Abstract
This collection of essays is an effort to help sociologists recover from what editors Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck call “sociological amnesia,” a disease that continues to afflict the discipline in its relationship to classical authors. The title itself is a nice double entendre. While the overall claim of this rather uneven volume is that contemporary sociologists suffer from amnesia as a kind of selective forgetfulness with respect to predecessors who plied the sociological trade in the distant (and not-so-distant) past, the further claim is that sociologists suffer from this amnesia for distinctly sociological reasons.
The editors make the latter argument in an introductory essay that features an excellent synthetic viewpoint on the process and drawbacks of sociological amnesia. This marks an original contribution to the sociology of ideas and makes that essay (at least) a must-read for those interested in the resurgent subfield. However, while high hopes accompany the introduction, the editors’ opening gauntlet—to develop a sociological explanation for why would-be classical authors are forgotten—is rarely taken up in the remaining essays, some of which feature their own (in many ways, significant) accounts of the same amnesiac process, but most of which count as exercises in pure exegesis dedicated to the social thought of figures overlooked, neglected, or otherwise consigned to an oblivion far worse than simply not being cited.
In the first camp, the highlight of the volume is probably Matteo Bortolini and Andrea Cossu’s fascinating comparison between the fates of Clifford Geertz and Robert Bellah, or more precisely the fates of their books The Interpretation of Cultures and Beyond Belief, respectively. Published only a few years apart in the early 1970s, both demonstrating the social-scientific acumen their authors honed as classmates in the Harvard Department of Social Relations, the former remains an agenda-setting “classic” text with cross-disciplinary appeal, while the latter has had a much more contained influence, largely limited to the sociology of religion. Judging by the book reviews at the time, exactly the opposite trajectory was expected. Geertz’s book was received with admiration, but also categorized as “more art than science.” Bellah’s book was widely praised, and many believed that it demonstrated a groundbreaking new approach to both religion and culture. As Bortolini and Cossu argue, however, those initial expectations didn’t come to fruition, largely because Geertz’s text quickly attained an “iconic” cultural status while Bellah’s book didn’t. This reveals the performative role that certain texts play in a given state of an academic field (e.g., citing a text without seriously reading it) that mimics the use of cultural objects in more prototypical ritual contexts. Bortolini and Cossu’s strongly cultural account for the presence (or absence) of sociological amnesia is important, though it deviates from how (presumably) the volume’s editors would have accounted for this same process.
Other essays that incline more toward explaining sociological amnesia than recovering forgotten social theory include Peter Baehr’s detailed but myopic account of the changing fortunes of Raymond Aron, Stephen Mennell’s richly historical academic biography of Norbert Elias, Neil Davidson’s intellectual history of Alasdair Macintyre’s early career flirtation with “Marxist sociology” and how it subsequently mattered for his famous critique of modern morality (in After Virtue), and finally Christos Memos’s account of Cornelius Castoriadis’s tumultuous path through the European (primarily French) left during the post-war period, extending through the ‘60s revolts and finishing with the backlash marked by rise of the nouveau philosophie in the 1980s. Misunderstood first by Stalinists, then by student radicals and ultimately by newly conservative ex-Trotskyites, Castoriadis’ highly original concepts (e.g., “the social imaginary”) are often used to lend a fashionable “radical sensibility” to otherwise stodgy academic texts, though, as Memos argues, completely out of context. Less about sociological amnesia per se, this essay reveals how the motivated interpretation and use of social-theoretical concepts is shaped by one’s position in a given academic field.
Among those essays more inclined toward exegesis, Álvaro Santana-Acuña offers a thorough analysis of Durkheim’s chief rival Gabriel Tarde and his well-conceived but ill-interpreted notion of the “social monad.” Providing the intellectual genealogy of Tarde’s concept and drawing the connection between Tarde and contemporary actor-network theory, Santana-Acuña dispels many of the grossest rumors that have circulated and distorted Tarde’s thought: for example, that his resistance to the reality of “social facts” makes him, ipso facto, the first methodological individualist.
Bridget Fowler, meanwhile, recovers the neglected and distinctly sociological contributions of Lucien Goldmann. Starting with his groundbreaking first book (a sociology of knowledge account of Kant), Goldmann developed a unique approach to knowledge and culture that, as Fowler deftly reveals, contains a much broader sociological problematic than is generally appreciated. Thinking with Goldmann against Bourdieu, for example, Fowler demonstrates the vital legacy of Goldmann’s thought, particularly for navigating basic problems related to the concept of structure.
Finally, in an essay that does its best to blend exegesis with the sociology of ideas, Kieran Durkin explains how the “core” members of the Frankfurt School shunned Erich Fromm in the 1930s, though he had been integrally connected with the school from its beginnings. Fromm would ultimately enjoy a broad popularity in the United States in the 1960s, even though much of his work, particularly his large-scale empirical work (e.g., comparisons between the psychological profile of German workers and Mexican peasants), is almost completely unknown. Durkin shows the value of recovering Fromm’s neglected thought for furthering a genuine rapprochement between psychology and sociology.
As Law and Lybeck argue in their introduction, one of the worst consequences of sociological amnesia is the tendency for “disciplinary knowledge” to get trapped inside narrow theoretical frameworks that effectively serve as self-sustaining conceptual blinders because they forbid the recognition of alternative trajectories of thought. While all of the essays in this volume provide some antidote for this problem by recovering lost social theory or by explaining why certain strands of social theory were forgotten but shouldn’t have been, the essays by Liz Stanley and E. Stina Lyon advance this effort in a different and presumably more radical direction. Recovering the thought of two almost completely unknown figures from sociology’s past—Viola Klein and Olive Schreiner, respectively—they argue for the benefits of rethinking what counts as sociology, providing rich examples of work that seems sociological enough for an obvious affinity but remains foreign enough to require a disciplinary translation. Reading Klein’s unique literary sociology or Schreiner’s timely insights into a (post)colonial sociology, the most significant consequence would seem to be testing the boundaries that determine what is and what is not “sociology” in our own time.
Such a test should be commonplace in a post-positivist enterprise like sociology, and one wishes the editors and authors of this volume would have engaged more with thinking through the ramifications of sociological amnesia from an epistemological standpoint. I think this would ultimately help to combine, in spite of their frequent mutual exclusion in these essays, the critical exegesis of lost social theory with the explanatory efforts found in the sociology of ideas by defining the relative strengths of both approaches in furthering a reflexive critique of sociology. Such an effort, as demonstrated by the work found in Sociological Amnesia, would finally put to rest Merton’s misguided, and misguidedly influential, idea that the significance of social theory is independent of its history.