Abstract
Sometimes when I’m working with students who are having a particularly hard time with the finite nature of dissertation work, the absolute inability to say it all, to cover all the important issues, I try to reassure them by saying “This is the early you.” And now I find myself reviewing books, like this one, by the “later” person, sociologists looking back on the course of their careers and, inevitably, looking back at the course of the discipline itself. Sociology just isn’t that old: Durkheim published Suicide less than 120 years ago. That’s just two long career lengths. Someone who was writing a dissertation 120 years ago could have taught someone who was writing one 60 years ago who could be writing a memoir now. It’s not ancient history. Neil Smelser’s career path is not that direct, but we are looking at pretty much the entirety of American sociology from the time his teachers were doing their early work to the time he’s writing this wrap-up of his life’s work.
It is important to note that Getting Sociology Right is NOT a memoir, but exactly what the subtitle promises: a half-century of reflections, essays, and review pieces written over the course of his career. Smelser came to sociology in the years immediately following World War II; he earned his undergraduate degree in 1952 from Harvard’s then-new Department of Social Relations, studying with Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, George Homans, and other familiar names. But it was three guest lectures in the spring of 1949 by Talcott Parsons that left him “breathless by his brilliance and above all his theoretical comprehensiveness” (p. 266). By 1956, he was publishing with Parsons. This bit of personal story comes in the final full chapter of the book, in a discussion of “sociological adventures” in which Smelser talks about his early years as the son of a community college professor and a high school teacher and a push toward academic and scholarly success that started in high school and went straight through Harvard to Oxford and back to Harvard for his Ph.D. in 1958. By 1961, he was tenured at Berkeley and editor of American Sociological Review.
He was solidly in sociology from very early on, but also doing a kind of “sociology of sociology,” presenting overviews and analyses of the discipline. The earliest piece in this book, “Sociology and the Other Social Sciences,” was published in 1967 in Paul Lazarsfeld et al.’s The Uses of Sociology. The opening essay is on “The Optimum Scope of Sociology,” from A Design for Sociology: Scope, Objectives, and Methods, edited by Robert Bierstedt in 1969. Eleven years after completing his doctorate, the still-early Smelser was being asked to help define the discipline and its scope. Every one of the dozen essays in this book, from that 1967 piece through to 2005, is a kind of review or placement of sociology: understandings of research, of social problems, of “mistakes,” of internationalization, looking ahead at the next decades in 1990, looking back at the last 25 years in the Annual Review of Sociology in 1999. However much one does or does not share Smelser’s “take” on sociology, his evaluation of what it is we are doing or should be doing or even can do, reading this book certainly gives a sense of the trajectory of the discipline.
The book is also extraordinarily valuable for younger scholars in showing how one thinks and rethinks an issue. Again, with the exception of a single chapter at the end, while the book is not a memoir, Smelser is doing a consistent intellectual, autobiographical probing. Throughout the book, false starts, errors, and missteps are not hidden, as they too often are when we present our final polished work, but explored. Perhaps his early training in psychoanalysis helps. He does not cast a psychoanalytic eye anywhere but briefly in the single memoir chapter, but that ability to go back, to rethink, to openly explore the past while moving to the future might well be a legacy of that training.
One chapter I certainly will be urging my doctoral students to read is the brief 1980 chapter on “Biography, the Structure of Explanation and the Evaluation of Research in Sociology,” from Hubert Blalock’s edited book Sociological Theory and Research. Smelser acknowledges a debt to a maxim of Parsons—that in dealing with any theoretical topic, it never fails to repay one’s efforts to go first to the great classical thinkers on that topic. Interestingly, in 1980 he declares Merton’s 1968 Social Theory and Social Structure to be the “classic.” He then critiques Merton and shows how he himself uses the ideas he found in Merton, including those he critiqued, before looking at the “three levels of process in social science scholarship,” starting with “The Biographical Level: Meanderings.” Smelser does not mean by this what so many of us now do: something happened to me, and out of my lived experience up popped a sociological insight. What he is calling a biographical level is completely intellectual and includes such things as his first approaches to a problem, encounters with other scholars who variously “applauded, qualified and shot down various ideas,” “moments of frustration over time spent in false starts, moments of euphoria as new interpretive insights flashed into my mind, and moments of disappointment as I later discovered how limited were these insights” (pp. 109–110). A biographical story, he concludes, is unsystematic, even “untidy,” and then he moves on to “The Level of Building Explanations: Operations Required.” Here he responds to the 1964 ASA presidential address by George Homans, “Bringing Men Back In,” in which Homans critiqued the functionalists, including Smelser—Smelser sees some merit but argues with an over-psychologizing he saw in Homans. The final section, “The Level of Evaluation: Methodological Questions,” briefly lays out essential research concerns for any project in the social sciences.
The book concludes with a brief afterword, and in the final paragraph Smelser takes on a commentary by Alan Sica, past editor of the journal you are reading. Smelser states, “after having established a reputation as a sociologist in the ‘golden age’ (1950–1970) of the field in the United States, I could afford to comment on its unseemly developments” (p. 312) and quotes Sica: “It seems a cardinal has noticed that the Vatican is weakening, and having reached a senior position in the College, can now risk saying as much” (p. 312). Smelser is duly complimented but again disagrees with his critic, seeing his own assessments as “more nearly neutral.” Neutrality, I would suggest, lies in the eye of the beholder. And Parsons, Merton, functionalism—were these the “golden age” of sociology? Or would it be the radical 1960s, which Smelser himself rather “sat out” in the Chancellor’s office at Berkeley? I guess it depends on where one’s own biography intersects the brief story of sociology in the United States. Maybe the golden age is right now, springing forth in the early you, or the early you of your students. In any case, read this book to understand where we have come from, to think better about where we are going.