice between alternatives which are socially structured by means of institutional patterns. On the one hand, “institutional consequences of action act back to shape the nature of the alternatives that people are posed with.” On the other hand, institutional patterns that shape individual action alternatives “become imprinted as basic character associations” (Stinchcombe, 2012 [1975]: 13). Merton’s conception of structural analysis in sociology seems to be more complex, however. Merton stresses the different intellectual roots of this version of structural analysis, and its divergence from that which has been formulated by Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Piaget, and others. His own image of social structure is one of “configurations of social relations among statuses and roles” (Blau, 1976a: 11). Merton makes the following points which bear on his notion of structural analysis: (1) Norm-sets constitute the social structure in conjunction with other and interlocking elements, such as differentiated social statuses, strata, organizations, and communities. (2) Different and contradictory norm-sets are a source of ambivalence in norm-based conducts. (3) This ambivalence causes deviance and social conflict. (4) Structural analysis “has a plurality of theoretical orientations,” to the effect that different paradigms and theories are compatible with it (Merton, 1976: 39), and is therefore able to investigate a variety of problems in accordance with a plurality of paradigms (Merton, 1976, 48). For Merton, the most important task of structural analysis involves investigating the institutional opportunities and constraints that affect the behavioral patterns of individuals and of collectivities (cf. Sztompka, 1990: 56–57). Parsons has declared himself “in very close agreement with Merton’s position,” insofar as the latter’s critique of functional analysis is concerned (Parsons, 2012 [1975]: 73). He has pointed to some differences between them, but has not mentioned structural analysis as one of such differences, and the subject of structural analysis does not seem to have occupied a central place in his work as a social theorist. This subject is of central relevance for Merton, however. In his major work, Merton has dwelt on structural constraints; namely, on the normative and

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institutional constraints which the social structure exerts on individual personalities in different settings and circumstances (Merton, 1968). This concept “has been of central significance in Merton’s theoretical analyses throughout,” as his Columbia University colleague P. M. Blau has stated (Blau, 2012: 117). Merton’s structural analysis is akin to that conducted by Blau himself, and in fact these two authors have coauthored an important work on structural analysis (Merton and Blau, 1981). According to Blau, a naturalized American sociologist who was born in Austria, traditional definitions may be distinguished according to their specific approach; namely, what concept was placed in opposition to structure, its mental image, where it is rooted – whether in psychological impulses or elsewhere – and “the range of social phenomena encompassed by the sociological perspective” (Blau, 1976a: 18–19). Blau has made use of this taxonomy to classify contributions to a definition and a theory of social structure, including his own (Blau, 1976a: 16–18). Social structure, as Blau sees it, is a notion that refers to “population distributions among social positions along various line-positions that affect people’s role relations and social interaction” (1976b: 221; see also 2012: 31). His conception of social structure impinges on parameters that “differentiate social status along various lines” (Blau, 2012: 131). As Blau maintains, the fundamental goal of constructing a theory of social structure involves individuating the structural parameters – heterogeneity, inequality, and intersecting of social differences – which delineate the distribution of people among social positions, and which therefore determine the constraints and opportunities for social relations (cf. Blau, 1974; 1977: IX, 4, 6–11, 246, 276–277; 1987: 75–79; 1994: 8–11, 13–15, 25). Social structure “is rooted in the social distinctions people make in their role relations and associations with one another. These social distinctions give rise to differences in roles and positions, which in turn influence subsequent social intercourse” (Blau, 1977: 3). The degree of complexity of the social structure depends on the number of social positions among which a population is distributed, and therefore, on the number of the structural parameters and on the degree of intersection (absence of correlation) among them (Blau, 1977: 260–261; 1994: 50–51). Structural analysis focuses on “emergent properties” pertaining to the composition of social structure and to the relations among its constitutive elements, and cannot be therefore detected by a separate examination of these elements (Blau, 1964: 3–4; 1981: 9–10; 1982: 278–279; 1994: 11–15, 104–105). Blau’s sociological structuralism has stimulated scholarly interest and a secondary literature (cf. in particular Calhoun and Scott, 1990; Calhoun, Meyer, and Scott, 1990). We shall not linger here on it, except to mention Giddens’ stricture that Blau’s structural approach has failed to consider how structural properties, or “parameters,” can affect “the mechanisms of social reproduction” (Giddens, 1984: 212). Blau, in other words, has neglected to pay attention to how individual actors allocate sense to what they do in the course of their interactions with others. Giddens provides his own, intentionally defined and rather well known concept of structure as “ruleresource sets, involved in the institutional articulation of social systems” (Giddens, 1984: 185). As he has put it elsewhere, structure “is both the medium and outcome of the practices which constitute social systems” (Giddens, 1981: 27). Giddens dwells

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at some length on the notion of structure; not, however, on the specificity of social structure. In anthropology, the latter notion, also intentionally defined, was familiar to the twentieth-century anglophone anthropologists. However, they did not always define either this notion, or the related one of structure. As a case in point, George H. Murdock in one of his major works referred to social structure frequently (Murdock, 1949: 135–137), and even thus titled this work, but he refrained from clearly indicating its meaning. The British anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown may be considered an exception to this tendency. Social structure, he maintained, is connoted by specific attributes of social groups such as the persistence of the network of their social relations, despite the continuous inflow and outflow of their members, and the internal differentiation by their social roles (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952). Yet another relevant exception was S. F. Nadel. Nadel, like Radcliffe-Brown, was a British anthropologist who had a profound interest in the notion and theory of social structure, and significantly contributed to this field of studies. We shall refer here to Nadel insofar as this theory is concerned (Nadel, 2004 [1957]). Nadel endeavored to formulate an abstract theory that leads to highly comparable and quantifiable data. Social roles, which are its component elements, are conceived of as interdependent sets of instructions, or briefs, by virtue of which individuals enact coherent behaviors toward each other. A social structure contains patterns and networks of role relationships. Patterns are “any orderly distribution of relationships exclusively on the grounds of their similarity and dissimilarity” (Nadel, 2004 [1957]: 15). By networks Nadel means “the interlocking of relationships whereby the interactions implicit in one determine . . . [particular outcomes] occurring in others” (Nadel, 2004 [1957]: 16), such as the interdependence of the societal components and society’s integration and cohesion. There is a plurality of social structures, Nadel argues, since in any society “there are always cleavages, dissociations, enclaves” (Nadel, 2004 [1957]: 153), as well as crucial interdependences between and within roles, and between subgroups. A most informative study of social structures should aim to discover “the general characteristics and regularities . . . in the realm of social existence” (Nadel, 2004 [1957]: 154).

Effective Definitions of Structure As mentioned, effective definitions of this term involve the notion of deep, not visible structures, the study of which calls for a particular method of inquiry. This notion may be found in such disciplines as anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, even though but relatively few authors who have contributed to them may be considered as structuralists in this sense. Some introductions to structuralism have pointed to its character as a method that: (a) is “intrinsic to the emergence of . . . hypothetical mental structures” (Kurzweil, 1980: 5); (b) “attempts to uncover the internal relationships, which give different languages . . . their form and function” (Ehrmann, 1966a: ix), and (c) “includes all human phenomena, no matter what their form” (Lane, 1970: 13). Other introductions have put forward different definitions,

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such as “a framework,” or “a model,” either in the sense of “a systematic metaphor” (Pettit, 1975: vi, 100), or in that of a paradigm. The model is built in accordance with some simplifying operations through which different phenomena are viewed from a unitary viewpoint, and are thereby uniform (Eco, 2015: 90). Still other definitions have characterized structure as “a system of transformations” (Piaget, 1968: 6). We shall here consider some main representatives of structuralism in each of these disciplines – anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis – and start with the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, whose works have been very influential on other followers of the structuralist method, so defined.

Lévi-Strauss Structuralism is a formal method of investigation whose operational value is to transpose the content of any message from one code to another in such a way that “different levels of social reality” can be apprehended (Lévi-Strauss, 1962b: 96). This method is distinguished by the following features, in Lévi-Strauss’ own words: “a resolutely intellectual approach, a bias in favor of systematic arrangements, and a mistrust of mechanistic or empirical solutions” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 27). An essential component of this method, as he points out, is to take into account “the unconscious substructures” (Lévi-Strauss, 2008a: 26; see also 1969: 452); to pay attention, accordingly, to the “hidden significance” of myths, which Lévi-Strauss himself has “sought so laboriously to bring to light” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 32). Lévi-Strauss dwells on the concept of structure in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his Anthropologie structural (1974: 329–401; we shall cite here the English translation: 1963: 277–345); but this concept may often be found in other works by this author. In this connection, Lévi-Strauss also points out that structures are apprehended by the human mind “consciously or unconsciously” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 440). There are accordingly two analytical levels of structures. The first level provides conscious articulation, but no logical coherence, to myths, customs, practices, languages, or any other human creation. The second level is “an unconscious activity of the mind.” It consists of “unconscious formulations,” which “display an . . . intelligible structure” that is “independent of any subject” and that is endowed with “a small number of simple principles” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 10–13, 20). In particular, elementary structures of exchange “are always present to the human mind, at least in an unconscious form” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 464). Whether these structures are apprehended consciously or unconsciously is – he maintains – a question that cannot be decided by means of prior knowledge (cf. LéviStrauss, 1973: 254–255). The human mind has – according to Lévi-Strauss – an inborn predisposition to conceive of the world, whether social or natural, in terms of “pairs of oppositions” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 464) or of “binary oppositions” (LéviStrauss, 1962b: 87); in terms, in other words, of a “dualistic principle,” which involves “the notions of opposition and correlation” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 83; see also 1963: 208) between different elements, such as myths or kinship systems, which the mind apprehends as related and bipartite. Instances thereof are: day vs. night, sky vs. water, or the raw vs. the cooked.

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Perhaps more fundamental for Lévi-Strauss is the opposition and correlation, as mediated by the prohibition of incest, between nature and culture (Lévi-Strauss, 2008b: 99–100). All such different elements are brought together by means of the structuralist method, in such a way that they appear as “part of a coherent whole” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 134); therefore, they “take the form of totality or of system” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 209). Such a broad notion of structure may account for those passages, in which this notion is defined by Lévi-Strauss in terms that are compatible not only with effective definitions of structure, but also with intentional definitions, such as a set of possibly conscious reciprocal relations. These passages are frequent in Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre. Thus, in Tristes Tropiques, referring to the existence of social hierarchies in different primitive populations, Lévi-Strauss finds a “complex structure of three hierarchical classes” (1982: 196), where the possibility that this structure may be empirically observable is not ruled out. In Totemism, as regards the kinship systems of two Australian tribes, he observes that each of them possesses “two codes to express its social structure, kinship and rules of marriage on the one hand, organization into sections or subsections on the other” (2008b: 50); later, commenting on Radcliffe-Brown’s work, he writes that this work “opens the way to a genuine structural analysis” (2008b: 86). In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, as regards the kinship systems of some tribes of Native Americans, Lévi-Strauss writes that the different modalities of marriage he has found among them appear “as elements of a total structure” (1969: 368; see also 291, 406, 409, 416, 419, 445, 459, 463, 470. 474). In The Raw and the Cooked, apropos of the relations between myths and social relations, Lévi-Strauss remarks that “it would . . . be naïve to suppose that there is always and in all circumstances a simple correlation between mythological imagery and social structure,” for “the number of contrasts used by mythological thought varies from set to set” (1994: 332). In La Pensée Sauvage, finally, concerning the change which has occurred in the component elements of totemic systems, LéviStrauss remarks that the old structure completely disappears and gives way to a new one (1962b: 86). The conventional notion of structure – namely, its first and superficial analytical level – may account, moreover, for Lévi-Strauss’ appreciation of Radcliffe-Brown’s structural analysis as “genuine . . . equally far removed from formalism and functionalism” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962b: 126–127; 1963: 86). LéviStrauss also praises his foundational work in the field of ethnography (LéviStrauss, 1973: 48), and the “most fertile contemporary school of anthropology” which he established (Lévi-Strauss, 1962b: 69; 2005: 44). These positive evaluations, however, should be considered in conjunction with his criticisms of Radcliffe-Brown and his functionalist school. Lévi-Strauss rejects the contraposition between the concrete and the abstract, and the preeminence conferred to the latter, which in his judgment connotes the functionalism of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 115). In particular, Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism rejects their utilitarian interpretation of social relations as having “no particular empirical foundation” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a: 95; 1973: 63). His appraisal of Radcliffe-Brown has been formulated in some detail in his celebrated work on the

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elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss, 1967 [1949]), but may be found in some of his other works as well. Radcliffe-Brown’s work is found objectionable on several grounds. Firstly, there are inexact statements in this work, such as Radcliffe-Brown’s assertion that the kinship relation alone determines marriage in primitive societies. Lévi-Strauss contends that what determines marriage is the structure of reciprocity in such relations (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 446). Moreover, Radcliffe-Brown “avoids all comparative studies,” and maintains that “every custom is explainable by an immediately apparent function” (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 495). This position, Lévi-Strauss remarks, would entail a different explanation for every cultural item. Lévi-Strauss also criticizes G. P. Murdock, another prominent functionalist anthropologist. Murdock’s proposal to abandon the notion of structure as static and unproductive is rejected as empirically inaccurate, besides being objectionable on other grounds as well (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). Lévi-Strauss’ own notion of structure differs, then, from those of the aforementioned authors. In keeping with Lévi-Strauss’ own understanding of structure, intentionally defined, the social relations which are constitutive of a social structure can be directly observable. Structure, in this sense, is “a system of relations which bind together all aspects of social life” (1963: 368). Thus, for example, the bonds which are created and maintained by intermarriage between different families form a social structure (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 343). Lévi-Strauss shows a greater interest, however, in those social relations that are not directly observable, but must be “discovered” (LéviStrauss, 1962b: 41); namely, they must be inferred by means of a model, whether conscious or unconscious, of social relations. As he puts it, concerning the specific properties of language in myths, they are “to be found above the ordinary linguistic level”; to the effect that these properties “exhibit more complex features” (LéviStrauss, 1972: 174), which “an empiricist conception of structure” (Lévi-Strauss, 2008b: 92) such as Radcliffe-Brown’s or Murdock’s, cannot grasp. The fruitfulness of this model does not depend on its empirical accuracy, though the model should make all the observed facts “immediately intelligible” (LeviStrauss, 1963: 279). Rather, its fruitfulness is predicated on its contribution to providing an understanding of the systemic character of the study object. Even biased or empirically inaccurate models can be useful in this sense (Levi-Strauss, 1963: 282). As stated in Structural Anthropology, the term of structure, effectively defined, refers, then, not to empirical reality, but rather to models which have been built after it. It is, accordingly, “a method to be applied to any kind of social studies” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 279–280). Lévi-Strauss’ own study on “The Sex of the Heavenly Bodies” (1970) instantiates this method. This study concerns the terms which have been used in several American native languages to designate the sun and the moon. Lévi-Strauss’ notion of social structure is distinguished from that of structure, though its definition derives from that of structure, whether intentionally defined in terms of sets of conscious reciprocal relations, or effectively defined in terms of sets of reciprocal relations which are unconscious. In either case, the notion of social structure involves the study of social relations while leaving aside the time and space

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dimensions (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 189–190). These kinds of studies, which LéviStrauss calls structuralist, are labeled synchronic and are distinguished from diachronic studies, in which these dimensions are instead taken into account. Even the study of synchronic structures, however, “requires constant recourse to history”; for “history alone makes it possible to abstract the structure which . . . remains permanent throughout a succession of events,” and to thereby find “a single structural scheme operating in different spatial and temporal contexts” (1963: 21).

Linguistics Structural analysis has been applied to linguistics, among other research areas. As the distinguished linguist André Martinet has stated, from this vantage point language is viewed as “a set of texts,” and a linguistic structure only consists of the relations between its component elements, such as the sound chain and its graphic representation (1966: 5). In this connection, reference should be made to the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure (2016 [1916]). As has been remarked (Wells, 1970: 95–96), language (langue) forms, according to Saussure, “a very tightly knit” system. The notion is recurrent in Saussure that language is a complex system, to the effect that all its component units are bound together at any specific time (cf. Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 161, 167, 179, 201, 219). If these component units are interdependent, solidary, and mutually coordinated, they form – as Saussure calls it – a syntagma; whereas a paradigmatic relation involves no interdependence between two or more associated language terms, only one of which is necessarily present (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 235–238). Structure, as referred to language, is distinguished from system; for structure designates a set of rules, by means of which any language component– for example, the phonemes, which are linguistic elements that differentiate a given acoustic image from any other, and have no other existence apart from this function – are arranged according to some order, such as a conjunction of consonants. The combination of units, which has thus been formed by means of analogical construction, has a new meaning, which is clearly distinct from the meanings of its original component units. As a structure, language is “not directly subject to the spirit of the speakers” (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 388). Rather, it constitutes “a closed system,” which is based on “some constant principles” (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 196). Saussure apparently refers thereby to the phonic and conceptual differences and oppositions that obtain in any language system. A linguistic system consists of combinations of signs, namely, of ideas and sounds. Linguistic signs are arbitrary. However, their arbitrariness is reduced when signs are combined according to some organizing principle: in other words, according to “a principle of order and regularity” (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 243). Language has an inner unity, which is given by oppositions between its constitutive terms. Language reduces the arbitrariness of signs. If this is the case, language may be regarded as a form rather than as a substance (cf. Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 226–229). Saussure views language as a social institution, and distinguishes it from speech, which is “an individual act of will and intelligence” (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 79–81).

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It is, in other words, an individual creation. It must be preceded, however, by an “unconscious comparison” with the wealth of materials, which different generations have deposited in the course of the language formation. The component units of language are arranged, by means of analogical construction and according to their associative and syntagmatic relations (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 159, 293). All languages are subject to change. Their evolution is connoted by unpredictable phonetic changes, which have become established over the course of time (Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 391–392). Saussure does not believe that the study of language may shed light on other social sciences (cf. Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 379–387). Furthermore, while this author makes use of the notion of structure, as we have seen (but see also Saussure, 2016 [1916]: 311, 324), he refrains from using the notion, and the very term, of social structure.2 In this respect he differs from Lévi-Strauss. In other respects, however, there are important continuities between these two authors, such as their views that individuals may be consciously aware neither of a kinship or language structure which has been their own ongoing creation, nor of the existence of binary oppositions between components of this structure. Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist studies were stimulated by his friendship and close collaboration with Roman Jakobson, who made important contributions to linguistic structuralism. To this end, he has borrowed from Russian formalism – a school of literary criticism active between the 1910s and the 1930s – the following principles: firstly, that “an analogy obtains between the language and the other forms of social activity”; secondly, that attention should be paid to “the structural complexity of literary work” (Todorov, 1965). According to Jakobson, Russian formalism produced analyses of poetic forms, metaphors, rhymes, and epithets, which paved the way to the use of structural analysis in linguistics (Jakobson, 1965). Jakobson, with Morris Halle, wrote an important theoretical work on structural linguistics (Jakobson and Halle, 1956). In this work, which focuses on phonology and therefore on phonemes and other linguistic units, Jakobson explicitly states his interest in “the different distinctive features on which the phonemic pattern is based,” and on “the structural interrelationship of these features” (Jakobson and Halle, 1956: 28). This interest is conducive to the pursuit of two distinct goals: first, “the study of invariances within the phonemic pattern of a given language”; second, a similar study that concerns however “the phonemic patterning of language in general” (Jakobson and Halle, 1956: 39). Coding rules, which combine “certain linguistic entities into units of a higher degree of complexity” (Jakobson and Halle, 1956: 72), guide the perception of speech sounds; they are necessary to decipher any information therein contained. Any change in the code brings about phonemic changes, and impacts on the diffusion of phonemic phenomena (cf. Jakobson and Halle, 1956: 46, 64). As an instance of the collaboration between Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson, the two authors jointly conducted a structuralist analysis of Baudelaire’s poem “Les Chats” (1970; originally published in 1962). This poem is analyzed from several viewpoints – such as prosodic, phonetic, semantic, grammatical (in particular, grammatical gender), syntactic, and thematic – in order to cast light on the system of variants, which may be found in this text by means of the structuralist method.

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The relations between the rhymes, strophes, and single verses are examined in detail to find connections between and a hidden order behind them; and further, what in fact these connections are, and whether the text contains synecdoche and metaphors (for a detailed and critical appraisal of this text, cf. Riffaterre, 1966). In keeping with the pioneering structuralist analysis of fairy tales conducted by Vladimir Propp (1968), Jakobson (1970) also authored a structuralist study of Russian fairy tales. In this study Jakobson laid stress on the tales’ formal characters, in keeping with the analytical method that may also be found in other structuralist studies of literary texts (cf. for instance Ehrmann, 1966b). Jakobson dwells on the existence in these texts of preludes and epilogues, ditties, and stylistic traits, and on their function as a social utopia. Accordingly, a programmatic statement of the structural method when applied to linguistic phenomena should deal with “any question of language and languages”; as long as any such question is “conceived of as being an operation in search of the equivalent relations that underlie the structure of a given language and that furthermore allow us to interpret the structural affinities” (Jakobson, 1985: 85). The verbal structures are specific objects of attention in another work by this author, which focuses on the relation between linguistics and poetics (Jakobson, 1972). Jakobson distinguishes between several functions of language, such as denotative, cognitive, expressive, and emotive. Language, he states, “must be investigated in all the variety of its functions”; for, this variety notwithstanding, it is a unity that possesses an “over-all code” encompassing “several concurrent patterns which are each characterized by a different function” (Jakobson, 1972: 88–89). As for the poetic function, it is defined by the rules governing the specific design and features of the verse. Verse is “primarily a recurrent figure of sound.” The “conspicuous similarity” in sounds that characterize poetry “is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning” (Jakobson, 1985: 107–109). Also noteworthy in this connection are some works by the philosopher and semiologist Todorov, such as his Poétique (1968). Jakobson was closely related to Todorov, as both – each in his own way – were part of the cultural current called Russian formalism (cf. Todorov, 1968; Jakobson, 1985). This particular work is especially notable because of Todorov’s attempt to establish, as he has put it, the “general laws” that guide the interpretation of any literary text. As a result of this attempt, “the manifestation of a general and abstract structure” should be brought to light (Todorov, 1968: 18–19). Todorov aims to disclose “the structure of literary discourse itself” (Todorov, 1968: 20); namely, “the abstract categories of the literary discourse” (Todorov, 1968: 95). His ultimate purpose is to present the themes of literature “as not an open and disorderly series, but as a structured whole” (Todorov, 1968: 38–39; see also 20). To this end, he distinguishes between several orders of discourse according to the particular relations that characterize them, such as logical, causal, temporal, spatial, and other kinds of relations. The propositions constitute the minimal unit of discourse. With reference to their relations, Todorov distinguishes between several orders of discourse. Discourses may be connoted by logical, causal, temporal, spatial, and by still other kinds of relations. Distinguishing between these relations

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supplies a criterion to identify several different textual structures (cf. Todorov, 1968: 68, 81–82). Their knowledge, he declares, is no obstacle to knowing the evolution and variability of literary works (Todorov, 1968: 95). Todorov holds that criticism of literary works has a continual two-way movement with the works it considers, in the sense that the very activity of criticizing transforms these works (cf. Todorov, 1972: 73). The structural analysis of literature, as applied to a particular subject such as Henry James’ tales, evidences an inner symmetry in the construction of the plots; for the analysis of their stories reveals some “constructive principle,” such as the existence of several “coincidences and symmetries” that are related to some essential secret (Todorov, 1972: 72, 95, 99). Semiologist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) has received considerable attention from structural linguists. Barthes’ notion of the sign is central to this, as “a compound of a signifier and a signified” (Barthes, 1968: 39). Barthes distinguished between different relations that obtain between signs; namely, a symbolic, a systematic, and a syntagmatic relationship. The first relation refers to purely conventional signs. The second relation refers to the systematic relation between the sign and any linguistic element from which it is distinguished because of its specific meaning, as “system” means in any signifying structure “an ordered reservoir of signs” (Barthes, 1983: 209). The third relation refers to the relation between the sign and any linguistic element with which it is significantly associated, as in a sentence. In any case, the relations between signs have consistently been the focus of Barthes’ attention (cf. Barthes, 1964: 206–212). Barthes’ work on the Japanese sign system (Barthes, 1982) instantiates this interest. Japan is viewed as an empire of signs, from language to cuisine, theater, bowing in greeting, stationary stores, poetry, and painting. Signs in Japan “extenuate meaning,” so that signification is made impossible. Female bodies, for example, are “signified, but not represented” (Barthes, 1982: 91). Barthes’ essay on wrestling provides another instance of semiological analysis (Barthes, 2012: 3–14). Rather than being seen as a sport such as boxing or judo, wrestling is viewed as a spectacle; more precisely, as a spectacle of excess, in which each sign “is endowed with utter clarity since everything must always be understood on the spot” (Barthes, 2012: 5). Signs – of victory, defeat, suffering, foul play, and so on – emphatically provide an “image of the perfect intelligibility of reality” (Barthes, 2012: 14). Both the Japanese sign system and wrestling have, then, specific meanings signifying particular structures. Barthes’ focus on the relations between signs is apparent in his conception of structuralism. Whether or not Barthes may be considered a structuralist author has been debated. According to Annette Lavers, “Barthes never really was a structuralist in the field of literary analysis” (Lavers, 1982: 175). However, Lavers herself has stated that “structuralism played a crucial part in Barthes’s work both as myth and reality” (Lavers, 1982: 217). Umberto Eco, for his part, has attributed to Barthes the procedure, which he considers proper to structuralism, of posing structure as a hypothesis and theoretical model (Eco, 2015: 93). Barthes’ conception of structuralism should be accordingly considered here with some attention. This conception lays stress on the structuralist activity, which consists – as he maintains – of two

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operations: cutting and arrangement (agencement). Cutting refers to the operation of finding in a given object such as a myth or poetry those fragments which possess a unitary meaning. Arrangement indicates the organization and combination of these fragments according to a principle or association rule. The object of the structuralist activity is then the construction of meaning on the part of human beings, as long as this activity takes place in keeping with some intelligible forms and rules (cf. Barthes, 1964: 213–220; cf. also 1975: 107, and Marrone, 2016: 222–225). More specifically, structuralism attempts to found “. . . a linguistics of discourse, whose object is the ‘language’ of literary forms, apprehended on many levels” (Barthes, 1986: 6–7). As has been observed with reference to Barthes, “Objects, images or patterns of behavior almost never appear in isolation, without some admixture of language to make their meaning more explicit” (Lavers, 1982: 139). Barthes’ conception of structure, as formulated in his celebrated work on the fashion system (Barthes, 1983) and elsewhere, refers to a “sequence of constraints” (Barthes, 1983: 161) with a meaning that cannot be defined apart either from its constitutive units, or from the constant relations that obtain between them. In Barthes’ concise formulation, “The system prevails over what the objects are” (Barthes, 1975: 51). Structures should not be conceived of as immobile forms (Barthes, 1975: 66). They are, furthermore, inhabitable, in the sense that one can adjust to, endure, and even desire them (Barthes, 1978: 46). Solitude befalls those, such as lovers, who have lost structures, as they have no dialogue with society because of their solipsism (Barthes, 1978: 11, 212). In particular, as for the fashion system, the designation of structure may either refer to the substance (the clothing), or to its transformations, representations, and significations by means of images and words. In this context, clothing is viewed, accordingly, as a system of significations; namely, as a system of meaningful, related, and arbitrary signs. The passage from a given structure to another takes place by virtue of operations called shifters, which accomplish the transformations from the real clothing into its image, and from its image into language. The system of signification consists of a visible and material signifier which refers to the object (the clothing) and an immaterial signifier, whose imputed meaning depends either on the outside world, or on fashion itself (Barthes, 1983: 4–12, 23–26). In order to subject the notion of structure to a semantic analysis, Barthes formulates a signifying matrix which comprehends the following abbreviations: O (the object aimed at signification, such as a piece of clothing); S (any other piece of clothing, such as a flap, that supports this signification); and V (the variant, namely any additional element of the clothing – such as whether the clothing is fastened or open, long or short) – “from which signification emerges” (Barthes, 1983: 66). These three components of the matrix OSV presuppose each other, and jointly constitute a signifying structure. To this end, he distinguishes between different but related language systems. The first system, which is called primary, has two semantic levels, one of expression or denotation, and the other of connotation. While denotation has language as its raw material, and has the important function of justifying structure, connotation refers to the level of content. As given by the social context, connotation

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is subject to interpretation and is the object of linguistic analysis (Barthes, 1974: 6–9, 128; see also 1968: 89–94; 1975: 71, 82, 119; and Lavers, 1982: 113–114). The primary system constitutes the level of content for the secondary and derived system, which Barthes calls the level of metalanguage. Metalanguage is used to support a nonliteral meaning; in Barthes’ own words, it is used to convey “a second meaning, of a generally affective or ideological order” (Barthes, 1983: 28; see also 1968: 92–94). In modern poetry in particular, the word may be used in any context; accordingly, it “shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable and uncertain and possible connections” (Barthes, 1977: 47). In this case, the word “is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications” (Barthes, 1977: 48; see also Barthes, 1975: 90; 1981: 12). Writing would then perform the function “to annul the power of one language over another, to dissolve any metalanguage as soon as it is constituted” (Barthes, 1974: 98). For writers today, there is no necessary coincidence between their psychological present on the one hand, and their own writing on the other. Writing has no psychological foundation, for literary form cannot be “merely the expression of an interiority constituted previous to and outside of language” (Barthes, 1986: 17), Barthes’ notion of structure rests on the premise that “the text possesses an infinite structure” (Barthes, 1974: 120). Accordingly, there is no “ultimate structure”; for “everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final” (Barthes, 1974: 12; see also 51). Barthes finds any reductive system objectionable (Barthes, 1981: 8; cf. also Lavers, 1982: 98, 199). While reducing a text to any unitary meaning is deceptive (Barthes, 1974: 160), the task of structural analysis of literature should purpose to individuate “an order, a system, a structured field of knowledge” (Barthes, 1975: 122). Barthes distinguishes between different codes, which readers may find in any text. They are as follows: semantic (additional meanings are provided by means of connotation, as distinguished from its basic denotative meaning); cultural (foundational and deemed unchallengeable); symbolic (meanings are thereby organized into broader sets); hermeneutic (when the text refers to some unexplained elements); and proairetic (when the text refers to actions or events that will occur, but have not yet done so; in this sense, proairetism “comparatively depreciates language”). These five codes “endow the text with a kind of plural quality,” and are woven into all narratives (cf. Barthes, 1974: 30, 104). As for clothing, its function is to convert reality into a myth, “into a pleasing phenomenon” which is at the same time “unpredictable and systematic” (Barthes, 1983: 300). Barthes distinguishes between real clothing having a technological structure of its own; an iconic or image structure; and a verbal structure, which he calls the rhetorical system (cf. Barthes, 1983: 8–9, 50–51). The rhetorical system, namely, how fashion changes are presented to the public of consumers, especially draws his attention. As a system of connotations, and therefore of signifiers, fashion possesses a functional structure of its own (cf. Barthes, 1983: 280–282). Its perpetual change, use of present tense, quest for novelty, and seeming ongoing disorder are no obstacle to its having a structure “at the level of its history” (Barthes, 1983: 299). In this respect at least, fashion differs from photography, as photography immobilizes

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time by blocking memory, and is accordingly without future (cf. Barthes, 1981: 90–91).

Foucault Like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault has considered all structures, including linguistic structures, as sources of constraints. Like Barthes, moreover, Foucault has objected to being classified as a structuralist (cf. Gutting, 2005: 61); he also rejected the notion of “the author as the specific creator of a work” (Kurzweil, 1980: 210). More generally, he has resisted any attempt to pigeonhole his work into any predetermined category. Nonetheless, the affinities between his thought and structuralism can hardly be denied, and have been discussed at length in the secondary literature, though with reservations (cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: xv–xvi; Flynn, 2003: 30; Gutting, 2005: 62). Foucault has rejected the notion of structure as used by representatives of the structuralist approach, for he has found the opposition between structure and change “not pertinent” to the definition of the historical field of studies, nor to that of the structuralist method (Foucault, 1969: 20). The debate on structuralism was lively in the 1960s, when Foucault published some of his major works. Foucault wrote that his Archéologie du savoir does not aim to continue this debate (Foucault, 1969: 16), but rather to expand it to a broader notion of structure; to one, namely, that points to an analysis of discourses prevailing in a historical time and that may concern “human beings, consciousness, origin and the subject” (Foucault, 1969: 26). Discourses are not manifestations of “a thinking, knowing, speaking subject” (Foucault, 1969: 74). Rather, it is the task of the archeology of knowledge to bring into light “discursive practices in their complexity and density” (Foucault, 1969: 272). These practices conform to a set of rules which define their specificity (Foucault, 1969: 63). The notion of structure is also relevant to other works by Foucault. Les mots et les choses (Foucault, 1966; English translation, The Order of Things) is a case in point. Structure, it is stated therein, has a different meaning according to the historical age, as defined by its specific discursive field (cf. Foucault, 1966: 147–148). Foucault himself has maintained that this work, and also his Naissance de la clinique (Foucault, 1963) and Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1972 [1961]), cannot be considered satisfactory; for they have not adequately dealt with the task of attending to the themes proper to the history of ideas (Foucault, 1969: 25–26). We shall nevertheless consider the notion of structure as it may be found not only in Foucault’s L’Archeologie du savoir (Foucault, 1969), but also in other works by this author. References will be made to them when they help us to clarify Foucault’s conception of structure. In Les mots et les choses, as for the problem of classifying different organisms, Foucault raises the question of how one may be certain that each structure “is not strictly isolated from all others,” so that it is only a specific characteristic of that organism. To achieve this certainty, it would be necessary that at least one element of those structures previously considered be repeated in another one (Foucault, 1966: 158). A system of elements – he writes in this work –

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“is necessary to establish the simplest order” (Foucault, 1966: 11). Structure seems therefore to refer here, in a conventional sense, to a set of interrelated units. The notion of structure is, however, present in quite a different sense in several works by Foucault. In the Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique Foucault maintains, in a statement that seems to echo Lacan, that “language is the first and last structure of madness, as madness reveals itself fully through discourse” (Foucault, 1972 [1961]: 302–303). In Discipline and Punish he points to the illegal acts of farmers before the French Revolution, and to the political struggles in the course of it, which aimed “to change the government and the very structure of power” (Foucault, 1972 [1961]: 319). In Naissance de la clinique Foucault argues that in recent years the condition of sickness has been redefined along with that of hospital organization, in such a way that scientific discourse in the medical field has been profoundly restructured (Foucault, 1963: 199–200). As Foucault states in a chapter of The Will to Knowledge, if power has a structure, it is not a structure itself. It is rather “the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (Foucault, 1998: 93). Structure, as Foucault uses this term, designates then a set of rules that guide discursive practices, which are instrumental to the exercise of power they represent and embody. Such discursive practices are interconnected, vary according to the historical age, and have no individual author. They connote and permeate political, judiciary, and other institutions. They can be discovered and described by means of an “archeological” analysis of discursive regularities. Foucault’s structural analysis does not share structuralism’s disregard of history, and departs from it in its focus on discourses as instruments of power. It concurs with structuralism, however, in rejecting psychological explanations of historical events. More in general, it shares with structuralism a preference for explanations which consider anonymous structures rather than individual actors.

Marxist Structuralism Marxist structuralism has commanded considerable scholarly attention (see Godelier, 1970, 1982; Heydebrand, 1981; Kurzweil, 1980; Lefebvre, 1966; Resch, 1992). We shall here briefly consider the contributions of Althusser and Balibar, both of which are in keeping with an effective definition of structure. Accordingly, the term of structure indicates a method, by means of which the way in which a total set of practices act upon each other is made intelligible (Balibar, 1995: viii). As Althusser maintains, the structuralist method has nothing to do with empiricism, or therefore with conventional research methods. None of these methods assumes that the conducts or practices that are investigated are invisible, and therefore unintelligible with conventional research methods. Althusser has authored an influential collection of articles on Marx (1995 [1965]) and, with Balibar and other authors, an in-depth study of Marx’s Capital (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]). Their focus has been on the structure of the social relations that characterize the capitalist mode of production. As they have contended, human actors are not relevant at all, to the effect that they are merely “bearers” (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 393) of social relations, as they

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cannot modify nor have any influence on them; for this structure arranges relations in such a way that actors have no choice but to submit to it (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 283). Marx’s Capital describes and accounts for capitalist social relations exhaustively, but implicitly. The structuralist method aims at bringing them to light by means of what is here called “symptomatic reading” (Althusser et al., 1996: 35, 343). Thereby, the “structural invariants” (Althusser, 1995 [1965]: 219) of capital are discovered. The object which is thus discovered is the real object of Marxist theory (Althusser, 1995 [1965]: 257). Such invariants are not immediately visible in Marx’s discourse, but constitute its real and hidden essence, “the structure of the real object” (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 35–37, 262). This method of inquiry brings to light – Althusser argues – the “essential structure” (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 279) of the present time. “Structure” is for Althusser “a complex unity.” The constituent practices which articulate it are “extremely differentiated.” This complex unity, which is conceived of as a totality, commands their development, and therefore dominates the social structure (Althusser, 1995 [1965]: 201–204). Althusser thereby distinguishes between the economic structure – that is, “the union of the forces of production with the relations of production” (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 397) – and the “juridical-political superstructure” (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 330). The practices which constitute the structure ultimately – but only ultimately – determine the conditions of existence of the superstructure. In other words, the structure of the relations of production constrains, but does not prevent the relative autonomy of the other practices, whose structure and development it determines only in the last instance (Althusser, 1995 [1965]: 111–112, 210–212; Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 564–567). The prevailing economic structure is characterized by different hierarchical levels of effectiveness in its domination over the political and ideological levels of the superstructure. All these levels are coexistent and organically related (Althusser et al., 1996 [1965]: 282–283, 290). The notion of “the last instance” determination of the superstructure on the part of the economic structure is empty if the importance of the superstructure is not realized, for the superstructures effectively concur in producing specific ideological, political, or historical events. In this sense, Althusser writes that the economic structure overdetermines all events (Réalités) that constitute a society. Simple determination obtains only if these events immediately and directly affect the lives of the members of any given society, which is not ordinarily the case. The overdetermination of societal events accounts for the time lag occurring between changes in the economic structure and their repercussions in the superstructure (Althusser, 1995 [1965]: 111–116).

Lacan’s Structural Psychoanalytical Approach The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) offered an interpretation of Freud from a structuralist vantage. We shall direct attention here to Lacan’s notion of structure, rather than attempting to introduce this author’s thought as a whole.3 To this end, Lacan’s oeuvre will be referred to selectively. The unconscious, Lacan

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argues, “is structured as a language” (Lacan, 1972: 188; see also 1973: 227), and “it is this linguistic structure that gives to the unconscious its status” (Lacan, 1972: 29). More precisely, the unconscious is constituted by “the effects of the word upon the subject”; that is, subjects determine themselves by means of the structuring effects of language on their unconscious (Lacan, 1973: 167). The subject and the Other refer to one another reciprocally, but there is of necessity a gap between every subject and the Other, since the subjects realize and define themselves through their relation of desire with the Other, as Lacan calls the total field of a subject’s relations with other subjects. This field is unitary, and originates from what Lacan calls the mirror stage; namely, the stage in which the subject while looking at a mirror unconsciously appears to him or herself as his or her own ideal. By means of the mirror stage, the subject relates to his or her own ideal image as an object of his or her desire; that is, as the Other and, therefore, as a signifier (Lacan, 1973: 113, 222–223, 227, 231, 281–286). Borrowing from a set of notions introduced by Saussure, an author whom Lacan frequently uses as a primary source, language is conceived of as a collection of signifiers. This collection of signifiers is a structure which “is built up step by step,” even though it is “finally inscribed synchronically” (Lacan, 1973: 197). A signifier is “something which represents a subject not for another subject but for another signifier” (Lacan, 1972: 194). As the signifier cannot contain everything, each signifier refers to a specific sphere of reality. The subject not only experiences a loss, but is defined by this loss (Lacan, 1973: 222–223). Words, moreover, are “the only material of the unconscious” (Lacan, 1972: 187); and the letter is “the essentially localized structure of the signifier” (Lacan, 1970: 110; see also 1973: 222). Structure is, then, for Lacan a “structure of the signifying chain” (Lacan, 1970: 115), and there is no place in this chain for subjects (Lacan, 1973: 263). Beside Saussure, Jakobson is another student of language whom Lacan cites as one of his main references. Lacan writes that he owes the notions of two figures of speech, metonymy (the part taken for the whole) and metaphor (one word for another), to Jakobson’s work. Metonymy indicates, according to Lacan’s viewpoint, “the one slope of the effective field of the signifier in the constitution of meaning” (Lacan, 1970: 114 and note 15). Both metonymy and metaphor do not merely disguise the thought of the subject. They also produce effects of truth by juxtaposing signifiers that have different meanings in the signifying chain. These effects lead, in keeping with Freud, to the discovery of the unconscious. As Lacan argues, Freud referred to the letter, and therefore to language, in the unconscious when he mentioned signifiers as having symbolic meanings in dreams. In dreams, signifiers are enigmatic because of the metaphors and metonymies they contain. Freudian psychoanalysis aims to bring to light the recondite meaning of the enigmatic signifiers that characterize dream language, and the unconscious in general; for, the unconscious is constituted – in Lacan’s words – by “the effects of the word on the subject.” For, it consists in “the dimension where the subject determines himself by means of the effects of the word, from which it follows that the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan, 1973: 167).

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Summary and Conclusion The related notions of structure and structuralism have been presented here in accordance with Boudon’s distinction between intentional and effective definitions of structure. Intentional definitions, which were discussed first, define structure as a set of interrelations between constitutive elements, such as statuses and roles, which are directly observable. Effective definitions designate structure as a set of interrelated but not visible elements, the study of which calls for a special method of inquiry. While both notions of structure have been used in anthropology, the theoretical perspectives which are based on them share only the name of structuralism, as they have implied contrasting research methods and different research goals. Aside from anthropology, their respective field of application has also differed. The former notion has found application in sociology, while the latter notion has been found useful especially in linguistics and a particular strain of psychiatry. By way of conclusion, structure and structuralism are polysemic terms, which have been differently construed and put to different theoretical uses. The range of their interpretations and scope of their applications suggest, nonetheless, that these differences have been fruitful for the social sciences.

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1982. “The Problem of the Reproduction of Socioeconomic Systems.” In I. Rossi (ed.), Structural Sociology (pp. 259–291). New York: Columbia University Press. Gutting, G. 2005. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Heydebrand, W. 1981. “Marxist Structuralism.” In P. M. Blau and R. K. Merton (eds.), Continuities in Structural Inquiry (pp. 81–119). London: Sage. Homans, G. C. 1976. “What Do We Mean by Social Structure?” In P. M. Blau (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (pp. 53–63). London: Open Books. Jakobson, R. 1965. “Vers une science de l’art poétique.” In T. Todorov (ed.), Théorie de la literature (pp. 9–13). Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1970. “On Russian Fairy Tales.” In M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (pp. 184–201). New York: Basic Books. 1972. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In R. DeGeorge and F. DeGeorge (eds.), The Structuralists from Marx to Lévi-Strauss (pp. 84–123). Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. 1985. “Verbal Communication.” In Selected Writings (pp. 82–92). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Jakobson R., and M. Halle. 1956. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Kurzweil, E. 1980. The Age of Structuralism. Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. 1970. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” In J. Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism (pp. 101–137). New York: Doubleday. 1972. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatsoever.” In R. Macksey and E. Donato (eds.), The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (pp. 186–200). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lane, M. 1970. “Introduction.” In M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (pp. 11–39). New York: Basic Books. Lavers, A. 1982. Roland Barthes. Structuralism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, H. 1966. “Il concetto di struttura in Marx.” In R. Bastide (ed.), Usi e significati del termine “struttura” nelle scienze umane e sociali (pp. 107–131). Milan: Bompiani. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1962a. Le totemisme aujourd’hui. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. 1962b. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. 1966. “I limiti del concetto di struttura in etnologia.” In R. Bastide (ed.), Usi e significati del termine “struttura” nelle scienze umane e sociali (pp. 37–43). Milan: Bompiani. 1967 [1949]. Les structures élémentaire de la parenté. La Haye: Mouton et Co. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1970. “The Sex of the Heavenly Bodies.” In M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (pp. 330–339). New York: Basic Books. 1972. “The Structural Study of Myth.” In R. DeGeorge and F. DeGeorge (eds.), The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss (pp. 168–194). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. 1973. Structural Anthropology Volume 2. New York: Penguin Books. 1974. Anthropologie Structurale. Paris: Plon. 1982. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin Books. 1994. The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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2008a. Nature, culture et société. Paris: Flammarion. 2008b. Totemism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marrone, G. 2016. Roland Barthes: parole chiave. Rome: Carocci. Martinet, A. 1966. “Structure and Language.” In J. Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism (pp. 1–9). New York: Doubleday. Merton, R. K. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press. 1976. “Structural Analysis in Sociology.” In P. M. Blau (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (pp. 21–52). London: Open Books. Merton, Robert K., and Peter M. Blau (eds.). 1981. Continuities in Structural Inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Murdock, G. P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: The Macmillan Company. Nancy, J.-L., and P. Lacoue-Labarthe. 1992. The Title of the Letter. A Reading of Lacan. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nadel, S. F. 2004 [1957]. The Theory of Social Structure. London: Routledge. Parsons, T. 2012 [1975]. “The Present Status of Structural-Functional Theory in Sociology.” In L. A. Coser (ed.), The Idea of Social Structure (pp. 67–83). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Pettit, P. 1975. The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Piaget, J. 1968. Le structuralisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Propp, V. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen & West. Resch, R. P. 1992. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. London: Sage. 2005. “Jacques Lacan.” In George Ritzer (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Theory, vol. 1 (pp. 428–433). London: Sage. Riffaterre, M. 1966. “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s Les Chats.” In J. Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism (pp. 188–230). New York: Doubleday. Rossi, I. 1982. “Relational Structure as an Alternative to the Structural and Interpretive Paradigms of Empiricist Orientation.” In I. Rossi (ed.), Structural Sociology (pp. 3–21). New York: Columbia University Press. Runciman, W. G. 1969. “What Is Structuralism?” British Journal of Sociology 20(3): 253–265. Saussure, F. de 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2016 [1916]. Cours de linguistique général. Paris: Payot. Stinchcombe, A. L. 2012 [1975]. “Merton’s Theory of Social Structure.” In L. A. Coser (ed.), The Idea of Social Structure (pp. 11–33). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sztompka, P. 1990. “R. K. Merton’s Theoretical System: An Overview.” In J. Clark, C. Modgil, and S. Modgil (eds.), Robert K. Merton. Consensus and Controversy (pp. 53–66). London: Falmer Press. Todorov, T. 1965. “Présentation.” In T. Todorov (ed.), Théorie de la literature (pp. 15–27). Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1968. Poétique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1972. “The Structural Analysis of Literature: The Tales of Henry James.” In D. Robey (ed.), Structuralism: An Introduction (pp. 73–103). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Wells, R. S. 1970. “De Saussure’s System of Linguistics.” In M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (pp. 85–123). New York: Basic Books.

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

There have been several introductions to the notion of structure and to the structuralist approach. They focus, generally speaking, on structuralism in anthropology and linguistics (cf. Bonomi, 1968; Ehrmann, 1966a; Lane, 1970; Runciman, 1969). There have been several introductions to the notion of structure and to the structuralist approach. They focus, generally speaking, on structuralism in anthropology and linguistics, though other field of studies such as Marxism and psychoanalysis may also be considered (cf. Bonomi, 1968; Ehrmann, 1966a; Lane, 1970; Runciman, 1969). This term is once found in the English translation of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique général (cf. the beginning of the fourth chapter in the last section of Saussure, 1966). The original French reads however: “social relations” (rapports sociaux) (cf. Saussure, 2016: 379). There are a few introductions to which readers may be referred. See in particular Kurzweil (1980: 135–164); Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1992); Resch (2005).

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14 Norbert Elias, Civilising Processes, and Figurational (or Process) Sociology Barbara Górnicka and Stephen Mennell

Norbert Elias (1897–1990) is best known for his theory of civilising processes, first advanced in Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, published in 1939, and translated into English much later as On the Process of Civilisation or The Civilizing Process.1 Yet this masterpiece was really only a case study, an early stage in the development of a much more comprehensive and profound perspective of general relevance for the social sciences. Indeed Quilley and Loyal (2005) have argued that Elias provided a ‘central theory’ for the human sciences. Elias’s writings are much more extensive than that celebrated book – they run to 18 volumes in the Collected Works – and deal with an astonishing range of empirical topics as well as advancing a sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences that is of at least equivalent general significance for the discipline of sociology as the idea of civilising processes. He once referred to his overall project as an ‘historical social psychology’ (Elias, 2012a: 449). From it there has stemmed an extensive research tradition, with researchers throughout the world working with and developing his ideas. This is often known as ‘figurational sociology’ (from one of Elias’s distinctive but non-essential terminological innovations), though he himself preferred ‘process sociology’, as do many of his followers. In the quarter-century after his death (Górnicka, Liston, and Mennell, 2015), this tradition was observably less well established in the USA, perhaps because his line of thought runs counter to the pervasive epistemological individualism of American life, including in American sociology. It is important to stress that this is a theoretical–empirical tradition. Elias disliked the term ‘social theory’, which is embedded in the very title of this Handbook, because it generally signifies a kowtowing to the hegemony of the philosophers – what he called a ‘philosophoidal’ tendency detached from empirical research. He preferred the older term ‘sociological theory’; yet it is a distinctive feature of this intellectual tradition that it appeals not just to sociologists – whose discipline seems to have narrowed in its intellectual ambitions since Elias’s youth – but also to a range of scholars in the other social sciences and the humanities. Indeed, it often seems that the most fruitful use of his ideas has been made by people working in the interstices of conventional disciplines. 272

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Norbert Elias: A Biographical Sketch Elias was born in the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the only child of Hermann, a well-to-do businessman in the clothing trade, and Sophie Elias. The family were not-particularly-observant Jews (Elias, 2013a). In school, he received an excellent education, including grounding in the natural sciences as well as in history and the humanities. Then, immediately upon leaving school, he had to enlist in the German army, in a telegraph unit, and saw action in the First World War. As a student at the University of Breslau, he at first studied both philosophy and medicine. He said he never regretted the insights that his medical studies – including the dissection of cadavers – gave him into the human condition; but it became impractical to pursue both subjects and he continued in philosophy alone, studying for his 1922 doctorate (in Elias, 2006a: 23–54) under the neo-Kantian philosopher Richard Hönigswald. Yet these student years were a time of great instability in Germany. Rival militias of the left and right, particularly the right-wing Freikorps composed largely of demobbed soldiers, were fighting and killing each other, and other people, in the streets; Elias remembered a fellow student being found shot dead and floating in a canal. Then in 1921–1922 came the great German hyperinflation (largely caused by the reparations demanded of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles), during which Elias’s father lost his wealth, so that Elias had to discontinue his studies and go out to work as a sales representative of a local company manufacturing steel pipes. These early experiences are worth stressing because Elias had certainly seen a good deal of what in common parlance may be called the ‘uncivilised’ side of human society, and it is a crass misunderstanding of his subsequent theory of civilising processes to see it as an account of inevitable human ‘progress’. Once the economy had stabilised and his father was once more able to support him, Elias resumed his studies, this time in Heidelberg and not in philosophy but in sociology. This change of direction requires a full explanation. Although Elias acknowledged how much he had learned from Hönigswald (‘I learned how to think from him’ – 2013a: 14), in the course of writing his thesis Elias was led into a fundamental intellectual disagreement with his supervisor. It concerned one of the central questions of Western philosophical epistemology. From Descartes’s cogito ergo sum through Kant to Karl Popper, philosophers had been bemused by the question of how ‘the individual’ can know what he or she seems to know. Elias (2012a: 512–519, 522–526) later called this the homo clausus assumption. The philosophers’ ‘subject’ was a single, adult, and isolated individual. Other philosophers around the same period were also finding this unsatisfactory; Richard Kilminster (2007) has argued that existentialism and Martin Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’ were other rejections of Kant’s notion that certain categories – space, time, the moral ‘categorical imperative’ – were innate in the human brain. But Heidegger and others attempted a solution purely from within philosophy. Elias’s stance became more radical. Without tracing all the ins and outs of Elias’s arguments throughout his academic life, it is important to recognise one of the essential but often overlooked aspects of On the Process of Civilisation. In Elias’s view, the

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feeling of being a homo clausus, an individual mind cut off from all other minds, was a mode of human self-experience which, far from being a human universal, had developed and come more to the fore during the Renaissance, as part of the European civilising process that gained momentum in that period. Descartes had given especially clear expression to that feeling, which at first was probably confined to small circles of intellectuals, but which then spread to broader strata. If there is any empirical truth in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), the striving, thrifty Protestant entrepreneurs are probably best seen as forming one small part of a much broader civilising process in the technical sense that Elias developed. In short, the row with Hönigswald – who seems to have insisted on the deletion of the thesis’s last three heretical pages as a condition of the award of a doctorate – led Elias into sociology. The rest of Elias’s life can be summarised more briefly. In Heidelberg, Elias was accepted by Alfred Weber as a Habilitation candidate, and embarked on a thesis on the common origins of Western art and science in Renaissance Florence. This was never finished (see the outline of it in Elias 2006a: 107–123). Elias had become close to Karl Mannheim, and when Mannheim was called to the chair of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, Elias went with him as his Assistent. There he completed a different Habilitationsschrift, on the French court under the Ancien Régime. This was only published more than three decades later, in 1969, after Elias had revised and enlarged it, as Die höfische Gesellschaft (The Court Society, 2006b). The University of Frankfurt’s Department of Sociology was housed in the basement of the building owned by the privately funded Marxist Institut für Sozialforschung. The Mannheim group and the Horkheimer–Adorno group knew each other well and shared many interests, but they did not see eye to eye intellectually. The happy and stimulating three years in Frankfurt were brought to an abrupt end by the accession to power of Adolf Hitler. Elias stayed on a few months longer than many Jewish scholars, and later observed that the Nazi takeover of the city and the university was both well organised and violent – it brought it home to him that the two were not mutually exclusive. Elias then went to Paris, but could not find an academic job there and by 1935 had lost his money in a small business venture. This was, he said, the only time in his life when he actually went hungry. He was invited by friends to come to Britain, where he was to live for the next four decades. At first he could read English a little, but not speak it. Meagrely supported by a grant from a refugee organisation, Elias worked in the great Reading Room of the British Museum on the vast work that became Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. The book was typeset by a Jewish printer back in Breslau, who himself soon fled into exile. The unbound sheets were taken to Switzerland by Elias’s father, to the small émigré publisher Haus zum Falken in Basel. As his later student Bryan Wilson wryly observed, 1939 was ‘not the most propitious year for the publication of a large, two volume work, in German, by a Jew, on, of all things, civilisation’ (Wilson, 1977: 15). Sales were minuscule, and the book did not make its mark until it was republished in 1969. For a time during the Second World War, Elias held a research post at the London School of Economics, interrupted by several months of internment by the British

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government as an enemy alien. His father had died in Breslau in 1940 and his mother in Treblinka in 1941, which Elias described as the greatest trauma of his life. After the war he eked out a precarious living in London, teaching extramural classes and giving occasional invited lectures. He began to write in English, though at first he published very little. In the early 1950s with S. H. Foulkes, his friend from Frankfurt days, he helped to lay the theoretical and practical foundations of Group Analysis, which has become a major international school of psychotherapy (see his 1965 essay ‘Sociology and Psychiatry’, in Elias, 2009b: 159–179). Only in 1954, when he was already fifty-seven, did Elias at last gain a secure academic post, at the University of Leicester. There, with his friend Ilya Neustadt, he built up a large and influential Department of Sociology, through which numerous subsequently prominent British sociologists passed either as students or colleagues. He retired in 1962 (compulsorily, at the age of sixty-five) in the rank of Reader. He then seized the chance to go as Professor for two years to the University of Ghana, where he acquired a large collection of, and expertise in, West African art (see Elias, 2009b: 201–237). Returning to Leicester, he continued to teach postgraduate theory classes and to engage in controversy with the then-dominant proponents of sociological positivism. He developed a distinctive sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences (see ‘A Sociological Theory of Knowledge and the Sciences’). The Leicester years also saw Elias’s collaboration with Eric Dunning in effectively founding the new field of the sociology of sport (Elias and Dunning, 2008). In another collaboration, with John L. Scotson, he wrote The Established and the Outsiders (2008), a study of a community on the outskirts of Leicester. An extraordinary feature of Elias’s career is that, apart from On the Process of Civilisation, all of Elias’s dozen or so books and more than a hundred essays appeared after he retired. From the late 1960s, with the republication of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Elias gradually became an international academic celebrity, starting in Germany and the Netherlands, then France, and eventually in the Englishspeaking world. He was frequently invited to visiting professorships, notably in Amsterdam where under the leadership of Johan Goudsblom, Abram de Swaan, and other colleagues, there took shape an influential (if controversial) ‘Amsterdam School’ of sociology that was expressly Eliasian in character. In 1977, after more than forty years living in England, Elias took up residence in Amsterdam, where he died on 1 August 1990.

The Theory of Civilising Processes Widespread misunderstanding of Elias’s theory of civilising processes among social scientists has arisen from his use of the term ‘civilisation’ in two different senses. The very word – especially in English – provokes ideological objections which, on careful reading, are not justified. The problem is that from Victorian times onwards ‘civilisation’ has been seen as the opposite of ‘barbarism’. It would not cause much outrage if we were to describe the process by which the neonatal barbarian becomes a fully functioning adult in our society as an ‘individual

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civilising process’. (In practice, we normally call it socialisation, or just ‘growing up’.) On the other hand, Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes was concerned with longer-term, intergenerational processes of social and cultural change. And this always landed him in hot water among other social scientists, especially anthropologists, and even more particularly British social anthropologists,2 owing perhaps to the history of the British Empire, in which anthropologists played an enabling role. By the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘civilisation’ had come to express the selfconsciousness of the West – as indeed it still does in times of stress such as in 2001 after the 9/11 barbarities, which were widely described as ‘an attack upon civilisation’ (Mennell, 2007: 23–25). Elias recognised the difficulty – indeed the first part of On the Process of Civilisation is concerned with how ‘civilisation’ came to be associated with feelings of Western collective superiority. For the European upper classes, it expressed their superiority first over the lower orders in their own societies, and then over ‘primitive’, ‘barbarian’, or ‘savage’ societies elsewhere. Elias went on to argue that by the nineteenth century Europeans had forgotten that their own ancestors had not always had the same standards of behaviour, manners, and feelings about which they themselves now felt so proud. These traits were not inherently superior – indeed there was often a random element in, for example, which ways of eating at table were deemed ‘proper’ and which ‘improper’ or ‘vulgar’. That is why Elias suddenly inserted into a discussion of table manners an excursus on ‘the modelling of speech at court’ (Elias, 2012a: 111–115), noting for instance that in seventeenth-century French un mien ami and un de mes amis meant exactly the same thing, but use of the former phrase came to be defined sneeringly as ‘smelling of the bourgeois’ – a random social distinction. Thus far, Elias was using the word ‘civilisation’ in the sense of the common usage, the everyday or ‘native’ sense. By the nineteenth century, to be civilised had come to mean many things: to be polite and good-mannered and considerate towards others; clean and decent and hygienic in personal habits; humane and gentle and kind; restrained and self-controlled and even-tempered; reluctant to use violence against others save in exceptional circumstances. But what Elias was really setting out to do was to understand and explain the process through which the actual standards of behaviour and feeling came to change over the generations – what he called der Prozess der Zivilisation. Unfortunately, as he later said, he could not think of a different, less ideologically loaded word that captured all these connotations.3 So he ended up using the word ‘civilisation’ in two distinct ways, without perhaps always making the distinction entirely clear. In technical jargon that became current among social scientists in later decades, the ‘native’ sense is what anthropologists like to call an emic concept, or phenomenologists like Alfred Schutz called a ‘firstorder’ concept. The technical sense that Elias wanted to develop, of civilisation as a technical term for a long-term process, is an etic or ‘second-order’ concept. He often emphasised that there was not and never had been any such thing as an ‘uncivilised’ society. There were ‘no zero-points’: all human societies had always had some rules governing such matters as those of ‘outward bodily propriety’ and interpersonal violence. In the technical or ‘etic’ sense, civilisation is only observable

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when there are changes over time in standards of socially normal habitual standards of self-restraint. (It may be that the familiar social scientific term deferred gratification expresses the central idea of Elias’s theory. It does not capture all the nuances of the word ‘civilisation’, but its use in connection with the ‘etic’ concept might have neutralised some of the more visceral objections to it.) Nor is there any end point in a static condition of ‘civility’, a concept that American sociologists often mistakenly attribute to Elias: civilité was an ‘emic’ concept native to the Ancien Régime European upper classes; civilisation is an ‘etic’ process-concept. In Part II of On the Process of Civilisation, Elias’s intention is to show by the examination of empirical evidence how, factually, standards of behaviour, feeling, and psychological make-up (or habitus4) have changed in European society since the Middle Ages and then to explain why this has happened. In effect, he demonstrated that over the generations children gradually came to have further to travel to attain the prevailing adult standards. He did this through a study of the manners books which, in French, German, Italian, and English, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century set out the changing standards of behaviour and feeling required first among the upper classes, and then among wider social circles. The most famous part of Elias’s masterpiece, and the most entertaining, shows how social standards changed regarding behaviour at table, ‘the natural functions’ (that is, urination and defecation), blowing one’s nose, spitting, and ‘behaviour in the bedroom’ (about undressing and the concealment of the naked body).5 In each case, an ‘advance of the threshold of shame and embarrassment’ is evident. Exactly which behaviour or feelings came to be felt shameful might be almost random, but the common feature is that the prevailing rules gradually became more numerous, elaborate, and increasingly demanding – demanding of greater habitual selfrestraint. Elias conceptualised this as a gradual change in the balance between ‘external constraints’ (Fremdzwänge) – external in the sense of being constraints imposed by other people – and self-constraints (Selbstzwänge), tilting in favour of the self-constraints. This can be observed in the course of child-rearing the displeasure towards such conduct which is thus aroused by the adult finally arises through habit, without being induced by another person. . . . Since the pressure or coercion of individual adults is allied to the pressure and example of the whole surrounding world, most children, as they grow up, forget or repress relatively early the fact that their feelings of shame and embarrassment, of pleasure and displeasure, were moulded into conformity with a certain standard by external pressure and compulsion. All this appears to them as highly personal, something ‘inside’, implanted in them by nature. (Elias, 2012a: 128)

But none of this implies that adults have become more like Talcott Parsons’s ‘actors’, cultural dopes passively reproducing ‘shared values’. On the contrary, although there is a ‘social constraint towards self-constraint’ (Elias, 2012a: 403–417), external constraints always continue to play a part in the steering of behaviour: if their effectiveness diminishes, adults, like children, will explore what they can get away with. What drives this long-term process of change in prevailing social standards? Social competition between social strata certainly; Elias points to a strong spurt of

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change in manners during the European Renaissance, the age of Erasmus, when a new upper class was being formed from diverse elements. More generally, his argument is that ‘chains of interdependence’ (Elias, 2012b: 64–65; 163–164) become longer as social entities become larger in scale and more complex, and that in order to play their own part in them, people are forced to look further down the chain and try to anticipate the effects of their own and others’ activities (as the chains and networks become more opaque, they will not always succeed in this). One aspect of increasing foresight is rationalisation, a term frequently associated with Max Weber, but Elias (2006b: 101–102) emphasises that rationalisation involves a process of emotional change. Moreover, the division of social functions under the pressure of competition means that individuals have constantly to attune their actions to more and more others. The skill of ‘observing oneself and others’ becomes more refined, the perception of others more ‘psychologised’ (2012a: 443–444, 449–450), as Elias sought to demonstrate at length in The Court Society (2006b: 113–116). Among other things, this implies that the ‘arts of impression management’, although seen by Goffman (1959) as universal human skills – which they are in some degree – are themselves subject to long-term change and patterning in the course of broader social development. This necessarily brief outline of Elias’s argument concerning changes in social habitus in response to changes in the broader structure of society should be enough to suggest that the theory is of considerable generality, with no implication that such processes are uniquely European. If the theory is valid, it should be possible to observe similar processes unfolding in non-European contexts.6 Indeed, the European manners books should be seen as providing no more than a case study. Nevertheless, it may be asked why Elias drew such broad conclusions from his investigation of eating habits, urination and defecation, and spitting and noseblowing, topics that would normally be regarded as too trivial to attract the attention of social theorists. The reason that Elias focused on these questions of ‘outward bodily propriety’ is that not only does every known human society, past and present, have some rules about how these matters are to be handled, but that the lifetime point of departure – the helpless neonate devoid of all inhibitions – is and always has been the same since the emergence of the human animal. In consequence, changes from generation to generation in the prevailing rules about these universal aspects of people’s life together are relatively easy to observe. But there are also other universal problems that all human societies have to deal with, notably how people can live in relative peace with one another. And for Elias, having personally witnessed so many of the ‘uncivilised’ aspects of life as a young man, this was a more fundamental question than table manners. Attention to this question is drawn in the chapters that close the (original) first volume of On the Process of Civilisation. The first of these is ‘Changes in attitudes towards the relations between the sexes’, which portrays the violent aspects of sexual relations that often prevailed in earlier centuries. The ‘changing balance of power between the sexes’ was one of Elias’s abiding interests; unfortunately, one essay under that title (1987) is all that survived of a lost book-length typescript. The penultimate chapter is ‘On Changes in Aggressiveness’ (2012a: 186–198). In view

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of how central Elias’s thesis has come to be to discussions of historical trends in violence (Eisner, 2011; Garland, 2001; Mennell, 2007: 122–157; Pinker, 2011), it needs to be stressed that his interest is in how habitus is formed and modified in the course of processes of structural change in societies: changes in levels of habitual self-constraint, not now in table manners but in the control of aggressive impulses. His theory suggests declines will be observed in some forms of violence, but increases in others. In a key remark towards the end of the (original) first volume, Elias says: if in this or that region the power of a central authority grows, if over a larger or smaller area the people are forced to live in peace with each other, the moulding of affects and the standards of the demands upon the management of emotions are gradually changed as well. (Elias, 2012a: 195–196; our emphasis; translation modified to reflect later terminology)

This serves as a bridge to the (original) second volume, the larger part of which appears at first glance to be concerned with a quite different topic, and even a different historical period from the first. If the first focuses on processes of conscience formation, the second traces processes of state formation. Only in the final part of the book (Elias, 2012a: 401–490) does Elias set out to explain systematically how these processes – one seemingly on the ‘micro’ sociological level, the other ‘macro’ – are connected. Elias begins by returning to the decline of the Roman Empire and the fragmentation and feudalisation of Western Europe into innumerable politically and economically semi-autarkic territories, controlled – that is, protected and exploited – by local warrior lords. This trend – the tilting of the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces, with the consolidation of larger territories – began to be reversed roughly around the end of the first millennium in the region that today is France, but only later in that of Germany. There follows an extensive discussion of long-term processes of state formation. Elias’s understanding of the concept of a state is the same as Max Weber’s: ‘an organisation which successfully upholds a claim to binding rulemaking over a territory, by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence’ (Weber, 1978 [1922]: I, 54).7 More than Weber, however, Elias is interested in the processes through which a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence8 – and taxation – is established and extended. That innocent addition – taxation – is significant. Elias insisted that Marxist attempts to accord causal primacy to economic ‘factors’ or ‘forces’ or ‘modes of production’ were misleading. In the period of which Elias was talking, the means of violence and the means of production – and even the means of orientation – were simply inextricable. In short, in state-formation processes, what Elias calls the ‘monopoly mechanism’ (2012a: 301–311) – the concentration of the means of violence in the hands of territorial rulers – has twin aspects: in war between rival territorial magnates, leading to the consolidation of larger and larger territorial units; and in the internal pacification of such territories. In the region that became France, an ‘elimination contest’ unfolded, in which the number of players grew smaller and the territories grew larger. It can be thought of as resembling the Wimbledon tennis championships,

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although without fixed numbers of entrants or the certainty of a single winner. It was an unplanned process: a medieval king in the Île de France did not picture his goal as being expansion to any preconceived boundaries of the modern ‘hexagon’ of France. Rather, ‘To some extent the same was true of the French kings and their representatives as was once said of the American pioneer: “[he] didn’t want all the land; he just wanted the land next to his”’ (2012a: 346). Nor was the process driven by some innate psychological trait of ‘aggressiveness’. There were instances of medieval territorial lords who did not much like the business of war and killing, but they tended not to prosper. ‘Aggressiveness’ was rather a survival skill in a society so structured as early medieval Western Europe, and most of the warrior class seem to have enjoyed battle. Marriage between warrior houses was to some extent an alternative, and later, as social structure became more complex, the power of central rulers grew through what Elias calls the ‘royal mechanism’: the ability of kings and dukes to play off rival social groups against each other, to their own advantage (2012a: 355–357). Perhaps the monopoly mechanism may not have played out in the rest of the globe in quite the same way and sequence as in Western Europe, although the period of the Warring States in China in the fourth to second centuries BC looks very similar to the elimination contest in Europe. Nevertheless, the internal pacification of territory and the ‘taming of warriors’ – meaning the subjugation by central rulers of rival power bases within their territory – are a universal requirement of effective state formation; see, for instance, Ikegami’s (1995) study of the taming of the Japanese samurai. Essential as it is, however, the internal pacification of larger territories is not a ‘prime mover’ or ‘first cause’ in the overall process of state formation. It interwove in a spiral process with the division of labour and lengthening chains of social interdependence, the growth of towns, of trade, and the use of money, all intertwining and reinforcing each other. Towns and trade and the growing use of money generated taxes which helped support military machines which conquered more territory – internal pacification and external warfare being again inseparable. An elaborate social division of labour and an adequate supply of money were necessary for the support of complex and permanent administrative and military apparatuses. But at the same time, the internal pacification and increasingly orderly administration of larger and larger territories were necessary conditions of economic growth. This is not an abstract matter: it comes down to questions such as how much long-distance trade could develop when merchants were in constant risk of their lives on the road (and therefore had to have some of the skills and temperament of the warrior, ever ready to defend themselves), and how towns could grow large if food supplies had to come from farmers a few miles away in territory controlled by a rival lord with whom one’s local lord was constantly at battle. The overall spiral was a cumulative process experienced as a compelling force by people caught up in it, and – here is the link with the first volume – this was the source of increasing pressure to more habitual foresight and self-constraints. This gradual change in social habitus was necessary for the working of larger-scale organisation, both civil and military. Elias stresses (2012a: 446–448) that by the early modern period, impetuous courage and the joy of battle were a diminishing asset even on the

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battlefield: military discipline was changing too. Let it not be forgotten, however, that the so-to-speak ‘civilised’ habitus necessary for orderly bureaucracy was also necessary for the organisation of distinctly ‘uncivilised’ enterprises like the Holocaust, as Elias stressed in his book Studies on the Germans (2013b). Indeed, the theory of civilising processes was never a naïve ‘progress theory’: Elias had seen too much of war and violence. Rather, Elias always stressed how fragile was the veneer of the ‘civilised’ habitus – the process was all too easily reversed. There was and is a direct connection between fears and dangers: The armour of civilised conduct would crumble very rapidly if, through a change in society, the degree of insecurity that existed earlier were to break in upon us again, and if danger became as incalculable as it once was. Corresponding fears would soon burst the limits set to them today. (Elias, 2012a: 576)

We have witnessed the truth of that remark in recent decades in several brutal civil wars, such as in Yugoslavia (Mennell, 1994; Zwaan, 2001) and Syria.

Some Major Continuations in Research Reversals in civilising processes – especially instances of rising violence and cruelty – have been the focus of research and discussion among scholars working under Elias’s influence since the late 1980s. This was a central concern in the last book he published in his lifetime, Studies on the Germans. The idea of ‘decivilising processes’ was taken up by others, including Mennell (1989: 246–250, 1990) and Swaan (2001), who introduced the additional concept of ‘dys-civilising processes’ to cover cases like the Holocaust. ‘Decivilising process’ turns out to be a slippery concept, although one thing is clear: just as civilising processes involve widening circles of mutual identification (Swaan, 1995, 2015), so decivilising processes involve a narrowing breadth of mutual identification, which is a frequent response when the level of danger rises in everyday life. Increasing dangers and correspondingly rising fears can easily spiral out of control, to forms of behaviour and feeling previously unthinkable in supposedly ‘civilised’ social groups. Thomas Scheff, one of the few American sociologists to be substantially influenced by Elias, has captured an aspect of the emotional component of this in his concept of ‘shame–rage spirals’ (Scheff, 1994; Scheff and Retzinger, 1991). A much clearer understanding has emerged of another kind of apparent reversal of a civilising process. As long ago as the 1970s, a debate broke out among Dutch sociologists about whether the ‘informalisation’ of manners and feelings then observable in the wake of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and the so-called permissive society represented a reversal of the long-term trend towards greater formalisation that Elias had depicted (Brinkgreve and Korzec, 1979). More informal modes of behaviour took many forms, from the increased use of forenames and decline in the use of titles, to more improvisatory forms of dancing and, especially, less distant and formal relations between the sexes. The trend had been discernible for most of the twentieth century, even if it accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed Elias in 1939 had posed

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the question of what it meant even then to observe mixed bathing and more revealing bathing costumes (2012a: 182). Was that a sign of a decrease in social constraints, which he considered entirely possible, or was it rather a sign of stricter, more deeply habituated self-constraints? He hinted that the latter seemed more likely: that rigid social rules could be relaxed because people’s ability to restrain their sexual urges could (usually) be taken more for granted: the level of ‘mutually expected selfrestraint’ (Goudsblom’s later phrase) had increased. In other words, the process involved a ‘highly controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’.9 Among sociologists involved in the debate, this has emerged as the accepted interpretation, particularly through the work of Cas Wouters, who has tenaciously pursued research over four decades. In numerous articles and two important books in English (2004; 2007), he has studied changing standards in manners and emotions over more than a century (1890–2000) in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and the United States. He is able to show how pervasive informalisation processes in many aspects of Western social life have been, and that they all tend to involve the deployment of subtler and more demanding standards of self-constraint. Take, for example, the increasing use of forenames (also, in languages other than English, the familiar pronouns tu, du, ты, and so on) between subordinates and their superiors in an office – symptoms of greater, but not absolute, equality. Above all, however, Wolters’s research throws light on changing standards in the key fields of sexuality, marriage, and divorce. Premarital sexual intercourse and unmarried partners starting families are widely taken for granted in a way that would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago, but arguably the maintenance of a stable family relationship is more demanding when it is not supported by the old formal frameworks provided and sanctioned by church and state. The ‘commandments of the new freedom’ (Brinkgreve, 1982) can be equally demanding in the case of divorce: at one time, divorce was such a shameful thing that divorced couples were expected never to be seen together again, but today the ideal – met sometimes! – is that they remain on good terms with each other and are no embarrassment to their acquaintances. Changes in attitudes to gay relationships have been even more dramatic (Stolk and Wouters, 1987). Elias spoke of the changing balance of power between the sexes (1987), but Wouters (1998a; 1998b) has introduced a new concept to capture the changing quality of emotional relationships: the ‘lust balance between love and sex’.10 He contends that male sexuality was – and of course for some people still is – dominated by lust, the drive for sexual intercourse, while female sexuality was orientated more towards lasting love. Now, the evidence is that many women – in Western societies at least – are more able to express their need for physical sex, while many men are able more easily to express their emotions and their need for love. All these trends, be it noted, are reflections of more general changes in power ratios within society, generally in the direction of greater ‘functional democratisation’. That being said, there has been a more recent debate among process sociologists about the coexistence of such trends alongside the marked trend to increasing social and economic inequality in Western societies. The ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ is also a key idea in Elias and Dunning’s writings on the sociology of sport (2008), a field that scarcely existed until

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they began their studies in the 1960s but which is now a densely populated worldwide sub-discipline. Before then, the conventional sociological view of ‘leisure’ in general was that it was the opposite of ‘work’, and was to be understood as meeting the need for ‘relaxation’ after the stresses of employment. Elias’s insight was that those stresses arose particularly from the necessity to exercise a constantly high level of self-constraint for the smooth functioning of the workplace. The result was often an emotional staleness, which created a need not for ‘relaxation’ but rather for excitement and for its resolution in pleasurable catharsis. That could be found in many fields – art, literature, theatre, music – but ‘the genesis of sports as a sociological problem’ (2008: 107–149) was particularly interesting. To bring out the distinctive features of sports in the modern world, Elias went back as far as the Ancient Greek Olympics, showing how violent, sometimes even fatal, the contests at those quadrennial games could be. The folk games of medieval Europe, such as annual ‘football’ matches, could be quite unruly – literally, with few rules. And field sports – hunting, shooting, and fishing – involved actual killing, albeit not of human beings unless by accident. Sports of the recognisably modern kind began to emerge in the eighteenth century, and most took firmer shape in the nineteenth, in the course of industrialisation, especially in Britain. They included cricket, various kinds of football, hockey, boxing, golf, and many others. A common feature was that they involved mimetic battles according to codified rules, under which players were not intentionally injured. For example, Dunning and Sheard (2005) show how the rules of the variety of football that first developed at Rugby School gradually came to prohibit such practices as kicking opponents’ shins with hobnailed boots. Rugby nevertheless remains a relatively dangerous game. Another, higher-status public school,11 Eton, played a key role in the development of the soccer code, which places far more constraints on players, banning the handling of the ball and virtually all forms of violent contact between players. Apart from basketball, no sports seem to have been ‘invented’ from scratch. Rather, their rules have been fine-tuned over the decades to achieve a satisfactory level of excitement in the contest. For example, the leg-before-wicket rule in cricket, the offside rule in soccer, and the prohibiting of forward passes in rugby were all introduced to prevent boring, safety-first practices creeping into the games. State-formation processes also played a subtle part in the development of sports: rule-making bodies gradually standardised codes to make contests possible first between neighbouring towns or counties and eventually between individuals (for example in boxing) and teams from different countries. The controlled decontrolling of emotional controls in this pattern of excitement leading to pleasurable catharsis is experienced both by players and spectators. Elias saw the rise of spectatorship as a key characteristic of modern sports: spectators too need to let off steam. And, just as no civilising process guarantees no absolute conformity to prevailing standards, so the excitement generated among spectators has often spilled over into problems of soccer hooliganism, and hooliganism in other sports and many parts of the world (Dunning, 1999). Another notable continuity in research has been the use of the established–outsiders model of inter-group relations, derived from Elias and Scotson’s (2008) study of South Wigston near Leicester around 1960. The (white) working-class populations of two

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areas of housing differed little from each other in ‘objective’ terms, except that one group was much longer established in the neighbourhood than the other and had had more time to form a dense network and channels of gossip, and to occupy the main seats of local power. They were able to use these advantages to stereotype the newer arrivals, in ways that would later be more associated with ethnic relations. From this book emerged a more general theory of established–outsider relations that has been widely used in later research (Górnicka and Mennell, 2014).

A Sociological Theory of Knowledge and the Sciences In 1956, Elias published his essay ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’ (see Elias, 2007: 68–104) in the British Journal of Sociology. The title led it to be widely misread as yet another routine discussion of ‘objectivity’ and Wertfreiheit. In fact, it represented Elias’s first public statement of a distinctive theory of knowledge. Its roots ran deep, to his dispute with Hönigswald in the 1920s and his rejection of mainstream philosophical epistemology. Elias’s long-term aim was to create what Kilminster (2007) has called a ‘post-philosophical sociology’ – including a sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences (in the plural) – emancipated from the hegemony of philosophers. The theory found fuller expression in the theoretical turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, with heated debates between so-called positivists and critical theorists (Adorno et al., 1976), and especially in Britain between the followers of Karl Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn respectively (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). Elias wrote numerous essays, now collected in one volume (2009a). He had long been an emphatic if little-noticed opponent of Popper, whose two most famous books, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957), had done a great deal to steer social scientists away from the long-term developmental perspectives that Elias championed.12 More fundamentally, Elias regarded Popper’s philosophy of science as the modern embodiment of the Kantian transcendentalism that he had rejected for decades. Popper contended that there was a single universal and eternal ‘logic of scientific discovery’, and that only knowledge capable of being empirically tested and ‘falsified’ according to methods modelled on those of physics could be regarded as ‘scientific’. On the other hand, Elias was also strongly opposed to the many forms of relativism then prevalent under the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). It depicted the formation of ‘scientific paradigms’, leading to periods of ‘normal science’ not striving for novelty, which posed serious obstacles to their eventual overthrow in ‘scientific revolutions’. Kuhn himself did not intend his book to be seen as relativistic, but among social scientists it fostered views of the ‘science is just another world view like magic and witchcraft’ type. Against both sides in these debates, Elias took a very long-term view of the growth of the stock of human knowledge from the earliest stages of human society. Here at last a connection with the theory of civilising processes

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becomes apparent. The kernel of Elias’s argument is that advances in knowledge require the investigator to make a detour via detachment. It is necessary to stand back, to be less emotionally involved, in order to perceive new connections between observations. That has been true of the growth of knowledge since the earliest human societies:13 it is not a distinctive feature of modern science. However, life for early humans was highly unpredictable, often dangerous; people were at the mercy of floods, droughts, famines, wildfire, wild animals, disease – all forces beyond their control. Danger and incalculability provoke fear, and fears promote emotional involvement and make detours via detachment more difficult.14 Fear also promotes fantasy and ‘magical-mythical thinking’. The growth of knowledge therefore proceeded rather slowly at first. It accelerated gradually in conjunction with the internal pacification of territory – everyday life became more routinely safe. The modern phase of the rapid growth of science is often traced, in Europe, to the seventeenth century, when scientific societies like the Royal Society of London and similar academies in other countries were founded under royal protection. A reminder that protection for the pursuit of knowledge – diminishing danger and fears – was necessary is provided by the fact that only a few decades earlier the Roman Catholic Church had burned Giordano Bruni at the stake and had come close to doing the same to Galileo, for the crime of believing on the basis of observation that the earth orbits the sun. Next, Elias launched an attack on the ‘covering law’ that logical positivists took from classical physics as a model of theory and explanation for all scientific endeavour, thereby inducing ‘physics envy’ in the social sciences especially. Taking inspiration from Comte’s (deeply unfashionable) idea of a hierarchy of the sciences, Elias proposes a ‘model of models’ (2007: 90–104; 2009a: 66–84), depicting the characteristics of theories in the various sciences. The covering law model is, or was, relevant to relatively unstructured congeries, marked by reversible cause-and-effect relationships; it is questionable whether it is any longer even relevant to modern cosmology. Chemistry already involved theories in three dimensions: for example, a generic or ‘quantitative’ formula for a sugar is C6H12O6, but the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen can be organised spatially in many ways to produce different sugars. Biology typically involves models in four dimensions: biological processes, generally irreversible, unfold in space and time. The social sciences require process theories in five dimensions, space, time, and the fifth dimension of experience, because people’s perceptions of the social processes in which they are caught up are an essential component of an explanation of those processes. Unlike most biological processes, social processes can be reversible. Finally, the overall interconnectedness of Elias’s thinking can be seen in his important essay on ‘Scientific Establishments’ (2009a: 107–160). He used the aforementioned established–outsiders model to show how closely the prestige hierarchy of academic disciplines correlated with the chronological sequence of their emergence as distinct sciences, and their emancipation from the protoplasm of ‘philosophy’.

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Characteristics of the Figurational or Process Sociology Research Tradition Norbert Elias once said that he did not have a methodology, but that perhaps he had a method. Among his papers was found a little note to himself, headed ‘Die Eliassche Methode’. It read: ‘Makrostrukturen durch die Untersuchung von Mikrostructuren sichtbar zu machen’ (to make macro structures visible through the investigation of micro structures). That sums up the method underlying the theory of civilising processes, and much else in the figurational or process-sociology research tradition. Elias’s most general ‘theoretical’ statement came in 1970 in What Is Sociology? (Elias, 2012b). In spite of its title, it is not really an introductory textbook for firstyear students; it is, however, a good statement of the main principles that underlie the continuing work of social scientists inspired by Elias. Besides his own work, many book-length expositions of Elias and the process-sociological tradition have been published. In English alone they include Mennell (1989), Krieken (1997), and Dunning and Hughes (2013). One principle is that this approach is always processual: its focus is not on ‘structure and process’ but on the ‘structure of processes’. Research seeks to reveal the ‘sequential order’ of social development, but without any implication that longterm social processes are ever ‘inevitable’ or irreversible. It further follows that adherents of the figurational approach are strongly opposed to what Elias (2009b: 107–126) called ‘the retreat of sociologists into the present’, or what Goudsblom (1977) called ‘hodiecentrism’. Time is always one axis of a figurational explanation. Linked to the focus on process is the strategy of ‘concept avoidance’, or more specifically the avoidance of what Elias (2012b: 106–108) called Zustandsreduktion or ‘process reduction’. He followed Benjamin Lee Whorf’s (1956) argument, that ‘Standard Average European’ languages exerted a pressure on sociologists (among others) to attempt to capture processes by means of a substantive and a verb – ‘the wind blows’ – and that if social scientists did not resist this form of conceptualisation it led to endless chicken-and-egg problems of the ‘individual and society’ type. Social scientists should rather strive for more thoroughly processual concepts. ‘Civilisation’ is just one example; Elias also invented such unlovely but thoroughly processual terms as ‘courtisation’, ‘sportisation’, ‘parliamentarisation’, and so on. Figurational or process sociologists also strive always to think in terms of homines aperti – of people in the plural – rather than homo clausus. when . . . the ‘freedom’ of the individual is stressed, it is usually forgotten that there are always simultaneously many mutually dependent individuals, whose interdependence to a greater or lesser extent limits each one’s scope for action. (Elias, 2012b: 162)15

Since human beings are ineluctably interdependent with others from birth onwards, power is an aspect of every human relationship. Where one person, or one group, is more dependent on another than the other is on them, the other party has a power

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advantage. But such ‘power ratios’ may, and typically do, change and fluctuate over time. The best exposition of the connections between these principles can be found in Elias’s chapter on ‘game models’ (2012b: 71–98). He shows how the longer and more complex and more opaque the chains or networks of interdependence become within which a person is typically caught up, and in particular the more relatively equal the power ratios between the links in the chain become, the less does the course of events resemble the outcome of anyone’s plans and intentions. ‘Unintended consequences’ are central in this research tradition. Indeed, people’s plans and intentions may come to be more shaped by than shaping the social process: they are entangled in ‘compelling processes’. Moreover, their perceptions of the more or less opaque social process feed into the appeal of rival ideologies – which takes us back to the problem of human knowledge once more. Process theories thus involve rejection of conventional dichotomies, like macro v. micro, individual v. society, or agency v. structure, with which social scientists too often continue to befuddle students. Process theories make connections that may otherwise be overlooked. Critics of Elias often point to this or that aspect that he seems to have ‘borrowed’ from one or other earlier writer. What they overlook in so doing is his enormous capacity for making unperceived connections, forging a powerful theoretical–empirical synthesis.

References Adorno, Theodor, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl Popper. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. New York: Harper & Row. Brandtstädter, Susanne. 2003. ‘With Elias in China: Civilising Process, Local Restorations and Power in Contemporary Rural China.’ Anthropological Theory 3(1): 87–105. Brinkgreve, Christien. 1982. ‘On Modern Relationships: The Commandments of the New Freedom.’ Netherlands Journal of Sociology 18(1): 47–56. Brinkgreve, Christien, and Michael Korzec. 1979. ‘Kan het civilisatieprocess van richting veranderen?’ [Can the civilising process change direction?] Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 3(1): 17–32. Broadhurst, Roderic, Thierry Bouhours and Brigitte Bouhours. 2015. Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dunning, Eric. 1999. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization. London: Routledge. Dunning, Eric, and Jason Hughes. 2013. Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology: Knowledge, Interdependence, Power, Process. London: Bloomsbury. Dunning, Eric, and Kenneth Sheard. 2005. Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, revised edition. London: Routledge. Eisner, Manuel. (ed.) 2011. ‘Violence in Evolutionary and Historical Perspective.’ Special Issue of British Journal of Criminology 51(4): 473–478. Elias, Norbert. 1939. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 2 vols. Basel: Haus zum Falken.

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1987. ‘The Changing Balance of Power between the Sexes: A Process-Sociological Study.’ Theory, Culture & Society 4(2–3): 287–316. 2006a. Early Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Dublin: UCD Press. 2006b. The Court Society. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 2]. 2007. Involvement and Detachment. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 8]. 2008. Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 15]. 2009a. Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 14]. 2009b. Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 16]. 2010. The Society of Individuals. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 10]. 2012a. On the Process of Civilisation. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. 1 vol., Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 3]. 2012b. What Is Sociology? Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 5]. 2013a. Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 17]. 2013b. Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 11]. 2018. ‘Spontaneity and Self-consciousness.’ In Jan Haut, Paddy Dolan, Dieter Reicher, and Raúl Sánchez García (eds.), Excitement Processes: Norbert Elias’s Unpublished Works on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. 2008. Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 7]. Elias, Norbert, and John L. Scotson. 2008. The Established and the Outsiders. Dublin: UCD Press [Collected Works, vol. 4]. Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Górnicka, Barbara. 2016. Nakedness, Shame and Embarrassment: A Long-Term Sociological Perspective. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Górnicka, Barbara, Katie Liston, and Stephen Mennell. 2015. ‘Twenty-five Years On: Norbert Elias’s Intellectual Legacy 1990–2015.’ Human Figurations 4(3). http://hdl .handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0004.303 Górnicka, Barbara, and Stephen Mennell. 2014. ‘Civilizing Processes.’ In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, vol. 1 (pp. 405–408). Chichester: John Wiley. Goudsblom, Johan. 1977. Sociology in the Balance. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. Fire and Civilization. London: Allen Lane. Ikegami, Eiko. 1995. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kilminster, Richard. 2007. Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Krieken, Robert van. 1998. Norbert Elias. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Kürsat-Ahlers, Elçin. 1994. Zur frühen Staatenbildung von Steppenvölkern: Über die Soziound Psychogenese der eurasischen Nomadenreiche am Beispiel der Hsiung-Nu und Göktürken mit einem Exkurs über die Skythen [Early State-Formation among the Peoples of the Steppes: On the Sociogenesis and Psychogenesis of the Eurasion Nomadic Empires, with reference to the Hsiung-Nu and with a Digression on the Scythians]. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave. 1970. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Leach, Edmund R. 1986. ‘Violence.’ London Review of Books, 23 October. Mennell, Stephen. 1989. Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 1990 ‘Decivilising Processes: Theoretical Significance and Some Lines for Research.’ International Sociology 5(2): 205–223. 1994. ‘The Formation of We-images: A Process Theory.’ In Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (pp. 175–197). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 2007. The American Civilizing Process. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Ohira, Akira. 2017. ‘The Development of Socialism in the Japanese Civilising Process.’ In Akira Ohira (ed.), Norbert Elias and His Sociological Perspective: Civilisation, Culture and Knowledge in Process (pp. 73–92). Tokyo: DTP Publishing. Özgören Kınlı, İrem. 2014. ‘Principal Elements of the Ottoman State-formation Process through an Eliasian Perspective.’ In Tatiana Savoia Landini and François Dépelteau (eds.), Norbert Elias and Empirical Research (pp. 161–178). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. London: Allen Lane. Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1972. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Quilley, Stephen, and Steven Loyal. 2005. ‘Eliasian Theory as a “Central Theory” for the Human Sciences.’ Current Sociology 53(5): 809–830. Scheff, Thomas J. 1994. Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War. Boulder, CO: Westview. Scheff, Thomas J., and Suzanne M. Retzinger. 1991. Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Souza, Juliano, and Wanderley Marchi, Jr. 2014. ‘Civilisation and Violence at the Periphery of Capitalism: Notes for Rethinking the Brazilian Civilizing Process.’ In Tatiana Savoia Landini and François Dépelteau (eds.), Norbert Elias and Empirical Research (pp. 117–138). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stauth, Georg. 1997. ‘“Elias in Singapore”: Civilising Processes in a Tropical City.’ Thesis Eleven 50: 51–70. Stolk, Abraham van, and Cas Wouters. 1987. ‘Power Changes and Self-respect: A Comparison of Two Cases of Established–Outsiders Relations.’ Theory, Culture and Society 4(2–3): 477–488. Swaan, Abram de. 1995. ‘Widening Circles of Identification: Emotional Concerns in Sociogenetic Perspective.’ Theory, Culture and Society 12(2): 25–39. 2001. ‘Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination, and the State.’ Theory, Culture & Society 18 (2–3): 265–276.

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2015. The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Allen & Unwin. 1978 [1922]. Economy and Society, 2 vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Bryan. 1977. ‘A Tribute to Elias.’ New Society (7 July): 15–16. Wouters, Cas. 1998a. ‘Balancing Sex and Love since the 1960s Sexual Revolution.’ Theory, Culture and Society 15(3–4): 187–214. 1998b. ‘Changes in the “Lust Balance” of Sex and Love since the Sexual Revolution: The Example of The Netherlands.’ In G. Bendelow and S. J. Williams (eds.), Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (pp. 228–249). London: Routledge. 2004. Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West, 1890–2000. London: Sage. 2007. Informalisation – Manners and Emotions since 1890. London: Sage. Zwaan, Ton. 2001. Civilisering en decivilisering: Studies over staatsvorming en geweld nationalisme en vervolging. Amsterdam: Boom.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

The English title has a complicated history. Edmund Jephcott’s translation of the first volume was published in 1978, under the title The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, from which many readers drew the mistaken conclusion that this was the complete work. The second volume did not appear until four years later in 1982, a delay (caused by Elias’s habitual procrastination in giving approval) that was itself a source of confusion. To make matters worse, the second volume appeared under two different titles: the unauthorised and misleading Power and Civility in the United States, but State Formation and Civilization (with ‘The Civilizing Process’ in a smaller font above it on the title page) in Britain and the rest of the world. A faulty single-volume edition was produced by Blackwell in 1994 under the title The Civilizing Process; with academic input, this was improved somewhat in a 2000 edition. Finally, the Board of the Norbert Elias Foundation decided that the definitive scholarly edition, published in 2012 as volume 3 of the Collected Works, should be entitled more literally On the Process of Civilisation; the reason was that the emphasis and focus should be on the word process, not on ‘civilisation’. However justified academically, it was probably a bad marketing decision. See for example the views of two of the grandees of British social anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century: Leach (1986) and Goody (2006). In a late essay entitled ‘What I Mean by Civilisation: Reply to Hans Peter Duerr’, Elias wrote: ‘I could have looked around for less ideologically charged terms for long-term changes of behaviour standards, or tried to free the concept of civilisation from its ideological burdens and transform it into an ideologically neutral term with the aid of appropriate documentation. I did cast about for other possible expressions but did not find any that were more appropriate. Finally I decided to develop the concept of civilisation into an ideologically neutral, fact-based term in conjunction with abundant empirical documentation’ (Elias, 2008: 8–13). Writing in German, Elias (like many other social scientists in Germany and France before the Second World War) used the word Habitus; but that term was virtually unknown in

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

English until it was popularised through translations of the works of Pierre Bourdieu in the 1980s. Therefore, Edmund Jephcott rendered the term as ‘psychological make-up’ in the original English translation of The Civilizing Process. In the Collected Works in English, the word ‘habitus’ has been restored. It essentially means that level of personality characteristics which individuals share in common with fellow members of their social groups – groups that may range in scale from families and communities and professions to nations and beyond. A recent study of the complexities of shame and embarrassment in relation to the naked body is Górnicka (2016). For applications of the theory of civilising processes beyond Europe, see: Mennell (2007) on the USA; Brandtstädter (2003) on China; Broadhurst et al. (2015) on Cambodia; Stauth (1997) on Singapore; Özgören Kınlı (2014) on the Ottomans; Souza and Marchi (2014) on Brazil; Ohira (2017) and to some extent Ikegami (1997) on Japan; and Kürsat-Ahlers (1994) on the Eurasian nomadic empires. This is the definition used almost universally among sociologists, except perhaps in the USA, where the word ‘state’ tends to denote what in other countries might be called a ‘province’ or a Land. American sociologists (and politicians) often speak instead of ‘nation-building’; this is, however, a misleading term, implying, besides a more planned, intentional, creation of institutions, a degree of emotional identification with fellow members of a ‘nation’. That may indeed overlap with state formation, but typically in later phases of it. Of course there will always be acts of violence, up to and including murder; but does the murderer have to contend with the strong possibility of being apprehended and punished by the forces of the state? This is the significance of Weber’s formulation about a ‘claim to binding rule-making [and] . . . a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: I); the legitimacy is claimed by the state, not necessarily acknowledged initially by its subjects. In this form, the phrase was first used by Cas Wouters, but Elias used the term ‘controlled decontrolling’ in a paper written in the early 1960s (Elias, 2018), and then in the essays on sport and leisure (Elias and Dunning, 2008). Note that in neither context does ‘balance’ indicate equality; in other contexts Elias often spoke of ‘power ratios’, a term less open to misunderstanding. The confusing British term ‘public school’ actually means a fee-paying private school. In his later work (1972), Popper himself adopted a more ‘evolutionary’ stance, but Elias discounted this on the grounds that it still rested on the idea of a single universal and eternal logic of scientific method. See Goudsblom (1992) on the gradual establishment of a human species monopoly on the active use of fire. See especially Elias’s essay ‘The Fishermen in the Maelstrom’ (2007: 105–178), in which he uses a short story by Edgar Allan Poe to illustrate this point. The most sustained dissolution of the supposed ‘individual and society’ problem can be found in The Society of Individuals (Elias, 2010), which contains three essays dating from 1939, the 1940s–1950s, and 1987.

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15 Phenomenology and Social Theory Thomas Szanto

Phenomenology is not so much an exact methodological doctrine as the title of a family of ideas, which originate in the work of the founder of the so-called phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl. A common denominator that all authors from the phenomenological movement converge upon is that phenomenology is the study of phenomena of conscious experience from the first-person perspective. It includes such diverse objects of study as the perception of ordinary spatio-temporal objects; scientific theories and knowledge systems; the experiential relation to one’s own and others’ mental states; emotions, space, and temporality; values, norms, or aesthetic objects; and, not least, intersubjective relations, interaction, social facts, and different types of social formations. A central explanandum of phenomenology is the everyday experience of such phenomena, or, to introduce a key notion of classical phenomenology, the “lifeworld” of the experiencing subjects in which these phenomena are always and already embedded. A core contention of phenomenologists is that an adequate study of all these phenomena must take its cue from the analysis of the different aspects and modes in which they are given in subjective experience. For example, not only can I perceive the scenery in front of me, I can also imagine or remember it. I can wish or hope that what I see lasts. I can be directed at it with joy or dread. Moreover, I always grasp only parts or aspects of it. But however I am directed at an object or event, it will always and only be from a certain perspective, and it will always and only be from my own subjective perspective. Moreover, no matter what kind of experience and under what aspects we consider it, there will always be something or other that one is experiencing. In phenomenological jargon, in every experience, I am always intentionally directed at something or someone, and the respective intentional object of my experience is given to me always and only in certain modes of givenness. Putting these two ideas together, we can say that phenomenology studies the complex ways in which something is intentionally given in subjective conscious experience. Now, prima facie this seems to lead not only to some kind of subjective relativism but, even more threateningly, to a form of solipsism. After all, one might argue, if the prime object of study is supposed to be the very way in which entities are given in firstperson experience, how do we get from there to any claims about social reality, or how do we integrate others’ perspectives into the picture? Such skepticism has been voiced over and over again vis-à-vis classical phenomenology from countless and in many ways not unsympathetic thinkers of the twentieth century, such as the critical theorists Adorno, Apel, or Habermas (cf. Bernstein, 1978; Schmid, 2001; Wolff, 292

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2012; Zahavi, 2000), or poststructuralists such as Foucault (cf. Oksala, 2012). It canvasses, however, the wrong picture, as I shall argue. I will start by outlining the historical context and the meta-theoretical and more general socio-ontological issues explored in the phenomenological movement. I will then focus on two different dimensions of sociality that have been analyzed in detail by phenomenologists, notably dyadic, interpersonal, or intersubjective relations on the one hand and the communal or collective dimension on the other. Regarding the first dimension, I will discuss phenomenological conceptions of empathy and sociocommunicative acts and the issue of social typification, as well as the notion of the lifeworld. Regarding the phenomenology of community, I shall concentrate on phenomenological accounts of different social formations, collective intentionality, and shared emotions.

Social Theory and the Phenomenological Movement Ever since its inception in the work of Husserl, phenomenology was directly engaged with a detailed analysis of social reality but also with contemporary thinking about social reality, or social theory. The phenomenological movement did not just evolve side by side with classical sociology; in addition, it was deeply interlinked with social thought, and especially so in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Not only was Husserl fairly well acquainted with the work of the founding fathers of German sociology, Tönnies, and Simmel; from very early on in his thinking, around 1905, Husserl came to identify intersubjectivity – a term that was probably first coined by him – as one of the central tenets phenomenology must address. Husserl’s subsequent plea for a “phenomenological” or “intentional sociology” (2008 [1916–1937]: 389; cf. 1973a [1905–1920]) did not go unheard by second- and third-generation phenomenologists. The most prominent examples pursuing this are: Max Scheler’s sociology of knowledge (1980a [1924]), his first systematic elaboration of the distinction between empathy, sympathy, emotional contagion, and emotional sharing, and his axiological theory of social formations such as associations, life-communities, or the so-called communal person (Gesamtperson) (2005 [1926]; 1980b [1926]); Alfred Schütz’s critical engagement with Weber, Mead, and Parsons in his interpretive sociology (verstehende Soziologie) (1967 [1932]), and its later development in the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann exploring the social construction of reality (1966); or Heidegger’s famous analysis of Dasein as “Being-with” (Mit-Sein) (1927; 1967), which was geared critically against his teacher’s, Husserl’s, theory of intersubjectivity and empathy. But beyond these better-known exponents, there were a number of second-generation phenomenologists who also engaged in book-length treatises on social ontology. These included Felix Kaufmann and Aaron Gurwitsch, who started their careers in Vienna and then emigrated to assume positions at the New School for Social Research in New York to become, along with their colleague Schütz, leading figures of the North American school of phenomenological sociology (see Barber, 2004).

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Phenomenology, however, was never merely an ontological, epistemological, or even purely philosophical enterprise. In contrast to much of today’s standard social philosophy and, in particular, contemporary social ontology in the analytic tradition, phenomenologists were interested not only in sociology but also in social renewal and political thought.

The Central Issues: From Individualism to Collectivism and Social Constructivism A good way to enter into phenomenological thinking about social reality is by way of distinguishing some general claims about the ontology and normative status individuals hold within social reality. The first three claims, which under different guises have been much debated throughout centuries of thinking from Aristotle to Marx or Durkheim, concern the issues of individualism versus holism, singularism versus anti-singularism, and collectivism versus anti-collectivism. And there is a corollary issue concerning the social constitution of reality, knowledge, and truth, namely the issue of social constructivism. The first issue concerns the fundamental question of what constitutes or determines individual persons’ mental, practical, and emotional life or, broadly speaking, intentional psychology. The question is whether individuals’ experiences, volitions, intentions, or emotions are constitutively dependent on entertaining relations with other individuals or social relations (including for example interaction, collaborative or joint agency, affective sharing, communication, or discursive thinking). An important epistemological corollary to this ontological issue is whether individuals can fully understand themselves and are understandable to others only by reference to those social relations. Or are there, rather, some essential features of human psychology whose existence and functioning are independent of persons being embedded in social relations (which, to be sure, is a contingent matter of fact of human existence)? Individualists endorse the latter claim, while holists deny it, and it is safe to say that virtually all phenomenologists endorse some version of holism. The next issue concerns the social atoms and the possible socio-ontological taxonomy of reality. Does social reality comprise only individual persons and their relations? Or does the ontology of the social world also include other social entities, including collectives or possibly “higher-order” or “supra-individual” entities, such as group agents or group persons? And, if the latter, do such nonindividual agents have an intentional, mental, or affective life of their own (group mentality, collective experiences, etc.), or a normative status (e.g., concerning collective responsibility) that is not reducible to but may still be founded upon individuals and their interactions? It is crucial to distinguish anti-singularism from anti-collectivism, all the more so since these two claims are prima facie in tension. The third main socio-ontological claim concerns the ontological and normative relation between individuals and nonindividual social entities and social facts. Assuming anti-singularist leanings, the issue is whether one is committed to the further-reaching claim that individuals’ intentional psychology, behavior, personhood, or moral status (including their

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autonomous agency, spontaneity, moral accountability, dignity, etc.) are compromised, or, as Pettit (1993) aptly puts it, “outflanked” or “overridden,” by individuals’ membership in collectives, their shared affective life, intentional regularities governing group agency, or sociocultural laws or norms. While this is indeed endorsed by, for example, Durkheim or different Marxist and some poststructuralist thinkers, there is hardly any phenomenologist who subscribes to such collectivism. So much then for the ontological and normative space individuals and groups of individuals hold within social reality. What about claims concerning the social constitution or construction of reality as such? The decisive difference in the socioontological impact of these two issues, that is the (social) construction of social reality and the social construction of reality, is nicely reflected in the title of two books, the first representing the (Schützian) phenomenological heritage by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), the other written by the analytic philosopher John Searle (1995). While Searle’s book is one of the most influential contemporary social ontologies, concerned with how social facts such as money, marriages, institutions, or conventions are constituted by acts of collective intentionality and acceptance, Berger and Luckmann provide arguably the clearest account of the sociology-of-knowledge tradition, whose founding text was published by Scheler (1980a [1924]). Sociology of knowledge is “concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 15, 13). But this analysis is inseparable from that of the social nature of knowledge of reality. Hence, for sociologists of knowledge the issue of the social nature of reality is never just an ontological but always also an epistemological and sociological enterprise. Knowledge is here defined as the “certainty that phenomena are real.” Phenomena have the specific qualities they have independent of our individual stances and volitions. However, the key contention of sociologists of knowledge is that phenomena are not independent but relative to the social context and framework in which we conceptualize them or understand what their reality means for us. Accordingly, sociology of knowledge addresses how we individually or collectively come to see reality as objective, that is, viewed from different perspectives other than mine or ours; how my everyday lifeworld is essentially not just mine but an intersubjective world that I share with certain but not all others; how bodily interaction, linguistic communication, institutionalization, and conventional or normative legitimization play a role in such sharing; how all my experiences are embedded in and shaped by norms, habits, and traditions of thinking, feeling, and communicating; and how this social history and reality eventually becomes sedimented not only in objective systems of representation (symbolic signs, public discourse, etc.) but also via processes of subjective internalization, and thus ultimately constitutes my social and personal identity (as a social being). Surely, when it comes to the metaphysical plausibility of these and related claims, everything depends on how to understand the notions of construction, constitution, or (in)dependence. Scheler, for example, clearly distinguishes between two different factors that regulate the acquisition of knowledge of reality, namely “ideal” and “real factors” (Ideal- and Realfaktoren). Real factors consist of the causal and material

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determinants of knowledge, such as the economic or demographic situation or power relations in society, as well as psycho-social and “psycho-biological” ones, such as individual “instincts,” “collective interests,” and “drives.” These factors are studied by (social) psychology, ethnology, and sociology and determine the conditions under which certain forms of knowledge emerge or certain aspects of reality become visible to certain groups. But real factors only affect the historical emergence or actualization of the ideal factors in a given society. The latter consist of the set of spiritual or cultural achievements, values, religious ideas, and normative ideals, or the Lebens- and Weltanschauung. Real factors do not affect the content of these idealities. Consequently, Scheler rejects what he calls sociologism (Soziologismus), a form of Durkheimian social determinism. Instead, he advocates a co-determination between mind, knowledge, and society. Scheler argues that only the “forms” of cognition, perception, and knowledge and “the selection of objects of knowledge” are co-determined (mitbedingt) by the structure of society and its “dominant perspective of social interests.” Scheler thus follows the Marxist idea according to which there are certain class or other socioeconomic and cultural biases that deeply shape the apperception of reality. Furthermore, he maintains that there are certain forms of thought and indeed affective patterns (esp. 2005 [1926]; 1980b [1926]) that are dependent on certain types of groups in which they alone can be realized. However much Scheler, Berger and Luckmann, and other phenomenologists with either stronger realist or idealist inclinations differ, most phenomenologists can readily agree on the following nuanced view regarding the issue of social constructivism: Reality is not constructed or causally dependent on human thinking and agency. Phenomenologists are not committed to radical constructivism, according to which everything, including ourselves, is but a social construct. However, they would still argue that we cannot fully understand reality as such or ourselves as long as we don’t understand our essentially social nature (see also Collin, 1997). To summarize, phenomenology operates with a holistic, anti-singularist, but also anti-collectivist ontology and maintains a moderate, epistemological version of social constructivism. In the following I will try to bring into greater relief this still very general and abstract picture. Roughly, the idea is this: Individuals not only stand in interpersonal relations, which constitute their very being as persons and are characterized by their own type of experience, namely empathic experience (Einfühlung). They can also properly speaking share intentions, plans, values, and even affective states and, though interpersonal, empathic encounters lie at the bottom of such sharing, they are not sufficient for such plural or “we-experiences.” Finally, depending on what exactly is shared (interests, volitions, emotions, etc.) and how robust the integration of the individuals is, phenomenologists distinguish different social formations.

The Phenomenology of Empathy and Intersubjectivity Phenomenology studies phenomena as they are given in subjective experience. Among the phenomena that arguably pervade subjective experience most

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deeply are other subjects and their experiences. Thus, the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the analysis of the ways in which subjects are given to one another in experience, understand each other, and interact, is not just one among others but a fundamental part of phenomenology. According to phenomenologists, subjects would not be full-fledged persons if they did not engage in interpersonal relations, and hence phenomenologists’ endorsement of holism. But how do subjects first enter into and eventually maintain interpersonal relations? And how do they have access to each other’s experiences and their mental, practical, or affective life? Most classical phenomenologists’ answer is that we access or experience other people by way of empathy (Einfühlung), interaction, social typification, and so-called sociocommunicative acts.

Empathy, Interpersonal Understanding, and Interaction There are roughly five features of what an empathic encounter between two persons amounts to, which all phenomenologists can agree upon. First, empathy is a sui generis kind of intentional act. Second, the most basic form of empathy presupposes the face-to-face encounter of embodied agents. Third, the most basic form of empathy is the direct apperception of other embodied minds. Fourth, phenomenologists have a clear view of how empathy relates to affectivity and emotions, a view that differs markedly from both the folk-psychological and dominant contemporary understanding of the notion. They argue that empathy must be clearly distinguished from related but distinctly different affectively laden interpersonal acts, such as emotional contagion, compassion, or sympathy. Moreover, empathy is neither itself an emotion, nor does it either require some “affective similarity” between the empathizer’s affective states and that of the target (Jacob, 2011). Finally, the more abstract phenomenological accounts of face-to-face empathic relations are typically accompanied by considerations of how such encounters are embedded in and mediated by the broader social context, involving social typification, direct interaction, or collaboration. In one of the most systematic classical phenomenological accounts of empathy, Stein defines empathy as “the experience of foreign subjects and their lived experience” (Stein, 1989 [1917]: 5, 20). This type of experience is a sui generis experience in that it is unlike imagination, but also unlike any kind of projection of one’s own past experiences or one’s self-experience onto others. After all, there is surely a difference in grasping another person’s sadness and feeling sad oneself or remembering the experiences of sadness one previously felt. Moreover, the access to and understanding of the motives, reasons, or intensity of the sadness of another is surely different from the affective experience one might have if, upon encountering another’s sadness, one eventually feels compassion with the other and in this sense comes to share another’s sadness or sympathizes with it. Rather than being identical, the latter experiences presuppose the former. It is not only embodied minds that we deal with in our everyday experience of others. Indeed, when encountering others, we always and already encounter “alter egos,” as Husserl usually puts it, or full-fledged personal agents, who also recognize

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us as persons and agents and who are embedded in a specific social context that we typically share to a large extent. We do not merely perceive the other person’s bodily countenances and gestures but rather see such movements as manifestations of the other’s affective states, emotional dispositions, or character traits (“The grumpy old man, he is angry again,” etc.). Often, they are also expressive of the person’s reasons for actions. This involves quasi-imaginatively representing the situation “as if” I were the other, taking into account the other’s values, habits, beliefs, and goals, and thereby understanding how the other’s situation would lead the other to act. As Husserl emphasizes, this is quite different from simply imagining how I would act in the other’s situation (Husserl, 2016 [1915–1917]: 755–759). Gurwitsch explored such collaborative contexts in terms of “being-together in a common situation” and, in particular, in a situation of “partnership” of coordinated action or a “consociate being-together” (gebundene Zusammensein). According to Gurwitsch, simply by being assigned and grasping the role you play, or being an active participant in a situation, and perhaps coordinating your actions with others, cooperating in achieving a joint goal, you gain an immediate understanding of others’ roles. This in turn permits a richer understanding of others’ desires, motivations, and intentions, since it familiarizes you with the context of “relevance” (Schütz, 1967 [1932]; Schütz, 1970; Schütz and Luckmann, 1974), which is specific to the situation and guides the intentions and motives of the agents. You thus gain a view from within, that is, from within a situation of being-together. While one confers with his partner, he faces the wishes, aims, and interests of the partner, which, even when not explicitly expressed, are provided by the setting of the things. In virtue of the partner’s comportment during the negotiations, his aims, motivations, etc., can be discovered. One orients his comportment with respect to the position disclosed by his partner . . . As a result, one’s own comportment in the situation (Situationsverhalten) is tuned in on the other and takes account of him. (Gurwitsch, 1979 [1931]: 105)

To be sure, often in our daily encounters with others, we remain satisfied if the other is empathetically grasped merely in accordance with “the general types of human existence” (Husserl, 2016 [1915–1917]: 580, 578). But even such a crude apperception of the other as a human being like me is, as phenomenologists have shown, based on a complex, implicit, or habitualized scheme of social typification.

Social Typification and Socio-Communicative Acts An important issue that has arguably not been sufficiently recognized in contemporary discussions of social cognition concerns the central role played by social typification in empathy, an issue explored at length in the phenomenological sociology of Schütz. He has convincingly argued that in all actual cases of interpersonal encounter, more or less explicit and specific typification of others will be at play. There is a complex “stratification” of interpersonal relationships, with “a continuous series of ever increasing anonymization, beginning with the ideal type ‘my friend N’ and culminating in the most general ideal type ‘one’ or ‘someone’ [Man], the originator of artifacts and objective sign systems” (Schütz, 1967 [1932]: 219). On

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the most general level, social reality is stratified by the ways in which interpersonal relations can come about: either by direct experience and interaction with one another or by non-direct forms of inferentially being related to others. More specifically, Schütz distinguishes the following layers of social reality according to the type of interpersonal relationship. First we have “Thou-relationships” or “Thouorientation” (Du-Beziehung, Du-Orientierung). Here others emerge in my immediate actual surrounding, and I am directed to them by means of empathy or acts of grasping foreign experiences (Fremdverstehen); if these empathic encounters are actual and reciprocal, the I–Thou relation constitutes a “we-relationship” (WirBeziehung). But not all social relations are direct face-to-face encounters of “consociates” (Mitmenschen), where subjects share their direct surrounding world (Umwelt) in “a here and now.” Within the “social world of contemporaries” (soziale Mitwelt), among my “fellow men,” there are also those who are not my direct consociates but “mere contemporaries” (Nebenmenschen). I know of them and their experiences not via direct empathic experience but only through inferences, typifications, and idealizations. Moreover, unlike my consociates in my immediate surrounding or everyday lifeworld (my colleague at the desk facing mine, my friend sitting with me in the coffee shop, the child playing in front of me in the park, my neighbors, etc.), I can only interpret them, often through complex forms of social observation. Such observation will not be based on the perception and interpretation of gestures, facial and bodily expression, tonality of voice, and so on, as in direct encounters but through complex mediation, for example by discursive, symbolic, or technological means. Importantly, I cannot (easily) transform the observation of my contemporaries into direct interaction (ask them something, etc.) and “make the behavior and subjective experience of my contemporaries the [. . .] motives of my action” (Schütz, 1967 [1932]: 143). Finally, my social reality also includes those others who, unlike contemporaries, cannot ever become my direct consociates. They constitute the “world of my predecessors” (Vorwelt) and the “world of my successors” (Folgewelt). In neither can I ever become an actor or interactor. Concerning the world of my predecessors, although I am always and already deeply interlinked with them and stand in various social relations of generativity, I am still confined as a historical observer. Concerning the future behavior of my successors, on the other hand, I can only vaguely grasp and predict it by “supposing that [typical experiences] will be the same as those of my contemporaries and my predecessors” (ibid.; cf. Schütz and Luckmann, 1974: 98–138). Typification for Schütz involves the recognition and grasping of an “objective web of meanings” (objektiver Sinnzusammenhang), practices or social facts in which subjects are always and already embedded. For instance, when greeting the postman who just handed you a letter, you become empathetically acquainted with both the nice smiling young man and the anonymous one whom you were eagerly awaiting this morning, but also with the surprisingly friendly representative of the stateowned service, which has recently been criticized for its bad-tempered, poorly paid employees (Schütz, 1967 [1932]: 227–290; Schütz and Luckmann, 1974: 98–139). Moreover, social typification is not only a means of understanding others’

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mental life but also of applying such understanding to concrete actions of concrete others, interpreting their motives, and thus predicting their behavior and actions. Such predictions are no more and no less than “interpretative schemes” and as such more or less “reliable,” depending on the adequacy of the typification. The closer, the less idealized, or the less anonymous the encounter with the other, the more information I receive in repeated direct empathic encounters or “werelationships” and the more spontaneous and free her actions become, to wit, relative to my idealized interpretative schemes. Thus, “the more anonymous my partner, the less direct and personal the relationship and the more conceptualized must my dealings with him be. And the more I conceptualize my partner, the less can I regard him as a free agent” (Schütz, 1967 [1932]: 219). One of the strongest glues of intersubjective relations is communication. A central dimension of how persons relate to one another above and beyond empathic understanding, direct interaction, or social typification that I have so far only touched upon is how we directly address each other. Paradigmatic examples of such acts of address are encouragements, requests, orders, indications, suggestions, or agreements. Furthermore, they include a distinctive class of acts, which, since Austin’s groundbreaking work (1962), are known as speech acts (orders, requests, promises, etc.). Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Stein (2010 [1922]) have, long before ordinary language philosophy dwelled on this issue, discussed it under the heading of “social” or “socio-communicative acts” (soziale Akte, sozio-kommunikative Akte, soziale Stellungnahmen). Husserl also labels these “social I-Thou-acts and We-acts” (soziale Ich-Du-Akte und Wir-Akte; 1959 [1923–1924]: 137). Social acts have their phenomenological basis in empathy. However, it is important not to confuse the two social stances (Husserl, 1973a [1905–1920]: 98ff.). One significant difference concerns reciprocity. Empathy, as we have seen, can well be but is not necessarily reciprocal. This is quite unlike socio-communicative acts, which Husserl frequently characterizes precisely as reciprocal social relations (soziale Akte der sozialen Wechselbeziehung; 1950: 159; 1973a [1905–1920]: 98ff.; 1973b [1921–1928]: 166ff.). Touching on this, it is noteworthy that Husserl occasionally distinguishes “reciprocal” from “unilateral” empathy (wechselseitige and einseitige Einfühlung; 1973b [1921–1928]: 133–135; 1973a [1905–1920]: 98). Importantly – and here we have another difference from empathy – part and parcel of what makes such communicative acts social acts is that they have a specific normative content. Finally, socio-communicative acts do not necessarily presuppose linguistic forms of communication. In discussing such acts, Husserl points to something akin to a currently much discussed phenomenon, namely joint attention (Eilan, Hoerl, and Roessler, 2005; Seemann, 2012; Tomasello, 2014). Thus, I may “guide” the attention of another by signaling, pointing, or guiding in an even more implicit way, for instance by waving a hand. The other might then apperceive my action as expressing my intention to communicate something. Here, a shared background of understanding each other’s communicative intentions constitutes the attentional link (Husserl, 1973b [1921–1928]: 167–168).

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Shared Lifeworld, Objectivity, and the “Transcendental We” Phenomenologists can build on the notion of the everyday lifeworld, which is especially well worked out in Husserl (1970 [1954]; 2008 [1916–1937]) and Schütz (Schütz and Luckmann, 1974). To be sure, the concept of the lifeworld is notoriously complex. Definitions for example in Husserl’s Crisis text (1970 [1954]) oscillate between the pre-theoretical, non-idealized, or non-mathematized world of intuitive, taken-for-granted experience, presupposed by any science, and the world in which scientific theories, sociocultural facts, and practical achievements of previous generations have already “sedimented” themselves and become habitualized and part and parcel of precisely everyday experience. Husserl also characterizes it as the ground (Boden) upon which every scientific and cultural endeavor is “founded” and from which they gain their “sense” and intersubjective validation. Furthermore, a sociologically important conception of the lifeworld is what Husserl calls the “home-world” (Heimwelt), defined in relation to the “alien-world” (Fremdwelt) and delineated by the bound of individuals’ “habitual style” of experiencing (Gewohnheitsstil), or the conceptions of the “familiar,” the “typical,” and the “normal” for one’s given community (e.g. Husserl, 2008 [1916–1937]: 8–9, 106, 208; cf. Steinbock, 1995). But however one cashes out the notion of the lifeworld, what is crucial is that it is not only intersubjectively shared but also intersubjectively constituted in the first place. Husserl emphasizes that notwithstanding the relativity of the different sociohistorically and culturally stratified lifeworlds there is a (transcendental) sense in which there is an “intersubjectively identical lifeworld-for-all” (Husserl, 1970 [1954]: 175f.). The subject-correlate of this universally shared lifeworld is accordingly not a set of individual subjects nor specific communities but rather the “transcendental We” (Husserl, 1950: 137). The world, for Husserl, is not only my and your and their world, but all stratification of the world is just a modalization of the sense in which the world is at bottom our shared world. Moreover, the transcendental or “general” We (Husserl, 1970 [1954]: 175f.) has its own constitutive function, which goes far beyond the establishment of interpersonal relations. It is responsible for the constitution of the very self-identity of objects across their potential givenness to a multiplicity of different perspectives and eventually of an objective world or objectivity as such. This “constitutive intersubjectivity” (Zahavi, 2001: 115), then, is a kind of transcendental primitive in the ontology of not just social reality but experiential reality as such. Notice that, however fundamental this layer of intersubjectivity might be, it is nothing above and beyond individual subjects. There is, to be sure, no other intersubjectivity than the one constituted precisely by individual subjects. However, insofar as individuals are members of the transcendental community and inhabitants of the social lifeworld, their experiences are such that they are impregnated, as it were, by a “we-mode.” And it is precisely in this sense that Husserl pluralizes Descartes’ solipsistic “ego cogito” and Leibniz’s “monads” and speaks of the “communalization of monads” (Vergemeinschaftung der Monaden) (1950: 149–156) and “nos cogitamus” (1959 [1923–1924]: 316). What we have here is a sharing of a first-person-plural

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perspective, built into not just the apperception of the lifeworld as common to all, but also into every individual perception of any given object. But, surely, the transcendental We is not the only form of community in social reality that phenomenologists have explored.

The Phenomenology of Community With a few notable exceptions such as Heidegger, most phenomenologists hold that the social dyad or some form of face-to-face interpersonal relations lies at the bottom of social reality. However, it is crucial not to misunderstand this claim: We do not find a single classical phenomenologist who would infer from this that all there is to social reality are interpersonal relations, or that more complex and mediated social formations were in some sense or another (ontologically, phenomenologically, or explanatorily) reducible to such relations. Quite the contrary, interpersonal and collective forms of being-together represent the two ends of the social spectrum and the most important explananda of a full-blown analysis of social reality. There are not many other traditions in social thought that have investigated in more detail both these forms and, even if not always quite explicitly, their complex interrelation. Moreover, a number of phenomenologists have engaged in painstakingly thorough attempts to distinguish different types of social formations and to elucidate their interrelations. These formations range from anonymous, unorganized, or temporary gatherings and crowd formations to instrumental associations or societies (Verband, Gesellschaft), complex, collaborative, and highly cohesive forms of communities (Gemeinschaft), and finally group minds or group persons. Such a project was very much familiar to the sociological contemporaries of early phenomenologists, from whom many in fact drew their inspiration. From the grandfather of German sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies (1991 [1935]), to less well-known but influential figures such as the unduly forgotten Theodor Litt (1919) or Alfred Vierkandt (1928), all have embarked on systematic socio-ontological taxonomies, a project that has become rather unfashionable in recent social philosophy. Moreover, we find a number of highly sophisticated accounts of the possibility and nature of collective intentionality, shared emotions, group personhood, and group agency. They are remarkably coherent with and often improve upon some of the best available accounts in contemporary social ontology, represented for example by philosophers such as Gilbert (1989), Bratman (2014), Searle (1995, 2010), Tuomela (2013), or List and Pettit (2011). Thus, it should come as little surprise that the very term “social ontology” was first coined by Husserl more than a hundred years ago (Husserl, 1973a: 102; cf. Salice, 2013; Caminada, 2011; Szanto, 2016a). Finally, phenomenologists such as Scheler, Stein, and Walther hold that the stratification of social communities is in large part determined by differences in how ways of being-together are phenomenologically experienced by individuals from a first-person-plural or “we”-perspective. Rather than due to exogenous or instrumental factors such as rules or norms, let alone statistical regularities, these stratifications are due to how communities are affectively integrated and how the

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individuals’ experiences are “colored” by communal experiences (Stein, 2010 [1922]).

Types and Forms of Sociality Among the accounts that offer the most fine-grained taxonomy of social formations ranks Scheler’s treatment in his Formalism book (1980b [1926]). Scheler begins with distinguishing four distinct types of “social unities” (soziale Einheiten). Importantly, Scheler’s project is not just an ontological but also an axiological, or value-theoretic, project, and accordingly has a normative impetus. Thus, he distinguishes “kinds of being with one another” according to the “kind and rank of values” constituting norms of social relations between members (Scheler, 1980b [1926]: 515ff.). Furthermore, for the sociologist of knowledge Scheler, various epistemic forms of thinking, knowledge, and representation also correspond to these social unities (Scheler, 1980a [1924]: 33f.). First, then, we have the “mass” or “horde” (Masse, Herde). This social formation was famously analyzed by Le Bon (1960) as a more or less temporary and – in sharp contrast to the by-now proverbial “wisdom of the crowd” – essentially irrational collective. Similarly, for Scheler, it is characterized by emotional “contagion and involuntary imitation devoid of understanding” (2005 [1926]: 515). In emotional contagion, someone is causally affected by another’s affective state, quite literally “taking over” another’s emotions or becoming immersed in a given affective atmosphere. Without really being affectively “fused” (as in emotional identification), individuals are “swept into” one another’s situations and hence lose the sense of a boundary between one’s own and another’s affective life. Typically they will not even be aware of the psychodynamics at play, which makes the affective situation prone to tip into dangerous crowd dynamics. Moreover, instead of founding or facilitating empathy, sympathy, or solidarity, the blurring of self/other boundaries in such emotionally contagious crowd dynamics rather hinders these other-directed stances. Secondly, we have Scheler’s version of Tönnies’ (1991 [1935]) concept of “community,” namely the “life-community” (Lebensgemeinschaft), such as a family or tribe. Two chief characteristics of this highly cohesive and robust form of sociality stand out: a specific form of “co-experiencing” (Miteinandererleben) others’ mental and affective states and a specific principle of solidarity, the so-called “representable (vertretbare) solidarity.” The distinctive feature of communal co-experiencing is that the phenomenal and intentional content of a set of individuals’ experiences is “truly identical” (Scheler, 2005 [1926]: 516). In communal co-experiencing, then, one is neither empathizing (Scheler’s Nachfühlen) with another, nor simply having experiences “in tandem with” others. Rather, there is no proper distinction between self and other or between the subjects of experience. On the affective level, this form of communal co-experiencing corresponds to the emotional fusion, for example in ritualistic worship, that Scheler (1980b [1926]) characterizes as “emotional identification” (Einsfühlung). Here, an individual’s self-experience is deeply affected by their membership in such “pure” communities. One is aware of oneself only as the

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subject of co-experiencing together with others. Thus, the life-community “arise[s] on the basis of the fact that, although the experiences of individuals are given as such, they vary with regard to their course and content in complete dependency on the variations of communal experiences” (1980b [1926]: 516). But this experiential and affective dependence also affects the sense and normative structure of solidarity at stake. Individuals are collectively responsible for the volitions and actions of the community, and indeed their self-responsibility comes only after collective responsibility (1980b [1926]: 488, 515ff.). Third, in sharp contrast to the life-community stands society (Gesellschaft). This is an instrumental association of “mature,” “self-conscious” individuals, or autonomous persons (Scheler, 1980b [1926]: 518), formed in the pursuit of some shared aim. It roughly equals Tönnies’ (1991 [1935]) and Weber’s (2002 [1922]) familiar conception of society where individuals are bound together to realize possibly purely egoistic interests and values. Lastly we have what Scheler calls “the unity of independent, spiritual [geistig], and individual single persons ‘in’ an independent, spiritual and communal person [Gesamtperson]” (1980b [1926]: 522). It is important not to misunderstand the personalist connotations here: Communal persons (CPs) are not supra-individuals or some free-floating macro entities above and beyond individuals. Whether or not a social formation is a CP is not a matter of scope, and there is no one ultimate, maximum-sized, or all-encompassing CP. Though CPs are “not a synthesis” of societies and life-communities, they are nevertheless considered to be a higherorder socio-ontological reality (höhere Gesamtrealität) founded upon societies and communities (1982 [1916]: 336). Thus, they exhibit the key features of both social formations. On the one hand, members of a CP are the independent and autonomous individual persons of societies; on the other hand, they are bound together by the strong principle of solidarity and sense of “real communal unity” (Gesamteinheit) of life-communities (1980b [1926]: 527). But individuals’ self-responsibility is not corrupted in a collectivist fashion by their membership in a CP, as may be the case in life-communities. Rather, the solidarity at stake is a “system of solidarity of autonomous, self- and co-responsible [mitverantwortlich] individuals” or “the personal-solidary association of non-representable [unvertretbar] individuals” (1980b [1926]: 33, 45). Moreover, CPs are not just characterized by a specific sense of co-responsibility and solidarity among their members. They form a complex but highly cohesive social integration of the very experiences, volitions, and actions of individuals. Essentially, CPs are not just abstract groupings but “experienced realities” (1980b [1926]: 511f.). They are constituted by and experienced in those specific intentional acts that Scheler calls “mutual co-experiencing” or “co-living” (Miteinandererleben, Miteinanderleben). Thus, what makes CPs personal is that they bear the intrinsic value of persons and exhibit a certain first-personal character of experiencing: they are “act-centres of experiencing within the co-experiencing of persons” (1980b [1926]: 512). Now, co-experiencing something with others for Scheler means that a subject is experiencing something and, at the same time, experiencing herself as a member of a community for which, and for whose members, she bears solidarity

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and co-responsibility. Hence, the experiential and normative properties of social integration of experiences are, at the level of CP, inseparably and constitutively tied together. Scheler offers a bewildering taxonomy of CPs, but the examples he typically mentions are the state (as distinct from both people and nation), so-called “cultural regions” and “cultural nations” (Kulturkreise/-nationen) and, above all, in its axiologically “highest” and “purest form,” the church, incorporating the universal “community of love” in which all individual persons partake (1980b [1926]: 531ff.) (see more in Krebs, 2015; Szanto, 2016b). In a Marxist-cum-Hegelian reversal of Scheler’s conservative “communitarianism” (without explicit reference to Scheler, to be sure), Sartre offers an alternative analysis of different social beings in his today little-known two-volume work, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre views the formation, fragmentation, dissolution, or maintenance of socialities as a constant movement of a dialectical progression of ossification, annihilation, and determination of individual and common praxis. This movement reflects the interpenetration of extraneous material structures and their exigencies, the function of “third parties,” such as antagonistic other groups, and those factors that are immanent to the self-determining tendencies of a collective. Sartre’s aim is to provide a novel phenomenological and materialist analysis of the concept of class (the working class, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the serfs, etc.). Sartre’s analysis may be somewhat outdated in doctrine and oftentimes idiosyncratic to the point of incomprehensibility, and he has already been criticized by famous contemporaries such as Merleau-Ponty as an “ultra-Bolshevist” (1973 [1955]). At the same time, his analysis provides a blueprint for an intriguing contribution to the notion of collective agency, which has recently been much debated in analytic philosophy of action. To see why, let me here explain the difference between three of the many social ensembles that Sartre explores (others include in particular “organizations” and “institutions” [1991 [1960]: 445–663]). Sartre begins his analysis of social dialectics with so-called “seriality”; that is, a set of individuals reciprocally negating and at the same time determining each other in their “alterity.” Using this notion, Sartre discusses so-called “gatherings,” collections of individuals in seriality, who, in the face of contingent external factors, center their individual practical projects around a “common,” though not shared, “interest” and hence constitute a “serial unity” (1991 [1960]: 261–265). Sartre’s example is a random collection of a handful of commuters who have different sociocultural backgrounds and just happen to wait for a bus at the same stop. They queue up to buy tickets, knowing that seats are limited and they might have to wait for the next bus. They have individual and even antagonistic interests and stand in relations of “reciprocal isolation.” Gatherings don’t have their own rationality or goal; that is, there is no “entelechy.” Yet, the sheer fact that “they are grouped around the same bus stop” and have a “common interest” “unites them from the outside” and provides them with a certain, however fleeting and practically “inert” or non-self-determined, socio-ontological structure (1991 [1960]: 258). Though the individuals are typically inattentive and unaware of this structure – they don’t have a unitary “identity” of being “those who wait for the bus” – their commonality may become “manifest,” and they may define themselves “in relation to their common interest” (1991 [1960]:

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260). Suppose, for example, that loudspeakers announce that due to a drivers’ strike there will be no bus service for the day and therewith trigger such awareness. Now, this is exactly what happens in the so-called “fused group” (1991 [1960]: 345–404), which is still an “unstructured” or “amorphous” (1991 [1960]: 357) ensemble, and eventually in the next dialectical step, in the so-called “statutory” or “surviving group” (1991 [1960]: 404–445). What emerges there is individuals’ “group consciousness,” an awareness of their “being-in-the-group” (1991 [1960]: 414). Thus, under certain material, historical, or simply situational circumstances, and particularly in the face of exigencies, danger, or scarcity, “passive” or “practicoinert” social ensembles determine some common goal and constitute themselves as active groups, eventually resulting in a “revolutionary group praxis.” Such active groups, in turn, are under constant threat of disintegration and of becoming “ossified,” “institutional” collectives (1991 [1960]: 347–348). Notice that group consciousness, like Scheler’s communal person, is not some emergent group mind, but individuals’ “recognition” of their “own action in the common action.” Sartre emphasizes the active and practical nature of the integration at stake: “my integration becomes a task to be done” (1991 [1960]: 408). The paradigm case, eliciting such ever-tighter social integration, for Sartre, is a spontaneous revolutionary movement under external pressure (e.g., danger of elimination in the face of an oppressor or an army), which he illustrates by an analysis of the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution of 1789. For Sartre, common need, common praxis, and common objectives determine common agency, but they are not sufficient for the constitution of more robust groups. The group must constitute itself as an agent that frames the common goal as something that each and every individual member identifies with and eventually enacts in common praxis: a group must “mak[e] itself into a community by feeling individual need as common need and by projecting itself in the internal unification of a common integration, towards objectives which it produces as common” (1991 [1960]: 350). This constitution involves the familiar socially transformative processes: at the bottom, “imitation” of others’ behavior and “contagious” crowd behavior (1991 [1960]: 353–354), eventually enacting practices such as constituting hierarchies and alliances – specifically in opposition to the “third party,” or the Other of the group (1991 [1960]: 362–373) – and establishing majority voting, lawmaking, symbolic representation, and collective agreements.

Collective Intentionality Among the social formations phenomenologists distinguish we find group agents, acting upon collective agreements and pursuing common goals. In the jargon of contemporary analytic philosophy, group agents act upon collective intentionality. However controversial the idea might still be that groups can be conceived of as genuine agents of their own and possibly “with a mind of their own” (Pettit, 2003), most contemporary authors agree that collective intentionality cannot be reduced to a mere summation or aggregation of individual intentions. To use Sartre’s example, the fact that you and I happen to intend to ride the same bus won’t make our

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intentions shared. Mere coordination of our actions or mutual knowledge of one another’s intentions won’t suffice either. Over the past three decades a number of proposals have been put forth as to how to account for the fact that two or more subjects can jointly intend to do something, to wit, given that intentions are traditionally conceived as paradigms of individual mental states (Schweikard and Schmid, 2013). And in the last couple of years, a growing number of scholars have mined classical phenomenology, demonstrating that there are ingenious proposals already developed by Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Ingarden, Gurwitsch, Stein, Walther, and Schmalenbach (1922). Husserl offers one of the most compelling accounts of collective intentionality avant la lettre. In the broadest of brushstrokes (see in detail Szanto, 2016a), for Husserl, collectivity in collective intentions is constituted by the appropriate integration of the intentional, goal-directed, normative, volitional, and practical properties of the mental life of always and already socialized and communalized individuals. More specifically, the integration is not so much brought about through mere collective agreement; nor is it effected by the appropriate “interlocking” of individual “subplans” in attaining a shared goal (as for Bratman, 2014), or the “joint commitment” to do something together and form a “plural subject” enacting this joint commitment (as for Gilbert, 1989), just to mention three influential contemporary accounts – though Husserl’s account integrates elements of all these dimensions. Rather, the jointness is built into the very intentional act through which one subject functionally enters into the intentional content of another subject as joint “means” to attain a shared goal. The shared goal, the object correlate of the respective intentions, is thus “represented,” as one might phrase it in Searle’s terms (1990; 1995; 2010), as the same intentional content in both intentions. Hence, the result is a genuinely “we-mode” intention. Here is how Husserl, in remarkably contemporary fashion, puts it: A community of will, consent [Einverständnis], may then also be mutual, resulting in a mutual agreement [wechselseitige Vereinbarung]. I satisfy your desire if you satisfy mine . . . . Furthermore: We both want something to happen, we “jointly” [gemeinsam] take a decision, I do my respective part, you do yours, etc. S1 and S2 want G, but not each of them separately, for their own sake, but S1 wants G as something that is equally wanted by S2, the will of S2 is part of what is willed by S1 [der Wille des S2 gehört mit zum Gewollten des S1] and conversely. The fact that S1 realizes D1 and S2 D2 is, in turn, comprised in the volitions of both, comprised as “means” (in a broader sense), or, as part of what belongs to the realization [als zur Realisierung gehörig], and, originally, to the intention [Absicht]. (Husserl, 1973b [1921–1928]: 170; own trans.)

If the thus reached intentional integration is robust enough, what is thus constituted is a group agent or, as Husserl calls it, a “common mind” (Gemeingeist) or “higher-order person” (Persönlichkeit höherer Stufe), a notion reminiscent of Scheler’s common person (1973b [1921–1928]: 165–204). This typically happens through the “sedimentation” of collective intentionality in the experiences and attitudes of the individuals involved via habits, tradition, or culture (Husserl, 2013 [1908–1937]: 39ff., 62ff.; 1921–1928: 222–232; 2008 [1916–1937]: 387–389).

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Husserl also suggests that contracts and explicit agreements may become sedimented and acquire “habitualized validity” (habituelle Geltung), normatively binding members to fulfill the commitment (e.g., 2006 [1929–1934]: 334). And the strongest form of such bonds without explicit prior agreement is constituted through the “habitualized identification” of the affective and volitional dimension in “love communities” (habituelle Identifikation der Gemüts- und Willenssubjektivität) (Husserl, 1997 [1923]: 209). We find another well-worked-out account of such “habitual unification” (habituelle Einigung) of the mental and affective lives of individuals in Walther (1923; see Szanto, in press).

Shared Emotions Social relations are almost always affectively charged. Sociality has not only its ontology and epistemology but also its often richly differentiated phenomenology. Other individuals and groups matter or concern us – some more, some less. As indicated, for phenomenologists, empathy does not amount to intentional or emotional sharing. However, social cognition is not just cognition but is typically embedded in some affective interaction between agents. Moreover, one of the distinctive features of the phenomenological accounts is that they view collective intentionality not just as a matter of integration and habitualization of cognitive, conative, or volitional states (intentions, desires, representations of action plans, etc.), or as a matter of coordination, team reasoning, or rational deliberation, but as a matter of experiential and indeed affective integration. When agents plan, intend, or act together, they typically do so on the basis of what phenomenologists call a “feeling-of-belonging together” (Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit; Walther, 1923) or “communal experience” (Gemeinschaftserlebnis; Stein, 2010 [1922]), or, as Scheler coins it, a “feeling-in-common” (Miteinanderfühlen; Scheler, 2005 [1926]). Finally, as we have seen, it is in large part precisely the different types and mechanisms of affective integration that do the work in the stratification of social communities. But how is it possible to literally share affective states or emotions? Social psychologists, sociologists of emotions, and philosophers have recently offered a number of answers, but many accounts suffer from serious conceptual ambiguities when it comes to distinguishing emotional sharing from cogent but distinct phenomena, such as emotional contagion, intragroup affective dynamics, and so on. In contrast, the work of classical phenomenologists such as Scheler (2005 [1926]), Stein (1989 [1917]; 2010 [1922]), or Walther (1923) contains precise conceptual schema to distinguish them. As a striking example, consider Scheler’s (2005 [1926]) fine-grained distinctions between empathy (Nachfühlen), emotional identification (Einsfühlung), emotional contagion (Gefühlsansteckung; Scheler, 2005 [1926], cf. also Stein, 1989 [1917], 2010 [1922]; Walther, 1923), “feeling-with,” or “sympathy” (Mitfühlen, Sympathie), and, finally, proper emotional sharing, or feeling-in-common (Miteinanderfühlen). Moreover, phenomenological accounts of emotions emphasize their intentional, cognitive, and evaluative as well as bodily and qualitative components (Kolnai, 1936 [1927]; Sartre, 2003 [1943]; Vendrell Ferran, 2016).

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Phenomenology and Social Theory

To get a grip on what is and, in particular, what is not at stake in the phenomenology of emotional sharing, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions of the sociality of emotions. The phenomenology of emotions of authors such as Scheler, Stein, and Walther is primarily, though certainly not exclusively, concerned with the fourth dimension. Roughly, the first three dimensions in which social relations and facts come into play in the affective life of individuals and groups are: (a) the interpersonal (e.g., I get sad if my partner is sad); (b) the group and intergroup (I am sad if my team loses); and (c) the sociocultural dimension (I feel shame in the face of violating certain social norms, and I only feel this because I have learned to appropriately respond to certain situations with certain emotions) (cf. Parkinson et al., 2005: 11). (d) Regarding the fourth dimension, shared emotions proper, and the sense in which it is marked off from the other three, consider the locus classicus for all subsequent phenomenological accounts, a passage from Scheler’s Sympathy book: The father and the mother stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the “same” [dasselbe] sorrow, the “same” anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s sorrow is in no way “objectual” [gegenständlich] for B here, as it is, e.g., for their friend C, who joins them, and commiserates “with them” or “upon their sorrow.” On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense of a feeling- and experiencing-in-common, not only the self-same value-situation but also having the same emotional agility [emotionale Regsamkeit] toward [the situation]. The sorrow, as value-content, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are here one and identical. (Scheler, 2005 [1926]: 24)

We can reconstruct Scheler’s example by distinguishing three dimensions of how the typically other-directed emotion of grief is embedded in a complex of further social relations: i. I (personally) grieve for our child. ii. I as a parent or family member grieve for our child. iii. We as parents grieve for our child. Notice that in (i) and (ii) – although the grieving subject is an individual – either the intentional object of the emotion or the specific mode in which the emotion is experienced is shared with others. In (i) the sharedness is built into the shared intentional object (“our child”); in (ii) the shared object (the grief directed at our son) is experienced as a member of a specific social grouping, and comes about by means of identifying with those others or groupings (my partner, family, etc.). But how do phenomenologists account for (iii), where the subject seems to be a collective and is typically expressed in the first-person plural? That is, how can individuals share an emotion in the sense of (iii)? The answer is provided if we consider the following three requirements expressed, even if not explicitly, in most phenomenological accounts of emotional sharing: intentionality and mutual awareness, integration, and plurality and self-/ other-differentiation. The first requirement is meant to contrast shared emotions with emotional contagion. Imagine that someone enters a bar and is affected by the

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cheerful or aggressive atmosphere without perhaps even realizing that this atmosphere is caused by the people having just finished watching an exciting sports event on an already turned-off screen (cf. Scheler, 2005 [1926]). In typical cases, one will not even intentionally enter into the situation of such affective “commonality.” Contrast this with a situation in which someone decides to partake in a public screening event precisely for the sake of sharing the excitement of watching the game together with others. In emotional contagion there might be only “affective mimicry,” which is non-intentional, and there is typically no mutual awareness of sharing any affective states. I might be aware that I am sharing the excitement with others. But it might still be that no one else realizes that I am present or undergoing the same or similar emotion. That is not to say that no properly shared emotional focus may eventually come into relief, nor possibly also a mutual awareness of this. On the contrary, contemporary authors rightly suggest (Hatfield, Carpenter, and Rapson, 2014; Salmela and Nagatsu, 2016) that emotional contagion often lies genetically at the bottom of proper emotional sharing – without, to be sure, presupposing that it is a necessary or sufficient constituent of the latter. This is ultimately an empirical claim that many phenomenologists including Scheler, Stein, Walther, and in some sense also Sartre would have no problem subscribing to. Concerning the second requirement, the claim is that we have no proper emotional sharing without accounting for a robust sense in which individuals’ emotions are deeply “unified” (Walther, 1923) or integrated, constituting a genuinely novel emotion that results from precisely this integration (which, to be sure, is still felt by individuals). This will, minimally, entail a coherence of the expression and regulation of the emotions across members; shared patterns of appraisals and concern or a joint focus of import; and some reciprocal modulation of the individuals’ affective experience itself. Some contemporary authors, who are in fact inspired by classical phenomenological accounts, have gone too far in their attempt to safeguard this requirement. They try to account for it in terms of a “phenomenal fusion” or strict “token-identity” of the respective emotional episodes (Krueger, 2016; Schmid, 2009, 2014; cf., critically, León, Szanto, and Zahavi, in press, and Szanto, in press). However, just as there can be no proper sharing without something that is common and rightly integrated, there is just as little room and no need for sharing if there is not a plurality of individuals who actually engage in sharing. To put it in a formula: no sharing if there is nothing common to be shared, but no sharing either if there is nobody (other than oneself) to share with. This, then, is the reason why the third requirement is needed. As should be clear from its double characterization (“plurality” and “self-/other-differentiation”), it not only states the just-mentioned and rather obvious fact that there is no sharing without two or more individuals who actually engage in sharing (hence: plurality) but also states that those individuals – their robust integration notwithstanding – actually differ and have a clear awareness and understanding of precisely not being fused, let alone identical, in their affective lives. Rather, in various aspects, they exhibit some experiential variations and differences vis-à-vis one another (hence: self-/otherdifferentiation).

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Phenomenology and Social Theory

Conclusion and Future Directions Phenomenologists offer uniquely rich descriptions of social reality. They have influenced sociological thought for more than a hundred years. Above and beyond the already mentioned authors, sociologists such as Bourdieu or Garfinkel have taken up phenomenological insights and applied them to concrete sociological research. But phenomenology’s contribution to sociology could arguably be taken further. For example, a fruitful avenue for future research would be to draw on phenomenological conceptions of social typification, sedimentation, and habitualization of intentional and affective states and their role in what the sociologist of emotions Eva Illouz calls “emotional habitus,” “emotional cultures,” or “emotional capital” (Illouz, 2007; cf. also Ahmed, 2004). Furthermore, the social dimension of embodiment discussed in extenso in Husserl or Merleau-Ponty as well as contemporary phenomenological accounts of the body as a sociocultural artifact (e.g. Dolezal, 2015) or affective “intercorporeality” (e.g. Fuchs, 2016) have still not been sufficiently recognized in the “corporeal” or “body turn” in sociology (Schilling, 2012; Turner, 2008). To be sure, phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity and phenomenological sociology, be it in a Husserlian, Schützian, or other spirit, have not been spared from criticism from various camps. Critical and post-critical theorists such as Habermas or Apel or sociologists such as Luhmann have launched sustained objections against its alleged triad of transcendentalism, subjectivism, and solipsism (cf. Schmid, 2000; Zahavi, 2001). Many of the above-sketched tenets of classical phenomenology have also been attacked from within the movement, notably by Heidegger (cf. Koo, 2016; Overgaard and Zahavi, 2009; Schmid, 2005; Theunissen, 1965). I hope to have shown, however, why the phenomenological approach should not be seen as a perhaps historically interesting but ultimately outdated theory but rather still deserves to be taken seriously by contemporary social theory. First, it provides a complex answer to the stillunresolved key socio-ontological challenge of how to accommodate a holistic account of individuals within an anti-singularist picture of social reality, to wit, without succumbing to either normatively threatening collectivism or a metaphysically untenable, radical social constructivism. Secondly, phenomenologists provide a fine-grained taxonomy of social formations that pays due attention to the complex stratification of social relations and allows us to account for the fact that different means of social integration (intentional, face-to-face, habitualized, affective, etc.) constitute different types of social groupings. Finally, they provide a multilayered conceptual framework that distinguishes forms of intentional and affective sharing that have typically been either ignored or confused by alternative theories, and that is suitable for analyzing the cognitive, affective, normative, and above all experiential dimension of being-together. Consequently, phenomenology can be seen as one of the few, if not only, theoretical approaches to social reality that represents a comprehensive account of the relation between first-personal, second- or interpersonal and first-person-plural experiences. Thus, a running thread throughout phenomenological accounts seems to be the idea that the

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socialization of individuals and their forming, maintaining, and enacting social groupings, or their communalization, are just two sides of the same coin. If we recognize phenomenology’s key insight that individuals are from the beginning socialized and communalized, or that they are subjects who always already stand in complex social relations to one another, then there is hardly any mystery in how individuals can act, intend, or indeed feel together.

Funding Acknowledgment Work on this paper was generously supported by my European Union (EU) Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships research project SHARE (655067): Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy.

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16 Pierre Bourdieu: An Intellectual Legacy David L. Swartz

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a prolific scholar, author of some 30 books and 400 articles plus numerous lectures, interviews, informal communications, and papers, many of which have been published posthumously. His publications have been translated into more than thirty languages and all major books are translated into English. His books and papers cover an astounding variety of topics, including art, literature, consumer tastes, elites, intellectuals, housing, lifestyles, education, Algerian peasant society, and social suffering, to name but a few. His multifaceted work has inspired much research in a wide variety of areas in sociology, such as culture, taste, education, theory, and politics. Beyond sociology, his influence stretches to anthropology, history, gender, cultural studies, and international relations. Particularly after 1996, he became the preeminent public intellectual not only in France but also abroad in the fight against neoliberalism and globalization. Bourdieu clearly stands as one of the greatest contemporary social scientists. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the emerging legacy of Bourdieu’s work. Writing in 2011, Santoro (2011: 3) observed that “there is no consensus today as to what the true significance of his work may be.” That remains the case today. It is also the case, as Santoro (2011: 3) observes, that “Bourdieu is, and will probably remain, a very controversial figure for both his numerous detractors and his sympathizers.” However, the omnipresence of Bourdieu’s influence in so many specialties in the social sciences and in so many countries means that his oeuvre needs to be taken into account, either negatively or positively. There are many ways in which Bourdieu’s oeuvre has inspired critical reflection, creative elaboration, and new research. We do not offer an exhaustive review of this legacy here, but highlight some of the key ways in which Bourdieu appears to be having an enduring effect on the practice of sociology. While there are studies of the significance of Bourdieu in many languages, we will look only at English-language assessments. Moreover, we will note the global reach of Bourdieu’s influence, but confine most of our attention to the US field of sociology. Because of its size and geopolitical position as well as material resources, US sociology is arguably the most globally influential sociological national field. We will also refer to US sociology rather than North America sociology or American sociology, since the reception patterns of Bourdieu in Canada (both in the anglophone and francophone areas) are rather different and there is considerable variation between Latin American countries. Finally, we will confine our attention to the reception of Bourdieu’s ideas, not their production. 317

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An Exceptional Career The intellectual success of Bourdieu is remarkable both in France and globally. He was born in 1930 into a lower-middle-class family (initially a sharecropper, his father became the village postman) in a remote mountain village of the Pyrenees in southwestern France. An only child, he spent his early years in the remote rural region of Béarn, and spoke the regional dialect. A particularly gifted and industrious student, he first entered the Lycée de Pau (1941–1947), and then the prestigious and academically selective Parisian Lycée Louis-Le-Grand (1948– 1951). In 1951, he entered the academically elite Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, where he prepared the agrégation in philosophy. After finishing this in 1955, Bourdieu, like many agrégés before him, left Paris to teach philosophy in a lycée. But the war in Algeria intervened, and he was called into military service in 1955 and soon sent to Algeria. Colonial Algeria and the war of liberation were important to Bourdieu’s career, for it was there that he actually began his social scientific work as a “self-taught” ethnologist of the Kabyle peasant communities. His first book, on Algeria (1961 [1958]), several subsequent books and papers, and his early and revised formulations of his theory of practices in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977 [1972]) and The Logic of Practice (1990 [1980]) were directly informed by this first fieldwork experience. Like many French intellectuals, Bourdieu opposed the French colonial war effort and for personal safety reasons was eventually obliged to leave Algiers and return to Paris. There he assumed an appointment as one of Raymond Aron’s teaching assistants at the Sorbonne. In 1964 he became one of the youngest directors of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He refused to complete the state doctorate degree, which was the standard requirement for those seeking chairs in the French universities. Instead, Bourdieu made his early career in research centers and seminar rooms rather than university lecture halls. For a time, Raymond Aron was an important institutional sponsor, as Bourdieu assumed direction of Aron’s research center in 1964. Sharp differences between them soon emerged after the 1964 publication of The Inheritors (1979 [1964]), in which Bourdieu, along with his coauthor Jean-Claude Passeron, advanced stinging criticism of the class-based character of the French university population and of student culture. Bourdieu broke with Aron in disagreement over the May 1968 French university crisis and set up his own research center, the Center for European Sociology. In 1970, Bourdieu and Passeron would publish their landmark book Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture, which has become a contemporary classic in the sociology of education. In 1975 he founded the journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, which he would preside over for over twenty-five years; he also founded the “Le sens common” book series with Editions de Minuit, which ran for over twenty-five years, and in 1997 started his own publishing house, Editions Libre-Raisons d’Agir. In the 1970s, extensive surveys of French consumer practices, cultural tastes, and lifestyles and further analysis of his Algerian data culminated in two major books,

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Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984 [1979]) and The Logic of Practice (1990 [1980]), which helped Bourdieu gain entry to the College de France, the pinnacle of French intellectual life, in 1981. Distinction was also a commercial success that brought him considerable media attention. The new public notoriety, however, did not diminish his research productivity. The 1980s brought to fruition his cumulative empirical and critical study of the French university and of the elite grandes écoles. His study of the Paris university faculties and professorate culminated in the 1984 publication of Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]). The research project on the grandes écoles, begun in the early 1970s, finally appeared in The State Nobility (1996 [1989]). Near the end of the decade he began a new research project on public housing policy in France that led to several articles in Actes and culminated in the publication of The Social Structures of the Economy (2005 [2000]). The early 1990s brought further research and publication successes. In 1992, he published The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]), which assembles his work on Flaubert – a sort of sociological response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on Flaubert – and on the rise of artistic and literary fields in France. The 1993 publication of The Field of Cultural Production (1993) brought together several major essays on art, literature, and culture that he had written over the 1968–1987 period. The research on housing was followed in the early 1990s by a massive project interviewing lower-middle and working-class individuals on the theme of social suffering and exclusion. This research led to the 1993 publication of The Weight of the World (Bourdieu, 1999b [1993]), which was also a commercial success. His call for a critical and reflexive practice of sociological investigation would find expression in 1992 with the widely read An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). In 1993 he received the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique’s prestigious Gold Metal for outstanding contributions to scientific research. Several subsequent and important books include On Television (1998 [1996]), Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]), Masculine Domination (2001 [1990]), and Acts of Resistance (1998). In late 2001, the Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004 [2001]) appeared in French, and books completed shortly before his death have subsequently appeared in English, including: On the State (Bourdieu, 2014 [2012]) and Manet: A Symbolic Revolution (2017 [2013]). The tremendous success of The Weight of the World, in terms of sales, public debate, and the media attention it provoked, brought Bourdieu a new level of public visibility and the possibility of a new and effective public intellectual role based on his scientific authority. In the 1990s he became the leading public intellectual voice in France and Europe speaking out against neoliberalism and globalization. When he died of cancer in 2002, he was working on a general theory of fields. However, success in France for a sociologist does not predict international renown for a sociologist like that of Bourdieu. When thinking of other post–World War II French thinkers with global renown one thinks of literary figures like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, or philosophers like Michel Foucault, or the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. Of course there is Raymond Aron, who was a sociologist, a journalist, and political thinker. And other sociologists such as Michel Crozier, Raymond

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Boudon, Alain Touraine, and Luc Boltanski have been well translated into English and have received considerable attention beyond France. But their global renown pales in comparison to that of Bourdieu. Indeed, not since Emile Durkheim has a French thinker had such a great influence on social scientific thinking globally as Pierre Bourdieu has had.

Bourdieu’s Conceptual Framework Bourdieu’s conceptual framework resists easy summary because his concepts were developed and elaborated across a diverse range of empirical research objects. He never attempted to construct an overall social theory even if theory informed every piece of sociological research he did. One does not find in his signature concepts of habitus, capital, and field a tightly structured and abstract theory of the social world as exemplified in the work of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Bourdieu’s concepts are not expressions of “grand theory,” as C. Wright Mills put it. His concepts are tools for conducting empirical research rather than formal constructs, definitions, or abstract propositions. We need to approach his concepts, as Brubaker (1993: 220) insightfully suggests, as “designators of a particular intellectual habitus or set of habits.” Bourdieu wants them read and applied in a “dispositional manner.” The perspective I outline here approaches Bourdieu’s concepts as “tools for research” that embody certain sociological dispositions. It is a dispositional perspective, a kind of sociological habitus rather than a strictly theoretical reading or empirical application of Bourdieu. Rather than talk about his concepts in terms of abstract theory that evaluates them in term of logical consistency, contradiction, affiliation with theoretical traditions, indebtedness to classical theorists, and so on, we should think of them as heuristic tools for sociological research that have a practical, dispositional orientation for understanding the social world (Swartz, 2005). Bourdieu offers a theory of action as practices that centers on his concept of habitus, a theory of domination that finds expression in the idea of symbolic violence, and a critical practice of sociology that he calls reflexive. Together these interweave key sociological concerns with action, culture, class, power, and knowledge. We begin with a general statement on the objective of Bourdieu’s sociology for the study of power and domination. We then identify five key analytical strategies that underlie his sociology and might be thought of as orienting dispositions that he brings to every aspect of his work.

A Sociology of Power and Domination At the heart of Bourdieu’s sociology is an analysis of power, particularly in the form of domination. He is a conflict theorist who stresses the competitive and stratified character of the social world and who sees it as ordered by structures and

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processes of domination and reproduction. He develops a theory of symbolic violence that elaborates and modifies Max Weber’s emphasis on legitimation. His theory of symbolic power, violence, and capital stresses the active role that symbolic forms play as resources that reflect, constitute, maintain, and change social hierarchies. Symbolic power entails the capacity to impose symbolic meanings and forms (classifications and categories) as legitimate. Symbolic capital signals the recognized authority to exercise symbolic power. Symbolic power becomes violence (symbolic violence) when those meanings and forms are incorporated in both cognitive schemes and bodily expressions as taken-for-granted, natural, and just, rather than as arbitrary expressions of power. Symbolic power finds expression in the form of embodied dispositions – what Bourdieu calls the habitus – that generate a “practical sense” for organizing perceptions of and actions in the social world. The dispositions of habitus incorporate a sense of place in the stratified social order – an understanding of inclusion and exclusion in the various social hierarchies. The product of internalized socialization, the deeply rooted dispositions of habitus are both cognitive and bodily and operate at an unconscious level. They nonetheless are generative forces that dispose individuals to act for the most part in unreflective, practical ways. The way in which those generative forces intersect with external structures is what shapes most of our actions in the social world. Bourdieu puts power at the heart of the functioning and the structure of habitus, since habitus involves an unconscious calculation of what is possible, probable, improbable, or impossible for people in their specific locations in the stratified social order. Two key properties of symbolic power are its naturalization and its misrecognition. Bourdieu’s symbolic power does not suggest “consent” but “practical adaptation” to existing hierarchies. The practical adaptation occurs prereflexively as if it were the “thing to do,” the “natural” response in existing circumstances. This produces the doxa of the social order, the unquestioned acceptance of things as they naturally are. The dominated misperceive the real origins and interest of symbolic power when they accept the dominant view of the world and of themselves. They therefore accept definitions of social reality that do not correspond to their best interests. Those misrecognized definitions go unchallenged and appear natural and justified, as something other than power relations. Hence, they represent a form of violence. These properties of symbolic power help explain how inegalitarian social systems are able to self-perpetuate without powerful resistance and transformation. Rejecting both Marxist and non-Marxist forms of economic reductionism, Bourdieu identifies a wide variety of valued resources beyond sheer material interest that function as resources of power, which he calls capitals, and that can be created, accumulated, exchange, and consumed. Bourdieu conceptualizes resources as capital when they function as a “social power relation” by becoming objects of struggle for advantage. Capitals are produced through human labor and present themselves in four generic forms: economic (money and property), cultural (information, knowledge, and educational credentials), social (acquaintances and networks), and symbolic (legitimation, authority, prestige). His concept of cultural capital is most widely known – particularly

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in the sociology of education and culture – but his work includes a wide array of capitals, such as social capital, economic capital, academic capital, and statist capital. As forms of power, capitals exist not in isolation but operate relationally in what Bourdieu calls fields. Fields denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize different kinds of capital. Fields are structured socials spaces that organize around struggles over specific types and combinations of capital. Field struggle, for Bourdieu, has two distinct dimensions. Struggle occurs over the distribution of capitals within fields. This is struggle to accumulate the more valued forms of capital or to convert one form into another more valued form. In this sense, capital is a stake in the struggle. Struggle also occurs over the very definition of the most legitimate form of capital. This is a struggle for symbolic power, a classification struggle, over the right to monopolize the legitimate definition of what is to be the most valued form of capital for a particular field. Modern societies are increasingly differentiated by fields of particular types of capital, such as scientific capital in science, juridical capital in law, and academic capital in education, in which individuals, groups, and organizations struggle to define and accumulate the valued capitals within their respective fields. However, they are also competing to impose their particular capital as the most legitimate for the entire social order. This broader struggle for legitimation between the various fields occurs within what Bourdieu calls the field of power. The field of power is that arena of struggle among the different power fields (particularly the economic field of big business and finance and the cultural field of the arts and universities) for the right to dominate throughout the social order. The concept covers the dominant classes in modern stratified societies. Dominant classes distinguish themselves from other classes by their sheer volume of capital but are also themselves internally differentiated by culturally oriented versus economic forms of capital. For example, artists, writers, and professors compete in the field of power against business leaders to impose their respective capitals (cultural capital versus economic capital) as the most legitimate. It is out of the inter-field struggles in the field of power that the modern state emerges historically as a subset of individuals, groups, agencies, and institutions that attempt to regulate relations among other fields within the field of power. It regulates the “rate of exchange” between the various forms of capital. Extending Max Weber’s definition of the state as that institution that claims monopoly over the legitimate use of physical violence, Bourdieu stresses the monopolizing role to symbolic violence as well. For Bourdieu the state consists not only of bureaucratic agencies, authorities, ritual, and ceremony but also of official classifications that regulate group relations and are internalized as mental categories through schooling. The state adjudicates the classification struggle among social groups by giving some classifications and categories official legitimation and rejecting others. In this regulatory function, the state institutionalizes its own specific form of capital, statist capital, a kind of metacapital that consecrates and renders official the most legitimate forms of power. Thus, the state ultimately concentrates the power to designate the most legitimate forms of capital.

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Power for Bourdieu also appears in a specific form of capital and a specific sphere of activity both of which are commonly associated with politics: political capital in the political field. Political capital refers to a subtype of social capital that is the capacity to mobilize social support for a candidate or cause. The political field refers to the arena of the struggle to capture positions of power using political capital (e.g. parties, occupations, and media). It is structured around competition for control of the state apparatus. Thus, Bourdieu’s sociology offers conceptual tools for analyzing three types of power: power vested in particular resources (capitals), power concentrated in specific spheres of struggle over forms of capital (fields), and power as practical, taken-forgranted acceptance of existing social inequalities and hierarchies (symbolic violence). It is also guided by several methodological dispositions. We highlight five key ones.

Breaking with Received Views and Official Classifications If the force of symbolic violence imposed by official institutions like the state and embedded in dispositions of the habitus is as all-encompassing as Bourdieu claims, how is it possible to obtain some critical distance from those realities in order to understand them objectively? Bourdieu’s answer lies in his conception of science, which he draws from the “historical epistemology” led by French philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. Social science must begin with an “epistemological break” with the received views of the social world. Breaking with empiricism, objects of research must be constructed. Constructing the object of research means refusing to take insider behaviors and claims at face value, or to accept official accounts of institutions, or refusing to focus on those units most immediately and directly visible, such as individuals, social groups, and organizations. This is because to do so would be to miss the underlying dynamics and process of conflict that have generated their immediate visibility. Bourdieu has developed his conceptual language of symbolic violence, habitus, capital, and field in order to facilitate the critical questioning of the taken-for-granted character of the social world. This involves thinking of individual action (choice) in terms of the practical action of habitus or showing that views are generated out of competing positions in fields that bring into play different power resources (capital) and relations of hierarchy and domination among the relevant players. A privileged intellectual tool for doing so is social history, since historical perspective helps break with received views that strike the uncritical observer as self-evident, commonsensical, and only natural.

Thinking Relationally Breaking with the most immediately visible forms of social life, such as individuals, social groups, and organizations, calls for relational thinking. Social realities obtain sociological significance only by comparison to others. Thinking

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relationally means not looking for intrinsic properties of individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, or even nations, but constructing the relations of differentiation and interdependence that unite them in fields. This sets Bourdieu apart from methodological individualism and social interactionist perspectives that focus on individuals and exchange relations between individual units.

Integrating Subjective and Objective Forms of Knowledge Bourdieu calls for a sociology that integrates subjective and objective forms of knowledge into what he calls a “general science of practices.” He contends that the social sciences have for too long been plagued by a series of classic antinomies that limit the development of a comprehensive view of human action. Bourdieu’s conceptual strategy is to overcome these classic dualisms by forging concepts that will permit integrating subjective and objective forms. His conceptual program would weave together the following four dualisms: (1) theory versus empirical research, (2) agency versus structure, (3) symbolic forms versus material objects of social life, and (4) micro versus macro levels of analysis (Brubaker, 1985; Swartz, 1997: 52–60, 84–88, 96–98). Bourdieu emphasizes that theorizing and empirical investigation must go hand in hand. The sociological habitus Bourdieu would have us cultivate is one that motivates us to seek out and demonstrate the intrinsically dual character of social life. We need to develop dispositions to seek out the rich, often subtle ways in which the social world is simultaneously subjective and objective, internal and external, symbolic and material, individual and collective, free and constrained, and to integrate these dual moments into our sociological accounts. His concepts are oriented toward that kind of integrating view of the social world.

Reflexivity All concepts are to be employed reflexively. A genuinely critical sociology must examine all assumptions and presuppositions not only of the object researched but also of the stance and location of the researcher. Reflexivity arises from the need to control the relationship of the researcher to the object of inquiry so that the position of the researcher is not unwittingly projected into the object of research. Three principal sources of such projection can occur: the habitus of the researcher, the intellectual field position of the researcher, and what Bourdieu considers the most difficult bias to overcome, namely the “theoreticist” bias inherent in the scholarly gaze itself (Bourdieu, 1990; Swartz, 1997: 271–277). Using the language of habitus acts as a reminder that practical, not theoretical, knowledge guides most human action, including that of the researcher. It reminds researchers to avoid the “scholastic fallacy” of mistakenly thinking that human action follows directly our rationally theoretical models of human action.

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Conceptual Arms for Combat Bourdieu’s master concepts are more than just research tools; they are also arms for intellectual combat. They are oriented toward trying to achieve specific corrective effects in the practice of sociology. Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 80) often “twists the stick in the other direction,” as he sometimes puts it, to obtain desired effects. His concepts’ intended meanings and empirical content vary in emphasis from study to study. His choice of terminology, the theoretical content he loads into concepts, and the empirical referents he selects all reflect his effort to break with received views, intellectual as well as lay. To understand Bourdieu, we need to understand whom he is arguing against. It is always important to read Bourdieu’s use of his concepts in light of the specific intellectual fields he is trying to influence, which is true of any intellectual work, including our own. Perhaps one of the positive contributions of Bourdieu is to increase our self-awareness in terms of just how much our own work is shaped by opposing views in the intellectual fields that we try to correct, react to, ignore, or sidestep. But Bourdieu’s concepts are more than tools for jockeying for better position in intellectual fields. They are also instruments of struggle against symbolic violence. This gives an activist political dimension to Bourdieu’s work. There is no armchair theorizing in Bourdieu. His concepts are “instruments of combat.” He wishes to change the world by changing the way we see it. We can see this activist orientation at two levels. First is to change the way sociologists view the social world. He wants to make sociology critical but not theoreticist, empirical but not positivist, and more relational and reflexive. He wishes to build up the intellectual and scientific legitimacy of sociology by protecting and increasing its autonomy from external political, economic, cultural, and social forces. But making sociology more scientific and critical is never an end in itself. Second is a political strategy to debunk existing power arrangements in larger society in hopes of creating the possibility of more rational, open, and egalitarian social relations. Acts of research are fundamentally to be political acts in that by debunking taken-for-granted assumptions about how the social world is ordered they open up the possibility that it could be ordered differently. Sociology is a struggle against symbolic violence, a kind of counter-symbolic power, which is exercised in the name of scientific rationality. It is also the task of the sociologist to be a public intellectual who exposes symbolic violence by attacking dominant representations that justify dominant social relations and hide underlying power relations. Thus, a sociology of intellectuals is for Bourdieu a key part of what it means to do a critical sociology of domination and practices.

Indicators of Legacy Bourdieu has become a “global thinker” and is the most internationally recognized sociologist today (Kauppi and Swartz, 2015; Santoro, 2008; Sapiro and Bustamante, 2009: 3). Since 1999 he has been the most internationally cited social scientist (Kauppi and Swartz, 2015; Santoro, 2008). Google Scholar (accessed 16

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November, 2018) currently ranks him number one by a considerable margin. Four of Bourdieu’s works appear in the top fifty most-cited social scientific works globally, with Distinction in first place (Caren, 2012; Green, 2016). Already by 2008, 347 of Bourdieu’s titles were in translation, published in 34 languages and in 42 countries. Translations of his work has itself become a notable industry (Sapiro and Bustamante, 2009). The number of texts elucidating and critically evaluating his work has grown tremendously since the 1990s. Today there is even a growing literature specialized in examining the export of Bourdieu’s ideas into other countries. One notable expression of this is the symposium of papers edited by Marco Santoro in the online journal Sociologica (Santoro, 2008; 2009a; 2009b). This work, and Santoro’s (2011) later summary in Cultural Sociology, represents the best conceptual and empirical effort to assess Bourdieu’s global influence. Another indicator of Bourdieu’s importance can be found in special publications devoted to his work. Several leading journals with a global readership in English, such as Theory and Society; Theory, Culture, and Society; International Political Sociology; and Poetics, have devoted special issues to Bourdieu. There is also The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (Medvetz and Sallaz, 2018). As Santoro (2011: 17) observes, “today it is almost impossible to do research in many fields without engaging in some fashion with Bourdieu’s work.” There are already numerous works assessing Bourdieu’s legacy. After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (Swartz and Zolberg, 2004), published shortly after his death, offered an early assessment that not only reviewed, clarified, and criticized several of Bourdieu’s arguments but also applied and elaborated some of them in new domains. Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives (Silva and Warde, 2010) explores Bourdieu’s legacy for cultural analysis in Britain, France, and the United States. The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu (Susen and Turner, 2011) offers a collection of papers by scholars of different nationalities critically assessing Bourdieu’s legacy as a scholar and as an engaged intellectual. Also, a special issue of Cultural Sociology (Santoro, 2011) focuses on Bourdieu in cultural sociology. The Sallaz and Zavisca study (2007) still offers the most comprehensive examination to date of growing Bourdieu’s influence in any one country, namely the United States. This study traces the diffusion of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas into American sociology from 1980 to 2004 through four flagship sociology journals and four influential books. Sallaz and Zavisca find that Bourdieu’s influence “represents the culmination of a long and steady diffusion of his ideas into American sociology” rather than a sudden short-term surge of interest followed by decline. They also find that while many journal articles cite Bourdieu “ceremoniously,” that is, mention him briefly without “significant elucidation of his theory or work,” the other “paradigmatic” citations do seriously engage aspects of Bourdieu’s work. The authors suggest that even the ceremonial citations are significant; they indicate how much “Bourdieu’s core concepts have become so taken for granted within the sociological lexicon that they now serve as building blocks for larger arguments, and so no longer need to be elaborated upon in the context of a journal article” (2007: 26, 25). Among Bourdieu’s concepts, they find that capital, particularly cultural

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capital, is the most extensively used, followed by habitus, and a recent increase in the concepts of field and social capital. More significantly, many of the articles “explicitly attempt to extend Bourdieu’s research program” rather than simply trying to replication his French findings in the US context (Zavisca and Sallaz, 2008: 8). Santoro (2008) traces Bourdieu’s reception globally. His study shows a significant and steady rise in citations in international sociology, but also variation in reception according to the agendas of intellectual fields in different countries. The mainstreaming of Bourdieu in the United States is not the pattern one finds in the United Kingdom, where Bourdieu’s influence has been mediated by more influential centers of interdisciplinary cultural production rather than in the mainstream British journals. Kauppi and Swartz (2015) gives an overview of Bourdieu’s reception globally and concludes that it is significant, though variation between national intellectual fields suggests there are “global Bourdieus” rather than just one.

Appeal of Bourdieu’s Work Bourdieu’s global appeal undoubtedly is due to the novelty of his conceptual vocabulary, his empirical exploration in many areas, and his steadfast refusal to separate theory from empirical investigation. It is also in part due to his capacity to differentiate his sociology from established alternatives illustrating, as Randall Collins (1998) has demonstrated, that intellectual innovation often emerges out of intense differentiation from competitive views. Undoubtedly part of the appeal stems from the extraordinary amount and character of Bourdieu’s oeuvre – a prolific scholarship that addresses the important topics of action, culture, inequality, power, and sociological knowledge. It is an oeuvre that crosses disciplinary boundaries, fertilizing sociological thinking with history, anthropology, linguistics, and economics. It is an empirically grounded and theoretically informed sociology that is multi-thematic, multidisciplinary, and politically committed. Bourdieu combines high theory with empirical investigation, and so appeals to those scholars interested in one or the other or both. He was a master of combining theory and empirical research, though is he perhaps most well known for his theory. Nonetheless, a key legacy of Bourdieu in the United States is the growing empirical research that draws inspiration from many of his ideas.

Distinct Conceptual Terminology Bourdieu’s work offers a novel conceptual language, with terms such as habitus, capital, field, and symbolic violence, which, if not always originating in his work, certainly strike many as conveying new insights into issues of considerable interest: power and inequality, and relations between action and structure. His concepts are elastic enough to permit a broad range of possible applications – a feature noted early on by DiMaggio (1979) in presenting the concept of habitus.

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What some consider a “fuzzy concept” mixing cognitive, bodily, perception, and emotional dimensions that need separate specification, others see as a powerful heuristic device designed to bring agency into structural analysis (see Swartz, 1997). Moreover, his work has opened up areas for innovative research in sociology that previously had been neglected subfields, such as the sociology of culture. This conceptual language also challenged commonly accepted ways of framing issues. The idea of thinking of culture as a form of capital that maintained if not enhanced inequality found resonance with a renewed interest in the cultural aspects of social life and the exhaustion of Marxist-informed views of ideology with which to do that. The practical agency embedded in the concept of habitus resonated with a growing interest in introducing agency into structural analysis and skepticism that an economist rational actor perspective was sufficient for the task. Habitus seemed to speak to the growing need to find ways of bridging micro and macro levels of analysis. The concept of field gives a more proximate and structured space in which action occurs than either markets, social classes, or institutions. Bourdieu was able to reframe traditional Marxist class analysis and Weberian status group analysis, thereby opening up a novel way of thinking about group formation and social classes in modern societies. No concept is tied to a particular domain. Even the concept of field, which some critics charge is tied to the national setting, is being elaborated to address transnational social spaces (Kauppi, 2018). Much of Bourdieu’s conceptual terminology has now become part of the sociological lexicon. His most extensively considered concept, cultural capital, now appears in many widely used introductory sociology textbooks (e.g. Conley, 2015; Ferris and Stein, 2016; Giddens et al., 2016). Cultural capital is used conceptually and researched empirically as a staple in much contemporary social scientific research. Forty-five years after its introduction into American social scientific research there still is no consensus over the definition of cultural capital, as its critics point out (Davies and Rizk, 2018: 332). Yet in spite of varying definitions and operational methods, Bourdieu’s model remains one of the must utilized and productive concepts in the social sciences today. The concept gained traction early in educational research. As a measure of family background, the importance of cultural capital relative to income and other possible stratifying factors has become the object of considerable research and debate in the sociology of education. However, the concept has been imported into many other substantive areas, such as culture, consumer tastes, family, organizations, and stratification. And it has provoked criticism and debate relative to how it is measured, its effects, its distribution, and variations in different national contexts (Davies and Rizk, 2018; Kingston, 2001; Lamont and Lareau, 1988; Lareau and Weininger, 2003; Swartz, 2018). In their review of empirically based research using the concept of cultural capital, Davies and Rizk identify three generations of cultural capital research in North America and three enduring strands of research inspired by the concept. First, DiMaggio and Mohr (1985) tie the concept to status attainment research using quantitative survey data. Second, Lareau (2011) uses qualitative observations to construct types of parental rearing (concerted cultivation vs natural growth). And

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third, Collins (Collins, 2008; 2014) stresses the cultural dimension of micro-level ritual interactions where cultural capital is seen as a stock of symbols that facilitate group interaction. Of interest is how the concept has been imported into US sociology and then US variations exported to other countries. Davies and Rizk (2018) document how DiMaggio’s and Lareau’s versions of cultural-capital research have been exported in research in other countries. This seems to be particularly the case of the DiMaggio tradition. Also of interest is that significant criticisms by Goldthorpe (2007) and Kingston (2001) have done little to deter use of Bourdieu’s concept in education research; indeed, responses to these criticisms have stimulated new lines of investigation. Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital provoked the “omnivore” debate that has been echoed abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom. Peterson (Peterson and Kern, 1996; Peterson and Simkus, 1992) coined the term “cultural omnivore” to extend cultural-capital analysis to observe that Americans with high-status tastes are not adverse to broader cultural engagements and tastes associated with popular culture. This observation launched a major omnivore debate in the sociology of culture in the United States and the United Kingdom in particular (Swartz, 2018). It also provoked a vigorous transatlantic debate in the Dutch journal Poetics, with several US sociologists participating. Even habitus, which Zavisca and Sallaz (2008: 7) opine that of all of Bourdieu’s concepts “has perhaps proved the hardest for scholars in US sociology to grasp,” has found frequent deployment in US sociology. The concept of habitus is frequently employed as an alternative view of action to strict structuralist analyses, and is often found in political economy, organizational, network analyses, and rational actor theory. While often submitted to critical assessment and/or application and elaboration well beyond Bourdieu’s own applications, the concept nonetheless is frequently employed to address an original concern of Bourdieu’s; namely, to bring more agency into structuralist analysis without falling back on a philosophical idea of free will or rational actor theory. The concept appeals to those critics of rational actor models found in analytical sociology such as those of Raymond Boudon or Jon Elster. The concept of field is being used globally more and more today in the social sciences. The concept now appears in numerous substantive areas of investigation, such as culture, education, economics, intellectuals, media, organizations, politics, religion, social movements, stratification, and globalization (Swartz, 2016). Bourdieu (1999a) was concerned with the international circulation of ideas (notably his own) and one of his contributions was to stress how when ideas and concepts are imported, they reflect in part the structure of the importing intellectual field. His legacy thus far certainly bears that out. The most comprehensive examination to date of cross-country variations in reception of Bourdieu’s work is to be found in the collection of papers assembled by Santoro (Santoro, 2008; 2009a; 2009b). Clearly, the reception varies by leading concerns specific to the individual intellectual fields. The Bourdieu of Brazil is not the same as the Bourdieu of Israel. The most frequent use of Bourdieu’s concepts is a fragmented one, where the researcher focuses on just one idea and tests it empirically or discusses its conceptual

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significance in isolation from Bourdieu’s other concepts. In the status attainment stream of education research, for example, cultural capital is reduced to some measurable quality of family background without situating it in field analytical terms. Sociologists working more within a Bourdieusian framework argue that this “toolkit” deployment of Bourdieu’s conceptual language misses the power of his thinking and wrongly tests the relevance of his outlook in terms of just one component of his framework. Calhoun (2013), Swartz (2013a), Wacquant (1992), and others stress that the greatest theoretical significance of concepts like field, capital, habitus, symbolic violence, and cultural capital comes from their interrelationships.

Intellectual Careers Following Max Weber, not intrinsic features of ideas themselves but their appeal to effective “social carriers” (or “reputational entrepreneurs” to use Gary Alain Fine’s expression) helps us to understand their diffusion, particularly transnationally. Bourdieu’s appeal in the United States has been enormously facilitated by key intellectual carriers. Many are his former students and close colleagues. Perhaps most noteworthy is Loïc Wacquant, a former student of Bourdieu, who later became a very successful exporter of the latter’s work to the United States (but also to other countries) through his many publications, university teaching, and conferences. His collaborative work with Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), has been a very significant conduit for the export of Bourdieu’s thinking to English readers. Wacquant’s importance goes beyond writing on Bourdieu, since he has also produced his own widely discussed works, on boxing, urban poverty, and incarceration, all of which draw some inspiration from Bourdieu (Wacquant, 2003; 2008; 2009). Globally, one should also mention that Wacquant’s efforts have not been confined to the United States. He has lectured and participated in conferences and debates in many other countries. Other important intellectual carriers include Franz Schulteis who has been an important voice in Germany, Anna Boschetti in Italy, and Nillo Kauppi in Finland and northern Europe. Another former student of Bourdieu, Michèle Lamont, professor of sociology at Harvard and former president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), has helped disseminate Bourdieu’s work through her criticisms, elaborations, and other research projects, all of which draw some inspiration from Bourdieu. Her paper (Lamont and Lareau, 1988) on cultural capital proved to be important in generating debate and further research relative to the nature of cultural distinctions in the United States. Though Paul DiMaggio not a student of Bourdieu, his “Review Essay on Pierre Bourdieu” (1979) in the flagship journal, American Journal of Sociology played a key role in introducing Bourdieu’s thinking to North American sociology. His subsequent research on cultural capital helped bring that concept into the mainstream of American social science and contributed significantly to how the concept of cultural capital could be researched outside of the French context. Swartz’s (1977) paper “Pierre Bourdieu: The Cultural

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Transmission of Social Inequality,” published in the widely read Harvard Educational Review, proved to be an influential introduction of Bourdieu’s thinking to American sociology of education. His book Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997) is a widely considered introduction to Bourdieu’s work and has been translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. His Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (2013) connects Bourdieu’s work to key concerns in political sociology. The influential voice of Craig Calhoun (Calhoun, 1993; 2008), former president of the Social Science Research Council (USA), former Director of the London School of Economics, and now at Arizona State University, has been important in enhancing understanding of Bourdieu’s work for English-speaking sociologists. Michael Burawoy, former president of the ASA, published in Bourdieu’s journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and coauthored with Von Holdt (Burawoy and Von Holdt, 2012), a series of lectures that he offered at numerous US universities on “imaginary conversations” between Bourdieu and Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Friere, de Beauvoir, Mills, and Burawoy himself. All of these US professors occupy positions at highly regarded universities. Finally, it is noteworthy that Bourdieu’s work has been acknowledged and discussed, often critically, but not ignored, by leading scholars. Four recent presidents of the ASA, Randall Collins, Michael Burawoy, Annette Lareau, and Michèle Lamont, have all explicitly engaged Bourdieu’s work. One could also mention John Goldthorpe’s (2007) sharply critical view of Bourdieu in the context of social mobility in the United Kingdom. These individuals have been important intellectual carriers of Bourdieu’s ideas in that they have disseminated his work through translation, books, articles, teaching, conferences, and debate. This is not an exhaustive list, but illustrative of key voices who have brought aspects of Bourdieu’s thinking into US sociology. Many others (such as Omar Lizardo, Tom Medvetz, Jane Zavisca, Jeffrey Sallaz, and Rogers Brubaker) have contributed as well. It secures the point that Bourdieu’s oeuvre has received widespread diffusion globally and attracted the attention of many central thinkers in US sociology and abroad.

Areas of Enduring Contributions Bourdieu himself applied his concepts across a broad range of empirical domains. Subsequent researchers have expanded enormously that scope. As Santoro (2008: 8) notes, seemingly “nothing escapes the toolbox Bourdieu forged.” Bourdieu’s toolbox provides instruments for a wide range of issues emerging in recent years in the social sciences, such as micro–macro relations, the practice orientation of action, inequality and stratification, and the cultural turn. There is hardly a major subfield in US sociology where Bourdieu’s influence has not been felt, as the Medvetz and Sallaz (2018) handbook attests. Ollion (2012) notes that many of Bourdieu’s main works have had transformative effects on the subfields they contribute to, with the greatest influence occurring in education and culture.

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Education The sociology of education is the earliest field in the United States in which portions of Bourdieu’s work received considerable attention and continues to this day to be shaped by his thinking. The early translation of Reproduction and early journal articles (DiMaggio, 1979; Swartz, 1977), and the Karabel and Halsey (1977) reader in the sociology of education, helped introduce Bourdieu in the United States. His work resonated with US concerns over inequality and limited opportunity and mobility. Reproduction rapidly became a citation classic. It is that work, more than any other, that marked Bourdieu as a reproduction theorist – a label he energetically disputed and with reason. Reproduction contributed to increasing attention to the cultural factors in both family backgrounds and schools as key in explaining educational inequality. Bourdieu’s signature concept, “cultural capital,” has become a mainstay in American educational research, reflected in the ASA section on Sociology of Education naming its annual outstanding book prize “The Pierre Bourdieu Award.” Moreover, Bourdieu is today the most-cited sociologist in education journals (Davies and Rizk, 2018: 331).

Culture Even more than in the sociology of education, Bourdieu’s work has shaped significantly the sociology of culture and it is difficult to overestimate the influence of Bourdieu in that subfield. Indeed, Santoro (2011: 11) goes so far to say that “cultural sociology would not have come to exist at all without his contribution, or at least would be very different from what it currently looks like.” Bourdieu’s influence contributed significantly to the growth of the production-of-culture perspective (Santoro, 2008: 19). Bourdieu rode the wave of the cultural turn in sociology and contributed to its emergence. The arrival of translations of his key works corresponded with the founding in 1986, under the leadership of Vera Zolberg, Gary Alan Fine, and Richard (Pete) Peterson, of the ASA Cultural Section and its tremendous growth: it rapidly became one of the largest ASA sections. In terms of the phenomenal growth of the Culture Section of the ASA, Lamont (2010) observes that reception of Bourdieu’s work played a major role in that growth. One should not underestimate the impact of the tremendous growth of the Culture Section of the ASA and its attraction of large numbers of graduate students in facilitating the spread of the “cultural turn” to other subfields, such as economic sociology, organizations, comparative historical studies, gender studies, urban sociology, and political sociology. The diffusion of Bourdieu’s thinking benefitted from the extraordinary “cultural turn” in American sociology in the late 1980s and 1990s. While the Bourdieusian influence in these other fields thus far has not been as remarkable as in the sociology of education and culture, there has been enough to take note of several examples.

Other Areas In 2006 Swartz (2006) called attention to the political sociology dimension of Bourdieu’s work and identified several reasons why this had not been picked up

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much by sociologists and particularly political scientists. By 2013, some political sociologists had already started drawing more on Bourdieu in their work. In 2013 Swartz (2013b) offered a political sociological reading of Bourdieu’s sociology and called attention to the role that Bourdieu sees culture as playing in political formation and conduct. That book argues that power is at the center of Bourdieu’s sociology and politics, and finds expression in cultural forms and practices. Goldberg (2003) highlights the symbolic moment of political struggles over the New Deal social policy. Drawing inspiration from Bourdieu’s idea of classification struggles in the process of group formation, Gorski (2013b) extends this idea to think about the origins, process, and character of what he calls “nation-ization struggles.” And Kauppi (2018) draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and cultural capital to analyze transnational relations in the European Union. The Morgan and Orloff (2017) volume illustrates growing Bourdieusian influence on analyses of state power. Two key ideas of Bourdieu find resonance in these papers. First, criticism of unitary and over-rationalized views of the state. Bourdieu’s distinction between the left hand and the right hand of the state, between the welfare/ education and the financial agencies of the state, and the idea more generally of the state as an array of bureaucratic fields, usefully orients research away from the assumption of unity and coherence in action and opens up research into the possible diversity of competing and conflicting power centers within the state. This suggests that multiple functions of the state derive from previous social struggles and do not always cohere. Second, Bourdieu’s claim that states try to monopolize symbolic violence directs attention of researchers to the extensive reach of the state in legitimating symbolic classifications that establish boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that involve public authority. As a cultural force that legitimates dominant values and beliefs of a society, the state also helps produce and impose them. Bourdieu’s concept of field has found its way into organizational sociology partially through the landmark work of DiMaggio and Powell (1983), which draws upon the idea of field in formulating the authors’ widely influential neoinstitutional perspective. Fligstein and McAdam (2012) likewise draw some inspiration from Bourdieu’s concept in using the language of field to analyze meso-level organizational realities though, like DiMaggio and Powell, they downplay the dynamic of conflict that Bourdieu stresses. By contrast, Emirbayer and Johnson (2008) offer a more thorough Bourdieusian perspective for analyzing organizations-as-fields and organizations as units within larger fields. Emirbayer and Johnson draw on all three of Bourdieu’s pillar concepts (habitus, capital, and field) and propose a relational approach to the study of organizations. Using these concepts, the authors reframe existing thinking about organizations, particularly from the neo-institutional and resource dependence schools. And Vaughan (2008) examines some of the empirical challenges in applying the relational concept of field to organizations-as-fields. Bourdieu did not specialize in economic sociology, but some of his earliest work enters into critical dialogue with economic views of action and markets. In his posthumous book on the French housing market, Bourdieu (2005 [2000]) does situate his thinking relative to key perspectives in contemporary economic sociology

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such as network analysis and the embeddedness of action. Bourdieu (1996 [1989]) also looks at the social and educational background of large-firm leadership in France. His concept of the field is receiving considerable attention today in that subfield. Swedberg (2002) finds a significant Bourdieusian influence in the so-called “new economic sociology” that shows the influence of the cultural turn in that subfield of sociology. Another contribution of Bourdieu to US sociology, one that is only beginning to be recognized, is to make knowledge the focus of inquiry and particularly the sociology of sociological knowledge as a necessary moment of all sociological inquiry rather than just an isolated subspecialty. Critics such as Calhoun (2008), Camic (2013), Swartz (1997), and Wacquant (1989; 1992), all note the importance of this contribution from Bourdieu to sociology. Finally, another distinctive contribution of Bourdieu to sociology and the social sciences more generally is his emphasis on the reflexive practice of sociology. This is a potential contribution, because it has yet to be incorporated into the mainstream of US sociology, though it is widely embraced by critical sociologists. For example, Burawoy (2005) finds similar themes in his call for a reflexive sociology.

Criticisms Bourdieu’s sociology leaves few indifferent or neutral. It tends to either inspire or provoke sharp opposition. A principal reason for this kind of response is the character of his work, which is sharply critical not only of existing power arrangements but also of the work of colleagues that fails to challenge the status quo. Many of those critical responses are intellectual as well as political. We will not review all of the critical responses to Bourdieu’s work but highlight just selected important intellectual ones. Each of Bourdieu’s major concepts has received considerable critical attention. Cultural capital, for example, is criticized for being associated with high culture and therefore less useful in countries where there is more cultural diversity and that lack a strong highbrow cultural tradition such as that in France (Kingston, 2001; Lamont and Lareau, 1988). In education research some (Carter, 2005; Dumais, 2015; Woodward, 2013; 2018; Yosso, 2005) argue that the concept implies a “deficit” and therefore a stigmatizing image of disadvantaged individuals and groups. Yet, critics like Carter, Dumais, and Woodward modify rather than discard the concept, by elaborating versions better suited to include the diversity of cultural resources among dominated groups. There has been debate as to whether the concept of field presupposes a national context and is of limited value for cross-national comparisons or for describing certain transnational social spaces (Cohen, 2018; Go and Krause, 2016; Kauppi, 2003; 2018; Madsen, 2006; Sapiro, 2018; Vauchez, 2008). Further, how are interfield relations to be conceptualized particularly with regard to change? Moreover, not every social space is a field. However, in the hands of Bourdieu and particularly many of his followers there has been a tendency to look upon all social realities in

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terms of field structure and dynamics. Yet others have called attention to social spaces between fields or interstitial spaces that do not have a field structure (Cohen, 2011; Eyal, 2013; Vauchez, 2011). Some have contested the dynamic of struggle, suggesting that cooperation also characterizes some activities within fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Others (Medvetz and Sallaz, 2018:16; Swartz, 2013a) ask whether field is a heuristic construct or a realist description of reality. Bourdieu saw his work, particularly his concept of habitus and his view of action as practice, as a way of bringing more agency into structuralism, which was a dominant framework in French intellectual circles during the 1960s and 1970s. He saw this conceptual move as a corrective to a one-sided emphasis of structural analysis. However, in the United States this corrective did not always resonate positively. Many (e.g. Jenkins, 2000) see in the concept an excessive structural emphasis where a kind of macro determinism prevails. Others (e.g. DiMaggio, 1979; Lahire, 2010) object to the elasticity of the concept, wanting more precision on the cognitive, emotional, psychological, or psychoanalytical components at stake. Some of the objections to particular concepts stem from fragmented readings or misunderstandings of Bourdieu’s texts. They tend to become recurring criticisms based on limited acquaintance with the ensemble of Bourdieu’s writings, reliance on secondary sources that misunderstood or wrongly interpret him, or simply misunderstanding of the emphases Bourdieu was trying to make in particular contexts. Three examples stand out: the alleged elite content of cultural capital, the unrelenting reproduction of structures, and the missing possibility for historical change. In each case, one can find passages by Bourdieu that suggest the types of meanings that merit such criticisms. Early work on French education did associate cultural capital with elite French culture. Early work on French schooling did indeed stress the social reproduction of inequalities through the transmission of cultural capital. And Bourdieu nowhere attempted to formulate a theory of social change (though there are elements here and there in some of his texts) and many of his field analyses offer a snapshot in time rather than a description of changes over time (Swartz, 2013b). Yet in each instance these common criticisms have been qualified, if not discredited outright. Cultural capital need not imply a national elite culture, but can take on regional if not local forms of power struggle using cultural resources (Weininger and Lareau, 2018). As for structural reproduction, Weininger and Lareau show from careful analysis of Bourdieu’s writings that his thinking evolved from Reproduction to The State Nobility, in which he acknowledges the possibility of more social mobility. Many US critics of Bourdieu remain stuck in the Bourdieu of Reproduction. Calhoun (1993; 2006) argues that genesis and development are key features of Bourdieu’s social theory even if he highlighted conditions contributing to the reproduction of existing social and cultural structures. Both Calhoun and Gorski argue that Bourdieu can in fact be viewed as a historical sociologist. As Gorski (2013a: 1) points out, “Bourdieu himself was something of a historical analyst,” and one can see Distinction measuring the effects of broad social class transformation in post–World War II France. Indeed his early work in Algeria was concerned with the effects of social transformation that French colonialism had on traditional Berber

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society. In his work he attempts to analyze at least four major processes of social transformation: the uprooting of traditional Algerian peasant life by French market colonialism and war; the increasing differentiation into fields with modernization; growing inequality accompanying the post–World War II economic boom in France; and the massive neoliberal attack on welfare state provision (Calhoun, 2013). Sewell (1992) also sees in Bourdieu’s theory of structure the possibility of change. Steinmetz (2011) stresses the important of temporal dynamics in all of Bourdieu’s major concepts. And Swartz (1997: 211–217; 2013b: 235–244) and Wacquant (1992) both identify elements for theorizing change in Bourdieu’s work. What is interesting is that these correctives to misunderstandings come not just from disciples but also from individuals who selectively and critically employ some of Bourdieu’s thinking or concepts. Both Wacquant, a former student and loyal advocate, and Gorski, a critical admirer, argue and document that these stereotyped criticisms cannot be explained only by Bourdieu’s work. They are “at least partly the result of a particular historically conditioned pattern of reception, translation, and appropriation” (Gorski, 2013a: 6). They reflect fragmented readings of Bourdieu or superficial generalizations from selected secondary sources. Gorski (2013a:11) puts it bluntly: “To accuse Bourdieu of being a reproduction theorist, then, is to confess that one has not read that much of his work or that one has not read it very closely.” One might add: or read it through the lens of received preoccupations of US sociology, namely to find agency in every possible location. Gorski (2013a:12) concludes that Bourdieu “was both a theorist of reproduction and a theorist of transformation.” These criticisms and corresponding responses notwithstanding, it is striking that Bourdieu’s concepts have not fallen into neglect; indeed, evidence suggests they have been productive tools in the hands of many scholars for producing new social scientific research. Criticism, whether superficial or well founded, appears to only contribute to the growing legacy of Bourdieu’s sociology.

Conclusion We of course cannot predict with certainty how enduring Bourdieu’s legacy will be, in US sociology or globally. Following the patterns already identified by Santoro and colleagues and Kauppi and Swartz, we would expect there to be significant cross-country variations. Nonetheless, we have shown the continued growth of influence of Bourdieu’s work since his death in 2002. That influence can be seen in the English translations of his work, and the number of published books and articles devoted to his thinking. He continues to be the mostcited sociologist in the world today. Many of those references are ceremonial, but as Sallaz and Zavisca have shown in the case of the United States, many of those references reflect real engagement with aspects of Bourdieu’s work. Parts of his conceptual terminology, such as cultural capital and field, have become embedded in the mainstream sociological lexicon. The number of sociologists who attempt to employ his full framework, however, remain limited. The predominant pattern in

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the United States is to take a “toolkit approach,” selecting just one or two of Bourdieu’s concepts or ideas for conceptual discussion or empirical testing. The concept of cultural capital is frequently discussed separately from the concept of field. His concepts have of course been thoroughly criticized, elaborated, modified, and in some cases rejected in favor of opposing ideas. But even in the latter case, Bourdieu’s thinking has served as a fruitful reference for much sociological thinking and further research. Even the critics, perhaps unwittingly, have helped further Bourdieu’s ideas for new research. Consider one of Bourdieu’s former students, Michèle Lamont (Lamont 1992; 2010; Lamont and Lareau, 1988), now Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, who has increasingly distanced herself from Bourdieu’s work by developing her own research agendas, empirical investigations, and conceptual vocabulary. Her early critical assessment of the concept of cultural capital sparked considerable further reflection, criticism, rectification, clarification, debate, and empirical investigation into the role of culture in transmitting social inequality outside of France. In spite of claims that the concept really did not apply to the United States, it has in fact generated considerable discussion, elaboration, and application in empirical research in the US context. Reflecting on her own relationship to Bourdieu, Lamont (2010: 138) says that she has “cultivated simultaneously multiple relationships with Bourdieu’s work,” was “inspired by it and extend[s] Bourdieu’s intellectual agenda,” used his “work as a springboard to open new vistas and ask new questions,” and “made empirical correctives to it” and “criticized its meta-theoretical assumptions.” At a very minimum one might therefore say that Lamont and many other critics have found, in the famed words of Claude LéviStrauss, that Bourdieu “is good to think with.” Of course, he has been much more to those whose work is more aligned with his conceptual framework. Together those amount to a most promising intellectual legacy.

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2018. “Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations.” In Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 200–246). New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, Randall. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2008. Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2014. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conley, Dalton. 2015. You May Ask Yourself, 4th ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Davies, Scott, and Jessica Rizk. 2018. “The Three Generations of Cultural Capital Research: A Narrative Review.” Review of Educational Research 88(3): 331–365. DiMaggio, Paul. 1979. “Review Essay on Pierre Bourdieu.” American Journal of Sociology 84(6): 1460–1474. DiMaggio, Paul, and John Mohr. 1985. “Cultural Capital, Educational Attainment, and Marital Selection.” American Journal of Sociology 90(6): 1231–1261. DiMaggio, Paul, and Walter Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48: 147–160. Dumais, Susan A. 2015. “Cultural Capital and Education.” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavior Sciences 5: 375–381. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B9780-08-097086-8.10433-7 Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Victoria Johnson. 2008. “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis.” Theory and Society 37(1): 1–44. Eyal, Gil. 2013 “Spaces Between Fields.” In Phillip S. Gorski (ed.), Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (pp. 158–182). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ferris, Kerry, and Jill Stein. 2016 The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, 5th ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. 2012 A Theory of Fields. Oxford, UK/New York: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, and Deborah Carr. 2016 Introduction to Sociology, 10th ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Go, Julian, and Monika Krause. 2016. Fielding Transnationalism: An Introduction. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Goldberg, Chad Alan. 2003. “Haunted by the Specter of Communism: Collective Identity and Resource Mobilization in the Demise of the Workers Alliance of America.” Theory and Society 32(5–6): 725–773. Goldthorpe, John H. 2007. “‘Cultural Capital’: Some Critical Observations.” Sociologica (2). DOI:10.2383/24755 Gorski, Phillip S. 2013a. “Bourdieu as a Theorist of Change.” In Phillip S. Gorski (ed.), Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (pp. 1–15). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2013b. “Nation-ization Struggles: A Bourdieusian Theory of Nationalism.” In Phillip S. Gorski (ed.), Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (pp. 242–265). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Green, Elliott. 2016. “What Are the Most-Cited Publications in the Social Sciences (according to Google Scholar)?” LSE blog. The London School of Economics and Political Science. Jenkins, Richard. 2000. Pierre Bourdieu. Revised ed. London: Routledge.

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Karabel, Jerome, and A. H. Halsey (eds.). 1977. Power and Ideology in Education. New York: Oxford University Press. Kauppi, Niilo. 2003. “Bourdieu’s Political Sociology and the Politics of European Integration.” Theory and Society 32(5–6): 775–789. 2018. “Transnational Social Fields.” In Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 183–199). New York: Oxford University Press. Kauppi, Niilo, and David Swartz. 2015. “Global Bourdieu.” Comparative Sociology 14: 565–586. DOI:10.1163/15691330-12341358 Kingston, Paul W. 2001. “The Unfulfilled Promise of Cultural Capital Theory.” Sociology of Education. Extra Issue: 88–99. Lahire, Bernard. 2010. The Plural Actor. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2010. “Looking Back at Bourdieu.” In Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde (eds.), Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives (pp. 128–141). London and New York: Routledge. Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. 1988. “Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments.” Sociological Theory 6(2): 153–168. Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. 2. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Lareau, Annette, and Elliot Weininger. 2003. “Cultural Capital in Educational Research: A Critical Assessment.” Theory and Society 32: 567–606. Madsen, Mikael Rask. 2006. “Transnational Fields: Elements of a Reflexive Sociology of the Internationalisation of Law.” Retfoerd 3(114): 23–41. Medvetz, Thomas, and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.). 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu. New York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Kimberly J., and Ann Shola Orloff (eds.). 2017. The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ollion, Etienne. 2012. “Pierre Bourdieu.” Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxfordbibliogra phies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0083.xml DOI:10.1093/OBO/9780199756384.0083 Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61(5): 900–907. Peterson, Richard A., and Albert Simkus. 1992. “How Musical Taste Groups Mark Occupational Status Groups.” In Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (pp. 158–162). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sallaz, Jeffrey J., and Jane Zavisca. 2007. “Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2004.” Annual Review of Sociology 33: 21–41. Santoro, Marco. 2008. “Putting Bourdieu in the Global Field. Introduction to the Symposium.” Sociologica 2 (September–October): 1–32. DOI:10.2383/27719 2009a. “Introduction to the Second Part.” Sociologica 1(January–April): 1–4. DOI:10.2383/29617 2009b. “Introduction to the Third Part.” Sociologica 2–3(May–December): 1–4. DOI:10.2383/31369

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2011. “From Bourdieu to Cultural Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 5(1): 3–23. DOI:10.1177/1749975510397861 Sapiro, Gisèle. 2018. “Field Theory from a Transnational Perspective.” In Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 161–182). New York: Oxford University Press. Sapiro, Gisèle, and Mauricio Bustamante. 2009. “Translation as a Measure of International Consecration. Mapping the World Distribution of Bourdieu’s Books in Translation.” Sociologica 2–3(May–December): 1–45. DOI:10.2383/31374 Sewell, William H., Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98(1): 1–29. Silva, Elizabeth, and Alan Warde (eds.). 2010. Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives. London and New York: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group. Steinmetz, George. 2011. “Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 5(1): 45–66. Susen, Simon, and Bryan S. Turner. 2011. The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays. London: Anthem Press. Swartz, David L. 1977. “Pierre Bourdieu: The Cultural Transmission of Social Inequality.” Harvard Educational Review 47(November): 545–554. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005. “Central Concepts of Bourdieusian Analysis.” In Conference on “Bourdieuian Theory and Historical Analysis.” April 28–May 1, 2005, Yale University. 2006. “Pierre Bourdieu and North American Political Sociology: Why He Doesn’t Fit In But Should.” French Politics 4: 84–89. 2013a. “Metaprinciples for Sociological Research in a Bourdieusian Perspective.” In Phillip S. Gorski (ed.), Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (pp. 19–35). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2013b. Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2016. “Bourdieu’s Concept of Field.” Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxfordbibliogra phies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0164.xml 2018. “Cultural Capital.” Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/ document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0209.xml Swartz, David L., and Vera L. Zolberg (eds.). 2004. After Bourdieu. Influence, Critique, Elaboration. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Swedberg, Richard. 2002. “In Memoriam: Pierre Bourdieu.” Account: A Newsletter of Economic Sociology 2(2): 1–2. Vauchez, Antoine. 2008. “The Force of a Weak Field: Law and Lawyers in the Government of the European Union (For a Renewed Research Agenda).” International Political Sociology 2(2): 128–144. 2011. “Interstitial Power in Fields of Limited Statehood: Introducing a ‘Weak Field’ Approach to the Study of Transnational Settings.” International Political Sociology 5(3): 340–345. Vaughan, Diane. 2008. “Bourdieu and Organizations: The Empirical Challenge.” Theory and Society 37(1): 65–81. Wacquant, Loïc. 2003. Body and Soul: Notes of an Apprentice Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press.

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2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity. 2009. Prisons of Poverty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 1989. “Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu.” Sociological Theory 7(1): 26–63. 1992. “Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology.” In Pierre, Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant (eds.), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (pp. 2–59). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weininger, Elliot, and Annette Lareau. 2018. “Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Education.” In Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 253–272). New York: Oxford University Press. Woodward, Kerry. 2013 Pimping the Welfare System: Empowering Participants with Economic, Social, and Cultural Capital. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2018. “The Relevance of Bourdieu’s Concepts for Studying the Intersections of Poverty, Race, and Culture.” In Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 629–644) New York: Oxford University Press. Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8(1): 69–91. DOI:10.1080/1361332052000341006 Zavisca, Jane, and Jeffrey J. Sallaz. 2008. “From the Margins to the Mainstream: The Curious Convergence of Pierre Bourdieu and US Sociology.” Sociologica 2: 1–20. DOI:10.2383/27721

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17 Developing Ethnomethodology: Garfinkel on the Constitutive Interactional Practices in Social Systems of Interaction Anne Rawls

Harold Garfinkel, often referred to as the “father” of ethnomethodology, developed one of the most comprehensive and innovative programs of theory and research of the twentieth century. The research arm of his program, documenting Garfinkel’s sociological theory of the object and his explanation of how coherence is cooperatively achieved in situated interaction, made an indelible mark on many disciplines, including communication, science and technology studies, and sociology. But his theory, which explains how “constitutive practices”1 in “interactional systems” are used to create collective coherence and social solidarity in social contexts that lack consensus, has been overlooked, and its important relationship to Durkheim and Parsons ignored. The effect has been to make Garfinkel’s position appear to be “micro” and focused on the individual, when it is focused squarely on the collective making of social objects/facts. Garfinkel studied social interactions involving individuals with Race, Gender,2 and mental health labels/identities because he understood that the interactional barriers and sanctions such people face give them a heightened awareness of the “tacit” practices that everyone uses to achieve social categories, but that most are not aware of. Garfinkel’s insight is analogous to W. E. B. Du Bois’ conception of “Double Consciousness” (Du Bois, 1904). This is not surprising, since for both scholars the insight developed through their own experiences of discrimination. As a Jewish man in the 1930s and 1940s Garfinkel experienced explicit anti-Semitism and racism. Those who have difficulty achieving “normal” identities are, Garfinkel said, like “natural experiments” whose awareness of social practices can be probed to show the rest of us – who lack this awareness – what we are all doing to achieve “normal” identities and meanings.3 In the late 1930s, as a student of Howard Odum and Guy Johnson at University of North Carolina, Garfinkel turned to observations of discrimination experienced by Black Americans in the pre–World War II American South for an understanding of how coherence and social order are created and denied. He studied racism in everyday life and in the legal system, documenting how inequality gets in the way of mutual understanding, distorts outcomes, and creates nonsense: the finding that would become the foundation of his mature theory and research. 343

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In focusing on constitutive practices, Garfinkel was developing a neglected aspect of Durkheim’s social-fact legacy (Rawls, 1996; 2019). Durkheim (1893) argued that a consensus-based social order would start to fail as societies diversified and that it would be replaced by new ways of creating coherence and solidarity that are grounded on constitutive practices and the need for justice. Although this was the foundational argument of Durkheim’s sociology, most social theories still assume that a traditional form of consensus is required in modern society. Garfinkel addressed this oversight, documenting the detailed processes of collective social-fact making, or to use his term, “social object” making, that comprise the structure of interactional reciprocities used to create collective order, mutually intelligible sense, and Self. Garfinkel considered the question of how social objects are created in social contexts that lack consensus to be the essential theoretical question, and criticized sociologists for failing to address it. Only with an adequate answer to this question, he argued, could the many theoretical contradictions in sociology be put to rest. Durkheim had said much the same thing. Although he began laying conceptual groundwork for this argument through studies of Race at North Carolina from 1939 to 1942, and continued developing it through his research for the Army Air Force in 1942–1946, Garfinkel’s first papers situating his approach theoretically were not written until 1946, when he arrived at Harvard to study with Talcott Parsons. In 1946, he proposed modifications4 to Parsons’ (1937) theory to bring it in line with his own emphasis on the role of interaction in creating social objects, and tried to convince Parsons to make the recommended changes. By 1949 Parsons was working on a theoretical approach to culture as an independent level of social order that incorporated interaction and by 1963 had arrived at an identifiably interactional position (see Parsons, 1963). We also know from materials in the Garfinkel Archive that Parsons and Garfinkel collaborated on a theoretical approach to a theory of a social system of interaction from 1959 to 1963 (Garfinkel, 2019a). Unfortunately, the timing of this important work contributed to its marginalization. Garfinkel was taking up an interactional approach to social theory just as sociologists in the United States were turning against studies of social interaction in the aftermath of World War II (Rawls, 2018). To the extent that Durkheim and Parsons built their arguments on interaction, their positions were also sidelined and distorted by the wartime turn against interaction. Durkheim’s main point that as societies grow and diversify consensus will lose its effectiveness, and social facts will need to be created in new ways that depend on constitutive practices in interaction and not on consensus, was misinterpreted (Rawls, 2012), and his social-fact epistemology, the sociological answer to positivism, was neglected for nearly a century (Rawls, 1996; 2008 [2004]). Parsons did not fare much better. His interactional approach to modern society was rendered in logically incompatible “structuralist” terms and then rejected. Sociology was being stripped of its theoretical grounding. Thus, while Garfinkel had the unusual good fortune to work closely at prestigious universities with two influential presidents of the American Sociological Association (ASA), Parsons (1949) for his PhD, and Howard Odum (1930) for his MA, and produced revolutionary work for both, he was often characterized as an outsider. Garfinkel was developing Odum’s focus on Race inequality and Parsons’ turn toward

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interactionism in a hostile intellectual climate. Garfinkel’s emphasis on Race and inequality also worked against him, as the new so-called “value-free” sociology turned against the social justice issues that Garfinkel (like Durkheim) had positioned at the center of social theory. Garfinkel’s aim was to develop a sociological awareness of how practices that people are not ordinarily conscious of (i.e., that operate at a “tacit” or “taken-forgranted” level of social action), are used to create social objects, and then show how inequality distorts this process. Through his early studies of the interactional difficulties and labeling problems associated with Race, Gender, and mental illness, Garfinkel developed the insight that for coherence and social stability in general to be collectively achieved in a diverse society a mutual commitment to sets of situated constitutive practices that are equally available to all participants – his “trust conditions” – is necessary. The theory is recognizable in outline by 1948 and appeared with “trust” in the title for the first time in a paper presented at the 1956 ASA meetings.5 The conception of constitutive practices (criteria social action must meet to achieve social objects) that Garfinkel’s position was also grounded on Durkheim’s theory of modernity. Garfinkel’s relevance to current dilemmas in social theory derives from this: that it was with this conception that Durkheim liberated sociological theory – and the social-fact tradition – from its dependence on a consensus of beliefs/values in the theories of Comte, Sumner, and Giddings. Garfinkel’s theory of social objects restores and advances Durkheim’s argument. While change does erode consensus and traditional culture, it strengthens the new forms of culture and morality that are created by constitutive practices. That we are unaware of this and “take it for granted” as Garfinkel says, fosters misguided theory and research, political division, and bad public policy. For instance, social theory that takes a consensus, rather than a constitutive position, supports the belief that immigration and diversity weaken culture and damage social solidarity, when they do not; while lack of awareness of how constitutive practices work obscures the tacit forms of discrimination (“implicit” and “tacit” biases) that do undermine coherence and solidarity. As Durkheim (1893; Rawls, 2019) warned, unless sociologists understand and can explain why justice is now a requirement, and how constitutive practices replace consensus, citizens will not recognize the moral aspects of modernity, and will not know which aspects of society they now depend on and need to strengthen and protect. It was Garfinkel’s agenda to bring the needed awareness to sociological theory and research. The insights gained through his studies of interactional trouble, incongruity, and sanctions in situations of inequality, ground his later studies of constitutive practices in occupations, sciences, and language. The social obligations involved comprise a new moral foundation for society because without them social objects, sense, and Self are not possible. This chapter considers the development of Garfinkel’s overall position through major contributions associated with the principal phases of his career: 1939–1942 at North Carolina; 1942–1946 in the Army Air Force; 1946–1952 at Harvard; 1952–1953 at Princeton; and, finally, 1954–2011 at UCLA. Major works from each period are discussed in some detail.

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North Carolina 1939–1942: Garfinkel’s Studies of Race Through Accounts When Garfinkel arrived in Chapel Hill in August 1939, after spending the summer building an earth dam at a Quaker work camp in Georgia,6 the Sociology Department, chaired by Odum, was already known as a center for “modeling,” an abstract logical and quantitative approach. But, social theory at North Carolina was taught under Odum with an emphasis on the Action Theory of Florian Znaniecki and W. I. Thomas. The sociology Garfinkel found at North Carolina was multifaceted; the perspective of the actor and interaction inspired by Znaniecki, Thomas, Cooley, and Mead were serious issues, as was the Chicago School focus on ethnographic field studies. Garfinkel’s insight that “accounts” reveal tacit aspects of social order was inspired by Kenneth Burke (1936), a literary theorist whose work he encountered there; while his grasp of the implications of “incongruity” for the coordination of action was inspired by the Gestalt psychology of Aron Gurwitsch (1964), which he encountered in the philosophy department. Postwar “scientific” sociology, with its emphasis on aggregation and generalization, its disdain for studies of interaction, and its insistence that “real” science was neutral on questions of justice, did not yet dominate the department. Odum and Johnson, Garfinkel’s mentors at North Carolina, were committed to documenting the folkways of the American South with an emphasis on the Black community. After Garfinkel had written and published his observations of racial accounting practices in “Color Trouble” (1940), they encouraged him to pursue field research documenting racial “accounting practices” in court for his MA thesis. Odum and Johnson were well-known proponents of an approach to civil rights that challenged the White southern status quo. Unfortunately, in contrast with Durkheim, who argued that constitutive practices replace folkways, both as ways of making social facts and as moral grounding, Odum and Johnson believed that stable folkways remain necessary and therefore were not prepared to abandon White southern folkways, even though they disagreed with them. The slow change they advocated was criticized by civil rights activists and White southerners alike (Gilmore, 2008: 226–230). Caught in the middle, Odum fell into relative obscurity before his death in 1954. The identification of folkways with morality also diminished Odum’s (1964 [1947]) promising conception of “technicways,” which Garfinkel would have been exposed to in 1937. Technicways are scientific and interactional practices that develop suddenly without regard for folkways. For instance, Odum (1943) noted that queues at the post office in the segregated American South that ignored Race and took everyone in turn had developed in the 1940s. But, because Odum identified morality exclusively with folkways, he considered technicways morally neutral, and worried that they could be manipulated for evil purposes (even associating them with Hitler during World War II). Garfinkel did not agree that interactional practices were morally neutral. In his first two publications, Garfinkel explored problems that arise when institutional accounts, categories, and labeling practices that embed inequality allow inequality to shape

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outcomes. Written in 1940 and 1942 (published in 1940 and 1949) his research examined the practices used to create racial inequality on a bus in Virginia and in ten county courtrooms in North Carolina. The reliance on tacit racial presuppositions on the bus, he said, created incongruity, making a “nonsense” of the situation. The extensive use of racial accounts that was taken for granted in court rendered legal (statistical) outcomes in ethnocentric terms. In other words, the supposedly objective numbers had racial bias built into them. In these early papers we see the outlines of Garfinkel’s later argument that equality and reciprocity are necessary and that the difficulties of presenting and managing marginalized identity offer clues to the relationship between trust conditions and nonsense. As disciplinary leaders narrowed their view of sociology, turning away from social interaction and fieldwork, and advocating a reliance on theoretical and methodological abstraction, generalization, and statistics, his mentors encouraged Garfinkel to go against the grain and broaden his view of sociology, supporting him in the collection of richer observational detail and signing off on an MA thesis (1949) that demonstrated how generalizations and statistics can distort the social processes they are assumed to represent. As the discipline turned away from social justice issues as “unscientific,” Garfinkel showed that qualitative studies of social justice could be more scientific than the new “value-free” statistical research.

North Carolina 1940, “Color Trouble”: Institutionalized Accounts Enable Racism Garfinkel’s first publication, “Color Trouble,” analyzed a racial incident he observed during a bus ride from Newark, New Jersey, where his family lived, to North Carolina, where he was a graduate student. The bus stopped in Petersburg, Virginia, on May 23, 1940 (Easter weekend). Many Black passengers left the bus, leaving two Black passengers sitting in the middle seats, one of whom was, unknown to Garfinkel, Pauli Murray, a famous transgender civil rights activist.7 Because of Murray, the incident has become part of the history of the civil rights movement, and comparisons of Murray’s own account of the incident with Garfinkel’s have been preserved.8 Garfinkel’s analysis focused on racialized presuppositions that exerted tacit constraints on the interaction. The bus driver explained that he could not load new passengers and continue the journey until the two Black passengers moved to the back of the bus. One of the two was dressed as a woman, the other as a boy. They refused to move all the way back, or sit over the wheel, because it was uncomfortable. But, they offered to move into a broken seat behind them if the driver fixed it. He accepted that compromise as preserving the appearance of Jim Crow, and fixed the seat. But, the compromise broke down when, as Garfinkel relates it, the two Black passengers began referring to their “rights” in a way that openly challenged tacit southern assumptions about racial order (Rawls, 2020). The bus remained in Petersburg for two hours as the incident unfolded and the two Black passengers were eventually arrested.

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The article reporting Garfinkel’s observations first appeared in the journal Opportunity (published by the Urban League) within days of the incident in May 1940, after which it was reprinted as if it were fiction in Best Short Stories of 1941 (and again in Primer for White Folks, 1945). The twenty-two-year-old Garfinkel did not write it as fiction. While the analysis employs literary devices that Garfinkel did not use in his later work, those devices are used to portray the tacit presuppositions about Race and inequality that shape the interaction. It is an interesting early approach to making the tacit visible.

North Carolina 1942: MA Thesis on Inter- and Intra-Racial Homicide Garfinkel’s second major work, his MA thesis of 1942 on inter and intra-racial homicide, a quite different version of which was published in Social Forces in 1949, focused on how legal outcomes that appear statistically fair are actually based on racialized accounts produced in the courtroom as part of a trial. At a time when the discipline was advocating a turn toward statistics, Garfinkel was demonstrating the pitfalls of a statistical approach, particularly in getting at issues of racial discrimination. The assumption that research based on statistics is objective is naively wrong when the numbers in question refer to things like the outcomes of trials in which Race was treated as a legally relevant part of the decision-making process. Garfinkel’s analysis focused on racialized narrative accounts, offered in court by those officially involved in the cases (including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and witnesses) that played a role in determining outcomes. The puzzle was that when the outcomes were looked at statistically the distribution of punishments by Race looked “fair,” even though Race had been a determining factor. Garfinkel found that the results of two contrasting sets of accounts had the effect of neutralizing each other. Statistically it looked like Race was not playing a role in the determination of cases, when in fact it was playing the determining role. Garfinkel realized that something like this could be distorting the statistical outcomes of any institution to create a false appearance of fairness. The way it worked was simple. Accounts were offered in court regarding the moral character of both offender and victim: character assessments. These accounts of moral order were framed in terms of shared cultural assumptions about Race. In other words, Black and White men were not expected to behave the same way, and judgments of character reflected these not-so-tacit presuppositions. Good White men “contribute to the community.” Good Black men “know their place.” Garfinkel found that “good” White men were rewarded (with lenient sentences or dismissal) for killing “bad” Black men. Similarly, “good” Black men were rewarded for killing “bad” Black men and “doing the community a favor.” Statistically (holding constant other factors), White and Black men in these two categories had a similar statistical probability of getting lenient sentences. In cross-Race homicides, however, White men could be rewarded for homicide while Black men were always penalized. Because most homicide occurs within Race, however, cross-Race homicides made up a very small percentage of cases.

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The more lenient sentences for White men killing Black men and Black men killing bad Black men canceled each other out and obscured the racial bias. The fact that the decisions were based on racist narratives remained hidden. The numbers were telling a big fat lie. It is remarkable, given such a clear demonstration of how racism can be rendered invisible by statistical accounts, that it is a legal standard in the United States today that claims of Race and Gender discrimination be accompanied by statistical proof that an institution has a “pattern” of bias. As Garfinkel demonstrated in 1942 this is often impossible, even in the most explicit cases of institutional racism, because statistics can obscure discriminatory practices such that outcomes appear legally and morally fair when they are not.

Gulfport Field Mississippi 1942–1946: Garfinkel’s War Research Garfinkel entered the Army Air Force as a Private First Class and left it as a Corporal. He was stationed at Gulfport Field Mississippi for most of the duration of World War II (fall 1942 to January 1946). His war research included his first “Hybrid Study of Work,” The History of Gulfport Field (2019b [1942]), a type of research he would become famous for in the 1980s. This hybrid study is of particular interest because it is the only detailed report of Garfinkel’s war research written at the time that has been preserved. Reports on other wartime research projects were reconstructed by Garfinkel after the war. These include a short report on leadership that was composed while he was working for the Ohio Personnel Research Board, and notes on his work in the military mental hospital at Gulfport Field, which appear in book proposals and outlines from 1957–19589 that discuss his 1957 grant from the Army Air Force. His studies during the war grounded his later insights with regard to hybrid studies, mock-ups, and decision-making, and earned Garfinkel significant monetary support from the Army Air Force.

Army Air Force Gulfport Field, Mississippi 1942: The History of Gulfport Field 1942 The idea behind hybrid studies is to examine the practices that participants/members at an occupational worksite use to coordinate their work. The research should be recognizable to those doing the work and also have research implications – hence its designation: “Hybrid.” Garfinkel’s first hybrid study was done for the Army Air Force at Gulfport Field in 1942 (Garfinkel, 2019b [1942]). At the beginning of the war the American Army was not prepared. Garfinkel found himself stationed at an airfield where the mission was to train pilots and mechanics. But there were no airplanes, nor airplane parts. His job was to document the training situation and help the Army get ready. New recruits from all over America, farmers, bakers, teachers, craftsmen, and so on with no background as mechanics, and no familiarity with airplanes, had to be taught in short order how to repair and fly airplanes into war zones in the absence of equipment.

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Garfinkel prepared a formal report for the Army Air Force on how airplane mechanic training was approached under these conditions. The formal report on mechanic training, The History of Gulfport Field 1942: The Aircraft Mechanics School (Garfinkel, 2019b [1942]) is 343 pages long, complete with dozens of fullpage photographs, and hand-drawn mock-ups. In this report Garfinkel describes the setting in great detail. A large barn-like structure was made available in which to hold classes and work with equipment. However, the structure was empty and to begin with there was no equipment. It was an ideal research subject for Garfinkel, who considered problems, or to use his term, “incongruities,” to be the key to discovering how things work under “normal” circumstances. The immediate task was to train Army recruits to repair airplanes. But, there were no airplanes and no engines. There were only a few engine parts and very few tools. There were no instruction manuals. In this context the recruits scavenged for any parts they could find, and developed practices for making tools from whatever was at hand. These aspiring mechanics often had to make their own tools, even screwdrivers. Initially this was because they had no screwdrivers. However, it likely came in handy in the field. They could make the tools they needed. Garfinkel describes these makeshift practices in great detail. Several pages and photos are devoted to describing how the recruits made a screwdriver. Attention was also devoted to describing how they were taught how to fix engines in the absence of engines, or even any books about or diagrams depicting engines. The interest in workplace practices that Garfinkel developed later, which focused on the importance of exactly how work was being coordinated, how hands turned and eyes and ears coordinated, and how it all meshed with the words used, which transformed studies of science and human machine interaction, began at Gulfport Field. Garfinkel’s report is a fascinating study of what is sometimes glossed as “American ingenuity.” Garfinkel was essentially describing the creation of a social order and an order of social practice from nothing. No traditions. No culture. No folkways. No practices. No knowledge. No materials. No airplanes. No tools. Just thousands of recruits and a few teachers making it up as they go. It is a perfect example of how constitutive practices differ from folkways and routines.

Harvard 1946–1952: Explaining the Need for a Sociological Theory of the Object Garfinkel was decommissioned from the Army in Texas in January 1946, after which he spent a month at the University of Texas, Austin. In February he went to Georgia Tech to teach for a semester, arriving at Harvard for the summer term in 1946. Garfinkel wrote one of the first theoretical papers that previews his mature position, “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems,” for a seminar he took with Parsons that summer or fall. In that paper he argued that an adequate sociological theory needs a theory of the object, but that no existing sociological theory had such a theory. His paper laid out a comprehensive appraisal

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of Parsons’ social action theory and the changes Garfinkel argued needed to be made to it, an agenda he pursued throughout his career. During his third semester at Harvard in winter/spring 1947 Garfinkel worked as a graduate assistant for a research project on American attitudes toward Russia with an interdisciplinary team that included the influential psychologist Jerome Bruner. Garfinkel wrote two manuscripts in 1947 based on his participation in this project: “Notes on the Information Apperception Test,” and “The Red as an Ideal Object” (Garfinkel, 2012 [1947]). His relationship with Bruner was of particular importance. Bruner had entered Europe with military intelligence immediately after D-Day and his experience interviewing French villagers who had just been liberated from the Nazis inspired his narrative approach to psychology. Listening to accounts of their relationship with the Nazis, Bruner (1990) realized that a shared narrative view of the world could be powerful enough to make things, including collaboration with the Nazis, seem acceptable that would have been inconceivable in “normal” times. According to Bruner he and Garfinkel discussed these experiences at length. Garfinkel also took courses with Bruner. The idea that a narrative framing of the world shapes cognition, what a person actually perceives and how they reason about it, the foundation of Bruner’s psychology, appears in Garfinkel’s early writing as “cognitive style.”10 The year 1948 found Garfinkel writing a series of proposals for his dissertation. He had secured funding from the Jewish Organization B’nai Brith to do PhD research with a focus on anti-Semitism. The first seven or so of his dissertation proposals bore variations on the title “the Jew as a Social Object.” The idea was to focus on the Jewish experience of marginality as a window into establishing the prerequisites for using constitutive practices: Garfinkel’s trust conditions. His proposals kept being sent back for revisions. Garfinkel did not make any headway until he took the word “Jew” out of the title. The plan had been to focus his research on difficulties experienced by the “Jew” as a marginal identity/category in interaction. Although the word was dropped from the title, the overall theoretical argument of his dissertation remained grounded in the idea that the difficulties and heightened awareness experienced by those in marginal identities hold the key to understanding social order. One of the dissertation proposals Garfinkel (2006)11 wrote during this period is of particular importance for the theoretical scope of its conception of communication and language as interaction. In this proposal, Garfinkel’s transformative approach to “language” and “communication” in terms of interactional “sequencing” made its first appearance. When Garfinkel worked out his “Toward a Sociological Theory of Information” at Princeton in 1952,12 and began working with Sacks around 1962 on calls to the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, he would continue building on the theory of communication outlined in the 1948 manuscript.

Harvard 1946: “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems” In this paper Garfinkel identified three foundational concerns of sociological theory: (1) meaning-relevant behavior; (2) social objects; and (3) social change. Resolving

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these concerns without examination, he argued, had prevented sociology from grasping the importance of interaction. The first concern (how we mean) has, he argued, been resolved by assuming that invariant categories exist, and that language (or communication) just works. The second concern (objects) has been resolved by treating objects and action as natural existents (epistemic objects) instead of recognizing their status as social objects that are constituted in situated interaction. The third concern (social change), he argues, is an artifact of the first two. Change is not a problem for a theory that does not rely on invariant categories or epistemic objects. Coherences comprised of mutually achieved constitutive objects and words/categories can change without any problem. A preoccupation with motivation is another artifact. As Garfinkel saw it in 1946, the main problem with Parsons’ (1937) social action theory involved these assumptions. While Garfinkel credited Parsons with a radical departure from conventional empiricism, he argued that he had inadvertently built on unexamined assumptions. Parsons lacked a theory of the object because he assumed that language works rather than asking how it works. By social object Garfinkel meant anything that is given meaning in interaction; including identity (role), words, symbols, information, and “things” like tables, chairs, cigarettes, and so on. Furthermore, while Parsons had recognized the importance of interaction, he had not focused on actual interaction, but on the actor’s point of view, leaving interaction itself out of the picture. Furthermore, even though Parsons had built on Durkheim’s social-fact position in an attempt to eliminate the individualism and naturalism of prewar US sociology, he had missed the epistemological point of Durkheim’s argument: that cooperatively made social objects cannot be independently “real” or epistemic. Consequently, in 1946 Parsons retained individualism in spite of his efforts (the later Parsons would address this problem). Garfinkel proposed modifying Parsons’ theory by doing two things: (1) explaining how social objects are created and sustained; and (2) studying how incongruities are handled to get insight into how coherence is achieved in “normal” social contexts (that lack consensus). This, he argued, requires focusing on interaction, the stuff that happens between people. Instead, social action had been formulated in terms of the actor’s point of view (and the observer’s perspective on the actor’s point of view). The individual (their biography, experience, attitudes, motives, values, and goals) then became the focus, and the important stuff happening between people – the interaction – was lost. By interaction Garfinkel meant the response of the Other, the anticipation and evaluation of that response, and the interpretation of what the Other anticipates about what they anticipates about that response, and so on. Social objects stand in relation to the action frame in the same way as people in social roles: every thing, person, word, or object gets its meaning, identity, and existence in the action frame in which it is engaged. Garfinkel proposed that action theory should become a theory of “meaningrelevant behavior” – of how we “treat” things – and he hoped to persuade Parsons that these problems required remedy, saying that he felt encouraged in this regard by comments Parsons had made in the seminar. The two would collaborate in 1959 on

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Parsons’ (1960) reformulation of his “pattern-variable” argument and of the terminology proposed by Garfinkel in his 1948 manuscript (“identified actor” and “oriented actor”) appears in the final version of that text.

Harvard 1947: “Notes on the Information Apperception Test” Garfinkel’s unpublished manuscript about the research project on American attitudes toward Russia, titled “Notes on the Information Apperception Test,” analyzed a test he administered for the project. He gave a detailed account of the testing situation and the theoretical implications of the constitutive reciprocities between participants that were taken for granted by the research design. Insights about tacit assumptions (constitutive background expectations) that must hold between interviewer and interviewee for talk to be mutually intelligible relate directly to Garfinkel’s argument that inequality prevents the achievement of mutual intelligibility. His insistence that properties of the situation/interaction organized the results, such that they actually report on the test situation, rather than on the personality dynamics of the research subjects and their relationship to society that the team thought they were measuring, is his earliest detailed account of what it means to say that meaning is achieved over the course of an interaction and thus, must be explained within the same constraints. Garfinkel’s own testing of trust conditions began the same year with students from Harvard chemistry courses. The aim of the overall project was to assess the attitudes of Americans toward Russia, and test psychological and social correlates of those attitudes. There were ten subjects, all adult married men, who cooperated in an in-depth interviewing process over a one-year period. There were seventeen researchers involved in the interviewing. In total twenty-eight different interviews and/or tests were administered to each subject. The Information Apperception Test (IAT) that Garfinkel administered was procedure number twenty-five. By the time he gave that test the subjects had already been interviewed or tested twenty-four times, and the research team had met many times to formulate an assessment of each case. Garfinkel’s task was to test the case assessment that had already been formulated. The procedure involved creating anxiety to see how subjects would respond when their opinions were challenged. The twenty-seventh procedure was a stress interview, after which there was a closing interview (Smith, Bruner, and White, 1956). While other members of the research team analyzed results from the total battery of twenty-eight tests, Garfinkel focused on the IAT test. He was interested in the tacit conditions that made such testing possible. What was assumed and therefore remained unexamined? What presuppositions about mutuality was he violating in creating anxiety? In keeping with his earlier research on Race and labeling, he noted the asymmetry of knowledge about the test situation between the tester and the person being tested and asked how they could achieve mutual understanding in the face of this asymmetry. He exposed tacit assumptions that the other researchers took for granted. While the others thought they were testing their own earlier assessments of personality, with the test as a neutral conduit, Garfinkel argued that the test was self-organizing; the test was constitutive of its results. If this was the case, then in

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what sense, he asked, do those results implicate personality and/or social structure, as the project design assumed? Garfinkel’s description of the purpose and design of the IAT is an interesting counterpart to the published volume. Where that volume describes the aims of each test, Garfinkel describes the testing procedure and the tacit assumptions behind it. For Garfinkel the test is not about Russia or things Russian. The implied question, Garfinkel says,13 is “whether and how the types of objects seen, their relationships to each other, and the kinds of reactions of the Subject to them will vary” according to aspects of the test situation itself. As in his 1946 paper on social action, Garfinkel maintained that taken-for-granted assumptions obscured the social processes involved such that researchers were focusing on the wrong things: overlooking questions of sensemaking involved in the test situation itself.

Harvard 1947: The Red as a Social Object In an article developed from the IAT experience, titled “The Red as an Ideal Object,” completed in late spring 1947 (Garfinkel, 2012 [1947]), Garfinkel developed the theory of labels/categories he had first outlined during World War II. He described difficulties faced by persons asymmetrically assigned the categories “Jew,” “Negro,” “Red,” and “Criminal,” explaining how the performance of Self is more difficult, trust conditions harder to achieve, and the consequences of failed reciprocity more serious for persons assigned these labels. While all four labels represent marginal statuses, he says that the social practices by which marginality is accomplished are different for each. Two of the categories are “profane” and two are “sacred”; two are “insiders” and two are “outsiders”; the combinations covering a range of possibilities (profane insider, profane outsider, etc.). The relationship of each category (and category pair) to the institutionalized norms of the community is also different, resulting in a different positioning of possibilities vis-à-vis the majority for each labeled minority. Garfinkel’s early sketches of how labels and categories work was elaborated later by Goffman (1961) and others.

Harvard 1948: Proposing a Sequential Approach to Communication/ Interaction One of Garfinkel’s dissertation proposals from 1948, included a section in which Garfinkel (2006: 179–188) laid out his approach to communication as interaction, arguing that communication “is a temporal process.” This means not only that communication takes place over time, or that time can be used to separate, or measure, different parts of interaction, but that the back-and-forth process of interaction across time is a constitutive feature of the practices that give order and meaning to bits of action and talk. In other words, the positioning of words and phrases in a sequence of talk is constitutive of their meaning: his mature position (Rawls, 2005). Mutual understanding, Garfinkel said, requires the creation of a witnessable orderliness in the ongoing temporal production of interaction for three reasons: (1)

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symbols have many meanings and convey different ideas to different individuals. Some temporal ordering process is therefore required to indicate which meaning a symbol is intended to convey on any given occasion; (2) while thoughts may occur to an individual all at once, they cannot be spoken all at once. “If one will reflect on his own experience,” Garfinkel says (2006: 184), they “will find that the succession of thought as it occurs ‘internally’ undergoes a selective ordering process in which form it is presented ‘piece by piece’ to the other fellow”; and (3) the next thing said can change the meaning of the last thing said. Consequently, ordinary communication has a sequential back-and-forth character that orders symbols in a time sequence that is social, shared, and public. Garfinkel calls the process “reflexive.” Reflexivity is often taken to mean that people can reflect on their own actions as they act, or that there are layers of interpretation available to introspection. But, for Garfinkel reflexivity refers a back-and-forth process of external interaction that is similar to Parsons’ (1951) conception of “double contingency.” Conversation proceeds bit by bit. First one person speaks, then the Other. The signs produced are meaningless (or too meaningful) unless and until they can be seen to exhibit an order. They are interpreted in light of that order and given back to the Other. One person speaks, the other interprets. Then they change positions. The constitutive rules involved in this process comprise the sequential ordering of interaction/communication. The listener “treats” the symbols produced by the speaker as exhibiting an order, and the interpretation of that order, produced by the listener when they speak, is designed to display for the Other the constitutive order properties the listener found exhibited in the sequence of interaction. If the interpretation is unexpected the speaker can then add bits to the order to clarify its developing contours. The ability of one person to “see” the meaning of a bit of interaction, Garfinkel argues (2006: 184), is the same thing as the ability to see the order that the Other is producing through sequential placement: A acts towards B as if the signs that B provides are not haphazardly given. When we say that A understands B we mean only this: that A detects an orderliness in these signs both with regard to sequence and meanings. The orderliness is assigned to B’s activities by A. The “validity” of A’s conception of the signs generated by B are given in accordance with some regulative principle established for Awhen his return action evokes a counter action that somehow “fits” A’s anticipations.

Because, for Garfinkel, mutual understanding is the same thing as the mutual recognition of an orderliness in interaction, all participants must use the same methods, strategies, and tactics for producing order. Furthermore, they must “trust” that everyone is doing the same, in order for the interaction to move forward. An attitude of mutual trust is not enough. Unless participants are actually using the same methods of creating order, and doing so competently in ways that effectively exhibit that order, the resulting actions will not be mutually recognizable, the expected order of things will not be confirmed, and confusion and ambiguity will result.

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Interaction is cooperative work in which speakers and listeners have mutual obligations. While speakers are speaking they cannot focus on the job of detecting order. They are at that point speakers. But as soon as they have finished producing an order of talk they become listeners again. Then their job is detecting an order in the Other’s response and producing a response to it that displays the order they detected. And so on. This sequential order enables participants to know at each next step whether the Other understands what has happened as they expected them to, because each next bit of conversation is built to display each next participant’s interpretation of the last bit of order that was built. According to Garfinkel (2006: 184): “Understanding means a mode of treatment of B by A that operates, as far as A sees it, under constant confirmation of A’s anticipations of treatment from B.” This rather neatly addresses the philosophy of language position on ambiguity, of which Paul Grice (1989) is the best known representative, which maintains that there can be no mechanism in conversation for signaling understanding as an ongoing matter. Clarification would not work because each clarification would require its own clarification – an infinite regress. But with the procedure outlined by Garfinkel, detecting and confirming order does not require clarification. Confirmation is displayed in the type of order produced next. The task of confirming the understanding of conversation occurs within the developing framework of a mutually experienced sequence of talk.14 Sacks, and his colleagues Emmanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Anita Pomerantz, and Alene Terasaki, would elaborate these insights as conversation analysis in the 1970s.

Princeton 1952–1953: “Toward a Sociological Theory of Information” In 1951, the year before his PhD was completed, Garfinkel accepted a research position with the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton under the direction of Wilbert Moore. While there, Garfinkel’s developing theory of social objects and communication, grounded in the trust argument, became the basis for an innovative sociological theory of information that challenges cybernetics (Rawls, 2015).15 Garfinkel’s interest in the social character of information and situated reasoning began earlier in discussions with Bruner and Parsons. But a theory of “Information” by that name did not appear in his writing until he was at Princeton.16 Garfinkel treated information as a social fact/object, not as a natural, epistemic, or logical object. Like other social objects, he argued, information is grounded in mutual cooperation and constitutive practice. While the famous Macy Cybernetics Group met in New York to draft a formal cognitivist approach to information (with Parsons attending), Garfinkel assembled scholars at Princeton for two conferences on information theory (in March and June 1952) to discuss an alternate natural language (and natural reasoning) approach to information, computing, and complex decision-making. Many famous scholars participated, including Parsons, Schütz,

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and Burke, along with Gregory Bateson, Oskar Morgenstern, John Van Neumann, Herbert Simon, Carl Deutsch, and Norbert Weiner. Garfinkel’s interactional approach to information theory is revolutionary. Building on the idea of constitutive practices, sequences/time, and trust conditions, Garfinkel distinguished “information” from “knowledge,” maintaining that there is no information that is not situated: no epistemic object – an extension of Durkheim’s epistemology. The redundancy that makes a thing not information, Garfinkel argued, is situated and time relevant – a finding that posed a challenge to existing definitions of information redundancy. Although Garfinkel liked and corresponded with Simon, he rejected Simon’s proposal that “boundaries” (Simon’s “bounded reason” and more recently “boundary objects”) are necessary to explain the possibility of information. It was Garfinkel’s view that social objects could be made by producing an order from the contingencies at hand, much like his experience at Gulfport Field during the war. In diverse societies where there is no consensus, there must be ways of constituting information that do not depend on the clarity or boundaries of objects, or the shared beliefs, cultural backgrounds, or biographies of participants. The alternate requirement, proposed by Parsons, that the situation itself, or the identities in it, remain invariant, Garfinkel also rejected: both situation and identity can change often and rapidly. Garfinkel maintained that any explanation that relies on invariance (as in Parsons’ social system and the cybernetic approach), or consensus, or boundaries, will fail in complex, diverse, and changing modern contexts. Whether the object is proposed as a constant, or knowledge, or the situation and its role identities: invariance and consensus are always problematic. The solution, Garfinkel argued, was to stop trying to hold anything constant and look instead at how participants in actual situations cooperate to make mutually recognizable social “things” in the midst of contingency and variation. The position Garfinkel outlined as a sociological theory of the object in his 1946 paper on social action theory, and in his 1948 theory of communication, became the foundation for his theory of information in 1952. After arriving at UCLA in the fall of 1954, Garfinkel would follow up his theory of information with an empirical study of technical decision-making in chess in 1955–1956 using data from chess tournaments. The study was carried out in collaboration with Robert Boguslaw (who had studied with Simon) and Warren Pelton. Their coauthored paper17 was referenced by Boguslaw (1965) but remained unpublished.

UCLA 1954–2011: Taking a Comprehensive Approach to Interactional Systems Garfinkel’s arrival at UCLA in 1954, after years of moving around pursuing work, ushered in a period of institutional stability that would continue for the rest of his life. He quickly got down to business. Having started immediately to design the studies he would become famous for, within three years Garfinkel secured a large

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multi-year grant from the Army Air Force that supported his research, freed him from teaching, and enabled travel back to the east coast to meet with Parsons and Schütz. He arranged an office in the UCLA Medical School and was soon collaborating with Medical School faculty. In 1958–1959, Garfinkel began a new round of research on marginal identity, interviewing fifteen transsexuals; began studying suicide and mental health; and continued working on a theory of interactional systems in collaboration with Parsons. The study of the psychiatric clinic with Egon Bittner18 that became the famous chapter “Good Reasons for Bad Clinic Records” in Studies began around 1959, and the research at the Suicide Prevention Center with Sacks about a year later. Contrary to accounts of Garfinkel’s career that locate one or more of these research projects in a later period, they were all going on at the same time. In addition, Garfinkel was also preparing his Parsons’ Primer manuscript (2019a) and writing at least three different versions of the trust paper, including one based on Wittgenstein (Garfinkel, 2019a). Situated studies of maps, queues, and science, sometimes mistakenly described as later work because they were not published until 2002, also began in the late 1950s. While research at UCLA became more technical, the studies remained grounded on Garfinkel’s theories of information and communication and on the reciprocities of the trust conditions. What is most distinctive about the later period is the discovery by Garfinkel and Sacks around 1962 that the constitutive practices that create social objects, information, and meaning involve a degree of witnessable constitutive detail they had not anticipated. The more detail they found the more they understood the importance of trust conditions, reciprocities, and time/sequentiality. Garfinkel attributed the empirical discovery of the constitutive character of this detail, which most scholars consider mere contingency, to his collaboration with Sacks.

UCLA 1958–1962: Interviews with Fifteen Transsexuals Garfinkel’s grant proposal to the Army Air Force focused on the importance of studying persons in marginal identities, including transsexuals and people with psychiatric disorders. His office in the UCLA Medical School was down the hall from those of Robert Stoller and Edwin Shneidman, both of whom would become major collaborators in his research over the next five years. Stoller was a professor of psychiatry and a researcher at the UCLA Gender Identity Clinic. Shneidman was a professor of clinical psychology and director of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, which he founded in 1958. Garfinkel collaborated with Stoller on his research with transsexuals, and with Shneidman on “suicide as a social object,” analyzing calls to the Center with Sacks. It was in the grant proposal for this project that Garfinkel had written that people who experienced difficulties achieving “normal” identities were like “natural experiments.” Garfinkel was committed to the idea that the heightened awareness acquired through the experience of discrimination held the key to unlocking the secrets of social order. The chapter that Garfinkel wrote for Studies on Agnes and the work she described as constitutive of presenting a female Self, represents only one set of

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Garfinkel’s interviews with transsexuals. From 1958 to 1962 he interviewed fifteen transsexuals, both male-to-female and female-to-male. The interviews were extensive, recorded, and transcribed. There are thousands of pages of transcription. In listening to these interviews the degree of rapport and friendly exchange is quite striking. In February 1962 Goffman proposed that he and Garfinkel coauthor a book combining Garfinkel’s Agnes chapter “On Passing” with a chapter by Goffman “On Stigma”: titled On Stigma and Passing. Garfinkel agreed, but then got new information about Agnes and began writing the addendum that became the Appendix to the Agnes chapter in Studies. He told Goffman he would need more time and urged Goffman to see if the publisher would agree to print his piece as a monograph. The book was published as Stigma by Goffman alone in 1963.

UCLA 1958–1963: Explaining and Demonstrating Parsons’ Interactionism Garfinkel gave the title Parsons’ Primer to a manuscript of nine chapters that he wrote from 1959 to 1963 to explain the importance of Parsons’ later social theory. The manuscript is important for at least four reasons. First, as it was written in response to discussion and correspondence with Parsons (while teaching seminars on Parsons in 1959 and 1963 at UCLA), it reflects a sustained but unknown dialogue between the two scholars about culture/interaction in their respective positions. Second, in it Garfinkel maintains that Parsons was misunderstood because he put interaction (and culture as interaction) at the center of his social theory, while few scholars realized he had done so: a problem that was exacerbated by the wartime turn against social interaction in US sociology. Third, the analysis challenges conventional readings of both scholars, showing Parsons to be more sophisticated and oriented toward interaction, and Garfinkel more indebted to him, than had previously been generally understood. Fourth, Garfinkel offers his own research on “ethnomethods” as a demonstration of Parsons’ position. As Garfinkel explains it, Parsons’ initial contribution in the 1930s was to ground social theory on a moral commitment to an underlying social contract and its guarantee of norms and sanctions, as a precondition for the possibility of rational actors, meaningful objects, and meaningful actions. Parsons’ move toward culture as an independent dimension of social action in 1949, and his formulation of interaction in terms of “double contingency” in 1951, were additional moves toward a comprehensive theory of interaction. Garfinkel’s elaboration of the trust conditions that are required to ground his conception of “culture as interaction” built on Parsons. While Garfinkel was also inspired by Schütz’s conception of “taken-for-granted” practices, and Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, making extensive use of both, neither treated constitutive practices in terms that were sociological in the sense Garfinkel required. They furnished an initial way of describing the content of actions in a system of interaction modeled on Parsons. Garfinkel found fewer shortcomings in Parsons’ theory in 1959–1963 than he had in 1946, but the ones he did find still involved Parsons’ failure to fully comprehend

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“constitutive” aspects of the social contract position he had taken, with particular emphasis on constitutive aspects of language/concepts. To say that practices are constitutive meant for Garfinkel they must meet the criteria actual participants are using to achieve them in actual instances of use. This necessarily involves contingency and variation. But, Parsons adopted a conceptual and referential view of language and practice as invariant. This produced contradictions, including his adoption of authority to limit variation (exigency), and his acceptance of inequality, which Garfinkel (like Durkheim) rejected. Garfinkel maintained that, if the question of how meaning and other social objects are assembled/achieved in actual interactions was addressed empirically, the problems with Parsons’ position could be remedied. Even without remedy, however, Parsons had, in Garfinkel’s estimation, gone farther than any other social theorist in positing an underlying moral commitment to situated “systems of interaction” and their corresponding sanctions as the foundation of social order. The necessary preconditions for interactional systems and their situated interactional framing, which Garfinkel conceptualized as trust conditions, were, in his view, most successfully worked out by Parsons in his 1960 revision of the patternvariable argument and other writing after 1960.19 But, Parsons’ acceptance of authority and inequality and his insistence on consistency kept him from ever getting it quite right.

UCLA 1960–1961: Language Games as Constitutive Cultural Practices “Notes on Language Games” (Garfinkel, 2019a), written by Garfinkel in 1960, is one of three distinct versions of his famous “trust” argument: that constitutive criteria define shared events/actions, objects, and meanings. The best known version of the trust argument (1963) emphasizes Schütz, while other versions align with Parsons (2019a). In this third version, the trust conditions are elaborated in terms of Wittgenstein’s language games. In this paper Garfinkel contends that all social events must meet the same three constitutive criteria – his trust conditions – which specify the basic constitutive requirements of mutually intelligible social life. This is a big argument. Garfinkel says that there is no difference between language games, culture/interaction in everyday life, and chess, with respect to constitutive conditions. He treats language events and cultural events as the same in this regard and, consistent with his 1952 information theory, maintains that game theory has been wrong to treat games as different in principle from serious matters of everyday life. One of the perennial problems confronting the observation and description of language and cultural events has been the question of correspondence between what people do and say and what their sayings and actions can be taken to refer to. The problems of “subjective” experience and the logic of “concepts” both come into play. Bertrand Russell popularized the modern iteration of the problem in his example of a “golden mountain” that has meaning but no reference to reality. The emphasis on reference rather than on constitutive elements of language and action is a mistake that, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, can happen “while doing philosophy.” Garfinkel is

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arguing that analogous assumptions about the referential and natural character of social objects and meanings are a mistake one can make while doing sociology. Conceiving of cultural and language events/objects in terms of constitutive practices – language games – reconfigures the sociological problem for Garfinkel, as it did the philosophical problem for Wittgenstein. The meaning of an event corresponds to constitutive requirements in a social context. That is its only reality: making it possible to claim a correspondence between the intended and achieved meaning of a language, or cultural event, but only within a particular constitutive context. It is the relationship of an action to a structure of legitimate constitutive commitments that defines the possible meanings to be achieved, while sanctions display whether they were achieved or not in any particular case. Correspondence is between an action or saying, and the constitutive criteria it orients: both witnessable public matters. This move reconfigures subjectivity and objectivity, putting the emphasis on how events are achieved and constitutive criteria met in this witnessable space: emphasizing the orientation toward constitutive practices, their legitimate commitments, and empirically evident sanctions. Garfinkel maintains that the constitutive criteria in question can be observed and described empirically, and that they can only adequately be so described: Any attempt to formulate constitutive criteria in advance, or in abstraction will lose them. Given this theoretical foundation, the conventional focus on generality is an obvious problem: Every detail is relevant. Standardization is only useful insofar as it is a constitutive feature of how events are actually made recognizable. Garfinkel distinguishes the property of “standard” or “routine” involved in producing recognizable practices from the property of generality that philosophy and sociology tend to worship. They are entirely different. The first is a characteristic of a practice, while the latter is the result of abstracting what is distinctive from it. Garfinkel cites Wittgenstein (1958: 17–18) to the effect that a “craving for generality” is responsible for many confusions, not least among them “the contemptuous attitude toward the particular case.”

UCLA 1960–1967: Studies of Suicide as a Social Object The grant that facilitated Garfinkel’s collaboration with Shneidman at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center offered Sacks the opportunity to do his dissertation research at the Center beginning around 1962. The work on conversation that Sacks became famous for took shape through this collaboration. By 1962 Sacks and Garfinkel were discovering new ways to demonstrate sequential aspects of the constitutive social-fact argument based on audio recordings of phone calls to the Center. In 1962 and 1963 Garfinkel organized conferences at UCLA in ethnomethodology that featured long presentations by Sacks. The constraint proposed jointly by Garfinkel and Sacks was to explain mutual intelligibility using only the methods and resources available to participants in a given situation, importing nothing from outside the situation that was not available to all participants. Exercising this constraint they sought to demonstrate how

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participants were making sense together. This constraint followed directly from Garfinkel’s theoretical position as articulated consistently from 1948 on, and focused on the temporal ordering properties of sequences that he had insisted on in his 1948 manuscript. Discussion of both this constraint and its relationship to a sequential analysis of conversation is already hearable in audiotapes from a 1964 meeting at the Suicide Prevention Center, in which Sacks can be heard pushing the others (Parsons, Garfinkel, and Goffman) to make their arguments based on situated data. Garfinkel and Sacks subsequently formulated the constraint in a coauthored paper titled “On Setting in Conversation” that they presented together at the ASA meetings in August 1967.20

UCLA 1967: Studies in Ethnomethodology Garfinkel’s famous book Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) collected research Garfinkel had been working on since 1954, when he presented the Jury Study (chapter 4) at the annual ASA meetings and first called his approach ethnomethodology. The first chapter, “What Is Ethnomethodology?,” is a version of a talk Garfinkel gave several times between 1960 and 1967. The second chapter, which examines the “routine grounds” of everyday activities, is a version of the trust argument. The “documentary method” of interpretation is discussed in the third chapter. Chapter 5, on “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status,” and the Appendix to that chapter (his famous study of Agnes), report on a small part of his research with transsexuals from 1958 to 1962. Chapters 6 and 7 present the clinic study done with Egon Bittner (a 1959 version of which used Parsons’ pattern variables in the analysis). The final chapter, which considers the “Rational Properties of Scientific and Commonsense Activities,” previews the studies of science that Garfinkel began in the 1970s. Other research on queues and tutorial problems that Garfinkel had done in the 1950s was not published until 2002 (Garfinkel, 2002), leading some to think that his approach had changed. While Garfinkel’s position continued evolving, these were very early studies and do not represent his mature work. Garfinkel likely left them out of Studies because he did not consider them as research. He had designed them as tutorial problems to use in teaching his approach to students. They were ways of creating the conscious awareness of social practices that he argued was crucial to a modern sociology. Ironically, the tutorials, or “breaching experiments,” as they are popularly known, became more famous than much of Garfinkel’s actual research and he decided to include them in later publications, but still did not consider them as research.

UCLA 1975–2008: Hybrid Studies of Work and Science Garfinkel’s work in the 1970’s with Mike Lynch on scientific practices extended his approach into contemporary studies of science. Lynch (1993) did his dissertation research in a science lab in which a team was working on “axion sprouting” (the possibility of generating new neural tissue). The famous 1981 “Pulsar” paper

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that Garfinkel published with Lynch and Eric Livingston (“The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar”), reported on the Nobel Prize–winning “discovery” of the optical pulsar in 1969, by Cocke, Disney, Taylor and McCallister. The team had left a tape recorder running during initial discussions of how to report their “discovery,” and Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston analyzed this tape, arguing that, for the team, a primary concern was how to report their discovery. They knew they had discovered something, but because it was a discovery they had no language with which to say what they had discovered. In other words, an account of what they could have discovered had to be formulated, and a theory to go with that account, before the empirical data could be reported. The empirical aspects of the discovery had, nevertheless, come first. It was an important challenge to the idea that science proceeds by testing theories. Research by Karen KnorrCetina (who studied with Aaron Cicourel; Knorr-Cetina, 2001) extends this line of inquiry. Since the 1980s, studies of constitutive detail inspired by Garfinkel and Sacks have transformed many areas of technical research: including computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (STS), conversation analysis (CA), communication and media studies, and workplace studies. At the end of his life Garfinkel was still working on fourteen notebooks on science and technology.

Newburyport, MA, 2008: The Garfinkel Archive Garfinkel’s complete archive of materials first arrived in Massachusetts in 2008. Garfinkel had taken an active interest in compiling his materials, carefully saving everything from 1939 on, with the hope that they could be made available to scholars in a way that would continue the work of bringing sociology to an awareness of constitutive practices (ethno-methods) after his death. The archive contains literally everything, on paper, video, and audio that Garfinkel ever had. He recorded everything. He copied everything and he kept everything. Because of his interest in detail he did not want the materials organized in a conventional way. He felt that would obscure the focus of his work. He also wanted the materials kept side by side with the various tools and machines he had used in his research. What he really wanted was for his office (designed for him by Joan Sacks) left just as it was on the last day he worked in it. That unfortunately was not possible. Between 2000 and 2008 Garfinkel and I talked about the archive and what to do with the materials many times. The archive finally ended up in Newburyport, MA with support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” (SFB 1187) at least through 2020. The Research Center, located in Siegen University, Germany, supports faculty and postdoctoral positions, and provides technical and financial support for digitizing, organizing, and publishing Garfinkel’s materials.

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Conclusion When Garfinkel began talking about ethnomethodology in the 1950s his objective was widely misunderstood. Garfinkel was defending the Durkheim/ Parsons social-fact legacy in sociology, but the impression that Garfinkel was attacking sociology – rather than its postwar direction – became widespread. The term “micro” sociology, which subordinates studies of interaction to the allegedly more important “macro” sociology that emerged victorious from the war, was used to label and trivialize his approach. Garfinkel’s position is not micro or individualistic. It is a theory of how social order and coherence work across all of modernity in the social interactions of everyday life and in the accountability structures of social institutions. It is a comprehensive approach to creating awareness of what needs to be done to produce collectivity and collective meaning in contexts of diversity. In crafting this theoretical approach, Garfinkel built on arguments by Durkheim and Parsons that treat the individual (and social facts) as social objects that only exist within shared social contexts framed by commitments to their constitutive features. In such a theory there are no individuals and no natural facts: There is no individual, or “micro,” level of action and no individual level of interaction; interaction is by definition between. The current distinction between micro and macro only makes sense to those who have abandoned Durkheim’s position on social facts and reentered the classical realm of philosophical individualism. While many contemporary social thinkers have made this mistake, Garfinkel did not. Contemporary social and cultural theory, in particular, when they operate without a foundation in the Durkheim/Parsons/Garfinkel legacy, confront difficulties with individualism and naturalism that Durkheim and Parsons had overcome. Without the social-fact legacy sociology is reduced to the original dilemmas inherent in psychology, economics, and philosophy. The reason social theory is no longer a robust enterprise is because it hasn’t been sociological since the mid-1960s, when George Homans, hand in hand with the wartime insistence that “macro” statistical methods are more scientific than qualitative studies of social facts, led the charge to decouple social theory from the social-fact legacy. Garfinkel sided with Parsons and Durkheim against Homans in 1960. But, so far Homans’ side is winning. It is important to do something about that. Restoring Durkheim’s argument, and the potential of Parsons’ attempt to revive and modernize it in interactional terms, requires reprising the relationship between Garfinkel’s position and the Durkheim/ Parsons legacy: It requires seeing that Garfinkel was an insider defending sociology from those who would reduce it to psychology, economics, and philosophy, not attacking it from the outside.

References Boguslaw, Robert. 1965. The New Utopians: A Study of System Design and Social Change. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1936. Permanence and Change. New York: New Republic. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1904. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Routledge. Durkheim, Emile. 1893. The Division of Social Labor. Paris: Alcan. Garfinkel, Harold. 1940. “Color Trouble,” published in Opportunity, May. [Reprinted in Edward J. O’Brien (ed.) 1941. The Best Short Stories of 1941. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin; and Bucklin Moon (ed.) 1945. Primer for White Folks. New York: Doubleday.] 1949. “Research Note on Inter- and Intro-Racial Homicide.” Social Forces 27(4): 369–381. 1963. “A Conception of and Experiments with Trust as a Condition of Stable Social Actions.” In O. J. Harvey (ed.), Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants (pp. 187–238). New York: Ronald Press Company. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2006. Seeing Sociologically. The Routine Grounds of Social Action. Edited with an introduction by Anne Warfield Rawls. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. 2012 [1947]. “The Red as an Ideal Object.” Ethnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 4(1): 7–18. 2019a. Parsons’ Primer. New York: Springer. 2019b [1942]. The History of Gulfport Field 1942: The Aircraft Mechanics School. Stuttgart: Springer. Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston. 1981. “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11: 131–158. Garfinkel, Harold, and Harvey Sacks. 1970. “On Formal Structures of Practical Action.” In John C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments (pp. 338–366). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Gilmore, Glenda. 2008. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919–1950. W. W. Norton: New York. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. Chicago, IL: The Free Press. Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Knorr-Cetina, Karen. 2001. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lynch, Michael. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Odum, Howard. 1930. “Folk and Regional Conflict as a Field of Sociological Study.” Presidential Address at the ASS annual meeting, December 1930, Cleveland, OH. Proceedings of the American Sociological Society. Washington, DC: American Sociological Society. 1943. Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1964 [1947]. “Folkways and Technicways.” In Folk, Region, and Society: Selected Papers of Howard W. Odum. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. 1949. Presidential Address: “The Prospects of Social Theory.” American Sociological Review 15(1): 3–16.

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1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. 1960. “The Pattern Variables Revisited: A Response to Robert Dubin.” American Sociological Review 25(4): 467–483. 1963. “On the Concept of Influence.” Public Opinion Quarterly 27(1): 37–62. Rawls, Anne. 1996. “Durkheim’s Epistemology: The Neglected Argument.” American Journal of Sociology 102(2): 430–482. 2005. “Garfinkel’s Conception of Time.” Time and Society 14(2–3): 163–190. 2008 [2004]. Durkheim’s Epistemology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2012. “Durkheim’s Theory of Modernity: Self-Regulating Practices as Constitutive Orders of Social & Moral Facts.” Journal of Classical Sociology 12(3): 479–512. 2015. “Getting Information Systems to Interact: The Social Fact Character of ‘Object’ Clarity as a Factor in Designing Information Systems.” The Information Society 31 (2): 175–192. 2018. “The Wartime Narrative in US Sociology 1940–1947: Stigmatizing Qualitative Sociology in the name of ‘Science.’” The European Journal of Social Theory 59 (1): 526–546. 2019. Developing a Sociological Theory of Justice: Durkheim’s Forgotten Introduction to The Division of Social Labor. Paris: Bord de L’eau. 2020. “Harold Garfinkel’s Focus on Racism, Inequality and Social Justice: The Early Years 1939–1952.” In John Heritage and Doug Maynard (eds.), Ethnomethodology: A Retrospective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, Anne W., Adam Jeffrey, and David Mann. 2016. “Locating the Modern Sacred: Moral/ Social Facts and Constitutive Practices.” Journal of Classical Sociology 16(1): 53–68. Rosenberg, Rosalind. 2017. Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Brewster, Jerome Bruner, and Robert White. 1956. Opinions and Personality. New York: Wiley and Sons. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Archival Appendix Unpublished Manuscripts by Harold Garfinkel in the Garfinkel Archive “Bastrop Notes.” 1942. Appendix 5: Garfinkel, 1952. Book draft on Criminology. 1951. Princeton. First version of the “Trust” paper. Conference paper, 1951. “A Further Note on the Prospectus for an Exploratory Study of Communication and the Maintenance of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship with Particular Reference to the Jew as an Object of Social Treatment.” Dissertation prospectus, 1948. “Initial Proposal for Some Studies of the Determinants of the Effectiveness of the Communicative Work of Leaders.” 1944. Appendix 3: Garfinkel, 1952. “Inter-Racial and Intra-Racial Homicide in Ten Counties in North Carolina, 1930–1940.” MA Thesis, 1942. “The Jew as an Intended Object in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship.” December 3, 1948. Dissertation prospectus, 1948. “Memorandum #1: Notes on the Sociological Attitude.” 1951. Memorandum #2 on Criminology. 1951. Princeton.

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“Notes on the Information Apperception Test.” 1947. “The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order.” Harvard PhD dissertation, June 1952. Several book proposals, c. 1958. “Some Conceptions of and Experiments with Trust as a Condition of Stable Concerted Action.” Unpublished conference presentation. American Sociological Association annual meeting, Detroit, MI, September 5–7, 1956. “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems,” 1946. “A Statement of the Problem of Communicative Strategies in Self-Maintaining Systems of Activity.” 1951. Appendix 1: Garfinkel, 1952. Studies in Ethnomethodology, early unpublished drafts, 1961–1962. “Toward a Sociological Theory of Information.” Organizational Behavior Project Manuscript #3, April 17, 1952.

Coauthored Works by Garfinkel in the Garfinkel Archive Garfinkel, Harold, Robert Boguslaw, and Warren Pelton. “Decision Making in Complex Situations: An Analysis of a Chess Tournament.” Unpublished, 1957. Garfinkel, Harold, and Egon Bittner. Presentation of the Clinic Study in Garfinkel’s class. Unpublished, 1959. Transcript in the Garfinkel Archive.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

Constitutive indicates criteria a practice must meet to succeed in creating a social object. For instance, a first move in chess that involves a bishop is not a first move in chess. An academic paper that copies sections of someone else’s writing without citation is not a paper. It is plagiarism. A car with four wheels and an engine that works is not a car in Massachusetts unless it has three matching VINs (i.e. Vehicle Identification Numbers; see Rawls, Jeffrey, and Mann, 2016). To indicate that Race, Gender, Self, and Other are social facts that do not exist in nature, I capitalize the words throughout. Several book proposals, unpublished, 1958. Garfinkel Archive. See “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems.” Garfinkel Archive. “Some Conceptions of and Experiments with Trust as a Condition of Stable Concerted Action.” Unpublished conference presentation. American Sociological Association annual meeting, Detroit, MI, September 5–7, 1956. Garfinkel undertook this adventure on advice from a Quaker instructor at the University of Newark on how to make connections with students from outside the Newark Jewish community. Students at the camp advised him about the program at North Carolina under Odum. Pauli Murray was a well-known feminist civil rights activist. Murray was also secretly a cross-dressing female. Garfinkel’s description of Murray as a “boy” is consistent with his discussion of Agnes (a transgendered person) as a woman. Murray “presented” as a boy and hoped to be seen as a boy. Garfinkel obliged. This upset civil rights activists, who objected to his description of Murray. Garfinkel considered the successful performance of Gender to settle the question. In this he was ahead of his time. That Garfinkel “mistook” Murray for a boy is not an “error” in his analysis. It was due to her own success in

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

presenting herself as a boy and consistent with his later analysis of Agnes (which has also been misunderstood). It is interesting to note, however, that Garfinkel refers to the “boy” as “flat chested” which suggests he may have been sensitive to some transgender aspect of the presentation. Murray recognized Garfinkel’s description of the incident while still in jail and the article became associated with Murray’s arrest in the history of the civil rights movement. Glenda Gilmore wrote about it in Defying Dixie (2008), taking Garfinkel to task for not being clear that the incident described in the fictionalized account had really occurred. Rosalind Rosenberg (2017) a civil rights historian, focused on discrepancies between the accounts given by Garfinkel and Murray. Murray’s account can be found in the Harvard University Schlesinger archive. Several book proposals, c. 1958. Unpublished. Garfinkel Archive. See “Notes on the Information Apperception Test,” 1947; also “A Further Note on the Prospectus for an Exploratory Study of Communication and the Maintenance of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship with Particular Reference to the Jew as an Object of Social Treatment,” dissertation prospectus, 1948 (both unpublished papers in the Garfinkel Archive). This originally appeared in 1948 as a dissertation prospectus titled “Prospectus for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relations.” “Toward a Sociological Theory of Information.” Organizational Behavior Project Manuscript #3, April 17, 1952. “Notes on the Information Apperception Test,” p. 2. The problem of recognizing the boundaries of this developing order as a phenomenal field of speech became a focus of some of Garfinkel’s later tutorial exercises. See “Toward a Sociological Theory of Information.” Special thanks are due Tristan Thielmann for asking whether Garfinkel had an interest in information before he got to Princeton. His question led to the author’s getting into contact with Elliot Mishler and Jerome Bruner about Garfinkel’s interest in information at Harvard. Bruner invited me to meet with him in New York City in 2011. Harold Garfinkel, Robert Boguslaw, and Warren Pelton, “Decision Making in Complex Situations: An Analysis of a Chess Tournament.” Unpublished, 1957. Garfinkel Archive. Garfinkel and Bittner, Presentation of the Clinic Study in Garfinkel’s class. Unpublished, 1959. Transcript in the Garfinkel Archive. The pattern variables, which Parsons introduced in the 1940s and spent the next two decades revising, were meant to represent all the normative ways participants could orient the assembly of social objects in interaction. It has been said (on the basis of hearsay) that Sacks did not contribute to this manuscript, or to its subsequent publication in 1970 as “On Formal Structures of Practical Action” in McKinney and Tiryakian (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). However, their collaborative work on the article was audiotaped and Sacks can be heard dictating parts of the manuscript to Garfinkel, which should settle the question.

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18 Jürgen Habermas Simon Susen

This chapter provides a summary of the main intellectual contributions that the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has made to contemporary social theory. To this end, it is divided into six parts. The first part gives an overview of Habermas’s life and career. The second part offers a synopsis of Habermas’s principal areas of research, drawing attention to his key works. The third part sheds light on the epistemological assumptions underlying Habermas’s conception of critical theory. The fourth part explains the central features of Habermas’s interpretation of three intellectual traditions that are crucial to his own theoretical project. The fifth part elucidates the core elements of Habermas’s plea for a paradigm shift – commonly known as the “linguistic turn” – in critical theory. The sixth part grapples with the main limitations and shortcomings of Habermas’s oeuvre, notably with regard to his theory of communicative action.

Habermas’s Life and Career Jürgen Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Düsseldorf, North RhineWestphalia, Germany. Three biographical elements played a formative role in his early life: First, owing to his cleft palate, for which he underwent corrective surgery twice during his childhood, he found it challenging to build social relationships. Due to this medical condition, he had great difficulty in uttering words and sentences clearly, for which he was frequently teased and bullied at school. Experiencing the psychosocial consequences of living with a speech disability, he became highly sensitive to the existential centrality of communicative processes and the formation of meaningful intersubjective relations. Because of his personal experience of discrimination related to his cleft palate, his preferred method of communication soon became the written, rather than the spoken, word. Undoubtedly, his early exposure to marginalization processes had a profound impact upon his intellectual interests, notably his sustained concern with the nature of linguistically mediated communication. Second, Habermas was deeply affected by Germany’s attempt to come to terms with its recent past – above all, with the atrocities of the Second World War, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Throughout his career, the “dark side” of modernity has been a major object of inquiry in Habermas’s thinking. An enthusiastic defender of “the unfinished project of modernity” in general and of the Enlightenment in 369

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particular, Habermas, insisting that it would be a mistake to “throw out the baby with the bath water,” has sought to expose the sociohistorical conditions that led to the rise of authoritarianism, fascism, imperialism, and large-scale conflicts (Habermas, 1989a, 1996a, 1996b). Third, Habermas grew up in a middle-class, Protestant, and rather conservative family. He described his father, Ernst Habermas, former Executive Director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, as a Nazi sympathizer. His grandfather was the Director of the Protestant seminary in Gummersbach. The staunchly conventional, Protestant, and value-conservative milieu in which Habermas was raised left a profound mark on him, providing him with firsthand insights into the political culture of postwar Germany, especially in relation to the tension-laden mixture of collective guilt, memory, and denial. Habermas studied philosophy, psychology, history, German literature, and economics at the Universities of Göttingen (1949–1950), Zürich (1950–1951), and Bonn (1951–1954). He obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bonn (1954); his dissertation, supervised by Erick Rothacker, was entitled Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The Absolute and History: On the Schism in Schelling’s Thought) (Habermas, 1954). After completing his doctoral studies, Habermas began to work as a researcher under Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (1956–1961). Habermas enjoyed Adorno’s strong support; yet, Horkheimer was less enthusiastic about the young scholar’s research, arguing his Habilitationsschrift had to be thoroughly revised. As a result of this intellectual disagreement, Habermas decided to complete his Habilitationsschrift at Marburg University, under the supervision of the Marxist scholar Wolfgang Abendroth. This work – entitled Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) – turned out to be one of Habermas’s (1989b [1962]) most influential studies. In 1961, he took on the role of Privatdozent at Marburg University, before moving to Heidelberg, where, at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith, in 1962 he obtained the position of “Extraordinary Professor” (the equivalent of a Professor without a Chair) in Philosophy. It was in the same year that Habermas, for the first time in his academic career, was granted significant public recognition, owing to the publication of his Habilitationsschrift. In 1964, Habermas – strongly encouraged by Adorno – moved back to Frankfurt to take over the Chair in Philosophy and Sociology previously held by Horkheimer, a position that he would hold until 1971. Between 1966 and 1970, the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer worked with Habermas as his academic assistant. In 1971, Habermas accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg (close to Munich), where he worked until 1983 and where he completed his magnum opus Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action) (Habermas, 1987a [1981]). In 1984, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of

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Arts and Sciences. Eventually, Habermas returned to Frankfurt, where he took up his Chair at the University, in addition to becoming the Director of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring in 1993, he has continued to be a prolific writer. Habermas holds the position of Permanent Visiting Professor at Northwestern University as well as the position of Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research. Among other awards, he received the Gottfried-Wilhelm-LeibnizPreis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany (1986), the Premio Príncipe de Asturias in Spain (2003), the Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy Section in Japan (2004), and the Holberg International Memorial Prize in Norway (2005). Habermas is widely regarded as the most prominent German social philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Habermas has taught, supervised, and mentored a number of scholars, who, in their subsequent careers, have become influential in their own right. Among his most famous disciples are Herbert Schnädelbach (1936–), Claus Offe (1940–), Jóhann P. Árnason (1940–), Hans-Herbert Kögler (1960–), Hans Joas (1948–), Axel Honneth (1949–), and Rainer Forst (1964–).

Habermas’s Principal Areas of Research One of the most striking features of Habermas’s work is that it draws upon numerous traditions of thought. His engagement with wide-ranging sources of analysis is reflected in the depth and breadth of his intellectual profile, which has been profoundly shaped by the following fields of inquiry (and canonical thinkers): (1) philosophy (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey, Husserl, Gadamer); (2) sociology (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Parsons, Luhmann); (3) critical theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse); (4) linguistic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Strawson, Toulmin, Searle, Chomsky); (5) psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg); and (6) history (Nolte, Hildebrand, Stürmer, Hillgruber). One of the most prolific writers of his generation, Habermas has produced an impressively large volume of books, book chapters, and journal and newspaper articles. The assumption underlying much of his work is that communicative action – that is, action oriented toward reaching mutual understanding – constitutes the ontological cornerstone of social order. Put differently, social order is possible only as a communicative order, the purposive reproduction of humanity is unthinkable without the communicative coordination of society, and the substantive impact of social transformation always depends on the coordinative power of communicative interaction. (Susen, 2010: 104)

Given the extensive scope and eclectic constitution of Habermas’s writings, it is difficult to offer a comprehensive overview capable of doing justice to the complexity of his oeuvre. It is possible, however, to identify at least ten areas of research that are central to Habermas’s communication-theoretic undertaking: (1) the public sphere, (2) knowledge, (3) language and communication, (4) morality, (5) ethics and law, (6) social evolution, (7) legitimation, (8) democracy, (9) religion, and (10) modernity.

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The concern with linguistically mediated communication is central to Habermas’s engagement with these areas of investigation: 1. Public spheres are sustained by processes of linguistically mediated communication, in which, in principle, all citizens – as legally recognized subjects capable of speech and actions – can participate. 2. Knowledge claims – irrespective of whether they refer primarily to states of objectivity, normativity, or subjectivity – are conceivable only as linguistically articulated validity claims. 3. Human language is a product of human communication, that is, of our speciesconstitutive capacity to establish a symbolically mediated relation to reality by raising assertive, regulative, and expressive claims to validity. 4. Morality cannot be dissociated from the discursive force of communicative rationality, since humans have the ability to make informed judgments, and to take responsibility for their actions, insofar as they – as reasoning beings – are capable of speech, justification, and reflection. 5. Ethical and judicial conventions vary across different life-forms, illustrating that socially constructed realities are regulated by historically specific sets of communicatively sustained, and discursively negotiated, normativities. 6. Social evolution is crucially shaped by language, which, as a speciesconstitutive tool, has provided humanity with one of its most powerful civilizational resources. 7. Legitimacy – regardless of whether it is social, cultural, or political – is unattainable without its carriers’ ability to reach a minimal degree of rational acceptability. 8. Democracy relies on linguistically equipped citizens, willing to coordinate their actions and decisions by engaging in communicative discourse, by means of which they reach mutual understanding (Verständigung) and, if necessary, agreements (Einverständnisse). 9. Religion, notwithstanding the projective power of its metaphysical imaginaries, is produced and reproduced on the basis of communicative processes between those who adhere to it, just as it may be discursively challenged by those who are critical of it. 10. Modernity cannot be divorced from communicative rationality, whose empowering potential is reflected in its capacity to contribute to both individual and collective emancipation from mechanisms of social domination. Considering that his work is firmly situated within the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, it is no surprise that Habermas attributes great importance to the role of social critique (Sozialkritik) in relation to the aforementioned fields of inquiry (Susen, 2010: 106–117): 1. Public spheres are shaped by public critique. Intersubjective processes of reasoning, arguing, debating, and disagreeing are essential to the construction of democratically constituted public spheres.

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2. Knowledge claims, since they constitute assertions concerning both epistemic validity and social legitimacy, are criticizable. By virtue of their critical capacity, which is embedded in their linguistic competence, human actors are able to make judgments not only about the acceptability of claims to epistemic validity but also about the bias stemming from the presence, or the lack, of social legitimacy. 3. Human language has developed, and continues to develop, out of human communication. If our ability to make critical judgments about objective, normative, and subjective aspects of reality is inextricably linked to our capacity to establish a linguistically mediated relation to other members of society, then our reflexivity is part and parcel of our daily search for different forms and different degrees of intelligibility. Critique constitutes an integral component of human language. 4. Morality is, by definition, subject to critique. The existence of individual autonomy and responsibility illustrates our species-distinctive ability to convert our critical capacity into the ultimate resource for decision-making processes, guided by the certainty that our actions possess ethical value only insofar as they can be regarded as morally defensible. 5. Ethical and judicial conventions change across time and space. Their acceptability is constantly being assessed and reassessed by those who produce, reproduce, and transform them by virtue of their critical capacity. The normative parameters underlying the interactions taking place in our lifeworlds are always – at least potentially – open to scrutiny and revision. 6. Social evolution, because it is mediated by linguistic processes, is crucially influenced by human actors’ ability to make judgments about reality that are structured by the evaluative resources of their critical capacity. This disposition equips human beings with the species-distinctive faculty to convert objective reason (Verstand), normative reason (Vernunft), and subjective judgment (Urteilskraft) into motivational driving forces of history. 7. Legitimacy – notably, political legitimacy – is contingent upon its defenders’ efforts to ensure that it enjoys a minimal degree of rational acceptability. As critical entities, human actors are endowed with the ability to make the legitimacy of social arrangements conditional upon the discursive power inherent in communicative rationality. 8. The consolidation of substantive variants of democracy constitutes one of the most noteworthy civilizational achievements of humanity. There is no genuine democracy without critique, since collective decision-making processes possess no genuine legitimacy unless those who are involved in, as well directly or indirectly affected by them engage in intersubjective processes of opinion- and will-formation. 9. Religion continues to be a dominant force in the contemporary world. Religious and nonreligious citizens need to enter into critical dialogue and engage with one another if they seek to take on the challenge of building, and living within, a pluralistically structured society. Mobilizing the evaluative resources of their critical capacity, they are obliged to accept that, when determining the course of

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their practices in accordance with the forceless force of the better argument, the grounds for rational validity are irreducible to metaphysical imaginaries. 10. The term modernity describes a historical condition that converts the emancipatory potential of communicative rationality into the cornerstone of its own possibility. As such, it constitutes a discursively mediated reality, whose development is contingent upon its inhabitants’ ability to determine their destiny by engaging in debate and controversy. Ever since it came into existence, the presence of modernity has been intimately interrelated with the critique of the multiple tension-laden elements that have made its existence possible in the first place.

Habermas’s Epistemology When reflecting on the epistemological assumptions underlying Habermas’s conception of critical theory, we need to consider the relationship between (a) knowledge and critique, (b) knowledge and interest, and (c) knowledge and language (Susen, 2007). The relationship between knowledge and critique concerns the possibility of questioning the taken-for-grantedness of behavioral, ideological, or institutional patterns of social existence. Owing to their critical capacity, human subjects are able to distance themselves from the objective, normative, and subjective elements of reality. To the extent that critical capacity is embedded in communicative competence, the normative foundations of social critique can be located in the rational foundations of ordinary language. As critical entities, human actors can reflect upon the physical, cultural, and personal dimensions of their existence. Far from representing a straightforward affair, however, critical reflection is characterized by the epistemological ambivalence of immanence and transcendence. All individuals, irrespective of their respective degree of critical reflexivity, are situated within society. At the same time, as actors equipped with hermeneutic resources of judgment, individuals have the cognitive and evaluative ability to step back from their everyday spheres of existential immersion, thereby converting the validity of their common-sense assumptions into an object of scrutiny. One of the principal objectives of critical theory is to shed light on the tension between emancipation and domination, that is, between every individual’s self-empowering potential and society’s coercive power to undermine this potential. Yet, “how can critical theory justify itself; how does it ground its own normative standpoint” (Pleasants, 1999: 155)? If they are serious about their endeavor, critical theorists must seek to identify the normative foundations of their own undertaking (see Finke, 2001 and Held, 1980). Discursively motivated actors may wish to defend seemingly universal values (such as “liberty,” “equality,” or “fraternity”), particular forms of governance (such as direct or representational democracy), or specific sets of rights (such as civil, political, social, cultural, sexual, or human rights). From a Habermasian perspective, it is imperative to

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provide normative foundations on which to justify the civilizational significance of each of these concerns. To the extent that “[e]very critical social theory is faced with the problem of constituting its grounds for critique” (Alexander, 1991: 49), critical social theorists need to concede that they are always already part of the conglomerate of human relations whose repressive features they aim to challenge. There is no such thing as a neutral, value-free, or disinterested form of critique, articulated from the privileged, pristine, and pure position of an untainted subject. All human actors – including the seemingly most critical ones – are situated within social networks of power. To be clear, critical capacity can be regarded as both a species-constitutive and a species-generative capacity:

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As a species-constitutive capacity, it represents an anthropological invariant and, hence, a distinctively human competence. The ability to reflect upon the physical, cultural, and personal facets of our existence constitutes a unique faculty that, in a fundamental sense, forms part and parcel of what it means to be human. To be exact, critical capacity stands for both an interpretive and an interactive treasure of meaning-laden experience. As “an interpretive competence,” it permits us to attribute meaning to the world by reflecting on the way in which it presents itself to us in a contemplative manner; as an “interactive competence,” it enables us to attach meaning to the world by sharing and exchanging our perceptions, representations, and interpretations of reality with our fellow human beings (Habermas, 1987a [1981]: 118, 130). As a species-generative capacity, it constitutes an anthropological driving force and, thus, a distinctively self-formative competence. In this sense, it possesses concrete – that is, sociohistorical – relevance for who we are and who we have become as a species as well as, more importantly, for the degree to which we have been able to determine who we are and who we have become as a species by influencing the course of history. Critical capacity, on this account, constitutes an integral element of our ability to shape both our personal and our collective lifehistories. Our “rational will that allows itself to be determined by good reasons” (Habermas, 2000: 328) puts us in the anthropologically privileged position of being able to claim authorship for both our individual and our social life-histories. “Insofar as the historical subjects, as mature and responsible [mündig] individuals, are in essence the subject of history,” their “reflective capacity of judgment constructs the progress of history” (Habermas, 1988a: 246). In short, we are a socio-constructive species able to write history by virtue of the purposive and imaginative resources inherent in critical capacity.

The relationship between knowledge and interest concerns the nexus between human cognition and human action. Our knowledge-constitutive interests (Erkenntnisinteressen) are embedded in our life-constitutive interests (Lebensinteressen). Our interest in generating knowledge about the world cannot be dissociated from our interest in determining our place within the world. The interpenetration of knowledge and interest is context-transcendent, in the sense that

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these two constitutive elements of human life depend on one another in any social formation, past and present, lying at the core of the civilizational processes that shape the development of human life-forms (Susen, 2015: 140). According to the early Habermas, the modern world is characterized by the emergence of three scientific spheres, whose existence emanates from three cognitive interests that are firmly embedded in the human condition: (1) the empirical-analytic sciences are driven by the technical cognitive interest in producing predictive knowledge, permitting the human subject to provide insightful explanations about, and to gain a substantial amount of methodically exercised control over, the physical world; (2) the historical-hermeneutic sciences are guided by the “practical cognitive interest [. . .] in the preservation and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding,” allowing for “a possible consensus among actors”; and (3) the critically oriented sciences are motivated by the “emancipatory cognitive interest” in human liberation from “dependence on hypostatized powers,” enabling actors not only to pursue but also to realize their “human interest in autonomy and responsibility [Mündigkeit]” (Habermas, 1987b: 308–311). As purposive entities, we develop an instrumental relation to the world. As communicative entities, we establish an intelligible relation to the world. As reflective entities, we aim to build a self-empowering relation to the world. In short, the pursuit of utility, comprehensibility, and sovereignty is central to the daily construction of human reality. In light of this tripartite constitution of the relationship between knowledge and interest, it seems necessary to draw a distinction between traditional theory and critical theory. In terms of their aims and goals, they possess a distinctive teleology. Traditional theories seek to explain and control particular aspects of the world, driven by instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität). Critical theories endeavor to contribute to the enlightenment and emancipation of human actors, motivated by substantive rationality (Wertrationalität). In terms of their logical and cognitive structure, they possess a distinctive epistemology. Traditional theories are objectifying in the sense that they seek to detach themselves from their object of study, whereas critical theories seek to be reflective and self-referential in the sense that they concede that their production of knowledge is no less influenced by power relations than the social domain they set out to scrutinize. In terms of their source of evidence, they possess a distinctive methodology. Traditional theories “require empirical confirmation through observation and experiment,” while critical theories posit that every claim to epistemic validity is embedded in structures of social legitimacy (Geuss, 1981: 55). The former purport to be committed to the ideal of objectively established, empirically substantiated, and universally defensible knowledge acquisition. The latter reject the scientistic pursuit of objectivity, positivity, and universality, arguing that all “validity claims” are “legitimacy claims” (Susen, 2007: 257, Susen, 2015: 55, 200). The relationship between knowledge and language concerns the symbolically mediated constitution of human existence. As linguistic entities, we attribute meaning to the world by virtue of language. Our daily use of, and immersion in, language

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can be described as a paradoxical affair in that it constitutes a vehicle of both existential immanence and existential transcendence. In terms of immanence, language provides a symbolically – that is, semantically, syntactically, and pragmatically – structured universe through which we encounter, and attach meaning to, the world. In terms of transcendence, language permits us to situate ourselves above and beyond our existence, enabling us to construct an interpretive domain shaped by the hermeneutic – that is, assertive, coordinative, expressive, communicative, and imaginative – functions inherent in the human search for meaning and intelligibility (Habermas, 1987b: 314). As linguistic beings, we can develop a sense of individual or collective autonomy, responsibility, intentionality, rationality, intelligibility, and agreeability. Moreover, as linguistic beings, we can build a sense of individual or collective utopia, anticipating that the ideal speech situation of unconstrained discourse is inherent in our communicative actions. Our linguistic condition, then, is a hermeneutic condition: our involvement in life is inextricably linked to our daily search for meaning on the basis of different forms of understanding. Hermeneutics is universal because “understanding is the fundamental way in which human beings participate in the world” (Outhwaite, 1987: 62). We position ourselves within, and in relation to, the world by attributing meaning to the multiple aspects permeating, as well as surrounding, our existence. The search for symbolically mediated and linguistically organized modes of intelligibility constitutes a fundamental characteristic of our value-laden immersion in reality. As Gadamer (1976 [1967]: 25) states, “The phenomenon of understanding [. . .] shows the universality of human linguisticality as a limitless medium that carries everything within it [. . .] because everything [. . .] is included in the realm of ‘understandings’ and understandability in which we move.” Epistemologically speaking, we do not have direct access to the world because our relation to reality (Wirklichkeit) is mediated by the interpretive power of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit). We mobilize our linguistic resources (1) to make assertions about the world, (2) to coordinate our actions within the world, (3) to express our thoughts and feelings concerning the world, and (4) to communicate with other inhabitants of the world.

Habermas’s Critique of Aporia Attempting to develop his own conceptual framework, Habermas has sought to overcome the aporias of several intellectual traditions upon which he draws, and which he proposes to revise, within the parameters of his own theoretical project. In this respect, the following currents of thought take center stage: (1) historical materialism, (2) early critical theory, and (3) philosophical hermeneutics. Historical materialism represents a philosophical cornerstone of Habermas’s critical theory. Yet, as much as Habermas’s framework draws upon key insights provided by Marx’s approach, the former seeks to overcome the principal drawbacks and pitfalls of the latter. Put differently, Habermas’s critical theory is firmly situated within the philosophical horizon of historical materialism while, at the same time,

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aiming to move beyond it. From a Habermasian perspective, the main source of conceptual reductionism within Marxian thought is the paradigm of labor. Within the Marxian architecture of the human universe, labor is interpreted as the most fundamental anthropological invariant and driving force, shaping – if not, determining – both the constitution and the evolution of human condition. According to Habermas (1987b: 44–47), however, this historical-materialist worldview suffers from at least three major fallacies:

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Productivist reductionism: The productivist fallacy consists in the tendency to reduce the symbolic to the material dimensions of social life by portraying the former as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the latter. On this account, the forces of production constitute the engine of history. Instrumentalist reductionism: The instrumentalist fallacy consists in the tendency to regard the human capacity to establish a purposive, and technologically driven, relation to the world as the primary source of civilizational empowerment. On this interpretation, it appears that humanity has succeeded in shaping the course of history, first and foremost, by virtue of instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität), rather than communicative rationality (kommunikative Rationalität). Positivist reductionism: The positivist fallacy consists in the tendency to fall into the trap of both ontological and methodological reductionism. At the ontological level, it is based on the assumption that both the natural world and the social world are governed by underlying laws. At the methodological level, it is founded on the assumption that the scientific tools that permit us to study the natural world can be used to study the social world and that, consequently, the natural sciences and the social sciences are not fundamentally different. On this view, Marx is guilty of flirting with the ideal of a unified science (Einheitswissenschaft), capable of crossing seemingly artificial disciplinary boundaries.

In light of the aforementioned reflections, Habermas (1987a: 383) has made it his task to “free historical materialism from its philosophical ballast,” thereby seeking to contribute to the fruitful reconstruction of Marxist social theory. In essence, he aims to accomplish this by arguing that “the developments that led to the specifically human form of reproducing life – and thus to the initial state of social evolution – first took place in the structures of labor and language” (Habermas, 1984: 137). Contrary to productivist reductionism, humanity has succeeded in constructing the conditions of its existence by means of both economic production and critical reflection. Contrary to instrumentalist reductionism, human development is driven by both purposive-rational and communicative action. Contrary to positivist reductionism, it is imperative to draw an ontological distinction between the natural world and the social world, as well as a methodological distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences, because we are both tool-making and meaning-producing entities, whose speciesdistinctive uniqueness can be grasped by combining, rather than opposing, the paradigm of explanation (Erklären) and the paradigm of understanding (Verstehen).

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Firmly situated within the tradition of the Frankfurt School, early critical theory is of fundamental significance to Habermas’s own undertaking. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the influence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings on his intellectual trajectory. Yet, as much as Habermas shares their diagnostic concern with the social pathologies of modernity, he rejects their – in his view – overly pessimistic stance, epitomized in their critique of instrumental rationality. To be sure, Habermas does not deny the powerful role, let alone the existence, of instrumental rationality in the context of modern society. He insists, however, that it is misleading to overestimate its capacity to permeate every single aspect of reality and to annihilate the possibility of challenging its ostensible ubiquity by virtue of the emancipatory force inherent in communicative rationality. To be precise, the paradigmatic obsession with instrumental reason is problematic for at least three reasons. First, it is historically reductive, since it undervalues the pivotal role played by progressive forces, as well as the wider significance of major civilizational achievements, in the construction of modern societies. Second, it is sociologically reductive, since it overlooks the multilayered constitution of the modern world, which contains both bright and dark, empowering and disempowering, progressive and regressive, positive and negative aspects. Finally, it is philosophically reductive, since it fails to recognize that there is no point in uncovering and criticizing relations of domination without building on both individual and collective resources of emancipation. Habermas’s endeavor to issue a “passport for critique” is motivated by the conviction that communicative rationality, expressed in our ability to reach mutual understanding, lies at the core of all societies, including those whose key domains of action coordination are colonized by instrumental rationality. The hermeneutical tradition in philosophy occupies a central place in Habermas’s project. Yet, Habermas proposes to replace “philosophical hermeneutics” with “critical hermeneutics” (Bubner, 1988). This paradigmatic shift is motivated by several central presuppositions. First, critical hermeneutics recognizes the complexity of the social, insisting that, although language constitutes a foundational element of human reality, the latter cannot be reduced to the former. The multilayered constitution of language makes it irreducible to a conglomerate of symbolic relations. Insofar as Habermas’s hermeneutics is based on what Thompson (1981: 3–4) refers to as “the elaboration of a critical and rationally justified theory for the interpretation of human action,” it is strongly opposed to any form of “hermeneutic idealism” or “linguistic transcendentalism” and, hence, to the reduction of human action to language (Habermas, 1988b: 132, 119). Second, critical hermeneutics recognizes the immediacy of the social, positing that language constitutes a product of social practices, as illustrated in the civilizational significance of communicative action. “The approach of linguistic analysis to the realm of social action is plausible only if internal relationships among symbols always imply relationships among actions. The grammar of languages would then be, in accordance with its immanent sense, a system of rules that determines connections between communication and possible praxis.” On this view, even the

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most abstract, formalized, and codified modes of language use are ultimately derived from the concrete, spontaneous, and intuitive forms of symbolically mediated communication unfolding in ordinary life (Habermas, 1988b: 118, 135). Third, critical hermeneutics recognizes the transformability of the social, drawing attention to the fact that language constitutes both a structuring and a structured structure. According to Habermas (1988b: 147), “Horizons are open, and they shift; we wander into them and they in turn move with us.” As much as language shapes us, we shape language. Just as language defines the semantically, syntactically, and pragmatically structured boundaries of our capacity to attribute meaning to the world, we constantly define and redefine these boundaries by inventing and reinventing the language we use when performing acts of interpretive engagement. Communicative actors, in order to be able to use language, need to draw upon the prejudgmental structure (Vorurteilsstruktur) of language, thereby mobilizing the interpretive resources provided by the sociocultural background in which they find themselves immersed. The “absolutization of tradition” (Lafont, 1999: 136), however, results in hermeneutic conservatism, which is problematic to the degree that it hypostatizes the structuring power of linguistic structures, while undervaluing the structuring power of speakers. In brief, subjects capable of speech and action both reproduce and transform language. Fourth, critical hermeneutics recognizes the ubiquity of the social, maintaining that a comprehensive account of symbolic forms needs to take into account both the interpreted and the interpreting aspects of meaning production. On this view, there is no social critique (Sozialkritik) unless it involves self-critique (Selbstkritik). Even when hermeneutic scholars seek to make the implicit explicit, reflect upon the unreflected, problematize the unproblematized, and uncover the covered, they are caught up in the prejudgmental structure (Vorurteilsstruktur) of language. Every truly critical form of interpretation requires readiness to engage in self-interpretation (see Giddens, 1977: 135–164; Habermas, 1987a: 110). To the extent that we are prepared to face up to the omnipresence of the social, we are in a position to admit that all actors – including the conceptually and methodologically most sophisticated interpreters – are shaped by power relations. Finally, critical hermeneutics recognizes the contestability of the social, exploring the interpenetration of power and language. Far from being reducible to a transcendental vehicle of pristine reflexivity, language represents a thoroughgoingly social “dimension which may be deformed through the exercise of power” (Thompson, 1981: 3). Language cannot be dissociated from power relations because it is constructed and reconstructed within horizons of social practices.

Habermas’s “Linguistic Turn” This section elucidates the fundamental elements of Habermas’ plea for a paradigm shift commonly known as the linguistic turn in critical theory. In this respect, two levels of analysis are crucial: lifeworld/system and language/ communication.

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Lifeworld and System The lifeworld constitutes the ontological base of society. In the most general sense, it can be defined as the lived world (Lebenswelt) or the experienced world (monde vécu). As such, it represents the sociohistorically situated realm of ordinary coexistence, as it is experienced by human actors in their everyday lives (Habermas, 1987c: 299). According to Habermas, every human lifeworld has three pillars: culture, society, and personality. Culture constitutes the interpretive background of the lifeworld. Society forms the integrative background of the lifeworld. Personality provides the identitarian background of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1987c: 343). The construction of social existence is inconceivable without the interpretive, integrative, and identitarian functions of the lifeworld. The lifeworld is tantamount to the cradle of communicative rationality, for it is sustained by actions oriented toward mutual intelligibility. The system constitutes the ontological “superstructure” of society. In the most general sense, it can be conceived of as the institutionalized extension of the lifeworld, illustrating the fact that every society depends on a specific degree of structural differentiation and institutional regulation. Habermas (1987a: 152) writes, “Systemic evolution is measured by the increase in a society’s steering capacity,” that is, by the expansion of its ability to regulate the behavioral patterns followed by its members on the basis of instrumental rationality. While the existence of the system presupposes the existence of the lifeworld, the coercive influence of the former tends to undermine the autonomy of the latter. The lifeworld is founded on the linguistic power of communicative rationality, whereas the system is driven by the de-linguistified power of functionalist rationality (Habermas, 1987a: 153–155). To the degree that modern society is characterized by the predominance of the system, functionalist rationality succeeds in permeating almost every single sphere of social life. Habermas’s systems-theoretic conception of modernization reflects the attempt to reconstruct historical materialism by endorsing a broader notion of societal development than the one advocated by defenders of orthodox Marxism. According to Habermas’s (1987a: 339) account, the prevalent imperatives driving social evolution are systemic forces. The preponderance of functionalist rationality in modern society is due to the far-reaching influence of the two principal components of the system: (1) the state and (2) the economy. The key feature that these two systemic spheres have in common is that they are driven by functionalist rationality. The main dimension that separates them from one another, however, is the fact that they possess different “steering-media”: (1) power and (2) money (Habermas, 1987a: 154–160). Owing to the hegemonic impact of the state and the economy upon the development of society, almost every facet of everyday life is driven by two main tendencies: bureaucratization and commodification (Habermas, 1987a: 318–326). Both the lifeworld and the system serve an integrative function. Yet, whereas social integration is provided by communicatively sustained interactions within the lifeworld, functional integration is guaranteed by instrumentally driven interactions

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derived from the system. Thus, these two modes of societal integration are fundamentally different. Maeve Cooke (1994: 134) writes, “Corresponding to the distinction between social (lifeworld) and functional (system) integration, we can distinguish between the rationalization of the lifeworld and the rationalization of the system.” At first glance, it may appear that the system constitutes an entirely nonnormative sphere. When scrutinizing its role and effects in more detail, however, it becomes evident that the system’s tendency to impose its functionalist logic upon almost all spheres of society reflects its capacity to make large parts of modern existence operate in accordance with its own normativity, which is governed by the maximization of profit, utility, and efficiency. The examination of the tension-laden relationship between lifeworld and system is crucial to Habermas’s architecture of the social. From a Habermasian perspective, the antinomy between lifeworld and system can be regarded as the most fundamental tension pervading modern societies. This tension is illustrated in the colonization of the lifeworld by the system. In essence, the colonization of the lifeworld is due to the system’s capacity to impose the functionalist logic underlying the state and the economy upon key spheres of social reality (Habermas, 1987a: 332–335, 374–375). Lifeworld and system, then, can be differentiated on several levels: social integration vs. system integration, linguistification vs. de-linguistification, communicative reason vs. functionalist reason. To the degree that the communicatively constituted “base” of society, the lifeworld, is gradually colonized by its functionally regulated “superstructure,” the system, modernity is shot through with the tension between two diametrically opposed forms of rationality (Giddens, 1987: 239). The relative autonomy of the system – which is demonstrated in its capacity to colonize almost all spheres of society and in its tendency to trigger significant social pathologies, such as alienation and anomie – needs to be problematized in terms of its historical contingency. Indeed, the hegemony of the system can be, and has been, challenged by numerous individual and collective actors aiming to regain control over their lifeworlds (Habermas, 1987a: 395–396; see also Ray, 1993: vii–xxi, 57–77). This reflects what Habermas (1996a: 38) describes as the “unfinished project of modernity,” marked by the tension-laden relationship between communicative and functionalist rationality.

Language and Communication Habermas’s paradigm shift is motivated by the conviction that critical theory needs to uncover the emancipatory potential inherent in communicative action. There is no society without linguistic communication because no action coordination between human subjects can take place unless they reach at least a minimal degree of mutual understanding. This insight lies at the core of Habermas’s “universal pragmatics”: The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding [Verständigung]. In other contexts one also speaks of “general presuppositions of communication,” but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching

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understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption (without undertaking to demonstrate it here) that other forms of social action – for example, conflict, compromise, strategic action in general – are derivatives of action oriented to reaching understanding [verständigungsorientiert]. (Habermas, 1984: 1)

Habermas proposes to locate the normative foundations of critical theory in the rational foundations of human language. The following conceptual elements are central to this undertaking: (a) universal pragmatics, (b) validity claims, (c) world, (d) mutual understanding, and (e) ideal speech situation. Habermas’s (1984: 5) universal pragmatics is aimed “at reconstructing the universal validity basis of speech.” It is motivated by the “attempt to establish a normative foundation for critical theory through a reconstructive analysis of everyday speech” (Thompson, 1982: 116). Universal pragmatics is a paradoxical endeavor, in that it sheds light on both the context-transcendent and the contextimmanent aspects of language. In Habermas’s words (1988b: 139), a “general theory of ordinary language would combine both points of view: the advantages of a formalized language on the theoretical level, and respect for natural language games on the level of the data.” The advantage of this complementary form of analysis is that it accounts for both the universal and the contingent dimensions of language without subscribing to transcendentalism or empiricism. Drawing attention to the close nexus between the universality of language, referring to “language as structure,” and the pragmatics of speech, referring to “speaking as process,” Habermas (1984: 6) highlights the interdependence of competence and performance: the species-constitutive distinctiveness of human communication manifests itself in both language and speech. Language, or langue, represents a universal framework that makes communication possible by means of a set of symbolically mediated and grammatically defined rules. Speech, or parole, stands for the executive process that makes communication possible insofar as members of a particular linguistic community employ these rules in specific contexts. In brief, human communication is the combination of language-based speech and speech-based language. On validity claims, Habermas (1984: 2) writes: anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated [or redeemed: einlösen]. Insofar as he wants to participate in a process of reaching understanding, he cannot avoid raising the following – and indeed precisely the following – validity claims. He claims to be: a. b. c. d.

Uttering something understandable; Giving [the hearer] something to understand; Making himself thereby understandable; and Coming to an understanding with another person.

In other words, as competent members of a linguistic community, we unavoidably raise four validity claims (Geltungsansprüche) in every speech act: truth (Wahrheit), correctness or rightness (Richtigkeit), truthfulness or sincerity (Wahrhaftigkeit), and comprehensibility or intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) (Habermas, 1984: 2–3).

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The socio-ontological centrality of these validity claims is due to their omnipresence in communicatively regulated, and discursively negotiated, modes of existence. Both the constitution and the evolution of human society depend on its members’ ability to engage in the daily search for linguistically articulated validity. Insofar as communication is ultimately oriented toward reaching understanding, comprehensibility constitutes the most fundamental validity claim. Rationally motivated claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity must possess a minimal amount of mutually shared comprehensibility in order to obtain a degree of implicitly or explicitly recognized validity. The intimate connection between comprehensibility and validity lies at the heart of communicative rationality, that is, it is reflected in the human capacity to learn how to reason by engaging in actions oriented toward mutual understanding. As illustrated in the German word Verständlichkeit (comprehensibility), Verstand (reason) is inextricably linked to Verständigung (communication), which is ultimately oriented toward reaching a viable degree of Verständlichkeit. As a species striving for intelligibility, we acquire the capacity to reason by reasoning with and against one another. In principle, validity claims are always criticizable, illustrating that, insofar as their cogency and acceptability can be called into question, they are subject to scrutiny and to discursive contestability (see Habermas, 1987a: 125–126, 149–150; Habermas, 1982; Habermas, 2001a). To the extent that the unfolding of symbolically mediated, communicatively regulated, and rationally motivated interactions depends on the power of linguistic intelligibility, the existence of society cannot be dissociated from its members’ quotidian search for, and claims to, validity. Far from serving a merely abstract role, removed from everyday reality, validity claims are raised in relation to the world. Thus, Habermas stresses the intimate relationship between language and validity claims, on the one hand, and our immersion in and experience of the world, on the other. The relevance of language to the construction of human life-forms can be illustrated by examining validity claims in terms of the following dimensions: (1) domains of reality, (2) modes of attitude, (3) types of speech act, (4) themes, and (5) general functions.

• • • •

The first validity claim is truth. It refers to “the” world of external nature. It represents an objectivating attitude. It is articulated through a constative speech act. It enables the speaker to assert a propositional content (“speaking about”). And it is used for the representation of facts. The second validity claim is correctness. It refers to “our” world of society. It represents a norm-conformative attitude. It is articulated through a regulative speech act. It enables the speaker to establish an interpersonal relation (“speaking to”). And it is used for the establishment of legitimate social relations. The third validity claim is sincerity. It refers to “my” world of internal nature. It represents an expressive attitude. It is articulated through a representational speech act. It enables the speaker to expose his or her intentions (“speaking from”). And it serves to disclose the speaker’s subjectivity. The fourth validity claim is comprehensibility. It refers to language in general. It represents an understanding-oriented attitude. It is articulated through

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a communicative speech act. It enables the speaker to establish intelligible relations with other speakers (“speaking with one another”). And it allows for the very possibility of successful communication. The existential significance of validity claims manifests itself in the nature of ordinary human action: language and action are two inseparable elements of human existence. Indeed, just as there are four main types of validity claim, there are four principal types of human action: 1. Teleological action, or purposive-rational action, is oriented toward success and aimed at the realization of a particular goal. Two main forms of purposive-rational action can be distinguished. Instrumental action is a non-social purposive-rational action, aimed at the technical “intervention into a complex of circumstances and events” (Habermas, 1987a: 285; see also Habermas, 1971). Strategic action is a social purposive-rational action, aimed at “influencing the decisions of a rational opponent” (Habermas, 1987a: 285). In both cases, the actor seeks to maximize the utility of his or her performance. 2. Normatively regulated action is guided by social values, roles, and expectations. Thus, “members of a social group . . . orient their action to common values. . . . The central concept of complying with a norm means fulfilling a generalized expectation of behaviour” (Habermas, 1987a: 85). There are no social interactions that are not embedded in culturally specific horizons of normativity, irrespective of the question of whether an actor complies with or deviates from a particular set of rules, conventions, and standards. The taken-for-grantedness of normative parameters can be challenged by virtue of communicative discourse (Habermas, 1987a: 85–86). 3. Dramaturgical action is motivated by the expressive self-presentation of the individual before other individuals. “The actor evokes in his public a certain image, an impression of himself, by more or less purposively disclosing his subjectivity. Each agent can monitor public access to the system of his own intentions, thoughts, attitudes, desires, feelings, and the like, to which only he has privileged access” (Habermas, 1987a: 85). As performative beings, we develop a sense of selfhood by engaging in social interactions. The “presentation of self” in everyday life is the precondition for the possibility of interactions between human beings. There is no enclosure in the social world without at least a minimum of representational disclosure of our subjective worlds. Intersubjectivity presupposes both the involvement and the unfolding of subjectivity. 4. Communicative action “refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations (whether by verbal or extraverbal means). The actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement” (Habermas, 1987a: 86). Comprehensibility represents the most fundamental type of validity claim because assertions of truth, rightness, and sincerity, in order to be recognizable, require a minimal degree of intelligibility. Communicative action is the most fundamental type of social action because our teleological, normative, and dramaturgical actions, in order to be valuable, require a minimal degree of symbolically mediated reciprocity. Put another way: the constitution of social order depends on the purposive, regulative, and expressive power of teleological, normative, and dramaturgical actions; the possibility of social order depends on the coordinative power of communicative action. To regard communicative action as the most fundamental type of human action means to accept our socio-ontological dependence on the intersubjective coordination of our actions.

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The preceding conceptual differentiation confirms the sociological centrality of validity claims in everyday life, illustrating the ineluctable link between rationality and human action (empirical relevance). It also provides a multidimensional, rather than a one-dimensional, account of human action, shedding light on its multilayered motivational constitution (action-theoretic relevance). Furthermore, it demonstrates that it makes sense to regard intelligibility as the most fundamental validity claim and communicative action as the most fundamental form of human action (communication-theoretic relevance).

Mutual Understanding Communicative action oriented toward mutual understanding constitutes the ontological cornerstone of society. Habermas (1987a: 290, 293) draws upon the Austinian distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts: whereas the former are driven by a “communicative intent,” the latter are “oriented to success.” “[I]llocutionary results are achieved at the level of interpersonal relations on which participants in communication come to an understanding with one another about something in the world.” By contrast, “[p]erlocutionary effects, like the results of teleological actions generally, are intended under the description of states of affairs brought about through intervention in the world” (Habermas, 1987a: 293; see also Habermas, 1985). This distinction is central to Habermas’s contention that “the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use,” upon which other – notably, strategic and instrumental – uses of language are parasitic (Habermas, 1987a: 288). Habermas’s (1984: 1) architecture of society is based on three interrelated presuppositions: (1) communicative action constitutes the most fundamental type of action (communication-theoretic foundationalism); (2) all other forms of action – such as strategic action – are derivatives of action oriented toward reaching understanding (communication-theoretic holism); and (3) to the extent that we can conceive of “reason as something that is in fact built into communicative relations, and that can in practice be seized upon” (Habermas, 1987a: 82), the normative grounds for critiquing disempowering aspects of asymmetrically structured societies can be derived from the discursive power inherent in communicative rationality (communication-theoretic criticism).

Ideal Speech Situation According to Habermas, “in every discourse we are mutually required to presuppose an ideal speech situation,” implying that utopia, far from being reducible to a mental fantasy, is built into the structure of human language. Actors engage in the construction of the ideal speech situation if – and only if – “communication is impeded neither by external contingent forces nor, more importantly, by constraints arising from the structure of communication itself. The ideal speech situation excludes systematic distortion of communication” (Habermas 2001b: 97). More specifically, Habermas’s conviction that the ideal speech situation constitutes an implicit element of communicatively generated forms of discourse is based on

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several assumptions. First, intersubjectively established agreements are possible. Secondly, genuine agreements can be distinguished from deceptive ones insofar as they are arrived at by the unforced force of the better argument. Third, agreements remain genuine to the degree that communication is not obstructed by internal or external constraints. Such communication presupposes the participants’ symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ constative, regulative, expressive, and communicative speech acts. A communicative condition in which this symmetrical distribution of chances is both guaranteed and realized can be characterized as an ideal speech situation (Susen, 2007: 88; Thompson, 1982: 128). The concept of the ideal speech situation has five major theoretical implications. First, it locates the emancipatory potential of the social in every ordinary actor’s capacity to engage in intersubjectively established processes of reasoning (discursive power). Second, it suggests that a utopian moment is always already present in every communicative speech act (anticipatory power). Third, by attributing an emancipatory status to the underlying presuppositions inherent in ordinary language, it detranscendentalizes the notion of counterfactuality (ordinary power). Fourth, it conceives of the “counterfactual conditions of the ideal speech situation . . . as necessary conditions of an emancipated form of life” (foundational power) (Habermas, 2001b: 99). Fifth, it serves as a yardstick for the critical analysis of systematically distorted communication (normative power). This last point is crucial to Habermas’s conviction that the effective critique of the factual distortion of language presupposes the possibility of its counterfactual nondistortion. Systematically distorted communication occurs in the face of the preponderance of the following factors: (1) success-driven, rather than understanding-oriented, actions; (2) deceptive, rather than genuine, agreements; (3) surreptitious, rather than open, use of strategic action; (4) coercive, rather than inclusive, internal and external forces; (5) asymmetrical, rather than symmetrical, distribution of chances; and (6) distorting, rather than enlightening, communication (Habermas, 2001b: 154–155). To the extent that the occurrence of systematically distorted communication is always parasitically dependent upon the understanding-oriented search for epistemic validity, the projection of the merely strategic community goes against the structure of language, whereas the “projection of the unlimited communication community is backed up by the structure of language itself” (Habermas, 1992: 188). The ideal speech situation concept plays a paradoxical role in Habermas’s critical theory: it idealizes the structural conditions under which an emancipatory society could be realized; at the same time, it posits that these conditions are always already present in ordinary language. (Habermas, 1992: 184, 188)

Limitations and Shortcomings While it is essential to acknowledge the valuable intellectual contributions that Habermas has made to contemporary social and political thought, it is no less important to grapple with the main limitations and shortcomings of his oeuvre,

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notably with regard to his theory of communicative action. The purpose of this final section, therefore, is to shed light on some controversial issues that need to be addressed when reflecting on the weaknesses of Habermas’s communicationtheoretic framework (Susen, 2007).

Habermas on Marx Habermas’s reading of Marx’s historical materialism is, at best, questionable and, at worst, deeply flawed. Habermas is right to express serious doubts about the validity of Marx’s “demand for a natural science of man, with . . . positivist overtones” (Habermas, 1987b: 46), illustrated in the epistemologically naïve assertion that “[n]atural science will eventually subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be a single science” (Marx, quoted in Habermas 1987b: 46). In opposition to this view, it is vital to defend the ontological distinction between the natural world and the social world, as well as the epistemological distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences. To the extent that the respective characteristics of each of these worlds are, on several levels, fundamentally different, both the conceptual and the methodological tools employed to study them need to prove capable of accounting for their specificity. Far from shying away from this task, however, the whole point of Marx’s anthropology is to flesh out the species-constitutive uniqueness of humanity without advocating the positivist illusion of value-neutrality (Marx, 2000: 171–173). Marx, like Habermas, stresses that knowledge cannot be dissociated from human practices (Lenk, 1986: 262–277). Habermas is right to take issue with economistic approaches insofar as they endorse the view that all social phenomena are ultimately derived from economic forces and that, consequently, the former can be explained by reference to the latter. While it is true that Marx’s approach is motivated by the ambition to comprehend society in terms of historically constituted material foundations, this does not mean that it therefore ignores, let alone denies, the anthropological significance of the symbolic dimensions of human life-forms. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness . . . ; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. . . . man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. (Marx, 2000: 183)

From a Marxian point of view, society is constituted by labor and language, implying that the latter cannot be reduced to a mere manifestation of the former. Language is not reducible to a functional epiphenomenon of labor, in an economistic sense; it emerges because humans depend on the ordinary experience of meaning-generating interaction, in a coexistential sense. Habermas is right to be wary of instrumental rationality. Yet, he is wrong to suggest that Marx tends to reduce labor to an instrumental form of action. In fact, one of the

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main objectives of Marx’s analysis of alienated labor is to criticize the reduction of labor to a largely instrumental form of action in class societies. Marx’s fourdimensional examination of alienation is based on a multilayered, rather than a reductive, conception of labor. According to Marx’s insightful account, the exploited worker is alienated from his or her product, other producers, the production process, and him- or herself as a species-being (Marx, 2000: 183). In other words, Marx “does not simply treat labor as a monologic relationship between society and nature” (Callinicos, 1989: 114). On the contrary, he conceives of labor as a multifaceted relationship between the producer and the natural world, the social world, the producer’s subjective world, and the producer’s human essence. In short, labor constitutes a purposive, normative, subjective, and species-constitutive activity. In light of the above, it is surprising that Marx’s four-dimensional approach to labor has not been systematically compared with Habermas’s four-dimensional approach to language. Most commentators tend to focus on the substantial differences between these two accounts, drawing attention to Habermas’s reductionist reading of Marx (Honneth, 1991; Roderick, 1986; Susen, 2007). These two explanatory frameworks are strikingly similar, however, in terms of the way in which they conceptualize their main paradigmatic category – language for Habermas and labor for Marx. When we speak, we unavoidably raise four validity claims (Geltungsansprüche): truth, correctness, sincerity, and comprehensibility. In a Habermasian sense, these validity claims are inherent in language. Analogously, when we work, we unavoidably raise four fulfillment claims (Erfüllungsansprüche): purposiveness, cooperativeness, creativity, and createdness (Erschaffenheit). In a Marxian sense, these fulfillment claims are inherent in labor (Susen, 2007: 106). Both validity claims and fulfillment claims fundamentally shape our relationship not only with realms of objectivity, normativity, and subjectivity, but also, more generally, with humanity. Instead of opposing Habermas’s paradigm of language and Marx’s paradigm of production to one another, it is vital to recognize that both are based on a four-dimensional conceptualization of human existence.

Lifeworld-Idealism Lifeworld-idealism represents one of the most problematic aspects of Habermas’s social theory. Its centrality is reflected in three interrelated thematic dimensions: socio-ontological optimism, utopianism, and romanticism. The problem arising from Habermas’s socio-ontological optimism is that it presupposes, rather than proves, the preponderance of communicative action in human lifeworlds. According to this presupposition, all forms of social action are derivatives of communicative action. On this interpretation, even the most radical forms of strategic action – such as betrayal, conflict, fights, and wars – are not only derived from but also parasitic upon our quasi-transcendental orientation toward reaching mutual understanding. This view suggests that communicative action constitutes the origin of all other modes of human action and that, consequently, “the fundamental norms of social action” (Habermas, 1972: 92) emanate from our daily search for mutual understanding.

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It is far from obvious, however, whether or not it is possible to demonstrate, rather than to presuppose, “the parasitic dependence of the use of language ‘oriented toward success’ on that ‘oriented toward coming to an understanding,’ not only with respect to the concealed strategic use of language but also with respect to its openly strategic use” (Apel, 1992: 155). Irrespective of whether one favors a transcendental-pragmatic or a universal-pragmatic perspective, it is essential to provide a sound justification for this communication-theoretic optimism. Indeed, socio-ontological pessimists may have good reason to argue that the opposite is true, by claiming that (1) communicative action is derived from, and parasitic upon, strategic action and that (2) even speech acts oriented toward mutual understanding are oriented toward success, since the communicative orientation that may, or may not, be built into language is precisely a motivational telos (Steinhoff, 2006). Socio-ontological optimism can be regarded as the cornerstone of Habermas’s conception of the lifeworld in particular and of human existence in general. As a presuppositional, rather than empirically substantiated, foundation, its validity needs to be proven, rather than taken for granted. Unless ample evidence can be provided to support Habermas’s socio-ontological optimism, it seems naïve to posit that instrumental action is primarily derived from the systemic forces of the state and the economy. In fact, it may be more accurate to concede that the functionalist rationality of the system constitutes an extension of the strategic rationality of the lifeworld. This would oblige us to embrace a less rosy, but more realistic, conception of the social. Within such a revised version of Habermas’s dualistic architecture, the core problem of instrumental action would have to be located both in the system and in the lifeworld. The problem arising from Habermas’s socio-ontological utopianism is epitomized in the concept of the ideal speech situation. Founded on the assumption that all forms of human action are ultimately derived from action oriented toward reaching understanding, the ideal speech situation represents a thought experiment that may be described as paradoxical. On the one hand, it is real insofar as its idealized conditions are supposed to be built into the understanding-oriented structure of language. On the other hand, it is unreal insofar as its idealized conditions clash with the power-laden structure of society. In other words, it permeates social reality, while being constantly undermined by it. On this account, utopia is both present and absent. This structural tension between quasi-transcendental ideal and empirical reality transforms any notion of utopia into a contradictory project. If the inherent telos of communication is understanding and, consequently, a consensually coordinated form of coexistence, the question arises why the orientation toward intelligibility, which lies at the heart of the lifeworld, is perverted into an increasingly powerful orientation toward success, which is built into the system. Drawing upon the dichotomous opposition between communicative and purposive rationality (Habermas, 1987a: 286–295) in order to approach this question, there are three main possible scenarios: first, all forms of social action are ultimately derived from communicative action (optimistic derivative argument); second, all forms of social action are ultimately derived from strategic action (pessimistic derivative argument); or, third, all forms of social action are ultimately derived

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from both communicative and strategic action, that is, communicative action and strategic action are inseparably interrelated (realistic interpenetrative argument). A utopian notion of the ideal speech situation that claims to be “quasitranscendental” – that is, at once universal and pragmatic – needs to face up to all three possibilities. The first scenario would convert utopia into a difficult, but necessary and completely justifiable, project: speaking and acting, we create utopia. The second scenario would render utopia not only a difficult, but also an impossible, project: speaking and acting, we annihilate utopia. The third scenario would transform utopia into a difficult, but viable, project: speaking and acting, we both create and annihilate utopia. A genuinely critical account of the social has to be prepared to confront all three possibilities. To the extent that the lifeworld is based on one of these three options, society as a whole, including its systemic spheres, is shaped by the constitutive nature of one of these three scenarios. The nature of the lifeworld – be it in the optimistic derivative, pessimistic derivative, or realistic interpenetrative sense – reveals the nature of society insofar as the most differentiated complexity of the latter is entrenched in the ordinary immediacy of the former. The ambitious theoretical attempt to ground the normative foundations of critique in the ontological foundations of the social has to recognize the inherent contradictoriness of human life-forms. If the profound ambivalence of modernity is rooted not in the tension between the lifeworld and the system but, rather, in the discrepancy between communicative and strategic action within the lifeworld, then the systemic manifestation of instrumental rationality is merely a symptomatic expression of the interpenetrative contradictoriness of the lifeworld itself. In other words, the problem stems from the ontological base of society, from human action as such. We are the problem. The schizophrenic relationship between consent-oriented and successoriented action is indelible. Any utopian notion of the social has to confront the possibility of its own impossibility. Critical utopia is, and needs to be, critical of itself. The problem arising from Habermas’s socio-ontological romanticism is closely intertwined with his optimistic and utopian view of the lifeworld. Socio-ontological romanticism portrays the lifeworld as a power-free realm of pristine intersubjectivity. Such a romantic notion relegates the source of power relations to the systemic sphere of the social, instead of locating them in the lifeworld. Power is interpreted as a lifeworldexogenous and system-endogenous mechanism. Such a romantic notion of the lifeworld, however, “fails to capture the processes of power that operate on a trans-subjective level within the historical-cultural lifeworld itself” (Kögler, 1996: 21). Communicative rationality stands for the “power to do” something, that is, the power to perform an action oriented toward mutual understanding. Instrumental and strategic rationality concern the “power over” something or somebody, that is, the power to perform an action oriented toward success over something or somebody. To the extent that both our consent-oriented and our success-oriented forms of action originate from the lifeworld, rather than from the system, the realm of everyday social interactions constitutes a highly problematic, rather than an unproblematic, space of intersubjectivity (see Habermas, 1987c: 298, Habermas, 1991: 223). Granted, quotidian power relations may gain substantial control over social

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interactions, when converted into systemic structures capable of colonizing people’s lifeworlds. Yet, the fact that they can be converted – if not, perverted – implies that power relations constitute an integral component of the lifeworld itself and that, consequently, it would be misleading to relegate their raison d’être to the systemic level. One of the principal aims of a socio-critical hermeneutics is to explore the extent to which all social relations are power relations. On this account, the challenge consists in scrutinizing the multiple ways in which power and the lifeworld – that is, power and language, power and discourse, power and subjectivity – interpenetrate one another before the power relations of the lifeworld are transformed by the power relations of the system, that is, before instrumental and strategic rationality are converted into functionalist rationality. Such a perspective, which may be conceived of as socio-ontological realism, should not be confused with socio-ontological fatalism – that is, with the defeatist assumption that the omnipresence of power indicates its omnipotence. Rather, it acknowledges that our reflective capacity to question the power of success-oriented action – both in its instrumental or strategic forms in the lifeworld and in its functionalist forms as part of social systems – derives from the discursive resources inherent in communicative action, which is rooted in the lifeworld. In order to abandon a romantic notion of the lifeworld, we need to accept the contradictory nature of ordinary existence, including its power-laden constitution. Put differently, ordinary social relations are no less problematic, let alone less power-laden, than systemic structures. Critical theory needs to shed light on the emergence and development of power relations within both the systemic and the ordinary spheres of society if it seeks to take seriously the task of grounding its normative concerns in the tension-laden complexity of human reality.

Conclusion As illustrated in this chapter, Habermas has made significant contributions to contemporary social theory. Both his supporters and his detractors tend to agree that, irrespective of the respective strengths and weaknesses of his intellectual project, he can be regarded as the most influential German social philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Arguably, the theory of communicative action can be considered his most original, and also most far-reaching, scholarly contribution. Given the interdisciplinary nature of his undertaking, Habermas’s attempt to locate the normative foundations of critical theory in the rational foundations of language has inspired a vast amount of researchers in the humanities and social sciences – notably those who, while acknowledging the problematic features of modernity, aim to uncover the emancipatory potential inherent in the species-distinctive resources of humanity. Notwithstanding their various limitations and shortcomings, Habermas’s writings have provided, and will continue to provide, a treasure of conceptual tools for the critical study of both the empowering and the disempowering aspects of modern societies.

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1989a. The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1989b [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1991. “A Reply.” In Alex Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.), Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (pp. 214–264). Cambridge, UK Polity Press. 1992. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1996a. “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” In Maruizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (pp. 38–55). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1996b. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory. Trans. William Fehg. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2000. “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language.” European Journal of Philosophy 8(3): 322–355. 2001a. Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2001b. On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Barbara Fultner. Cambridge; UK: Polity Press. Held, David. 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kögler, Hans-Herbert. 1996. The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lafont. Cristina. 1999. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lenk, Kurt. 1986. Marx in der Wissenssoziologie. Lüneburg: zu Klampen. Marx, Karl. 2000. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Outhwaite, William. 1987. New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Pleasants, Nigel. 1999. Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas, and Bhaskar. London: Routledge. Ray, Larry. 1993. Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements. London: Sage. Roderick, Rick. 1986. Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory. London: Macmillan. Steinhoff, Uwe. 2006. Kritik der Kommunikativen Rationalität. Marsberg: Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Susen, Simon. 2007. The Foundations of the Social: Between Critical Theory and Reflexive Theory. Oxford, UK: Bardwell Press. 2010. “Remarks on the Concept of Critique in Habermasian Thought.” Journal of Global Ethics 6(2): 103–126. 2015. The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, John B. 1981. Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1982. “Universal Pragmatics.” In John B. Thompson and David Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates (pp. 116–133). London: Macmillan.

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19 Anthony Giddens, Structuration Theory, and Radical Politics Rob Stones

The argument of this chapter is that Anthony Giddens’s later work on ‘third-way’ politics turns away from some of the best instincts of structuration theory. I will suggest that what he has to offer in terms of reflection on the political landscape, and on political strategy, could be greatly strengthened by returning to what is of enduring value in the structuration approach. Structuration theory itself has undergone various transformations in the years since Giddens largely left it behind, and these subsequent developments would aid and enhance a grafting of the powerful ideas and formulations of structuration onto the more valuable aspects of Giddens’s vision for radical politics within late modernity. Giddens’s substantive theoretical writings on politics, as they stand, are inevitably informed in a general way by his long and distinguished engagement with sociological and social theory. This is also true of his writings on late, or radicalised, modernity, which provide a substantial measure of the intellectual context for his politics. A positive consequence of these combinations is that, at their best, Giddens’s understandings of empirical political issues are informed to a significant degree by larger conceptions of societal forces and societal change emerging out of deeply reflective traditions of social thought. However, I want to argue that Giddens’s turn away from structuration theory has undermined his ability to make adequate, truly satisfactory, connections between his larger, more abstract, analyses and specific, contextualised, political situations and settings. The political goals and strategies Giddens advocates lean heavily on a number of prior themes of large-scale social processes he constructs to characterise and understand the current period of ‘radicalised modernity’. The methodological standpoint through which he constructs these large-scale themes of late modernity is one that pulls the social processes in focus away from (abstracts them from) the ‘messiness’ of their real-world manifestations where, in reality, they are interwoven with other themes and other aspects of context. When Giddens condenses social processes into themes he treats them at a high level of abstraction, and also individually and serially, so that we lose a sense of their embeddedness in the ongoing flow of life with all its interlacing of influences and processes. All of this is carried out, moreover, from Giddens’s own perspective as an external observer and analyst, lacking hermeneutic engagement with situated actors. This same methodological process is repeated when he comes to reflect upon politics within radicalised modernity. The briefest of examples will be useful to provide a sense of this. So, one can see this thematic approach being employed in Giddens’s treatment of work. He notes its 395

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many benefits, such as its role in generating income for the individual, providing a sense of stability and direction in life, and creating wealth for the whole society. At the same time, he strongly counsels that society should resist being overly dominated by the work ethic (the ethic of ‘productivism’) so as to be able to genuinely recognise and integrate the wider diversity of goals life has to offer (Giddens, 1998: 110; and see 1994: 175–180). Work, as encountered here, is reflected upon as an individual theme, uprooted from exigencies and influences of context. A great deal of Giddens’s work revolves around this kind of thematic treatment. As a result he finds it very difficult to consider the matrix of pressures, demands, and obligations that converge on specific events and processes and on the situations of specific individuals. The uprooting of themes from context also means that his characterisation of political possibilities, and of the room for manoeuvre for individuals, organisations, and collectivities lacks grounding, and so is constantly exaggerated. A corollary of the role of themes in Giddens’s analysis is a similarly ‘distant’, topdown approach to policy prescriptions, notwithstanding thematic gestures he makes in the opposite direction. He seems to be most comfortable when sketching out his perspectives on large-scale, generalised practices. These sketches hover some way above the ground, lifted away from contextual constraints, and make it easy for him to suggest, for example, that his politics will serve the values of autonomy, selfrealisation, and life politics through increasing ‘the overall freedom a person has to pursue his or her well-being’ (Giddens, 2000: 88). In real-world situations, however, actors are positioned at the junction of a range of different structural factors, and they need to perceive, interpret, and act within this nexus of possibilities, constraints, rewards, and sanctions. Such embedding means they are far more constrained than Giddens’s politics repeatedly suggests. He appears much less comfortable when pushed to focus in on such realities, on particular actors situated in positions where the pressures are many, and the constraints are claustrophobic, potentially overpowering. At the level of his value-standpoint, Giddens fails to acknowledge the damage caused by the forces of instrumental reasoning within contemporary societies, or to address the ways that instrumental forces interweave with his other themes in concrete situations. We shall see, below, that he has very insightful things to say about the role of abstract systems, such as those of money and expert-led technology, in late modernity. However, his concern does not stretch to any serious examination of the obstacles these systems present to his third-way politics, or of the chronic harm they inflict upon countless numbers of individuals. For the truth is that individuals positioned both inside and outside formal organisations are damaged by the insufficiently regulated and attenuated forces emanating from abstract systems. Dominant amongst these are the abstract systems embedded within deregulated competitive capitalism, audit-driven, performance-managed bureaucracies, and constantly innovating forms of science and technology. These abstract systems constrain many aspects of the political strategies Giddens advocates, but there is little recognition of this. To continue with the example of the theme of work, the genuine freedom people have to make decisions as to whether paid work should play a central role in their lives is often severely constrained by

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contextual factors. The same is true with respect to the opportunities they get for democratic participation at work; for their sense of security within paid work, if they have it. The same is true for many other aspects central to his politics, such as the scope people have for making life choices, both for themselves and for those they care about (Giddens, 1991: 209–231; 1994: 171–197). I accept a great deal of Giddens’s criticisms of the old left’s refusal to acknowledge what markets, for example, can and do achieve when they are suitably regulated and contained (e.g. Giddens, 1994: 66–69; 2000: 34–37; Hutton and Giddens, 2000: 17–20). However, his enthusiasm for some of the more debatable, ideological, claims for markets often lacks critical distance, as does the zeal with which he presents decontextualised market and technological solutions in areas such as health and education (Giddens, 2014: 107–113; Hutton and Giddens, 2000: 38–51). Most broadly, Giddens has a major blind spot when it comes to the extensive damage caused by insufficiently restrained instrumental reasoning as it works through impersonal, disembedded mechanisms. This applies to markets, but also to the role of such reasoning within bureaucracies and in and around technological change. The effect of the blind spot, when combined with his methodological standpoint, is to radically undermine the necessary conditions for his more sympathetic value-orientations. My overall position is that there is much of immense value in Giddens’s writing on politics in late modernity, and his vision needs to be reconfigured and refined rather than entirely jettisoned. Having said this, however, there are key elements of his methodological perspective and his value-orientations that are highly problematic. Addressing these adequately will lead to a radical reframing of the politics. The theoretical grounds for this can be created, firstly, by bringing back structuration theory’s ‘hermeneutic’ emphasis on respect for the situated standpoint and understandings of the people who are in the thick of things. Such respect has ontological, methodological, and ethical dimensions, and the three are closely interconnected. And secondly, by bringing in subsequent developments in structuration theory, in tandem with other, kindred approaches that can re-embed Giddens’s large abstracted themes back into the detailed complexity of their relevant contexts. In order to understand the impact of the large themes and structures of modernity we must be able to look at how they impact upon specific social relations in particular times and places. This means paying attention to the concrete details of constraint and possibility that populate each of the many contextual fields in which the everyday struggles of politics take place. Paying close attention to the strengths of structuration theory can, I believe, breathe more radical, more progressive, life back into a politics of radicalised modernity.

Giddens’s Structuration Theory The scope of Giddens’s writings is formidable. He first came to prominence with his enviably lucid exposition of, and critical commentary on, the sociological classics in his Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (1971), an account of three of the great social

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thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Giddens built on these foundations as he subsequently devoted a decade or more to the formulation of his own theoretical perspective, structuration theory. This was an erudite and original synthesis of plural strands of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociological and philosophical thinking, many of which had often previously been presented as incompatible rivals (see Giddens, 1976; 1979; 1984). The primary preoccupation here was with the quite fundamental question of how we should characterise the social world itself, and Giddens was keen to draw out the strengths and weaknesses of the different answers that had previously been given to this question. As can be seen in his 1984 summation of structuration theory, The Constitution of Society, Giddens’s attention within the overall enterprise was divided into two relatively distinct endeavours. On one side of the divide were very abstract, ontological, concerns involving perennial, indispensable conceptual building blocks such as structure and agency, knowledge and motivation, time and space, norms and power. And on the other side were more substantive, large-scale, theoretical interests in mapping out the qualities and dynamics of different kinds of institutions and social systems (see, also, Giddens, 1981 and 1985; Stones, 1996: 88–117; 2005: 40–44). The first part of this project – which, I would argue, is most appropriately thought of as the core of structuration theory proper (Stones, 2005: 4–8, 12–44) – saw the construction of an array of carefully integrated ontological concepts focused around the practices of individual agency in the context of social structures. The volumes, New Rules of Sociological Method (1976) and Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), are the key reference points here. In New Rules, structuration theory was pitched against what Giddens believed was the polar opposite way of mistaking the nature of social life, that of voluntarism. Voluntarism marks a set of standpoints associated with interpretive and action-oriented sociologies, and with philosophies of language, meaning, action, and experience, that place too much emphasis on the willpower and inventiveness of social actors. These perspectives, on Giddens’s reading, fail to adequately recognise the power of social structures inherited from the past to set the agenda of what is and isn’t possible for actors situated in the present. In Central Problems, Giddens developed structuration theory as a means of overcoming the inadequacies of determinism, a cluster of perspectives that included forms of Marxism as well as other broad perspectives such as functionalism and structuralism. Giddens believed these approaches afforded social structures far too large a role in social life, allowing no space for human will, resistance, and creativity. Despite his sense that both perspectives were misleading, Giddens believed that some truth remained in both. However, a more subtle form of theorising was needed to be able to grasp the relative contributions of structure and agency, weight and freedom, constraint and creativity. Within structuration theory, social structures will, indeed, sometimes appear to the individual as negative constraints or as unwanted pressures. At other times the external structures will be seen as providing the social conditions that positively enable individuals to perform particular actions and to pursue their projects, often even driving these forward through a dynamism already inherent in ongoing, chronically reproduced, social processes. Giddens argues that these structures can be thought of as possessing three components that it is useful to

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distinguish, analytically, one from the other. The three components of structures are, when they are boiled down, power, meaning, and norms (see, e.g., Giddens, 1976: 118–26, 161; 1979, 81–94). At other times these are expressed as ‘rules and resources’, with rules being a composite of meanings and norms, and resources referring to power. The power elements of structures, in turn, can be divided into allocative resources, or economic power, in which there is control over things, and authoritative resources, or political power, in which there is control over people (Giddens, 1984: 258–262). Each of these structural dimensions has a significant presence in society, being embedded within routine institutional practices, and consequently making a deep impression on people’s sense of the social terrain facing them, indicating what they will and will not be able to do, and what the likely consequences of their actions and non-actions are likely to be. While the three aspects of structures are analytically separable, they are, in fact, always intertwined with each other in real situations and circumstances. All situations and actions will involve power, meanings, and norms, to a great or lesser extent, albeit with one or other of these often taking on a greater salience depending on the situation at hand. This is a useful framework that I would endorse, but I want to note that Giddens says very little about the ways in which the three structures – the rules and resources – interweave and interact with each other in concrete circumstances. The adverse significance of this silence for the preparedness of his version of structuration theory to adequately engage with the empirical level cannot be too highly emphasised, and we will return to this. He prefers, for the most part, to remain at the level of the abstract, with his ontological themes of power, meaning, and norms each treated separately, approached from within their separate respective theoretical traditions of sociological and philosophical thought. It is important for Giddens that actors are not ‘cultural dopes’. Influenced by the terminology and the insights of Harold Garfinkel, the pioneer of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967, and see Heritage, 1984: 2017), Giddens is adamant that individuals are skilled and knowledgeable actors, who draw, recursively and reflexively, on their subtle knowledge of their conditions of action, and the structures within these, such that these perceptions inform and guide their actions. The structures the actors perceive – their conceptions of power relations, social meanings, and social norms – are always seen from within their particular ‘frames of meaning’ or cultural standpoints on the world. This means that an individual’s ‘knowledge’ of conditions out-there in the world is always mediated by language, culture, and perspective. For the individuals conceptualised by structuration theory there is no direct, raw, unmediated access to the world; it is always the world interpreted from a socially and culturally mediated frame of meaning. It is from within, and on the basis of, such a frame that individuals are motivated to engage in projects within the world, in longterm projects and in more circumscribed everyday tasks. Giddens wisely counsels that social scientists should attempt to discover and describe what these motivations are, and strive never to give an impoverished account of them. This is to accord weight and respect to agency. In elaborating upon the diversity of cultural, discursive, and interpretative processes involved in agency, Giddens enlists, in addition to ethnomethodology, an array of intellectual traditions, that include phenomenology,

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hermeneutics, ordinary language philosophy, structuralism, and post-structuralism, to name but some (Giddens, 1976, 1979). Given that an actor’s own interpretive frame of meaning is an essential part of this picture, any external assessment of what is going on will have to engage in what Giddens calls a ‘double hermeneutic’ (Giddens, 1976: 162; 1984: 284). This indicates the intersection of the frame of meaning of the external assessor – who could be a social scientist, activist, journalist, professional practitioner, or political strategist, and so on – with the frame of meaning of the situated actor. For those developing political strategy, the logical lesson would be to cultivate a reflexive awareness of their own value-orientations, cultural schemas, and knowledgeability and to recognise the need to do the same with respect to the lay actors whose situated lives are implicated in their strategies. They should learn to access and respect the complex, context-related, frames of meaning of lay actors, including the mutual knowledge and values they share – or do not share – with others in overlapping communities. While Giddens places much emphasis on the interpretive mediation of social structures by actors, he retains a conception of the ontological reality of the social structures external to these actors. This means the structures can be misperceived or unacknowledged, leaving the actor in the dark as to the true nature of the structural conditions ‘out-there’ in the world at any one time. There is, therefore, a formal, analytical, difference between the ‘virtual’ structures that are actually perceived by given lay actors and the real structures that these lay actors are striving to capture and understand. External assessors can also misperceive the real external structures facing the involved actors. In both cases the perceptions will always, of course, be from within the respective frames of meaning of lay actors and external assessors. Perception or ‘knowledge’ will sometimes coincide with reality in the ways that matter, and at other times it will fail to do so. The knowledge of situated, involved actors is potentially fallible, as is the knowledge of external observers. When there is a disjunction between the structures that are actually out-there in the world and the internalised, virtual structures informing the actions of individuals then, all things being equal, there is a greater likelihood of unintended consequences resulting from those actions. In Giddens’s rendering of the ontology of structuration theory one is repeatedly pulled towards the point at which powerful, and quite abstract, social structures outthere in society converge in various ways upon actors. This focal point is one where the external forces out-there converge ‘in-here’, within actors’ perceptions, at which they deeply influence their subsequent practices. Indeed, the actors routinely keep in touch with the structural grounds of their actions through reflexively monitoring them. Such monitoring requires actors to integrate a continual flow of both new and familiar indexical knowledge into the decisions they make and the priorities these reflect as they negotiate their way through their days. The resulting practices engaged in by individuals then produce effects in the world, effects that will be more or less consequential, and more or less concentrated or dispersed in time and space. There is what Giddens calls a ‘duality of structure’ at work here (Giddens, 1976: 121–122, 161; 1979: 77–78, 81–85; 1984: 25–29, 297–304). In the first moment of this duality, the structural context out-there is internalised by individuals, actors, as

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refracted through their frames of meaning. The internalised conception of the structural context then acts as a medium for agency as it informs the practices the actors engage in. Their practices may simply reproduce the structural context or modify it in some way. This means that in the second moment of the duality, the reproduced or modified structural context is the outcome of actors’ practices that have been engaged in on the basis of structure as medium. There is an ongoing recursive cycle in which the outcomes of practices then loop back into becoming the new structural context out-there that is internalised by actors during the next round of practices. This process is what Giddens refers to in shorthand when he writes of the duality of structure as indicating the way that ‘structure is the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively organizes’ (Giddens, 1984: 374, and passim). The second part of the structuration project is more substantive, adopting the spirit of the theoretical tradition of historical sociology, mapping the large, societal scale, and making it visible and available for analysis. In volumes such as A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981) and The Nation-State and Violence (1985), as well as in significant sections of earlier books, Giddens sketches in the broad contours of different types and periods of society. He generalises about organisational and institutional practices and relations, covering everything from kinship to political and military power, from forms of economic interdependence to variations in dominant spatial locales, such as the urban or the rural. He sweeps high and wide as he discusses societal types and their dominant structural principles, contradictions, conflicts, collectivities, movements, and so on (Giddens, 1981, 1984, 1985). There is a palpable sense that Giddens’s commitment to the structuration philosophy including its emphasis on unfolding and contingent practices and on the duality of structure is always there in the background of this more substantive theorising. At times he explicitly introduces formal models from what I’ve called the core of structuration into the midst of his discussions of these large-scale mappings (e.g. Giddens, 1984: 190–193, including figure 11, 191), although these connections are light and fleeting. One feels that structuration is there as a touchstone to refer to, keeping him honest and on the right track. However, the actual focus of this part of the project lies elsewhere. It is on innovative ways of characterising types of society (e.g. tribal society, class-divided, and class society or capitalism), on the transitions from one kind of society to another, on the forces of large-scale social change, and on the role of inter-societal systems in the constitution of each of these. A central theoretical aim in this part of Giddens’s project is to argue for a pluralistic approach to large-scale social change. His explanations move away from the ‘reductive’ explanations of other writers, where often just one factor, such as the economic or the political, would be emphasised. He argues for an explanatory approach at the substantive, macro, institutional level that would parallel the ontological approach at the micro level, outlined above. There, norms, meaning, and power were drawn on to analyse the precise workings of the duality of structure. Here, legal and other formal and informal rule-setting institutions – including educational and religious institutions, for example – would be involved in the large-scale structuration of legitimacy or norms; institutions designed to deal primarily with the production of culture and discourse would

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signal the sites of the primary practices of meaning or signification; and economic and political institutions would embody practices of allocative and authoritative power (see, for example, Giddens, 1984: 163–168, and 180–206; Giddens, 1981, 1985; and see Stones, 2005: 40–44). A highly consequential methodological choice is made by Giddens in his elucidation of this large-scale historical domain, a choice he labels as institutional analysis. This is a form of what he calls ‘methodological bracketing’, which directs attention to certain aspects of social life while blocking out others. The specific methodological bracket of institutional analysis provides a type of: ‘Social analysis which places in suspension the skills and awareness of actors, treating institutions as chronically reproduced rules and resources’ (Giddens, 1984: 375, my emphasis). This is a methodological standpoint that focuses on various types and clusters of generalised practices that are sketched out from afar. It is the perspective of the abstracted themes we introduced at the beginning of the chapter. Giddens contrasts this with another form of methodological bracketing, that of strategic conduct analysis, which is a form of social analysis that ‘places in suspension institutions as socially reproduced, concentrating upon how actors reflexively monitor what they do; how actors draw upon rules and resources in the constitution of interaction’ (Giddens, 1984: 373). This contrasting form of analysis is in tune with structuration theory proper as it directs the focus to social practices in the process of being produced by situated actors: ‘Institutionalized properties of the settings of interaction are assumed methodologically to be “given” . . . It is to concentrate analysis upon the contextually situated activities of definite groups of actors’ (Giddens, 1984: 288; see also Giddens, 1979: 80). We see here, prefigured in his formal definition of institutional analysis, the distant, top-down, external observer of Giddens’s later writings on modernity and on politics. He has gained the large-scale only to lose a connection with the frames of meanings of lay actors and the hermeneutic, interpretive moments these entail. In the process, the institutional practices that are ‘treated as chronically reproduced rules and resources’ within institutional analysis are pulled away (abstracted), serially and individually, from the complex fullness of context so that the broad contours of societal types can stand out in relief. This is the same methodological standpoint that Giddens will steadfastly adhere to over the next thirty years as he delineates the characteristics of late modernity and its various political landscapes. The resultant large-scale mappings of the most dominant institutional practices are far too slight and insubstantial to provide practical grounds on which to answer strategic questions of constraint, possibility and consequence. A fortiori, we have lost the ability to address the ways in which the fullness of context is internalised by situated actors as a critical medium helping to inform them of their capabilities, of what is and isn’t possible, and what the consequences are likely to be of taking any particular action. Giddens has not only suspended the hermeneutic moment of connection through verstehen, he has also given up structuration’s distinctive concern with grounding this, anchoring this, in how an actor’s interpretative frame of meaning connects, or fails to connect, with their relevant structural context. It would

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be impossible to overstate just how much of the potential power and distinctiveness of structuration theory is forfeited through this methodological choice.

Radicalised Modernity: The Setting for Third-Way Politics The structuration project dominated Giddens’s work in the second part of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s, but from there his attention moved towards the radical transformations he saw taking place in the character of contemporary social life. In books such as The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), and Runaway World (2002b; also see Giddens, 1993), he responded to these changing times, to the power of the global financial markets, to the pace of scientific and technological innovation, to the rising significance of the knowledge economy (the ‘weightless’ economy), and perhaps most important of all, to the communications revolution. He attempted to capture and understand these transformations, and the many different forces of globalisation that accompanied them, by formulating a conception of radicalised modernity. We can learn a great deal about Giddens’s political vision by first examining some key aspects of this conception. He contrasted radicalised modernity not only with the other phases of modernity preceding it, but also with the idea of postmodernity. He believed the idea of postmodernity was overly focused on the cultural domain, and on certain limited, albeit eye-catching, phenomena within this domain, such as the fragmentation of experience into increasingly dissociated or hybridised images and meanings. His response was a large-scale, sociological explanation, focusing primarily on changes in an identifiable cluster of institutional practices. He approached these from the same external observer, bird’s-eye standpoint that characterised institutional analysis. Grand conceptual themes were developed, abstracted from embedded realities in ways familiar from the earlier work. Marxists would typically give pride of place to just one set of institutional priorities, those of the capitalist economy, in any formulation of the deep structural causes of the phenomena that postmodernists call attention to. Giddens, by way of contrast, extends the ‘non-reductionism’ of his earlier historical sociology to argue for more pluralistic explanations. The institutional dimensions of globalisation, for Giddens, certainly included the world capitalist economy, but also involved the nation-state system, the world military order, and the international division of labour, including the distinctions between more and less industrialised areas of the globe, regional specialisations of various kinds, and the worldwide, if uneven, diffusion of machine and communication technologies (Giddens, 1990: 70–78). The development of the technologies of communication, Giddens emphasises, are an indispensable condition for the ‘global extension of the institutions of modernity’ (Giddens, 1990: 77). The global money markets, for example, ‘involve direct and simultaneous access to pooled information on the part of individuals spatially widely separated from one another’ (Giddens, 1990: 78).

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Giddens’s ability and willingness to address the big picture is particularly evident in The Consequences of Modernity. He identifies the deeper and most pervasive dynamics of the contemporary age – the age of late modernity and globalisation – and conceptualises these in newly penetrating ways. It is here, in providing the larger picture of the plural forces at work, that his talent for ‘substantive social theory’ is most appropriate, and where it is most effective. To the four key dimensions of globalisation, outlined in the last paragraph, he adds additional themes that either: (i) nestle within one of the four key institutional domains; (ii) constitute additional institutional spheres in their own right; or are (iii) themes that cut across the different spheres, providing part of a more general societal backdrop. The emphasis on communication technologies, for example, fits as a sub-theme within the dimension of the international division of labour in Giddens’s model, although we can note that it would also clearly be interwoven throughout the other institutional domains at the level of real-world practices. Democracy and democratic movements, too, can be mapped as a sub-theme onto the institution of the nation-state system, as Giddens does when sketching out the types of social movements that correspond to each aspect of his fourfold classification of the institutions of modernity (Giddens, 1990: 70–71, and 158–163). The family, to take another example, figures large in Giddens’s writings on identity and intimacy within late modernity, and a separate lecture is devoted to the changing grounds of the family in the 1999 BBC Reith Lectures series, Runaway World (2002b). It makes sense that the family can be treated as an additional institutional sphere in its own right. However, it should be kept in mind, when clarifying what Giddens’s analyses actually do and don’t do, that the character of family roles and relationships could very easily also figure within a conception of the division of labour. This edges us into epistemological issues, a domain of analysis that Giddens, along with most other social theorists, have paid scant attention to in the forty or so years that have passed since the high point of critiques of empiricism at the end of the 1970s (Bryant, 1992; Stones, 1996: 89–90, Stones, 2017b). It is instructive to linger for a moment on some quite basic aspects of this domain. For one would have to specify the purpose at hand of an inquiry in order to know the precise relevance of any one of Giddens’s themes. To what extent, for example, would the contours of a particular problem-to-be explained (explanandum) make it appropriate to focus just on the character and dynamics of the theme of the family in isolation from other themes? Some purposes would, of course, make it sensible to trace external connections from aspects of the family to one or more of the other institutional domains Giddens marks out. Indeed, one of Giddens’s universal policy prescriptions, based on his argument for an ever-deepening process of ‘democratising democracy’, is for a democratisation of the family, which takes us into the connections between the family and processes, which Giddens’s initial clustering has situated in the domain of practices associated with the nation-state system. My point is that Giddens leaves us with an enormous amount of work to do when it comes to moving from his broad-brush schematic themes to addressing particular problems in the world.

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Some of Giddens’s most abstract themes are, nevertheless, amongst the most important and telling of all. These provide the generalised background conditions, characterising and pervading high modernity, conditions that cross-cut his more discrete institutional domains. They are themes adopted by Giddens to conceptualise and comprehend the most significant characteristics of radicalised modernity: of reflexivity, the pervasive presence of high-consequence risks, the subversion and reconfiguring of tradition, time-space distanciation, the abstract systems of money and expertise, disembedding, trust and its transformations, and the ideal of the ‘pure relationship’ said to represent new forms of intimacy based on narrative disclosure rather than on traditional bonds (e.g. Giddens, 1990; 1993; 2002b). A focus on the concepts of reflexivity and disembedding will allow us to bring many of these themes together, indicating the broad connections between them. Reflexivity is a central component of Giddens’s characterisation of radicalised modernity, indicating for him the way contemporary ‘social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices’ (Giddens, 1990: 38). There is a constant attempt to use revised knowledge – additional information or newly conceptualised information – to improve upon existing practices, to correct problems, errors or inefficiencies, to get an advantage over competitors, and so on. Reflexivity produces a dynamism that Giddens regards as essential to progress (e.g. Giddens, 1998: 63–64). In a world of such complexity, however, the consequences of reflexive adjustments constantly exceed and run counter to the intentions of their authors. This means that ‘advances’ in knowledge of the world, which one might think would help to bring about more control and order in that world, in fact ‘contributes to its unstable or mutable character’ (Giddens, 1990: 45). On an individual level, reflexivity represents the increasingly pervasive necessity in contemporary life of making life decisions where once one would simply have followed the traditional way of doing things (Giddens, 1991: 209–231; 1994: 14–15, 168–173; 2002b: 36–50). The greater awareness imposed on individuals by the restless, pluralistic, reflexive character of contemporary life means, for Giddens, that we are routinely required to make choices, and then to account for ourselves, to give reasons for what we do and the choices we make. This means that even when we defend traditions, which – following philosophic conservatism – it can often be reasonable to do, we must do so by appealing to reason, giving good grounds for doing so, rather than simply refusing dialogue, retreating into the defensive, closed, justification that this is how things have always been done around here (Giddens, 1994: 45–50). In societies that are multicultural, pluralistic, incessantly adjusting, constantly being challenged, it is necessary to engage in reasonable dialogue, to enhance mutual understanding. This means that we can no longer defend ‘tradition in the traditional way’, refusing reflection and dialogue, for this will lead to retrenchment, fundamentalism, and violence (Giddens, 2002b: 36–50). Reflexivity within institutions works in tandem with ‘disembedding’ mechanisms. Giddens’s elaboration of the idea of disembedding as he reflects on the deepest characteristics of radicalised modernity is one of his most insightful and far-reaching contributions. The two main forms of such mechanisms for Giddens are expert

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systems of many kinds, and symbolic tokens that are used to guide and sustain systemic co-ordination, with the functioning of money being his main focus in the latter case. Disembedding refers to the way in which the injunctions, guidelines, and pressures that are transmitted through these systemic activities have a generalised quality that outranks any traditions, deliberations, and judgements made from within localised contexts. The functioning of the abstract systems inevitably has to work through multiple localities. However, the system imperatives are ‘lifted out’ of those multiple immediate contexts in the sense that local concerns are subordinated to the efficient systemic organisation and reorganisation of social relations across large distances of time and space. That money typically works in an abstract and impersonal way is easy to grasp, typically exchanged as it is through modes of calculation that are impervious to anything but a few key objective indicators. It has qualities that allow social systems to function over large stretches of time and space, being a ‘means of connecting credit and liability in circumstances where immediate exchange of products is impossible’ (Giddens, 1990: 24). The idea of expert systems is very similar. For Giddens, it refers to the systems of professional expertise and technical accomplishments that organise so much of contemporary life. They involve the socio-technical application of impersonal knowledge embracing a vast range of differentiated practices from engineering to medicine, from accountancy to law, and from nuclear power to financial markets. Each of these abstract systems plays a part in co-ordinating social relations between distant and absent others according to impersonal, ‘universal’ criteria. The majority of local contexts are cross-cut and ‘emptied out’ by the power and authority of these stretched relations, and seemingly substantial local ‘places’ take on an increasingly phantasmagorical character. These local sites become conduits rather than places of autonomous decision-making. The specialised systems of thought which experts have knowledge of, or access to, and possess the skill to interpret, strive to provide guarantees of authority that can be trusted across stretched time and space. Both forms of disembedding mechanism rely on trust, and this intertwines with the centrality of risk to social life in radicalised modernity. In a context of heightened reflexivity, abstract systems require active trust in the validity of their mechanisms from system incumbents. The abstract systems themselves play a large role in bringing about the heightened level of reflexivity. This is because the individuals and groups who occupy nodal points within these systems are continually reviewing the knowledge they have in the light of new information about the systems they belong to, and in the light of shifting purposes. Late modernity faces a whole series of high-consequence risks, as well as those of a more limited nature, that are a direct result of reflexivity, of ‘our conscious intrusion into our own history and our interventions into nature’ (Giddens, 1994: 78). Giddens talks about these risks as forms of ‘manufactured uncertainty’. The uncertainties are social in origin, and include the risks associated with global warming, ozone depletion, nuclear power, desertification, chemical and biological warfare, the vulnerabilities of the global economy, demographic issues, and ‘illnesses generated by technological influences, such as those producing pollution of air water or food’ (Giddens, 1994: 78; also see 1990: 127). One can see the

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significance of economic and other systemic forces in the production of each one of these consequences, including the reflexive role that is played by experts in both creating and then attempting to solve the problems caused.

The Top-Down, Abstracted Bias of Giddens’s Radical Politics These deep themes of high modernity possess a generalising character. They pervade late modernity, and are all around us, marking and driving many different aspects of social life. While the strongest points of Giddens’s trademark analyses of large forces provide valuable elements of a framework in which to situate a radical politics, we also see the corresponding weaknesses. These are most evident in the roles of methodological orientation and value-dispositions in the shape and form of the politics. The continued absence of the best instincts of structuration theory translates into a lack of hermeneutic-structural sensitivity towards the lived experience of actors. There is also a continued focus on thin, uprooted themes, which means that too little attention is paid to establishing actual context. We have scant sense of the character of the relevant contextual meso- and micro-relationships that we would require to grasp the likely consequences of particular political platforms. These flaws are fused with the blind spots in Giddens’s value-dispositions, such that the only negative effects of abstract systems that he seriously considers are those that fall within his paradigm of risk and ‘manufactured uncertainty’. The combination of these limitations means that he consistently fails to focus on the pernicious hermeneutic-structural effects that disembedding systems produce in place after place, organisation after organisation, life after life, as a direct consequence of the forces of instrumental reason. It is difficult to reproduce these deficiencies in a summary account, so the cogency of my argument will ultimately rest on how well it stands up to close, full readings of Giddens’s writings. But some of the texture of what I am arguing can be conveyed in a sketch of some aspects of his politics. I will roughly sketch in some of the content of Giddens’s intervention into the political sphere, and its location at the historical intersection between radicalised modernity and the fate of social democracy in the UK and in Europe from the early 1990s. This will flesh out a little how the politics bears the stamp of the methodological and value characteristics I have described. It was during the 1990s that Giddens first outlined the third-way political position, initially in the still substantially theoretical volume, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (1994), and then in The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998), targeted at a wider audience. These came very soon after the prominent books on radicalised modernity, which have a significant influence on the political writings (Giddens, 1990; 1991; 1992). Giddens’s engagement with politics has been unfalteringly sustained since then, with a sequence of books strategically punctuating Labour’s years in power in the UK between 1997 and 2010 (Giddens, 2000; 2002a; 2007a; Hutton and Giddens, 2000; Giddens and Diamond, 2005), an influential book on The Politics of Climate Change (2009), and a recent, really quite

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prescient volume, Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe?, which was awarded the 2014 European Book Prize (Giddens, 2014; see also, 2007b). It is useful to single out four large themes in these writings linked to the generalised setting of radicalised modernity, and in some cases also to the historical conjuncture within particular societies. Each of these themes provides a significant impetus for Giddens’s turn towards politics. The first was what he calls the ‘death of socialism’, which was marked historically by the events of 1989, and intellectually by the demise of the belief that the reflexive dynamism required by late modern economies could be efficiently managed by centralised systems (1994: 66–69; 2000: 34–37). Secondly, there was the advent of globalisation with its profound transformation of time-space, its intensification of connections and flows of multiple kinds across national borders, and all that this indicated for the continuing, secular decline of the powers of individual nation-states. Here, the global financial markets were just the most developed form of what was now ‘a fully global economy’, with the everaccelerating revolutions in information, and in science and technology, already closely intertwined with this (Giddens, 1998: 30). Thirdly, there was the emergent reality, embodied in the significant role that reflexivity now plays in the lives of individuals, that life politics, life-values, and well-being are just as important as the traditional left-oriented politics of emancipation and equality (Giddens, 1991: 209–231; 1998: 41–46). Giddens was moved to highlight the role of reflexivity in this, and the abstracted elements of late modernity that could favour life politics. Interwoven with this emphasis, Giddens noted that the welfare state, the primary institutional form of promoting the politics of emancipation within existing social democracy, was buckling as an increasing proportion of GDP was spent on sustaining it. Expenditure on health, education, and public housing accounted for significant parts of this, but expenditure on social security had increased most. In the UK this increase amounted to more than 100 per cent in real terms over the twenty-year period up to 1995–1996: ‘The main factors underlying the increase were high unemployment, a growth in the numbers of in-work poor, and changes in demographic patterns, especially a growth in numbers of single parents and older people’ (Giddens, 1998: 113–114; also see 1994: 134–150). And fourthly, at the beginning of the 1990s, there was the electoral threat to the continued existence of social democratic parties across Europe, and Giddens focused a particular interest on the fate of the Labour Party in the UK. This provided a pressing pragmatic reason to reimagine social democracy in a manner that enabled it to rise to meet the challenges of radicalised modernity. In his 2002 Fabian Society pamphlet, Where Now for New Labour?, written as Tony Blair’s second government took office, Giddens accused third-way detractors from the left of having acute ‘memory loss’ on this score (Giddens, 2002a: 6–8). Giddens was adamant that his third-way political response to these and other factors was still firmly located within the tradition of social democracy, but he wanted to rethink and reconstruct that tradition, to break out of the confines of inherited and entrenched modes of thought. At the heart of his proposals was the belief that capitalism was here to stay, and, moreover, that there was much to be said for the responsiveness of market mechanisms to consumer demand and to what this

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represented in terms of the satisfaction of individual preferences. The creation of these spaces was infinitely preferable to their replacement by the dictates of authoritarian or bureaucratic commands. And – a key point for Giddens – one needed, also, to acknowledge the dynamic impetus that market mechanisms gave to scientific and technological innovation. He believed it to be clear that ‘private capital is essential for social investment’, and argued for a new ‘mixed economy’, looking for synergy between public and private sectors, including the non-profit sector (Giddens, 2000: 34; see also 2002a: 54–68). He placed a good deal of emphasis on dynamism and risk within the economy, but then also tempered this theme with another, calling for a humanising ‘balance between the economic and the non-economic in the life of the society’ (Giddens, 1998: 100, and 99–128). The public–private synergy would extend to the provision of welfare services, and there were said to already be many successful examples of such practices across several European countries. To underpin the new, mixed economy there was a need for a ‘social investment state’, facilitating, supporting and, where appropriate, providing insurance for vigorous and innovative forms of economic enterprise and investment. Social and economic policy should no longer be treated as if they were in separate compartments (Giddens, 2000: 121). The social investment approach offered a frame and a justification for the development of active forms of welfare integrated into an enabling enterprise culture. Within this, the state would harness ‘the positive or energetic side of risk’ by becoming actively involved in the provision of resources required for risk-taking (Giddens, 1998: 116). This was one aspect of a new vision of solidarity, part of which was captured in the refrain ‘no rights without responsibilities’, which would replace the ‘moral hazards’ that were at times encouraged, unwittingly, through welfare dependency (Giddens, 1998: 115; see also, 1994: 139–148). Giddens writes that we should no longer accept the passivity and inaction that, he argued, often resulted from a welfare system that was ‘essentially undemocratic, depending as it does upon a top-down distribution of benefits’, and whose forms could be ‘bureaucratic, alienating and inefficient’ (Giddens, 1998: 112–113). But without any sense of the messiness and the difficulties of actual contexts, and without any accompanying analysis of the intersections between abstract systems and real possibilities, it is difficult to see what alternatives to alienation Giddens is proposing here. His political prescriptions focus less on the impersonal, dehumanising negatives of bureaucracy per se and more on the need to engineer supply-side social mechanisms to match supply-side economics. The negatives within the welfare system, he writes, would be replaced – wherever possible and without abandoning the appropriate safety nets and mechanisms of redistribution – by forms of welfare provision that would themselves represent an innovative form of ‘social investment’. Welfare payments needed to be re-envisaged as investments in human capital so as to positively open up future possibilities for individual participants, or, alternatively, they could be integrated into programmes for the active development of civil society (Giddens, 1994: 174–197; 1998: 78–86, 111–128). The solutions are characteristically broad-brush, programmatic statements, abstracted from context.

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A Stronger Structuration Theory and a More Radical Politics From the start Giddens claimed, with appropriate satisfaction, that structuration theory was a ‘hermeneutically informed social theory’. This was undoubtedly a large part of its appeal. As we have seen, these interpretive dimensions of social life were always closely linked to structures within the approach, and so the emphasis on agency and meaning was always balanced by a corresponding attention to the ways in which these aspects were situated, grounded, in structural context. Because of this it is useful to think of structuration theory as having a distinctive ‘hermeneutic-structural’ emphasis at its heart (Stones, 2005, 5; 2015: 59–93; Stones and Jack, 2016). In more recent forms of structuration theory this dimension has been much further developed, and in ways that could facilitate more grounded conceptions of political strategy. The approach of strong structuration theory (SST), which is a synthesis of innovations in structuration theory and cognate areas gathered together over a number of years, is self-consciously designed to refine and enrich the conceptual range and precision of structuration (e.g. Coad, Jack, and Kholeif, 2016; Greenhalgh et al., 2013; Greenhalgh, Stones, and Swinglehurst, 2014; O’Reilly, 2012; Stones, 2005). The aim is to fashion structuration theory so it is easier to translate its abstract insights into empirical analysis while retaining links with broader conceptions of society. The aspiration is also to facilitate and shape empirical analysis so that it can be as relevant, detailed and precise as the problem at hand requires, and to the extent which the available empirical evidence will allow. Within all of this is a concern to sustain and deepen structuration theory’s emphasis on the interconnections between the inner lives of actors and the social-structural contexts of those lives. SST retains all, or most, of Giddens’s early conceptions of structure and agency within structuration, but has built on them quite substantially with an eye to being able to do greater justice to the contexts and the lived experiences of individuals. In this final section I will draw on SST, and the work of the various contributors to its formation, to indicate how it can help to bring Giddens’s uprooted, externally constructed themes of late modernity and third-way politics back down into the hermeneutically suffused, embedded contexts in which the real consequences of political strategies make themselves felt. In the process, I will indicate how this reembedding can provide the conceptual basis for a less top-down, more realistic, more progressive politics.

Two Interrelated Kinds of Internalised Structures SST not only insists that structuration theory must remain a hermeneutically informed theory, but aims to deepen this dimension of the approach. In pursuit of this end, it makes a distinction between two ways in which the cultural ‘frames of meaning’ of flesh-and-blood actors are affected by structural conditions ‘out-there’ (Stones, 2005). On the one hand, actors internalise and interpret the structures of the current context of action (structures a fronte). On the other hand, however, there are those many layers of conditions that have inhabited the many past significant

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moments in the biography of an individual, influencing her formation up to the current moment (structures a tergo). These layered social influences include those from geographical location, family, class, gender, ethnicity, socialisation, education, work, media, and so on, which leave their marks and their weight on the actor’s mind and body. The influences become lodged in what Nicos Mouzelis calls embedded dispositions, and which Pierre Bourdieu refers to as habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Mouzelis, 1991 and 2008; also see William Sewell Jr., 1992). The resultant embodied dispositions or habitus are made up of a mixture of values, ethical principles, cultural schemas or discourses, stocks of knowledge, ‘typified’ ways of seeing and categorising things and people, abilities, skills, gestures, ways of speaking, facility in interactions, and so on, that make up a good deal of who a person is. Habitus is an embedded matrix of perceptual and linguistic schemas, competencies and confidences, appreciations, sentiments, know-how, and so on. This matrix is in large part taken for granted, hardly noticed, and is transposable from one situation to another. Individuals draw on their durable dispositions skilfully and creatively, adapting them to varying but analogous situations. Values and ethical or moral principles are a significant part of these relatively enduring and transposable inheritances from past experiences. The writings of Andrew Sayer have established the necessity of conceptualising habitus so as to include ‘“ethical dispositions”, which, when activated, produce moral emotions or what Adam Smith termed “moral sentiments”’ (Sayer, 2005: 42, emphasis added). The importance of these moral emotions will be immediately apparent, for example, when thinking about the politics of populism, or of various kinds of fundamentalism. They must also be given weight when we think about the not unrelated everyday consequences of abstract systems. Sayer, drawing inspiration from recent feminist ethnographic and theoretical work on gender, class, and race, indicates the significance of ethical and emotional dispositions towards such principles as respect and disrespect, dignity, honesty, trust, a sense of justice, and altruism, to name just some. These are things that matter to people, that they care about, and which they have invested in, gradually, and in interaction with people they care about, over a lifetime. Such dispositions, Sayer argues, are an important part of intelligence and insight about the character of the social world, and hence of ethical reasoning (Sayer, 2005: 43, 39–50; 2011: 146–148). When people who are invested in these dispositions are confronted with circumstances and interactions in which the dispositions are transgressed, or seem to be, this will ordinarily result, quite reasonably, in intense emotional responses, whether repressed or vigorously articulated. It is important to be able to conceptualise the relation between these reflections on the past formation of habitus and the triggers in the present that will activate moral emotions. And this returns us to the first way in which the ‘frames of meaning’ of actors are affected by structural conditions ‘out-there’. This is through actors’ knowledge of the imminent conditions of action, what SST labels as actors’ conjuncturally specific knowledge of the contextual field that confronts them in carrying out their current everyday practices, whether routine or exceptional. The quality and adequacy of such knowledge, as well as its dispositional framing, matter immensely given the role these play in promoting moral emotions and varying forms of ethical

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reasoning. The conjuncturally specific terrain already plays a significant role within the ontology of Giddens’s structuration theory, whereas there is very little in that work that corresponds to the historical, social, and biographical weight of habitus. Giddens’s structuration theory, drawing on phenomenology, does make significant reference to elements such as actors’ stocks of knowledge, often accessed prereflectively, and these are important constituents of an actor’s frame of meaning. However, these are invariably directed towards conditions and consequences of current action. The role of conjuncturally specific knowledge within SST indicates just how useful it can be to treat such an emphasis on situationally specific knowledge as an analytical category in its own right, one that is distinct from habitus or the dispositional, but which is in continuous interaction with it. The category of conjuncturally specific knowledge draws attention to actors’ perceptions of the ways in which power, norms, and meaning are already inscribed in, and at work within, their contexts of action. The combination of the two categories – conjuncturally specific and habitus – also has the effect of highlighting the significance of the layers of cultural schemas and dispositions that are brought to bear on the framing and interpretation of situationally specific knowledge. This indicates the need to cultivate a deep appreciation of both, and of their interplay.

Excessive Instrumentalism and the Damage Done There is much more to say than I have space for here about how an actor’s knowledge of the forces, pressures, and potential dangers of the conjuncture interact with the more enduring dispositions of habitus. This is a rich seam to mine, including with respect to the ways in which an actor’s awareness of current, situational pressures will often clash with their ethical dispositions and moral emotions. The actor’s grasp of the power relations within the imminent contextual field will frequently create a tension between what the ideals, principles, and values of habitus would want her to do, and what she feels able to do if she is not to undermine her real-world obligations, commitments, and security. As we have noted, habitus typically harbours ethical and emotional dispositions towards issues of well-being, respect, fairness, loyalty, civility, mutual care, social integration, solidarity, and so on. Such concerns involve the kinds of values long associated in ethical thought with Aristotelian virtues, and these are typically interwoven with practical orientations towards what the moral theorist Alasdair MacIntyre calls the ‘internal goods’ of a particular vocation, profession, or set of practices (Greenhalgh et al., 2014, 213–214; MacIntyre, 1981: 216; also see Greenhalgh et al., 2013). These are goods realised in the course of trying to achieve standards of excellence appropriate to a particular kind of activity (MacIntyre, 1981: 175). Internal goods are to be distinguished from external goods, such as fame, status, or wealth that may result, contingently, from engaging in a particular set of practices but cannot be said to be intrinsic to the internal standards of those practices. There is much scope for tension between the pursuit of internal and external goods. On the basis of SST

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we can say that in the context of radicalised modernity it will be a struggle for even the most experienced and judicious groups to sustain the production of internal goods, and the excellences they represent, in the face of abstract, disembedded forces pushing them to focus on narrow targets and constricted conceptions of efficiency. At the same time, settling for the pursuit of narrow systemic goals leads to that ‘hollowing out’ of localities that Giddens cogently identifies with disembedding, but then fails to sufficiently address. The diminishing of local spaces for direct and meaningful collective decision-making has significant effects. There are fewer and fewer opportunities to develop those aspects of individual and group habitus that are part and parcel of collective decision-making aimed at the joint, autonomous, pursuit of internal goods. That is, there is a decline in those dispositions of habitus cultivated through mutually supportive practices of joint creativity, mutual assistance, care and concern, which generate capabilities, motivation and self-regard (cf. Nussbaum, 2011: 17–45; Sen, 1999: 225–317). The elements of these dispositions that do continue to be performed take on a spectral quality. Mainly they are clustered around practices whose constricted parameters have been set elsewhere. Other, noninstrumental dispositions, such as the human care and concern invested in colleagues, will now be largely severed from intrinsic connections to the shared pursuit of internal goods. The undermining of local contexts amounts, in fact, to the gradual subversion of conditions necessary for the continued production of substantive excellence and human flourishing across a range of spheres. In order to prevent this erosion of capabilities, local groupings would need to possess sufficient autonomy to keep excessively intrusive external pressures at bay. Without this autonomy, they will not be able to exercise the appropriate forms of practical wisdom (phronesis) that their layers of local background knowledge tell them is appropriate to the situation at hand. The appropriate in situ exercise of such knowledge relies, amongst other things, on actors having the power to draw on their deep indexical awareness regarding the specifics of context, and the licence to employ their sense of the appropriate ethical-emotional dispositions or ‘orders of moral worth’ relevant to the situation at hand (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; and see Stones, 2014b). In the absence of concerted resistance and sympathetic regulation, the abstract systems of late modernity will routinely undermine and subvert many of the necessary conditions of existence of these non-instrumental excellences and valuedispositions. Their current, gradual, widespread erosion is typically treated as nothing more than essential collateral damage as the abstract systems, transmitted impersonally from near and far, impose themselves on the immediate conjunctural field. These forces systematically undermine those indispensable aspects of social support that Avishai Margalit lauds as ‘thick conceptions’ of ethics (Margalit, 2002: 8 and passim), and which Peter Hall, Michèle Lamont, and their collaborators continue to explore as the vital ‘social resources’ that allow individuals to withstand the magnitude of life challenges (Hall and Taylor, 2009: 84; original emphasis; see also Hall and Lamont, 2013).

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A truly ethical politics cannot assign such damage to silence, to the realm of the invisible or treat it as inconsequential, a means to more efficient ends. Rather, an ethically attuned politics needs to be hermeneutically attentive not only to what Amartya Sen calls ‘culmination outcomes’ – those that we measure and judge at the end of a process – but also, and much more so, to the ‘comprehensive outcomes’ which his conception of justice places at the ethical centre of social organisation. Ethical attention to comprehensive outcomes means paying attention to every consequence at every step of the way, to each of the ‘exact processes through which the eventual states of affairs emerge’, which should not be ‘obliterated by some exclusive focus on what happens only at the culmination’ (Sen, 2009: 22–23, 208–221; Stones, 2017a). Ethical attention needs to be directed to the damage caused at the junction between instrumental systems designed to produce narrow culmination outcomes and the lives of human beings designated as means by these systems. This is the junction between the system and the lifeworld identified by Jürgen Habermas, and we are insisting here, against Giddens, that the damage done to lifeworlds be placed centre stage in any progressive politics (Habermas, 1987; White, 1988: 107–127). The plurality of lifeworlds, equipped to foster the pursuit of internal goods, need to receive much greater respect and active support within the functioning of social systems. And to do this adequately, dialogically, Giddens’s political vision needs to bring back the hermeneutic-structural dimension of structuration, and to bring in a greater attentiveness to the dynamics between the powerful instrumental forces within context and the values and moral sentiments within habitus. As things stand, far from Giddens developing an approach that can facilitate the ever-deepening dialogue with citizens that he advocates in volumes such as Beyond Left and Right (Giddens, 1994: 112–124), the effect of his later writings, which are heedless of the voices and the experiences of actors in situ, is to move politics in the opposite direction.

Conceptualising and Identifying the Force of External Structures Grounded political strategy needs us to pay attention to these hermeneutic-structural junctions in the lives of actors. And it also needs us to think more seriously about the structural contexts themselves. For it is with the detailed characteristics of these that a politics that is boldly utopian and ethically informed but also genuinely realistic, needs to contend. Particular attention needs to be paid to the dynamics of abstract systems within these strategic contexts of radicalised modernity. This is a further area which contemporary structuration theory has been developing through innovation, dialogue, and debate. Margaret Archer’s key criticism of Giddens’s structuration theory was that it had no conception of external, contextual structures that could be identified independently of the situated actor’s perception of these (cf. Archer, 1995). This was a perceptive and, as it turned out, fruitful insight, at the same time as it was an exaggeration. It was an overstatement because some conception of external structures was already built into various aspects of Giddens’s framework, including, as we have seen, in the ideas of unacknowledged and unintended consequences of action (Stones, 2001; 2005). But there was something in the criticism that prompted

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further exploration. It was true that Giddens had done little to flesh out this domain, leaving those interested in the empirical application of his ideas with a lot left to do if they wished to translate the abstract idea of structure as rules and resources into an empirical context. The inherent ability of structuration theory to go on to say more about external structures has been demonstrated in the work of the Greek theorist Nicos Mouzelis. Amongst other innovations, Mouzelis has shown that the framework of structuration can provide the basis for the creative development of a range of conceptual tools around the idea of external structures. He indicates, for example, how external structures can be more or less malleable or intractable, and he draws out both objective and subjective aspects of this observation (Mouzelis, 1991, and 2008). Mouzelis’s theorising suggests a variety of different degrees of constraint and opportunity for differently situated actors, and for actors with different relational characteristics, such as variable degrees of power. The extent and character of the constraint or the opportunity will depend upon a combination of the hard and soft realities of the external context and upon an actor’s own ability to assess that context and to perform within it, through it, or against it. It is of considerable significance that neither of Giddens’s two forms of methodological bracketing is able to adequately address the issue of context, which means the external conditions of action facing any political strategy. Neither institutional analysis nor strategic conduct analysis is able to look outwards towards the richness of the structural or contextual field itself. We have already seen that institutional analysis has an anaemic conception of context. Strategic conduct analysis does provide some access to the structural side of the ‘hermeneutic-structural’ dimensions of social life. However, the focus here is on how situated actors’ perceptions of what these are act as guides that inform their actions. Neither form of methodological bracketing is designed to look outwards towards the strategically indispensable detail of context, to the powerful dynamics of that context, and to whatever room exists there for creative, humane resistance. These are serious ontological and methodological lacunae within Giddens’s version of structuration theory, with substantial implications for political vision and strategy. At the level of ontology, we need to be able to say more about the characteristics of the external conditions of action themselves that would lie beyond the realities that ‘strategic conduct analysis’ directs one towards. And at the level of epistemology and methodology we need to be clear that there are many questions and problems (explananda) in the realms of politics that require a close knowledge of external conditions in order to be adequately addressed. The question posed with respect to a particular phenomenon might concern, for example, the rise of support for right-wing populism and the search for the plural causes of this within context. Or, again not unrelated, we may want to address one of the plurality of politically strategic puzzles around ill health, or feelings of worthlessness or anomie, produced by specific aspects of the slash-and-burn disembedding mechanisms of abstract systems. Understanding both the specifics of contextual dynamics and the hermeneutic-structural perceptions of these is essential to the formulation of political strategy.

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In order to begin to address questions such as these, and to engage in theoretically informed dialogue with citizens, one would need a further form of methodological bracketing. A methodological focus is required that can focus attention upon the characteristics and dynamics of the external contextual field itself, and which can compare it with the internalisation of relevant aspects of the field by actors of interest within it. The methodological bracket of ‘strategic context analysis’ was developed in the early 1990s for analogous reasons, and ones that can be readily transposed to the questions thrown up by Giddens’s third-way politics (Stones, 1991: 673–695; 1996: 98–102; 2005, 121–123). Strategic context analysis (SCXA) – at times labelled as ‘agent’s context analysis’ – focuses on an actor’s conjuncturally specific knowledge, and then combines this with a conception of the external structures the knowledge is directed towards. In its most developed form SCXA leads us more clearly outwards from the actor into the domain of external structures conceived in terms of the contextual field in which she is situated (2015: 59–66 and passim). SCXA directs us to examine the social configurations out-there, which can include systemic connections and transmission mechanisms, and likely consequences of different courses of action. It can lead us through actors and their frames of meaning into the details of the entities, relations, and processes within their conjunctural terrain of action. Situated actors’ perspectives on the contextual field can be examined by an external researcher or political advocate on the basis of the double hermeneutic. Such an external perspective on the contextual field can also potentially identify causal influences, potential courses of action, and probable consequences that may well not be apparent to the situated actors. It is essential to also recognise, however, that the external observer may well fail to grasp a great deal about relevant actors’ contexts and their orientations to these contexts. In deploying SCXA it can be helpful to begin by sketching out the ontological features of a contextual field in order to foreground an array of features that could well be relevant in different ways to situated individuals within that field. In shorthand, we can refer to these as ‘the objective factors’ within a contextual field (Stones, 2015: 27–35). These would include the mapping of the following potentially relevant factors: key individual and collective actors; their respective locations; their most important formal duties, obligations, and sets of expectations, and the goals attached to their roles; the various kinds of resources and powers these actors have at their disposal; relations of interdependence linking key actors to each other and providing conditions of existence for each other’s activities and practices – these would include various kinds of hierarchy and power dependence, embracing those based on authority, resources, technology, communication, and logistics; shared or conflicting cultural and ideological affiliations; and the forces, pressures, constraints, and sanctions that actors routinely impose, or could impose, on each other as a result of their powers, relations, interdependencies, and so on (Stones, 2015: 32; see also, Stones, 2014a). Outlining the contextual field in this way takes us way beyond the high abstractions of Giddens’s three analytically distinct aspects of the structural context. The contextual field still contains abstract, ontological ideas – the kinds of observations about the characteristics of the social world that could apply anytime and anywhere.

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However, there are many more of them here than in Giddens’s conception of external context, providing a much richer framework for analysis. The conception of contextual fields is also designed to invite easy translation into the actual, empirical specifics of particular cases, providing general concepts – of actors, hierarchies, interdependencies, and pressures, for example – that can readily be geared towards empirical identification within particular cases. Contextual fields use a perspective, moreover, that fits well with the everyday language of the public sphere, starting, in the first instance, with resources and powers attached to specific actors, and embedded in networks of relations, rather than with themes of power existing in the abstract. This enhances the potential for social theory to weave itself into the fabric of practical, everyday social and political reflection. The conception of a contextual field relevant to the issue at hand can encompass the immediate micro level of analysis but can also stretch through the meso to the macro level, accommodating many different forms of time-space distanciation, including those of globalisation. Powerful factors within a contextual field can be spatially distant to an actor-in-focus while being very near in terms of the time it would take for their negative sanctions to make themselves felt. In this sense the macro will often be as much a part of the imminent conditions of action as the meso and the micro. As noted, mapping an appropriate contextual field aims at an easier translation between concepts and empirical evidence. However, it leaves us with the problem, never addressed by Giddens, of how to link structures as rules and resources to this more substantive, filled-in, sense of structural context. It is here that we need to return to the specific problem at hand, or situation to be explained. We could start by postulating what we think the causes of the explanandum might be, causes lodged in and emanating from the conjuncturally detailed contextual field. It would be at this stage that we would have to decide on the usefulness or otherwise of translating more substantive ideas, such as a specific instance of hierarchy or interdependence into the language of power, norms, and meaning, or of resources and rules. My own view is that it will, in fact, often be useful to think with these analytical tools, derived as they are from significant traditions of sociological thought that have singled them out as central forces within social life. Thinking with them might involve considering whether, say, power or cultural norms are of more significance in a particular situation, as this can provide clues as to the best strategy to adopt in attempting to bring about change. They can provide a prompt to examine how ‘rules’ interweave with power, sometimes simply cloaking secure power with the charm and allure of rhetorical significations and the sheen of legitimacy. Or, in considering how norms and power interweave, one may discover, in many cases, that power insists on the adaptation of behaviour to norms that would not otherwise be freely adopted. Alternatively, in other situations it will be the allegiance to certain norms that will underpin power, meaning that a change in normative culture in what is considered legitimate would be enough to undercut the authoritative resources of those at the apex of a hierarchy. In all this, however, the direction of analysis has changed substantially, for now our starting point is a more substantial, recognisable world. It is a theoretical

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world that is much closer to the ground. We have only brought in Giddens’s highly abstracted analytical structures as and when they are required to help us with our explanatory objectives. We are able to work out how his analytical categories interweave with each other, but only once we have already established the much more substantial, fulsome set of objective categories that populate the contextual field. This is the field within which hermeneutic-structural analysis makes sense. A politics that is genuinely determined to ‘democratise democracy’, to engage in dialogue with situated actors within the plurality of social and institutional spheres, needs to have a developed, grounded conception of those plural contexts. These are the contexts that provide the structural setting for the hermeneuticstructural frames of meaning of the actors who are being given the promise of dialogue. They are the contexts that are traversed in particular ways by the abstract systems that are the most dominant contemporary forms of power-norm structures. A progressive politics must provide infrastructures that can enable actors to articulate their experience of interacting with abstract systems. Weight needs to be given to tensions between the dynamic pressures emanating from contextual fields and the dispositions, values, and ideal endeavours of actors. The infrastructures required would have to facilitate a multiplicity of conversations about, within, and beyond multiplicities of institutions and organisations. The purpose of these conversations and negotiations would be an organic, reformist, twenty-first-century analogue of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘war of position’, integrating a concern with culture and norms with issues of power and the honest provision of spaces for autonomy. Such a vision would have to take very seriously the specificities of values, knowledge, and positioning. It would need to be committed to significant degrees of reembedding to swing the pendulum back towards comprehensive outcomes of human flourishing and away from the narrow culmination outcomes of instrumental reasoning. The re-embedding would need to create spaces in which individuals and groups at local levels would have sufficient power and autonomy not to simply submit to the injunctions of disembedding forces. Actors near the centre of macro-level politics – if, in fact, they possess sufficient contextual autonomy and power to do so (Stones, 2014b: 224–231) – would need to create mechanisms allowing meso and micro actors the autonomy necessary to make their own meaningful, value-based judgements of compromise, resistance, or creative re-visioning. But a further step is also essential. A progressive politics will have to find mechanisms to enable these more autonomous local judgements to feed back into the steady reform and re-visioning of macro political schemas, engaging and informing a politics that is genuinely based on situated dialogue.

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Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. 2006 [1991]. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bryant, Christopher G. A. 1992. ‘Sociology without Philosophy? The Case of Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory.’ Sociological Theory 10: 137–149. Coad, Alan, Lisa Jack, and Ahmed Kholeif (eds.). 2016. Special Issue on Strong Structuration Theory. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 29(7). Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Giddens, Anthony. 1971. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Macmillan. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan. 1981. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Volume 1: Power, Property, and the State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Volume 2. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1993. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2000. The Third Way and Its Critics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2002a. Where Now for New Labour? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2002b. Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives, 2nd edition. London: Profile Books. 2007a. Over to You, Mr Brown. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2007b. Europe in the Global Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2009. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2014. Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony and Patrick Diamond (eds.). 2005. The New Egalitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Greenhalgh, Trish, Joe Wherton, Paul Sugarhood, Sue Hinder, Rob Procter, and Rob Stones. 2013. ‘What Matters to Older People with Assisted Living Needs? A Phenomenological Analysis of the Use and Non-use of Telehealth and Telecare.’ Social Science and Medicine 93: 86–94. Greenhalgh, Trish, Rob Stones, and Deborah Swinglehurst. 2014. ‘Choose and Book: A Sociological Analysis of Resistance to an Expert System.’ Social Science and Medicine, 104: 210–219.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Critique of Functionalist Reason. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hall, Peter, and Michèle Lamont (eds.). 2013. Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Peter, and Rosemary C. R. Taylor. 2009. ‘Health, Social Relations, and Public Policy.’ In Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont (eds.), Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (pp. 82–103). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2017. ‘Harold Garfinkel.’ In Rob Stones (ed.), Key Sociological Thinkers, 3rd edition, (pp. 188–200). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hutton, Will, and Anthony Giddens. 2000. ‘Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton in Conversation.’ In Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds.), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (pp. 1–51). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. MacIntyre, Alisdair. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mouzelis, Nicos. 1991. Back to Sociological Theory. London: Macmillan. 2008. Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Reilly, Karen. 2012. International Migration and Social Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sayer, Andrew. 2005. The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Amartya, 1999. Development as Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2009. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin Books. Sewell Jr., William. 1992. ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformations.’ American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. Stones, Rob. 1991. ‘Strategic Context Analysis: A New Research Strategy for Structuration Theory.’ Sociology 25(3): 673–695. 1996. Sociological Reasoning. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2001. ‘Refusing the Realism-Structuration Divide.’ European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2): 177–197. 2005. Structuration Theory. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014a. ‘Social Theory and Current Affairs: A Framework for Greater Intellectual Engagement.’ British Journal of Sociology 65(2): 293–316. 2014b. ‘Strengths and Limitations of Luc Boltanski’s On Critique.’ In Bryan Turner and Simon Susen (eds.), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’ (pp. 211–234). London, Delhi, New York: Anthem Press. 2015. Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2017a. ‘Political Sociology and Political Theory.’ In William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology (vol. 1, pp. 256–275). London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2017b. ‘Sociology’s Other Unspoken Weakness: Bringing Epistemology Back in.’ Journal of Sociology 53(4): 730–752.

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Stones, Rob, and Lisa Jack. 2016. ‘The Bridge between Ontological Concepts and Empirical Evidence: An Interview with Rob Stones.’ Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 29(7): 1145–1151. White, Stephen K. 1988. The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice & Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Abend, Gabriel, xiii, xviii Abendroth, Wolfgang, 370 Abernet, Viola, 221 Academy of Dijon, 12 Acéphale (group), 113 Adams, John, 30–1 Addams, Jane, 218 Addison, Joseph, 33, 35–6 Adler, Mortimer, 29, 31–2 Adorno, Theodor generally, 77 Elias and, 274 in Frankfurt school, 76 Habermas and, 370–1, 379 phenomenology and, 292–3 Weber and, 148–9 Ainslie, George, 246 Akagawa, Manabu, 221 Akers, Ronald, 213 Alexander, Bryant, 218 Alexander, Jeffrey C. generally, xiii–xv, xvi, xvii Durkheim and, 85–6, 92, 99 Weber and, 147 Algerian War for Independence, 318 Ali, Tariq, 80 alienation, 47–8 Altheide, David, 220 Althusser, Louis, 46, 78–9, 264–5 altruistic suicide, 93–4 Ambrosino, Georges, 104, 120 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 370–1 American Civil Liberties Union, 197 American Psychiatric Association, 214 American Sociological Association, 332 Amsterdam School, 275 Anderson, Kevin B., xix–xx Anderson, Perry, 78 Annales school, 79 anomic suicide, 94–5 anti-Semitism, 343, 351 Antonio, Robert J., xxi–xxii Apel, Karl-Otto, 292–3, 311 Archer, Margaret, 414 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 19, 149 Ariosto, Ludovico, 35–6

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Aristotle, 30, 32, 51, 294, 412 Arizona State University, 331 Árnason, Jóhann P., 371 Arnold, Matthew, 24, 36–7, 38 Aron, Raymond, 149, 318, 319–20 Arunta clan, 105, 111–12, 115 Athens, Lonnie, 219, 220 Atkinson, Max, 246 Atkinson, Paul, 220 Austin, J.L., 230–1, 371 Australia, Marxism in, 72 Ayukawa, Jun, 221 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 24, 32, 41, 134 Bachelard, Gaston, 323 Bacon, Francis, 16 Badiou, Alain, 77, 79–80 Baehr, Peter, 41–2 Bakunin, Mikhail, 59 Bales, Robert F., 187 Balibar, Étienne, 264 Barash, Meyer, 123 Barnes and Noble Company, 31 Barthes, Roland, 218, 260–3 Barzun, Jacques, 40–1 Bastide, Roger, 250–1 Bataille, Georges. See also Collège de sociologie generally, 103, 105 centrality of sociology and, 116–18 founding of Collège de sociologie and, 104–5 myth and ritual and, 113–14 “primitive” and, 122 sacred and, 106–8, 111–12, 121 sacrifice and, 121 social action and, 109–11 tragedy and, 121 virility and, 116 Bateson, Gregory, 236, 356–7 Baudelaire, Charles, 258–9 Bauman, Zygmunt, 78 Baxter, Richard, 131 Beattie, James, 34 Beauvoir, Simone de, 331 Bebel, Ferdinand August, 71 Beck, Ulrich, xxii Becker, Howard, 212

Index Beiderbecke, Bix, 25 Beilharz, Peter, xix–xx Bell, Daniel, 191 Bellah, Robert, 99, 132, 152–3 Bendix, Reinhard, 152 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 79, 103 Bennett, Arnold, 24, 37–8 Benoit-Smullyan, Émile, 85 Bentham Jeremy, 90 Benzecry, Claudio, xvii Berg, Lars-Erik, 221 Berger, Peter, 146, 293, 295, 296 Bergson, Henri, 146 Bernstein, Eduard, 70–2 Bershady, Harold, 195, 196–7 Best, Joel, 214 biosociology, xxii Bismarck, Otto von, 129, 152 Bittner, Egon, 358, 362 Blair, Tony, 408 Blake, William, 40 Blau, Peter M., 147, 219–20, 251–3 Bloch, Ernst, 65, 162 Bloom, Harold, 35 Blumenberg, Hans, 154 Blumer, Herbert generally, xv, 219–20 symbolic interactionism and, 205, 208–10, 213, 214 B’nai Brith, 351 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 35–6 Bodin, Jean, 1 Boethius, 35 Boguslaw, Robert, 357 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 127 Boileau, 35–6 Bolshevism, 72–4 Boltanski, Luc, 319–20 Bonald, Louis de, 6 Bonapartism, 56, 57 Borchardt, Knut, 127 Borges, Jorge Luis, 65 Boschetti, Anna, 330 Boswell, James, 26–7 Bott, Elizabeth, 230 Boudon, Raymond, 250–1, 267, 319–20, 329 Bouglé, Célestin, 88, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre generally, xx, 80, 84–5 Algeria and, 318 appeal of, 327 capitals and, 321–3 classics and, 36 conceptual arms for combat, 325 conceptual framework of, 320 contributions of, 331–4 criticisms of, 334–6 cultural capital and, 328–9, 334, 335

culture, contributions to, 332 education, contributions to, 332 epistemological break, 323 field and, 321–3, 329, 334–5 habitus and, 327–8, 329, 335 integration of subjective and objective forms of knowledge, 324 legacy of, 325–7 life of, 318–20 Marxism versus, 321 “omnivore” debate, 329 overview, 317, 336–7 Parsons compared, 320 phenomenology and, 311 power and, 320–3 reflexivity and, 324 relational thinking and, 323–4 scholars influenced by, 330–1 structuration theory and, 411 symbolic power and, 321 terminology of, 327–30 Weber and, 147, 321, 322 bourgeoisie, 55–6 Bowring, Finn, 97 Brahms, Johannes, 29, 32 Braithwaite, R.B., 187 Bratman, Michael, 302 Breiger, Ronald L., xxi British Museum, 274 Broch, Hermann, 149 Brown, John, 58 Browne Thomas, 33 Brubaker, Rogers, 320, 331 Bruner, Jerome, 351, 356, 368 Bruni, Girodano, 285 Budapest School, 77–8 Buddhism, 125–6, 131, 150 Budgeon, Shelly, xxi Buffon, Comte de, 35 Bunyan, John, 131 Burawoy, Michael, 331, 334 Burgess, Ernest, 219–20 Burke, Edmund, 6, 27, 39 Burke, Kenneth, 230, 346, 356–7 Byron, George Gordon, 35–6 Cage, John, 134 Caillois, Roger. See also Collège de sociologie generally, 103 antipolitical stance, 116 festival and, 122 founding of Collège de Sociologie and, 104, 105, 123 myth and ritual and, 111–12 “primitives” and, 122 sacred and, 107, 108, 110, 113, 121 shamans and, 114 social action and, 109

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index Calhoun, Craig, 330, 331, 334, 335–6 Camic, Charles, 334 Camus, Albert, 319–20 Canguilhem, Georges, 323 Carnegie Corporation, xiv–xv Carter, Prudence L., 334 Casanova, Pascale, 41 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 65, 66, 71–2, 80 Catholicism science and, 285 suicide and, 94 Center for European Sociology, 318 Cervantes, Miguel de, 35–6 Challenger (space shuttle), 217 character of nations, 9–11 charisma, 137–8, 151 Charmaz, Kathy, 220 Chevalier, Danielle, 221 Chicago school, 146–7, 175–6, 346 China civilizing processes, and theory of, 280 Marx and, 60–1 Weberian social theory and, 155 Chomsky, Noam, 218, 371 Chopin, Frederic, 29 Chugerman, Samuel, 42 Cicourel, Aaron, 362–3 civilizing processes, theory of generally, xx civilization defined, 275–7, 290 de-civilizing processes, 281–2 established-outsider model and, 283–4 fragility of habitus, 281 gender and, 278–9 Goffman and, 278 habitus, changes in, 277–8, 280–1, 290–1 Marxism and, 279 overview, 272 Parsons and, 277 problems in translation, 290–1 reversals of, 281–2 Schütz and, 276 sexuality and, 281–2 sport and, 282–3 state and, 279–80 Weber and, 278, 279, 291 civil society, xxii Clark, Brett, xxi–xxii Clark, Kenneth B., 197 Clarke, Adele, 220 classics generally, xix Arnold on, 36–7 Bennett on, 37–8 defining, 24–5, 39 Eliot on, 38–40 importance of, 26 Lamb on, 33–4

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in literature, 26, 31–2 in music, 25, 29, 32 overview, 24 recent analyses of, 40–2 Sainte-Beuve on, 35–6 Signet Classics, 31 Club de l’Entresol, 10, 15 Cocke, W. John, 362–3 Coetzee, J. M., 24, 41 Cole, G. D. H., 65 Coleman, James, 147, 229, 240, 251 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 33, 40 Collaborative Research Center, 363 collective conscious, 91 collective intentionality, 302 Collège de France, 84, 318–19 Collège de sociologie generally, xix–xx activism of, 109 ambiguity and, 108 antipolitical stance of, 114–16 centrality of sociology and, 116–18 disconnect between personhood and social function and, 107–8 festivals and, 112 founding of, 104 Frankfurt school and, 109 Lévi-Strauss and, 118 myth and ritual and, 105–6, 111–14 overview, 103–4 power and, 109–11 “primitive” and, 115 “sacred sociology” and, 104–5, 106–8 sacrifice and, 121 shamanism and, 114 social action and, 109–11 tragedy and, 120 Collins, Patricia Hill, xxi Collins, Randall, 85, 87, 147, 327, 331 colonialism, Marx and, 60–2 Columbia University, xiv–xv communicative action, 385 Communist International, 45, 72 comprehensibility as validity claim, 384–5 Comte, Auguste generally, 5, 8, 162 classics and, 24, 37, 39 Durkheim and, 87–8, 89 Garfinkel and, 345 science and, 285 symbolic interactionism and, 206 Condorcet, Marquis de, 5 Confucianism, 125–6, 150, 156 conjuncturally specific knowledge, 411–12 Constant, Benjamin, 6 constructionism, 214–15 contextual field, 415–18

Index Contre-Attaque (political collective), 113 conversation analysis, 356 Cook, Gary, 220 Cook, Maeve, 382 Cooley, Charles Horton, 207, 227, 235, 346 Copernicus, Nicholas, 185 Corneille, Pierre, 35 Cornelius Nepos, 27 correctness as validity claim, 384 Coser, Lewis A., xv, 188, 192–4, 251 Couch, Carl J., 210, 221 Crawley, Sarah, 215 crime, symbolic interactionism and, 211–13 critical hermeneutics, 379–80 critical realism, xxi critical theory Habermas and, 369, 374, 376, 377–8, 382–3, 392 Marxism and, 76–8, 79 criticism, 181, 182–3 Croucher, Sheila, xxi Crozier, Michel, 319–20 cultural theory, xxi Currie, Scott, 218 Cuvillier, Armand, 118 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 180, 188, 192, 194–5 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 2 Dante, 35–6, 37, 40, 68 Daoism, 125–6, 131 Darwin, Charles, 71–2 Darwinism, 49 Davies, Scott, 328–9 Davis, Murray S., 42 debate regarding theory, xiii–xiv Deegan, Mary Jo, 218 defining social theory, xiii De Mann, Caroline, 221 democracy Habermas and, 372, 373 Weber and, 152 Demosthenes, 35–6 Denzin, Norman K., 217–18, 220, 221 Derrida, Jacques, 78, 80, 84–5, 218 Descartes, René, 273–4, 301 Deutsch, Karl, 356–7 deviance, symbolic interactionism and, 211–13 Dewey, John, 190, 207 dialectic, 45–7 dictionaries, xix Diderot, Denis, 2 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 147, 371 DiMaggio, Paul, 327, 329, 330, 333 disenchantment, 151 Disney, Michael J., 362–3 “disobedient generation,” xvii Ditton, Jason, 231 Dorsey, Tommy, 25

dramaturgical action, 385 dramaturgical sociology generally, xx advantages of, 231 “Agnes” study, 229, 240–5, 246 anchor frames and, 237 communication, as theory of, 227, 230, 235 disadvantages of, 231 discrepant roles and, 234–5 Durkheim and, 244 ethnomethodology and, 240–5, 246 Freud and, 230 Garfinkel and, 226, 229, 240–5, 246 Habermas and, 227 identity, as theory of, 227–9 inhibitory norms, 232–3 intellectual context of, 229–31 keyings and, 236 Mead compared, 226–7, 235, 236 Merton and, 227, 234 overview, 226–9, 245–7 Parsons compared, 227, 228, 229–30, 244–6 performance and, 233–4, 235 pretense versus depiction, 231–2, 233 primary frameworks and, 236 rational choice theory and, 227, 228, 246 re-emergence of, 235–6 signaling theory and, 228, 230, 232, 237–40, 246 Simmel and, 230, 232 symbolic interactionism and, 211 team and, 234–5 trust versus deception, 232, 237 “two selves thesis,” 234 Weber and, 230, 244 Draper, Hal, 65 Dreyfus, Alfred, 96–7 Dreyfus, Louise, 88 Dreyfus affair, 96–8 DuBois, W. E. B., 206–7, 343 Dumais, Susan A., 334 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 45, 54, 78 Dunning, Eric, 275, 286 Durkheim, André, 87 Durkheim, Émile generally, xiv, xvi, xix–xx, 123, 319–20 abandonment of binary nature of solidarity, 92–5 Alexander and, 85–6, 92, 99 altruistic suicide and, 93–4 anomic suicide and, 94–5 Arunta clan and, 105, 111–12, 115 binary nature of solidarity and, 89–92 classics and, 42 collective conscious and, 91 Collège de sociologie (See Collège de sociologie) Comte and, 87–8, 89

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index Durkheim, Émile (cont.) division of labor and, 89–92 dramaturgical sociology and, 244 egoistic suicide and, 93–4 fatalistic suicide and, 94–5 formative years, 87–8 Foucault and, 84–5 French Revolution and, 114 Garfinkel and, 343, 344, 345, 357, 364 Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, 89–92 Giddens and, 92 Habermas and, 371 individualism versus collectivism and, 95, 96–8, 294 integration and suicide, 93–4 Kant and, 87–8, 97 legacy of, 84–6 Lévi-Strauss and, 84–5 life of, 86–9 Marx compared, 84, 90–1 Mauss and, 88, 89, 98, 105 mechanical versus organic solidarity, 89–92 Montesquieu and, 87–8 Parsons and, 85, 86, 99, 180, 352 regulation and suicide, 94–5 religion and, 95, 98–9 Rousseau and, 91, 97 sacralization and, 114–15 Simmel compared, 90–1, 163, 175 social constructivism and, 296 Spencer and, 87–8, 89, 97 structuralism and, 251 suicide and, 92–5 symbolic interactionism and, 206, 207 Weber compared, 84, 90–1, 145, 146 Durosoy, Abbé, 6–7 Dylan, Bob, 29 Eagleton, Terry, 80 Eco, Umberto, 260 École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 318 École normale supérieure, 318 Ecology, xxi–xxii Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture, 16 egoistic suicide, 93–4 Einstein, Albert, 185 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 151, 152–3 Elias, Hermann, 273 Elias, Norbert Adorno and, 274 civilizing processes, theory of (See Civilizing processes, theory of) collected works of, 272 figurational sociology (See Figurational sociology) Horkheimer and, 274 knowledge and, 284–5

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life of, 273–5 Parsons and, 198 science and, 284–5 sociological theory and, 272 Weber and, 274 Elias, Sophie, 273 Eliot, T. S., 24, 38–40, 41, 226 Ellis, Carolyn, 220 Elster, Jon, 246, 329 embodiment, xxii Emirbayer, Mustafa, 333 emotions theory, xxi empathy, phenomenology and, 297–8 Enckendorff, Marie Luise, 161 encyclopedias, xix Engels, Friedrich generally, 58, 67, 69, 71–2, 80, 237–8 dialectic and, 45 free association and, 48 gender and, 59–60 German Social Democracy and, 70 historical materialism and, 49 Marx compared, 67 revolution and, 56 Russia and, 62 social class and, 55 systemic collapse and, 54 Enlightenment generally, 2, 4, 7 criticism during, 181 Rousseau and, 11–12 Epictetus, 30 Erasmus, 27, 277–8 Erfurt Program, 72 Erikson, Kai, 213 ethics and law, 372, 373 ethnomethodology generally, xx dramaturgical sociology and, 240–5, 246 Garfinkel and, xx, 362 Euripides, 27 Eutropius, 27 Everyman Library, 31 evolutionary sociology, xxii “expression games,” 217 Fabians, 72, 75, 408 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, xix–xx Fanon, Frantz, 331 fashion, 172–4 fatalistic suicide, 94–5 Fehér, Ferenc, 77–8 feminist social theory generally, xxi constructionism and, 215 Ferguson, Adam, 17–18 festivals, 112 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 68

Index Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 206 Fielding, Henry, 34 figurational sociology generally, xx concept avoidance and, 286 dichotomies, rejection of, 287 game models and, 287 overview, 272, 286 role of humans in, 286–7 time and, 286 Fine, Gary Alan, 218–19, 221, 330, 332 First International, 58–9, 68 Flaubert, Gustave, 319 Fligstein, Neil, 333 Foote, Nelson, 219–20 Forst, Rainer, 371 Foucault, Michel generally, 319–20 Durkheim and, 84–5 phenomenology and, 292–3 structuralism and, 78, 79, 263–4 symbolic interactionism and, 218 Weber and, 153 Foulkes, S. H., 274–5 Fournier, Marcel, 85, 96, 99 Fourth International, 73–4 fragmentation, xv–xvi France Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 5 Bonapartism in, 56, 57 civilizing processes, and theory of, 279–80 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), 4–5 Dreyfus affair, 96–8 French Revolution, 4, 6, 19, 96, 98–9, 114, 306 historical background of social theory in, 5, 8–9 Marxism in, 72 Paris Commune (1871), 57, 86–7 Paris protests (1968), 77 symbolic interactionism and, 206, 221 Franco-Prussian War, 57, 86 Frankfurt School, 45, 76–8, 79, 109, 149, 372, 379 Franklin, Benjamin, 37, 130–1 Frazer, James George, 32 Freides, Thelma, xviii–xix Freire, Paolo, 79 Freud, Sigmund generally, 124, 185 dramaturgical sociology and, 230 Frankfurt school and, 76, 77 structuralism and, 79, 266 Weber and, 149 Friedländer, Julius, 161 Friere, Paulo, 331 Fromm, Erich, 49, 76 Frye, Northrop, 182–3

Fugger, Jakob, 132 Furedi, Frank, 221 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 147, 370, 371 Galileo, 285 Gambetta, Diego, 228, 238–40, 245, 246–7 Gane, Mike, 85 Garfinkel, Harold anti-Semitism and, 343, 351 archive, 363 chess and, 357 Comte and, 345 constitutive practices and, 345 conversation analysis and, 356 dramaturgical sociology and, 226, 229, 240–5, 246 Durkheim and, 343, 344, 345, 357, 364 ethnomethodology and, xx, 362 Goffman and, 354, 359 Gulfport Field Mississippi and, 349–50 hybrid studies, 349–50, 362–3 information, theory of, 356–7 Information Appreciation Test and, 353–4 interactional systems and, 357–8 inter- and intra-racial homicide and, 348–9 language games and, 360–1 Mead and, 346 overview, 343–5, 364 Parsons and, 343, 344–5, 350–1, 352–3, 355, 356–8, 359–60, 362, 364 phenomenology and, 311 race, studies of, 343, 344–5, 346–9 reflexivity and, 355 Schütz and, 356–8, 359, 360 science and, 362–3 sequential approach to communication and interaction, 354–6 social action theory and, 351–3, 357 social interactionism and, 343, 344–5, 359–60 social object and, 344, 345, 350–1, 354 structuration theory and, 399 suicide and, 361–2 symbolic interactionism and, 212 technicways and, 346 transsexuals and, 347, 358–9, 367–8 trust conditions and, 345, 351, 353, 357, 358, 359, 360 war research, 349–50 Weber and, 147 Wittgenstein and, 358 Geertz, Clifford, 99, 147 Gemeinschaft, 89–92 Gender civilizing processes, and theory of, 278–9 Marx and, 59–60 General Council of the International, 59 Generational change in social theory, xvii–xviii Genovese, Eugene, 198

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index Georgia Institute of Technology, 350 Gerhardt, Uta, 182, 189 German Historical School, 127 German Research Foundation, 363 German Society of Sociology, 161 Germany civilizing processes, and theory of, 279 “Great Depression” (1873–1896), 162–3 Green Party, 136 Habermas and, 369–70 historical background of social theory in, 7–8 Holocaust, 78, 280–1, 369–70 hyperinflation in, 273 social democracy in, 70–2 Staatswissenschaften, 7–8 symbolic interactionism and, 206–7 Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), 8, 129 Weberian social theory and, 152 Weimar Republic, 137, 149, 152 Gerth, Hans, 147 Gesellschaft, 89–92 Gestalt psychology, 346 Gibbon, Edward, 34 Gibbs, Jack, 213 Giddens, Anthony generally, xvi, xx, xxii Durkheim and, 92 individualism and, 96 “radicalised modernity” (See “Radicalised modernity”) signaling theory and, 238 structuralism and, 252–3 structuration theory (See Structuration theory) Weber and, 147 work and, 395–7 Giddings, Franklin Henry, 345 Gilbert, Margaret, 302 Gillan, Kevin, xxii Gilmore, Glenda, 368 Ginsberg, Allen, 189 globalization, xxi Glover, Jonathan, 227 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 37, 40 Goffman, Erving generally, xx, 99 civilizing processes, and theory of, 278 dramaturgical sociology (See Dramaturgical sociology) Garfinkel and, 354, 359 intellectual context of, 229–31 Kant and, 230 symbolic interactionism and, 207, 211, 212, 217 Weber and, 147 Wittgenstein and, 230–1 Goldberg, Chad Alan, 333 Goldthorpe, John H., 329, 331

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Goodman, Benny, 25 Górnicka, Barbara, xx Gorski, Phillip S., 333, 335–6 Gotham, Kevin Fox, xxi Goudsblom, Johan, 275, 286 Gouldner, Alvin W. generally, xv–xvi criticism of Parsons, 180, 192, 195–7 Marxism and, 65, 66 reflexivity and, 195–6 Weber and, 149 Gove, Walter, 213 Gramsci, Antonio, 45, 77, 79, 331, 418 Grice, Paul, 230–1, 356 Grossman, Henryk, 71 Grotius, Hugo, 12 group analysis, 274–5 Guevara, Che, 77 Gulfport Field Mississippi, 349–50 Gurwitsch, Aaron, 293, 298, 307, 346 Gusfield, Joseph, 215 Habermas, Ernst, 370 Habermas, Jürgen generally, xx, 81 Adorno and, 370–1, 379 aporia and, 377–80 communication and language and, 372, 373, 382–6 communicative action and, 385 comprehensibility as validity claim, 384–5 correctness as validity claim, 384 critical hermeneutics and, 379–80 critical theory and, 369, 374, 376, 377–8, 382–3, 392 criticisms of, 387–92 critique, relationship to knowledge, 374–5 democracy and, 372, 373 dramaturgical action and, 385 dramaturgical sociology and, 227 epistemology of, 374–7 ethics and law and, 372, 373 in Frankfurt school, 76–7 Germany and, 369–70 Horkheimer and, 370–1, 379 human action and, 385–6 ideal speech situation and, 386–7 instrumentalist reductionism and, 378 instrumental rationality and, 379 interest, relationship to knowledge, 375–6 knowledge and, 372, 373 language, relationship to knowledge, 376–7 legitimacy and, 372, 373 life of, 369–71 “lifeworld” and, 381–2, 389–92 “linguistic turn” of, 380–7 Marxism versus, 377–8, 381, 388–9 modernity and, 372, 374

Index morality and, 372, 373 mutual understanding and, 386 normatively regulated action and, 385 optimism, criticism of, 389–90 overview, 392 Parsons and, 199 phenomenology and, 292–3, 311 positivist reductionism and, 378 productivist reductionism and, 378 Protestantism and, 370 public sphere and, 372 religion and, 372, 373–4 romanticism, criticism of, 391–2 sincerity as validity claim, 384 social evolution and, 372, 373 species-constitutive capacity and, 375 species-generative capacity and, 375 structuration theory and, 414 teleological action and, 385 truth as validity claim, 384 universal pragmatics and, 382–3 utopianism, criticism of, 390–1 validity claims and, 383–5, 386 Weber and, 133, 147 Wittgenstein and, 371 habitus Bourdieu and, 327–8, 329, 335 changes in, 277–8, 280–1, 290–1 fragility of, 281 structuration theory and, 410–14 Hall, Catherine, 79 Hall, Peter, 413 Hall, Stuart, 79 Halle, Morris, 258 Halsey, A. H., 332 Hamilton, Peter, 180 Hammersley, Martyn, 220 Hani, Chris, 80 Harms, Friedrich, 161 Harrington, Austin, xix–xx Harvard Law School, 246 Harvard University, xiv, 185–6, 199, 344, 351 Harvey, David, 80 Hauser, Philip, 219–20 Hegel, G. W. F. generally, 24, 75, 80 colonialism and, 60 criticism and, 181 dialectic and, 45–7, 56 Habermas and, 371 historical materialism and, 49 Marx and, 69 symbolic interactionism and, 206 Weber and, 156 Heidegger, Martin, 149, 273–4, 293, 302, 307, 311 Heilbron, Johan, xix, 84, 88 Heller, Agnes, 77–8 Hemingway, Ernest, 28

Henderson, Lawrence J., xiv, 190 Hendrix, Jimi, 77 Heritage, John, 243 Hertz, Robert, 89, 108 Hildebrand, Klaus, 371 Hillgruber, Andreas, 371 Hinduism, 125–6, 150 historical background of social theory generally, xix, 1–2, 18–19 character of nations and, 9–11 conservative reaction, 6 in France, 5, 8–9 in Germany, 7–8 industrialization and, 7 monarchists and, 6–7 political economy and, 1 predisciplinary stage, 1–2 revolutions of 1848 and, 8 social, use of term, 3–4 social contract, 11–14 socialism, use of term, 5 social science, use of term, 5 social theory, use of term, 4–5 sociology, use of term, 5, 8 “spirit of the laws” and, 9–11 terminology of social theory, 2–8 (See also Terminology of social theory) historical materialism, 49, 162 Hitchcock, Alfred, 80 Hitler, Adolf, 105, 110, 138, 274 Hobbes, Thomas generally, 16 brutal state of nature and, 3, 12 classics and, 33 Marxism versus, 49 Parsons and, 193 Rousseau versus, 12 state and, 1 Hobsbawm, Eric, 79 Hollier, Denis, 103, 113–14, 120 Holocaust, 78, 280–1, 369–70 Holton, Robert J., 182 Homans, George, xv, 184, 186–8, 198, 250, 364 Homer, 27, 35, 37 Hommay, Victor, 92–3 Hönigswald, Richard, 273–4, 284 Honneth, Axel, 76, 77, 97, 371 Hood, Jane, 218 Horace, 27, 35–6 Horkheimer, Max generally, 77 Elias and, 274 in Frankfurt school, 76 Habermas and, 370–1, 379 Weber and, 148–9 Hubert, Henri, 87, 88, 89, 106, 121 Hudis, Peter, 48 Hughes, Everett C., 219–20, 230, 238

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index Hughes, Jason, 286 Huizinga, Johan, 32 Human action, 385–6 Humboldt University, 161 Hume, David generally, 17–18 classics and, 34 law and, 10 Scottish Enlightenment and, 15–16 Smith and, 16, 17 symbolic interactionism and, 207 Hungarian Revolution, 74 Husserl, Edmund. See also Phenomenology generally, 311 collective intentionality and, 306–8 empathy and, 297–8 Habermas and, 371 phenomenology generally, 292 shared lifeworld and, 301 social ontology and, 302 social theory and, 293 socio-communicative acts and, 300 transcendental “We” and, 301 Weber and, 146 Hutcheson, Francis, 15, 16 Hutchins, Robert, 29, 31–2 Hutchinson, Anne, 213 Hutton, E. F., 217 Hyppolite, Jean, 78 Ibarra, Peter, 214 ideal speech situation, 386–7 identity theory, 216 Ikegami, Eiko, 280 Illouz, Eva, 311 immigration, xxii India Marx and, 60–1 Weberian social theory and, 152 individualism Durkheim and, 95, 96–8, 294 Giddens and, 96 metropolitanization of society and, 167–8, 171–2 phenomenology, individualism versus collectivism in, 294–5, 296 Simmel and, 175 structuration theory and, 399–400 Information Appreciation Test, 353–4 Ingarden, Roman, 307 instrumentalist reductionism, 378 instrumental rationality, 379 intellectual space of theory, xiii International Sociological Association, 198 International Working Men’s Association, 58–9, 68 Interpretive interactionism, 218 intersectionality, xxi

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Iran-Contra Affair, 217 Ireland, Marx and, 59 Jacobson, Roman, 251, 258–9, 266 James, C. L. R., 45, 48 James, Henry, 260 James, William, 24, 190, 207 Jameson, Frederic, 45, 79, 80 Japan bushidō, 132 civilizing processes, and theory of, 280 Meiji Restoration, 132 structuralism and, 260 symbolic interactionism and, 221 Weberian social theory and, 152–3 Jaspers, Karl, 124, 151 Jaurès, Jean, 87–8 Jefferson, Gail, 356 Jefferson, Thomas, 30–1 Jenkins, Philip, 215 Jenness, Valerie, 215 Jephcott, Edmund, 290–1 Jesus, 137 Joas, Hans, 371 Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 370 Johnson, Andrew, 58–9 Johnson, Barclay D., 97 Johnson, Guy, 343 Johnson, John Myrton, 220 Johnson, Samuel, 26–8 Johnson, Victoria, 333 Jones, Robert Alun, 86 Joppke, Christian, xxii Joshua (Bible), 185 Judaism, 125–6, 150 Julius Caesar, 27 Justin, 27 Juvenal, 27 Kant, Immanuel generally, 3, 273–4 criticism and, 181 Durkheim and, 87–8, 97 Goffman and, 230 Habermas and, 371 symbolic interactionism and, 206 Kantorowicz, Gertrud, 161 Karabel, Jerome, 332 Karady, Victor, 84 Katovich, Michael, 210, 221 Kaube, Jürgen, 125 Kaufmann, Felix, 293 Kauppi, Niilo, 327, 330, 333, 336 Kautsky, Karl generally, 75 Bolshevism and, 73, 74

Index historical materialism and, 45 social democracy and, 70, 71–2 Kerouac, Jack, 189 Keynes, John Maynard, 67 Kilminster, Richard, 273–4, 284 Kinel, Gertrud, 161 Kingston, Paul W., 329 Kitagama, Evelyn, 219–20 Kitsuse, John, 214 Kivisto, Peter, xix–xx Klein, Naomi, 80 Klossowkski, Peter, 104, 120, 121 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 199 Knies, Karl, 127, 130 Knorr-Cetina, Karen, 362–3 Kögler, Hans-Herbert, 371 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 371 Kojeve, Alexandre, 78 Korsch, Karl, 74–5, 76 Kotarba, Joseph, 220 Krause, Monika, xvii Kuhn, Manford, 210, 217, 221 Kuhn, Thomas, 284 Kusenbach, Margarethe, xxi labeling, 211–13 Lacan, Jacques, 80, 265–6 Laclau, Ernesto, 79 La Fontaine, Jean de, 35–6 Lamb, Charles, 24, 33–4 Lambert, Madame, 10 Lamont, Michèle, 330, 331, 332, 337, 413 Lareau, Annette, 329, 331, 335 Lasch, Christopher, 198 Lavers, Annette, 260 Lazarsfeld, Paul, xiv–xv Lazarus, Moritz, 161 League of Nations, 152 Le Bon, Gustave, 303 Lefebvre, Henri, 45, 78 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 301 Leiris, Michel, 104, 108, 116–17 Lemert, Charles, xviii–xix, 84–5, 212 Lenin, V.I., 45, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–3, 75, 76 Le Trosne, Guillaume Francois, 6–7 Levine, Harry, 215 Lévi-Strauss, Claude generally, 32, 337 Collège de sociologie and, 118 Durkheim and, 84–5 structuralism and, 79, 251, 254–7, 258–9 Lewitzky, Anatole, 114 Leys, Simon, 77 Libra, Pierre, 104 Library of Congress, 32 “lifeworld,” 381–2, 389–92 Lih, Lars, 73 Lincoln, Abraham, 58–9

Linguet, Simon-Nicholas Henri, 6–7 linguistics communicative action and, 385 comprehensibility as validity claim, 384–5 correctness as validity claim, 384 dramaturgical action and, 385 Habermas, “linguistic turn” of, 380–7 human action and, 385–6 ideal speech situation and, 386–7 “lifeworld” and, 381–2 mutual understanding and, 386 normatively regulated action and, 385 sincerity as validity claim, 384 structuralism and, 257–63 teleological action and, 385 truth as validity claim, 384 universal pragmatics and, 382–3 validity claims and, 383–5, 386 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 191, 251 List, Christian, 302 Litt, Theodor, 302 Livingston, Eric, 362–3 Lizardo, Omar, xiii, xviii, 331 Locke, John, 15, 16, 24, 30 Lockwood, David, 188, 191–2 Lombardo, Guy, 25 London School of Economics, 274–5, 331 Lopata, Helen Znaniecka, 219–20, 221 Loseke, Donileen R., xxi Louvre, 32 Lowenthal, Leo, 76 Löwith, Karl, 149, 370 Lowney, Kathleen, 214 Loyal, Steven, 272 Lucian, 27 Luckmann, Thomas, 146, 293, 295, 296 Lucretius, 35–6 Luhmann, Niklas, 147, 184, 311, 371 Lukács, György, 45, 74–5, 76, 77–8, 149, 162 Lukes, Steven, 84, 89, 93, 96 Luther, Martin, 132 Luxemburg, Rosa, 70–1, 73 Lycée de Pau, 318 Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, 318 Lyman, Stanford, 213 Lynch, Michael, 362–3 Lyotard, Jean François, 80 MacDonald, Dwight, 189 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 33, 40–1, 49, 76, 138 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 227, 412 Macy Cybernetics Group, 356–7 Maimonides, 33 Maistre, Joseph de, 6 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 85, 255 Mandeville, Bernard, 15, 16 Mannheim, Karl, 38–9, 40, 41, 154, 274

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index Manning, Philip, xx Maoism, 77 Mao Zedong, 66, 69, 77 Marburg University, 370 Marcus Antoninus, 30 Marcuse, Herbert, 45, 76, 78, 371 Marcus Tullius Cicero, 27, 30, 35 Margalit, Avishai, 413 Markus, Gyorgy, 77–8 Markus, Maria, 77–8 Marlowe, Christopher, 39 Marshall, Alfred, xiv, 126–7, 244 Marshall, Douglas A., xxii Marske, Charles, 97 Martinet, André, 257 Marx, Karl generally, xiv, xvi, xix–xx, 237–8, 331 alienation and, 47–8 American Civil War and, 57, 58–9 automation and, 53 China and, 60–1 classics and, 42 colonialism and, 60–2 dialectic and, 45–7 dual nature of, 66–70 Durkheim compared, 84, 90–1 early Marx versus later Marx, 66–70 Engels compared, 67 ethnicity and, 59 free association and, 48–9 gender and, 59–60 Habermas and, 371 Hegel and, 69 historical materialism and, 49, 162 humanism and, 48 India and, 60–1 individualism versus collectivism and, 294 Ireland and, 59 legacy of (See Marxism) modes of production and, 50–1 Opium Wars and, 60–1 overview, 62 race and, 58–9 revolution and, 56–7 revolutions of 1848 and, 57 Rousseau compared, 67 Russia and, 60–2 Simmel and, 175 slavery and, 58–9 social class and, 54–6 state and, 56–7 surplus value and, 52–4 symbolic interactionism and, 206, 207 systemic collapse and, 53–4 theory of value, 51–4 wages and, 52–3 Weber versus, 45, 50–1, 76, 124, 127, 130, 145, 147–8

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Marxism Bolshevism, 72–4 Budapest School, 77–8 civilizing processes, and theory of, 279 critical theory and, 76–8, 79 Darwin and, 71–2 Frankfurt school, 45, 76–8, 79 German social democracy, 70–2 Habermas versus, 377–8, 381, 388–9 Hobbes versus, 49 Marxist structuralism, 78–80, 264–5 overview, 65–6, 80–1 “radicalized modernity” and, 403 reform versus revolution, 70–1 social constructivism and, 296 structuration theory versus, 398 theory versus practice, 70–1 Western Marxism, 74–6 Maryanski, Alexandra, 98 Mattick, Paul, 75 Matza, David, 213 Maurer, David, 232 Mauss, Marcel Collège de sociologie and, 107, 115, 116–17, 121, 123 Durkheim and, 88, 89, 98, 105 Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World, 370–1 Mbembe, Achille, 79 McAdam, Doug, 333 McCallister, Robert, 362–3 McCarthyism, 189, 191 McCartney, Paul, 29 McCullough, David, 30 McKinney, John C., 368 McPartland, Thomas, 210 Mead, George Herbert generally, xx classics and, 24 dramaturgical sociology compared, 226–7, 235, 236 Frankfurt school and, 77 Garfinkel and, 346 Habermas and, 371 phenomenology and, 293 symbolic interactionism and, 205, 207–8, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219 Medvetz, Tom, 331 Mele, Vincenzo, xx Mendelssohn, Felix, 32 Menger, Carl, 127 Mennell, Stephen, xx, 281, 286 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 78, 305, 311 Merton, Robert K. generally, xiii, xiv–xv criticism of Parsons, 186, 196 dramaturgical sociology and, 227, 234 structuralism and, 251–2

Index symbolic interactionism and, 212 Weber and, 147 metalanguage, 262 metaphor, structuralism and, 266 “metatheory,” xvi–xvii methodological bracketing, 415–16 metonymy, 266 metropolitanization of society a priori of social life, 165–8 blasé individual and, 169 erleben (experience) and, 168–9 “intensification of nervous life,” 169 intersection of social circles, 170–1 monetary culture and, 169–70 other as social type, 165–6 overview, 163–5 partial knowledge of other, 166–7 pessimistic suffering and, 168 reciprocal action and, 164–5 Spencer and, 169 two forms of individualism in, 171–2 universality of individual, 167–8 Weber and, 165, 168 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32 Michels, Robert, 152, 153 Millar, John, 18 Miller, James, 87 Mills, C. Wright, 147, 180, 184, 188–91, 320, 331 Milton, John, 34, 35–6, 37, 40 Mirabeau, Comte de, 2 Mishler, Elliott, 368 Misztral, Barbara A., xxii modernity generally, xxi Habermas and, 372, 374 “radicalized modernity” (See “Radicalized modernity”) Modern Library (New York), 31, 33 modes of production, 50–1 Molière, 35 Mommsen, Theodor, 161 Monnerot, Jules, 104, 120 Montaigne, Michel de, 33, 39 Montesquieu, Baron de generally, 2, 3, 6, 17–18 classics and, 30, 35 Durkheim and, 87–8 social theory and, 18–19 “spirit of the laws” and, 9–11 Moore, Wilbert, 356 moral emotions, 411 morality, 372, 373 moral panics, 215 Morawska, Ewa, xxii Morgan, Kimberly J., 333 Morgenstern, Oskar, 356–7 Morris, William, 72 Mouffe, Chantal, 79

Mouzelis, Nicos, 411, 415 Mukherjee, Ankhi, 41 Muller, Thaddeus, 221 multiculturalism, xxii Murdock, George H., 253, 256 Murray, Pauli, 347, 367–8 Mussolini, Benito, 75–6, 105, 110 mutual understanding, 386 Nadel, S. F., 253 Nagy, Imre, 74 Nandy, Ashis, 79 Napoleon (France), 5 Napoleon III (France), 86 narrative analysis, 216–17 Nash, Jeffrey, 218 The Nation (magazine), 199 Naumann, Friedrich, 90–1 Negotiation Project, 246 Negri, Antonio, 80 neoliberalism, xvii networks theory, xxi Neumann, Franz, 76, 124 Neustadt, Ilya, 274–5 New American Library of World Literature, 31 New Iowa School, 210 New Left, 77 New School for Social Research, xv, 293, 371 Newton, Isaac, 15, 16, 17, 186 Nichols, Lawrence T., xx Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79, 149, 168 Nisbet, Robert, 92 Nolte, Ernst, 371 normatively regulated action, 385 North, Douglass, 126 Northwestern University, 371 O’Brien, Mike, 41–2 Occupy movement, 80 Odum, Howard, 343, 344–5, 346 Offe, Claus, 371 Ollion, Etienne, 331 Ollman, Bertell, 52 Opium Wars, 60–1 Opp, Karl-Dieter, xxi optimism, criticism of, 389–90 Orloff, Ann Shola, 333 Otto, Rudolph, 108 Ovid, 27, 35 Owen, Robert, 7, 179 Oxford University, 41 Pachucki, Mark C., xxi Paine, Thomas, 14–15 Paley, William, 34 Pannekoek, Anton, 75 Pareto, Vilfredo, xiv, 42 Paris Commune (1871), 57, 86–7

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index Park, Robert E., 175 Parker, Charlie, 189 Parkman, Francis, 31 Parsons, Talcott generally, xiii, xiv–xv, xx Bourdieu compared, 320 character, criticisms of, 197–9 civilizing processes, and theory of, 277 commission, criticisms of, 183–5 Coser, criticism by, 188, 192–4 crisis theory, criticism based on, 195–7 criticism of generally, 180, 181–2, 183–5 Dahrendorf, criticism by, 188, 192, 194–5 defense of, 181–2 dramaturgical sociology compared, 227, 228, 229–30, 244–6 Durkheim and, 85, 86, 99, 180, 352 Elias and, 198 fetishism of concept, criticism based on, 189 Garfinkel and, 343, 344–5, 350–1, 352–3, 355, 356–8, 359–60, 362, 364 Gouldner, criticism by, 192, 195–7 Habermas and, 199, 371 Hobbes and, 193 Homans, criticism by, 184, 186–8, 198 ideology, criticism based on, 190–1 Lockwood, criticism by, 188, 191–2 Merton and, 186, 196 Mills, criticism by, 188–91 omission, criticisms of, 183–5, 191–2 overview, 179–80, 199–200 phenomenology and, 293 Schütz and, xv social action, criticism based on, 192, 194–5, 352–3 static view of society, criticism based on, 189–90 structural-functionalism and, 85, 147, 152–3, 180, 185–6, 192–4, 196 structuralism and, 251 theoretical framework, criticism based on, 190 Vietnam War and, 197, 200 Weber and, 130, 146, 147, 149, 180 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 318 Pearce, Frank, 85 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 190, 207 Pelton, Warren, 357 Pericles, 138 Peterson, Richard A., 329, 332 Pettit, Michael, 232 Pettit, Philip, 302 Peukert, Detlef, 149 phenomenology generally, xx Adorno and, 292–3 Bourdieu and, 311 collective intentionality and, 302, 306–8 “communal persons” and, 304–5

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community and, 302–3 Durkheim and, 296 empathy and, 297–8 Foucault and, 292–3 future trends, 311–12 Garfinkel and, 311 “gatherings” and, 305–6 “group consciousness” and, 306 Habermas and, 292–3, 311 “horde” and, 303 individualism versus collectivism in, 294–5, 296 interaction and, 297–8 interpersonal understanding and, 297–8 “life-community” and, 303–4 Marxism and, 296 “mass” and, 303 Mead and, 293 overview, 292–3, 311–12 Parsons and, 293 Schütz and, 293, 298–300, 301 shared emotions and, 302, 308–10 shared lifeworld and, 301 Simmel and, 293 social constructivism and, 294, 295–6 sociality and, 303–6 social theory and, 293–4 social typification and, 298–300 “society” and, 304 socio-communicative acts and, 300 Toennies and, 293, 302, 303, 304 transcendental “We” and, 301–2 Weber and, 293, 304 Piaget, Jean, 251, 371 Pieterman, Roel, 221 Piketty, Thomas, 80 Pilger, John, 80 Plato, 24, 30, 32, 33, 35–6 Platt, Gerald M., 197 Plekhanov, Georgi, 49 Plotinus, 30 Plutarch, 30, 39 political economy, 1, 126–7 Pollock, Friedrich, 76 Pol Pot, 77 Pomerantz, Anita, 356 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 155 Pope, Alexander, 35–6, 40 Pope, Whitney, 97 Popper, Karl, 273–4, 284 positivist reductionism, 378 Poso, Tarja, 221 Postone, Moishe, 51 Poulantzas, Nicos, 78 Pound, Ezra, 28, 29 Powell, Walter, 333 Power Bourdieu and, 320–3

Index Collège de sociologie and, 109–11 in structuration theory, 398–9, 401–2 Weber and, 137–8, 152 pragmatism, 190, 207 Princeton University, 356–7 process sociology. See Figurational sociology productivist reductionism, 378 proletariat, 55–6 Propp, Vladimir, 259 prostitutes’ rights movement, 215 Protestantism Habermas and, 370 suicide and, 94 Weber and, 130–2, 150–1, 155–6 psychoanalytical approach to structuralism, 265–6 Puddephatt, Anthony, 218 Pushkin, Alexander, 40 Quilley, Stephen, 272 race discrimination in public transportation, 347–8 Garfinkel’s studies of, 344–5, 346–9 inter- and intra-racial homicide, 348–9 Marx and, 58–9 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 85, 251, 253, 255–6 “Radicalized modernity” “death of socialism” and, 408 disembedding and, 405–7 family and, 404 globalization and, 404, 408 Marxism and, 403 methodological standpoint of, 395 overview, 395, 403 reflexivity and, 405–7, 408 social democracy, and threat to, 408 social investment approach in, 408–9 themes of, 395 top-down approach to politics in, 396, 407–9 Radkau, Joachim, 125 Rasborg, Klaus, xxii rational choice theory, xxi, 227, 228, 246 Rawls, Anne, xx Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, 15 Reed, Isaac Ariail, xvii reflexivity Bourdieu and, 324 Garfinkel and, 355 Gouldner and, 195–6 “radicalized modernity” and, 405–7, 408 Reinach, Adolf, 300 Reinarman, Craig, 215 relational thinking, 323–4 religion. See also specific religion Durkheim and, 86, 98–9 Habermas and, 372, 373–4 Weber and, 130–2, 150–1 Renouvier, Charles, 87–8

revolution American Revolution, 4, 14–15, 19 Arendt and, 19 Engels, 56 French Revolution, 4, 6, 19, 96, 98–9, 114, 306 Marx and, 56–7 revolutions of 1848, 8, 57 Russian Revolution, 70, 75, 80 Ricardo, David, 126–7 Richardson, Laurel, 220 Rickert, Heinrich, 130 Ricoeur, Paul, 232 Riesman, David, 151, 219–20 Riley, Alexander, 92 Risk, xxii Ritzer, George, xvi–xvii Rizk, Jessica, 328–9 Robertson, Roland, 182 Robertson, William, 34 Robespierre, Maximilien, 73 Rolling Stones, The, 29 Romanticism, criticism of, 391–2 Rosen, Alexander, 241, 242 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 368 Ross, Edward A., 207 Rothacker, Erick, 370 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques generally, 2, 3, 4 classics and, 30, 35 Durkheim and, 91, 97 Enlightenment and, 11–12 Grotius versus, 12 Hobbes versus, 12 Marx compared, 67 Smith versus, 16–17 social contract and, 11–14 social theory and, 18–19 Royal Society of London, 285 Rubin’s vase, 184 Russell, Bertrand, 360 Russia Bolshevism in, 72–4 Marx and, 60–2 New Economic Policy in, 73 Russian Revolution, 70, 75, 80 Weberian social theory and, 152 Rutgers University, 41 Rutzou, Timothy, xxi Ryan, Alan, 231, 233 Sacks, Harvey, 358, 361–2, 363, 368 “sacred sociology,” 104–5, 106–8 Said, Edward, 79 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 24, 35–6, 41 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 5, 24, 162 Sallaz, Jeffrey J., 326–7, 329, 331, 336 Sallust, 27 Salomon, Albert, 124

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index Sandstrom, Kent, 218–19, 221 Santoro, Marco, 317, 326, 327, 331, 332, 336 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 78, 230, 305–7, 319–20 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 26, 79, 257–8, 266 Savage, Stephen P., 182, 183–4 Sayer, Andrew, 411 Schabas, Margaret, 1 Schegloff, Emanuel, 245, 356 Scheler, Max collective intentionality and, 307 community and, 302–3 shared emotion and, 308–9, 310 sociality and, 303–5, 306 sociology of knowledge, 293, 295–6 Schelling, Frederick von, 206, 371 Schelling, Thomas, 228, 230, 238, 246 Schmalenbach, Eugen, 307 Schmitt, Carl, 149, 152 Schmoller, Gustav, 127 Schnädelbach, Herbert, 371 Schulteis, Franz, 330 Schumpeter, Joseph, 153 Schütz, Alfred civilizing processes, and theory of, 276 Garfinkel and, 356–8, 359, 360 Parsons and, xv phenomenology and, 293, 298–300, 301 Weber and, 146 science Catholicism and, 285 Comte and, 285 Elias and, 284–5 Garfinkel and, 362–3 Weber and, 139–40 Scotson, John L., 275, 283–4 Scott, A.O., 179 Scott, Marvin, 213 Scott, Susie, 218 Scottish Enlightenment generally, 2, 7, 15 Hume and, 15–16 Smith and, 16–17 social theory and, 18–19 Searle, John, 230–1, 295, 302, 307, 371 Second International, 72, 75 Segre, Sandro, xx Select Society, 16 Selg, Peeter, xviii semantic therapy, xviii Sen, Amartya, 414 Seneca, 30, 39 Sepoy Uprising, 61 Serpe, Richard, 216 Sewell, William H., Jr., 336 sexuality generally, xxii civilizing processes, and theory of, 281–2 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 15, 16

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Shakespeare, William classics and, 32, 34, 35–6, 38, 39 dramaturgical sociology and, 226 Shalin, Dmitri, 211 shamanism, 114 Shared emotion, 302 shared lifeworld, 301 Sheard, Kenneth, 283 Shilling, Chris, xxii Shils, Edward A., xiv–xv, 99, 147, 153, 191 Shivaji (anti-Mughal resistance fighter), 61 Shneidman, Edwin, 358, 361 Sica, Alan, xvii, xix Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 5 signaling theory, 228, 230, 232, 237–40, 246 Signet Classics, 31 Simand, François, 88 Simmel, Angi, 161 Simmel, Georg generally, xx, 86 Chicago school and, 175–6 classics and, 42 in context of German sociology, 162–3 dramaturgical sociology and, 230, 232 Durkheim compared, 90–1, 163, 175 fashion and, 172–4 historical context of, 162–3 individualism and, 175 “inheritance” and, 175 life of, 161–2 Marx and, 175 metropolitanization of society (See Metropolitanization of society) overview, 161–2 phenomenology and, 293 sociability and, 174 social games and, 174 Spencer and, 169 style and, 172–4 Toennies and, 161 Weber and, 146–7, 161, 162–3, 165, 168, 175 Simmel, Hans, 161 Simon, Herbert, 356–7 sincerity as validity claim, 384 Skinner, Quentin, 1 slavery Marx and, 58–9 Smith, Adam generally, 17–18 classics and, 27 economics and, 17 Hume and, 16, 17 Rousseau versus, 16–17 Scottish Enlightenment and, 16–17 structuration theory and, 411 symbolic interactionism and, 207 theory of value and, 51 Weber and, 126–7

Index Smith, Bernard, 79 Smith, David N., 85 Smith, Dennis, 198 Smith, Greg, 229, 235–6 Smith, Philip, 89 Smith, William Robertson, 98, 108, 121 Smollett, Tobias George, 34 Soame Jenyns, Roger, 34 sociability, 174 social class, 54–6 social contract, 11–14 social democracy, 70–2 social games, 174 sociality, 303–6 social movements, xxii social ontology, 302 social reaction, 211–13 social typification, 298–300 Society for the Study of Social Problems, 215 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI), 220, 221 socio-communicative acts, 300 Sociological canon, xiv Socrates, 30, 45 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 77 Sombart, Werner, 90–1, 130, 161, 162 Sophocles, 35–6 Sorbonne, 89, 318 Southern Sociological Society, xv space and time, xxi Spector, Malcolm, 214 Spencer, Herbert generally, xiv, 162 classics and, 24 Durkheim and, 87–8, 89, 97 Simmel and, 169 symbolic interactionism and, 206 Spillman, Lyn, xxi Spinoza, Baruch, 33, 87–8 “spirit of the laws,” 9–11 Spivak, Gayatri, 79 sport, theory of civilizing processes and, 282–3 Stalin, Josef, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75, 80, 138 Stalinism, 69, 73, 74, 77, 80, 81 stalking, 214 state civilizing processes, and theory of, 279–80 defined, 291 Hobbes and, 1 Marx and, 56–7 Weber and, 152–3 Steele, Richard, 33 Stein, Edith, 297, 300, 302–3, 307, 308–9, 310 Stein, Gertrude, 28–9, 31–2 Steiner, George, 35–6 Steinmetz, George, 336 Steinthal, Haymann, 161 Sterne, Laurence, 34

Stets, Jan, 216 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 251 Stoller, Richard, 241, 242–3, 244 Stoller, Robert, 358 Stonequist, Everett, 175 Stones, Rob, xx Strand, Michael, xxi strategic conduct analysis, 402, 415–16 Strauss, Anselm, 219–20 Strauss, Leo, 33 Strawson, Peter Frederick, 371 strong structuration theory (SST) generally, 397 Bourdieu and, 411 conjuncturally specific knowledge in, 411–12 contextual field in, 415–18 external structures in, 414–18 habitus and, 410–12 instrumentalism, excesses of, 412–14 internalized structures in, 410–12 methodological bracketing in, 415–16 moral emotions in, 411 overview, 395, 410 Smith and, 411 strategic conduct analysis in, 415–16 structuralism generally, xx binary opposition in, 254–5, 258 Durkheim and, 251 effective definitions of structures, 253–4 Foucault and, 78, 79, 263–4 Freud and, 79, 266 Giddens and, 252–3 intentional definitions of structure, 250–3 Japan and, 260 Lacan and, 265–6 Lévi-Strauss and, 79, 251, 254–7, 258–9 linguistics and, 257–63 Marxist structuralism, 78–80, 264–5 Merton and, 251–2 metalanguage and, 262 metaphor and, 266 metonymy and, 266 myth and, 255 nature versus culture, 255 overview, 250, 267 Parsons and, 251 psychoanalytical approach, 265–6 social relations and, 255, 256 symbolic interactionism and, 215–16 structuration theory generally, xx Bourdieu and, 411 components of structures, 398–9, 401–2 conjuncturally specific knowledge in, 411–12 contextual field in, 415–18 determinism versus, 398 duality of structure in, 400–1

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index structuration theory (cont.) external structures in, 400, 414–18 Garfinkel and, 399 Habermas and, 414 habitus and, 410–14 individualism and, 399–400 institutional analysis in, 402 instrumentalism, excesses of, 396–7, 412–14 internalised structures in, 410–12 Marxism versus, 398 meaning in, 398–9, 401–2 methodological bracketing in, 415–16 moral emotions in, 411 norms in, 398–9, 401–2 ontological aspects of, 398–401 overview, 397–8 power in, 398–9, 401–2 rehabilitation of (See Strong structuration theory (SST)) Smith and, 411 strategic conduct analysis in, 402, 415–16 strong structuration theory (SST) (See Strong structuration theory (SST)) substantive aspects of, 398, 401–3 voluntarism versus, 398 Stryker, Sheldon, 215–16, 220, 221 Stürmer, Michael, 371 style, 172–4 suicide altruistic suicide, 93–4 anomic suicide, 94–5 Durkheim and, 92–5 egoistic suicide, 93–4 fatalistic suicide, 94–5 Garfinkel and, 361–2 integration and, 93–4 regulation and, 94–5 Sumner, William Graham, 345 surplus value, 52–4 Susen, Simon, xx, xxii Suzuki, Takashi, 221 Swaan, Abram de, 275, 281 Swartz, David L., xx, 327, 330–1, 332–3, 334, 336 Swedberg, Richard, 334 Sweden, Marxism in, 72 Sykes, Gresham, 213 symbolic interactionism generally, xx antecedents of, 206–7 Blumer and, 205, 208–10, 213, 214, 215–16 Comte and, 206 constructionism and, 214–15 crime and, 211–13 deviance and, 211–13 dramaturgical sociology and, 211 Durkheim and, 206, 207 “expression games” and, 217 Foucault and, 218

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Garfinkel and, 212 Goffman and, 207, 211, 212, 217 Hegel and, 206 Hume and, 207 identity theory and, 216 Kant and, 206 labeling and, 211–13 Marx and, 206, 207 Mead and, 205, 207–8, 213, 214, 215–16, 217, 218, 219 Merton and, 212 narrative analysis and, 216–17 overview, 205, 220–1 Smith and, 207 social reaction and, 211–13 Spencer and, 206 structuralism and, 215–16 Thomas Theorem and, 209 Toennies and, 207 Weber compared, 205, 206–7 Szanto, Thomas, xx Szelenyi, Ivan, 77–8 Tannenbaum, Frank, 212 Tarde, Gabriel, 84, 207 Tasso, 35–6 Tatum, Art, 25 Taylor, Donald J., 362–3 technicways, 346 teleological action, 385 Temperance movement, 215 Terasaki, Alene, 356 Terence, 27 terminology of social theory, 2–8 social, 3–4 socialism, 5 social science, 5 social theory, 4–5 sociology, 5, 8 Theocritus, 27 Theophrastus, 30 theoretical framework, xiv–xv theory of value, 51–4 Thielmann, Tristan, 368 Thijssen, Peter, 97 Third International, 45, 72 “Third way.” See “Radicalized modernity” Third Worldism, 77 Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 209 Thomas, Paul, 56 Thomas, W. I., 209, 346 Thomas theorem, 209 Thompson, E. P., 79 Thucydides, 138 Tiryakian, Edward, 90 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6, 96 Todorov, Tzvetan, 259–60

Index Toennies, Ferdinand generally, 89–91, 187 in context of German sociology, 162–3 historical context of, 162–3 phenomenology and, 293, 302, 303, 304 Simmel and, 161 symbolic interactionism and, 207 Toklas, Alice, 29 Tole, Lise Ann, 98 Toulmin, Stephen, 371 Touraine, Alain, 319–20 transcendental “we,” 301–2 transsexuals, 347, 358–9, 367–8 Treaty of Versailles, 152, 273 Treniño, A. Javier, xx Trilling, Lionel, 36, 37 Troeltsch, Ernst, 154 Trotsky, Leon, 66, 70, 72, 73–4 Trotskyism, 77 trust, xxii truth as validity claim, 384 Tsutomu, Kajiyama, 130 Tuomela, Raimo, 302 Turner, Bryan S., 179, 182, 183–4 Turner, Jonathan, xvi–xvii, 219 Turner, Stephen, xv, xvi–xvii, 200 Twain, Mark, 39 “two selves thesis,” 234 United Kingdom British Museum, 274 Labour Party, 407–8 Marxism in, 72 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 8 Reform Bill of 1867, 36 Royal Society of London, 285 symbolic interactionism and, 206 United States “American Celebration,” 191 American Revolution, 4, 14–15, 19 American Social Science Association, 8 Challenger (space shuttle), 217 civil rights movement in, 197 Civil War, 57, 58–9 Declaration of Independence (1776), 14 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 196–7 Gulfport Field Mississippi, 349–50 House Un-American Activities Committee, 197 Iran-Contra Affair, 217 Marxism in, 72 McCarthyism in, 189, 191 Salem witchcraft hysteria, 213 student radicals in, 197 symbolic interactionism and, 207 universal pragmatics, 382–3 University of Berlin, 161

University of Bonn, 370 University of Breslau, 273 University of California, Los Angeles, 241, 357–8, 361 University of Cambridge, 238 University of Chicago, xiv, xv, 207–8, 209–10 University of Frankfurt, 274, 370–1 University of Freiburg, 127, 129 University of Ghana, 275 University of Göttingen, 370 University of Heidelberg, 127, 273–4 University of Iowa, 210 University of Leicester, 274–5 University of Michigan, xiv, 207 University of Munich, 138 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 343, 346 University of Texas, Austin, 350 University of Zürich, 370 utopianism, criticism of, 390–1 Vajda, Mihaly, 77–8 validity claims, 383–5, 386 Valocchi, Stephen, xxii Van Krieken, Robert, 286 Van Nuemann, John, 356–7 Vaughan, Diane, 217, 333 Vico, Giambattista, 24 Vierkandt, Alfred, 302 Vietnam War, 77, 197, 200 Vincent, Veronique Campion, 221 Virgil, 25, 27, 35–6, 39 Vivaldi, Antonio, 32 Voegelin, Eric, 149 Voltaire, 10, 30, 35 Von Holdt, Karl, 331 Wacquant, Loïc, 330, 334, 336 Wagner, Peter, xxi Walras, Léon, 126–7 Walther, Gerda, 302–3, 307, 308–9, 310 Ward, Lester F., 42 Waring, Fred, 25 Watson, John, 236 Weber, Alfred, 274 Weber, Marianne, 125 Weber, Max generally, xiv, xvi, xix–xx, 330 action and, 145–7 Adorno and, 148–9 Alexander and, 147 authority and, 137–8, 152 Bourdieu and, 147, 321, 322 bureaucracy and, 135–6 charisma and, 137–8, 151 civilizing processes, and theory of, 278, 279, 291

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index Weber, Max (cont.) classics and, 26, 37 collected works, publication of, 125–7 culture and, 150–1 democracy and, 152 disenchantment and, 151 dramaturgical sociology and, 230, 244 Durkheim compared, 84, 90–1, 145, 146 economy and, 147–9 Elias and, 274 Foucault and, 153 Freud and, 149 Garfinkel and, 147 Gesinnungsethik (ethic of conviction), 138–9 Giddens and, 147 Goffman and, 147 Gouldner and, 149 Habermas and, 133, 147, 371 Hegel and, 156 Horkheimer and, 148–9 intellectual preoccupations of, 125–6 interaction and, 145–7 interpretation and, 145–7 leadership and, 138, 152 legacy of, 140–2 Marxism versus, 45, 50–1, 76, 124, 127, 130, 145, 147–8, 150, 321 Merton and, 147 modern capitalism and, 127–30 modernity and, 153–7 nation and, 152–3 overview, 124, 145 Parsons and, 130, 146, 147, 149, 180 phenomenology and, 293, 304 political economy, influence of, 126–7 politics and, 136–9, 152–3 power and, 137–8, 152 Protestantism and, 130–2, 150–1, 155–6 rationality and, 132–4 rationalization and, 134–5, 147–9 as realist, 138, 152 religion and, 130–2, 150–1 Schütz and, 146 science and, 139–40 Simmel and, 146–7, 161, 162–3, 165, 168, 175 Smith and, 126–7 social action and, 132–4 social change and, 150–1

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social class and, 147–9 state and, 152–3 symbolic interactionism compared, 205, 206–7 Verantwortungsethik (ethic of responsibility), 138–9 “West” and, 153–7 Weiner, Norbert, 356–7 Weininger, Elliot, 335 Wellmer, Albrecht, 370–1 Western Marxism, 74–6 Whitehead, Alfred North, 187, 194 Whyte, William Foote, 175 Wigforss, Ernst, 72 Wilder, Thornton, 29 Wiley, Norbert, 218 Wilhelm II (Germany), 137, 138 Williams, Raymond, 79 Wilshire, Bruce, 227 Wilson, Bryan, 274 Wilson, Woodrow, 152 Winch, Peter, 147 Winnicott, Donald, 77 Wirth, Louis, 175, 219–20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Garfinkel and, 358, 361 Goffman and, 230–1 Habermas and, 371 interpretation and, 147 language games and, 359, 360–1 Woodward, Kerry, 334 Wordsworth, William, 33 World War I, 87 Worms, René, 88–9 Wouters, Cas, 281–2 Wrong, Dennis H., 184 Wundt, Wilhelm, 87–8 Xenophon, 27, 35–6 Yale University, 86 Zavisca, Jane, 326–7, 329, 331, 336 Zeller, Eduard, 161 Žižek, Slavoj, 45, 73, 80 Znaniecki, Florian, 219, 346 Zola, Émile, 97 Zolberg, Vera, 332