Sociology’s inescapable past

For the last 20 years I have taught sociological theory as a required course to undergraduates at New York University. The course consists (I should say “consisted,” since I have now retired) in the study, based on selected texts, lectures and class discussion of Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and, for the last 2 years, W. E. B. Dubois and Simone de Beauvoir. At the first lecture I raise the question: Why are we doing this—studying the writings of figures from the past, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries—and now reaching only the mid-century? For their final assignment I give the students a saying of Kenneth Burke’s to write about, asking the question: “‘Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing’. How would you compare and contrast at least two of the thinkers we have studied in the light of this saying?” I shall here suggest that perhaps the saying cited in the second question helps to answer the first.

To sharpen the first question I ask how many of them are also studying a natural science or a social science other than sociology and invariably elicit the response that none of these disciplines has a required course that involves reading classics of the past. Physicists, chemists, and biologists learn about the history of their disciplines, if at all, from summaries in textbooks. Economics students are not required to read the writings of Smith, Marshall, Walras, and Keynes. Psychology students do not have to read Wundt, James and Piaget, or even Freud. Even political science students who learn about Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Mill do so by choice under the rubric of “political theory”—or, more likely, “classical political theory,” since “contemporary theory”—rational choice theory, for example, and related analytical approaches—is similarly focused on where current theoretical work is going than in where it came from.

In sociology these are not alternatives. Understanding where any given type of current theoretical work is going is, I argue, not possible without a serious study of its origins. I realize that this is a rather strong claim. Not every reader is likely to find it persuasive, even among sociologists, though I imagine that it would be music to the ears of most of the readers of this journal. So what is it that is distinctive of sociology—within which, also controversially, I would include what in Britain is called social anthropology, and in the United States cultural anthropology, despite their largely separate lineages of founding ancestors? What is it about sociology, thus broadly understood, that ties it so seamlessly to its past?

The best place to start in seeking to answer this is probably with the indeterminateness of the very concept of the social. The other disciplines cited can all happily proceed, pursuing research programs that focus on problems and topics that clearly lie within their boundaries, and also cross them in interdisciplinary work, without feeling the need to police them and without agonizing over the demarcation problem, leaving that, for the most part, ¹ to the philosophers. What counts as “economic” or “political” or “psychological” are real and interesting questions but they are not questions that practitioners, even theorists within these disciplines, need to address. Practicing sociologists, by contrast, are committed from the outset to one or another conception of what makes human beings social—or, more precisely, all social scientists are so committed, but only sociologists need to commit to one or another conception, which they often may do without even reflecting on the matter. Importantly, these conceptions are not merely divergent: they not infrequently clash.

This is not just an observation about scope. Norman Birnbaum wrote somewhere that sociology is about everything from the Destiny of Man to fallen women. There is no topic unamenable to sociological inquiry. Nor is the point one about method. It is not about the differences between causal, statistical and interpretative methodologies, or qualitative versus quantitative approaches; nor is it about, say, the case for interviewing versus observation of behavior in ethnography, or for experimental versus survey-based research. We can take for granted that sociology’s scope is limitless: humani nihil a me alienum puto; and what methods are appropriate for the study of any given object depends on what that object is and on various considerations, among them pragmatic ones, and is likely to divide research communities. What is distinctive of sociology is that there are several divergent conceptions of what features of that object, whatever it is, are such as to render it social and thus a problem for sociology. Moreover, as I shall end up by arguing, it is not self-evident that this divergence is a matter for regret.

Consider, first, the conceptions of the early and most “classical” members of the sociological canon—the holy trinity of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber plus (I insist) Simmel. These conceptions are more or less abstract. The most abstract are the formal definitions. There is Durkheim’s account of social facts as external to any given individual, constraining, and general throughout a society while existing independently of their individual manifestations. A cousin of this view is Marx’s statement that in the social production of their life men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will—his focus, unlike Durkheim’s, being on relations of production. There is Weber’s statement that an action is social insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. There is Simmel’s view of the social as interaction between agents (whether individual or collective), which exhibit different patterns universally present across all times and spaces. One can regard these accounts as transcendental in the sense that they will hold for each and every type of society, that is, any form of (human) social life. Though divergent they are not mutually incompatible.

Less abstract are the explananda—the key, overarching questions calling for explanation and analysis—on which these classical sociologists severally focused. Durkheim’s inaugural lecture at the University of Bordeaux was on “Social Solidarity” and it is plausible to claim that social solidarity is central throughout his work: what strengthens it and what enfeebles it, from The Division of Labor in Society and Suicide to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Marx’s central orienting concern throughout is captured by the concept of exploitation, which incorporates several ideas: extraction, domination, and (arguably) injustice and clearly takes different forms at different stages of world historical development. Weber had more than one central question but domination, stabilizing the power of the rulers over the ruled, was certainly at the center of much of his thinking, most obviously in his extensive work in political sociology and on the functioning of institutions and organizations. And for Simmel the patterning of social life was itself the puzzle: how different such forms are reproduced at different levels of social life in all societies and different stages of history and have their impact on individuals’ experience and mental life.

Each accordingly adopted a distinctive stance, developed a distinctive vocabulary, and employed distinctive metaphors. Durkheim was the sociological diagnostician, identifying social pathologies, and devising institutional remedies. Marx combined analysis, activism, and critique, focusing on revealing the bases of the social relations that block the realization of human emancipation. Weber, by contrast, sought rigorously to separate sociological work from political commitments, seeing it as value-driven but aiming for objectivity through the discipline of scientific constraints. And Simmel was less value-driven, seeking commonalities across apparent differences, uniquely combining the abstracting gaze of the geometrician with the particularizing insights of a novelist. Durkheim used the language of anomie, integration, and regulation. Marx wrote of alienation, class struggle and commodity fetishism, Weber of status groups, legitimation and disenchantment, and Simmel’s universal forms included conflict, exchange, and hierarchy. And Durkheim’s metaphors and analogies tended to come from contemporary science (organic solidarity, suicidogenic currents, collective effervescence). Marx’s writing is replete with countless powerful metaphors (a topic itself worthy of further study ² ), some invoking capitalism as predator (vampire ³ ), some its oppressiveness (incubus), some its degradation of human beings (prostitution). Weber’s most famous metaphor for the soulless bureaucratic world of the future was poetically translated (by, of all people, Talcott Parsons) as the iron cage. ⁴ And Simmel, exploring spatial metaphors to characterize social life, made much of nearness and distance, as in his classic essay, “The Stranger.”

At a still lower level of abstraction, we can turn to the central conceptual schemes deployed by all eight figures in my course that are more specifically tied to the distinctively modern world whose essential features each intended to capture. At this level the divergences become sharper, exemplifying their respective views of what constitutes the social. Saint-Simon, the genius who inspired Comte, prophetically looked forward hopefully to the rise of meritocracy, technocracy, and productivism in the future industrial society. Tocqueville, unlike Saint-Simon combining fear with hope, saw losses and gains in the transition to modernity: growing equality threatened liberty, for as people’s social status inexorably became more equal, their civic freedom was threatened by despotism, both political and social, and could only be preserved by flourishing civil associations. Durkheim’s vision of the social is exemplified by his account of what endangered it under (what Marx called) capitalism: anomie or limitless acquisitiveness (the “malady of infinite aspiration”) and social isolation (which he called “egoism”), to be remedied respectively by instituting regulative norms and fostering integrative attachments locally, in occupational groups, nationally and beyond. Marx’s indispensable and independent relations were resolutely materialist antagonistic class relations, invoking three distinct models—the radical dichotomy of bourgeois and proletariat in the Manifesto, the functional three-fold division (landowners, capitalists, and laborers) in the last, unfinished chapter of Capital volume III and a view of multiple classes on a gradational scale—while always assuming that the first would prevail, leading to world-wide revolutionary transformation. In contrast, Weber (like Durkheim) saw no prospect of such transformation, advancing a less determinist conception of classes, with looser links between class situation, consciousness, and action, relating class positions to individual life chances and positing the independent reality of status groupings. For Simmel what was central was the shaping role of the money economy and its social and psychological consequences, above all in metropolitan cities: the multiplication of social roles, anonymity, and the pervasive effects of quantification, calculation, and the blasé attitude on social relation from international politics to the most intimate sphere of life. And with Dubois and de Beauvoir we can see the first systematic theories of what have become predominant issues in our time. With Dubois, above all in his great book on Black Reconstruction, race is treated sociologically and in specific relationship to class. And in de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, one can find the beginnings (as both inspiration and target) of the subsequent ramifying sociological debates over sex and gender.

These various divergent visions of what constitutes and what exemplifies what is social have of course all been subject to continuing and unending debates. That is the main reason for dubbing them classical. I have not even touched on other classical figures but the ideas of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber have from the beginning been developed, extended, refined, deepened, modified and adopted but also challenged and sometimes rejected. Above all, they have constantly been present. Consider the rich and complex story of the developments, modifications, and transformations across generations of Durkheim’s thinking, among sociologists, and anthropologists beginning with Marcel Mauss down to the present, so brilliantly and comprehensively traced in Philip Smith’s recent book Durkheim and After (Smith, 2020). Consider the many strands of Marxist and Marxist-inspired sociological work, from Engels’ orthodoxy and Bernstein’s revisionism to the elaborate and creative elaborations of class theory in the work of Erik Olin Wright, not to mention all the work on class formation and revolutions by both historians and sociologists. Once you step beyond those who see themselves as Marxists and seek to trace the impact of Marx’s ideas on sociological thinking and research, including but extending far beyond class and stratification, and the task becomes unmanageable. More confined to the academic realm, much the same is true of Weber, whose impact tracks his polymathic interests and contributions, from the early essay on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to the general economic history, the work on cities, on law and on comparative religion, ranging across the world’s religions, not to mention political sociology, stratification, and bureaucracy. Leaving his marks in all these fields, it has, of course, been in counterpoint to Marx that Weberian positions have mainly resonated. Simmel, largely because his talents constituted such a unique blend, had far fewer self-proclaimed followers; there was no Simmel school of “Simmelians.” ⁵ But his impact and echoes can be discerned in many sociological fields, from urban sociology to symbolic interactionism to network analysis.

Of course, one common response to all this has been eclecticism—picking and choosing elements and insights in constructing theories and hypotheses. It is not hard to find examples of this. They range from the work of prominent figures of our time, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins to the latest journal articles. The path that I claim leads nowhere is the path of synthesis in quest of overall convergence and unification, aiming for a “general theory of action” ⁶ that would gain discipline-wide consensus. I have no general argument to offer that would show why this must be so, but I will conclude by observing that there seems to be a deep-lying truth in the visual metaphor in Kenneth Burke’s saying, and add the further, final thought that perhaps the works of the classical sociologists suggest that not seeing what the others do may be a precondition for attaining insights that would otherwise be inaccessible.