Abstract
The question posed in 1937 by Talcott Parsons – who now reads Herbert Spencer? – was in fact first formulated a few years earlier by the American political scientist Crane Brinton. The latter was marvelling at the fact that, in just a few decades, Spencer had shifted from being widely viewed as a colossus of the social sciences to become a figure whose very long books now lay mostly unread, gathering dust on library shelves. The same fate awaited the works of Brinton, and, to a lesser degree, Parsons too. Who gets remembered, who gets forgotten, and for what reasons, are some of the big questions that social theory can pose about its own history. Social theory is also animated by the perennial idea that great thinkers and wonderful ideas of the past await excavation and rescue by scholars today. Indeed, the whole genre of so-called ‘classical sociology’ is nothing other than a series of remembrances, forgettings, and attempted excavations and resuscitations. The recent instance of Bruno Latour’s resuscitation of the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, as counterpoint to, and critique of, the highly consecrated figure of Durkheim, is a good case in point, illustrating how successful intellectual entrepreneurship can reshape the canon. Ten years ago, nobody writing a classical sociology textbook in English would have thought of including Tarde. Nowadays, it is becoming de rigeur.
No such spectacular revivification has yet brought Spencer’s once mighty reputation back to a position that is anything like it was more than a century ago. Nonetheless, in answer to the question posed by Brinton and Parsons, clearly someone who still reads Spencer today is John Scott, a distinguished English sociologist, and a scholar with a very strong sense of the history of the discipline of sociology, especially in the UK. Scott is very well placed to narrate, and seek to re-tell, the history in Britain of both sociology, in the narrower institutionalized and academic sense, and social theory, in the broader sense of patterns of thought and intellectual traditions inside and outside universities.
The book is animated by a desire to rebut claims made by Perry Anderson in the late 1960s that no ‘classical sociology’ comparable to that found in France, Germany and the USA ever developed in the British context. The main point of Scott’s book is to show that there was in fact plenty of sociology, and, more broadly, social theory, in the UK, both in the nineteenth century, and in the years both immediately prior to and after it. But this sociology and social theory have been mostly forgotten, both abroad and in Britain itself. The book is an exercise in rehabilitation of streams of thought that were vigorous and sometimes influential in their own times, but which have subsequently been cast into the intellectual penumbra.
Scott does this act of reconstruction and revivification in a book with a primarily two-part structure. In the first four substantive chapters, four different intellectual constellations are set out. These are social theory as it existed in mainstream philosophy (key figures including Adam Ferguson and the other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, Harriet Martineau, Henry Buckle and J.S. Mill); various reflections on the ‘social organism’ (key figures including Walter Bagehot, Edward Tylor, Benjamin Kidd and Spencer himself); the Romantic critique of capitalism and industrialism (key figures including Edmund Burke, the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and Bernard Bosanquet); and the socialist critique of the current social order (key figures including the various Utopian socialists, the circle around Marx, including Eleanor Marx, plus the Fabians, and John Hobson). Then three chapters are each devoted to a figure whom Scott sees as central to ‘classical sociology’ as it existed in the British context, namely Patrick Geddes, Robert MacIver and Leonard Hobhouse. A penultimate chapter takes the story further into the twentieth century, discussing figures such as Radcliffe-Brown in anthropology and G.D.H. Cole and Richard Tawney, inheritors of the earlier socialist tradition. A final chapter offers brief reflections on the implications for social theory today of excavating the relatively forgotten ‘British’ streams of social theory.
As may be discerned from the description above, this is a well-organized book, with the reader being carefully and clearly guided through the main intellectual highways, and sometimes byways, of social thinking in Britain across a span of almost 150 years. The unadorned writing style is a distinct plus. If a reader wants a short but reliable primer on what, for example, Spencer essentially said, then this book fits the bill.
The book also succeeds in its own terms. Anderson’s rather simplistic remarks are well and truly rebutted, through a clear documenting of the scope of social theory, broadly understood, in Britain across the time period under consideration. Scott does not mention it, but claims such as the UK lacking a bona fide classical sociology brought to my mind E.P. Thompson’s satirical take in the mid-1960s on the intellectual dispositions of some parts of the British intellectual Left. Referring to Dickens’ character Mr. Podsnap, who thought everything English superior to everything foreign, Thompson chided leftist English intellectuals for their assumption that everything was superior on ‘the continent’, and that the local versions must always be radically inferior to the European equivalents. Any assumptions that Britain did not produce some sort of ‘classical sociology’ do seem to smack of the ‘inverted Podsnappery’ which Thompson warned of.
Nonetheless, any book undertaking this sort of enterprise with this sort of material is probably bound to display certain shortcomings. The very large time period being considered means that contextual nuances are underplayed. There is a great deal of difference between the society where the story begins – the late eighteenth-century Scotland of Ferguson, Smith and Millar – and where it ends up – the London School of Economics and suchlike university locations in the inter-war period. But in a relatively brief book there is not enough space really to consider the contexts out of which the social theorizing arose, and which also shaped it. A more substantial theoretical and political issue is the lack of treatment of the sorts of issues that post-colonial scholarship would raise. Racist and eugenicist ideas are covered, and appropriately disdained, but too little is offered of the imperial context in which social thought of the period was generated. By and large, it is male theorists of the imperial, Northern hemisphere metropole who are discussed, in ways that I suspect would not really satisfy post-colonial critics or those enamoured of the idea of Southern Theory.
On the other hand, Scott is very sharply attuned to modes of exclusion and marginalization within upper middle class, male academic worlds. While Hobhouse flourished at the new intellectual epicentre, the LSE, Geddes and his discipline Branford are clearly shown to have failed to influence wider sociology because of marginal institutional locations, such as the former being based in Dundee for a while. MacIver only really became influential in sociology once he left for North America, just one in a long line of social theorists to have fled the intellectual periphery that is Aberdeen.
Given that the book is in the business of rediscovery, much of the terrain covered is actually quite familiar, and not just to hyper-specialists. The Romantic and socialist critiques of capitalist industrialism were very well surveyed by Raymond Williams in books that are still widely available, and their treatment here does not add anything new to what he, or others following him, have already noted. Specialists will also not find radically different insights into the work of any of the figures covered beyond what is already known. But perhaps such a criticism is unfair. The book essentially works as a digest of existing knowledge, and its novelty rests in pulling together diverse tendencies of thought into one relatively brief space. In that sense, it works very well, and it does lay to rest the myth of the supposedly a-theoretical nature of social thinking in Britain, hopefully once and for all.
Still, as the book went on, quite a lot of that theorizing struck me as rather unremarkable, and often wholly stuck in debates of its time, debates that now seem seriously antiquated. It is one thing to point out that a broad spectrum of social thought existed in Britain, but it is quite another to prove that much of it is still interesting or useful for people today. Scott’s reflections on the ongoing interest and usefulness of the material that he has covered are too brief and sketchy. They do not really work as a rallying-cry for a new generation of exegetes to divert their attention from the French, German and American classics, and to blow the dust off the big Victorian and Edwardian volumes that have been relegated to the remote storage facilities of those few university libraries which have spared them from the bonfire or the remainder sale. Apart from perhaps Spencer, there is no evidence here that anyone in the British context produced anything as rich and still as suggestive as Durkheim’s Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse, or that anyone was as truly intellectually capacious as Max Weber (with, of course, the exception of the Soho-dwelling Marx).
But perhaps such judgements are the result of this reviewer’s own inverted Podsnappery, an unexamined reflex reaction which is dinned into one during British sociological training, within which the canon has long been presented as primarily Franco-German in nature. Perhaps it is time to rediscover the intellectual delights that might be found lurking within, say, the works of Benjamin Kidd or Lancelot Hogben?
A final remark. Book reviews do not often mention cover designs, but they are an important element of any book being reviewed. The paperback version of the book has a very cool cover illustration by designer Stephanie Guyaz, with the disembodied heads of Spencer, Wollstonecraft and (probably) Matthew Arnold floating around among manipulated British Library archive pictures of whales riding penny-farthing bicycles. Not only is this a far better cover than most academic books will ever have, it also suggests a novel way of selling Old School social theory, ‘British’ or otherwise, to a younger generation: present it as an exercise in steampunk sociology.
