Abstract
Contemporary Sociology 1(6) (November 1972): 507–508
In 1937, when Talcott Parsons published The Structure of Social Action, a triumvirate consisting of Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber occupied the marble seats of fame in the pantheon of European sociological theory. Today, thirty-five years later, Pareto’s statue has been removed to the basement and Marx’s has been installed instead in the Great Hall as a reminder that he now belongs to an elite trio who, in the words of the author of this book, “established theprincipal frames of reference of modern sociology.” It is the intention of Anthony Giddens, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, to analyze the ideas of these authors and especially to compare and contrast the views of Marx with those of the other two. It is a task he accomplishes with dedication, skill, and superior scholarship.
His book, as he emphasizes in his Preface, is “not a critical, but an expository and comparative work.” He is interested in the meaning that Marx, Durkheim, and Weber have for us today and in the kinds of significance they still have for contemporary sociology. He is interested in addition in correcting certain misinterpretations which have collected, like moss on a decaying log, around the classic writings. He denounces, for example, the view which has “tyrannized” Marxian scholarship of recent vintage, the view, namely, that there was a “young Marx” and then a mature Marx and that the two had different designs in mind. On the contrary, the perspective was a consistent one, and one that Marx never abandoned.
As for Durkheim, although he has been rescued from some kinds of criticism and misinterpretation (the group mind problem, for example, which the concept of collective representations inevitably raised), he is nevertheless—and erroneously—interpreted in functionalist rather than historical terms. The thesis here is much more questionable, but Giddens does not hesitate to assert that “Durkheim was not primarily concerned with ‘the problem of order,’ but with the problem of ‘the changing nature of order’ in the context of a definite conception of social development.”
With respect to Weber, Giddens’ principal complaint is that the experts at exegesis have failed altogether to stress—indeed, even to appreciate—the essential consistency in the Weberian corpus. There is a radical neo-Kantianism there which survives and transcends the profusion of substantive interests to which Weber gave expression.
In support of these ideas Giddens devotes sections of his book to Marx, to Durkheim, to Weber, and finally to “Capitalism, socialism, and social theory,” in which he tries to relate Marx to the other two, especially on concerns that relate to the division of labor. All of the dominant ideas, however, in the three thinkers receive their proper allocation of attention and emphasis. Giddens concludes with a special Postscript entitled “Marx and Modern Sociology” in which he argues, with a rather considerable cogency, against the view that Marx after all appeared too early to be of sociological account and that the discipline really begins with the generation of Durkheim and Weber; and against the view also that all of post-Marxian sociology is merely a bourgeois response to the author of the Communist Manifesto. Each of these views, of course, contains a kernel of truth. But the kernel is small indeed, and it therefore behooves us all to re-think these relationships with the help of all three of our great mentors: “paradoxically, in taking up again the problems with which they were primarily concerned, we may hope ultimately to liberate ourselves from our present heavy dependence on the ideas which they formulated.”
So much for Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. What now shall we say of Giddens? One easily pays tribute to his erudition and, as mentioned above, to his impeccable scholarship. We have here a profound and comprehensive study ofimportant sectors of sociological theory. But his interpretations are less than startling and his discourse is often pedantic. Exegesis without exaltation can be tiresome and, although almost everything Giddens says is susceptible to reasonable agreement or argument, it does little to enlist our enthusiasm.
What would Marx or Durkheim or Weber have said about the assembly line at Lordstown, Ohio, in 1972, when 7,800 members of the United Automobile Workers Local 1112 walked off their jobs in protest against being forced, every 36 seconds, to perform an identical task in order that the line itself could produce 1500 automobiles a day? Does this kind of division of labor contribute to the cohesion of society? And how [sic] account for the current popularity of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which Charlie, always a victim of circumstance, is forced to give his one nut one-sixteenth of a turn every two seconds throughout the day? Did Chaplin, with his own kind of passion and sentiment, perceive something that escaped the attention of Giddens’ sociologists?
These last observations, however, are superficial and unfair. Giddens chops his way through a dense and tangled thicket and his explication des textes achieves a high degree of scholastic excellence.