Abstract
H. Stuart Hughes (1916–1999), grandson of a Supreme Court Chief Justice, taught intellectual history at Harvard from 1957 through 1975, during which time the Boomers passed through its halls. He was correctly positioned to influence everyone whose interests revolved around social and cultural theory, not only by means of excellent lectures, but also his trio of books that were widely sold, read, and admired: Consciousness and Society (1958; 1977), The Obstructed Path (1966), and Sea Change (1975), each one covering a different era of socio-intellectual mutations. It was the first volume, which treated 1890–1930, that became his best-known work, despite Alfred Knopf’s hesitation to publish it, not regarding it as “real history” (1990: 231). In this uniquely interesting study, not unlike Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940) in its tone and ease of comprehension, Hughes dealt with “irrationalism” (the index entry) as it was evidenced in and analyzed by Pareto, Sorel, Bergson, Croce, Freud, Jung, Dilthey, and others, including Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Hughes did not celebrate the irrational as such, but he did, perhaps reflecting a deep appreciation for French and Italian cultures, seek to understand irrationality through the lenses provided by the gifted scholars he chose to discuss.
In the late 1960s, one Harvard student felt particularly moved by Hughes’ lectures: he “was taken by his exploration of the irrational. . .the challenge of irrationality and the non-rational continued to haunt me, particularly in the context of the extraordinary difficulties faced by modern, putatively rational societies” (p. vii). In this collection of previously published essays, the third volume issued by Polity in as many years, Jeffrey Alexander works through a series of puzzles the seeds of which were clearly sown by Professor Hughes’ book and lectures that Alexander absorbed when young. In fact, he deals in this essay book with Georges Sorel and others, following Hughes’ lead, into what he calls “the dark side of the Enlightenment” and therefore, of modernity. Given that Horkheimer and Adorno pursued this angle vigorously in 1944, and Zygmunt Baumann updated the critique of contemporary thinking in 1989 with reference to Jewish extermination by the Nazis, Alexander’s observations are not entirely novel. He also deals explicitly with “evil” as such, something most social theorists have sidestepped as it has long seemed more a theological than theoretical concern.
Yet because he wishes to establish his own interpretation of The Irrational, he forces himself to put some space between his own observations and those of other theorists. For instance, he notes: “Weber showed a persistent inability to relate his historical political sociology to the cultural analysis of his religious work (Alexander 1983a)” (p. 39). It is always comforting to learn of Weber’s failures, his inabilities, his blind-spots, his analytic weaknesses, since it gives later theorists hope that they may have something useful to say that has not already been said better, and for this, Alexander’s essays are a tonic. This practice also displays a necessary rhetoric in performances of the theoretical imagination since, by definition, if there is nothing palpably “new” in an argument, there is little reason to keep on writing. Thus, Alexander’s analyses of Weber (1987), Shmuel Eisenstadt (2005), Parsons (2005), and Simmel (2004) are filled with pointers to their shortcomings, added to which are his own helpful suggestions for improvements. He also writes about psychotherapy as necessary “repair” within our contemporary societal condition (2009), and ends the book with a handy guide (2011) to the amelioration of present discomforts (e.g., commodification, isolation, othering, nationalism, and so on).
As with his prior essay volumes, The Dark Side of Modernity reprints pieces available elsewhere, but adds a 12-page bibliography, the first two pages of which are filled with his own writings, giving Alexander’s followers a nifty checklist of 31 entries for their future reading. Only M. H. Abrams’ famous work of literary criticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), and Thomas Aquinas’s essay on “evil” precede Alexander’s own entry in the bib. Taken together, they would make a fine introduction to the substance of his book.