Sociological Amnesia

sociological amnesia
Classical and Contemporary

Social Theory
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Also in the series
A Sociology of the Total Organization
Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion
Mikaela Sundberg
ISBN 978-1-4724-5560-4
Arendt Contra Sociology
Theory, Society and its Science
Philip Walsh
ISBN 978-1-4094-3863-2
Being Human in a Consumer Society
Edited by Alejandro Nstor Garca Martnez
ISBN 978-1-4724-4317-5
Hegels Phenomenology and Foucaults Genealogy
Evangelia Sembou
ISBN 978-1-4094-4308-7
Sociological Amnesia
Cross-currents in Disciplinary History
Edited by
Alex Law
Abertay University, UK
Eric Royal Lybeck
University of Cambridge, UK
The editors and contributors 2015

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Sociological amnesia : cross-currents in disciplinary history / [edited] by Alex Law and
Eric Royal Lybeck.
pages cm. -- (Classical and contemporary social theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4234-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-4235-2 (ebook)
-- ISBN 978-1-4724-4236-9 (epub)
1. Sociology--History. I. Law, Alex. II. Lybeck, Eric Royal.
HM435.S635 2015
301--dc23
2015004238
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at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck
2 British Sociology and Raymond Aron

Peter Baehr
17
3 Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines: Robert N. Bellah,

Clifford Geertz, and the Making of Iconic Cultural Objects
Matteo Bortolini and Andrea Cossu
4 Erich Fromm: Studies in Social Character
Kieran Durkin
vii
xi
5 From Literature to Sociology: The Shock of Celines Literary

Style and Viola Kleins Attempt to Understand It (With a Little
Help from Karl Mannheim)
E. Stina Lyon
6 Olive Schreiner, Sociology and the Company She Kept
Liz Stanley
37
57
73
89
7 Lucien Goldmanns Key Sociological Problems and His

Critical Heritage: From the Hidden God to the Hidden Class
Bridget Fowler
105
8 G.D.H. Cole: Sociology, Politics, Empowerment and

How to be Socially Good
Matt Dawson and Charles Masquelier
125
9 Social Monads, Not Social Facts: Gabriel Tardes Tool

for Sociological Analysis

lvaro Santana-Acua
141
vi
10 Alasdair MacIntyres Lost Sociology

Neil Davidson
159
11 Castoriadis and Social Theory: From Marginalization to

Canonization to Re-radicalization

Christos Memos
181
12 Norbert Elias: Sociological Amnesia and The Most Important

Thinker You Have Never Heard Of

Stephen Mennell
197
Index
211
Peter Baehr is Professor of Social Theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
His books include Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World (1997), Hannah
Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Social Sciences (2010) and Founders, Classics,
Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociologys Heritage
(2nd edn 2015). Current interests centre on the political writings of Rebecca
West, and the history of exposure practices (denunciation, informing, unmasking,
whistleblowing) since the French Revolution.
Matteo Bortolini is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova,
Italy, where he teaches undergraduate classes on the logic of the social sciences.
His research covers the fields of intellectual and artistic success, post-secularized
societies, and Foucauldian technologies of the self from the standpoint of a
strongly culturalist sociology. He is currently writing a sociological biography of
Robert N. Bellah from the standpoint of the sociology of the intellectuals, and a
book on secularization together with the Italian philosopher, Paolo Costa.
Andrea Cossu teaches Cultural Sociology at the University of Trento and the
University of Bologna. He has been a Visiting and Faculty Fellow of the Center
for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He works mainly in the fields of cultural
and political sociology, with a particular focus on the relationship between
memory and the formation of identities and reputations. He is also the author of
It Aint Me Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity, and his work
has appeared among other journals in Memory Studies, Journal of Classical
Sociology, Modern Italy.
Neil Davidson lectures in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is the
author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), the Deutscher-Prize
winning Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), How Revolutionary Were
the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012) and, most recently, Holding Fast to an Image
of the Past (2014). Davidson has also co-edited and contributed to Alasdair
MacIntyres Engagement with Marxism (2008), Neoliberal Scotland (2010) and
The Longue Dure of the Far-Right (2014). His work has appeared in a number of
journals including Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Capital and Class,
Historical Materialism, New Left Review and Science and Society.
Matt Dawson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has
research interests in social theory, political sociology, normativity, the history of
viii
sociology and asexuality. Matt is the author of Late Modernity, Individualization

and Socialism: An Associational Critique of Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013) and is currently writing a book outlining visions of alternative societies
offered throughout the history of the discipline. He has also published articles on
the work of theorists such as Bauman and Durkheim in a variety of journals.
Kieran Durkin is Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Glasgow. His
research interests are in Social Theory, and in Humanist Marxism, Critical Theory,
and the thought of Erich Fromm in particular. He is the author of The Radical
Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Bridget Fowler is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. Her
main research interests are in social theory, Marxist-feminism, and the sociology
of culture. She remains greatly indebted to the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, on
whom or around whom her own work has been published, including two books
Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (Sage, 1997) and
The Obituary as Collective Memory (Routledge, 2007). Her most recent work
has been an article on the significance of welfare state support to British drama
and how this affects Bourdieus arguments about cultural production (Pierre
Bourdieu, Social Transformation and 1960s British Drama, Theory, Culture and
Society, May 2012), a chapter on the relationship of Bourdieu to Marx (Bourdieu:
Unorthodox Marxist? in S. Susen and B.S. Turner [eds], The Legacy of Pierre
Bourdieu, Anthem, 2011), and an evaluation of Bourdieus former collaborator,
and founder of the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique: Boltanski (Figures of
Descent from Classical Sociological Theory: Luc Boltanski, in S. Susen and
B.S.Turner [eds], The Spirit of Luc Boltanski, Anthem, 2014).
Alex Law is Professor of Sociology at Abertay University. His most recent
book, Social Theory for Today (Sage, 2015), examines the historical relationship
between crisis and social theory. He is interested in developing a reflexive
history of sociology as a means of orientation for sociology in the present. His
work develops a relational sociology to account for, amongst other things, the
disciplinary failure of Patrick Geddes sociology, changing power-balances in
Scotland, and international sport and the national habitus.
Eric Royal Lybeck is an historical sociologist of education at the University of
Cambridge. His dissertation research focuses on the academization process and
the institutionalization of the modern research university in Germany and the
United States since 1800. He has also published research in the fields of general
social theory and the history of the social sciences.
Charles Masquelier is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. His
research assumes an interdisciplinary outlook, crossing over the fields of social
theory, political theory and political philosophy, with particular interests in
ix
critical theory, social movements, the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole and the
cooperative movement. He has published articles in international journals and a
book entitled Critical Theory and Libertarian Socialism (Bloomsbury).
E. Stina Lyon is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences,
London South Bank University. Her recent research interests lie in the areas of
the history of sociology and social research, inequality and the welfare state. Her
most recent work has been on the contribution to sociology of Viola Klein and the
Swedish social scientists and reformers Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. She is a Fellow
of the Academy of Social Sciences in Britain.
Christos Memos is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology,
University of Abertay, UK. He has previously taught at the Department of
Politics, University of York. His research interests include Critical Social and
Political Theory, the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, Marx and Marxism,
Council Communism and Anarchism, Social Movements and Anti-capitalism. He
is the author of Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique and Radical
Alternatives (Palgrave, 2014).
Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College
Dublin. His books include All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and
France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985), Norbert Elias: Civilization
and the Human Self-Image (1989), and The American Civilizing Process (2007).
He holds the degrees of Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen (Amsterdam) and
Doctor of Letters (Cambridge). He is a member of the board of the Norbert Elias
Foundation, Amsterdam, of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea.
lvaro Santana-Acua is College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at
Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection between material
culture and processes of valuation. His dissertation, The Making of a National
Cadastre, studies cadastral mapping and its contribution to the nationalization
of the French territory between 1763 and 1807. He is currently finishing a book
manuscript on the process by which some literary books attain classic value.
Liz Stanley is a feminist sociologist and ESRC Professorial Research Fellow
at the University of Edinburgh, where she also holds the established chair
in Sociology. Her interests include all aspects of sociological theorizing and
questions of methodology, while much of her research has involved historical
topics. Recent books include Mourning Becomes: Post/Memory and the
Concentration Camps of the South African War (2006), Documents of Life
Revisited (2013) and The Worlds Great Question: Olive Schreiners South
African Letters (2014), with a book on archive methodology and another on
race and social change hovering in the wings.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
Alex Law wishes to thank his co-editor Eric for helping to sustain the project
from the start, all the contributors for their cooperation, patience and efforts, and
John Scott and Ray Bromley for their insights into and support for a historical
sociology of sociology. Last but no means least, he would like to acknowledge Jan
for tolerating his constant state of distraction over many years.
Eric Lybeck would likewise wish to thank his co-editor Alex and all the
contributors for their endurance and efforts. Members of the RASTA group at
Cambridge, including Martin Fuller, Nicolas Fleet and Marjan Ivkovic, provided
essential feedback during the conceptualization of this book. And for their untiring
support, unending gratitude goes to Ellie and my parents.
The editors would also like to thank Neil Jordan, assisted by Lianne Sherlock,
for much needed editorial support and guidance at each stage in the development
of the book, and Carolyn Court and Jacqui Cornish for steering the book safely
through the production process.
Chapter 1
Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck
Trajectories: Success and Failure

In the late nineteenth century, a group of around twenty members of the American
Economic Association (AEA) met in a private dining-room of a hotel for an
informal talk about the subject of sociology. Albion Small, who was present at
the AEA meeting, recalled a pent-up desire among those in attendance to determine
once and for all a roadmap for the establishment of sociology as a traditional
social science. During the meeting a theologian, president of a prominent New
England seminary, declared that a starting place should be a radical reordering
of the classification of the sciences. Many in the room, including Lester F. Ward,
leaned forward in anticipation until the seminarian suggested, in my judgment
there never will be any reliable sociology until it has its place in a system of
sciences founded on theology (Small 1924: 344). Ward, who was at the time the
most well-known American sociologist, let out an exasperated gasp as he threw
himself back in his chair in disgust and despair. Small noted that this was last
appearance of that particular Doctor of Divinity as a constructor of sociology
(Small 1924: 344).
This would not be the last time that possible trajectories were excised from a
discipline as it became increasingly conscious of itself as a discourse requiring
a clear and stable basis for demarcation. During the so-called era of Classical
sociology in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, intellectuals struggled
within competitive discursive fields as academic disciplinary boundaries were
established via the setting up of institutional positions and university departments,
the framing of course syllabi, scientific conferences, introductory textbooks, and
practical applications of sociology. During this period, in France, mile Durkheim
institutionalized sociology as a science of social facts, and, in Germany, Max
Weber took up his chair in sociology at Munich (Lukes 1972; Mommsen and
Osterhammel 1989).
Sociology was marked deeply by the uneven national contexts within
which it struggled to establish itself. Its early development in France stamped
the sociology envisioned by Auguste Comte with an overweening ambition to
crown it Queen of the Sciences based on a flimsy or non-existent empirical
kingdom. As Claude Lvi-Strauss (1945: 503) put it in his mid-twentieth
century review of French sociology: French sociology was born early, and it
still suffers from the gap which existed, at the time of its birth, between the
boldness of theoretical premonitions and the lack, or insufficiency, of concrete

data. A century beforehand, Karl Marx had argued that the closed philosophical
systems formed by the eternal principles of nineteenth-century Germany were
theoretical idealizations of the countrys socio-political under-development.
Later, at a time of rapid social and economic development in Germany, Weber
entered his critical dialogue with the ghost of Marx by developing a substantive
form of sociology that famously allowed rationality considerable autonomy in
the making of capitalism. In his lecture on Science as a Vocation, Weber (2013:
341) expected that the sociology of his and each generation would be superseded
by the discoveries and developments of future generations. It is the fate of all
science that it faces imminent obsolescence. Supersession is the meaning of
progress in science, Weber argued, the inner attitude that sociologists are
driven to adopt towards their own profession. All that can be done is to accept
this daemonic fate and work towards it as the forced choice that needs to be
made between the warring gods of ultimate values. As only one alternative
between warring cultural values, sociology is best pursued without edifying
illusions about itself, Weber warned.
In America, dramatic material development amidst cultural and political
spectacles appeared to give rise to sociology as the newest, most advanced
science of modernity. The first department of sociology in the US, at Chicago,
was established by 1892. Yet, like the discipline more widely, the cooperative
efforts of determined individuals who constructed sociology contributed a rather
eclectic and disparate undertaking, mixing European influences, notably the
sociology of Georg Simmel, with emerging national concerns, such as urbanism.
Around the same time, the weak and halting development of sociology in Britain
was put down to the relative stability of social and political conditions since the
eighteenth century unlike the rapid transition and crises experienced elsewhere
in Europe and America (Rumney 1945). Gradual change without bouts of social
upheaval and crises, it was argued, relieved British intellectuals from the need to
study social processes, structures and relations too closely or systematically and
to adopt piecemeal analyses and local surveys. At most, social stability and slow,
incremental reform in Britain supported the dominant evolutionary schemas of
Herbert Spencer and L.T. Hobhouse. However, such accounts omit the pioneering
momentum of British sociology during the Edwardian period, before it subsided
into passivity, allowing an alternative national sociological tradition to be forgotten
or dismissed (Renwick 2012; Scott and Bromley 2014).
Once securely established, the history of sociology overwhelmingly focuses
on the winners. During the 1930s, in America, Talcott Parsons aimed to resolve
a perceived theoretical crisis by selectively consolidating the classics (minus
Marx) in The Structure of Social Action as a canon of sociological thought (Camic
1989; Parsons 1937). Parsons believed that a general theory could be woven from
the conceptual fragmentation bequeathed by the founders of sociology in order to
provide empirical study with more solid foundations. General theoretical systems
of the kind constructed by Parsons and, more recently Habermas, tend to reproduce
the problem of fragmentation that they were devised to overcome (Holmwood

1996). Any purely formal arrangement of premises and concepts like structure
and action seems bound to succumb to repeated crises of fragmentation and
theory reconstruction.
Sociologists from the past most routinely recognized today belong to the
Trinitarian canon of classical sociologists, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber,
sometimes supported by other bit players like Comte or Simmel. More
contemporary additions to the canon emerge typically out of a dialogue with the
classics, either to synthesize, revise or challenge that legacy. This process of
successively restricting sociology to the winners impoverishes sociologys claim
to be a form of historically reflexive knowledge. In this sense sociology can be
considered a collective form of amnesia insofar as the disciplines self-knowledge
avoids reconstruction of its own history and modes of thought, past and present.
The overall field of the history of sociology results in an eternal dialogue with
these most famous precursors, these heroes. In so doing, the uneven processes
and struggles of sociologys own making as a form of disciplinary knowledge is
obscured and largely forgotten.
This book presses in the opposite direction. It focuses on sociologists who are
largely forgotten today, as well as sociologists whose fortunes were revived after
languishing in obscurity. By looking at now forgotten figures who were significant
in their own time and previously obscure but now revived figures, new insights are
opened up into not only individual sociologists themselves, but, more pointedly,
our understanding of the discipline of sociology itself its trajectories, forgotten
promises and dead ends.
A Reflexive Sociology of Sociology
This distinctive approach is not intended as a compendium or history of sociology
and sociologists. Its aim is to contribute towards the development of a historical
sociology of sociology formed within and, at the same time, producing particular
institutional and interpersonal fields. What did sociology mean to those scholars
present at the birth of the discipline? How has the discipline been shaped, organized,
and institutionalized since? One cannot address these questions adequately guided
solely by the light of our canonical ancestors. Rather, it becomes most important
to understand who, when, where, and why sociologists became excluded from the
canon, how they became failures. How does a figure as prominent as Lester Ward,
the first president of the American Sociological Society (ASA), by all accounts the
father of American sociology, become forgotten within a decade? What were
the political, economic, and ideological conditions that led to Raymond Arons
prominence during the post-war era, and how have those conditions changed, such
that he is almost erased from sociological discourse today?
We are therefore interested in failures, that is, sociologists whose projects
did not catch on. These figures might have been minor academics throughout
their career, but many had considerable success within the discipline during their
lifetimes, only to find themselves left behind. Others, like Norbert Elias, as Stephen
Mennell shows in his chapter, were neglected for much of their career, headed
toward obscurity, when suddenly his oeuvre and reputation was resurrected, not
least through the collective efforts of strategically-situated individuals, as well as
the physical and intellectual energies of the ageing Elias himself. How does such a
comeback occur late in life? What were the conditions and chances that occurred to
draw such attention to an obscure, often misunderstood figure disinclined toward
self-promotion? Who were his allies? What was the role of publications, journals,
and other resources mobilized on his behalf?
Indeed, in all cases, the institutional resources, materials, and practices of
scholarly labour are essential objects of interest in establishing any sociology of
sociologists. This approach, in line with the emerging new sociology of ideas
(Camic and Gross 2004; Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011), focuses on the local
interactions of academics in the wild so to speak. Authors texts are placed
within the context in which they were written. The current turn toward academic
practice, however, has the potential to neglect broader, macro-sociological
factors that condition the development of ideas. Theoretically, we therefore
adopt a processual or relational approach informed by the social theories of
Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault (Bourdieu 2004; Elias 1987;
Foucault 2002). The concepts of field, capital, and habitus are familiar to
contemporary sociologists, and have been applied within the academic context
in Bourdieus Homo Academicus (1988) and The State Nobility (1996). Elias
process theory highlights the interaction between social habitus and individual
habitus, while also alerting us to the social fund of knowledge which pre-exists
knowledge production (Elias 1987). Though not a figurational theorist, Foucaults
archaeological method provides one means of analysing discourses as structures
composed of internal relations that develop across epistemological thresholds
(Foucault 2002).
Our approach is equal parts archaeological, figurational and reflexive in so
far as it draws upon the sociologies of knowledge presented by Foucault, Elias
and Bourdieu (Elias 1987; Foucault 2002, Bourdieu 2004). In the Archaeology
of Knowledge, Foucault laid out his program for understanding what a discourse
is, and what considerations must be taken into account should one attempt to
grasp where, when, and how they emerge and evolve (Foucault 2002). The first
task in this regard is a radical deconstruction of the signifier itself in this case,
sociology. Foucault wrote, These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these
syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense (Foucault
2002: 29). What was meant by the term sociology in the nineteenth century
was very different from our contemporary conception. It circulated within a
context of interrelated institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral
patterns, norms, and epistemic virtues that were substantially different from
the relations and institutions of later phases. For Foucault (1989) an pistme
can be identified retrospectively as the apparatus that establishes the conditions
of possibility for statements that are acceptable to and verified by a field of

scientific expertise from all the possible statements and delimits what statements
might be classified as scientific. Such pistmes are, therefore, conditional on
relations that are both internal and external to the discourse itself. Their norms,
procedures and signifying content exist as constellations and as processes which
bear some resemblances to other discursive forms, but are also highly particular
and unique.
In order to sift through the wheat of relevant information, we should try
to locate possible points of diffraction of the discourse, characterized by either
incompatibility or equivalence between two objects, types of enunciation, or
concepts (Foucault 2002: 58, 73). For example, the periods before and after
the formations of the American and British sociological associations were such
moments of possible diffraction. However, we must also study the economy of
the discursive constellation; that is, the intellectual space available within the
emergent positivity. We must consider the discourse of sociology in relation to
the function (or lack thereof) that the discourse served for a field of non-discursive
practices.
Thus, we have three formal levels of discursive analysis: points of diffraction,
the economy of the field, and the external function; all of which are co-dependent
yet irreducible to the others. Foucault proceeded to outline four potential
emergences within a discursive formations evolution:
1. Threshold of positivity the moment in which a discursive practice achieves
individuality and autonomy; as a single system that enables the formation
of statements to be put in operation.
2. Threshold of epistemologization when a group of statements are articulated
that claim to validate coherent norms over a realm of knowledge.
3. Threshold of scientificity when the above epistemological figure
obeys a number of formal criteria and certain laws for the construction
of propositions.
4. Threshold of formalization when this scientific discourse, in turn, defines
axioms, legitimate propositional structures, and mechanisms for tolerating
transformations (Foucault 2002: 2056).
These thresholds are points of reference within multi-directional evolutions
across all dimensions of the discourse. As historical emergences, they do not
exist independently of, or fully replace, pre-existing forms of discourse. Rather,
different thresholds represent identifiable moments in which rules, patterns
of behavior, and inter-relationships, both internal and external, are made more
concrete, predictable, and determining.
Along broadly similar lines, Norbert Elias figurational sociology suggested
an analysis of the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of processes of structural
formations (Elias 2000). Elias sociology opens the possibility for biographical
consideration of particular figures while maintaining recognition of the
structural, disciplinary field within which they were constituted. Like Foucault,
Elias conceived of knowledge not as the unfolding accumulation of inherently
accurate or true knowledge as perceived by a transcendental subject. Rather, Elias
considered individual contributions to knowledge as always premised upon the
historical accumulation and context of knowledge that exist at particular points of
time. Despite its many ruptures and breaks knowledge is always constituted in
media res.
Sociological theories of knowledge have to break with the firmly entrenched
tradition according to which every person in terms of her or his own knowledge
is a beginning. No person ever is. Every person, from the word go, enters a preexisting knowledge stream. He or she may later improve and augment it. But it
is always an already existing social fund of knowledge which is advanced in this
manner, or perhaps made to decline (Elias 1987: xvii).
The development of knowledge is a process, not a static system that is settled at

any moment. The modern detached scientific perspective on nature, emerged from
prototypical versions of this way of thinking as it became increasingly defined by
rules and habitualized practices (Elias 1987: xx). As such, one can always extend
ones analysis farther and farther back in time ad infinitum. Particular ways of
knowing are preceded by other ways of not-knowing, and may later regress back
into relative ignorance, providing the conditions for a novel emergence within the
creative process of discovery. Which direction these movements take cannot be
imputed a priori, but must be understood within the theoretical frame of figurations
formed by dynamic processes.
At the same time, the construction of disciplines takes place within a field of
competitive intellectual actors (Bourdieu 1988; Collins 1998). Thus, sociologists
at the turn of the twentieth century engaged in what Thomas Gieryn called
boundary-work: the concerted effort to distinguish real science from amateur and
non-scientific versions of sociology (Gieryn 1983). The task that lies before us,
then, is to position the figures of interest in the broadest context of what might be
called their sociopolitical worldview, as well as within a specific spatio-temporal
field of forces struggling for individual and disciplinary recognition within and
outside of the university.
Since the sociologist is necessarily situated in the world that they seek to analyse,
a degree of reflexivity must be brought to bear on sociologys implicit assumptions
and misrecognitions of itself and the problems of complicity with the spontaneous
immediacy of everyday forms of knowledge. As Bourdieu argued, the sociology
of sociology is a fundamental dimension of sociological epistemology (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992: 68). It is not merely a question therefore of focussing on
the biographical trajectory of individual sociologists. This would excessively
individualize what Elias (1991) usefully called the social habitus. Within the
complex chains of interdependency that ensnare individual sociologists, one the
sociological acquires a special significance. Such a sociological habitus always
emerges as a break with the general social habitus formed by everyday routines
and the implicit assumptions of national societies.
The sociological habitus begins to re-model the seemingly unmediated,
spontaneous nature and implicit national habitus of everyday life. Acquiring a
sociological habitus opens up a process of specialization and separation from the
practical immediacy of everyday life. As the discipline comes to appear too remote
from urgent problems, calls are made for a re-engaged public sociology. Yet the
sociological habitus is far from a serene calling unto itself. It involves choices
and struggles between alternative, competing perspectives, research problems,
methodologies, and professional and political networks. It demands a display of
scholarly competence appropriate to the field and sub-field, demonstrating an ease
and familiarity with its approved knowledge set and modes of self-presentation.
Professional habit and self-images, as well as the profits of ritualistic transgression,
only became possible once sociology has acquired institutional recognition as a
basic university subject.
Without the collective effort of reflexive self-understanding, sociologists
run the risk of projecting their individual habitus onto the object of study in
which scientific discourse is mobilized to express unconscious sentiments like
resentment, ambition, disdain, a whole range of unanalysed experiences and
feelings about the social world (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The theoretical
approach adopted here, therefore, focuses historical attention on disciplinary fields
and formations, including:
a) the overall trajectory of discipline(s),
b) the internal elements and relations between theories and statements, and
c) canonization projects during or after a scholars career.
This represents the first or sociological dimension of the study, establishing the
context in its wider sense. The second level of analysis examines the individual
biography of one or more agents within this context. Here we are interested in the
entry of individuals into the disciplinary field at a certain stage in its institutional
development. Specific dates and geographical locations are established in relation
to the epistemological structure of the discipline at that time and place. We must
further evaluate the relationship of individual habitus to the content of theories
and the trajectory of the disciplinary field, past, present, and future. Finally,
institutional support, including material resources, student acolytes, and peer
recognition, are significant factors for plotting the direction of the sociologists
trajectory.
How to be Forgotten
In this volume, we have sought a wide range of contributions to address the
question of why certain sociologists and schools of thought become forgotten. The
issue of who can be deemed forgotten or failed is a complicated definitional

issue, and, indeed, we do not imply the sociologists as individuals have failed
in a purely epistemological sense. Rather the discipline of sociology has itself
failed in two senses: first, by restricting its historical self-conception to canonical
figures it neglects the actual history of its discursive developments. The second
failure follows from the first insofar as sociologys claim to be a form of reflexive
knowledge is limited by the arrest or misrecognition of sociological thought past
and present. This book represents a move towards recovering this forgotten legacy
and attempts to begin the process of reflexive reconstruction.
As Elias would chide us, the sociology of sociology does not begin from a
zero-point in the present. It builds on previous work in the field of the sociology
of sociology. From its earliest origins, sociology has concerned itself with the
emergence of sociological thought. August Comtes three stage model moving
from the Theological to Metaphysical to Positivist phases of human history and
thought sought to connect changes in the infrastructure of social order to changes
in the orientation of social thought (Comte 1975). Regardless of the merits of
the Positivist legacy, subsequent generations of sociologists have concerned
themselves with the organization of their own disciplinary knowledge, seeking to
root the development of social understanding (or, perhaps, lack thereof) in relation
to changes in the structure of the social environment.
Karl Mannheim, for example, isolated the shift from epistemological to
psychological to sociological interpretations of knowledge during the rapid
transformation of social mobility since the Enlightenment (Mannheim 1985).
His colleague in Frankfurt, Herbert Marcuse, similarly sought explanation for the
shift from Hegelian Reason to Marxist Revolution in the changing structure of
industrial capitalist society (Marcuse 1941). Subsequent analyses, drawn from the
New Left critique of monopoly capitalism and the neglected standpoints of the
working class, women and ethnic minorities, critically reassessed the hegemonic
discourse of structural functionalism and quantitative social research (Gouldner
1970; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974; Therborn 1976). While much of
this sociology of sociology provided insights into the relationship between social
scientific ideology and the broader class structure of late capitalism, rarely did
these works penetrate to the level of academic practice.
Under the influence of Thomas Kuhn, a number of scholars and historians
began consideration of sociology as a shared paradigm established by a scholarly
community (Haskell 2000; Kuhn 1962; Ross 1992). Among the most promising
of these agendas was the schools approach recommended by Edward Tiryakian
(1979). Since sociology rarely accumulates knowledge in the manner of scientific
communities described by Kuhn, the sociology of sociology should dedicate
attention to study of various schools of sociology. Charismatic founders of schools
like structural-functionalism promoted methodological approaches that were
subsequently depersonalized and diffused by students. The institutional dynamics
which extend the reputation of the school also foreshadows its inevitable downfall as
success leads to attempts by rivals to overthrow the newly dominant paradigm. One
need think only of the unchallenged dominance of Parsonian structural functionalism

and its rapid wholesale overhaul during the last third of the twentieth century.
Similar studies focus on the institutional dynamics, particularly the patronage
networks and resource bases of sociological research, as in Turner and Turner
(1990). In covering the history of American sociology in relation to the base of
economic support, the authors note shifts during the pre-World War I, interwar and
post-war periods, which corresponded with changes in the institutional support for
academic sociological research. More recently, the so-called new sociology of
ideas has rooted such developments in relation to interdisciplinary struggles for
position. Charles Camic, for example, explains the success of Parsons Structure
of Social Action, with reference to the disciplinary battles between sociology,
economics and biology raging at Harvard at the time of Parsons writing (Camic
1989). This struggle to exercise command over interdisciplinary turf explains the
success of Parsons charter for a yet to be institutionally established discipline.
Other research, such as that of Andrew Abbott (1999, 2001), shares with the
new sociologists of ideas and the institutionalists, an interest in the disciplinary
and resource struggles amongst academics, and retains the insight of the Tiryakian
schools approach that sociology does not tend to accumulate knowledge in the
traditional scientific sense. Rather, sociologists recycle broadly similar concerns
while constantly revolutionizing the categorical terms used to describe them,
such as the cyclical repetition of the supposed opposition between realism and
constructionism . These patterns of cultural recycling tend to occur in generational
waves as young scholars engage in an Oedipal struggle against the gerontocracy of
elders who monopolize the reward structures of the academic profession. Abbott
admitted that this patterned generational change, or slip-clutch, does embody
a form of dynamism, even if that change is organized in a regular succession
whereby the young build their careers on forgetting and rediscovery, while the
middle-aged are doomed to see the common sense of their graduate school years
refurbished and republished as brilliant new insight (Abbott 2001: 148).
Various approaches have the potential to address the concerns of the present
book. Most commentaries are dedicated to canonical or successful sociologists
who receive funding, establish a paradigm and contribute to the hegemonic
stabilization of sociological knowledge in a given period. But, what about those
scholars who do not extend into the history books and drop out of the conservation
of sociological networks? Are the dynamics which lead to the success of a paradigm
the same as that which leads to failure? Such is the question addressed by Neil
McLaughlin in How to become a Forgotten Intellectual, a study of Erich Fromm,
in contrast to the new sociologist of ideas, Michele Lamonts analysis of Derridas
success (Lamont 1987; McLaughlin 1998). McLaughlin demonstrates that the
rise and fall of Fromms reputation had much to do with the success of his ideas
in the broader public sphere. The popularity of his research in public discourse,
and the broadness of his humanistic concerns, in fact, contributed to the decline
of his reputation within specialized academic disciplines. This example points to
a dynamic of considerable interest for the present volume, namely the limiting
10
role of academic disciplinarity as contributing to the failure of given sociologists

and sociological traditions. As we will see time and again, those scholars whose
work transcends the boundaries of sociology as institutionally defined tend to be
isolated from the canonical lineage.
It is not only sociology that engages in intellectual fratricide. Randall Collins
(1998) traces how intellectual networks in the oldest discipline, philosophy,
have been beset by disagreement and rivalry in ways that structure the creative
possibilities of the field. Such a social constructivist theory of intellectual field
does not fatally undermine epistemological judgements about the reality of the
object of study. Truth cannot be true in itself, the pre-social outpouring of a
disembodied mind. All the criteria mobilized for establishing the truth of statements
about reality emerge as a process over generations through social networks. Truth,
including the truth of the network itself, is communicated through verbal symbols
formed by shared rituals of interaction. As Collins (1998: 860) argues, echoing
Elias, we are always in media res, in the middle of things. Individuals only form
ideas as part of the conversation and problems of wider social networks. This is
why sociological reflexivity often appears as such an affront to the established
truths of science and philosophy.
We have sought original contributions from a range of scholars interested in
developing a reflexive historical sociology of sociology. We have asked the authors
to study their cases in relation to the concern with disciplinary amnesia. This
includes the trajectory of scholars who were once famous, but later fell into relative
obscurity. Peter Baehrs study of Raymond Arons reputation in British sociology
is the first of subsequent chapters. Baehr highlights the considerable reputation that
Aron enjoyed within postwar British sociology, as well as his popularity among
intellectual journals and public opinion more broadly. However Baehrs research
into the syllabi of British undergraduate sociology reveals his near absence from
teaching. This reflects the importance of synthetic texts consolidating a thinkers
point of view, as well as the role of teaching as a necessary condition for retention
of a sociologists oeuvre.
The next chapter, by Bortolini and Cossu, focuses, not on the neglect of
scholars themselves, but rather on two similar books written by Clifford Geertz
and Robert Bellah. The study charts the course and migration of the books due to
the nature of the disciplines in relation to the authors performative contribution.
Bortolini and Cossus conceptual innovation of considering the works and the
authors themselves as cultural objects effectively demonstrates the interaction
between what might be called the variation and selection process bearing on the
disciplinary field. The chapter also gives insight in the context of other disciplines
at the time e.g., religious studies, anthropology and history and why certain
opportunities for cross fertilization were available for Geertz and not Bellah.
11
The role of disciplinary interfaces is also important in Kieran Durkins chapter

on Erich Fromm. Following a biographical review that builds to the period
analysed by McLaughlin, Durkin returns to consider what else is lost when a
sociologist drops off the map: namely the content of the research. Summaries
of two cases of empirical research put to rest assumptions that Fromm was an
armchair psychoanalyst, while demonstrating the promise of recovering Fromms
insights into character and social psychology.
Similar issues relating to the role of content and ideas emerge in the chapters
by E. Stina Lyon on Viola Klein and Liz Stanley on Olive Schreiner. Stina Lyon
assesses the merits of Kleins forgotten dissertation on the French novelist, Celine.
There are many instances of amnesia within the chapter, including Kleins own
neglect of this work in her later achievements. It is interesting to see the way in
which Kleins analysis connect to changes in Celines career as they occurred
in real time. This draws attention to the potential pitfalls of direct application of
the sociology of knowledge to single authors. In Stina Lyons retrieval of Kleins
dissertation, the reader encounters the way Kleins analysis of Celines detached
literary style contributed to her later work on patriarchy in language. Her concluding
assessment of Kleins rejection of Mannheims advice demonstrates that it was
the literary and linguistic side of her analytic style that was retained, while the
sociology of knowledge was sidelined. One can see from earlier reflection on her
dissertation that Klein had already experienced the failure of the Mannheimian
approach.
In her study of Schreiner, Stanley opens up a productive contrast between
networks and figurations that contribute to exploration of long-term relationships
as significant factors within social outcomes. Here, figurational analysis is used to
show how Schreiners work and fate was shaped by the confluence of international
connections, at once political, sociological and cultural, at the interstices of race,
nation, class and gender in the context of imperialism and militarism. The analysis
effectively demonstrates the way in which political-ethical concerns seemed to
drive intellectual interaction as much as the content of the ideas. Similarly, these
interests contribute to different patterns of integration with academic disciplines,
and eventually to patterns of forgetting within these disciplines.
In her chapter, Bridget Fowler provides a powerful restatement of Lucien
Goldmanns relevance (and some limitations) for present-day sociology. The
structure of the chapter allows a careful unpicking of the tragic vision and social
structure leading to more programmatic statements for a sociology of literature and
class. These observations strengthen the comparison with Bourdieu that Fowler
develops across the chapter. As she reminds us, Bourdieu adopted Goldmanns
concept of genetic structuralism as part of a response to the now largely forgotten
structuralist controversy that engulfed the human sciences in France in the
1960s as a way to by-pass the false opposition posed between existentialism and
structuralism.
In their chapter, Dawson and Masqueliers distillation of G.D.H. Coles
associational sociology reminds us that one need not be called a sociologist to
12
be a sociologist. While recognizing the work going on in the supposedly empty

period in British sociology prior to 1950, the authors comparison with Durkheim
and a kind of Rousseauean sociology is especially striking. Through this lens, we
observe the way that Coles political and normative commitment to guild socialism
was shaped by his now neglected social theory.
More recently, the rise of actor-network-theory has revived interest in the work
of Gabriel Tarde. lvaro Santana-Acuas study considers Tardes monadology
in light of the uncanonized field. The resulting chapter becomes a study of one
path not taken, for sociology as a whole. Santana-Acuas summarization of
monadology, including the prehistory and Tardes innovation of making monads
social introduces the reader to the significance of his work, while attending to
potential reasons why Tardes sociology has begun making a comeback in the
contemporary context of poststucturalism, the rehabilitation of agency and the
crisis of the social.
Not all of our contributors adopt an explicitly figurational or relational
approach to the dynamics of the sociological field. Indeed, not all of the figures
discussed can be considered sociologists in a strict sense. As the chapters
by Davidson and Memos illustrate, some like Castoriadis and MacIntyre
would have categorized themselves as philosophers and it is only with elastic
semantic tension that the label of sociology can be appended to their work.
Philosophers have generally been content to establish the epistemological,
ethical and political preconditions for sociology as an empirical science. Even
here, however, philosophers grappling with social and political problems
cannot help but stray into territory that sociology would like to reserve for
itself. A politically-committed philosopher like Louis Althusser, for instance,
was inspired by certain striking turns of phrase to read very closely a
limited number of texts and from this to elaborate contrasts, oppositions and
connections as the basic procedure for constructing theory: I constructed a
whole philosophical system as if it had no object (in the sense that science
has an object), but was rather a practical and polemical affair, and I began to
develop a practical and polemical view of philosophy, based on a model of
political thought I was working out at the same time (Althusser 1993: 169).
Polemical intent, of course, did not prevent philosophers from pronouncing on
matters of sociological enquiry. Radical political philosophy was defined for
much of the twentieth century by the crisis of Marxism and the class nature of
Soviet society. Too often, as Memos reminds us, solutions were proclaimed
polemically by stale political categories like totalitarianism, dictatorship or
socialist state in the absence of a comparative historical sociology of social
structure, relations and dynamics.
As important as the analysis of failed or forgotten sociologists or
sociological texts are, we are equally interested in the rare occasions in which a
sociologist moves from obscurity to renown. The most dramatic instance of this
shift is the case of Norbert Elias. In his chapter Stephen Mennell situates Elias
in the intellectual and political context of his time in post-war Britain. Then, the
13
intellectual field was shaped by a number of forces, including the anti-Marxism

of the Cold War years, advanced not least by the ideological pronouncements of
the philosopher of science Karl Popper; a stifling intellectual culture induced by
empiricism, social administration, and hegemonic American sociology; and the
post-imperial reaction of anthropologists (who exercised a neglected element of
hegemony over sociologists). Against the self-evidence of national figurations,
Elias (2014: 53134) posed the problem of what Rodney Needham (1972) called
the question of the logical unity of mankind, something that both Elias and
Needham argue cannot be resolved by a priori epistemological fiat but must be
determined by empirical study.
As Mennell reminds us, sociological amnesia is aided and abetted by the
disciplinary schism between empiricism and theoreticism. A form of sociology
concerned with supposedly pre-theoretical forms of data is subject to the effects
of heterogeneous influences over the construction of sociological problems. These
come to be defined by the immediate concerns of research agencies, governmental
policy or media agendas. Constrained by the short-term horizons of the present,
empiricist amnesia surrenders the disciplinary autonomy required as a means
of orientation for understanding the longer-term trajectory of human society, its
possibilities and probabilities. Social theory, meanwhile, wriggles free from its
necessary moorings in sustained empirical inquiry. At best, a few examples culled
from newspapers often suffices to illustrate intricately constructed conceptual
edifices about the latest new beginning in social theory. By calling for a more
reflexive approach to sociologys failures, this volume begins to offer a corrective
to the double trap set for sociology by epistemological and methodological
reification.
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Chapter 2
British Sociology and Raymond Aron

Peter Baehr
Introduction
Some thinkers, Nietzsche observed, are born posthumously. Slighted or ignored
by their contemporaries, they are vindicated by later generations. Far more
common, however, is the reverse path: writers celebrated in their own time do
not survive its passing. The career of Raymond Aron in Anglophone sociology
attests to just this fate.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Aron achieved international fame as a journalist, scholar,
and an interlocutor of the powerful; Henry Kissinger and Maurice Schumann were
among his more regular discussants. While the French marxisant Left condemned
Aron as a reactionary and a cold war apologist (he was neither), intellectuals
across the Channel took a more sensible view. Arons combative liberalism was
understood, if not always admired. But British sociologists recognized a thinker
of rare quality, engaging with issues of real importance, whose work deserved
serious attention.
British recognition came early. During the war, Aron was based in London
editing and writing a column for France Libre, the official organ of the Free
French forces under General de Gaulle. Karl Mannheim, who was teaching
at the London School of Economics, was my host on several occasions, Aron
(1990: 133) recalled. Towards wars end, Morris Ginsberg urged Aron to take up
a permanent position at the LSE. Impatient to return to France, he declined: I
would be French or have no country.1 Still, when the LSE-based British Journal
of Sociology began publication in March 1950, the editors saw fit to give Aron
(1950a; and 1950b) its opening article.
More LSE tributes followed, among them the Auguste Comte Memorial Trust
Lecture (1957), an Honorary Fellowship (1973), the Millennium Lecture on
International Studies (1978), and the Government and Opposition Lecture (1981).
Robert Colquhouns (1986a; 1986b) magisterial intellectual biography of Aron
was originally an LSE doctoral thesis pursued under the supervision of Donald
MacRae. Three Directors of the School, albeit sometimes in pre-LSE incarnations,
also took notice of Arons work. Introducing Arons Millennium Lecture on
1Aron 1990: 133. Arons daughter, Dominique Schnapper (Halsey and Runciman
2005: 117), says that, in 1944, Lionel Robbins asked Aron to become the chair of sociology
at the School. The recollections of father and daughter are not mutually exclusive.
18
War and Industrial Society: A Reappraisal, Ralf Dahrendorf declared There

cannot be a more sophisticated analyst of the socio-economics, the politics and
the philosophy of war in the world today (Aron 1978: 195). Anthony Giddenss
(1973: 5963, 768) judgement was cooler; advancing his own account of class
structure required Giddens to challenge the industrial society thesis of his older
French rival. Similarly, Craig Calhoun (2012 [1989]) dissented, albeit mildly,
both from Arons characterization of the French revolution of 1848 and from his
interpretation of witnesses (Marx, Comte, Tocqueville) who took its measure.2
Sociologists today show little interest in Arons legacy. Why is that? This article
examines Arons British reception in his own day to help account for his eclipse as
a sociologist in ours. An archive of British university teaching materials housed at
the LSE, and assessments of Arons books, are my main reference points. The next
two sections are devoted to the assessments; in them, I include both British and
American appraisals because they point in the same direction. The third section,
examining the archive materials, draws on purely British sources. Given the
descriptive and explanatory objectives of this article I seek here neither to defend
Aron nor urge a reconsideration of his oeuvre. Nor, in the confines of a single
paper, can I provide a full analysis of Arons major commentators: in order of
importance, John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner, Tom Bottomore and Anthony Giddens.
A point worth bearing in mind as we proceed, however, is that the evaluation of
Aron among British sociologists is also a window onto the discipline itself. It
shows what sociologists consider distinctly sociological methods and arguments
to be. It shows how difficult it is for specific kinds of thinkers to be read as vital
sociologists and social theorists. It shows, in short, both the demands and the
limits of the sociological imagination as currently construed.
Sociologist Without a System
The 1960s to the mid-1970s witnessed the high-water mark of Arons global
sociological reception. Especially respected was the first volume of Main Currents
in Sociological Thought (Aron 1965) on Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Comte, Marx
and the uprisings of 1848. Hailed as a triumph of civilized exposition, adjectives
such as lucid, graceful, wise, judicious, urbane, elegant, insightful,
perspicacious and fair-minded abound in the commentaries.3
2Other British universities sought out the committed observer (Aron 1983). He
delivered the Montague Burton Lecture on Imperialism and Colonialism in Leeds, and
the1965 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen on the topic of Historical Consciousness in Thought
and Action. But London was his British base. Perhaps his greatest work on the philosophy
of history was delivered there in 1960 (Aron 2002a).
3Emblematic of this praise are Feuer (1965: 331) and Poggi (1966: 20911). Volume
II (Aron 1967a) was far less appreciated, even by writers who admired Aron. MacRae
(1968) called it tired, its bibliography ludicrously inadequate, and its discussion of
19
Yet from the beginning of the 1960s, reviewers express reservations that spell
trouble for Arons sociological appropriation. The most common complaint is that
his writings are insufficiently systematic. Describing the French scholar to readers
of the AJS as a kind of French Walter Lippmann, Benjamin Barber (1962: 5923)4
noted the fertile overlap between the problems of sociology and philosophy that
Arons work embraced. A downside was that Arons essays are less systematic in
theory and less rigorous in method and data than most sociologists would now like
to be in their professional writing. Writing in the BJS, Charles Madge (1962: 789)
struck a similar note. Arons breadth of vision was remarkable Philosophy, history,
sociology; around these three conceptions the agile mind of M. Aron never tires of
playing yet this diversity of guises loses something in theoretical rigor.
A related set of criticisms concerned Arons failure to articulate a rigorous,
precise and systematic concept of the social. The indictment was by no
means arbitrary; Aron himself emphasized that sociology only emerges when
thinkers self-consciously seek to grasp the social as such and to theorize its
distinctiveness from politics, regime or state (Aron, 1965: 89; cf. Aron, 1967a:
vi). Roland Robertson (1966: 1918) leveled a number of objections. One is that
Arons delineation of the boundaries of sociological analysis [is] not easy to
follow. Those boundaries are either too porous (Montesquieu and Tocqueville
are evidently political writers and it is their political contribution that Aron so
evidently values) or too impervious: can politics really be separated from the
social? Whether political phenomena should be seen as a sub-category of a wider
class of social phenomena is an issue about which Aron says very little (192).
Another oddity for Robertson is that having stressed the aim of grasping the
social as such as a defining attribute of sociology, [Aron] then proceeds to castigate
those sociologists who have concentrated on doing just this. The obvious case is
Durkheim towards whom Aron exhibits a frank distaste. In a similarly ambiguous
fashion, Aron,
although at pains to point up the limitations in Marxs infrastructuresuperstructure model, nevertheless states that modern societies can often best
be understood in terms of their economic infrastructure.5 Most of his difficulties
Durkheim unjust. Indeed, Aron stresses what has been ephemeral [in Durkheim] the
ethical aspiration, the pedagogy and the concern about the social solidarity of the French
at the expense of the actual sociological achievement. Coser (1965: 9489) and Torrance
(1969: 255) also found the Durkheim chapter tendentious. Not everyone agreed. Barbu
(1968: 771) claimed that from an expository viewpoint, Durkheim gets by far the fairest
deal, while Runcimans review (1968: 3089) registers no protest at Arons handling of
Durkheim.
4Barber (and Madge) were reviewing a collection of Arons essays written mostly in
the late 1950s, entitled Dimensions de la conscience historique (1961).
5Personally, if I want to analyse a society, whether it be Soviet or American, I often
begin with the state of the economy, and even with the state of the forces of production, and
then proceed to the relations of production and finally to social relations (Aron 1965: 155).
20
stem from the assumption that one must either be a sociological reductionist or
claim that non-social factors determine or heavily influence social factors. It is
true that this dichotomy has relevance to any critique of Marx and Comte; but
Aron seems to have allowed these two men to set the problem for him, instead
of explicating it himself and then discussing their work Thus, although Aron
is keen to discuss the boundaries between the sciences of man, he is never
completely successful in this respect (1966: 1945).
The problem is compounded, Robertson continues, by the fact that Aron

chooses figures for his sociological gallery who themselves did not advance
a clear formulation of the theoretical basis of social analysis. It is doubtless
true that Tocquevilles emphasis on social and cultural constraints contains an
implicit sociological theory. It is also evident that he remains an influential
thinker, especially for students of American society. But Aron employs neither
Tocqueville nor Montesquieu to elaborate systematically a precise conception
of social phenomena.6 Even when writing on Marx, Aron misses the opportunity
to engage with contemporary sociological discussions of class structure. Hence
despite Arons ability to spot intriguing nuances in the work of the classic
writers, we are left with a writer more literary than scientific and the conclusion
that his program of analysis has not been consistently carried out (ibid.: 198).
The weakness of Arons articulation of the social also perplexed Martin
Albrow (1969: 11214) when he reviewed the second volume of Main Currents.
Albrow acknowledges Arons gifts of erudite and controlled exegesis the
chapter on Pareto is especially commended for being sine ira et studio
but taxes him for matters that bear directly on theory itself and for critical
comments that seem so puny in relation to their targets. John Torrance (1969:
2556) concurred. While the condensation of Durkheim, Pareto and Weber
is elegant and judicious, as a critical exposition, however, it is distinctly
disappointing. Yet, for Albrow more than for Torrance, a much greater problem
is Arons facile ontology. Aron criticizes Durkheims social realism by
insisting that only human groups, rather than a society, actually exist. But to
invoke a human group is already to take up a common ground with Durkheim
for it gives the collectivity a sui generis existence, albeit on a lower level of
generality than a society. Ontological arguments either rule out the existence
of both groups and societies [as in methodological individualism] or accept
both. More generally, Aron is an example of a writer who appears to admire
wistfully the great classical syntheses but seems unable to replicate them. Thus
he contents himself with broad interpretations of industrial society without
systematizing the conceptual framework of the theoretical giants he depicts.
Reinforcing these points, Anthony Giddens (1970: 134) observed that Arons
Main Currents fails to offer a systematic critique of the many difficulties and
ambiguities inherent in the writings of the various social theorists whose work
6Arons doctoral sudent, Jon Elster (2009), later supplied the deficiency.
21
is portrayed. Instead, and despite many penetrating observations, one receives

mostly ad hoc criticisms that are rarely developed at any length.
These initial verdicts on Arons work show the degree to which his writings
engaged sociologists at an especially deep level of analysis. By clarifying what
modern sociologists expect sociology to look like, they are also presentiments of
his later reception failure. An inability to be systematic, to delineate the contours of
the social, to develop core concepts, and to use exposition of the classics to launch
a major theoretical restatement of his own all detracted from Arons credibility as
a sociological theorist. As for Arons more empirical work on industrial society,
this also provoked near ubiquitous theoretical and methodological complaint. The
Economists reviewer (Anon 1967: 16645) was obviously puzzled at what Aron
was up to in Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (1967b). The Frenchmans
claim to be using an analytical framework amounts to little more than two
juxtaposed concepts: a model of growth and a type of industrial society. But
what exactly is a model on Arons reckoning? And is it a model at all without
formalization? Alas, the general impression is one of common sense discourse
interspersed with fairly unrelated methodological pronouncements. Thus the
notion that economic growth depends on economic attitudes interest in science,
the habit of economic calculation, the desire for progress is perfectly acceptable,
but superficial.
Equally unimpressed were Arons sociological colleagues. W.G. Runciman
(1967: 234) declared the arguments of Eighteen Lectures to be unexceptionable
and a little disappointing. The level of generality of the argument is throughout
just a little too high and too tentative: the provisos seem to swamp the hypotheses.
Steven Lukes (1967: 9289) who, like Runciman, admired Main Currents wished
that Eighteen Lectures were a little more analytical and systematic. To be
sure, Aron offers a welcome corrective to ideologically driven positions, and by
reviving and reshaping Comtes idea of industrial society furnishes a valuable
reorientation of perspective. Yet what Aron says about modes of social inequality
and the preconditions of industrialism is no longer fresh; it appears to be rather
obvious, not to say banal. Likewise, Wilhelm Baldamus (1967: 4556), reviewing
Eighteen Lectures and a related volume (Aron 1967c), considered the first to be
old hat: Arons contribution to the study of industrial development is already so
well known in this country that a detailed report on these books is unnecessary.
Baldamus concedes Arons versatility but expresses a lack of sympathy with
both his politics (while Aron confesses to a form of conservatism, Baldamuss
own value commitments are roughly the opposite of Professor Arons) and with
his method. Aron tells us that disciplined sociological analysis must attend to
objective economic facts and restrain ideological predilection. Fine. The problem
is that the facts that Aron cites, the indices he employs to make sense of them,
and the conclusions he adduces are crudely assembled. The abundant use of
measurement, in the two books under review, is puzzling as no attempt is made to
connect interdependent economic variables with each other; there is not a single
reference to the vast literature on post-Keynesian growth theory in mathematical
22
economics. It seems to me therefore that the emphasis which Aron puts upon
measurable statistical facts is somewhat misplaced. And if Arons research
relies chiefly on crude, non-correlational statistics, how are we ever to discover
what kind of facts are sociologically relevant?7
Even Jon Elster (1983/4: 6) who reckons Eighteen Lectures and La lutte de
classes to be Arons most durable texts, characterizes them as masterpieces of
haute vulgarization and relentless common sense. One should read these books,
Elster adds delphically, not so much in order to learn about society, as in order to
learn how to think about society. Yet Elster also believes that while, as a political
writer, Aron conveys above all the austere demand for intellectual honesty, and
is a shrewd observer of telling details and spurious analogies, sociologically he
is a weak thinker with little creative imagination. He has no eye for hidden
similarities, lacks the ability to generalize, and would have benefited from a more
analytical philosophical training. Conversely, for Anthony Giddens (1973: 59
63, 768), it is precisely Arons penchant to over-generalize that constitutes the
main problem. It leads Aron to incorporate capitalism too readily into the master
category of industrial society, to reduce class (an explanatory realist concept
in Marxian terms) to stratification (a descriptive, nominalist or heuristic one in
standard sociological renderings) and to treat stratum and class as if they were
the same things. All considered, Arons theory makes little contribution towards
reconceptualizing the notion of class (Giddens 1973: 77).
The publication of Arons (1968a) Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics
of Modern Society prompted similarly negative reviews.8 True, John Rex (1968a:
31314) found its sweeping vistas exhilarating, a welcome respite from the dry as
dust quantitative analysis for which sociology is notorious. Arons analysis of the
tensions among the three ideals of Western civilization equality, personality and
universality is also stimulating. Yet Rex is unconvinced by Arons explanations
7The American reviews were even more damning. Eighteen Lectures was frivolous
and lacked hard data according to Remi Clignet (1967: 207), while The Industrial Society
reminded Kim Rodner (1968: 3023) of a speechwriter for a state college president
advertising his moderation. Arons work, Rodner continued, came across as dated, poorly
informed of relevant literature, laboured in its critiques, and tone deaf to cultural ecology
Aron fails to recognize that growth means very different things in different societies,
especially to the poor. Out of his depth in this domain, readers are better advised to consult
Main Currents, a work with no equal in the historiography of these matters.
The only strongly positive review of The Industrial Society I have found by a sociologist
is MacRaes (1967: 234). He calls the first essay in the collection informed, skeptical,
pluralist and politically wise and, more generally, warms to Arons critique of radical
ideology and social engineering. More the pity, MacRae laments, that both are recrudescent
among a new generation.
8Among sociologists, at least, unless the anonymous TLS reviewer (Anon. 1969:
651) was one. Progress and Disillusion was a stimulating tour de force which presents
with admirable clarity some of the major issues of modern social controversy. Even so,
some of Arons judgements seem to have been overtaken by events.
23
and by the narrow range of alternatives he stakes out. Alasdair MacIntyre (1968:
2034) was more severe. Time after time one is led along a path of argument
marked by insight and originality to be confronted finally with an unveiled
platitude. Aron is trapped by generalizations of his own devising that issue in
facile and empty statements.9
Political Sociology
If Arons writings on industrial society underwhelmed reviewers, his political
sociology polarized them. On one side ranged critical enthusiasts fallibilist bigtent thinkers such as Ernest Gellner and John Hall for whom sociology was
one identity among others; as if marking their own distance from the sociological
mainstream, they wrote often in politics or literary journals. Gellner (1961)
initially offered a heavily qualified endorsement. Reviewing a botched translation
of Arons 1938 doctoral thesis on the philosophy of history, Gellner pronounced it
conceptually elliptical and linguistically clumsy, the early work of a man who has
acquired, rightly, a quite outstanding reputation as a social thinker and an incisive
writer.
But if the early work was serpentine and vertiginous, the mature political
writing was lucid and clear-headed. Arons (1970) Essai sur les liberts deserved
to stand beside J.S. Mills On Liberty, Gellner (1966: 258) enthused. He
particularly warmed to Arons sociological probabilism, the notion, adapted from
Tocqueville, that while history advances along no single path, not all possibilities
are open. Similarly, Arons critique of technological determinism, and his
unflinching analysis of the forces that undermine liberal democracy, especially in
France, could hardly be bettered as a framework to understand the alternatives
and choices that face us (ibid.: 260). Not that Gellner and Aron saw eye to eye
on every issue. They disagreed, notably, in their appraisal of the prospects of
liberalization in Central and Eastern Europe, Gellner being the more positive and,
as it turned out, perspicacious party (Aron 1979a; Gellner 1979a, 1979b; also Hall
1986: 1567, 2069).10
9The American appraisal was no better. For Harvards Martin Peretz (1969: 437),
Arons book was a meandering, unfocused romp [indeed] intellectual rigor mortis
would not be too unfair a characterization of this synoptic and synthetic view. Reinhard
Bendix (1969: 481), a sympathetic reader who applauded a superb antidote to the anarchic
utopianism so rampant in our time, was also less than fully satisfied. The book was too
abstract and rigid. Where are the history makers in its canvass?
10Gellner served with Aron on the editorial board of the Archives europennes
de sociologie and, as a commissioning editor of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, procured
the British rights of Main Currents. Arons influence on Gellners theory of industrial
society is described in Hall 2010: 1345. Gellner also appreciated, Hall points out, Arons
openness to complexity and his ability to understand French left-wing thought from the
inside.
24
Shortly after Arons death, John Hall added his own encomium. Arons
greatest contributions, Hall averred, lay in his understanding of industrial
society and in his geopolitical analysis. But a weakness haunted the Frenchmans
greatest strength:
His general model is Montesquieu, and the mention of one of his masters
demonstrates that Arons sociology is to be understood in the largest sense,
that is, not as the study of the social but of the full workings, economic, political
and ideological, of society as a whole. It is the greatest pity that Aron did not
systematize the three [Sorbonne] courses, on economy, class structure and polity
of East and West Europe, into a single book: and it is further to be regretted
that only two of these [Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society and Democracy
and Totalitarianism] were translated into English, and then without a full
appreciation of the project as a whole (Hall 1984: 425).11
On the other side of the Aronian divide stood more perplexed or hostile critics.
Reviewing Peace and War (1966) for the BJS, Robert Bierstedt (1967: 4545)
clearly wished Aron were an entirely different kind of political thinker, more
utopian, less Machiavellian. While graced with a mind of unrivalled lucidity
and penetration, Aron offers us no vision of a new society. On the contrary,
he furnishes an entirely orthodox view of the world, vouchsafing thereby
comprehensive pessimism. Arons treatise is a sociology of international relations
as they unfortunately are rather than a sociology of war and peace that would give
us some perception, however dim, of a world that would war no more. Roland
Robertson (1968: 3567), reviewing the same book for Sociology conceded its
vast array of insights, perspectives and data on vitally important subjects. When
it comes to observation on concrete features of the international order, Aron is
unfailingly perceptive. But Robertson declared himself dissatisfied with a work
that offers no evident means to tackle problems of analysis in the international
field. The problem, as Robertson saw it, was precisely Arons inability to develop
a sociology of international relations, notwithstanding his claim to do so. Arons
analysis was too traditional and hidebound, cleaving to a model of diplomaticstrategic action, as opposed to social action. Socio-cultural factors, illuminated
by writers such as Etzioni, Deutsch, Galtung, and Haas, are given virtually no
attention. Nor does Aron integrate into his analysis sociological concepts such
as conflict, power, structural balance and sociometric choice.
11La lutte de classes (1964) remains untranslated. Hall planned to write an
intellectual biography of Aron for the publisher Longmans. It never appeared. Still, an
expressly sympathetic appraisal of Aron is Hall 1981: 15696, a book framed largely as
a contribution to the philosophy of history rather than to sociology proper. Halls (1981;
1984a; 1984b; 2011) prolific work on Aron is too large a topic for me to examine properly
here. Suffice it to say that, over three decades, no sociologist has done more, and done it
more cogently, to keep Arons ideas in play.
25
A more caustic opinion of Arons political sociology was expressed by

Bierstedts compatriot Thomas Lough (1970: 55960), who declared Democracy
and Totalitarianism (1968b), dated, biased, and unsystematic notwithstanding
its interesting analyses of violence, terror and political parties. The book is dated
because it is a translation of lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in the later 1950s.
It is biased because of its evident partiality towards the Western side of the cold
war. And it is unsystematic because, lacking methodically gathered empirical data,
its arguments are supported only by ad hoc historical facts. John Rex (1968b:
612) likewise bemoaned a dreary wandering argument marked by a rather mean
lack of objectivity in its discussion of matters relating to Marxism. The books
pivot a contrast between monopolistic and multi-party regimes cannot disguise
the fact that it has too little sociological analysis; the argument settles somewhere
between that of Seymour Lipsets Political Man and the journalism of Peregrine
Worsthorne. It is all very well for Aron to be a multi-faceted, cross-discipline
Simenon. The result is ultimately to base himself on no discipline at all. We
need sociology, Rex implores, not the better form of journalism. Democracy and
Totalitarianism simply fails to be what it sets out to be: a political sociology for
our times.12
Lough, in the previously mentioned assessment, offers another criticism that is
especially telling of how Aron bucked the expectations of sociologists interested
in politics. Political sociologists, Lough stipulates, are scholars concerned with
poverty, pollution, militarism, racism, and weapons of mass destruction. Yet
precisely on these problems Democracy and Totalitarianism is silent, and this dates
it and limits its usefulness. Evident in such an opinion is the marked difference
in meaning of political sociology as Lough and Aron conceived it. For Lough,
political sociology is concerned with world problems, with the interface of social
ills and political behaviors. Political sociology and the sociology of politics shade
into one another. Aron, conversely, separates them analytically and substantively.
As he sees it, political sociology is focally concerned to examine the impact of
politics on society, not the other way round. Its task is to show how politics is
an independent force with independent dynamics without a monopolistic
party system, for instance, the Soviet Union would never have been able to
collectivize agriculture or set industrial prices and quotas. Equally, because such
a system prohibits civil society it is also far less amenable to social pressure than
constitutionally pluralist societies are. Here, then, it is not only Arons particular
arguments that are problematic or reactionary (Starr 1971: 159) to sociologists;
the approach itself is utterly alien to their way of thinking.
12Similarly, the TLS reviewer (Anon. 1969: 651) who commented favorably on
Progress and Disillusion, found Democracy and Totalitarianism somewhat disappointing.
Many of the phenomena with which it deals are by now so familiar that it is difficult to say
anything new about them. Moreover, it seems to suffer more than the others books in the
[Sorbonne trinity] series from its origin in lectures and to give only a superficial survey of
the question which it raises, often in the style of daily journalism.
26
Yet, from a quite different vantage point, Arons political theory was
objectionable not because it was orthogonal but because it was conventional: a
species of elite theory first articulated by Mosca, Pareto and Michels. For Tom
Bottomore (1966), Aron was a political cousin of Schumpeter; both were theorists
who considered democracy to be integrally a competition among elites. Yet
Aron went further than Schumpeter by claiming that the plurality of elites in
government, trade unions, and in civil society caused their division and lack of
synchronization. This contrasted fatefully with the unified elite structure of the
Soviet Union, orchestrated by the Communist Party. According to Bottomore,
however, the Aronian approach is deeply conservative and tendentious. For
one thing, Aron, like Schumpeter, appears to believe that Western democracy
is somehow a completed project, whereas for democratic socialists such as
Bottomore it is still in its infancy. Much more needs to be done to enable people
to participate in decisions that affect their lives. For another, Bottomore disputes
Arons postulate that democracy in modern states is representative or it is nothing.
Direct democracy is not the anachronism that many claim it to be, and if it is not
a panacea it is at least a potential medium of involvement in the spheres of work
and community. Indeed, Aron seems to concede as much in his remarks about
the role played by professional and voluntary associations in modern life. Such
organizations diffuse power by providing so many occasions and opportunities
for ordinary men and women to learn and practice the business of self-government.
They are the means through which government by the people is made more real
and practical in a large, complex society (ibid.: 126).13
What Gets Taught?
Until recently one could only speculate on how Arons work, and that of numerous
other writers, was communicated to students by British sociologists. Now we have
a better sense, thanks to a cache of Sociology Teaching Materials collected by
Jennifer Platt and archived in the LSE.14 Platt is frank that the teaching materials
synoptic degree syllabi outlines; individual course reading lists; university
Calendar digests are not a representative sample of anything; the cache
represents all that she was able to gather, without any deliberate selection of
topic areas. On one side of the spectrum, we have large collections of material:
notably, from the universities of Edinburgh (19542003; nineteen folders), Hull
(19572006; fourteen folders) and Leicester (19522004; eleven folders). On the
other side, we have tiny deposits: for instance, from Brunel (c. 1969; ten sheets),
Aberdeen (19721982; one folder), Kent (19692003; two folders), Durham
13Bottomores wide ranging critique also taxes Aron for failing to articulate his elite
theory of democracy to a theory of social classes.
14http://archives.lse.ac.uk/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=
RefNo&key=STM
27
(19651998; three folders). Collections occupying the middle range include

Sussex (19662002; nine folders) and Bristol (1970s2003; seven folders). Other
discrepancies are obvious. Some syllabi are more detailed than others; gap years,
both of short and long duration, are evident where syllabi are missing and the trail
goes cold; not all universities and polytechnics are represented; and so forth. Even
so, the Platt archive is the richest documentation yet assembled on British teaching
recommendations in sociology.
In regard to Aron, these materials tell us several things. They will tell us
more, and with greater accuracy, if the archive is ever digitized. This would
correct for human error (mine) by enabling accurate counts of Aron citations.
Digitization would also enable the didactic usage of Aron to be compared with
that of other sociologists. For instance, it would reveal precisely what I can only
state impressionistically from a perusal, conducted over ten days in the spring
of 2012, of all the folders and CDs: that, despite extensive translation, Aron is
far less present in the syllabi that cover his topics (theory, stratification, political
sociology) than contemporaries such as Frank Parkin, Ralf Dahrendorf, John Rex,
Tom Bottomore, Reinhard Bendix, Robert Nisbet, W.G. Runciman and Anthony
Giddens. I venture tentative explanations for this asymmetry as the story proceeds.
For the moment, let some bald observations suffice. They should be treated as
indicative of broad trends rather than rigorously systematic accounting. Many
nuances are obliterated, much colour bleached, in the generalizations that follow.
First, the materials show which teachers cited Aron.15 They include Peter
Lasssman (Birmingham), Ian Hamnett (Bristol), David Marsland (Brunel), Robert
Moore (Durham), Frank Bechhofer, John Holmwood and John Orr (Edinburgh),
Colin Creighton and Martin Shaw (Hull), Frank Parkin, Ray Pahl and Richard
Scase (Kent), Zygmunt Bauman and Paul Bagguley (Leeds), Steven Hill, Angus
Stewart, Leslie Sklair and Elizabeth Weinberg (LSE), David [Norman] Ashton,
Clive Ashworth, Eric Dunning, Nick Jewson and John Scott (Leicester), Peter
Worsley and D.T.H. Weir (Manchester), Ken Plummer (Polytechnic of the South
Bank), Tom Bottomore, Luke Martell, William Outhwaite and Jennifer Platt
(Sussex), Steve Fuller and Charles Turner (Warwick), Philip Stanworth and
Andrew Tudor (York). Note that to cite authors is not necessarily to teach them.
In fact, no one, so far as I can see, now teaches or has taught Aron in the way
they have taught Parsons, Dahrendorf, Parkin or Bourdieu as a debate-shaping
theorist who spins off concepts or distinctions that require, and are worthy of,
narrative explication.
Second, the Platt archive confirms that of all Arons cited works, the two
volumes of Main Currents predominate by a large margin. My practice was to count
each course syllabus in which an Aron text was cited; if in a particular syllabus the
15In courses taught by more than one individual, it is unclear who initiated Arons
inclusion. Some courses show clear signs of inheritance as teachers adapt only slightly
a course they have taken over. And many courses, including those that cite Aron, do not
specify a lecturer at all.
28
same Aron text was cited more than once, I still counted the text only once. Using
that method, Arons work appears in at least 123 course syllabi.16 Of that number,
79 references or sixty four per cent of the total refer to Main Currents, volume 1
being cited more often than volume 2. A more revealing number, however, is one
that contrasts these 79 citations to the next most cited work German Sociology
(Aron 1964a) which receives only ten hits. Most of the other books mentioned
in sociology syllabi for instance, Opium of the Intellectuals (1985 [1955]), La
Lutte de classes (1964b), Progress and Disillusion (1968a) garner four or fewer
citations.
Suppose we divide Arons texts into two broad categories: those principally
of commentary or creative exegesis, and those that seek strategically to make a
theoretical contribution in their own right. Main Currents, German Sociology and
the books on the philosophy of history are salient examples of the former type;17
the articles on class structure (Aron 1950, 1969a), Democracy and Totalitarianism
(1968b), Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (1967b) are instances of the latter.
On that basis, 91 counts or almost seventy four per cent of the total, refer to books
of commentary, and 32 or only twenty six per cent refer to texts of theoretical
contribution. The most cited theoretical article, at 8 counts, is the BJS two-parter
(Aron 1950a and b), while its later elaboration (Aron 1967d) receives 3. Texts
one would expect to be cited many times rarely receive a mention: the stunning
example is Eighteen Lectures which picks up only eight mentions; the companion
book The Industrial Society collects another four.
A third fact to emerge from the archive is doubtless related to the second.
Because Aron was construed to be principally a commentator on the classical
tradition rather than as an innovative theorist in his own right, Modern Theory
courses tend to pass him by unless they have a prefatory section with a quasiclassics overview. Hence Aron is absent from Bryan Headings (East Anglia, c.
1980) 18 page syllabus for Sociological Theory, a modern theory course, dense
with reading recommendations, whereas Giddens, Rex, Percy Cohen, Lenski,
Runciman, Gouldner, Merton, Peter Blau, Ossowski and Dahrendorf all appear
there. The same is true for John Holmwoods (Edinburgh, 19811982) course
Contemporary Sociological Theory, Andrew Tudors Contemporary Sociological
Theory (York, 1981) and, further back, Terry Johnsons and Clive Ashworths
(Leicester, 1974/5) Theoretical Sociology and Christopher Dandekers Leicester
iteration of the following year. To this a few exceptions can be mentioned,
among them Essexs Theoretical Sociology (1973/4) taught by H. Newby and
16The majority of these courses are run-ons and adaptations: repeats of courses with
either the same or similar titles. Sometimes the same instructor or instructors teach them, at
other times new teachers take them over.
17This is a simplification. As I show elsewhere, Main Currents does include a viable
vision of sociology encrypted within its exegetical frame (Baehr 2013). Even so, this and
German Sociology are not works where Aron stakes out deliberately and explicitly his
theory of modern society.
29
G. Kolankiewicz, John Scotts (Leicester, 199192) Sociological Analysis and

the Warwick courses Sociological Imagination and Investigation and Forms of
Sociological Investigation (20002004) but, in all cases the citations are to Main
Currents. The conclusion to draw from the above is that Aron, sequestered in
classical sociology, rarely makes the leap in to its modern equivalents. Teachers
who deemed him a great guide to a past era left him there.
Worse, and this is the fourth observation, by the mid-seventies Arons commentary
on the classics had come to play second fiddle to Giddenss Capitalism and Modern
Social Theory (1971). That book had several distinct advantages over Arons Main
Currents: it simplified the canon into the magic number 3, rather than dispersing it
across seven individuals; it distilled those three authors into one volume, rather than
Arons two; and it set the classics in the frame of capitalism, a concept congenial
to the Marxist tide in British sociology, instead of industrial society.
More surprising is a fifth fact: that Aron often fails to appear in course syllabi
that fall squarely in his major topic areas, as if he really were of no consequence
to them. The most obvious example is courses or sections of courses that concern
Industrial Society. Examples are Industrial Society (Durham, 19661967);
Sociological Theory and Industrial Society (Aberdeen, 19721974, taught by
Ellis Thorpe, Adrian Adams, Chris Wright, Bryan Turner and Peter McCaffery);
The Class Structure of the Industrial Societies (Manchester, 1974, taught by Peter
Martin). Instead, texts by Goldthorpe (1971), Giddens (1973), Scott (1979) and
Kumar (1976, 1978) quickly supplant the earlier writings of people like Clark
Kerr, Daniel Bell and Aron.18 This process of author-text displacement is common:
faculty read new books, write new ones, many of these are synoptic and good to
teach with and, accordingly, reference to older authorities declines. In time, the
secondary sources become the primary ones and the cycle then repeats itself.
Was the growing criticism of Industrial Society the main cause of Arons being
sidelined? Possibly. Yet it bears emphasis that the critique of concepts such as
Industrial Society or Culture, Citizenship and Nation in no way necessitates
their eclipse. Critique can burnish, rather than tarnish, the significance of its
targets. Disputes keep works alive, totemic. The more individuals are criticized,
the more entrenched their reputations become. The bigger problem for Aron, I
suspect, was that the concept of Industrial Society was trumped by new labels
that painted our social condition as post-industrial, post-modern, late modern,
post-fordist liquid or risk centred. Industrial Society, for all the sophistication
Aron brought to it, looked antiquated.
If I am right that Aron was swept away by a tide of new terms and debates, why,
then, is Dahrendorf ubiquitous in the Platt archive and still a fixture in sociology
textbooks today? Was his book not about Class and Class Structure in Industrial
18Goldthorpe (1971) defends Aron, Giddens (1973) and Scott (1979) critically
appraise him, and Kumar (1976, 1978) largely ignores him. The best overall treatment of
Industrial Society as a concept and theory, in which Aron figures prominently, is Badham
1986.
30
Society (1959)? Dahrendorfs sociological longevity is explained by the fact

that his work, aside from enunciating a provocative theory of class as authority,
was readily slotted into conflict theory a key category of the discipline.
Much like power and class, conflict is a feature of all societies not just one
type of them. It is constitutive rather than time bound. As a concept it can be
continually finessed but it cannot, unlike Industrial Society, be deemed outdated.
Accordingly Dahrendorf, like Rex,19 became emblematic of the conflict school
or approach or tradition enshrined in sociological textbooks and surveys both
pedestrian and refined (see Alexander 1987; Collins 1994, Joas and Knbl 2009).
The mercurial Aron is not so easily identified unless it is under Industrial
Society, a category most sociologists now consider shop soiled.
Before closing this brutally abbreviated section, shorn of many possible
illustrations, I must address one area in which Aron (1966, 1974, 1985b, 1985c)
is generally recognized a pioneer: the sociology of war and global conflict.20
What presence does this aspect of his work have in the Platt archive? Practically
none. As is well known, war and global conflict were not of pressing interest to
most post-war British sociologists until the early eighties. But even then Aron is
not conspicuously on the radar of those who taught these topics.
The paucity of Aron reference in this area may well be an artifact of the archive
itself. It contains no syllabi on war and civil military relations of sociologists with
a keen interest in these topics: Christopher Dandeker, John Hall, Anthony King,
Lynn Jamieson and Donald MacKenzie. Michael Mann left Britain in 1987 to
join the UCLA faculty; the previous decade he spent at the LSE has left no trace
in the Platt archive. In any event, he tells me that Raymond Aron is one of the
many distinguished social scientists whom I have barely ever read in fact only
Main Currents for teaching purposes (email of July 3, 2012).21 Clive Ashworths
Leicester syllabus on European Societies (Leicester 1986) emphasizes the neoMachiavellian tradition of which Aron is a modern exemplar (Ashworth and
Dandeker 1987: 7; also 1986); yet students are referred to Hall (1984b; cf. 1985)
on Aron rather than any article or book by Aron himself.
Nor do Martin Shaws syllabi at Hull flag Aron until Shaw begins
to pull away from dogmatic Marxism. Even then, the Frenchmans
presence is slight. Professor Shaw remarks that When I turned to war
at the beginning of the 1980s, although I was much more influenced by
Weberian ideas, I was aware of Aron but not really attracted to his work
(email of July 9, 2012). This is evident in the courses on Modern Industrial
19Another perennial. Rex filled two niches simultaneously: that of a conflict theorist,
that of a race/ethnicity theorist.
20Though Joas (2003: 136) believes Arons neo-Clausewitzian strategic realist
theory of war to be a dead end. On the topic of warfare, Joas compares Aron unfavourably
with C. Wright Mills!
21One Essex syllabus of Manns is preserved in the archive (Sociological Analysis
Summer 1976, Essex) but it has no mention of Aron.
31
Societies22 and Social Structures of Advanced Societies that, during the 1980s
and 1990s, Shaw shared with Colin Creighton. Creightons sections of the
course invariably cite Aron (for Main Currents), whereas Shaws never do, even
when they contain parts on war and the state. On the other hand, Shaws edited
collection on War, State and Society (1984) contained a major article by Hall on
Arons contribution to this area and Shaws third year course for 1984/5, with the
same title as the book, does mention two Aron (1958 and 1978a) pieces on war.
Conclusion
Reputational success, the formation of the so-called canon, is a common topic of
sociological discussion. Reputational collapse attracts less attention (McLaughlin
1998; Turner 2007). This essay is a contribution to its study. When A.H. Halsey
(2004: 16979) conducted his 2001 survey of British chair professors (n. 255) and
asked them Who have been the most important mentors in your career? and In
the world as a whole which sociologists of the twentieth century have contributed
most to the subject, Raymond Aron appears in neither category.23 In a subject
teaming with influential continental writers Beck, Bourdieu, Elias, Foucault,
Habermas, Touraine Aron no longer figures.24 Various reasons may be adduced
for this state of affairs. Aron was a liberal conservative in a leftist discipline.25 His
measured lucidity a respect for the humble fact is one of the qualities that keep
his prose permanently fresh remarked Clive James (2007: 37) collides with what
British social theorists expect of their French counterparts: opacity, iconoclasm,
promethean ambition. Yet, as this article has shown, Aron also failed to live up
to what sociologists more generally expect of the discipline: digestible concepts;
theoretical systems; methodological design; in a word, professionalism. Aron
was simply too broad ranging, too humanist, too unclassifiable to attract a critical
mass of sociologists.
If, as Nietzsche said, some writers are born posthumously might others be
posthumously re-born? Some renewed interest in Aron is certainly evident today.26
Might that portend a larger reappraisal? We cannot know. Yet a nagging question
hangs over anyone who takes the trouble to read Aron carefully in the context of
22Before 1984/5 the course was Modern Industrial Society.
23Halseys citation analysis of British sociology journals shows Aron to be the ninth
most cited author in the 1970s (175).
24Arons irrelevance to British sociology is evident by his absence in Scott (2007),
Elliott (2009) and Blackhouse and Fontaine (2010).
25Aron 2002b, 1969b, 1975. On the meaning of leftism among the left, see Aron
1979a: 4950 and 1979b.
26See the special issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology (Baehr (2011a, 2011b)
and the work of Robbins (2011, 2012), Scott (2011) and du Gay and Scott (2010). More
evanescently, see Alexander 1995: 664 and 211, n. 43.
32
our own age of hyper specialization, historical amnesia and ideological addle.
Raymond Aron was a big thinker who asked big questions, straddled disciplines
and challenged doctrinaire formulae from whatever quarter they came. He was a
writer who put the highest store on intellectual honesty and political responsibility.
When sociologists fail to read Aron because he does not conform to what they
expect of a sociologist, is it Aron or sociology that is the bigger loser?
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Chapter 3
Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines:

Robert N. Bellah, Clifford Geertz, and the
Making of Iconic Cultural Objects
Matteo Bortolini and Andrea Cossu1
As individuals who specialize in the production of cognitive, evaluative and

expressive ideas (Camic and Gross 2001: 236), intellectuals are constituted by the
practices and experiences taking place within more or less extended networks of
other producers, critics, and publics.2 Initially, would-be-intellectuals customarily
undergo a period of learning and training as members of one group or school
within formal or informal venues. This apprenticeship, however, is bound to come
to an end as they reach their maturity and face crucial decisions regarding their
positioning within the field of cultural production. According to Randall Collins
(2002: 526), the very logic of intellectual distinction prompts the producers
of cultural objects to determine whether to remain within the boundaries of
their original networks and traditions or try to break with them in order to gain
recognition as imaginative authors, scientists, or scholars.
Being already at the center of the profession, the best pupils of the best
teachers will be pushed by structural and psychological factors to differentiate
themselves proposing innovative and attention-grabbing ideas in forms that
could be recognized as both groundbreaking and legitimate (ibid.; Frickel and
Gross 2005). Within scholarly fields this often means abandoning the routine
of normal science for that epistemological realm where the principles for
the hierarchization of scientific practices are discussed via the proposal of a
1This chapter is the result of the joint work of both authors. The introductory section
and the coda were jointly written by the authors. Matteo Bortolini wrote the following
sections: Between Religion and Social Science: Robert Bellah, 19501970, Beyond
Belief and its reception, and The Traps of Symbolic Realism in the Books, Authors,
Fields, Trajectories section. Andrea Cossu wrote the following sections: The Uses of
Diversity: Clifford Geertz 19501973, The Interpretation of Cultures and Its Reception,
and Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries in the Books, Authors, Fields, Trajectories
section.
2We interchangeably use idea or cultural object to indicate any recognizable
ideational object discoveries, facts, theories, paradigms, methods, research programs,
novels, ways of acting, paintings, songs, poems, and so on.
38
new paradigm, a new framework, or a new method (Bourdieu 1991). A key

precondition of such a paradigm revolution is the creation of an exemplar, that
is, an example of what can be done with the new method(s): how to construct
problems, how to solve scholarly puzzles, how to relate different pieces of work
within the new conceptual and methodological frame (Alexander 1987a). Wellcrafted exemplars might be thought as would-be iconic cultural objects with
which intellectuals and their positions may be identified by other participants in
the field of cultural production (Bortolini 2012; Cossu 2012).
In this paper we try to further our understanding of processes of scholarly
innovation and intellectual positioning by comparing the creation and reception
of two collections of essays published in the early 1970s: Robert N. Bellahs
Beyond Belief and Clifford Geertzs The Interpretation of Cultures. Both books
were conceived as more than mere assemblages of texts: they were powerful
statements of their authors vision of the state of their field and the direction it
should take from that moment on they were both created as prospective iconic
cultural objects advancing the cause of what later came to be called interpretive
social science. At the time of their publication, the two books were greeted
with interest, respect, and enthusiasm. In the decade that followed, though,
The Interpretation of Cultures became one of the founding texts of the cultural
turn and was widely read across the disciplinary spectrum, while Beyond Belief
lagged behind and ended up being little more than a repository of Bellahs most
famous pre-1970s essays. If we take for granted that social processes other than
the simple recognition of the best ideas are at work, we should ask: what does
explain the differences in the reception of the two books and their success as
iconic cultural objects?
The comparison between Beyond Belief and The Interpretation of Cultures
is made interesting by the remarkable affinity of their respective authors early
intellectual careers: a sociologist and an anthropologist, Bellah and Geertz studied
together at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard under the mentorship
of Talcott Parsons in the early 1950s. They were trained to an interdisciplinary
approach to the social sciences and became full members of some of the
most powerful scholarly networks of the time structural-functionalism and
modernization theory. Upon graduation, they got top academic jobs and developed
similar research programs, often in close collaboration. In the mid-1960s, as they
were approaching their forties, Geertz and Bellah quietly distanced themselves
from Parsons and started working towards the creation of an interpretive social
science, a distinctly hermeneutic approach to which coeval disciplinary boundaries
made little sense. After a close description of Beyond Belief and The Interpretation
of Cultures as performative cultural objects aimed at showing the full potential of
interpretive social science as each man understood it at the time, we argue that
successful interdisciplinary positioning can be accounted for by a combination of
institutional conditions, autonomous cultural representations about the scholar and
his work (perceived originality, stance against normal science, public image of the
work as a turn), and the penetrability of germane disciplines.
Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines
39
Between Religion and Social Science: Robert Bellah, 19501970

Born in Altus, OK, in 1927, Robert Bellah arrived at Harvard college in 1945 from
Los Angeles. After one year of service in the army, he resumed his studies in social
anthropology and graduated in 1950 his honors thesis was published in 1952
as Apache Kinship Systems. He then enrolled in a PhD program in sociology and
Far Eastern languages under the mentorship of Talcott Parsons and John Pelzel,
studying the influence of reformist religious movements in Tokugawa Japan. He
graduated in 1955 and, after a two year stint at the Institute for Islamic Studies at
McGill University in Montreal, he went back to Harvard on a shared appointment
at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Divinity School. During graduate school
Bellah befriended Clifford Geertz and established with him a solid intellectual
and personal camaraderie, with Parsons being extremely active in fostering their
collaboration.
Bellahs dissertation was published in 1957 as Tokugawa Religion. Reworking
the Protestant ethic thesis via Parsonian systems theory, Bellah (1957) focused on
the role played by religious beliefs and movements in setting the stage for the takeoff of Japanese modernization. In his quest for an analogue to the inner-wordly
asceticism Max Weber considered as crucial for the emergence of the spirit of
capitalism, Bellah studied a spiritual movement, Shingaku, and its leader, Ishida
Baigan. The books roots in modernization theory were mitigated by a critique of
the latters crudest, most materialistic versions and a plea for a multidimensional
analysis of industrialization founded on the causal autonomy of culture. Tokugawa
Religion won Bellah international acclaim as a japanologist and a theoretician in
the sociology of religion, and opened the doors of the most powerful networks in
both modernization theory and area studies to him.
Bellah went to Japan on a Fulbright grant in 19601961, and upon his return he
was promoted associate professor. At Harvard he was especially close to Parsons,
Paul Tillich and, after 1964, his friend and mentor from his McGills days, Wilfred
Cantwell Smith. In the early 1960s, his theoretical and empirical work was divided
between the attempt at establishing a paradigm for the study of religious meaning
systems combining Parsonss systems theory and Tillichs theology of culture
Religious Evolution (1964) and a series of studies on Japanese and Chinese
modernization Values and Social Change in Japan and Some Reflections on
the Protestant Ethic Analogy in Asia (1963) and the essays on Ienaga Saburo
and Watsuji Tetsuro (1965).3 As he approached his 40th birthday, however, Bellah
quietly moved away from Parsonian functionalism for a complex synthesis of
historical sociology and hermeneutics, which he termed symbolic realism.
As a method for studying myths and religious narratives, symbolic realism
insisted on the sui generis nature of religious symbols as an irreducible way of
grasping the ultimate conditions of human existence. In essays like Meaning and
3Almost all these essays are now collected either in Bellah 1970 or Bellah 2002. See
also Bellah and Tipton 2006.
40
Modernization (1968) and Transcendence in Contemporary Piety (1968) Bellah

radicalized his crossdisciplinary posture and started to reflect critically on the
untenability of disciplinary boundaries and positivist scholarly objectivism. This
intellectual shift was also accompanied by a major existential change: in the spring
of 1967 Bellah left Harvard to become a professor of sociology and chairman
of the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, and an adjunct professor at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union.
Shortly before his move to California Bellah published his best known
essay, Civil Religion in America. A description and interpretation of a nondenominational, abstract set of religious beliefs and practices which, according to
Bellah, constituted the common religious backbone of the United States, the essay
was published in the winter 1967 issue of Daedalus, the interdisciplinary journal
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. One year later, it was reprinted
in The Religious Situation: 1968 along with commentary by historians and
sociologists and Bellahs reply, where he defended himself from the accusation of
nationalism and restated his prophetic conception of the civil religion as a higher
moral standard toward which the nation and its leaders bore public responsibility
(see Cutler 1968). Almost immediately Civil Religion in America aroused a wide
and raucous crossdisciplinary debate which took Bellah away from his Japanese
interests and made him a well-known figure in American studies.
In 1970 Clifford Geertz was appointed as the first professor of social science
at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Almost immediately he asked
Bellah if he would like to join forces and create a full-fledged School of Social
Sciences with the support of the IAS director, former Harvard economist Carl
Kaysen. According to the documents prepared by Geertz to justify his choice,
time was ripe for the social sciences to cross disciplinary boundaries and secure
an alliance with humanists, historians and philosophers to study the relationships
between ideas, institutions, and societal change. Bellahs official nomination
aroused opposition from the majority of the permanent members of the Institute,
and gave rise to an unusually harsh public quarrel. In the end Bellah decided not
to join the Institute for personal reasons and went back to Berkeley (see Bortolini
2011). One of the main targets of Bellahs critics was Beyond Belief, his first
collection of essays, published in 1970 as a recap of his past work and a statement
of new things to come.
The Uses of Diversity: Clifford Geertz, 19501973
Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco in 1926 and spent his childhood in
Northern California. After World War II, he took advantage of the GI Bill and set off
to Antioch college in Yellow Springs, OH, to study English literature and become
a journalist (see Geertz 2000: 5 ff.). There, he met future sociologist and political
scientist David Apter, with whom he was to establish a lasting, if somehow loose,
association for the rest of his career (Apter 2007; 2011). Upon graduation Geertz
41
enrolled in the anthropology program at Harvard, where he became recognized

as one of the most gifted junior members of the retinue hanging around the
Department of Social Relations. For example, he gave a distinctive contribution
as research assistant to Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohns systematic attempt
to review all existing definitions of culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952). In
19521954 he left Cambridge for Java to carry out his first extensive period of
fieldwork. Back in the US, he obtained a position at Harvard before leaving again
for Bali. Soon thereafter, he was often on the move (at Berkeley, Stanford, and
again in Bali), before taking a position at the University of Chicago, where he
landed in 1960 to work alongside Parsonss longtime associate, Edward Shils.
Geertzs early career was characterized by this sort of back and forth
wandering between the field and prestigious academic institutions. Moreover, he
entered anthropology in a period when the disciplines context was undergoing
a tremendous change: the old colonial powers were retreating to their trenches
in Europe, new independent states were being formed, and the new postcolonial
elites were facing the twin challenge of democratization and modernization.
This led also to the rise of a new figure of anthropologist, less acquainted with
colonial officers and with the duties of colonial administration, and more involved
in observing the dramatic cognitive and organizational changes shaking the
foundations of the colonial infrastructure.
As a Parsonian by training and a Weberian by vocation, Geertz approached
this changed context with a strong emphasis on culture, which allowed him
to approach the issues at the core of modernization theory (social change and
development) with a non-reductionist vision. His work from the 1950s shows an
interest for ritual, symbols, and beliefs (Geertz 1956a; 1956b; 1957a; 1957b), and
for the interconnection of this cultural dimension to the problems of economic
and social change, an interest that became more prominent in the 1960s, a period
when Geertzs more routine work often tackled issues within the framework of
modernization theory (although with a Weberian flavor) rather than outside what
was at the time a dominant paradigm.
Geertzs career was propelled by these early, remarkable achievements. He
was appointed associate professor in 1962 and full professor in 1964. During the
1960s he also conducted ethnographies in Morocco and Indonesia and published
a number of books: The Religion of Java (his dissertation, 1960), Agricultural
Involution, Peddlers and Princes (1963a; 1963b), and The Social History of
an Indonesian Town (1965a). This early phase of Geertzs work, by the mid1960s, slowly changed into more reflexive, theoretically-laden work, in which
ironically enough he entered the emerging critique of Parsonianism and its
strong interdisciplinary program of unified social science by constantly reworking
Parsons notion of cultural system.
In 1964, he published Ideology as a Cultural System in a collection edited by
his former schoolmate David Apter (Geertz 1964). The following year one of the
central texts of The Interpretation of Cultures, Religion as a Cultural System,
saw the light in a preliminary version (Geertz 1965b). In its 1968, and ultimate,
42
version, Religion as a Cultural System originated a small family quarrel with

Parsons (1968) and Bellah: the former criticized Geertzs particularistic view
of singular religions and voiced his preference for Religious Evolution as a
framework for comparative studies; the latter criticized his friends epistemological
bias in favor of the world of everyday life and affirmed his own conception of the
religious world, which organizes the deeply unconscious fantasies on which both
personality and society are built, as the paramount symbol system (Bellah 1968:
291).
At the same time, Geertz was taking decisive steps in the building of an
hermeneutic methodology of his own. Like Bellah had done with Civil Religion
in America, Geertz found in Daedalus an interdisciplinary venue for one of
his master works. Deep Play. Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, published in
1971, described a seemingly trivial episode in the life of a Balinese village
from which, thanks to its authors interpretive finesse, the whole pattern of
Indonesian structural and symbolic social structure emerged. By then, many
of the essays that were to become the bulk of The Interpretation of Cultures
had been published. When the book finally appeared as Geertzs mid-career
intellectual, conceptual, and methodological manifesto, it took anthropology
by storm.
Beyond Belief and its Reception
Robert Bellah published Beyond Belief. Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional
World in 1970. His first collection included sixteen papers, slightly less than half
of his publications up to that point. It was a carefully crafted cultural object aimed
at positioning its author in the emerging field of religious studies: introduced by a
preface and a long introduction, it was divided into three sections, each introduced
by a short preamble; moreover, each text had its own footnote explaining when it
had been written, its context, and how it related to Bellahs ongoing intellectual
development. In this, Beyond Belief was incomparably more elaborated than both
The Interpretation of Cultures and Parsonss own collections, such as Essays
in Sociological Theory or Social Structure and Personality. The book included
all of Bellahs most well-known papers: Religious Evolution, Civil Religion
in America, and Meaning and Modernization, along with some more specific
studies on Japan, China, and Islam.
The last section presented six papers, focusing on Religion in Modern
Society, among which Transcendence in Contemporary Piety, an important
essay where Bellah theorized the relationship between man and the symbols
created to represent the intimate unity of all reality borrowing an insight from
Wallace Stevens: To believe is a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there
being nothing else (Bellah 1970: 203). In his review of Norman O. Browns
Loves Body, Bellah spoke of the book as an exemplary work that was at the same
time religious and an analysis of religion and reflected on its consequences for the
43
scientific study of religion: if all symbolic forms spoke of of the same thing that
is, the human condition then they were all legitimate to occupy the same terrain
occupied by the social sciences. Methodological barriers should be flattened so
that the symbolic resources of religious thought would become vitally available
to the social sciences, with critical and, most of all, liberating consequences
(Bellah 1970: 2335). Together, these essays indicated the direction of Bellahs
future research, and his conviction that in the future social science would take the
place of philosophy in providing the intellectual tools for religious self-reflection
(Bellah 1970: 191).
From another point of view, Bellah constructed Beyond Belief as an exemplar
in itself of the strict, integral relationship between scholarly and personal life on
which symbolic realism depended. In fact, the whole book was a dramatic and
larger-than-life narrative of Bellahs shift from the Harvard complex scientism,
structural-functionalism and modernization theory to the Berkeley complex
hermeneutics, religious experience and post-modern productive chaos. While
in the preface Bellah declared his lack of satisfaction with the sociology of
religion and promoted the crystallization of religion, broadly understood, as
an independent field of reflection and research within the academic community
(Bellah 1970: x), the introduction tried to anchor his scholarly work dealing
with the great collective myths which are dying and being born in our time to
his personal experience (Bellah 1970: xi). Bellah recounted his whole story up to
the moment of his move to Berkeley, a place where he could feel the intensity,
the immediacy, the openness and the precariousness of an emergent social order
(Bellah 1970: xvii). In his renewed commitment against any political totalism,
Bellah embraced the playful radicalism of Norman O. Brown and pleaded for
a politics of the imagination, a politics of religion (Bellah 1970: xvii). His
short introductions to the readers sections underscored his growing interest
in symbolism within religious systems and his disillusion with a scientistic
approach to social phenomena, his Weberian roots, and his optimistic concern
for modernitys crisis of meaning (Bellah 1970: 1, 51, 191). The book closed
with Between Religion and Social Science, Bellahs manifesto of symbolic
realism, and its radical plea for a new understanding of religion which called
into question the scholar as a whole human being: The radical split between
knowledge and commitment that exists in our culture and our universities is not
ultimately tenable. Differentiation has gone about as far as it can go. It is time
for a new integration (Bellah 1970: 257).
The book got rave reviews. In the American Journal of Sociology, Andrew
M. Greeley (1971: 754) called Bellah a scholar of the highest quality and
commented on the two book reviews included in Beyond Belief saying that my
own inclination is to think that what Bellah has to say about Brown and Robinson
is of considerable more interest than what Brown and Robinson themselves have
to say. One reviewer remarked the role played by Bellah in giving new life, and a
higher status, to the sociology of religion in America (Gladden 1971: 733), while
others underscored his interest for religious evolution and civil society. Most
44
reviewers, however, focused on his personal introduction and his general attitude
towards his Beruf as a scholar: the introduction was deemed as superb and the
quality of his essays was explained by pointing to his personal commitment. One
reviewer, in particular, spoke of Beyond Belief as an autobiographical account
of one sociologists attempt to come to terms with the sociology of religion
and the essays as expanded expressions of that [individual] search. Its interest,
however, was more than biographical: Bellahs vision of the sociology of religion
as a way of finding oneself religiously had methodological implications in that
it highlighted the subjective nature of all contributions of sociology of religion
(Brendle 1971: 2223).
The most appreciative review of the book, however, was published on the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion. There, Samuel S. Hill, chair of the
Department of Religion at the University of Florida, paired Bellah and Geertz
as the most influential figures in the study of religion of the early 1970s and
spoke of Bellahs uniqueness in taking the widest possible array of roles: In
addition to being social scientist, phenomenologist, and historian of religiousphilosophical ideas () he is humanist, poet, mystic, and theologian (Hill 1973:
448). Hill also praised Bellahs pluralism, radicalism, and open-mindedness, and
concluded:
No one should be surprised that his program sometimes meets with savage
rejection. Yet, so intelligent, humane, and thoughtful a student of culture must
be listened to. I have to conclude that he is a prophet (Hill 1973: 450).
As Beyond Belief came to be identified with symbolic realism, it followed its

destiny. Influential sociologists of religion criticized Bellahs vagueness the
book lacked both one single theoretical statement on the study of religion and
a precise methodological illustration of what the approach might accomplish,
his radicalism or, ironically enough, his hidden reductionism (Johnson 1977;
Barnhart 1977). As the debate on symbolic realism quickly faded, Beyond
Belief became a handy container for Bellahs most famous essays especially
Religious Evolution and Civil Religion in America. Later, its epistemological
essays were somehow superseded by the more accessible appendix to Habits of
the Heart, Social Science as Moral Philosophy, which became Bellahs new
methodological manifesto albeit a very different, and much less ambitious,
one (Bellah et al. 1985). Upon Robert Bellahs death, obituaries generally cited
Religious Evolution or Civil Religion in America, Habits of the Heart, and
Religion in Human Evolution, but almost no mention was made of either Beyond
Belief or symbolic realism.4 As a collection and a theoretical statement the book
had been long forgotten.
4Sam Porter, administrator of the website www.robertbellah.com, complied a list of
40 webpages with articles or obituaries published after Bellahs death: only 6 of them cited
Beyond Belief at all, and only one spoke about it.
45
The Interpretation of Cultures and Its Reception

Few books have been able to make the interdisciplinary impact that The
Interpretation of Cultures made upon its first appearance in 1973. All but one of
the essays included in the collection had previously been published, but somehow
its opening and closure the long methodological essay on Thick Description
and the empirical venture into the world of Balinese cockfight constituted a
powerful couplet that, almost immediately, stood as a manifesto for interpretive
anthropology. The Interpretation of Cultures also reconstructed Geertzs own
intellectual path, signaling his reader that he could not be put easily into the cage
of modernization theory.
Indeed, some of his essays dated back to the 1950s, and the majority had already
appeared in the 1960s, when Geertzs clear interest was with the intertwined effects
of culture and society onto economics and social change. Many of the essays
included in the book represented Geertzs own attempt to come to terms with
functionalism, and witnessed his move from a systemic understanding of culture
to a more complex semiotic vision, influenced by the linguistic turn (Geertz 1973:
ix), two definitions that are clearly visible in two of the major essays included in the
book. In Religion as a Cultural System, Geertz made a step towards a univocal
(and unified) notion of culture, trying to avoid the multiplicity of referents that
Kroeber and Kluckhohn had reviewed in their work. To him, culture denoted
an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system
of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes
toward life (Geertz 1973: 89).
These symbols were tangible elements, concrete embodiment[s] that qualified

as social events just like any other. At the same time, this symbolic dimension
was also theoretically abstractable from those events as empirical totalities.
This conception of culture and especially the notion that culture itself could be
analytically isolated from the social and the psychological was still a nod to
Parsonss notion of the cultural system and to its implicit semiotics. From this point
of view, Geertzs notion was semiotic in so far it established a relation between
abstract symbolic meanings and expressions (symbols), even though he never
went so far as to analyse in depth what kind of function this relation expressed.
Yet, in Thick Description Geertz also moved forward, away from Parsonss
homologies of the semiotic relationship within subsystems and among the
operational workings of his generalized media of exchange. It is ironic that
Geertzs contribution to the theory of culture, and then to the cultural turn, is
wrapped in methodological preoccupations rather than in theory-building. The
concept of culture presented in Thick Description is essentially a semiotic one,
an update of Webers idea that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance
he himself has spun, whose analysis is interpretive and whose understanding
46
requires looking at what practitioners of it do: in a word, ethnography. The notion

of thick description was therefore put forward as the solution to a methodological
problem, building on the idea that observable behavior is grounded on structures
of signification (Geertz 1973: 9) that become available (and only insofar as they
are made available) in symbolic action.
Upon its publication, The Interpretation of Cultures was received with raucous
praise in sociology, where culture was still a bad word, probably even more than
it was in anthropology. In 1974, the book won the Sorokin Award of the American
Sociological Association, while its author was the first recipient of the Talcott
Parsons Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an award endowed
with a clearly interdisciplinary mission. As The Interpretation of Cultures gained
its status mostly by word of mouth, it is indeed ironic to see with a lot of hindsight
how problematic the first major reviews of the book were. Writing in Science,
Ward Goodenough (1974) acknowledged that the book contained influential essays
(like Religion as a Cultural System) as well as masterpieces (Person, Time and
Conduct and Deep Play), but also wrote that Geertzs vision of culture was
uncomfortably close to Durkheims idea of collective representations. Culture,
therefore, became a system of Platonic ideals that [existed] in society as a kind
of collective mind rather than in people. In Contemporary Sociology, Elizabeth
Colson (1975) recognized Geertz as one of the most original and stimulating
anthropologists of his generation, while pointing out that his development as a
scholar was making him more a philosopher than an anthropologist. His work
was an art, not a science. As it had happened with Bellah, the most enthusiastic
review appeared on The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, where
William Shepherd (1975) marked the book as essential reading and the most
significant anthropological understanding that we have of religious form and
function in culture.
Both critics and supporters praised Geertzs highly personal style, his irony,
and his ability to move from the world of common sense to what he had called
generalization within cases. At the same time, they were clearly interested
in his conversion from functionalism to semiotics and in the central role that
methodological issues had played in this transition. The shift was brilliantly
argued and the result was an invaluable backdrop against which to understand
his work on religion and on symbol, his ethnographic analyses, and his physical
anthropology (Colson 1975). Goodenough (1974: 436), for his part, wrote of
thick description as an outstanding example of insightful and rich handling of
the problems arising from the public existence of ideal forms, somehow conflating
Geertzs own semiotics and his implicit theory of the publicness of meaning, that
he derived from the late Wittgenstein.
As we have seen, in the immediate wake of the books appearance, rave
reviews did not mean unanimous praise. Still, by the end of the decade, Geertz had
established himself at the forefront of the cultural turn, praised equally by historians,
sociologists, anthropologists, and literary theorists as well as philosophers. His
interdisciplinary appeal resulted mainly from the reception of the two essays that
47
ideally bracketed The Interpretation of Cultures, the methodological statement

and its illustration by means of the masterful presentation of a case, the Balinese
cockfight. All other essays, even the most influential ones, were forgotten save for
specialists, shadowed by the iconic power of these two classic formulations.
To some extent, in fact, the two major essays of The Interpretation of Cultures
became autonomous from both the context that had produced them, and from the
book that contained them. One needed not be an expert of Balinese culture and
society to read Deep Play and get inspiration from the guidelines it provided
for empirical analysis; nor did one need training in the philosophy of ordinary
language to appreciate Geertzs Wittgensteinian seduction. Thus The Interpretation
of Cultures became, almost overnight, an interdisciplinary cultural object, one that
could be adapted to different fields witnessing the first changes brought by the
cultural turn. What, then, are the underlying motives at the root of its success and
appeal? And what is the social logic that makes an interdisciplinary object stick
with a scholarly audience, to the point that it acquires the status of a classic?
Books, Authors, Fields, and Trajectories
The Traps of Symbolic Realism
Beyond Belief and The Interpretation of Cultures were meant as powerful
scholarly statements that could push forward Bellahs and Geertzs programs for
the interpretive renewal of social science. As it happened, they were also meant
to seal their comradeship and collaboration, a project that failed when Bellah
and his work became the epicenter of the intellectual controversy that prevented
him from joining arms with Geertz at the Institute of Advanced Study. After the
end of the Bellah affair at Princeton, Bellah focused on the civil religion debate
and, as the Bicentennial of the American Revolution approached, published
The Broken Covenant, a hugely successful, deeply committed analysis of the
nations religio-political myths that won him the Sorokin Prize of the American
Sociological Association for 1976. On the other hand, upon the publication of The
Interpretation of Cultures Geertz gained enormous intellectual status. For many,
his work became the epitome of the cultural turn in the social sciences, and a book
that could serve well those who were trying a similar transition to interpretive
social science, whether they came from the fragmented field of anthropology, or
from the more positivistic milieux of sociology and social history.
What remains unexplained, though, are the differences in the intellectual
trajectories of reception of these two books, which were similar in aim, if not
in target and in their structure as proposed turning points in their respective
fields. As much as one needs to approach the success of The Interpretation
of Cultures by means of a careful reconstruction of its early reception and
its interdisciplinary appeal, one needs to face the other side of the mirror;
namely, why was a similar work left to disciplinary amnesia, and how did this
48
different reception affect the image of the authors and, in the last instance, their
reputation across the spectrum of disciplinary fields? Objectivist explanations
based on the sheer quality of ideas do little to advance our understanding: by all
measures Beyond Belief is a great book, and The Interpretation of Cultures has
its flaws, which only the staunchest, less well-read, or strategically interested
post-Geertzian culturalist would deny (especially those with little training in
the kind of philosophy and semiotics that Geertz was exposed to). We argue
that what made the difference in the trajectories of the two books were (a) their
transformation into compact symbolic objects something that could be cited
to nod at something that everybody knows and (b) the structure of the fields
within which they were launched and promoted as performative texts. The
point is that a complex cultural object such as a collection of essays might be
identified, or typecast, differently as one or more essays are taken to be its true
core; this identification, on the other hand, will encounter a field structured
around one (or more) symbolic opposition(s), in relation to which the work will
make more or less sense and will be categorized either as a standard input to
the field, an instanciation of an important idea, or even a groundbreaking work
(Bortolini 2012). To be sure, the final outcome i.e., the text assuming an iconic
quality depends on the combination of these two major factors together with
other, lesser elements (its authors prestige, scientific or intellectual fads, its
sheer availability, and so on).
As we said, in the early 1970s Beyond Belief came to be identified almost
completely with symbolic realism its most cited essays were Between
Religion and Social Science and Religion and Belief. As such, its relevance
depended on the force of Bellahs epistemological approach, one that had a
paradoxical destiny. The sociology of religion was not ready to accept too radical
a conception of interpretive social science denying the necessity of boundaries
between the social sciences and the humanities. During the Postwar years,
American sociologists of religion had fiercely struggled for the recognition
of their sub-discipline as an objective, scientific and completely secularized
scientific endeavor. Bellahs proposal, which depicted the scientific study of
religion as yet another form of religious symbolism and called for a strongly
personal involvement on the part of the scholar (Bellah 1970: 2567), was too
subjective and anti-positivist to be accepted by his strictly scientist colleagues
to their ears, symbolic realism, and with it Beyond Belief, could be summarized
in that infamous phrase, To put it bluntly, religion is true (Bellah 1970: 253).
Among the proponents of interpretive social science, Peter L. Berger proved to
be more palatable for American sociologists of religion: not only did he clearly
distinguish between sociology, theology, and religious studies, but he was at the
forefront of the mainstream of secularization theory, which Bellah had often
ridiculed from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view (see Bortolini
2014).
In fact, Bellah won most of his public in a field which, to a great extent,
needed no hermeneutic revolution. As Donald Wiebe (1999: 97) wrote in his
49
reconstruction of the politics of American religious studies, the study of religion

after World War II was dominated by an unstable alliance of historians and
theologians trying to establish itself as a clerisy, a secularized group who
[expressed] great anxiety about modern developments in society and who
[were] dedicated to protecting the soul and spirit of humanity. From the point
of view of the practitioners of religious studies, Bellah belonged to a wide front
of offenders who criticized the positivistic approach to the study of religion:
Martin E. Marty, Mircea Eliade, Jacob Neusner, Michael Novak and Bellahs
mentor and friend, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (see also Segal 1989: 5762 and
126 ff.). In sum, as coeval commentaries show, Bellahs work was seen by
sociologists as a capitulation to the humanities and by humanists as a welcome
addition to an ongoing conversation between philosophers, theologians, and
public spirited clergy from different denominations.
As Bellah was rejected by the sociology of religion and adopted by religious
studies, the debate on symbolic realism subsided and the very structure of Beyond
Belief, with its complex weaving of personal and scholarly themes, lost its main
raison dtre. The book became, somehow, opaque to an overall reading as
a cultural object in its own respect: when it was reissued by the University of
California Press in 1991, reviewers noticed its personal character and criticized
it on the ground that Bellahs own experiences as a religious scholar of religion
were not necessarily the stuff of academic scholarship (Nossen 1993: 275).
If Beyond Belief was itself an exemplar of what could be done with symbolic
realism it was both too much (for conventional social sciences) and too normal
(for humanists and theologians).
Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries
The fate of The Intepretation of Cultures and its becoming a truly iconic cultural
object can also be explained looking at the combination between typecasting
processes and the structure of the different fields within which it circulated after its
publication. To begin with, the condition of anthropology was quite peculiar, and
undoubtedly different from that of religious studies. Cultural anthropology had
benefited from the postwar expansion and was, by all standards, a complex and
diverse field, with fuzzy boundaries, a range of places that could accommodate
differences of theory and approach, and a tradition of scholarly hybridization
(Silverman 2005: 283 ff.). As an eclectic modernization theorist who added a
Weberian, cultural twist to the study of economic and social development, Geertz
was well-positioned when he began to elaborate his hermeneutical framework
(Silverman 2005: 302 ff.). Quite rapidly, his position came to be recognized
as one of the two poles along the materialist-culturalist continuum of cultural
anthropology with Eric Wolf, Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins occupying
the opposite end.
At the same time, Geertz competed with others that were busy trying to redefine
the anthropological notion of culture. He made a contribution to an area of scholarly
50
reflection in which multivocality was the norm.5 The field was therefore already
permeable to the proposal of new ways to interpret culture, and the early reception
of the linguistic turn provided a key for the recognition of a theoretical-cummethodological proposal loosely based on a semiotic approach to culture, whether
it came from French structuralism (Needham 1973; Sahlins 1976), Durkheimian
sociology (Douglas 1966), or from American linguistics (Turner 1967). At the turn
of the 1960s, to borrow two suggestive images from Victor Turner, the forest of
symbols was indeed a forest, and anthropologists willing to penetrate the nuances
of culture had better enter it and not stay sheepishly on the edge of the bush.
Geertz was first identified as a voice in a broader intellectual movement and
then as the author of an original contribution to the cultural turn, especially the
one he made explicit in The Interpretation of Cultures. Such a closeness between
the author and his work (at the level of public perception) seems to be one of
the factors at work in the making of a classic, i.e., that series of procedures of
consecration (Bourdieu 1994) and sacralization (Di Maggio 1982a; 1982b) through
which a peculiar kind of symbolic capital is bestowed upon a work. Classicization,
however, goes one step further because, as Alvaro Santana-Acua (2014: 98) has
argued, it involves the autonomization of the work from the social conditions of
its production. In particular, one element of the making of a classic involves a
situation in which its contents are appropriated and considered meaningful by
actors and organizations that had no share in their production.6
Unlike Beyond Belief and other works by Robert Bellah, The Interpretation
of Cultures was able to transcend both disciplinary boundaries and exert a crossgenerational influence beyond both the circles in which the work was originally
produced and the circles of those practitioners likely to refer to a work years after its
publication. To this wider audience, The Interpretation of Cultures was not simply
a theoretical statement, but most of all and we may dare say, predominantly an
instruction manual that showed how to do things with thick description. As an
intellectual argument and as a cultural artifact it had a certain illocutionary force,
inviting scholars to follow on the same path rather than simply taking a position in
the area of cultural theory.
The recollections of prominent scholars support this idea. Harvard
psychologist Jerome Bruner (2005: 22), who in the 1970s was pursuing his
studies on language development from a strongly interactionist perspective,
found that The Interpretation of Cultures, especially in the analysis of Balinese
cockfights, demonstrated what you could do by keeping an eye firmly on the
meaning-process. Historian Natalie Zemon Davis, one of the first supporters of
an interpretive vision in historical studies, explained Geertzs appeal as a reaction
to the rejection of narrative and culture common among the majority of social
5For a coeval review see Keesing 1974, which is an important document of the range
of intellectual positions at the beginning of the cultural turn in one of its most strategic
fronts.
6For a perspective on this process see also Cossu 2012.
51
historians at the time. On the one hand, Geertz stressed the need to understand
ceremonial, liturgical, festive and other forms of symbolic behavior, which
social historians often ignored [] as irrational, or reduced them to practical
uses. On the other, he was a perfect fellow traveller for micro-historians, thanks
to his pendant for a focus on a limited space [] and an intensely significant and
observable local event, out of which could be teased a world of meaning and an
enduring style of living (Davis 2005: 3839).
At the time, Geertz was not the only anthropologist that pursued the affirmation
of a semiotic vision of culture and the development of methodological tools. At
his best, Victor Turner (1974) offered a recognizable method (social dramatic
analysis), an illustration of its application to historical events his analysis of the
assassination of Thomas Becket is as powerful as Deep Play, and the promise
of interdisciplinarity (see Moore and Myerhoff 1975; 1977). Yet, in the end, he
remained dangerously close to narrative analysis and far from the kind of semiotic
palace Geertz built. From this point of view, Geertzs characterization of culture
as an acted document could be easily appropriated by historians by focusing
on the document, rather than on symbolic action. A document, indeed, counted
already as an interpretation of an interpretation, an ethnographic account made
from within ones culture of reference, rather than from without. The best case was
perhaps put forward by historian Robert Darnton (1984: 6), who co-taught with
Geertz a seminar at Princeton:
It therefore should be possible for the historian to discover the social dimension
of thought and to tease meaning from documents by relating them to the
surrounding world of significance, passing from text to context and back again
until he has cleared a way through a foreign mental world.
Darntons formulation does sound like the hermeneutic circle, but also as an
explicit appropriation of Geertzs methodological strategy. In a certain sense, the
latter was ready made for historians and other practitioners in different disciplines
in a way Bellahs wasnt in fact, while Bellah was well-known among historians
thanks to the American civil religion debate, Beyond Belief and symbolic realism
gained no currency within the field of history. In a sense, symbolic realism was too
radical, and at the same time too personal, asking for a personal involvement that
meant going native rather than seeing things from the natives point of view.
Coda
Even in the top tiers of scholarly research, symbolic capital is distributed
unequally, and barriers to circulation affect not only the early reception of a
cultural object but also its interdisciplinary and intergenerational impact. In this
chapter, we have tried to contribute to a growing body of studies on the dynamics
of success and the mechanisms of consecration and classicization focusing on
52
two works that had been carefully devised to become iconic cultural objects,
The Interpretation of Cultures and Beyond Belief. In fact, only the former gained
this enviable status, whereas the latter has been condemned to a subtle form of
sociological amnesia.
Accordingly, we have identified a few reasons in the rise of Geertzs work:
the permeability of his discipline, cultural anthropology, to the affirmation of a
semiotic notion of culture, which resulted in early recognition of the merits of
the work; the definition of a methodological proposal that was constructed in an
interdisciplinary way and which called for interdisciplinary work, which resulted
in understanding and appropriation outside his discipline; the production of an
exemplar in which this methodology was illustrated and tested. These conditions
were lacking in Bellahs case, due to the shape of his primary area of research,
the positivistic stance of practitioners in the area, and the problematic alignment
between his methodological proposal and his best-known exemplar Civil
Religion in America. This different fate calls for further research on the subject of
how intellectual cultural objects achieve oneness (Schwartz 2009), while others
are forgotten.
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Chapter 4
Erich Fromm: Studies in Social Character

Kieran Durkin
Introduction
An early member of the Frankfurt Institut fr Sozialforschung (Institute for Social
Research) who went on to enjoy a career as a leading intellectual figure in the
middle-part of the last century, Erich Fromm is today largely forgotten. His theory
of social character and applied social-characterological case studies, which were
groundbreaking contributions to twentieth century social thought, have achieved
at best a tentative assimilation into the sociological canon. In this chapter, I will
look at Fromms psychoanalytic social psychology and studies of social character
within the context of the rise and consolidation of sociology as a discipline. As
part of this study, I will discuss Fromms largely under-acknowledged role in the
early phase of the Institut fr Sozialforschung, in which he and Max Horkheimer
were the main drivers of an interdisciplinary programme which sought to unite
the social sciences with philosophy in a long-lasting collaboration aimed at
lessening the arbitrary injustice of social life. In addition to this, I will discuss
Fromms relationship to American sociology and, in particular, to the culture and
personality tradition which flourished there during the 193050s, as well as his
break from Horkheimer, etc. and career as a public intellectual following the
publication of Escape from Freedom. Finally, I will look respectively at Fromms
more or less forgotten empirical social-characterological case studies of manual
and white collar workers in Weimar Germany and of the inhabitants of a peasant
village in Mexico.
Marx, Freud, and Social Psychology
Surveying the entirety of Erich Fromms corpus, it is clear that it represents a
complex body of social psychology, social philosophy, social commentary and
politics amongst other things that, in many respects, escapes easy categorization.
Whilst this is so, I have argued elsewhere that the various aspects that contribute
to Fromms thought can be most consistently and most adequately categorized as
radical humanist (Durkin 2014). As Fromm defines it in You Shall Be as Gods,
radical humanism is a global philosophy which emphasizes the oneness of the
human race, the capacity of man to develop his own powers and to arrive at inner
harmony and at the establishment of a peaceful world. Radical humanism considers
58
the goal of man to be that of complete independence, and this implies penetrating
through fictions and illusions to full awareness of reality (1966: 13). In an addition
on the following page, Fromm stresses that radical humanism recognizes the fact
that ideas, especially if they are the ideas of not only a single individual but
have become integrated into the historical process, have their roots in the real life
of society (1966: 14). The quartet of clauses contained in this definition (three
of religio-philosophical origin and a fourth taken from sociological or socialpsychological thought) are connected on the basis of a developmental schema
which works through the translation and retranslation of Judaic, Marxian, and
Freudian elements (all interpreted humanistically) such that each new thought
system successively develops the previous system without supplanting the core
of that system. This core then works itself outward into the new system, where it
interacts with the new elements in that system to progressively develop the basis
of humanism itself (Durkin 2014).
Detailed discussion of this process is not possible in the present chapter, but
suffice it to say that after concluding the absurdity of theology as a coherent
intellectual endeavour in his mid-twenties (and thus breaking with the dominating
feature of his life until this point) Fromm nevertheless sought to continue what he
saw as the emancipatory thrust of the philosophical and hermeneutic traditions
of Judaic thought by secular means a continuation that he saw most clearly
manifested in the philosophical and sociological thought of Karl Marx. Fromm
saw Marxs concept of communism and the whole emancipatory nature of his
thinking as representing a form of secular messianism, his image of the communist
society to the extent that he offers one paralleling the idea of Messianic Time
as found in the biblical prophets.1 But not only this: Marxs materialism offers
a crucial progression of the emancipatory thrust of the biblical tradition, his
materialism seeking to invert and transcend the theological speculation of Hegel
and Feuerbach and to thereby attain substantive, empirical knowledge of really
existing active men (Marx 2000: 191). In as much as this is the case, Fromm saw
Marx as combining emancipatory and scientific concerns and thereby laying the
basis for a new science of man and society which is empirical and at the same
time filled with the spirit of the Western humanist tradition (2006: 7).
The foregoing taken into consideration then, the social-psychological clause
in Fromms definition of radical humanism which is of Marxian origin, in
essence can be seen to stem directly from the central radical humanist concern
that characterizes Fromms thinking. But it is with the adoption of Freuds insight
into the forces in the psychological realm which direct us behind our backs the
largely unconscious structuring of our passions and interests through discernible
psychological mechanisms and tendencies that Fromms thinking takes on
its most distinctive and determinate character. In the same manner that Marx
1I do not have space here to deal with the controversial nature of this position,
other than to say that the discovery of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
strengthened its viability.
59
represented a secular (or materialist) development of the messianic prophetic

tradition for Fromm, the psychoanalytic theory and practice of Sigmund Freud
represented, in certain crucial respects, a development of Marxs materialism,
offering what Fromm saw as the basis of a science of the irrational and, thus,
a radical humanist conceptual instrument for more fully understanding really
existing active persons. As such then, by combining Marx and Freud completing
Marx by supplying a formalized psychological basis to historical materialism,
and correcting Freud by installing a more adequate sociological starting point
for psychoanalytic theory Fromms thinking evolved into an epistemological
and methodological materialism and, through this, into a sociopsychoanalytic
programme which is directly relevant to sociology.
While working at the Frankfurt Institut fr Sozialforschung, directly concerned
with negotiating the theoretical and practical crossovers between psychoanalysis
and historical materialism, Fromm formulated the essentials of this materialism, and,
along with Max Horkheimer, laid down the specifics of the empirical programme
of the early period of the Institut. Despite deciding against an academic career in
favour of pursuing psychoanalytic training, Fromm was employed by the Institut
on a part-time basis in 1929, becoming a tenured member and the most important
theoretical influence next to Horkheimer himself two years later. Fromm had been
introduced to Horkheimer by his schoolmate, Leo Lwenthal, an introduction
which was itself facilitated by the fact the Psychoanalytic Institute of the SouthWest German Psychoanalytic Association, where Fromm was then based, was
housed in the same building as the Institut fr Sozialforschung (hereafter Institut).
As part of the Institut, Fromm was charged with the integration of psychoanalysis
and sociology along the lines stipulated by Horkheimer in his inaugural lecture in
January of 1931 in this lecture, Horkheimer called for the fusion of philosophy
and the various sciences, uniting in long-lasting interdisciplinary collaboration and
focusing on the question of the connection between the economic life of society,
the psychological development of its individuals and the changes within specific
areas of culture (Horkheimer 1989: 33). As such, Fromm was put in charge of an
innovative empirical study of the attitudes of German manual and white-collar
workers in relation to authoritarianism, which, although remaining unpublished
until the 1980s, formed the conceptual and methodological basis for the Instituts
more famous The Authoritarian Personality study some twenty years later.
Despite Fromms central involvement in this early period of the Institut, he
was for a long time effectively written out of its official history, being replaced by
Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and even Walter Benjamin in the Origin Myth
that went along with this history (McLaughlin 1999). Though this deliberate myopia
has been challenged by Martin Jay, Rolph Wiggershaus and others, since the 1970s,
the tendency to consider Fromms role as minor, if to consider Fromm at all, often
prevails. What is worth stressing here is that Fromm had, in fact, been working on the
connections between psychoanalysis and sociology/historical materialism for some
time prior to his involvement with Horkheimer. Whilst training as a psychoanalyst
in Berlin, Fromm attended Otto Fenichels famous Kinderseminar, a gathering
60
point for young dissident psychoanalysts interested in exploring the relevance of

psychoanalysis for matters pertaining to socialism. During this time Fromm was an
acquaintance of Paul Federn, Ernst Simmel, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Wilhelm Reich,
all high-profile psychoanalysts and socialists with whom he shared ideas on the
connections between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Bernfeld and Reich in particular
are important here Bernfelds Psychoanalysis and Socialism, which originally
appeared in 1925, effectively acted as the introduction to the Freud-Marx synthesis,
whilst Reichs Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, which appeared in
1929, brought it to greater prominence. Fromm himself published Die Entwicklung
des Christusdogmas, Eine Psychoanalytische Studie zur Sozialpsychologischen in
1930 (translated as The Dogma of Christ in Fromm 1992 [1963]), as an attempt to
map the morphology of Christian Dogma by relating the ideas it conveyed, relative
to each stage of its development, as expressions of the socioeconomic situation and
psychic attitude of its followers. Although problematic in many respects exhibiting
a somewhat cavalier attempt to render simple the complicated issues of Christology
and exegesis, and the problem of deep-historical attributions of psychic states the
work was genuinely pioneering, being the first empirical example of the integration
of Freud and Marx. Two years later, Fromm published ber Methode und Aufgabe
einer Analytischen Sozialpsychologie. Bemerkungen ber Psychoananlyse und
historischen Materialismus and Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre
Bedeutung fr die Sozialpsychologie (translated as The Method and Function of
Analytic Social Psychology and Psychoanalytic Characterology and its Relevance
for Social Psychology, respectively, in Fromm 1970) as programmatic articles
mapping out the enduring fundamentals of his psychoanalytical social psychology
in the Intituts periodical, Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung.
The Freudo-Marxist work discussed here is largely the development of the
critique of mechanical Marxism inaugurated by Karl Korsch and Georg Lukcs
in the light of the failure of the German proletariat to realize the transition from
capitalism to socialism in the aftermath of the First World War. Korsch had seen
that this failure could be attributed to the social-psychological ill-preparedness of
the workers for revolution (Korsch 1974: 128) and Lukcs had seen the general
need for Marxism to deepen its shallow empirical understanding of the subjective
experience of the working class, a realization reflected in his distinction between
actual and ascribed class consciousness (Lukcs 1971). But while this was so,
Korsch and, particularly Lukcs were given to an anti-psychological view that
greatly limited their penetration into the subjective aspect. Going against this antipsychological position, Fromm and the other Freudo-Marxists sought to extend the
critique of mechanical Marxism into distinctively psychological, and in particular,
psychoanalytical territory. The thinking informing this extension ran approximately
thus: as society consists of nothing but individuals, and that as individuals are
subject to the laws and limits of the functioning of the psychological apparatus,
historical materialism needs to be able to say something about such laws and
their presence in the social process. What psychoanalysis could bring to historical
materialism (and, therefore, sociology), then, was the knowledge of the human
61
psychic apparatus and personality as a factor in the social process, considered next
to and in connection with economic, financial, and cultural factors.
The proliferation of such Freudo-Marxist syntheses in 19201930s Germany was
facilitated by a number of factors, most important of which being the following: 1)
the socio-economic and political situation of the Weimar period (i.e., the failed postwar revolution of 1918/19 and the financial collapse of 1929); 2) the popularity of
Freuds thinking; 3) and the particular development of German sociology. Sociology
as a discipline was just forming in Germany when Fromm was a student, at the
beginning of what Richard Mnch describes as its consolidation phase (Mnch
1994) (Fromm studied what was then called national economics at Karl-Ruprecht
University, in Heidelberg, under Alfred Weber, Heinrich Rickert, and Karl Jaspers).
To the extent that it existed as a coherent body of thought, sociology in Germany
at the time represented a less autonomous and scientific discipline than it did in
France or North America. What characterized German sociology during this period
was the combination of pronounced theoretical depth (the influence of Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, and the Idealist tradition in general) and the Verstehende approach
to social analysis that differentiated it from the Durkheimian tendency towards antipsychology a combination of influences best exemplified in the thought of Max
Weber. Whilst Fromm clearly shares some of these influences with Weber, and whilst
he relies heavily on Webers historical sociology at points, his opposition to the kind
of thoroughgoing nominalism and positivistic approach to value that characterizes
Webers thinking puts him at odds with what is now considered the mainstream of the
sociological tradition. Fromms social-psychological explorations are, nevertheless,
certainly representative of definite trends in German sociology at this time. From
the very birth of German sociology there were serious if relatively unsystematic
and amorphous attempts to understand the individual as simultaneously individual
and social: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Alfred Vierkandt, and Max and Alfred
Weber, amongst others (Karl Mannheim embarking on a similar programme in
the 1930s). Precisely because of such a proliferation, we can see Fromms socialpsychological explorations as part of this wider phenomenon of sociology grasping
for its object, passing beyond the stage in which it was merely a philosophy of
history and trying to deal with the seemingly intractable issue of the relationship
between the individual and the collective.
Escape from Freedom and the Rise and Fall of a Public Intellectual2
Political developments in Germany during the early 1930s meant that life was
becoming increasingly precarious. Fearful of the prospect of deepening and longlasting fascist rule, the Institut temporarily re-located to Geneva in 1933, before
2In this section I have drawn extensively on the scholarship of Neil McLaughlin
(1996, 1998, 1999, 2007), whose work on Fromm has been a crucial catalyst for much of
the recent return to Fromm. Thomas Wheatland (2009) has also helped excavate Fromms
62
moving on to the United States, settling in New York, at Columbia University in

1934. Part of the larger influx of European intellectuals that swelled the academic
institutions of North America and rejuvenated the American intellectual scene at
the time, the Institut were given generous office space and the recognition of a
premier academic institution at Columbia. This support enabled the Institut to
continue the interdisciplinary work it had embarked on in Frankfurt, this work
evincing a shift of focus, however, from the earlier emphasis on research into
the social-psychological connections between material and intellectual culture in
relation to skilled and white-collar workers to the broader issue of the changes
taking place in the structure of the family at a period of particularly severe economic
crisis (Wiggershaus 1994: 137). Studien ber Autoritt und Familie (Studies on
Authority and the Family), a 1,000-page preliminary report on this research, was
published in 1936, containing a detailed social-psychological section by Fromm in
which he elaborated on the connections between authoritarian forms of society
and what he termed the authoritarian character (Fromm 1936).
All-throughout the period covering the move to New York and the preparatory
work for Studies on Authority and the Family, Fromm was suffering from recurring
bouts of tuberculosis which at various points severely restricted his ability for any
sort of work beyond that of reading (Funk 2000: 812). The physical separation from
the other members of the Institut that the illness brought about Fromm was based
at a sanatorium in Davos from 19321934, and was thereafter forced to regularly
seek sea and mountain air to aid his recuperation meant that he was removed from
regular contact with Horkheimer and was generally unable to participate fully in
the development of empirical programme. During this time, Horkheimers attitude
towards Fromm and towards the interdisciplinary project itself had begun to shift.
Such a shift was to become evident in Horkeimers rejection of a prospective article
Fromm had written for the Zeitschrift in 1937 (the article has since been published,
along with other previously unpublished works, by Rainer Funk under the title Mans
Impulse Structure and Its Relation to Culture in Beyond Freud: From Individual
to Social Psychology, in 2010). In this prospective article, Fromm embarked on a
fundamental re-examination of Freudian theory, accusing Freud of a bourgeois and
patriarchal psychologism that confused the middle-class character with that of all
humanity and, thereby, of thereby giving up the historical, that is to say, the social
principle of explanation (2010: 23). Fromm also put forward the idea of a revision
of Freuds theory of the drives, in which the psychic structure of a person would be
understood first and foremost by reference to the life-situation of that person rather
than as the direct or sublimated product of the impulses themselves (2010: 46).
Horkheimers rejection of the article is initially surprising, given his previous
support for the interdisciplinary fusion of Marxian sociology and psychoanalysis
that was the very basis of Fromms position. Despite seeming to follow the logic of
Marxian materialist analysis based as it was on sociological and anthropological
true contribution to development of the Frankfurt School, and his role in the Instituts
integration into the American academic establishment.
63
considerations that challenged the patently ethnocentric and biologically reductive

aspects of Freud: the universality of the Oedipus complex and the psychosexual
stages of libido development Fromms modification of Freud now drew accusations
of revisionism from Horkheimer, who had come to adopt a position in relation to
Freud which closely echoed the position of Adorno. More and more intent on carrying
out his long projected social-philosophical dialectics work, Horkheimer was in the
process of striking up an increasingly tight theoretical and personal relationship with
Adorno, seeing in him an aggressiveness and a maliciously sharp eye for existing
conditions that he felt was lacking in Fromm (Horkheimer to Adorno, 8 December,
1936, in Wiggershaus 1994: 162). Horkheimers move in this particular theoretical
direction meant that Fromm was essentially surplus to requirements, and, therefore,
a drain on finances which were certainly under some strain at the time. In addition to
this, Horkheimer refused to publish the German worker study the analysis of the
questionnaires for which Fromm had been working through since 1935 (Funk 2000:
88). As the culmination of these developments, Fromm broke with the Institut in
1939, his departure depriving him of the funds, personnel and support that might have
enabled the further development of his social-psychological research programme
(whilst it has to be noted that such a development was perhaps an unlikely prospect,
given Horkheimers change of direction and refusal to publish the worker study, the
Institut did return to interdisciplinary work in a series of empirical studies led by
Adorno in the 1940s).
As it was, in 1941, two years after leaving the Institut, Fromm managed to
secure publication of Escape for Freedom, a work which was in many respects
the realization of the proposed psychological study of Man in the Authoritarian
State which had been listed as part of the research programme of the Institut
prospectus of 1938 (Wiggershaus 1994: 272). Through this work, which consisted
of a socio-historical and existential analysis of authoritarianism and conformism
from the period between the Reformation to the present day, Fromm was to
register on the American intellectual scene in a way that his Institut colleagues
would not manage for two decades. On moving to New York, Fromm had made
friends with thinkers such as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and
the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, and was a regular attendee at Sullivans
Zodiac Club gatherings. Escape from Freedom received glowing reviews from
Mead and people like Ashley Montagu, fitting in to the culture and personality
tradition that had grown up around Meads studies and those of Benedict, Sapir,
and Cora DuBois. Fromms delineation of the idea of social character developed
here (the idea of a core character structure common to every group, class, or
society), fitted alongside the idea of national character developed in the accounts
of the culture and personality authors and, in particular, to the idea of a basic
personality structure as developed by Ralph Linton and Abram Kardiner. Fromms
particular role in relation to sociology at this juncture was to help to bring depthpsychological insights to a tradition generally caught between grand systems
theory on the one hand and abstract empiricism on the other (Mills 2000). Escape
from Freedom, which is flawed as a historical sociological document but which
64
was nevertheless a pioneering attempt to understand the historical interaction of

emotional and characterological aspects as crucial elements in the social process,
influenced thinkers such as Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, who, much like
Mannheim before them, attempted their own syntheses of social psychology and
structuralism (McLaughlin 1998: 222). Parsons in particular made a concerted,
if in fact somewhat limited, attempt to improve his account of the functioning of
systems in this regard (Parsons 1950, 1964; and Parsons and Bale 1955). People
like Gerth and Mills (1953) made an arguably more detailed attempt to carry this
out, although, like Parsons and Merton, they generally opted for a more Freudian
or Meadian version of psychology than the revised Freudian account that Fromm
suggested in Escape from Freedom and in his next work Man for Himself (1947).
Fromms popularity grew in the 1950s with the publication of The Sane
Society (1955) and The Art of Loving (1956), the latter in particular becoming an
international best-seller. Fromms development of the notion of the marketing
character (which had first appeared in Man for Himself) and his critique of the
affluent alienation of 1950s American market culture found resonance with other
critics of social conformity, such as William H. Whyte, C.W. Mills, and Vance
Packard. Whilst Fromm was increasingly reaching a wide public audience, and his
reputation becoming cemented as a leading public intellectual, his work was also
having a direct influence on later critical sociologists such as David Riesman, Robert
Blauner, and Alvin Gouldner (McLaughlin 1998: 2223). Fromms popularity
continued to grow over this period and into the 1960s where in Marxs Concept of
Man (1961) he published what was at the time the most complete English-Language
translation of Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. During the
1960s Fromm was central to the growing radical movements that came to form the
New Left, speaking to over sixty thousand people on a lecture tour of California
in 1966 and taking on the role of speech writer in Eugene McCarthys 1968
presidential campaign. In addition to this, Fromm was involved for a short period
of time with the American Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF)
and was a founding member of the influential anti-nuclear group SANE, a group
which played a leading role in efforts at encouraging unilateral disarmament. In his
recent biography of Fromm, Lawrence Friedman suggests that there is evidence
that Fromm may in fact have influenced President Kennedys June 1963 American
University Commencement Address, a talk that was crucial in paving the way for
disarmament talks between the Soviets and Americans (Friedman 2013: 210).
From the mid-1960s onwards, however, Fromms appeal, both popular and
academic, began to dwindle. By this time, the popularity of the culture and personality
tradition had tailed off Fromm in fact had been largely rejected by other culture
and personality scholars since the late 1950s. Kardiner, who in particular disliked
Fromm intensely, managed to disseminate, along with Ralph Linton, a negative view
of Fromms work through their well-attended culture and personality seminar at
Columbia (McLaughlin 1998: 230). In addition to this and despite being amongst
the top 70 cited intellectuals in the social sciences between 19561965 (McLaughlin
1998: 244) Fromm was increasingly seen as too unsystematic for mainstream
65
sociology, which was embarking on a period of professionalization at the time.

Fromms ethical Marxian form of radical humanism was patently at odds with the
sensibilities of most American sociologists, running up against the strict Weberian factvalue separation that had become one of the mainstays of social scientific thinking.
Ironically, at a time at which he was seen as too critical, too Marxian, by
mainstream sociology, Fromm was increasingly opposed in radical circles by
people like Sidney Hook and by his ex-Institut colleagues, particularly Adorno
and Marcuse. These attacks centred on Fromms apparent revisionist conformism
his stress on love and humanism, and on practical steps to move towards
the democratization of the political and economic spheres, essentially seen as the
idealist and social democratic harmonising of social antagonisms. The critique of
Fromms positive, or identity thinking provided by his ex-Institut colleagues, was
simultaneously a criticism of Fromms humanistic revisions of Freud. Marcuse,
in particular, pursued this criticism in a very public spat with Fromm in Dissent
magazine in 19551956 and in Eros and Civilization, accusing Fromm of the
traditional devaluation of the sphere of material needs in favour of spiritual needs
(1966: 265). That these criticisms of Fromm do not hold up to rigorous analysis
is not something I can go into here. Suffice it to say that Fromms non-dogmatic
flexibility and perceptiveness in his accounts of Marx and Freud which, in fact,
mirror the dominant interpretations of both thinkers today meant that he was
caught between two rigid, orthodox positions that were increasingly forced to
assert themselves in the face of significant challenges to their authority at the time.
Fromms legacy naturally suffered as a result, the criticisms of Adorno and Marcuse
being passed down and repeated by people like Russell Jacoby and Paul Robinson
such that Fromm came to be superseded in popularity by Adorno and Marcuse and
by a number of feminist, poststructuralist, and post-colonialist thinkers.
Studies in Social Character: Weimar Germany and a Mexican Village
In this section I want to focus on the previously discussed German workers study
and on Fromms subsequent study of a Mexican peasant village. As with his more
well-known historical studies The Dogma of Christ and, particularly Escape
from Freedom Fromms empirical studies were also groundbreaking advances
in sociological analysis. Like the more famous historical studies, the empirical
studies sought to demonstrate the importance of emotional and characterological
forces in social analysis, seeking to do so, however, through direct engagement
with real, living individuals. But unlike the more well-known historical studies,
these studies have received a lack of attention which is revealing in terms of making
sense of Fromms relative neglect and general exclusion from the sociological
canon. Although it may be argued that it is Fromms more well-known studies
which ought be discussed here, it seems to me that focusing on these lesser-known
empirical studies better enables the process of recovering the full relevance of his
thinking for contemporary sociology.
66
The German workers study which Fromm led during the early period of
the Institut was published in German in 1980 as Arbiter ind Angestellte am
Vorabend des Dritten Reiches. Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung (it was
subsequently published in English as The Working Class in Weimar Germany:
A Psychological and Sociological Study in 1984). The study represents in
certain definite respects the continuation of a relatively short-lived period of
empirical sociological inquiry into the conditions and attitudes of German
workers before the outbreak of the First World War. In particular, it represents
the continuation of a study of the workers question by Adolph Levenstein
in 1912 (Bonss 1984: 13). Levensteins study, which was itself heavily
informed by an earlier working paper by Max Weber on the issues of surveying
workers in large-scale industry, was primarily concerned with the connection
between technology and the inner life of the workers, seeking to illicit data on
this connection through the implementation of a questionnaire consisting of
26 questions that probed on four particular themes: 1) the psychic relation
to work and working conditions; 2) ideas on improvements of the material
situation; 3) the relationship to the social community; and 4) attitudes to nonoccupational cultural and other problems (Bonss 1984: 13). Fromms study
(which was largely carried out by Hilde Weiss) sought to develop Levensteins
study, adding a level of psychological depth through use of an interpretive
questionnaire. The questionnaire, which was distributed to 3,300 recipients,
consisted of a comprehensive open-ended list of 271 questions which would
collect data pertaining to the opinions, life-styles and attitudes of manual and
white collar workers, data which would then be analysed in accordance with
the basic psychoanalytic dictum that an individuals statement about his or
her thoughts and feelings cannot always be taken literally but must instead
be interpreted so as to try to unearth their deeper psychological motivation, in
order to illicit the relationship between the individuals emotional make-up
and his political opinions (Fromm et al. 1984 [1980]: 42). In particular, the
study sought to determine the weight and reliability of political convictions
amongst left-wing workers in relation to the rise of the Nazi Party (Fromm et
al. 1984 [1980]: 206).
Perhaps inevitably for such an exploratory exercise, there are some quite
considerable problems with the study: in addition to a flawed sampling strategy,
a response rate of only 33 percent (with only half of this number forming the
basis of the analysis) meant that as a picture of the attitudes and opinions of
the Weimar workforce it does not hold up as a representative account. Fromms
stress on the fact they werent trying to prove certain hypotheses, admitting
that the material was both quantitatively and qualitatively much too sparse
to enable us to do this (Fromm et al. 1984 [1980]: 42), only partly absolves
him here, for, as Richard Hamilton notes, Fromm at various points declared
the sample to be representative (Hamilton 1986: 83). As a result of this and
a number of other issues the simplicity of the questions and the simplicity
of the cross-tabulations, amongst others Hamilton questions the validity of
67
Fromms contention that the study robustly demonstrated that it was only a
small minority of the left-wingers who had deep anti-authoritarian convictions.
Whilst Hamiltons criticisms of the study are largely fair, there is a harshness
and lack of charity to them at times that leads to his under-emphasis of the subtlety
of Fromms attempt to illicit unconscious material and of the overall significance of
the project. For instance, whilst he is right to criticize Fromms tendency to read his
interpretation into the results with a conclusiveness which cannot always be justified,
Hamilton overstates the occurrence of this phenomenon. As such, he downplays the
more elementary point that the study did find empirical evidence in certain cases of
the co-presence of conscious anti-authoritarian beliefs and apparently unconscious
authoritarian convictions. In addition to this, from the point of view of the study
itself, and of Fromms overall social-psychological project, it seems clear that
Fromm managed to find some evidence for what would later become his theory of
social character and, thereby, for the idea of the much posited lag that was reported
to help explain the failed revolution of 19181919. By stressing the importance
of judging it against the standards of today, then, Hamilton greatly underplays the
significance of the study in the development of authoritarian studies and psychosocial analysis more generally. Fromm explicitly states in relation to the study
that he was much more concerned with drawing the most appropriate theoretical
conclusions from the evidence and with offering a stimulus for new empirical and
theoretical studies (Fromm et al. 1984: 42 italics added). Taken on these terms, the
study was unique, offering a level of critical depth in sociological analysis that had
previously not been seen, and going some way to empirically validating Korschs
and Lukcss concerns over the simplistic standpoint of mechanical Marxism.
In the late 1950s Fromm started work on a follow-up to the German workers
study, which would be published in 1970 under the title Social Character in
a Mexican Village: A Sociopsychoanalytic Study. The work, which was coauthored by Michael Maccoby, was based on the fieldwork data gathered by a
team of anthropologists and psychoanalysts between 19581963, in a village of
800 inhabitants near Cuernavaca, where Fromm had lived since 1956 (Fromm
moved to Mexico City in 1950 due to the ill-health of his then wife). The stated
aim of the study was the application of psychoanalytic categories to the study of
social groups, by the minute examination of the personality of each member of the
group, by the simultaneous and equally minute observation of all socio-economic
data and cultural patterns, and, eventually, by the attempt to use refined statistical
methods for the analysis of the data (Fromm and Maccoby 1996 [1970]: 8).
Vexed by criticism over the unempirical nature of his theorizations in the field
of social character, Fromm hoped the study would support his contention that
specific social structures promote and are sustained by specific character types.
As such, the preparatory work was more impressive than that of the German
workers study. Unlike the workers study, the interpretative questionnaire in this
case was administered to 95 percent of population. In addition to this, Rorschachs
and Thematic Apperception Tests were administered to subjects drawn from the
larger sample and the overall analysis was backed-up by a far greater level of
68
collation and analysis of socioeconomic data and ethnographic material (the fact
that there was a concerted effort to interact with the villagers over the course of
a number of years was also significant).
In terms of substantive findings, the study sought to determine what happened
to the peasant class (campesino) after the Mexican revolution in the 1920s. In
particular, Fromm was interested in why it was that, despite being given land as
a consequence of the revolution, levels of violence and alcoholism, for instance,
rose among the campesinos. What the study purported to have found was the
existence of three main village character types (based on Fromms revised
Freudian character typology) and their statistically significant correspondence
to certain socioeconomic conditions: the non-productive-receptive character,
corresponding with position of the landless day labourer; the productive-hoarding
character, corresponding with the position of the free landowner; and productiveexploitative character, corresponding with the position of the new entrepreneur
that had risen to prominence. The work here goes well beyond the workers study
in terms of the psychoanalytical (as connected to a socio-economic) explanation
for the analysis offered. Moreover, the study offers strong empirical support for
the idea of social character as a character matrix (i.e., a syndrome of character
traits which has developed as an adaptation to the economic, social, and cultural
conditions common to that group) the particular social characters, as defined
by Fromm and Maccoby, shown to be clearly correlated with economic activity
(even down to the type of crops that were planted) and to cases of alcoholism.
Fromm and Maccoby explain the differing fortunes of the respective social groups
with reference to the idea of social selection through character adaptation to the
objective conditions obtaining in the society, the idea being that those individuals
whose character coincides with their class role tend to be more successful, provided
that their class role objectivity allows the possibility of economic success, and
that, therefore, when the economic situation of a class does not provide the basis
for economic success only exceptional individuals whose character differs
from the social character of their class can escape from a level of extreme poverty
and dependence (Fromm and Maccoby 1996 [1970]: 230). In the context of the
study although clearly potentially extendable beyond this context Fromm and
Maccoby show that an understanding of character can help us account for the
increasing gap between richer and poorer villagers.
As with the workers study, there can be questions raised around the use of
correlation, inference, and the level of proof that the Mexican study provides.
Perhaps the strongest criticism of both the village study and the earlier German
workers study, however, pertains to the appropriateness of the methodological
framework used. Given the nature of the material being sought (i.e., the dynamic
and underlying dominant characters of the subjects under analysis) it could be
argued, as Neil McLaughlin (2007) has done, that the studies might have been better
conceived qualitatively, using in-depth open-ended interviews and offering a deeper
ethnographic account than was the case. Interestingly, Michael Maccoby chose to
move in this direction in his later studies into the character of managers of industrial
69
companies in the United States (Maccoby 1976). Here Maccoby opts for a threehour interview session through which he sought to determine the dominant character
syndrome of each participant. He also sought to re-describe Fromms character
types in language that would appeal to the participants themselves, and not in the
potentially condescending language that Fromm used. Other than Maccoby, and a
few others who have worked with him and who knew Fromm in Mexico (Sonja
Gojman and Salvador Milln, in particular), the kind of work pioneered in Fromms
Mexican study has more or less vanished without a trace. Fromms increasing
marginality, and the marginality of the culture and personality tradition itself, as well
as the practical and financial demands of the nature of such interdisciplinary work,
means that the study has become at worst completely forgotten and at best a relative
curiosity at the very margins of the sociological tradition.
Conclusion
In any appraisal of the development of sociological thought over the past century
or so, it seems clear that Fromms psychoanalytic social psychology ought to be
viewed as a genuinely pioneering contribution which has ultimately received
insufficient attention. His attempt to bring about a fundamental rapprochement
between psychology and sociology, effected through the melding of Marx and
Freud, was innovative and exploratory, and played an important role in the
development of German and American sociology and of Marxian sociology more
generally. But despite this, and despite his status as a leading intellectual figure in
the middle-part of the last century, Fromms work has largely come to languish
on the forgotten margins of sociology the result of personal, interpersonal, and
cultural factors as much as the relative value, substance and promise of the work
itself.
Looked at objectively and with an historical focus, it is clear that Fromm
was at the vanguard of the social-psychological attempt to make sense of the
social and historical forces that shape our individual and collective lives. His
concept of social character was an attempt to reconcile the play of forces within
the individual (elucidating the dividing line that separates the personal and the
structural). Additionally, his introduction of the interpretative questionnaire to
social-psychological inquiry opened up the ground for the empirical meeting
of psychoanalysis and sociology which is being returned to today to a greater
and greater extent. In terms of contemporary sociology, then, Fromm represents
an example of how to bring psychological depth to sociological analysis and,
thereby, to see emotional and characterological factors as contributory to a whole
range of social phenomena. Although there are clearly potential problems with
such an enterprise, to fail to try to understand the role of psychodynamic factors
is to leave sociological analysis incomplete and potentially unsound at crucial
points. Additionally, whilst culture and personality research has taken-off again
in psychology, sociologists have been slow to return to it. This leaves much of
70
sociological theory little better advanced in understanding these matters than it

was during the middle-part of the twentieth century an important development
which goes some way to correcting this situation has, of course, been Bourdieus
concept of habitus and its attempt to capture, at the individual level, the durable
structuring of structure (Bourdieu 1990: 53) characteristic of social groups and
their dominant practices (it is noticeable, however, that the concept of habitus is
developed by Bourdieu in relative disciplinary isolation, without explicit connection
to psychology, as is the case in Fromms account of social character). Returning to
Fromm, therefore, offers the chance to deepen and broaden sociological thinking,
to draw out the parallels and divergences between Fromms social psychology and
the perceptive sociology of Bourdieu, and to therefore more fully understand the
laws that govern the life of the individual man, and the laws of society that is, of
men in their social existence (2006: 5).
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Chapter 5
From Literature to Sociology:

The Shock of Celines Literary Style and
Viola Kleins Attempt to Understand It
(With a Little Help from Karl Mannheim)
E. Stina Lyon
In his work on the history of sociology, Between Literature and Science: The Rise
of Sociology (1988), Lepenies points to the lack of attention to the role of fiction
as an important source of influence in the development of sociology. In the case of
Viola Klein (19081973), the early experience of doing a sociologically informed
linguistic study of a contemporary literary sensation which aimed to provide a
social commentary on the state of society in the wake of World War I brought
a lifelong attention to the significance of language in sociological argumentation.
This paper presents a discussion of Kleins first, now forgotten, doctoral thesis
on the literary style of the French novelist, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)
written at the University of Prague before her escape to Britain in 1938 (Klein
1936). Her second thesis, written under the supervision of Karl Mannheim at the
London School of Economics and published as The Feminine Character: History
of an Ideology (1946), is better known in the history of sociology. This thesis is
now seen as one of the first attempts to apply Mannheims conception of sociology
of knowledge as a diagnostic tool in the analysis of a particular social issue in
Kleins case, that of the position of women in society as a highly original critique
of patriarchal constructions of knowledge.
Mannheim was not, however, her only source of intellectual influence. Her
first thesis offers a textual analysis at the boundary between literary criticism,
linguistics and the sociology of knowledge and culture. It throws light on her own
intellectual journey during the 1930s, from literature, linguistics and philosophy to
British empirical sociology, and also explains why she approached Mannheim for
supervisory help. This was an ideologically turbulent decade across Europe with
economic depression, political unrest, the rapid rise of fascism and anti-Semitism.
Towards the end of the decade, a year after the completion of her thesis, Celine,
a celebrated novelist and public intellectual, turned to virulent anti-Semitism and
political support for German Nazi ideology. Klein, a Jewish woman journalist of
left-wing persuasion, was at the same time forced to flee to Britain, leaving her
parents behind in Czechoslovakia, both later to perish in concentration camps.
74
Klein brought to Britain a copy of her first dissertation, presently located in her
archive at Reading University Library. But, there is no record of her referring to it
again in her later works, nor has its content been discussed in other writings about
her except as a curiosity (Sayers 1989; Deegan 1991; Kettler and Meja 1993). This
dissertation became, for Klein, a case of self-imposed amnesia about a work that
started with high intellectual pretensions and ended in what can only be described
as a failure to fully understand the complexity of her topic, a complexity which
ultimately connects to the fate of her and her family. Nonetheless, one can trace its
influence on her second thesis and her later commitment to a conceptually critical,
non-typifying and empirically strong sociology an approach that coloured all
her later writings on women and made her a path breaker in the development of
feminist sociological thought (Lyon 2007 and 2011).
After a brief summary of the biographical contexts of both Klein and her
subject, Celine, the main part of the paper is devoted to a presentation of the
structure and main content of her thesis and her attempt to combine a detailed
linguistic analysis of Celines use of speech and syntax with her own more general
sociological analysis of the changing contexts of industrial mass society and its
artistic and literary consequences as described by Celine. The paper will raise
questions about how Kleins first dissertation, despite its theoretical weakness and
failure to foresee the consequences of Celines stylistic obsessions, nonetheless
presents a powerful analysis of the syntactical tools and verbal tricks used in the
populist language of Celines fictional characters, a language later adopted in his
still officially banned anti-Semitic writings. I outline what I consider to be the
legacy of this work in terms of her relationship to Karl Mannheim and her second,
sociologically more important, thesis on patriarchal ideology.
The Excitement and Tragedy of Celine
In choosing the language of Louis-Ferdinand Celine (18821961) as the topic for
her thesis, Klein took on what has become one of the literarily and morally most
controversial public intellectuals of the 20th century. Her choice was prescient of
his continuing fame as a novelist, though not of his later notoriety as a ferocious
proponent of anti-Semitism and a collaborator during the German occupation of
France (Hewitt 1999; Jackson 2001; Callil 2006). There were many reasons why a
progressive and politically engaged woman, knowledgeable in French, linguistics,
Marxism and psychoanalysis, would have been intrigued about and attracted to
his first novel, Journey into the End of the Night. Published in 1932, it was an
acclaimed international success, especially amongst the socialist and communist
left who saw the book as expressing Marxist and anarchist sympathies for a
struggling proletariat. The book caused a literary furore because of its use of crude
and offensive popular speech in vivid dialogue and descriptions of the misery,
violence and abuse of power that characterized life during and after the First
World War: on the battlefield, in factories, in hospitals, in domestic and sexual
From Literature to Sociology
75
relations. In describing the adventures of the books anti-hero, Bardamu, Celine

drew on his own experiences as a young man in France during and after the First
World War and on his travels across Europe, USA, and colonial Africa. Celine was
a decorated soldier and a doctor of social medicine practising amongst the poor.
For a brief period he held a Rockefeller grant in the US for medical research, and
worked for the League of Nations (Hewitt 1999).
The first publication that stirred his literary talent and broke the frames of
formal linguistic conventions was his medical thesis, a short biography of the
Hungarian physician Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis (Celine 1952). An obstetrician
in 19th century Vienna, Semmelweis discovered the cause of puerperal fever. His
conclusion that women were infected by medical students, arriving fresh from the
dissection of cadavers, led him to the simple recommendation of hand washing
with disinfectant before assisting in child birth, advice rejected at the time by his
medical superiors. Semmelweis was never given the recognition he deserved for
his work, and his fate, alongside that of the infected women, became an illustration
for Celine of the impossible obstacles of human indifference and cruelty that
stood in the way of individuals seeking to ameliorate their effects. This became
a recurrent theme in his novels. His first novel, largely pacifist in orientation and
often highly humorous, gave no direct indication of his later dramatic shift to the
anti-Semitic far right. The same year Klein passed her thesis, the first of Celines
violently anti- Semitic pamphlets was published and widely disseminated. During
the Vichy regime, he counted as his friends its most anti-Semitic supporters of
National Socialist expulsion of French Jews to extermination camps (Calill 2006).
After release from imprisonment in Denmark, he continued to work in France as
a doctor of social medicine after the war. The refusal in France in 2011 officially
to honour Celine on the half century of his death has more recently added to the
continuing controversy about him and his work (Alliot 2012).
Thesis Work in Times of Conflict
Born in Vienna, Klein moved as a child with her family to Bohemia, then in
Czechoslovakia. Having originally enrolled as an undergraduate at Vienna
University in 1929, student violence kept her from attending and she instead
spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris before continuing her studies in Prague.
Here she studied modern languages and philosophy. She worked as a teacher and
journal editor before enrolling as a doctoral student in the Faculty of Philosophy at
what was at the time the German University of Prague (now Charles University)
in 1934. As part of her completion of the doctoral degree she sat two rigorous
exams in Romanische Philologie and Deutsche Volkskunde and a further one in
Philosophy. She had her doctoral Promotion in March 1937. Her supervisors were
Erhard Preissig (18891945), Professor of Roman Archeology and Epigraphics,
and Friedrich Slotty (18811963), Professor of Comparative Indogermanic
Linguistics. Both professors were of German origin and known in their field, but of
76
very different political persuasion. Preissigs earlier publications were on French

literature and language as thoughts of a people (Volkergedanke). He was later
allowed to remain in post during the Nazi occupation. During the war he published
a book on pre-war French cultural propaganda in Czechoslovakia (Preussig
1943), a work that systematically outlines the destructive presence of French
intellectual culture in Czech universities. It is particularly critical of concepts
derived from the French enlightenment such as universalism, human rights,
individualism, reason and rationality, at the time ideologically associated with the
dangers of Jewish cosmopolitanism. Mitteleuropa was then, as now, a contested
cultural domain, especially with respect to the position of minority groups across
the region, including both Jews and German speaking minorities (Vidmar-Horvat
and Delanty 2008). Slottys publications, on the other hand, were technical studies
of the grammar and syntax of ancient languages. During the Weimar Republic
he was an active member of the Deutsche Democratische Partei and publically
opposed Hitler and the growth of National Socialism up till and on the occasion
of the invasion of Sudetenland in 1938. As a result he was immediately deprived
of his post and the right to publish. The tension between the two halves of her
thesis, between on the one hand generalizing national-historical and sociological
explanations of the context and location of a cultural Zeitgeist, and on the other
the logical, factual and critical details of the linguistic constructions and means of
expression of a particular creative individual, reflect these contradictions.
The Structure and Content of the Thesis
Klein structured the submitted version of her dissertation on Celine into two main
parts.1 The introductory third of her 109 page thesis is devoted to the general social
and historical context of Celines writings, the Zeitgeist of rapid industrialization
and total war. Here she cited her indebtedness to Mannheims then recent book
Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (1935), published the same year
Mannheim was forced, as a Jew, to relinquish his post as professor in Frankfurt.
In the second section, she offered a detailed linguistic analysis of Celines use of
speech and syntax, quoting un-translated extracts from his first novel as evidence
of the ways in which his language could be seen to typify this new Zeitgeist.
Her list of references is brief and multidisciplinary, but, as was customary at the
time, she seldom referred to the sources in detail in the text. It includes a few
1In the following sections, the translations both of Kleins German and Celines
French are my own. My attempt to turn both of their writings into clear and readable
English is inevitably an interpretation by myself as the author. In undertaking the task of
trying to give a prcis of her thesis, I have tried to stay as close to the original as possible.
There are many German concepts in this which themselves ask for a lengthy analysis as to
their meaning, such as Zeitgeist and Volk, but I have avoided the attempt to engage with this
in favour of a more immediate understanding of Kleins arguments.
77
texts in linguistics, amongst them Ferdinand de Saussures posthumous Cours de

Linguistique General (1922), a literary analysis of Emile Zolas novel LOeuvre,
a philosophical text by Martin Heidegger and a text by the German art historian
Wilhelm Pinder, a conservative nationalist whose writings on generational cultural
shifts in European art history Mannheim saw as one of the departures for his own
sociology of culture (Mannheim 1940: 41).
In introducing her topic, Klein made a biblical reference. In the beginning was
the word, she wrote, and words have changed worlds, caused spiritual revolutions
and affected the happiness and unhappiness of humanity. Words may have the
power profoundly to affect human realities, but they are also the mental products
of those same realities. Language, she argued with Saussure, is at the same time
a living actuality, a parole, and a product of the past, a langue. For the writer,
language is at the same time a tool box to be practically used and manipulated, and
an expression of public consciousness, thus making the author both an individual
artist and the voice of a particular concrete world in a specific historical situation.
Language is both individual and social, and this paradoxical ambiguity is similar
to that of sociological understandings of the individual in society. Thought, in both
form and substance, changes with the situation it finds itself in, and with the social
function it fulfils. With Mannheim she argued that major social change, such as
had dominated Europe since the beginning of industrialization and modernity, had
affected and changed cultural expressions, thought and understandings, without
individuals knowing why. A writer like Celine, to be understood, must be seen
both as a creative individual and as a mouthpiece of his time.
Celine in Social Context
What is this time, she asked, for which Celine and his linguistic style is the
symbolic expression? Her answer comes first through an example from his
novel Journey into the Night. Celine symbolized the epoch in which he writes
through a vivid description of the young Bardamus youthful experience of the
Paris Exposition of 1900, one of mass humanity and brutality, of thousands of
huddled feet in queues and trampling up escalators, all in awe in front of a gallery
of machines in a glass cathedral, all fearful and stunned of catastrophes in
suspense. Modern life begins (Klein 1936: 5. See also Celine 1989: 8082 for
full section in later English translation). The crisis of our time is one of machine
idolization, argued Klein, and the accompanying spiritual crisis could be traced
back to the simultaneity of contradictory elements: enormous technical and
industrial progress without commensurate developments in the power and heart of
human understanding. She described this discrepancy using Pinders notion of the
simultaneous presence of contemporaneity and the non-contemporaneous. She
illustrated this with a further analogy, this time one provided by Mannheim, of the
technology of carpet bombing used to destroy a town of innocent civilians. The
revaluation of values, a slow and socially uneven process, had fallen out of step
with cataclysmic technological change. A form of thought that may once have been
78
progressive emerges as counterproductive to societal well being. Her final literary

analogy was taken from the satirist Karl Kraus: We are running a world transport
system on narrow-gauge brain tracks (Klein 1936: 7. This quote is taken from
Kraus 1922: 7). The analysis of such change, she argued, required both detailed
knowledge of the objective contexts of industrialization, political democratization,
capitalism, and war but also of individual perceptions and their outcome in art and
the written word. With Mannheim she came to see the heart of the social analytical
enterprise as a diagnostic one, a study of knowledge and culture to be undertaken
by a culturally informed and ideologically detached elite capable of dissecting the
underlying factors affecting social understandings and expressing them in more
socially informed and logically coherent ways. In her attempt empirically to apply
such a theoretical framework to a complex author like Celine, she encountered
many of the unresolved difficulties inherent in the sociology of knowledge and
ideas and the ultimate disappointment of failing to foresee their consequences.
Klein did not write in terms of the turbulent party politics of the time. Hers
instead was a passionate plea for greater intellectual understanding of the
consequences of the machine age, drawing ultimately on Marxs concern for
the fate of the growing proletariat. Modern production methods and their required
centralization and detailed regimentation of work and planning, even of education,
culture and the press, she argued, had left the lower middle classes of artisans,
small traders and petty government officials in a permanent struggle, not just for
an independent economic existence, but also for their particular forms of rational
thought. This was the class into which Celine was born and whose lives he
described. Her sympathy was probably enhanced by the fact that this was also a class
whose hardships she knew from her childhood in Vienna and Bohemia. Fuelled
by war, depression and unemployment, enmity against industrial rationalization
had grown and become converted to hatred against all things associated with the
elite and their hypocritical promulgation of an ideology of progress, ineffective
politicians offering no social protection, and a rarefied culture inaccessible to the
masses. The human propensity for irrationality, brought to public awareness by
Freud, and previously reined in by religious doctrine and faith, had now turned to
sport idolization, machine prowess, competition mania, and new modes of more
emotional, populist linguistic expressions, as exemplified in Celines crude literary
style. It should be noted that when Klein wrote this the preparations for the 1936
Berlin Olympics and the 1937 International Paris Exposition were in full swing.
This double sidedness between technical rationality and fanaticism had not so
far, she argued, been as politically catastrophic in France as in countries overrun by
mass totalitarian regimes, due largely to a longstanding French tradition of reason
and rationality. This differed from the romanticism and mysticism characteristic
of the Kleinburgertum elsewhere in Europe. In so arguing, she anticipated
later and ongoing debates about French immunity in the politically turbulent
decades preceding the Second World War (Kennedy 2008). At the time, however,
this set of assumptions about rational French resistance to fascism no doubt
contributed to her benign assumptions about Celines moral distance from his
79
irrational proletarian characters. It is noteworthy, that she offered no reflections

on the growth of French anti-Semitism as an increasingly respectable ideological
response, both for the left and the right, and its expression in the thoughts and
words of Celines characters (Irvine 2008). It was an anxious time to be a Jew in a
German speaking environment.
Celines Language and Literary Style
Having briefly diagnosed the distinctiveness of Celines social and cultural time,
in the second and main part of her thesis, Klein turned to the question of what
she saw as distinctive about Celines literary style, and its capacity to shock and
engage. Her linguistic skills came to the fore in a detailed analysis of Celines
use of popular speech (Volksprache) and the subtle ways in which his literary
characters, drawn from an uneducated class, as Klein described them, get their
meaning across through various creative but extra-grammatical linguistic means.
Using such popular spoken language to create his own individual literary style,
Celine, she argued, aimed to contribute to the cultural and social revolution of his
time. The power of his style to enrol the attention and sympathies of the reader,
whilst at the same time shocking the literary sensibilities of the educated elite, had
many elements: the use of loose and open-ended sentence constructions, the use of
contrast to intensify expressions, repetitive emphasis, irony, satire, tricks of over
emphasis and simplistically typecast characters and lives. She offered numerous
detailed examples from his work, quoted in the original French, interspersing
them with her own thoughts on the novelist and his motivations. Repeatedly she
returned to the question of how to distance the author from his hero. One literary
advantage of using Volksprache, she argued, is that despite using the I form, the
author almost never steps forward and it does not occur to the reader to identify
him (Celine) with the narrator (Bardamu). Celine uses the mouth of all his many
characters to describe his own varied life, love and travel experiences, thereby
enhancing their colourful vividness, yet stands himself invisibly in the background.
This distancing is experienced through ironic nuances in the presentation of
the main character. She makes a comparison with Chaplins film Modern Times,
released in 1936, in which Chaplin engages the audience by ironisizing the
many sufferings of his anti-hero through the means of situation comedy. Celine,
she argued, does so through the ironic use of speech and with equal comic, yet
powerful, effect shows the frustrations and dissolutions of a little man in a false
and brutal world beyond his control.
But forms of more sociological thinking also entered into her linguistic
analysis. Stylistically, argued Klein, Celines resigned irony in the face of a sense
of powerlessness in a collapsing world order is expressed through exaggerated
extrapolation of absurd individual experiences into universal ones. Subjective
and banal everyday judgements are, with ironic undertones, given the status and
appearance of well established facts and causal relations. Klein referred to such
verbal expressions as those of pseudo causality, by which she meant a kind of
80
casual everyday wisdom about what explains persons and events in the world,
and which, if repeated often enough, became accepted as true social descriptions.
Celines frequent use of the impersonal French on, an all embracing totality and
a depersonalization of personal experience, expressed, she argued, the tendency
of ordinary persons to escape anxiety by generalizing their own experiences into
what appears to be universally valid truths To give but one small example from
her dissertation: Celines use of an everyday expression such as: the streets
are empty because of the heat, as expressed in conversation, can be read as a
factual description of empty streets and the nature of the weather, but also, more
sarcastically, of Parisians not at work in the summer, and thus also as a pseudo
causal explanations and rationalization of why not, presented as fact (Klein 1936:
48). A highly personal picture thus becomes presented as if it were the picture of
human motives, presented under the stylistic mask of irony, which for Klein was
a clear sign of Celines own literary distance, at least until she read his second
novel and began to have doubts. The effect on the reader of the heavy use of such
typifying generalizations, Klein argued, is seductive in the way that it creates a
sense of fatalism, or resigned determinism in a world where no one can escape
their fate. Celines characters have become imprisoned and determined both by
their own muddled and contradictory minds and by the miserable proletarian
environment in which they find themselves. Through the transition from a
more specific nous and vous to the generalized on the reader is brought into a
community in which what counts as truth for the teller also includes the reader in
a shared language. Here Klein saw the problem of the simple man as one of not
having been given the linguistic means to express particular and complex feelings,
but instead having to rely on general descriptions of human anxiety, insecurity
and vanity. Her repeated references to Celines ordinary characters, including
Bardamu, as the uneducated, point to her own tendency to separate them
from us. This leaves both Klein, and the well educated Celine, creator of the
words, as reflecting thinkers positioned outside the scene, yet, it is Celines own
experiences that are described. Not once in the thesis does she offer a linguistic
experience or encounter of her own, either as a woman or a Jew, subjectivities she
would have felt inappropriate for a research thesis.
Alongside the use of Volksprache, Klein described Celines style as one
characterized by the use of free indirect speech (erlebte Rede), a concept she
took from the work of the linguist E. Lorck (1921). This describes impressionistic
writing using a stream of consciousness of third person narration alongside firstperson direct speech. Klein showed in detail how Celine consistently makes public
the content of subjective deliberations to give his readers an experience that is as
alive as that experienced by the author and his characters as it happened. The speech
is of the moment, unedited, incomplete and loose ended. Thus, a mixture of voices
are presented without clear contours, yet offering an atmospheric whole. Such a
style, she argued, does not reflect a logical thought process, but only a mixture of
emotion, interpretation and commentary. Whereas Proust used an impressionistic
style to express the mental differentiations and emotional sensibilities of the
81
intellectual, she argued, Celines impressionist use of language is folksy and

represents a different social stratum with a fundamentally different world view,
incoherent thought, and a totally different language in which to express it. The
muddled thoughts of the simple man give Celine the excuse for a frequent use
of drastic juxtapositions in which there are only rich and poor, humans and
animals, leaders and followers. This is also exemplified in the bagatellizing
of dramatic contrasts between ordinary situations and horrendous experiences, as
when the blood from a severed head is compared to an overflowing pot of jam, or
burning villages during the war to fireworks on a jolly festival night. The simple
man cannot make a big fuss about his feelings, but sticks to irrelevances, and
Celine, she argued, makes of this emotional primitiveness an artistic style.
Finally, Klein richly exemplified Celines use of grammatical manipulation for
emotional effect. To mention only a few: expressions and explanations suddenly
withdrawn for an opposite afterthought; the second part of a sentence used as
a commentary on the first; rich use of supplementary brackets and sub-clauses
to fill in previous omissions; expressive use of double negatives; onomatopoetic
summary lists of objects and adjectives; overemphasis of particular pronouns;
loosely connected memories appearing in an associative manner creating a sense
of unbalanced restlessness; making verbs passive or excluding them altogether.
Such linguistic restlessness she saw as a valid expression of the high speed
modernity of the time, expressing human fates out of control. She referred to Karl
Kraus when she argued that style is not the what but the how of seeing. She
also here made a brief socio-cultural comparison with artistic culture in Germany
when she argued, presciently as it turned out, that Celines style was a break away
from an old French tradition of logical clarity in favour of a more Germanic style
of emotional literary expression. In retrospect it is surprising, though politically
understandable, that she offered no discussion of the contemporary French and
German artistic styles of expressionism and surrealism, styles closer to that of
Celine than her frequent comparative references to impressionism and Proust,
but also at the centre of the national-socialist charge of degeneracy at the time
(Johnson and Johnson 1987).
Behind the Mask of Celine the Intellectual
Celines second novel, Death on Credit (1936), published in the final year of
Kleins thesis preparation, received only a brief mention in her thesis. It was
recommended to Klein by Celine himself, but did not quite fit with her earlier
arguments. In this novel, Celine gives the main character his own name, Ferdinand,
and the story is told as auto-biographical memory. Klein observed a change of
style here towards greater brutalism and unrealistic exaggerated fantasy in the
description of the down trodden masses and the experiences of Ferdinand growing
up amongst them. She quoted from a public speech given by Celine in 1933, at an
event honouring Zola, in which he described the world as stuck in an incurable war
psychosis, a collective death wish for destruction with all political parties, liberals,
82
Marxists, and fascists offering only one solution more soldiers and war. With the
old literary realism of Zola no longer convincing only symbols and dreams remain.
She noted how the heavy use of popular speech mannerisms in this second novel
was even more emotional, underpinned by an even greater use of three full stops
delineating unfinished sentences. His linguistic style had become as recognizable
as that of impressionists like Manet or Renoir, a comparison she felt confirmed
her initial proposition of a particular literary style: the artistic expression of a
particular, socially located, mind revealed in a particular form in accordance with
patterns of social change, and articulated as a contribution to such change.
But Celines second novel must also, alongside his letters to her, have given
an indication of the difficulties inherent in drawing inferences from a particular
personal literary style to the psychology, political motivations and class alignment
of its creator. Klein sought help with some of her questions by writing directly to
Celine. His four replies, dated between May and October 1936, are included as
an appendix to the thesis. The first two of his replies are gallant: he is absolutely
(totally) flattered that my work could be the object of your thesis and completely
at your disposal in giving all the desired information (Klein 1936: 106). But he
warns her that he feels incapable of reasoning about literature and has a natural
hatred of all commentary. I execute or I keep quiet. He offers to send her a
revised version of his medical thesis, which, he tells her, will help explain his style.
This would have her reference to it in the thesis, but also points to his continued
identification with the victimhood of Semmelweiss. Celine, who had many
women friends across Europe, encourages her to seek out his friend in Prague,
the psychoanalyst Anny Reich (the ex-wife of Wilhelm Reich and a member of
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society). Later in July, a further letter charmingly,
but rather patronizingly, addresses Klein as Cher Demoiselle and invites her to
Paris for a personal conversation, offering her hospitality in his home if that
would suit her better. In August he replied more fully, but in a much angrier
tone. Today more is known about Celines tempestuous personality, but these were
not the kind of answers Klein might have expected, given her assumptions about
Celine as an admired novelist and a committed doctor to the poor. Celine had
by now been exposed to a very critical reception of his second novel, both from
the intellectual left who saw it as a demeaning attack on the proletariat, and the
intellectual traditionalist right, who saw its style as an insult to French culture.
He now rants in a style similar to that of his books. On his manner of working he
explains that he knows nothing of literature but likes to make his page sing like
Chopin on his piano he is a failed poet who only does what he can . He has
never read Joyce is only interested in emotional expressions singing the
organic he finds such aimless meandering, like those of Proust, repulsive, and
would really like to write popular songs (Klein 1936: 107). He proclaims himself
fundamentally, absolutely, radically an anarchist one must strangle all leaders
All that which commands is ipso facto rotten, harmful, criminal, repugnant,
only worthy of death Language is a whore, she enjoys being raped, caresses
leave her cold. In the final letter he simply states: I do not know I have a
83
profession in medicine and earned my living Poetic impulses? I do not know. It

is indecent to speak of such things. These are things one must never say, nor write.
All that is shameless and disgusting Here is my advice Men and especially
writers do not behave as modestly as they should (Klein 1936: 108).
We now know that, having exposed in his novels the horror of capitalism,
imperialism, militarism and, after a visit to Stalins Russia, communism, he was
now in the process of embracing virulent anti-Semitism and about to publish his
first propagandistic pamphlets. Celines fictional characters, awful as they are
with words, but to whom the reader is invariably drawn, provided the tools, on
which Celine sharpened his pamphleteering style in the defence of an ideology
with already visible murderous effects. Klein was one of the Jewish names on
the long lists of such names he assembled to support his attack on them, and Proust
and Joyce figured prominently as examples of degenerative Jewish influence on
genuine French popular culture and art (Celine 1937).
A Failure of Interpretation?
Kleins attempts to socially contextualize and explain Celine and his literary
style were more complex than she appreciated at the time. A more contemporary
psychoanalytical approach to the work of Celine concludes that there is no
valid way of making inferences from his literary writings to his motivations
and personality. Such interpretations invariably become as much a reflection of
the analyst as an account of the mind of Celine (Coen 1982). Klein attributed
to Celine a detached intellectual wisdom, of being like us, like her, like
Zola, or Chaplin or even Mannheim: educated and cultured individuals with
reason and logic and a demand for accuracy of judgement behind them. But the
occasional expressions of anti-Semitism and racism Celine puts in the mouths
of his proletarian characters were also at the time deeply embedded in him
and in French elite culture generally (Irvine 2008). Her simplistic sociological
assumptions about the cultural uniformity of class, and her view of Celine as
a detached intellectual using populist language to elicit sympathy for the
underclass, were plainly wrong. She may have seen Celines fictional character
of Bardarmu as the mouth piece for the little man, as in Chaplins film Modern
Times (1936), but Celine the author was not as detached as Klein assumed. So
why, in the light of all this should Kleins first thesis not remain forgotten?
Even if in one respect this thesis was a failure, there are reasons to conclude
that her analysis of the social contexts and manipulative uses of language in the
creation of prejudice, cynicism and hatred is as relevant today as it appeared to
her when after the tragedy of World War II she was faced with writing a second
dissertation to compensate for her unmentionable first.
A brief read of Celines anti-Semitic language shows Kleins insights. Celines
three notorious anti-Semitic texts remain banned in France. The first, Bagatelles
pour un massacre (Trifles for a massacre) (1936), has been translated into English
and is available on the net. In this, the stylistic techniques used by Celine in the
84
process of directly engaging the reader in his narrative, so carefully analysed by

Klein, are brought to the fore with even greater power and intensity than in his first
novels. Celine here expresses his own views, using his distinct literary style so
carefully dissected by Klein. His breathless style, including what she calls energy
saving grammatical devices that force the reader to fill in missing bits, thus
becoming sucked in as a co-creator of the meaning of the text, leaves the reader
no time to think about content, or step back for any kind of critical detachment.
Through the use of imagined intimate conversational dialogue between the author
and various friends, emotive and verbally rich descriptions, sudden dislocating
shifts of tone and even more rapid ad hoc pseudo-causal connections, the reader
is purposefully led down narrow allies and dark basements of anxiety and
hatred, but also into a seductive sense of identification. He does not tell us what
to think, but through engagement with this rapid and loose ended narrative we
become sucked into a particular kind of pseudo-experiential knowledge. Which is
subjective or objective, which experiences belong to author, or are just fictitious
inventions based on rumours assumed to be shared by the reader? Celine does
not distinguish. From a starting position of expressing his own hatred of critics,
publishers and literary agents for turning against his work, Celine rapidly, and
repeatedly, moves to an identification of all his personal opponents as Jews or
sympathetic to Jews. He then turns these enemies into a fictitious homogenous
universal group, ever present and always in control, particularly where there are
communists, capitalists, freemasons or militarists responsible for revolutions and
wars against the common people. He is the only one courageous to stand up to
their conspiracy. With ad hoc lists of random names and organizations, selective
quotes and totally dubious statistics from popular publications and newspapers,
including clearly misrepresented Jewish ones, and fictitious ones like the Elders of
Zion, the writing gives the air of being respectably historically and sociologically
factual rather than the rants of a fictitious character in a proletarian novel. His
irony and sarcasms are no longer detached, but used as propaganda in what,
today, can only be described as incitement to hatred.
The Importance of Words: The Making of a Critical Sociologist
In one of her first letters to Mannheim after gaining her refugee scholarship,
Klein self-effacingly confesses that she has not yet done any preparatory
studies worth mentioning (VKA 16.9.41, Lyon 2011). But her proposed
problem formulation on the issue of womens emancipation in democratic
post-war reconstruction brings to mind ideas discussed in her first thesis and
borrowed from her earlier readings. She points to a culture and a reality out
of joint, for which she gives the example of the political and psychological
attraction of the back to hearth policies of the German National Socialist Party,
and its simultaneous failure to implement such reactionary principles in practice,
given industrial demands for labour. In a democratic future based on the ideals
85
of liberty and equality such contradictions need to be addressed, she argued,

with studies about what values to preserve and what changes are necessary to
facilitate the adoption of these democratic ideals.
But half a year later her tone in addressing Mannheim is less anxious to
please, and her topic gained a sharper focus. She now wrote that what people
think of as typical female characteristics are not based on factual observations,
but on prejudice and ideology. She aims to prove that the scientific attitude is
not less than any other way of regarding experience subject to the influence of
surrounding culture and or personal bias (VKA 30.5.42). Klein already knew the
difficulties in trying to understand the linguistic, and illogical, means by which a
fictional character like Bardamu articulated his prejudices, and the even greater
difficulties in trying to discern where a respected author like Celine drew a line
between the ill-informed prejudices of his characters and his own views. The task
she was now setting herself was to expose how well-known seemingly rational
social scientists in pursuit of the scientific truth about women, fell into similar
prejudicial, typifying and poorly evidenced pseudo causal traps, with little critical
self-awareness of their very damaging effect on individual womens search for
equality and freedom.
She pursued this task in a critical, at times literary and journalistic, style that
owed less to Mannheim than to her own earlier intellectual trajectory. When he sent
her long and highly eclectic literature lists, or suggested she do major overviews
of literature on womens cultural and social change and their psychological
consequences, she was grateful, but stuck to her own search for critical clarity. After
a broad general sociological introduction on the changing position of women, she
focused on a series of specific authors, amongst them Freud, Haverlock Ellis, the
Vaertlings and Otto Weiniger (not only patriarchal in his categorizations, but also
anti-Semitic), whose works she meticulously criticized with respect to conceptual,
theoretical and logical inconsistencies, weak methodological strategies, poor
empirical accuracy and doubtful validity of findings, spurious and tendentious
descriptive and pseudo causal generalizations, lack of regard for comparative
counter evidence, and assumptions about ideal type norms (Klein 1946). In the
first edition of the book she included an analysis of a generational novel about
women as evidence of the reflection of social change in literature (Klein 1946).
Such biased assumptions can, she believed, only be explained by the pervasive
patriarchal ideology based on conceptually simplistic binary contrasts seductive to
an audience in search of false certainties. In the introduction to the book version of
her thesis she was anxious to dispel the notion that such critical contextualizing of
scientific writings was an expression of relativism, or a belief that objectivity in
the social sciences was not possible, only that it required a lot more self-criticism
of ones own perspective than she observed with respect to these scientists of
women (Klein 1946).
But when, towards the end of her supervisory period, Mannheim suggested
that she include a comparison between women and intellectuals in her thesis,
she forcefully pointed out that too close a comparison between free-floating
86
intellectuals, women and minority groups was unwarranted. Her reply to

Mannheim, as conclusion to this story of an intellectual journey, is worth quoting
in its entirety. It gives us some insight into the hard lessons that she had learned
whilst working with, and on, free floating intellectuals and literary wordsmiths
during one of the most cruel periods of recent European history and how the
experience had sharpened her sociological understandings:
With regard to the freischwebende Intelligenz it does not seem to me to fall
into the same category as those marginal groups I mentioned. It is characteristic
of the intelligentsia to be socially unattached while all those types I mentioned
are characterized not by detachment, but by dual loyalty; both to their own,
subordinate group and to the prevailing standards of the dominant group.
The intelligentsia does, moreover, not share the two essential characteristics
common to women, Jews, foreigners, Negros, etc.: they have not got that
sense of solidarity and unity which, for want of a better expression I called
collective consciousness; they have, on the contrary, a very marked Sinn fur
den Wert der Eigenpersonlichkeit, and are not subject to inferiority feelings
and compensatory mechanisms as intellectuals. A Jew, qua Jew, a woman qua
woman, a Negro as a Negro, feel inferior; but I do not believe that even in Nazi
Germany with its proclaimed contempt of the intellect, an intellectual will ever on
that account feel inferior. The marginal position may in many cases contribute to
make a person an intellectual; the constant shifting of perspectives will heighten
his critical judgement and increase sensitivity. But the intelligentsia, as a group,
does not share the characteristics of the other marginal groups mentioned in
my chapter and I do not think I can include it, except, if you think right, in
a footnote, emphasizing the differences between this and the other unstable
groups (VKA, letter to Mannheim, 25.4.1944).
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Interwar France, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historique 34(2): 2545.
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the Rise of Women, International Sociology 8(1): 555.
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Reading University.
Klein, V. 1946. The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology. London: Kegan
Paul, Trubner & Co, Ltd.
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Welt durch Schwarze Magie. Wien: Verlag Die Fackel.
Lepenies, W. 1988. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Carl Winter.
Lyon, E.S. 2007. Viola Klein: Forgotten Emigre Intellectual, Public Sociologist
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Chapter 6
Olive Schreiner, Sociology and the

Company She Kept
Liz Stanley
Olive Schreiner and Sociology: Opening Thoughts

The South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855
1920), who lived in Britain for long periods as well as South Africa, was in her
day one of the worlds most famous people.1 The company she kept in a literal
network sense included many well-known figures in Sociology and other social
sciences and her analytical concerns are clearly of sociological import and yet
there were at the time and still are now issues concerning where and how to locate
her in relation to Sociology as a body of ideas and a way of thinking, and also
as a discipline. In exploring the whys and wherefores of this, the company she
kept will also be explored in more complex figurational terms of her associational
connections and their political and ethical grounding.
Schreiners publications convey the range of her concerns and indicate the
analytic connections shared with Sociology.2 These include a ground-breaking
novel (The Story of an African Farm, 1883), two collections of socialist and
feminist allegories (Dreams, 1891; Dream Life and Real Life, 1893), a powerful
critique of Cecil Rhodes and his imperialist activities in a scandalous magic
realist novella (Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, 1897), a number of groundbreaking political economy essays (The Political Situation, 1896; An English South
Africans View, 1899; Closer Union, 1909) and a best-selling volume of feminist
theory (Women and Labour, 1911), and they put her firmly on the international
intellectual and political map. After Schreiners death, posthumous publications
included two more novels (From Man to Man, 1923; Undine, 1929), another
collection of allegories (Stories, Dreams and Allegories, 1923) and a volume
of essays analysing the racial dynamics of polity and economy in South Africa
(Thoughts on South Africa, 1923).
Schreiner wrote in and across a number of genre forms, with all her publications
containing a strong element of social theorising, as also do her nearly 5,000
1For background and Schreiner as a proto social scientist, see Stanley, 2002.
2For bibliographic information on all Schreiner publications, see the Essential
Schreiner/Schreiners Publications page of the Olive Schreiner Letters Online at www.
oliveschreiner.org.
90
extant letters (published in full in the Olive Schreiner Letters Online at www.
oliveschreiner.org; see also Stanley and Salter 2014). Schreiners political and
social as well as literary contributions were widely praised by contemporaries,
including Herbert Spencer, W.E. Gladstone, Charles Dilke, Keir Hardie, and
later J.A. Hobson, Leonard Hobhouse, Bertrand Russell and Norman Angell in
Britain and Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gillman in the US; and were also
acknowledged by those on the receiving end of her social analysis and critique,
including Cecil Rhodes, Jan Smuts and Lloyd George. Schreiners analytical
concerns include the economic base and its implications for divisions of labour;
the relationship between political, economic and social hierarchies; the three great
questions of labour, gender and race; imperialism and its violent exploitations;
forms of governance and their implications for libertarian politics; autocracy and
the causes and consequences of increasingly industrial forms of warfare; and
social justice and how a better future might come into being.
These matters are undoubtedly also among the concerns of Sociology, with
the sociological company Schreiner kept featuring some high-profile names. They
include: Hebert Spencer, whose First Principles she was initially influenced by
and later recoiled from and with whom she later maintained a friendly relationship
while she lived in England and subsequently. Karl Marx, who she met via his
daughter Eleanor during the last months of his life and with her social care theory
of value in Women and Labour in some measure a rejection of the Marxian one.
Karl Pearson, a friend in the days of his socialist as well as social science concerns
with social ethics, but whose emotionally frozen rationalism she disliked. John
Atkinson Hobson, an economist-cum-economic sociologist with whom she shared
many ideas about imperialism, war and pacifism. Leonard Hobhouse, regarding
his critical engagement with imperialism, including in Democracy and Reaction
(1904) and Liberalism (1911). And the US sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose
ideas about race were a particular influence on her thinking in the mid 1900s.
At her death, Schreiners reputation and stature seemed assured.
Subsequently, in some areas of UK Sociology her work, particularly regarding
imperialism (her influence on Hobsons theory of imperialism, and his on
Lenins) and also women and work, had considerable impact. Indeed, as late
as the 1970s, Women and Labour appeared on some undergraduate Sociology
reading lists, together with her younger friend Alice Clarks (1919) Working Life
of Women in the Seventeenth Century, and Hobsons The War in South Africa
(1900) and Imperialism (1902), with Hobsons War featuring an interview with
Schreiner (concerning the actual feelings of the Boer population, rather than
as reported in the press). But with hindsight this was a swan-song occurring
in departments with strong economic sociology inclinations, like Manchester
Universitys Department of Sociology, where I encountered it in the late 1970s
as a new lecturer. Few sociologists between then and now would have placed
Schreiners work within the expanding sociological canon because, ironically,
it was displaced from reconsideration by contemporary feminist writings at the
very point when reassessment might have occurred.
Olive Schreiner, Sociology and the Company She Kept
91
Subsequently, however, the decline of a commanding heights view of

Sociology and accompanying rise of diversity and areas of specialism has enabled
a broader range of sociological ideas and positions to be recognized, and to some
extent Schreiners work has benefitted from this. Indeed, in terms of intellectual
distinction on an international and interdisciplinary level, Olive Schreiner is clearly
a winner, with new editions of her major books still appearing supported by an
international interdisciplinary industry of Schreiner interpreters at work within
contemporary academic feminism. But while a good case can be made for the
relevance of her theorizing, she is still largely forgotten as a sociologist, or rather
as someone who might, or might not, belong to Sociology, both as constituted
across the period of her life-time, and also in the present-day. But of course this
begs the questions of what Sociology was and is and where its boundaries lie and
who is seen as legislating these matters and consequently who is seen to produce
key sociological ideas.
What follows explores these matters of borders, boundaries and not/belonging
regarding Sociology and the relationship of this to the company she kept,
focusing on Olive Schreiner and her work. The discussion starts with her links
with Spencer, Hobson, Hobhouse and Du Bois.
Sociological Company She Kept
The earliest known intellectual influence on Schreiner was sociological in character
and came from Herbert Spencers (1862) First Principles. She encountered this
in 1871 while staying with her aunt Elizabeth, married to the missionary Samuel
Rolland. The Rollands lived at Beersheba on the frontier of the now-Lesotho,
and a chance passing visitor left his copy of First Principles with her. Its impact
was profound although not perhaps quite what Spencer might have wanted, for
in 1895 Schreiner wrote to a friend that, while it had showed her that systems
of political and ethical thought could replace religious ones, she had rejected its
mechanism and had to transmute this into workable ideas (OS to Betty Molteno,
24 May 1895; see Olive Schreiner Letters Online) The social organism aspect of
Spencers thinking and his ideas concerning increasing social complexity attracted
Schreiner. However, contra Spencer, she rejected a progress view of social
change over time, with her eye remaining on what she termed the backwards
and downwards movements that also occurred, while the strong individualistic
emphasis in Spencers thinking and his rejection of state interference are poles
apart from Schreiners communitarian and socialist-federalist stance (Stanley
2002; Mingardi 2013; Francis and Taylor 2014).
During the first period she lived in Britain (end 1881 to late 1889) and
on subsequent visits, Schreiner and Spencer became personally acquainted
and she remained grateful for her early encounter with his work. Later, each
referred appreciatively to the others public rejection of Britains provocation
of war in South Africa (18991902), and Schreiner valued Spencers linking
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of imperialism with war. Spencers last public activities included his active
opposition to the war in public statements and writings, while Schreiners
many high-profile writings and political activities in this respect led to her
confinement under martial law for most of the wars duration (Spencer 1902;
Stanley and Salter 2014: 13060). The appreciation was mutual, shown by
Spencer donating to the fund that helped Schreiner when her Johannesburg
house was destroyed in 1900 by fire-bombing, with Schreiner appreciatively
commenting, that dear old Herbert Spencer who has meant so much to me since
I was a girl, should have contributed (OS to Mary Brown, 9 January 1901; see
Olive Schreiner Letters Online); and in 1903 when Spencer was dying, he had
favoured passages in The Story of an African Farm read to him.
The South African War witnessed other connections between Schreiners social
theorizing and Sociology, through her links with Leonard Hobhouse (Owen 1975)
and John Atkinson Hobson (Cain 2002), both then working for the Manchester
Guardian, the major anti-war British newspaper of the day. Among other things,
overtures were made for Schreiner to act as a special correspondent and, via
Hobsons involvement in the South African Conciliation Committee, an invitation
was issued for her to carry out an anti-war speaking tour (for health reasons, she
refused). The social reformer Emily Hobhouse became a friend of Schreiners
and Schreiner certainly communicated with and shared some political views with
Leonard Hobhouse, Emilys brother, who in 1907 became Britains first professor
of Sociology. However, the closer political and intellectual affiliation, and the one
with greater longevity, was with Hobson.
This is indicated with Schreiners literal presence in Hobsons The War in
South Africa of 1900, and also because her thinking underpins the analysis in his
Imperialism of 1902. Hobsons intellectual contributions were cross-disciplinary
in approach and interdisciplinary in formation, with important conceptual
ideas including under-consumption, marginal productivity and the concept of
imperialism in its academic formulation owed to him. Although Hobson is often
described as an economist, he can with equal justification be termed an economic
sociologist. By the 1920s and 30s, his closest associations were with economic
sociology and the sociology of work, and he was closely involved in pre-1939
planning to expand Sociology around economic sociology, an academic and
government venture foiled by the outbreak of World War II (Dugdale 1937).
While mutual influences can be traced around how the thinking of both
Schreiner and Hobson developed concerning imperialism in general and in
southern Africa in particular, it was the relationship of such things to war that
provided the long-term bond. Both opposed the South African War in very public
ways. But unlike many who did so, it later became apparent that they shared
absolute pacifist views regarding war generally and rejected any involvement with
its conduct. Later, during the 19141918 Great War, Hobson was a leading figure in
the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) and also an opponent of the introduction
of conscription, while Schreiner became involved with the No-Conscription
Fellowship (NCF), publishing open letters supporting conscription-resistance in
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its pamphlet series and also anti-war writings in a journal associated with both
organizations, War & Peace (Stanley and Salter 2014: 32164; Kennedy 1981).
Another, rather different, influence on Schreiner from Sociology came through
the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, which she described as changing the way she
conceived of matters of race and racism. Schreiner and Du Bois never met face
to face and do not seem to have had links outside of the impact that reading his
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) had on her. However, Schreiner was invited to
and almost attended (again, ill-health intervened) the Universal Race Congress in
London in 1911 that Du Bois was an important presence at, and she wrote letters
of support and gave her name to various of its public documents (Spiller 1911). So
a meeting between them came tantalizingly close.
There were two things in particular that impressed Schreiner about The Souls
of Black Folk. The first was that Du Bois was clearly her equal in education and
insight and his book expressed how he saw and directly experienced the world
as a black man. This was something different in crucial respects from how
well-intentioned whites (she mentions Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Toms
Cabin and herself in Trooper Peter Halket) represented this, and she thought
self-representation of fundamental importance. The second was a longer-term
influence, starting with her powerful reaction to one of Du Bois essay in Souls,
Of the passing of the first-born. This was written as a bereaved father and, among
other things, he comments that his deceased son would never learn to lower his
head in the face of prejudice or hatred. The same sentiment had been written by
Schreiner some years earlier concerning the death within hours of birth of her
daughter, and reading and assimilating it led her to draw direct (both experiential
and political) comparisons between the situations of women and black people.
Eventually it influenced her thinking about the women and race questions, and
her analysis of social movements and their challenges to the autocratic forms of
governance characterizing the imperial powers.
Schreiners links with some sociologists and sociological writings as outlined
here are interesting and suggestive. In network terms, she has clear sociological
connections. However, looking more closely suggests that all of them, not just
the encounter with Spencer and First Principles, became transmuted, the
word Schreiner used in her 1895 letter to Betty Molteno referenced above. The
abstract systemic approach of First Principles became transmuted into Schreiners
appreciation of Spencer as a public intellectual and essayist opposing war, with
Schreiner playing a similar public role herself. A shared analysis of imperialism
transmuted into her long-term connections with Hobson in the context of both of
them having an absolute pacifist opposition to all war. The overlaps between the
classic liberal analysis of democracy and imperialism of Hobhouse (Morefield
2004) and her own more radical stance faded, perhaps not coincidentally with
Hobhouse later becoming a supporter of Britains involvement in the Great War.
The conviction that black people should represent their own experiences and that
the different social movements for justice and social change shared fundamental
human and political principles, brought home by the work of Du Bois, became
94
central for Schreiner and among other things can be traced in her Closer Union
(1910) and Women and Labour (1911), and also her never completed The Dawn
of Civilization, discussed later.
More Company: Networks or Figurations?
The idea of figurations and figurational or process sociology is central to the
work of Norbert Elias (1939, 1970). Figuration is sometimes used in my view
misused as though synonymous with network and thus being what fills the
conceptual divide between the individual on the one hand and society on the other,
with figurations seen as the small social worlds of networked individuals (eg.
Malerba 2014: 1278; Depelteau and Hervonet 2014: 17981, 18990). There
are, however, important network/figuration differences. Figurations involve
unfolding processes and flows, and are perpetuations with accruing differences
(and shifting power-ratios) over time. But, while some new departures in thinking
about networks, in particular actor network theory (Latour 2007), aspire to similar
temporal longitudinality and processual complexities, the mainstream of social
network analysis remains wedded to a cross-sectional snapshot approach (Scott
2012: 13946). Turning to Elias (1939: 4823) on figuration, his use of the
analogy of a dance in explaining it confirms the difference, for the participants in
a dance join and leave although the dancing continues, and they may have little
personal or network links with each other apart from their figurational presence,
their involvement in a shared enterprise.3
Succinctly, networks involve links between persons at particular points in
time, while figurations are over time social enterprises with common frameworks
which people variously join and leave; and those involved may or may not have
shared inter-personal connections with each other but are nonetheless part of the
mutual enterprise. Another way of thinking about this is that figurations depend on
functional, emotional and dynamic interdependences of a kind that networks need
not imply, with Elias (1987) helpfully discussing such matters in his Involvement
and Detachment. In this connection, Schreiners network links with some
sociologists and sociological writings have been explored above, but pinning these
down is quite tricky, for while the network links are demonstrable, and that they
involve sociologists is apparent, they frequently over time transmuted into other
kinds of allegiance and association. It is these associational connections of Olive
Schreiners that are figurational in character and connected with but not reducible
to her network links that I now want to explore.
Schreiner and Hobson met when he visited South Africa in late 1899 around
two closely connected matters, imperialism and the role of international finance
capital, and the provocation of war. The context was the events leading to the South
3Elias (2007) on the naval profession provides a detailed example for thinking
through figuration/network overlaps and differences.
95
African War (18991902). For both, there were deeper processes at work and the
dynamics involved here also played out in other contexts, not just regarding these
particular events. Another close friendship originated at this time and for similar
reasons, with exploration of this opening up more of the figurational associations
at work. This was with Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, now best known for his
involvement with his wife Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in the womens suffrage
organization, the Womens Social and Political Union, and later as a Labour
Government Secretary of State for India. In the run-up to the South African War,
Fred Pethick-Lawrence was a newspaper owner and journalist of increasingly
radical views and came to know Schreiner in the context of a fact-finding visit
to South Africa. Their friendship was maintained through letters, a joint PethickLawrence visit to South Africa, and then after Schreiners return to Britain from
late 1913 to mid 1920, in face-to-face ways.
During the Great War (19141918), Fred Pethick-Lawrence became Treasurer
of the UDC (in which Hobson was closely involve too) and he was also an
opponent of conscription when introduced in Britain in 1916. Emmeline PethickLawrence was one of the few British women who managed to arrive at The Hague
for the feminist peace congress that established the pacifist Womens International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) (Confortini 2012), with Schreiner
becoming a member of its International Committee. Schreiners friendship with
Fred was straightforward and admiring, although her relationship with Emmeline
had earlier been problematic because of the latters interjections in South African
suffrage matters during 19071910 by promoting votes for women there on the
same terms as men. In context, this meant a racial franchise, as only white men
were fully enfranchised, something Schreiner strongly opposed (Stanley and
Salter 2014: 20768). However, over the period of the Great War, Emmelines
absolute pacifist credentials stood out and the breech was healed to the extent that
Schreiner could see the Pethick-Lawrences views as largely her own.
Another long-term friendship was cemented by shared opposition to the South
African War, with the socialist feminist Isabella Ford, who Schreiner had first
met in the 1880s (Hannam 1989). Ford was even more outspokenly anti-war
than Schreiner, which caused some difficulties regarding both censorship and the
effects of martial law for Schreiner during the South African War. Later, Schreiner
together with various other radical or liberal South African expatriates supported
members of two black delegations to Britain in 1914 and 1919 to protest its
unfolding race politics following the 1910 Union of South Africa and the passing
of highly retrograde legislation there (Stanley and Salter 2014: 3213, 3448).
Ford was one of the few British radicals involved in supporting the delegations
activities and also a wider anti-racist platform. In addition to involvements in
both the UDC and the NCF during the Great War, Ford was active in the WILPF
and one of a relatively small number of Schreiners friends to adopt an absolute
pacifist stance. Lost friendships with people who stopped short of this and gave
degrees of humanitarian and other support to wartime activities included Edward
Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Mohandas Gandhi and Emily Hobhouse.
96
This was not simply a matter of old friendships continuing or becoming less
close, although something of this was involved. It was more that the changed
circumstances were responded to by many people as politically and morally in
extremis ones, and this pointed up levels of agreement or disagreement not fully
realized before. This in turn led to the transmuting of relationships, the term
used earlier, with Schreiner in each case emphasizing figurational association
and pacifism over network links and sociological connections. As the Great War
started, so the divisions quickly became starkly clear between those who objected
to particular wars, those who objected to war but accepted aiding combatants in
humanitarian ways, and those who objected to all war and rejected giving their
support to any aspect. What was revealed, both to Schreiner and to many (former)
close friends, was that for her anti-war associational ties had been the basis of many
close relationships, but these were sometimes grounded in the misapprehension
that the friend in question objected to all war and all war absolutely.
Whether Schreiners associational tie with Herbert Spencer founded on his
analysis of imperialist autocracy and its provocation of wars and in particular the
South African War might have been loosened or ended in the Great War context,
given his somewhat different approach to defensive wars, is merely speculative, as
he died in 1903. What is certain is the weakening of a whole swathe of Schreiners
relationships; and of those connected with Sociology discussed so far, only that
with Hobson remained strong (another, with Jane Addams, is discussed later). At
the same time and in spite of Schreiners increasingly debilitating heart condition,
some older friendships took different form and a range of new associations and
related activities came into prominence in her life. The changed character of her
relationship with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence has already been noted around
her and Fred Pethick-Lawrences involvements in absolute pacifist causes and
organizations, as has Schreiners association with Hobson in this regard.
The level of Schreiners own involvement in pacifist activities is marked. When
legislation for compulsory conscription was introduced in Britain, Schreiner was
one of the leading figures who published an open letter in the Times on 12 January
1916 opposing this and supporting Sir John Simons attempts to prevent it passing
into law, with other signatories including Pethick-Lawrence and Hobson. The
impetus here probably came from Bertrand Russell, a high-profile absolute pacifist
active across a range of wartime initiatives and organizations (Vellacott 1981).
Russell and Schreiner established a political friendship and he seems to have been
a source for some of her information about war matters. Schreiners relationship
with Norman Angell, one of the founders of the UDC and a later Nobel Peace
Prize winner, also came about at this time (Ceadel 2009). This probably occurred
through anti-Conscription Bill meetings and is discernible through various lunches
and meetings with him noted in her letters and also her publications in the journal
that Angells Foundation sponsored, War & Peace.
Schreiners absolutist convictions and her profound sense of the injustice
of military tribunals scapegoating men who resisted both conscription and
humanitarian forms of service led her to most closely support the NCF. The
97
analysis in Women and Labour of 1911 suggests that if everyone, both women and
men, had social care responsibilities, then aggression and violence would decline.
However, this stance had given way by 1915, leading to Schreiners attempt to
write the fragmented and barely started The Dawn of Civilization, Stray Thoughts
on Peace & War, intended to result in an absolute pacifist analysis of the wellsprings of human aggression. By 1915 her conviction, based on many everyday
wartime experiences, was that women and men shared equally in animalistic
aggression but because of social conventions the expressions of this took different
gendered forms. Thus while Schreiners support for the WILPF was strong and
active, this was around her understanding that no special relationship existed
between women and peace or men and war.
Many women involved in the WILPF shared Schreiners absolute pacifism
(although not always her rejection of a binary view of the gendered character of
aggression and violence), with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence already mentioned
in this respect. Also, high level WILPF members Aletta Jacobs and Jane Addams
were friends of Schreiner. Aletta Jacobs was the first Dutch woman doctor and
a leading member of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and she and
Schreiner had first met in 1911 when Jacobs was in South Africa as part of an
IWSA tour. However, it was Jacobs absolute pacifism during the Great War that
became the prime link between them. The US activist, sociologist and reformer
Jane Addams was, with Ellen Gates Starr, the founding presence in Hull House, a
centre for social research as well as social reform in Chicago. And here too, it was
Addams role in absolute pacifist activism that formed the major bond between
Schreiner and her, not Sociology.
Hull House was closely if uneasily connected with the University of Chicagos
Sociology Department, with Addams a charter member of the American
Sociological Association and a university extension lecturer on Sociology topics.
Hull House personnel and activities received a less than positive response from
some male sociologists at Chicago and were side-lined or vanished in various
subsequent accounts of Chicago Sociology (Deegan 1988). However, Addams
has more recently been reclaimed as key sociologist (Deegan 2006) and there is
certainly now a greater acceptance of a broad church approach to the discipline
and the presence within it of more policy-oriented and social reformist strands, in
the UK as well as the US and elsewhere.
However, it was not Addams Sociology credentials or publications that
Schreiner was influenced by and nor does she mention these in her letters. It was
instead Addams absolute pacifism, in particular her leading role in the pacifist
movement in the US and also in relation to the WILPF and its Peace Committee
(which toured the world successfully commanding meetings with national leaders
in many of the combatant countries) that attracted Schreiner. Rather than network
links and Sociology, it was the associational connections of absolute pacifism
and the international peace movement that led to the flourishing of friendship
between Schreiner and Addams and their meetings when the latter was in Britain
on WILPF business. Another way of putting this is that, rather than understanding
98
the sociology of ideas in terms of academic contexts, ideas and networks, in

Schreiners case it was instead the political-ethical pacifist connections and the
social analysis that went with them which was primary, with intellectual-ethical
affinities providing a kind of social glue holding these relationships together.
The discussion so far has brought to sight two strands of important relationships
in Schreiners life, and shown that while there were strong interconnections, these
were by no means coterminous. Schreiners strong analytical inclinations and the
range of social and political concerns that engaged her are clear and there are
definite network links with some sociologists and some Sociology key works.
At the same time, she had, for instance, very different responses to different
components of Spencers writings and political interventions, and her recognition
of important overlaps between her thinking and Hobsons did not lead her to
follow his particular intellectual boundary crossings. The developing thread of her
intellectual, political and ethical concerns departed from these network connections
around her unfolding analysis of social organization, the economic base, forms of
governance, imperialist and autocratic expansionism, and violence and war, with
the latter an increasing emphasis from the 1890s on. Regarding this, another set
of links developed, with some of the same people and ideas but others too, and
these were engaged in concerning associational co-presence, with her Great War
relationships with, for example, Addams, Russell and Angell being cases in point.
So how, then, is Olive Schreiner to be characterized in relation to Sociology,
its boundaries, domain ideas and people? At this point it is helpful to remember
that Herbert Spencer was not only a social theorist but also a prominent public
intellectual, and to think about whether Schreiner is in or out when considering
that perhaps more porous boundaries existed between public intellectuals and
Sociology than did so between Sociology and other kinds of boundary-crossing,
such as regarding feminist work.
The Public Intellectual and Public Moralist
In earlier work, I have described Schreiner as a social analyst who was a
cultural entrepreneur, someone who used her analytic activities to fuel her active
engagement with contributing to processes of change at individual, interpersonal
and also social movement levels, particularly in relation to cultural and political
domains (Stanley and Dampier 2012; Stanley, Dampier and Salter 2010; Stanley
and Salter 2013). She did so around a strong sense of the need for social justice
and equality, with her writing having an emphasis that was both realist and utopian
regarding the future, with an attention to the unfolding character and effects of
events in the present and how these contributed to this future state. However,
Schreiner can equally well be characterized as a public intellectual, positioning
herself at the intellectual and political margins, so as to analyse and comment on
the social fabric. In her case, these margins were habits of mind rather than the
literalist ones sometimes invoked, that the real or true intellectual is, therefore,
99
always an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society

(Said 1994: 142). In addition, Schreiner can be seen as part of the public moralist
discourse that Collini (1993) sees as a prominent feature of British civil society
from the 1850s to the 1930s, signifying the existence of an intellectual class, a
figurational grouping, rather than particular individuals and their pronouncements.
The figures Collini identifies in public moralist terms are John Stuart Mill,
Matthew Arnold, John Maynard Keynes and F.R. Leavis. In the Britain context
Herbert Spencer and Olive Schreiner should certainly be seen as among their
ranks, as key producers of ideas harnessed to social critique and ethical demands
for greater social justice. This is a notion of the public intellectual as not only a
public moralist in Collinis sense, but also as having a modus operandi that placed
them between philosophy and politics, to use the sub-title of Melzer, Weinberger
and Zinmans (2003) discussion, and in a context where an intellectual class or
figuration was in existence, rather than just lone individuals speaking out.
Achieving the status of a public intellectual and public moralist had already
been established at the beginning of the period Collini discusses as something
that could be legitimately if awkwardly aspired to and sometimes achieved by
women. The novelist George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans) is one case in point,
and the journalist and social commentator Harriet Martineau another (Hill and
Hoecker-Drysdale 2003). However, as invoking Martineau points up, womens
presence in academia was another matter, as a still resolutely male preserve
and with Sociology not so much present within as on or beyond the margins
and admissible mainly via Philosophy or Psychology. Thus while in the Britain
of Schreiners young womanhood the representative figure of the sociologist
was Spencer, Martineau has claims as good as his, as the translator of Comte,
author of Sociologys first text on observational methods (How to Observe
Manners and Morals of 1838), a major figure in publishing popular works of
economic sociology both in the Times newspaper and in book form (Illustrations
of Political Economy), and a leading figure in the National Association for the
Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS).
In the British intellectual landscape of the 1880s as Schreiner experienced it, it
was Spencer and his colleagues and peers around and within the university system
who constituted the social sciences, including in Schreiners milieu Karl Pearson,
initially a socialist ethicist with an equal interest in German literature, later a
mathematician and statistician turned eugenicist (Porter 2006). Schreiner drew
her distance from the concerns and habits of mind thus configured, referring to
the aridity of Spencers social theory, and Pearsons humourless and emotionallydenuded rationalism. In her maturity in South Africa, her relationship to Sociology
and the other social sciences was more simple, for while there was some 1900s
interest in Comte and Spencer, a course in Sociology was not taught until 1919 (at
the University of South Africa [UNISA]) and departments were not founded until
the 1930s (Jubber 2007).
In the contexts of Britain in the 1880s of Schreiners young womanhood, and
South Africa from the 1890s to the 1910s of her maturity, it would not have been
100
possible for her to be a (professional) sociologist, then. Nor would it have been
possible for her to have had the freer-floating intellectual and academic career
of Hobson, moving in and out of academia and working with ideas that could
legitimately if controversially cross nascent disciplinary boundaries. In Britain
and South Africa, for sociologically-minded and boundary-crossing women of
Schreiners generation and earlier, the outlets were social reform, and/or a public
moralist role, and/or by writing works of fiction. However, although such comments
are a useful reminder of academic boundaries and patterned exclusions, confining
the discussion to this would beg some important questions and reservations.
Firstly, there is the important matter of whether Schreiner might have ever
seen herself as, or wanted to be, part of the configurations of either Sociology or
the academia of her day. The evidence firmly suggests no. She had a developed
critique of the then current academic way of thinking and deportment, expressed
in particular in comments about Pearsons approach, which was not a rejection of
analysis but of the particular masculinist mode he represented. Also, apart from
late teenage hopes that a brothers foray into diamond-mining might produce
sufficient funds to send her to a womens college in the US and a subsequent
short-lived (for health reasons) attempt to train in midwifery, there is no sign that
Schreiner thought of herself in terms of a career outside of writing.
Secondly, there were important gains from Schreiners position outside, a
position that resulted from her particular habits of mind as well as barriers of
gender and education. These habits of mind are intertwined with the aesthetic
and analytical principles set out in the well-known Preface to The Story of an
African Farm. They involved Schreiner focusing on the everyday and emergent,
interweaving emotion and reason, crafting cross-genre and mixed genre ways of
writing, combining political commitments with measured analysis, and developing
innovative modes of presentation. Recognizing this, and thinking about the work
of Spencer and Hobhouse in comparison, points up both differences and gains,
for it is highly doubtful that Schreiner could have produced and published what
she did within the narrower frameworks accepted by Spencer and Hobhouse (and
recognizing these two were positioned rather differently from each other in timeperiod and academic location).
And thirdly, thinking about Schreiner vis a vis the older Harriet Martineau
in Britain and slightly younger Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the US is helpful
in considering the role of temporality and context here. Martineau is in some
respects a more respectable and mainstream figure than Schreiner, because
of what was possible for independent women to be and do during Martineaus
young womanhood and maturity, also because of her particular family, class and
religious background. Martineau nonetheless was an experimentalist in genre
and an intellectual boundary-crosser and achieved considerable acclaim as a
writer and public intellectual. But by comparison Schreiner seems less fettered,
more wide-ranging; and because of the changing times she moved in, women in
metropolitan contexts at least had a wider range choices available than had existed
for Martineau. However, the colonial context of the Cape that Schreiner returned
101
to in late 1889, remaining until late 1913, was very different. She experienced
it as limited in intellectual and political terms, while a series of events which
started with invasion and massacres in the then Matabeleland and Mashonaland
by Cecil Rhodes Chartered Company (the topic of her Trooper Peter Halket) and
eventuated in the Union of the white settler states in 1910 and the rapid introduction
of racially retrograde legislation, absorbed much of her analytical energy.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also an experimental writer and genre-crosser
(Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantly 2013). Gilman, a friend and colleague of Jane
Addams, identified as a sociologist, taught sociology courses, published some work
in the American Journal of Sociology and like Addams was a charter member of the
American Sociological Society. However, Gilmans certainly closer relationship
with institutional Sociology was still somewhat problematic in spite of disciplinary
patrons who sought to help and promote her and her work. This may have been
connected with her allying herself strongly with Lester Wards gynocentric ideas
about gender relationships, while her ideas about domestic labour failed to reckon
with how class and race issues made professional womens liberation reliant on
specialists who would carry out childcare and domestic work. However, it was
also connected with the USs disciplinary associations, including the American
Sociological Society (later Association), being both active and open to women,
but with institutional Sociology in colleges and universities still struggling with
co-education and its ramifications. The result was that the possibilities regarding
Sociology were somewhat greater for Gilman (and Addams) than for Martineau or
Schreiner, although jobs and disciplinary acceptance remained elusive.
Clearly the times and the context were important regarding what kinds
of boundaries existed, impacting on who was seen as in and out, including
where Sociology itself was located, as well as influencing these three womens
relationships to it. However, associational concerns and habits of mind still have to
be acknowledged and reckoned with. Given the importance of both for Schreiner,
it is difficult to envisage her wanting to enter the portals of any discipline, let alone
any university, while it is extremely easy to imagine an Olive Schreiner without
asthma or heart disease as a leading figure in a social movement or political context
as well as a public intellectual one.
The Small Matter of Forgetting
Forgetting is something humankind does well: we forget almost everything we
have ever done or experienced, and what we do remember is often wrong. However,
sometimes forgetting is strongly patterned and maps onto such structural matters
as age, gender, race and class. The strange forgetting of the connections of key
women producers of ideas with Sociology is one such instance. A combination of
the fetishizing of the small handful of founding fathers, coupled with a frequent
marked presentism in how Sociology is written and taught, clearly has something
to do with it. However, beyond noting the problem, explanations lie outside the
102
concerns of this chapter. What is within its remit, however, is to emphasize what is
lost, lost to Sociology, when a producer of ideas of the stature of Olive Schreiner
is forgotten in the ignored sense. Schreiner did not aspire to be a sociologist,
disliked the academic mode, and her style of theorizing traversed genre boundaries;
but the power and reach of her analysis, its international significance and close
connections with key sociological concerns, ensures that her work remains of high
relevance to Sociology. What Sociology was, and where it was located, in the
period of Schreiners lifetime from approximately 1850 to 1920, is complicated,
no matter what inter/national context this is explored from. There is accordingly
no good reason to exclude from consideration women such as Schreiner who
produced internationally recognized social theory, for her complicated relationship
to Sociology and sociologists and even stronger associational concerns and
connections is the name of the game, just as with Spencer, Hobson and Addams.
Canon-revision needs to open its eyes to such matters.
Acknowledgements
My grateful thanks to the ESRC (RES-062-23-1286) for funding the Olive
Schreiner Letters Project. Thanks also to the Sociology Department at the
University of Pretoria, South Africa, where these ideas were formulated, to the
Sociology Department at the University of the Free State, South Africa where the
final draft was written, and to Emilia Sereva from Edinburgh Sociology.
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Chapter 7
Lucien Goldmanns Key Sociological

Problems and His Critical Heritage: From
the Hidden God to the Hidden Class
Bridget Fowler
I address here the work of Lucien Goldmann (19131970), at present removed

from both the sociological canon and the curriculum, but once acclaimed by
Alasdair MacIntyre as an original philosopher of great powers [ whose ]
untimely death in 1970 robbed us of the finest and most intelligent Marxist of
the age (1971: 79). It will be argued that Goldmann is worthy of consecration
not just as the originator of a powerful theory of cultural production but as a
key contender to hegemonic structuralism and post-structuralism (1981: 5574).
His genetic structuralism is rooted in Kant, Hegel, Marx, the young Lukcs and
Piaget1 rather than in Spinoza and Levi-Strauss. It has contributed towards the
abandonment of a simplistic base-superstructure theory (Williams 1977: 7582).
As Raymond Williams concludes, this was a huge gain for a non-mechanistic
historical materialism (1971: 11). Goldmann kept alive a rich, non-Stalinist
Marxism at a time when the very idea of the subject was being devastatingly
revoked. Two highly-distinguished works are crucial in this respect: Immanuel
Kant and The Hidden God. His many other contributions elucidate the
theoretical ideas behind these, whilst also demonstrating his grasp of the German
phenomenological tradition and advancing the sociology of the novel. Although
exposed to withering criticism by some of his sociological peers, I shall claim,
alongside Sami Nar and Michel Lwy (1973) and Mitchell Cohen (1994) that his
oeuvre represents an enduring achievement, especially in the historical sociology
of cultural production. More surprisingly, as we shall see, even some vigorous
detractors, like Pierre Bourdieu, have constantly evoked his memory.
1We might be tempted to see Goldmanns homage to Piaget as a repayment of an early
debt incurred in World War II when the young man was sheltered by Piaget in Switzerland
as a penniless Jewish Rumanian, fleeing from a concentration camp in occupied France.
But this would be a mistake: Goldmanns adoption of a genetic structuralism was fired
throughout his life by Piagets constructivism (1972). This he regarded as an empiricallybased epistemology and social theory of human adaptation, organized around the flux of
structuration and destructuration. He regarded this theory as all the more precious for its
corroboration of his own ideas because of its non-Marxist scientific origin.
106
But first we assess his historical sociology of the Enlightenment, with his work
on the French rationalists (1973), and on the philosophical roots of Lukcs and
Heidegger (1977). Here Goldmanns most sustained and lasting accomplishment
is without question Immanuel Kant, his original Swiss PhD thesis.
Part I: Goldmanns Studies of the Tragic Vision: Kant, Racine and Pascal
Kant
Immanuel Kant (2011 [1945]) analyses Kants philosophical works, from the precritical writings to the three critiques: of pure reason, practical reason and judgement.
Goldmann emphasizes the importance of Kants Copernican Revolution which
was founded on his antagonism to Humean atomistic empiricism and deepened by
his relational conception of the human community (2011: 14). Fundamental to this
is Kants understanding of knowledge as based on a priori synthetic judgements,
as well as on experience. Goldmann argues plausibly that it was partly because
Kant lacked an adequate conception of the collective, or transindividual, subject
that he instead attributed the categories of synthetic judgement to the divine
understanding (2011: 623). Be that as it may, his formulation of the a priori
categories (space, time, causality etc.) certainly provided an early initial conception
of a social consciousness (2011: 71). Hence for later writers, such as Goldmann
himself, the transcendental element was ultimately vested solely in the social,
following thinkers such as Durkheim and Piaget, with their social and genetic
epistemology (2011: 14).2
For Goldmann, it is Kants anthropological conception of universitas
humankind, the emergent human community that founds the task of creating
a world (2011: 57). This is based on reason and law, of course, but also peace
and cosmopolitanism; in contrast to the rationalists, it moves beyond possessive
individualism (2011: 835). Unlike the Romantics, Kants community is directed
at a universitas founded on both individual autonomy and the general will: a hope
Kant formulated by 1764 and which he maintained in his mature thought (2011:
1256). Yet he also realized with great poignancy that all such rational projects
were at present unattainable. For Goldmann this produced Kants subsequent tragic
vision:3 [C]ritical philosophy became one of the great expressions of the tragic
2Goldmann notes that in some respects Kant was Durkheim's great predecessor. For
example Kant pointed out that death was both based on natural laws but also on human
freedom, that might lengthen or shorten life. Goldmann regards this as Suicides central
insight, as long as human freedom is interpreted broadly (Goldmann 2011: 77).
3Goldmann clarifies this by adding that Kant considered a community as presupposed
when he established knowledge as based on synthetic a priori categories space, time,
number etc. Moreover, empirical knowledge, using the categories, aids humans in the
forging of communities (2011: 163). Nevertheless, he did not see a community based on
Lucien Goldmanns Key Sociological Problems
107
visions of the world [] it became a metaphysics of tragedy (2011: 170). Such a

historically-recurrent view, Goldmann noted, was especially strong where the forces
bearing the Enlightenment were blocked like Elias on the 19th century, Goldmann
derives the tragic vision from the historical impasse of the weak and divided German
progressive bourgeoisie in the face of Prussian authoritarian rule (Elias 1996).
Goldmanns approach to Kant and his heritage is sharply differentiated from
his appropriation by the Marburg neo-Kantians. As Cohen has astutely observed,
his is based on a post-Kantian, humanist, Marxist reading [] rather than a
Lukcsian (Hegelian), Marxist one (1994: 117). Goldmanns interpretation
makes Kant a sympathetic figure for sociologists due to his break with Cartesian
atomism. His unusual reading of the categorical imperative4 envisages it as based
not on an eternal collision between virtue and happiness but on a contingent
tragic clash in contemporary society, in which duty or obedience to law must
at present triumph over pleasure. Indeed, it is Goldmanns more generous view
that Kant, the greatest thinker of the German Enlightenment, had come too early
to see the material and social prerequisites emerge for a community such as he
imagined it, virtuous, just and happy. One striking piece of evidence for this is
the ageing Kants salutation to the French Revolutionaries as having broken
the bars of their prison (1971: 220). Under the Revolutions influence, Kant
founded (although failed to elaborate) a philosophy of history:
Kant opened the way to a new philosophy which unites the Christian idea []
with the immanence of the ancients and the philosophers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in considering the intelligible world, the totality, as a human
task, as the object of the authentic destiny of man and the product of human
action (Goldmann 2011: 225).
The Hidden God (1964 [1956]) and Racine (1956)

Lucien Goldmanns linked studies of Jansenism, The Hidden God and Racine,
together bestow us with one of the most valuable scholarly analyses of the
sociology of literature. Goldmann not only shows how Pascal and Racine break
with earlier thinkers, such as Aquinas and Descartes, but illuminates how they
are linked to wider social groups in so doing. Thus they express a world-vision
elaborated through distinctive philosophical and artistic forms the fragment
(Pascals Penses) and tragic drama (Racine). Such a world-vision or significant
structure is a reality which goes beyond them as individuals [and] which finds
common human activity as existing in the present, acknowledging instead individuals
largely instrumental action, or, alternatively, the folly of clashing nationalisms (2011: 24n,
1545).
4Goldmann translates this as Act only on that maxim through which you can at the
same time will that it should become a universal law (cited 2011: 166), acknowledging that
Kant recognized that at present this was consigned to a highly formal character.
108
expression in their work [] in the particular case of [these] authors, a tragic

vision (1964: 15).
Resting as it does, on a transindividual subject, this claim is not without its
controversial elements. Indeed, the literary historian, David Caute, ridiculed the
very idea of any collective authorship, dismissing Goldmanns author as merely
the midwife of a social group (1971). But this is to misread Goldmann: he never
denied that authors might contribute original and distinctive elements; these derive
from the writers singular histories, and are potentially illuminated by Freudian
psychoanalysis (1970a; 1981). Thus Cautes individualist default position missed
the wider significance of the author: his/her capacity to express in the most unified
and coherent fashion the (possible) consciousness of a group when faced with
practical problems of living. In elaborating on this, Goldmann (1964) pioneered
a new method: first, he interprets the writings of Pascal and Racine, linking their
most ideal-typically pure works together as underpinned by a tragic worldview; secondly, these most unified and coherent works are understood in terms
of the 16th and 17th century development of Jansenism; a history clarified by
Goldmanns own discovery of an extremist doctrinal fraction around Barcos,
with his unearthing of the latters letters. Finally, Jansenism and the Barcos
fraction as its most oppositional wing- can only be explained by an existential
and material crisis on the part of a whole social group. The States legal officers
or noblesse de robe, faced with being suddenly marginalized by the royal turn to
absolutism, represented such a declining group or class fraction.
What then was radical Jansenism? Goldmann locates this in an ascetic
movement within the Catholic Church, founded on the Augustinian belief that
salvation required both sufficient and efficaceous grace. Certain Jansenist religious
houses were highly influential here, particularly the convent of Port Royal, where
the orphaned Racine was later to be educated. Crucially, Goldmann distinguishes
three currents of Jansenism, whose fluctuating fortunes cannot be entirely
separated from developments in the political world. These are, in his terms, first,
the moderates, notably, Arnauld, St Cyran and Nicole (moderate despite St
Cyrans arrest and death in prison); second, the extremist Jansenists Mre
Angelique and Barcos, who demanded that believers refuse the world and retreat
into monastic seclusion; and third, the radical Jansenists, for whom refusal meant
remaining within the world but saying yes and no to it. Goldmann links Pascals
Les Provinciales and Racines tragedies of 16671670 Andromaque, Britannicus
and Brnice to the second strand of tragic thought. Much more austere was the
radical rigour of the third current expressed solely in the Penses of Pascal and
Racines tragic Phdre. What was dominant here was a notion of a hidden God,
and therefore of a deep paradox within social reality. Pascals distinctively tragic
ethos, crystallized in the most condensed form in the paradoxes of Penses, is
illuminated both by Goldmanns internal textual analysis and also by his historical
detection of hitherto-missing writings.
The quintessential tragic world-view derived from the God of Pascal being
like that of Calvin, [] a transcendental God, inaccessible and mysterious, who
109
has absented himself from the world (Lovell 1973: 314). His absence explains
human wretchedness and the unendurable weight of the world yet his
presence is also evident, especially in humans continued search for justice and
truth (Goldmann 1964: 63). For Pascal, the world had to be rejected and humans
had to live by perpetually seeking to reconcile opposites. Far from God being
Descartes watchmaker who started off a whole efficient global mechanism,
Gods existence could only be grasped through a wager it was a perpetually
unprovable possibility (Pascal) (1964: 63). Hence, at best, humans were justes
pcheurs (justified sinners): those who seek God with groans and anguish
without being able to find him (Penses, quoted 1964: 163).5
Parallel to this were Pascals actions at his bleakest, towards the end
of his life, which epitomized both the pursuit of absolute ends and a turn to
innerworldly asceticism. Meanwhile Racine was producing plays at court, in the
heart of the Beast, so to speak. His Phdre the most pure of his tragic plays
pivots on the irresolvable opposition between Phdres transgressive love for her
stepson, Hyppolyte, and her regal awareness of her precious public reputation.
Thus rather than the monstrous figure whom some see in her, Racines Phdre is
an ideal-type righteous sinner, who finds herself irrevocably abandoned by her
closest friends and the world. His other tragic heroines in pursuit of love such
as Andromaque and Brnice are cast into a dizzy vortex of political passions
where men with power are portrayed as acting like wild animals.
But what was the engine of this tragic vision? Goldmann produces a highlycompelling account of a social group that might have motivated the garnering
of such an extraordinary harvest from its suffering. His detailed analysis
proposes that this is the rise and fall of the noblesse de robe a meritocratic
State Nobility of law officers which had gathered strength throughout the
17th century, only to clash with the centralizing monarchys royal intendants,
a new bureaucratic stratum. These officials de robe varied as to whether or
not they were legally ennobled. But from the 1630s they all suffered from
social devaluation, including the removal of their heirs inheritance of their
offices on payment of a tax (la paulette) and the degradation of their skills
following the establishment of the new intendants and the conseils de roi.
Significant numbers of this group turned to Jansenism, especially from
the Paris Parlement, which they staffed (Cohen 1994: 1679; MacIntyre
1971: 82). Theirs was suddenly a socially-paradoxical position, structurally
correspondent to the theological, moral and artistic paradoxes of Les Penses
and Phedre.
5I am unconvinced by MacIntyres explanation of the idea of the justified sinner.
This does not mean as MacIntyre suggests that a just man may well be deprived of
Gods grace. Rather that (in certain interpretations) possessing predestined grace, one can
sin and still not lose salvation whatever act is committed. It is this interpretation that is at
stake in the 18th century Scottish novel, A Justified Sinner (Hogg). This is surely another
of the paradoxes to which Pascal alludes in his onslaught on Descartes.
110
There remains one puzzle: if Racine could be appointed court dramatist,

an Academician and one of only two royal historiographers, how could he be
simultaneously the bearer of such an austere and uncompromising Jansenist
tragic vision? This is a curious enigma given the quite different drama of
Corneille and Molire, which although sometimes expressing disenchantment
lacks the crushing necessity running through Racines tragedy. For it
appears that both Molire and Racine were central members of court society,
yet Goldmann sees Molire as closest to the noblesse de cour (the pacified
nobility of the feudal military aristocracy) while Racine expresses the outraged
indignation of the noblesse de robe. As Viala (1985) elaborates, this enigma is
heightened by the fact that the 17th century witnessed the first beginnings of
an autonomous literary field, occupationally committed to freedom from State
and Church control, which established certain new literary institutions such
as the (writers) Academy (1635). Goldmann himself acknowledges Racines
membership of the Academy. Perhaps only such a well-placed and protected
position could explain the room for manoeuvre that allowed the playwright
to advance the discomfortingly tragic vision of Phdre his last and most
uncompromising play.
Goldmanns wider solution to this puzzle is convincing. He argues that the
orphaned Racine, brought up at Port Royal, turned sharply away from extreme
Jansenism as an adolescent. He broke with Barcos as his spiritual father via
a letter, and through him, with the entire convent community (1970b: 66).
Indeed, unable to find other work, Racine turned transgressively back to the
court as a dramatist. He not only married an actress but flouting the Jansenist
sexual ethic made various other liaisons, all with actresses. Yet, despite
appearances, Racine at court was not the fish in water that this suggests.
Openly a renegade from Jansenist authority and engaging in a literary form
which was anathema to Jansenism, as a dramatist he never entirely gave up
this inner commitment, even when writing to Louis XIVs wife (Mme de
Maintenon) to expressly deny any active connections with Port Royal. Towards
the end of his life, the resumed persecution of the Jansenists and the narrow
conformism of the absolutist court turned him into an internal refugee. Using
Goffmans terms, we might say that Racine became an expert at passing. It
is this that is responsible for Racines conflictual double vision, turning him
into an extraordinary dramatist who:
had brought together in his works the two principle traits of progressive literature:
implacable realism and the defence of oppressed innocence (Goldmann, 1970b;
134, my translation).
Both Calvinism and Jansenism held a doctrine of predestination and

a saved elect (Lovell 1973: 315). Why did predestination in the one
instance produce an inner-worldly activism whilst in extremist Jansenism,
with the exceptions above, it produced flight being in but not of the
111
world?6 Here the different class-fractions that adopted the beliefs seem crucial,
as Terry Lovell so lucidly argues. The rebuffs to the once ascendent noblesse de
robe, described vividly both in Goldmann and in Perry Andersons Lineages of
the Absolutist State, induced their demoralized refusal. Having lost their semiindependent role they either had to join the Third Estate or retreat (Lovell 1973:
309). Their political and material situation thus contrasted sharply with the
improved position of the urban merchant and industrial masters who, as Weber
and others described, took up Calvinism.
These different responses are much more explicable now we possess Eliass
phenomenological experience of everyday life in Parisian court society (2006).
In particular the rise of the royal mechanism (Elias) created not just the ruin of
the noblesse de robe, but the forced domestication at court of the former noblesse
dpe (military nobility), their weapons reduced to words (Elias 2006: 231) This
stopped any potential for the traditional nobles regionally-based rebellions against
the kingly centre, but it created a new game from which even the king whom
it benefited was not exempt. This was organized around conspicuous luxury at
court, in other words, a life dedicated to idleness, fashionable consumption and
gambling, all activities funded by the peasants raised taxes. It created a deepened
gulf between the world of the court and plebeian society since both peasants and
servants now became seen, in Eliass words, as a racialized other (Elias 2006: 53).
As Goldmann emphasizes, Pascal was himself an original social theorist, not
just a theologian of Christian belief and ethics. More surprisingly, he was also
an exemplary mathematician and, indeed, the inventor of roulette. We now have
a greater understanding of what his distinctiveness was in terms of the parallel
emergence historically of probability theory, for instance, in the playing of games
of chance such as cards or dice. It is argued that this leap forward in statistics could
only have come from the dawn of modernity and especially from the growth of a
mercantile bourgeoisie, who instigated the first era of collective mutual insurance
(Reith 2002: 289). This is not to deny anything that Goldmann wrote; yet the new
historical studies of chance, probability and risk heighten even more acutely the
paradoxes that Goldmann identifies as at the centre of Pascals thought.
Part II: Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1975 [1964]) and Method in the
Sociology of Literature (1981)
As many have commented, Goldmann appeared subsequently to lay aside the
theoretical approach of The Hidden God, for example in his studies of the 20th
century novel (Cohen 1994; Eagleton 1976; Evans 1981; Orr 1977). His declared
method is rather to adopt an internal analysis of the novels in order to discover
6As Lovell points out, Calvinism was already a heresy, thus only Jansenism was
effectively open to the noblesse de robe subsequently, it would be deemed heretical as
well (Lovell 1973: 320)
112
their significant literary structures, and then to explain these structures by showing
their homologies with the historical development of the structures of capitalism
itself. More specifically, he distinguishes between three stages: laissez-faire,
market-based capitalism with its emphasis on individual autonomy (18001910),
the First World War and interwar crisis of capitalism (19101950), and the period
of post-war organized capitalism with State intervention and technocratic
authority (19501969). Thus he refers to certain wider literary motifs, such as the
dissolution of character associated with the inter-war period (in Kafka, Joyce, and
Musil) or the emergence of the nouveau roman or chosisme (representations of
a reified world, without heroes) with post-war writers such as Robbe-Grillet and
Sarraute. But he typically omits both the social and literary groups in which the
novelists are situated. In other words, while these writers are chosen because their
works possess unusual thematic depth and aesthetic coherence, Goldmann fails
to clarify which social groups or transindividual subjects are the bearers of their
work.
What, then, does Goldmann say about method? He does acknowledge that
these particular studies are internal alone i.e., that they display comprehension
of the text but explication only by means of reference to the changing nature of
capitalism (1975: 124). Elsewhere, endorsing Sartres view that Valrys poetry
cannot be explained by being located as the work of a petit- bourgeois writer,
Goldmann emphasizes that we must examine how this class fraction at a given
point develops a set of categories that are then elaborated with a notable coherence
and rigour through the richness of Valrys writing (1970a: 24950). But he does
not himself undertake this for the novel, via, for example, dissecting the plight and
contradictory pressures experienced by the petit-bourgeoisie.
Goldmanns analysis of Robbe-Grillets experimental fictions is certainly a
telling advance over Lukcss wholesale dismissal of modernism as mere literary
subjectivism. But in his Novel studies he fails to openly pose questions of his
authors places either within the literary institution or within the field of power.
In the absence of this, his method here could be said to be, in John Orrs words:
[a] mechanistic reflection of the changing nature of the economic system, in
which social consciousness, as the third element, plays only a secondary role
(Orr 1977: 35).
What then is his strategy with his extended study of the interwar novels of Andr
Malraux (19011976)? These are all shown to have the same significant structure:
a problematic hero who searches for authentic existence (Enlightenment values)
within a degraded universe. Unlike the epic form, his heroes fail to find these
enshrined in a viable community; or, more specifically, they may find an authentic
community but lose their lives in identifying with it.
The precise structures of Malrauxs fictional works change along with his own
trajectory within the interwar period, undergoing transformation from surrealist
novellas to various types of realist narrative. These are organized round heroes
113
caught up in the history of French imperialism in Indo-China and the Chinese

revolution. Several of these novels are set in Shanghai; they represent a very
different world from, say, Ballards Empire of the Sun: that of workers faced with
oppressive structures very close to those of colonialism.
In Goldmanns view, the most powerfully organized and innovative of
Malrauxs novels are Mans Fate (1933) and Mans Hope (1938). Mans Fate is set
in the industrialized region of China but is orchestrated around a Chinese couple,
Kyo and May, who are members of the Shanghai revolutionary workers group.
They in turn are dependent on the strategic decisions of the Chinese Communist
Party leaders. The action revolves around the deliberate sacrifice of the Chinese
revolutionary group by the Howkow Communist Party leadership, apparently in
the interests of discipline but in fact to protect Soviet socialism from exposure to
any danger via China. Thus Mans Fate ends with the betrayal and imprisonment
of the vulnerable revolutionary group. Kyo and May are bound by their love as
a couple, not by the exploitative eroticism depicted in earlier Malraux novels.
But they finish by committing suicide. Sharing their cyanide pills, they cheat the
otherwise inevitable torture before death that the Leaderships action has brought
upon them, but, of course, at the cost of their lives.
Love appears once again in Malrauxs last novel centring on revolution, Mans
Hope, organized, like the earlier Days of Wrath (1935), around the engagements
and defeats of the Spanish Civil War. This is a love remembered later in the person
of the revolutionaries child, who was born in Czechoslovakia, where they escaped
Nazism. In Mans Hope, as in Mans Fate, Malraux depicts an emergent and nonproblematic organic community and the supersession of solitude (1975: 79). But
in Mans Hope haunted by Nazism and the consequent defence of the Soviet
Union there is an unequivocal celebration of the Communist Party as well as of
the Republican revolutionaries, despite also introducing thematically the austere
discipline of the Party. Its heroes would not die in vain but would be remembered
as martyrs (1975: 80).
We can summarize Goldmanns key oppositions in his sociological analysis
of Malraux by drawing on another of his works: Lukcs and Heidegger (1977).
Whilst crediting Heidegger with a critique of the sometimes superficial or even
trivial nature of Western modernity, as well as acknowledging his incisive grasp
of the phenomenological experiences of time and the omnipresence of death, it is
Lukcs who is viewed as offering a more democratic return to the values of the
Enlightenment in other words, liberty, tolerance, solidarity. These he combines
with a model of an unalienated community. Heidegger on the other hand, is
ultimately only concerned about the small elite community of creative individuals:
in this sense, he is a Nietzschean philosopher.
In terms of novel structures, we could gloss Goldmann further by noting that
Malrauxs early literary works, up to and including The Conquerors (1927), are
underpinned by Heideggerian or reactionary modernism. By Mans Fate Malraux
has moved instead into the Lukcsian orbit of a pursuit of progressive values: an
existence lived out in a tragic bid for a just social order. In this schema, Mans
114
Fate and Mans Hope are the equivalent of Pascals Penses and Racines Phdre:
the most radical form of Malrauxs tragic vision. In the intervening novel, Days
of Wrath, he abandons a tragic vision, but maladroitly, and merely as the lesser
of two evils. For Goldmann then, the development of the novel by this author is
highly distinctive: Malraux is the only writer, apart from Victor Serge, to make
the proletarian revolution an important structural element in his novels (1975:
35).
Are there in fact groups to whom this literary structure can be linked? If we read
Goldmann closely we notice that he criticizes Trotskys interpretation of Malrauxs
1928 novel of the break, The Conquerors, as suffering from Stalinist blind-spots.
Despite protests to the contrary, Goldmann in fact interrogates Malrauxs novels
in terms of their political or ethical structures and the political fractions underlying
them. For this reason, for Goldmann, Mans Fate is the supreme example of the
proletarian revolutionary novel because its realism possesses the perspective of the
Russian Workers opposition. Days of Wrath, on the other hand, is less powerful.
Here Malraux gave up both the realist insights and the painful (even tragic) vision
that he had possessed earlier, in order to depict the revolutionary couple making
common cause with the Soviet Union in the Resistance.
In other words, beneath the surface, Goldmanns actual practice is to locate
Malrauxs entire fictional works in terms of their alternation between divergent
literary groups. These groups are segregated first, by their political world-visions
including their reaction to the changing policies of the Soviet-dominated
Communist Party in the context of the rise of Nazism. But they are also divided,
secondly, by their literary form, especially surrealism versus realism.7 The
sociology of literature that has best extended this analysis of form and meaning is
perhaps Sapiros brilliant study (La Guerre des Ecrivains [1999]), which shows
how French writers political and literary stances within the Second World War
were structured by the places they occupied within the various opposed regions
of the literary field (Acadmie, Goncourt prize-winners, poets in small surrealist
magazines etc).
We might add that in the 1930s, the novel of political revolution or of what
Lunacharsky called the proletarianization of the Enlightenment (Fitzpatrick
1970) stretched beyond the path-breaking contribution of Malraux. Indeed with
varying degrees of literary power it underpinned the central literary structure
adopted by numerous writers across the world, including Agnes Smedley, James
Hanley, Tillie Olsen, Jean Guhenno, Georges Navel, Lewis Jones and Grassic
Gibbon (Klaus 1985: 10627). Unlike Malraux, these novelists were of workingclass origins.8 But they participated, along with many educated writers from
7Similarly, Flauberts formalist realism or pure novel measured its distinctive
universe within the literary field against Victor Hugos earlier Romantic social art and
morality (Bourdieu 1996 [1992]: 73, 111, 1345, 237).
8Malraux's father was a stockbroker; when bankrupted by the 1929 Crash, he
committed suicide, as his maternal grandfather was suspected of having done.
115
the middle-class such as Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Malraux himself in

representing a socialist world-vision that had become truly global in scope.
There are two more points that should be made here. First, I would argue
that it is essential to analyse the type of education (or cultural capital) that these
various revolutionary writers possessed in order to elucidate the nature of the form
they chose, the precise social meanings they represented and the composition of
their alliances. This poses questions that obviously overlap with the concerns that
Bourdieu has raised in relation to writers necessarily slow acquisition of craft
and experimental skills in modernist movements (1993; 1996). In brief: the more
experimental the form, the longer the literary apprenticeship to master it.
Second, as David Harvey has suggested (1989: 275), a dialectical (or
progressive) world-vision has constantly alternated with regressive modernism.9
The most recent period, since Goldmanns death, has produced a further variant
of such a regressive modernism with an anti-historical, even anti-ethical turn to
aesthetic formalism (Harvey 1989: 336, 33842). If this is right, then the alternating
shifts in artistic movement in the 19th century between the realist bohemia and
the modernist bohemia, described so vividly by Bourdieu in The Rules of Art,
have continued as oscillating artistic structures into the 20th century. It is only by
pursuing both these aspects of the internal structuration of the literary field that
we can find the deeper mediating groups Goldmans critics searched for. Such
mediating groups appear to be totally absent from Towards a Sociology of the
Novel but Goldmanns schematic political comments surely beckon us towards
them.
Goldmanns study of Genets plays clarifies these issues further (1970c; 1981).
Genet, in Goldmanns words, is the poet of the sub-proletariat (1970c: 11). But
he is also described by Goldmann as a poet whose mastery of form has entailed a
reaching out to wider social groups to progressive workers, the intelligentsia of
the left, even the cultivated bourgeoisie (1970c: 13). More precisely, as with Pascal
and Racine, it is necessary to identify, with Goldmann, different periods in Genets
drama and to notice over time a shift from a tragic vision in which the contest for
power merely produces a circulation of elites (The Maids, The Balcony) to a more
transformative vision (The Screens, and to a lesser degree The Negroes). Thus,
for example, in The Screens the colonized Algerians are represented successfully
staging a revolt against their colonizers, without immediately sinking into a pale
reflection of their oppressors. Of course, there is a fidelity, too, to his early ideas
of the outsider (Querelle of Brest, Our Lady of Flowers). But Goldmann is right to
argue that if the earlier plays express the disillusionment of the working-class and
the political Left with State socialism, the later plays return to a reworked version
of this, with a new conception of a possible consciousness and an alternative
social reality.
9 Goldmanns essay (1959) on Kraus shows that a writer can be a "reactionary" in
the non-deprecating sense of a thinker committed to 18th century Enlightenment ideals at a
time of 20th century war and Depression.
116
This is not merely Goldmanns genetic structuralist reading of Genets literary

position-taking but it also epitomizes in certain key respects the development
of Goldmanns own mature world-view, as noted perceptively by Cohen (1994:
199200). For shortly before his death, Goldmann expresses the hope that the
new combination of realism and optimism of the will might be seen as the first
swallow in the spring that will presage the summer. Genets The Screens (1959) is
symptomatic of this: the Events of May 1968 were also enactments of such hopes
(1970c: 34). Goldmann distances himself from some of Genets views, identifying
this summer with the model of workers control in general, and the ideas of the
Yugoslav Praxis group at their Korkula conference in particular (1970c: 34). Cohen
reports that Goldmann went on to develop both concrete and detailed arguments
for democratization, for example in the form of a film he made which owed much
to Proudhon and to Spanish anarchism (Cohen 1994: 26873). Here he finds fresh
and suitably complex modes for confronting and detailing the transformation of
the social world.
Part III: Goldmann Faced with the Crisis of Working-class
Transformative Agency
Following Lukcss History and Class Consciousness (1971), Goldmann had
conceptualized the working-class as the class most subjected to reification in
capitalism and thus as the revolutionary force that would act as grave-digger of the
entire economic and political system (1959; Nar and Lwy, 1973: 37). Later, in
the 1960s, deeply influenced by changes in contemporary capitalist organization,
Goldmann questioned that classical position. He saw both Stalinism in Eastern
Europe and the higher levels of material consumption in the West as having deeply
undermined revolutionary dispositions (1970a: 296). Cohen has aptly expressed
this as a move from The Hidden God to the Hidden Class (1994: Ch. 8).
However, against what he called Marcuses pessimism, Goldmann never
gave up the notion that humans develop wider aspirations when their material
ones are satisfied (1970a: 280, 287); they crave further democratization at
work, whilst they continue to possess and exercise powers of resistance against
unjustified outcomes. Hence his attraction to the 1960s Yugoslavian factorydemocracy reforms, to the ideas of the Praxis group such as Heller and Fhr, and
to the thought of progressive workers (1970a, 1970c: 13). But hence also his
revaluation of limited market elements as a source of actors autonomy:
The great conquest of Yugoslav socialist democracy, workers control
(autogestion) is, from a theoretical point of view not solely the means
of assuring effective democracy, but [it is] also the union of an extensive
socialization of the [] means of production [] which permits the end of
the exploitation of man by man [] and the maintenance of production for
the market, facilitating the foundation of a real and authentic development of
117
liberty from, the humanist values of liberty in general, the liberty of expression
in particular and of individual dignity (1970a: 310, my translation; 1974).
I have no space here to debate the issue of market socialism. However, Goldmanns
revisions of classical Marxist theories of proletarian opposition are worth further
comments. In order to evaluate better such theories of the making and remaking
of the working-class, we are now able to address the recent research undertaken
by Satnam Virdee (2014). Whilst focusing particularly on Britain, this work has
wider implications for the West as a whole. For it is Virdees claim that from the
1880s on, the mainstream of the English working-class was incorporated within
the British nation, via the ideology of social imperialism. It was only racialized
outsiders who consistently resisted this turn notably Irish-Catholic workers
(racialized in the course of the 19th century), as well as Jewish, Indian, Caribbean
and African migrants:
[] their attachment to the British nation tended to be less firm, whilst their
participation in subaltern conflicts gave them a unique capacity to see through
the fog of blood, soil and belonging so as to universalize the militant yet often
particularistic fights of the working-class. In this sense, they acted as a leavening
agent nourishing the struggles of all, informed by their unique perspective on
society (2014: 164).
This suggests that a structural position exists which has been veiled both by the
doctrinal historiography of classical Marxism and the retreat made by the Frankfurt
School, most spectacularly by Adorno and Horkheimer. In contrast, Virdee
is persuasive in noting the continued salience and radicalism of marginalized
outsiders within the working-class from the 1880s on, particularly in relation to
anti-imperialist and anti-fascist movements. It was they who offered the greatest
resistance to Britain entering World War I and, much later, they who challenged
racialized divisions in the 1960s. This argument merits extended analysis
elsewhere, especially in relation to Goldmanns characterization of 20th century
Western societies.
Since his death in 1970, some of Goldmanns later stances demand reevaluation for different reasons. In particular we need to interrogate his conclusion
that capitalism has overcome the inherent tendencies to crises in its earlier history
(see also Evans 1981: 1435). Writing in the Keynesian period, for him economies
appeared to be haunted no longer by mass impoverishment and precarisation.
Consequently the main issues now were different: they were the degradation
of labour and the reification inherent in [] a society that threatens to deprive
human life of all spiritual content (1973: 95).
After forty years of neoliberal doxa and finance capitalism, in which it is
largely the bourgeoisie that has acted in and for itself (Boltanski 2008), we need
an expanded notion of the working-class or labour. Following Goldmann and
Mallet, this should include not just the new working-class (educated technicians)
118
to whom he referred, but nonmanual workers more broadly, who are devoid of
significant power. We also need an unflinching recognition of the changes within
capitalism since 1979, not least the return to social inequalities on the same level as
those of the pre-World War I Edwardian period. Goldmann was rightly sensitive to
changes in capitalism following Labourism and social democracy. But subsequent
developments within the global capitalist world system which he could not have
foreseen have recreated precarity and instability on a much more widespread
basis (Harvey 1989: 32835). In particular, new and well-documented research
shows deepened gaps in class life-chances in terms of both income and returns
from capital since the late 1970s. These buttress conjectures of a decline in social
mobility and the success of a conservative revolution (Piketty 2014: 24650,
4845, 549).
Yet if Goldmann had some justification in the late 1960s for detecting a decline
of mainstream working-class activism, his rootedness in his time in other respects
has since been laid bare. It is much to his credit that he broke with Lukcss
repudiation of modernism. Yet his silence on other questions that have since
moved to the fore is all too evident: the issue of patriarchy and gender divisions,
for example, despite having Julia Kristeva as his doctoral student. In his work on
Genet, he keeps to his drama alone, omitting the early novels that would require
debating Genets creative play with gay identities. Except for considering Genets
The Negroes and The Screens in terms of the liberation from colonialism, he never
addresses Eurocentric perspectives10 (1970c). Lastly, despite Cohens justifiable
praise for the flexible nature of his thought, in normative terms his theorizing of
radical humanism is somewhat schematic, especially in comparison with writers
such as Erich Fromm, Eric Olin Wright or Lawrence Wilde.
Yet despite these omissions, we should remember that it was Goldmann who
from an early period stood up against linguistic structuralism, challenging the
hegemony of Foucaults archaeology of knowledge especially the provocation that
Man is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end (Foucault
1970 [1966]: 387). It was Goldmann, too, who consistently lamented Althussers
failure to address issues of agency or the future (see, for example, Goldmann 1981:
50, 878). He was fond of quoting a student who wrote on a blackboard in the midst
of the May 1968 Events Structures dont take to the streets (Goldmann 1981: 50).
Part IV: Goldmann and Bourdieu
Finally, I return to the disputed question of Goldmanns legacy. He has been
rightly lauded as a sociologist of culture, both in Williamss striking obituary
(1971), and more recently, Mitchell Cohens thoughtful and erudite study (1994).
Yet Williamss general assessment also raises persuasive critical arguments
10He briefly criticizes Malraux's Eurocentrism within his novels set in Indochina
and China (1975).
119
does Goldmanns model of homology allow enough for the specific nature of the
imaginative literary works which are a simultaneous realisation of and response
to [] underlying and formative structures (1971: 14)? Williams argues cogently
that orthodox Marxist conceptions never allowed sufficiently for the imaginative
constructions of the writer. In contrast, the practical criticism and the emergence
of Leavis and Left Leavisism had acknowledged the distinctive intensity of the
literary response to new experiences and emergent social relations.11 Goldmann
was moving away from such a reductive approach, but his concept of form was
still too abstract. The notion of a problematic hero pursuing authentic values in a
degraded world was over-general. a philosophical legacy of Lukcss early Soul
and Form and of the bipolar split between the abstract rationalist and empirical
arguments in History and Class Consciousness. More close-up microscopic
analysis of social tensions and contradictions was necessary, especially more
awareness of differences within the novel as a genre, and a greater focus on novels
outside the French tradition (Williams 1971: 15).
A similar point had been made cogently by Henri Lefebvre when he argued
that Goldmanns methodological preference for works that exhibit great coherence
is in danger of neglecting the registering of contradictions. Doesnt Goldmann
tend to overestimate the importance of coherence and neglect the existence of
contradictions in the works? (Goldmann et al. 1967: 215, my translation and
emphasis).
More combatively, reading Pierre Bourdieus repeated criticisms of Goldmann,
it might be thought Goldmann had left no significant legacy in the sociology of
culture (1993: 567, 18081; 1996 [1998]: 83, 2023, 350n.2, 383n.24). Yet closer
observation reveals that the issues are more disputed than that. It is clear that the
evolution of Bourdieus own master-concept of habitus shared a dependence
on the notion of collective consciousness and homology (see Goldmann
1970c: 37; Bourdieu 1968). Both authors became firm proponents of a genetic
structuralism, stressing historical analysis, structuration and destructuration
and, of course, actors deep-rooted dispositions labelled habitus (Bourdieu)
and world vision (Goldmann). Granted, Goldmanns mentors were Lukcs and
Piaget, whereas Bourdieus mentors also included Canguilhem and Bachelard. But
profound similarities are nevertheless evident.
Yet time and time again, Bourdieu was to raise as his principal objection to
Goldmann the question of the absent cultural field as the milieu for specialized
skills. Bourdieu shows the ways in which the internal structures of the field are
refracted within the literary work.12 Thus the same basic dispositions can produce
11Williams also justifiably drew attention to the narrow basis for Goldmann's
sociology of the literature, which lacks any reference to Shakespearean tragedy and in the
novel, to the American as well as British traditions.
12Bourdieu emphasizes here the chiasmic split between restricted field (eg the avant
garde) and large-scale field (entertainment) as well as the divisions between schools (for
example, naturalism and symbolism).
120
very divergent literary works in relation to the specific region of the literary field
that the writer inhabits and the specific historical period in which s/he is writing.
Goldmann is challenged for his short-circuiting approach to literature. There
is essentially no difference, claims Bourdieu, between Goldmanns early works
where he elaborates the homologies between the literary structures, the worldviews and social groups material or political urgencies, and that of his weakest,
where these mediations are absent (Bourdieu 1993: 567, 18081).
Now I still hold that Goldmanns Hidden God never simply short-circuited
the cultural field as Bourdieu claims (Fowler 1997). Why else would theological
divisions have such importance in terms of separating or uniting writers, and
explaining literary structures? But we can certainly concede that Goldmann largely
leaves aside the genesis of semi-autonomous institutional structures in the literary
field such as the Acadmie Franaise (founded in 1635). He failed to enquire how
these and other literary structures affected the ideological dissidence discussed at
such length re Jansenism (Viala 1985: 16, 23, 2913).
Yet there is something of a paradox about Bourdieus own position. The
abundant critical references to Goldmann suggest a degree of tacit recognition.
For Bourdieu also invokes Goldmanns key concepts in his own work: this at the
very least keeps them part of the sociological imagination, at most suggests a
theoretical significance that his overt rejection denied. This debt to Goldmann
is strikingly evident in On Television and Journalism where Bourdieu refers
ironically to audience meters as the Hidden God of the television world, invisibly
controlling producers actions (1998: 25). Note too, Bourdieus 19901991
lectures at the Collge de France, Sur lEtat (2012) which address centrally the
role of the noblesse dEtat in creating a meritocratic legal officier class and the rule
of law. Here credit is surely due to Goldmann initially for exploring the tragic and
paradoxical vision of the noblesse de robe under French absolutism.14 Even more
importantly, is it purely an accident that genetic structuralism is retained by both
sociologists as an approved theoretical approach?
I might note here one of Bourdieus most well-cited books, Pascalian
Meditations (2000). Given the explicit homage to Pascal as a sociologist in this
work, does it not simultaneously serve as recognition of the celebrated study of
13This point is by no means insignificant Sapiro (1999) has shown in her
illuminating study of French writers in the Second World War how certain positions in the
literary field (particularly membership of the Academy and holding of Goncourt prizes)
can be correlated with complicity towards the Vichy and occupying Nazi regimes. Just as a
single exceptional Academician, Franois Mauriac, opposed the other celebrated members
with his consistently critical, anti-Vichy stance, so Racine, as an earlier Academician,
occupied that rare space of insider dissidence. We know from Goldmann that Racine
was such an internal refugee but it is certainly true that the impact of such institutional
memberships merits more analysis than Goldmann gives it.
14Despite the congruence of his argument, however, Bourdieu makes no reference to
Goldmann in this work (2012).
121
his predecessor on Pascal and Racine? Indeed many of the positions Bourdieu
himself adopts here remind us of Goldmanns Pascal. In this same text, Bourdieu
cites Pascal on the object of sociological knowledge being englobed by the
observer, who is in turn englobed by the world a position similar to Goldmanns
on the partial identity of subject and object.15 He ends by referring poignantly
to the (Pascalian) paradox of subordinate social groups their possession of a
habitus often accommodated to others power yet for all that, their incontrovertible
possession also of margins of liberty.
Conclusion: Goldmann and Politics: A Radical Humanist
One of Goldmanns greatest achievements was to look back to a Pascalian Marx
(MacIntyre) for whom socialism was a risk-laden project in pursuit of authentic
values (Goldmann 1964: 300301, 3089; MacIntyre 1971: 85, Lovell 1973: 322).
MacIntyre is surely right here that what is at stake with Goldmanns work is not
simply the question of the hidden God, nor even that of the hidden class. It is,
much more profoundly, a gamble on the emancipatory possibility of socialism:
a form of society in which the Enlightenment goals of tolerance and liberty are
combined with the ending of material deprivation and the achievement of greater
equality (Goldmann 1973 and 1977; Cohen 1994: 345; Davidson 2014). In
this, Kants vision of a just community might be realized in practice, not, as at
present, in the false coin of the Wests rhetoric of the international community.
The alternative, as noted in World War II by Benjamin, is barbarism; in our time,
barbarism via the threat of untrammelled neoliberalism on the one hand or that of
absolutist Islam on the other. We need Goldmann to help teach us how to gamble
wisely.
References
Anderson, Perry. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: NLB.
Boltanski, Luc. 2008. Rendre la Ralit Inacceptable. Paris: Editions Demopolis.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1968. Structuralism and the Theory of Social Knowledge,
Social Research, 35(4) (Winter): 681706.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998 [1996]. On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996 [1992]. The Rules of Art. Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity.
15In my view Bourdieus Pascalian Meditations has deepened Goldmanns approach
further. But this work similarly elucidates with great realism the remorseless determinants
of class power within the present social world whilst also clarifying significant margins for
liberty or transformative practices.
122
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2012. Sur LEtat. Paris: Seuil.

Caute, David. 1971. Portrait of the Artist as a Midwife, Times Literary
Supplement, 26th November.
Cohen, Mitchell. 1994. The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectic and a
Hidden God. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Davidson, Neil. 2014. Holding Fast to an Image of the Past. London: Haymarket.
Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso.
Elias, Norbert. 1996. The Germans. Cambridge: Polity.
Elias, Norbert. 2006 [1939]. The Court Society. Dublin: University College Dublin
Press.
Evans, Mary. 1981. Lucien Goldmann: An Introduction. Brighton: Harvester
Press.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1970. The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization
of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
Fowler, Bridget. 1997. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1959. Recherches Dialectiques. Paris: Gallimard.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1964 [1956]. The Hidden God. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Goldmann, Lucien, et al. 1967. Littrature et Socit. Brussels: Universit Libre
de Bruxelles.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1969 [1966]. The Human Sciences and Philosophy. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1970a. Marxisme et Sciences Humaines. Paris: Gallimard.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1970b [1956]. Racine. Paris: LArche.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1970c. Sociologie de la Littrature: Recherches Rcentes et
Discussion. Brussels: Universit Libre de Bruxelles.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1973 [1968]. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1974. Power and Humanism. Nottingham: Spokesman Books.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1975 [1964]. Towards a Sociology of the Novel. London:
Tavistock.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1977 [1973]. Lukcs and Heidegger. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1981. Method in the Sociology of Literature. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Goldmann, Lucien. 2011 [1945]. Immanuel Kant. London: Verso.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Klaus, Gustav. 1985. The Literature of Labour. Brighton: Harvester.
Lovell, Terry. 1973. Weber, Goldmann and the Sociology of Beliefs, Archives
Europenes de Sociologie XIV: 30423.
Lukcs, Gyorgy. 1980. Soul and Form. London: Merlin.
Lukcs, Gyorgy. 1971 [1923]. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin.
123
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1971. Against the Self-Images of the Age. London: Duckworth.
Nar, Sami and Michael Lwy. 1973. Lucien Goldmann; ou la dialectique de la
totalit. Paris: Seghers.
Orr, John. 1977. Tragic Realism and Modern Society. London: Macmillan.
Piaget, Jean. 1972 [1970]. The Principles of Genetic Epistemology. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard, MA:
Belknap Press.
Reith, Gerda. 2002. The Age of Chance. London: Routledge.
Sapiro, Gisle. 1999. La Guerre des Ecrivains. Paris: Fayard.
Viala, Alain. 1985. Naissance de lEcrivain. Paris: Minuit.
Virdee, Satnam. 2014. Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Wikipedia (consulted 10.5.2014) Jansenism.
Wikipedia (consulted 10.5.2014) Jean Racine.
Williams, Raymond. 1971. Literature and Sociology: in Memory of Lucien
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Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Chapter 8
G.D.H. Cole:
Sociology, Politics, Empowerment
and How to be Socially Good
Matt Dawson and Charles Masquelier
In recent years there have been attempts to revisit the history of British sociology. It
was often suggested that prior to 1950 sociology hardly existed in the British Isles
as an intellectual enterprise or even a series of pragmatic prescriptions (Soffer
1982: 768). In particular, the UK was seen as lacking any institutionalized form
of sociological study (Anderson 1968); it is only recently that this story has been
fully contested. A key topic here has been this problem of institutionalization
(Abrams 1968: 4), specifically how the one major institutional event, the
appointment of L.T. Hobhouse to the Martin White Professorship in Sociology
at the LSE in 1907, denied backing to figures such as Patrick Geddes (Studholme
2008), his collaborator Victor Branford (Scott and Bromley 2013) and H.G. Wells
(Levitas 2010). Consequently, scholars have focused on how this meant certain
visions of sociology, be they based on biology (Renwick 2012), the environment
(Studholme 2008), social reconstruction (Scott and Bromley 2013) or utopianism
(Levitas 2010) were lost.
These works have been important and fruitful, however, this history has tended
to stop with World War I. British sociology has quickly gained a forgotten period
of the years between this and the late 50s/60s when the expansion of university
education and the formation of the British Sociological Association provided new
impetus to discuss sociologys history (Halsey 2007, Platt 2003). This is despite
the fact sociology had a clear presence, and a number of successes, in Britain
during these years as a floating discipline (Rocquin 2014).
This chapter considers the work of a scholar active throughout this forgotten
period: G.D.H. Cole. Cole is not part of the sociological canon with his name
rarely, if ever, occurring in histories of the disciplines or summaries of social
theory. There are justifiable reasons for this exclusion, including Coles own
distancing from the discipline (Cole 1957a). However, we will argue a key reason
was Coles era and work; by coming to prominence after these institutionalization
battles Cole confronted a form of sociology which was antithetical to his views
and goals. Rather than abide by its precepts he sought to combine sociology and
politics in a normative theory driven by the idea of individual emancipation. As he
put it: Social Theory, then, I regard as an essentially normative study, of which
126
the purpose is to tell people how to be socially good, and to aim at social goods
and avoid social evils (Cole 1950: 10).
In what follows we will outline the basis of Coles sociological outlook.
From here we will discuss how Cole linked his sociology to a normatively driven
political theory before finally returning to Coles relation to the sociology of his
day. Before that, however, some biographical detail is required.
Who was Cole?
George Douglas Howard Cole was born in 1889 and died in 1959 having been
for 14 years the first holder of the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political
Theory at the University of Oxford. Throughout his career, running from his first
book, The World of Labour in 1913 to the posthumous publication of the final
volume of his History of Socialist Thought in 1960, Cole filled many roles: he
was a political theorist, a philosopher, a labour historian,1 an economist and, as
we will suggest, a sociologist. He published incredibly widely across these fields,
including over 70 books and numerous articles.
Further to this, Cole held many roles outside academia: he was labour
correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, a founding member of both the New
Fabian Research Bureau and the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda,
twice chairman of the Fabian Society (despite a sometimes frosty relationship
with this group), a frequent writer for the New Statesman along with numerous
newspapers both national and local,2 a key player in the Workers Educational
Association including its first Director of Tutorial Classes in 1922, a Labour
candidate for parliament, director of the UNESCO seminar on workers education,
a writer of socialist ditties and plays, president of the International Socialist Society
and a tutor to prominent Labour politicians, such as Hugh Gaitskell and Harold
Wilson. He even found time to write 20 detective novels with his wife, Margaret
Cole (see Cole 1971 and Carpenter 1973 for detailed biographies of Cole).
During Coles time, his influence was vast, so much so that a so-called Cole
Group formed at Oxford (Gaitskell 1960). Indeed, the period of 19291933 has
been termed the age of Cole within the Labour party and the wider movement
(Riddell 1995) and one obituary canonized him as a secular saint (Martin 1959:
63).
One of Coles biographies begins with the claim that obscurity has never
been a threat to G.D.H. Cole (Houseman 1979: 7) yet we would argue it is a
major threat now. The exception to this occurs within socialist theory where his
guild, or, as current parlance has it, libertarian, socialism (Cole 1920a) continues
1Having effectively invented this field of study (Owen 1966)
2The Cole archives in Nuffield College Library, University of Oxford, contain a
large selection of such newspaper articles. Their topics are broad, including: contemporary
politics, freedom, democracy, economics and capitalism.
G.D.H. Cole: Sociology, Politics, Empowerment
127
to influence a small group of scholars (Schecter 1994; Wyatt 2011; Dawson 2013;
Masquelier 2014). His continued influence in this field is perhaps unsurprising
given the strongly normative element of Coles thought, central to his sociology
and his conception of what sociology should be.
Coles Sociology
As we have seen above, Cole had a normative conception of sociological study
as telling people how to be socially good. Therefore, his turn to sociology was
not due to a positivist desire to know, or an interpretivist will to understand, but
rather due to a political drive to change. As he told his students at Oxford: that it
is desirable to discover [social] regularities (which do exist) in order to know how
to act for the best is evident (Cole n.d.a: 7).3 Therefore, Coles fundamental claim
that the subject-matter of social theory is the action of men [sic, and throughout the
chapter] in association (Cole 1920b: 17) is as much a normative claim concerning
the ends of his guild socialism as it is an empirical claim regarding the centrality
of function to modernity. Consequently, while in what follows the focus will be
in outlining Coles sociology this, as we shall see in the next section, is intimately
tied to his political alternative, with its focus on individual emancipation and
political pluralism.
This intimate connection is indicated by the fact that Coles sociology starts
with political theory, namely Rousseau and the general will, as the key to any
rational social theory must be found in some conception of a General Will (Cole
1914a: 14950). However, in turning to Rousseau, Cole in effect sociologizes
him, since to understand how the general will is conceived for Cole, we need to
begin with the principles which condition the nature of sociality. As Cole puts it:
non-social man would be neither an egoist nor an altruist in any moral sense: he
would be pre-moral. But he would have in him already, as essential parts of his
nature, the qualities which under the influence of society would subsequently
take on a moral character (Cole 1955a: ix).
Therefore, in drawing upon the trope of non-social man, a common hermeneutic

device in social theory (Bauman 1990: 5), Cole argues that an essential part of
human activity and nature can be found in what he terms the associative will
(Cole 1914a: 145). Humans, for Cole, inevitably associate with one another,
this is partly expressed through the need for association in satisfying common
wants and social action for common purpose (Cole 1920b: 49). Therefore, Coles
sociology is one concerned with association and its expression in function; the
3Though undated this lecture, and the other undated references which follow,
would have been delivered during the late 1940s or 1950s with perhaps the notes reused
throughout this period.
128
associative will can be found when we have common interests or, as Cole also puts
it, obligations or loyalties to others (Cole 1926). While this is primarily workbased loyalties, such as the associative form of production (Cole 1920a), it is also
a wider conception, where loyalties are owed to civil bodies, such as Churches,
and personal communities, such as the family (Cole 1926).
It is from such associations that morality grows. As has been noted by
Lamb (2005) Coles particular contribution to general will theory is an attempt
to understand it as a process of structure and agency, a particularly sociological
contribution. To begin with the structural elements, the general will, as the
guidelines for moral conduct, grows out of the various associative wills and comes
to exert a coercive function upon individuals. As Cole puts it, the general will
develops a set of fundamental laws and principles that will induce the citizens
to act in line with its precepts (Cole 1955a: xxx). The fundamental precept of the
social contract, from which the general will develops, is that a political sovereign
exists to allow us to realize political liberty by giving up lawlessness and licence
(Cole 1955a: xvii). However, the associative will also drives social action since it
is linked to our functional activity, as nothing is done without loyalty. Loyalty is
the root of the tree of good and evil conduct (Cole 1926: 156). Therefore, when
acting functionally we are not simply acting through self-interest but also through
the loyalties and obligations such associative activity engenders. The general will
cannot possibly regulate such a diverse society. Consequently:
As soon as the plurality of loyalties or obligations is admitted, and various groups
and associations are seen as the points of focus for these various loyalties, it
becomes plain that the individual will or conscience, guided by the consideration
of right, is the sole rational arbitrator of such conflicts (Cole 1926: 160).
Therefore, while the general will provides moral precepts for all issues which
affect all citizens, roughly speaking, equally and in the same way (Cole 1914a:
152) it is within associational activity that forms of associationally specific and
individual morality are developed. However, it would be mistaken to treat these
two planes as independent for Cole, since the general will is an expression of the
desires of associations taken collectively and it is through associational activity
that it emerges. As Cole argues: there is no General Will unless the people will
the good (Cole 1955a: xxxvii). In associative action, then, the General Will
or common good, i.e., the purpose of the association, becomes an extension of
an individuals will, for it is both constituted by, and constitutive of, individual
conceptions of the good life.
Consequently, Coles sociology is fundamentally an associational sociology.
It takes as its prime unit of analysis the associations formed by individuals, their
varying functions and loyalties and how these change over time and space. This
includes all the theoretical assumptions such an associational sociology would
hold that we all do form associations, that this is an inevitable part of sociality
and that associations have forms of agency, the latter of these is a claim sociologists
129
following Cole have urged the discipline to embrace (Schmitter 1993), though
such an embrace has been infrequent. This means Coles sociology has a clear
point of analysis:
We have to start out, not from the contrasted ideas of the atomized individual and
of the State, but from man in all his complex groupings and relations, partially
embodied in social institutions of many sorts and kinds, never in balanced
equilibrium, but always changing, so that the pattern of loyalties and of social
behaviour changes with them (Cole 1950: 15).
Therefore, Cole uses Rousseaus conception of the general will as the basis of
his sociology. It was Rousseaus conception of piti, understood as the most
fundamental and natural form of compassion, that particularly appealed to Cole,
for it allowed sentiment to become a force in the shaping of human affairs (Cole
1950: 128) and rejects whatever leads in society to war or subjection of man
(Cole n.d.b: 8). Cole therefore borrowed from Rousseau the idea that sociality and
the moral outlook entailed by the General Will, are grounded in human feeling
itself (Cole 1955a: liii) and ought to be construed as a primitive social impulse
that has been overlaid by bad institutions, but not destroyed (Cole 1950: 1289).
It is here that Coles sociology becomes critical, since he traces these bad
institutions back to capitalism and liberal democracy. Capitalism for Cole
was the source of the inequality and poverty which blighted society and made
equal realization of associative wills impossible due to a difference in resources
(Cole 1955a: xxxvii). It also was inhumane in its subordination of individuals
to economic requirements and dictates. As Cole put it: Socialists have all too
often fixed their eyes upon the material misery of the poor without realizing that
it rests upon the spiritual degradation of the slave (Cole 1972: 41). This could
especially be seen under contemporary forms of management where the worker
is treated purely as a raw material of industry (Cole 1914b: 119). Meanwhile,
Cole rejected the fundamental premise of liberal democracy, with its focus on
democratic representation on the arbitrary principle of location, rather than the
socially lived differentiation of function (Cole 1920a). As we shall see, both of
these were confronted in Coles political alternative of guild socialism.
Before turning to that, however, it is important to note that Cole differentiated
himself from two figures that seem similar to him, Marx and Durkheim. His
relationship to the former is somewhat complex, for although he did not identify as
a Marxist, he was keen to acknowledge his debt to Marxism (Cole 2010). This was
unlike most sociologists of the period, in whom Marxism generated a fearful and
conservative reaction (Rocquin 2014: 198). Cole in fact devoted an entire book
The Meaning of Marxism to the task of re-assessing this school of thought
in the light of empirical conditions and as a response to the vast array of (mis)
interpretations of Marxs work. Here Cole attempts to recover the constructive
influence of the minds of men (Cole 2010: 17) in historical change, which some
of the precepts of scientific Marxism had effectively obscured. Cole, therefore, not
130
so much wished to reject the materialist conception of history as to praise Marxs

recognition of the constantly changing nature of all living things (Cole 2010: 3),
even with the challenge posed by a newly emerging middle class to radical social
change and scientific Marxisms profound error to contribute to classes any
reality distinct from that of the individuals which compose them (Cole 2010:
1). Here one finds another explanation for Coles fervour for the General Wills
capacity to treat the reality of the common good and the reality of individual
conceptions of the good life as co-constitutive.
Coles similarities to Durkheim are notable and wide (see Dawson 2013) and
indeed Cole read Durkheim and appreciated much of his work. He crowned him,
reflecting the canon at the time, the most important French sociologist after Comte
and LePlay and praised his insistence on the functional character of diversity
(Cole 1952: 125). However, he had two key criticisms. Firstly, he argued that
while Durkheims discovery of coercive social facts was central he didnt fully
discuss why societies develop their particular value structures (Cole n.d.c: 4).
Secondly, he criticizes Durkheim for rejecting the notion of class struggle which
reflects his nature as a conservative social thinker, who emphasizes the danger
of new social tendencies coming into conflict with the existing moral order of a
society, and so leading to its disruption (Cole 1952: 127). Both of these points
are united in Coles focus on the demands of capital as both giving society certain
value structures and in making class struggle central.
Therefore, Cole took up a unique position in the emerging sociological canon
of his day, distancing himself from key figures and placing himself in the tradition
of Rousseau.4 In doing so, he had a key grounding for a critical and normative
sociology, in which he opposed the perversion of a primitive social impulse by
bad [liberal capitalist] institutions to the actualization of the General Will within
a socialist alternative. In the following section we will look further at how Cole
linked his sociology and politics.
Coles Politics and Alternative
While we have noted above that Cole had an associational sociology, his
normative focus was always driven by individual freedom and empowerment.
He shared with Durkheim a belief that contemporary societies were marked by
a regime of moral individualism (Cole 1950: 1516) and put his own valuing of
this into religious language with the claim that my Zeus is man (Cole 1950:
16). Indeed, it was due to this belief in individual empowerment that Cole
turned to associations since each individual was realized or made particular
by engaging in associational activity (Cole 1920b: 1920). Therefore, this drove
Coles alternative: guild socialism.
4Of course an irony here is that, unbeknown to Cole, Durkheim had also lectured
approvingly on Rousseau from a sociological perspective (Durkheim 1970).
131
Guild socialism, in Coles hands, was based on the two critiques which,
as noted above, emerged from his critical sociology. Firstly, capital not only
exacerbated poverty but also reduced the individual autonomy and freedom
found in work. Cole refused to accept that people could not suffer deeply from
spending their lives in tasks in which they find no pleasure (Cole 1957b: 17)
and, drawing his inspiration from William Morris (Cole 1957b), identified the
source of this lack of pleasure with a lack of autonomy in a form of production
subjected to the rule of the capitalist market. We have no evidence that Cole read
Marxs Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but had he done so, he would
have surely been impressed by its critique of the wage system, the division of
labour and its concern for the role of work in the individuals open revelation
of human faculties (Marx 2000: 102). However, Cole did not limit the scope
to a critique of labour and was keen to emphasize the fact that the good life is
a blend of satisfactions achieved from consumption and satisfactions achieved
from successful creation (Cole 1950: 97). As such, he recognized the need
to restore control in both spheres, for even the consumer failed to experience
true autonomy on a marketplace dominated by commercial agencies (Cole
1972: 107). Such a concern for self-realization of individuals qua producers
and consumers led him to advocate the replacement of the capitalist system of
allocation via the market with dialogical coordination between producers and
consumers organized into democratic associations. Additionally, since a key
tenet of guild socialism was that economic power precedes political power
(Cole 1920a: 180), ruling class power was seen to permeate political institutions,
meaning that the state assumed more nakedly and obviously the shape of an
instrument of class domination (Cole 1920a: 22).
The second critique concerns the nature of representative democracy, since
assuming that one person can represent each individual in all their functional
activity flagrantly violates the fundamental principles of democracy (Cole
1920a: 31), instead:
The essentials of democratic representation, positively stated, are, first, that the
represented shall have free choice of, constant contact with, and considerable
control over, his representative. The second is that he should be called upon, not
to choose someone to represent him as a man or as a citizen in all the aspects
of citizenship, but only to choose someone to represent his point of view in
relation to some particular purpose or group of purposes, in other words, some
particular function. All true and democratic representation is therefore functional
representation Brown, Jones and Robinson must therefore have, not one vote
each, but as many different functional votes as there are different questions
calling for associative action in which they are interested (Cole 1920a: 323).
Both of these critiques lead Cole to develop a system based upon associations, the
guilds, representing individuals in their three fields of production, consumption
and civic activities. Each guild then has executive authority over its particular
132
field (Cole 1920a). Importantly for Cole, this would be a highly devolved system
so that the main activity of guilds happens at the level of the factory, or place of
work (Cole 1920a: 48). Guilds would be representative bodies where workers
vote on issues of procedure as well as related concerns such as wages, appointment
of managers and workplace regulations and would be in dialogue with consumers
regarding the allocation of resources. This recognizes the value of political and
moral individualism and how this is made particular by functional activity while
also removing the power of private capital by placing control in hands of the
producers and consumers alike.
Within such a system the state, refashioned as the commune, has its field
of activity greatly limited to co-ordination between guilds that negotiate their
common interests and desires. While this commune body still has some executive
activities (foreign affairs, coercive functions, taxation) the principle of functional
representation makes sovereignty multiple and connected to associative wills
(Cole 1920a: 13940). Furthermore, since the good State must be a State based
on equality on the equal participation of all its citizens (Cole 1955a: xxxvii),
the guilds ensure that all citizens get functional democratic voices in socialized
corporations and, by removing the market mechanisms in favour of negotiation,
lessen advantages of income while guaranteeing dialogical coordination.
These are the broad outlines of the guild socialist system which we dont have
the space to explore further (see Dawson 2013: 6272, 1069; Masquelier 2014:
14368). Instead, what is important for our discussion here is that Coles guild
socialism rests upon his sociological viewpoint and critique. Only by conceiving
of the general will as emerging in a process of interaction between associative and
general wills, with the goal of equal participation from all, can the justification for
guild socialism be realized.
Reflecting Coles wider interests and his turn to sociology, he also used guild
socialism as an inspiration for practice, where willing the good in this case was
based upon the gradualist concept of encroaching control, i.e., actions directed
to wrestling bit by bit from the hands of the possessing classes the economic
power which they now exercise (Cole 1920a: 196). Unsurprisingly, this required
an association, the trade unions, to be active in advancing control and the gaining
of economic power. Therefore, not only was Coles sociology linked to an
alternative, but also a way of realizing this alternative. It is this focus on means
and ends what later writers would term Coles attempt to become the labour
movements eminence grise (Riddell 1995: 947) which gave his sociology a
unique position in its day.
Cole and British Sociology
Above we outlined what we termed Coles sociology; however, nowhere does
Cole use that term to describe his work. Indeed, as we shall see below, Cole
rejected the label of sociologist. This is despite the fact Cole had some early and
133
important connections to the world of British sociology. For example he published

in the British Journal of Sociology (Cole 1957a), the Sociological Review (Cole
1914b) and the American Journal of Sociology (Cole 1946). He was also one of
the sponsors on a letter which called for the formation of what would become
the British Sociological Association (Platt 2003: 1820), reviewed many of the
key sociological books of his day, such as Lockwoods Blackcoated Worker (Cole
1959) and was acquainted with many of the early sociologists in the UK, including
Barbara Wootton via the Workers Educational Association (Oakley 2011: 96) and
Michael Young who worked under him during Coles brief period at the Ministry
of Labour during World War II (Cole 1971: 231). Furthermore, his 1955 Studies
in Class Structure has been claimed as one of the first sociological monograph
on class in the UK (Abraham 1973: 626); its discussion of the emergence of a
new technical middle class and changes in forms of social mobility with the
emergence of new occupations prefigured much sociological debate on class in the
second half of the twentieth century.
Cole also contributed towards the further institutionalization of sociology in
Britain. Upon returning to Oxford as a Reader in Economics in 1925, during
the war as the leader of the Nuffield Social Reconstruction Survey and later as
the Chichele Professor Cole agitated for greater inclusion of the social sciences
at the University (Worswick 1960). For Carpenter it was largely due to Coles
advocacy on University committees that lectureships in sociology were established
and that Oxford finally came to accept sociology (Carpenter 1973: 219). Indeed,
throughout his time in the Chichele professorship Cole was certainly one of the
few, and perhaps the only, lecturer at Oxford to teach the theories of sociologists,
including Durkheim, Comte, Turgot, LePlay, Ginsberg, Weber, T.H. Marshall and
Parsons (Cole 1952).
It also seems that at the time, and for some time after, Cole was thought of as
a sociologist. As part of a torrid attack by the writer St. John Ervine in 1934 on
Cole as the greatest enemy of freedom alive in this land compared to whom Sir
Oswald Mosely is a devout lover of liberty (Ervine 1934a) Ervine claimed that
I have no doubt whatever of his authority or his influence among a large number
of ardent politicians and sociologists (Ervine 1934b). From a more sympathetic
position, Houseman spoke of how Coles desire to write accessible texts on social
matters made him an early advocate of popular sociology (Houseman 1979: 94),
while Scott argues that Coles ideas became influential elements in the emerging
mainstream of British sociology textbooks (Scott 2014: 214). Cole was also
enthusiastic about one element of the emergence of sociology. In the UK, political
and economic theory had largely been separated as disciplines. However, due to
the growth of sociology in continental Europe, including the work of Durkheim,
this divorce has not been anything like so complete (Cole 1934: 3). This, for
Cole, was to the great credit of sociology since economics and politics cannot be
divorced in theory or practice, reflecting his desire to overcome such boundaries,
condemning the isolation of specialized studies from the general study of Society
as a whole (Cole 1950: 29).
134
Yet Cole rejected the label of sociologist. To understand why, it is easiest to

quote him at length.
Because I hold strong subjective views on these and other social questions,
and have always taken part and interest in social investigation primarily for
the purpose of furthering causes in which I believe, I have always rejected
the appellation of social scientist and have been reluctant to accept that of
sociologist for fear of being expected to restrict my conclusions to what can
be inductively demonstrated on the basis of purely factual studies. This does not
mean that I reject, or seek to minimize, the importance of studying as impartially
as possible all the relevant social facts on the presence of which any effective
action for change must needs rest to a very great extent. I want certain things
because I believe them to be worth wanting, not because they are actually
wanted (Cole 1957a: 167).
Therefore, as Cole put it,

I am not a social scientist, but a social idealist who tries to make use of the
factual verdicts of scientific investigators, but not to be ruled by them, except
in excluding the impracticable from my field of aspiration (Cole 1957a: 168).
We have seen above how Cole operated as a social idealist in his attempt to link
ideal conditions of existence to a normative project. The more pressing issue for
this section is what led Cole to paint this picture of sociology and then differentiate
himself from the discipline. To understand this, we must return to the question of
the state of British sociology during this forgotten period of its history.
The pre-WWI period of British sociology, the time of the problem of
institutionalization, would have been a congenial environment for Cole. It is
easy to imagine him engaging with Geddes idea of sociology as applied civics
given his own inspiration from William Morris and the ideas contained in his A
Factory as it May Be (cf. Geddes 1904; Cole 1957b). He also would have been
in agreement with the key argument of Wells that sociology is the creation of
Utopias and their exhaustive criticism (Wells 1906: 367) given his own focus on
using social theory to assist in willing the good society (Cole 1950: 116). Alas,
Cole was born too late for such debates. Therefore, when Cole speaks of sociology
in this period having an outlaw status (Cole 1950: 23) he was referring to its
second quest, following institutionalization: the one for scientific recognition. As
Renwick notes, after the battles for the Martin White Professorship, the task of
establishing sociology as an autonomous science began (Renwick 2012: 17077).
In doing so, two distinct paths emerged, traced by Cole (1952: 11718). One path,
which Cole linked to the LSE, turned to evolution and the philosophy of history.
Since this was influenced by the work of Max Weber it also tended to adopt the
concept of value-free study. The second field, influenced by Durkheim, tended to
move into the field of cultural anthropology through its use of the comparative
135
method. Once again, this method tended to value objectivity in its desire to
make value-free comparisons. In order to achieve such objectivity Cole argued
sociology had become an increasingly statistical discipline with only a few
acolytes of theorizing left. These few had, in turn, become non-empirical and akin
to philosophers rather than sociologists (Cole 1950: 267).
All of these elements, as we have seen, clashed with Coles conception of
intellectual study. Firstly, he was strongly opposed to intellectual specialization,
which he saw as especially prominent in the greater use of statistical techniques.
Secondly, while always valuing the role of theory, he consistently sought to connect
this to material conditions, saying the social theorist is constantly concerned with
finding data (Cole 1950: 12). Thirdly, it contrasted with Coles belief in sociology
and social theory as the study of how to be socially good. However, what counts
as good, and the ends we should be seeking, is fundamentally, for Cole, a moral
judgement (Cole 1950: 249) and, as he also argued, you cant prove anything to
be good (Cole n.d.d: 4). While Weber used a similar distinction between facts
and morals in his defence of value-freedom Cole goes in the opposite direction,
arguing:
It is often suggested that the sociologist will be endangering his objectivity if he
identifies himself with the advocacy of any specific social policy, and that he ought
in his investigations to set aside his personal beliefs and values and confine himself
to a coldly impartial survey of facts. But what nonsense this is! the investigator
who remains coldly aloof will never discover some of the most essential facts
especially the facts about the value-judgments of the persons whose conditions
and mutual relations he is setting out to study. His duty as a sociologist is to remain
aware of his bias, and to correct it in arriving at his conclusions: his duty cannot be
not to have a bias, for it is often his having one that is his strongest inducement to
undertake his investigations (Cole 1957a: 17071).
Therefore, since moral positions lead us to certain topics and to appreciating the
position of those we study, it is inevitable that morals, and biases, become part of
sociological analysis. The fact that for Cole so many sociologists had attempted
to ignore this, in effect creating a divide between a pure sociologist who simply
collects facts and a policy maker who can decide ends, was the key problem
with the sociology he encountered (Cole 1957a: 171). It is notable how close this
view is to that of Howard Becker in his classic Whose Side are we On? (1967).
Therefore, not only was Cole born too late for debates on the utopian elements of
sociology, he was also born too early for debates on its values and normative ends.
There are undoubtedly other reasons Cole didnt make it into the sociological
canon. His aversion towards specialization in favour of generalism is shared
by other failed sociologists, such as Geddes (Law 2012). Moreover, given the
importance of books in canon building (DaSilva and Vieira 2011), Cole lacked
that one truly great text which could be put on reading lists as a systemization
of his thought, reflecting Coles desire to write broadly and quickly, rather than
136
carefully and in-depth (Carpenter 1973: 21727). Guild Socialism Restated and
Social Theory were close the latter of which Scott (2014: 213) places as one
of four pioneer British sociology textbooks but these were shaped by the
aforementioned normative view, making them unsuitable for sociologys emerging
quest for scientific recognition. But, to truly understand why Cole is not placed
within the history of British sociology, it is central to understand the conditions
of institutionalized sociology during his time. Cole simply did not fit within the
disciplines quest for scientific recognition and therefore was left to work within
and across other disciplines. As we have suggested, had Cole been born later or
earlier this may have been different, but sociology had the unfortunate luck of
Cole working in the forgotten period of the discipline while also being alienated
from it.5
Conclusion
As this chapter has hopefully shown Cole was a unique intellectual, yet he also
confronted many of the issues which our discipline still confronts today; for
example, what it means to be a sociologist but also be public and political.
He had his share of successes and continued to feel pride in the idea that his guild
socialist work may have left a strong impression behind on much of the Labour
movement (Cole 1932: 66). But, Cole never lost his fundamentally optimistic,
utopian urges. Despite his advocacy of a link between sociology and policy he
could never be what Burawoy later termed a policy sociologist, required to
craft policy with the ends decided by someone else (Burawoy 2005); Cole would
always want to decide the ends too, hence why he defined policy broadly as what
ought to be done (Cole 1957a: 158). He held strong to the view that one could set
out to be scientific and moral; to decide both means and ends (Cole 1950: 249).
This assured that Cole had a troubled relationship with leading lights in the Labour
party who not only felt they had the authority to decide the ends but would flinch
at Coles utopianism. Indeed, when Clement Attlee would have Cole to visit he
5 It is striking how similar Coles position is to someone else alienated from British
sociology in this period: Karl Mannheim. Having arrived at the LSE in 1933, Mannheim
instantly, and famously, clashed with Ginsberg and what he saw as the untheoretical
empiricism of British sociology (Kettler et al. 1984: 120). Such a breach became even
more pronounced when Mannheim turned his hand to normative prescriptions and the
construction of his Third Way (Mannheim 1943). He was eventually forced to give up
on sociology, spending the last year of his life in education research. Therefore, Mannheim
and Cole confronted a form of sociology totally unaccommodating of their utopian and
theoretical leanings. Indeed, Cole provided a lengthy review of one of Ginsbergs books
where, rarely mentioning Ginsberg, he makes clear his belief in the need for both empirically
driven theoretical enquiry and an orientation towards how actors can produce social change
(Cole 1953). While Mannheim had already made his name as a sociologist before coming
to Britain, Cole had no such opportunity to be removed from British sociology.
137
would welcome him by saying give me a pair of starry eyes Douglas and I will do
what you say (Foot 1968: 53).
So Cole was a dreamer but there was another part of his personality we havent
covered. While many speak of his kindness and humility (see Martin 1959) he was
also, by all reckoning, a bit lacking in humour and very much your stereotypical
aloof intellectual (Brown 1960). Cole was, in perhaps his most lasting public
contribution, the inspiration for the character of Professor Yaffle in Bagpuss.
Oliver Postgate, Coles nephew by marriage and creator of the show, justified his
choice by saying he wanted a character who had no sense of humour and wasnt
a bit ridiculous but who also was a distinguished academic personage who
would claim to know everything and would go nerp, nerp, nerp in a birdy way
(Postgate 2010: 296). Recognizing these two parts of Cole character, the dreamer
convinced by the value of associational forms of socialism and the dry academic
puts us in mind of how Cole concluded his biography of another humourless
dreamer, Robert Owen. The final words Cole used to defend Owen can apply
equally to himself: Well, non-sensical notions, as well as bores, are oftentimes
the salt of the earth (Cole 1930: 322).
Acknowledgements
Matt Dawson would like to thank the Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College,
University of Oxford for kindly granting permission to reproduce material from
the G.D.H. Cole archive, and the library staff at the college for facilitating access
to the papers. Thanks also to the sociology subject area, University of Glasgow,
for funding a trip to the archives.
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Chapter 9
Social Monads, Not Social Facts: Gabriel

Tardes Tool for Sociological Analysis
lvaro Santana-Acua
Standard accounts of the history of sociology often present the rise of the discipline
in a linear fashion. From the cradle of the Scottish and French enlightenments,
sociology benefitted from Comtes and Spencers pioneering efforts and decades
later from Durkheims and Webers early structural enterprises (Collins 1994;
Eriksson 1993; Ritzer 2010). Yet, as most contributors to this volume point out,
the evolution of the discipline is neither teleological (for it suggests an arrow) nor
even ramified (for it suggests a common trunk), but rather messy and multiplex. In
its early days there were numerous alternatives to draw the boundaries and contents
of sociology. My particular contribution to this exercise in avoiding sociological
amnesia and in expanding the horizon of alternative sociologies is the study of
Gabriel Tardes monads. Why Tarde? And why monads? My contention is that,
in the late 19th century, the production of sociological knowledge about society
could have been concerned not with the analysis of social facts but with that of
social monads. In 1893, one year before Durkheim launched his programmatic call
for the study of social facts in The Rules of Sociological Method ([1894] 1973),
Tarde one of his rivals advanced his own programmatic call for sociological
enquiry: the transformation of monads into social monads. I argue that Tardes
effort was truly groundbreaking. Writing on monads, that is, on single, simple,
and independent units, can be traced back to the Pythagoreans (5th century
BC). In the 17th century, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried
Leibniz renewed their study. However, Tarde criticized Leibniz for conceiving of
monads as closed atoms and offered a new definition: monads were interactive
units. For Tarde, this turned monads into social atoms and thus into an object of
sociological research. He advanced his contribution in Monadology and Sociology
(Monadologie et sociologie [(1893) 1999]), a work that remains peripheral to the
sociological canon.
In analysing Tardes transformation of monads into social units, this chapter
suggests that the social monad could have become a foundational tool of the
nascent discipline of sociology. This chapter does so by comparing Tardes social
monads to Durkheims social facts. With that comparison, this chapter seeks two
additional and larger goals. First, it reflects upon the idea of the sociological canon
(Alexander 1988; Connell 1997; Ritzer 2010) and, second, it offers some insights
on why Tardian sociology has attracted international attention in recent years.
142
Building on this second goal, the chapter suggests that, rather than treating them
as curiosities, engaging with works outside the structuralist tradition can provide
researchers with an alternative arena for sociological innovation. This is the case
of Tardes non-structuralist tool of the monad in Monadology and Sociology.
The chapter proceeds in the following way. The first two sections introduce
the figure of Gabriel Tarde and the concept of the monad. The next three sections
analyse Tardes neo-monadology and specifically how he turned monads into
social monads and why his neo-monadology cannot be described as individualistic
but rather as unitarian, that is, not as being concerned with agentic individuals, but
rather with socialized and interactive units. The last two sections compare Tardes
social monads and Durkheims social facts.
Tarde: The Sociologist, His Work, and His Disciplinary Standing
Gabriel Tarde (18431904) was a sociologist, criminologist, and social
psychologist. A native of the Dordogne (southwestern France), he served there as
a magistrate until 1894, when he was appointed director of the criminal statistics
bureau at the Ministry of Justice in Paris. Thanks primarily to his path-breaking
work in criminology, in 1900 he was named professor of modern philosophy at
the Collge de France, to this day one of the nations most prestigious higher
education and research establishments (Clark 1973).
Tardes major works include La Criminalit compare (1890), La Philosophie
pnale (1890), Les Lois de limitation (1890), Les Transformations du droit. tude
sociologique (1891), Monadologie et sociologie (1893), La Logique sociale (1895),
Fragment dhistoire future (1896), LOpposition universelle. Essai dune thorie des
contraires (1897), crits de psychologie sociale (1898), Les Lois sociales. Esquisse
dune sociologie (1898), LOpinion et la foule (1901), and La Psychologie conomique
(1902).1 Their translation into English has been irregular and sporadic. Translations
comprise his work in criminology, Penal Philosophy; in sociology, The Laws of
Imitation and Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology; and even his science fiction
utopia Underground Man (H.G. Wells wrote the preface for the English edition). The
most recent addition is Monadology and Sociology, available since 2012.2
Accordingly, Tardes influence has mostly been limited to criminology and
to a lesser extent to sociology. In France, social psychologist Serge Moscovici
(1976, 1981) studied social movements, minorities, and masses, as well as the role
of innovation in social change drawing upon Tardes works. More recently, at the
onset of the poststructuralist turn in the human and social sciences, philosopher
1An online list of his complete works, including his fiction writings, is available
on the French Ministry of Justice website. http://www.enap.justice.fr/ressources/index.
php?rubrique=15. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
2Tarde, Gabriel. [1893] 2012. Monadology and Sociology. Melbourne, Australia:
re.press.
Social Monads, Not Social Facts
143
Gilles Deleuze (1968) and sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour (2002,
2008) have contributed to bring Tardian sociology back in. In the United States,
scholars, especially those related to the Chicago School of Sociology, took up
Tardes theories on innovation, imitation, and diffusion (e.g., Rogers [1962]
2003). In 1969 the University of Chicago Press dedicated to his work a volume of
selected writings entitled On Communication and Social Influence, which is part of
the seminal The Heritage of Sociology series that features the work of canonical
(e.g., Durkheim and Weber) and non-canonical but influential sociologists (e.g.,
Max Scheler and Pitirim Sorokin). As another sign of the growing interest in
Tardes sociology, the volume was reissued in 2010.
Yet, for almost a century, Tarde has also been regarded as an esoteric
sociologist (Clark 1973; Latour 2002). This characterization is mostly due to his
call for an understanding of social life as made out of monads, as he presented it in
Monadology and Sociology. Yet as this chapter seeks to show, in 1893 the call for
a sociology anchored in monadological analysis was far from esoteric. Writings
on monads punctuate the history of Western philosophy since the Pythagoreans
to Leibniz (more on this below). To put it differently, in the late 19th century, the
call for a sociology of monads was no less arcane than a sociology of social facts
or social structures, since the latter had not yet emerged as dominant sociological
tools. Hence, if Tardes monads became a difficult idea to grasp in the 20th century,
it is partly due to the historical process by which structuralist understandings of
social life (e.g., Durkheims collective representations, Webers ideal types, LviStrausss structures, and Parsonss systems) took preeminence over less or nonstructuralist understandings (such as Tardes or his contemporary, Simmel).
It remains to be seen whether the interest in post- or non-structuralist
understandings of social life (Bauman 2000; Giddens 1990; Latour 2005) would
make Tarde a more canonical author. Since the early 21st century new contributions
not only make him less of an esoteric sociologist but also they reveal the existence
of alternative ways of thinking about sociology during its formative decades.
At least in France, some of these alternatives were eclipsed by the success of
Durkheimian sociology (Lukes 1985; Riley, Miller, and Pickering 2013). One
such alternative was the monad.
Monads: More a Way of Framing Reality than a Thing
The monad is primarily a philosophical concept. In its most basic definition, it
refers to a way of framing reality characterized by the idea of unity. Beyond this
definition, the monad can be formulated in multiple ways, from metaphysics to
materialism. Hence, the monad can encompass from the perfect or supreme unity
(that is, the monad becomes something similar to the idea of the One, First Being,
or God) to the minimal unity (e.g., the atom). The monad can also be regarded as
a microcosm containing within it the totality of possible beings. The origins of
monadic thought are customarily linked to the Pythagoreans (5th century BC),
144
especially Philolaus, Archytas, and Pythagoras himself. They regarded the monad
as the first existing thing or original unity. It was, as Diogenes Laertius (1853:
8.19) put it, the beginning of everything. Then, according to the Pythagoreans,
from the original monad emerged the dyad, from the dyad the numbers, from the
numbers the signs, from the signs the lines, from the lines the plain figures, from
the plain figures the solid figures, from the solid figures the sensible bodies, which
are four: fire, water, earth, and air.
The idea of the monad as a foundational unit of reality made its way
into Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy (e.g., Syrianus, Nicomachus, and
Iamblichus). Centuries later, via Neoplatonism, the monad entered medieval
Christian theology mainly as a reference to God (e.g., Thierry of Chartres,
Dominicus Gundissalinus, and Nicholas of Cusa) and, during the late Renaissance
and the Scientific Revolution, it was taken up by Giordano Bruno, Henry More,
and Gottfried Leibniz. In De triplici minimo et mensura (1591) and De monade,
numero et figura (1591), Bruno (15481600), a Dominican friar and philosopher,
reaffirmed the connection between the divine and the monad. God, in short, was
the supreme monad. But also it continued to be an indivisible unit that constituted
the minimal element of spiritual and material things. Like Bruno, in his early
writings Henry More (16141687), a philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist
School, equated the monad to God, which he called Nature Monadicall and
unmoved Monad (Reid 2012: 51). However, in his late writings, More shifted
towards a more materialistic (and arguably secular) definition, which was closer
to the idea of the atom: By physical monads, I understand particles so minute that
they cannot be further divided or dispersed into parts (ibid.).
In the 1690s the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz,
who had access to Mores late writings, took up this atomic understanding of the
monad. He laid out such an understanding in La Monadologie (1998)3 a work
originally written in French in 1714 and conceived as a treatise on the science
of unity. This work not only continues to be regarded as the most influential
contribution to modern monadic thought, but also it was Leibnizs alternative to
the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. He offered a metaphysical system
of monads that eliminated dualisms. He defined the monad as a simple substance,
which was indivisible, autarchic and without extensions, parts, or shape. The
universe consisted of monads; they were the first element of every composed
thing, possessed actions and passions (49), and were endowed with the power
of perception (15). The monads with higher perception power were souls,
while the rest were formed by the perceiving mind into aggregates that constituted
material objects. When it came to creating or suppressing monads, God was the
only one capable of doing so.
Thus, for Leibniz the monad was an irreducible force, containing in itself the
source of all its actions. This was a critical point of his monadology. As he famously
put it: the monads have no windows through which something can enter or leave
3References to this work will appear as parenthetical section citations.
145
(7 my emphasis). This meant that he believed no monad exerted its influence

over another, since each was an individuality defined by the ensemble of its
intrinsic characteristics (9). His autarchic view of the monad had important
implications for the way in which change could occur (an aspect criticized by
Tarde). For Leibniz, change could never happen due to reciprocal influence
among monads. Instead, each monad was equipped with an internal principle
of change (1011) and everything was regulated by a pre-established harmony
(7879). As I will explain below, Tarde believed the opposite: monads were
constantly interacting. Yet, from Leibniz, Tarde retained the goal of offering
an anti-Cartesian way of thinking, that is, an anti-dualist system that did not
distinguish by default between, in Tardes case, the individual and society.
Rather, monadic thought permitted Tarde to present them as part of the same
continuum of reality.
After Leibniz, especially during the 19th century, monadic thought
experienced two significant changes. First, the atomic (materialistic)
understanding of the monad rose to prominence (as opposed to the spiritual
or providential understanding; that is, the emphasis on God as a monad); and
second, the idea of the unity of the monad was equated to the idea of the unity
of the natural and social realms. These two changes made it possible that the
monad could be increasingly referred to, in the natural sciences, as a singlecelled organism and, in the human and social sciences, as the individual
human subject, especially if separated from society.4 In short, these changes
confirmed a semantic shift by means of which the monad was used not to
point out to God, but to individual natural and social elements. This was the
context of modern materialism and individualism in which Tarde formulated
his call for neo-monadology. He did so, not by endorsing the individuality
of the monad (as in Leibniz), but rather by showing that they were social
units, interacting with each other. In so doing, Tardes revision of classical
monadology led to the invention of social monads.
Neo-Monadology: A Manifesto for a New Sociological Way of Seeing
Monadology and Sociology (hereafter MS)5 can be divided into two parts. In the
first one, Tarde sought to convince readers about the existence and appropriateness
of thinking about the world from a modern scientific viewpoint in terms of
monads. As he claimed, science tends to pulverize the universe, to multiply beings
indefinitely (43); an avalanche of new discoveries in biology, astronomy, physics,
etc., he argued, demonstrated that monads really existed. But we have just seen
that science, after pulverizing the universe, necessarily spiritualizes its dust (55).
4monad, n. OED. 2014. http://www.oed.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/Entr
y/121054?redirectedFrom=monad. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
5References to this work will appear as page citations. All translations are mine.
146
In other words, he criticized the divorce that separated empirical findings and the
theories underlying them from the overarching logic that should govern science.
The reunification of both (theory/empirical evidence and scientific logic) was
the objective of the second part of MS, in which Tarde analysed the objections
sociology faced in order to become a disciplinary analytical viewpoint. He argued
that the affirmation of monads (55) in scientific discourse was a crucial step in
that direction and he sought to convince his readers by also employing common
sense arguments; for instance, by acknowledging the intelligence of small things,
such as monads, versus big things (53).
MS was thus a real manifesto, in which Tarde attempted to prove empirically
that a major change in the perception of reality had been taking place in the human,
social, and natural sciences in recent decades:
All this may seem strange, but in the end, all this it is no more than a commonly
accepted way of seeing, commonly accepted until now by scientists and
philosophers, and which the universal sociological viewpoint must have the
logical effect of delivering it to us (67).
What was previously seen and conceptualized as homogeneous (e.g., human cells,
the cosmic nebulous, the life of nations, the structure of atoms, the functioning
of illnesses, etc. (34 & 72)) had become increasingly more and more nuanced,
detailed, and multiform. In short, the world, he argued, was moving towards the
infinitesimal:
We see where this trend leads us if pushed to the limit: to monads that fulfill
the wish of the boldest Leibnizian spiritualism. Whereas the vital principle,
disease, another entity treated as a person by ancient doctors, is pulverized into
infinitesimal disorders of histological elements, and, moreover, largely due to
the discoveries of Pasteur, the parasitic theory of disease, which explains these
disorders by internal conflicts of tiny organisms, is spreading every day and
even with an excess that must be called a reaction. But parasites also have their
parasites. And so on. Again the infinitesimal! (35)
For Tarde, what laid beneath this major change in perception were monads.
Although scientists and ordinary people had not yet observed them, he insisted
that they ought to believe in them:
Before the telescope, which has revealed us the multiformity of nebulae, stellar
types, double and variable stars, did not we dream universally, beyond the
known sky, beyond immutable and incorruptible heavens? And in the infinitely
small, which remained, even more than the infinitely large, inaccessible to our
observations, do not we dream also about the philosophers stone in a thousand
forms, the identical atom of chemists, the supposedly homogeneous protoplasm
of naturalists? (72)
147
By collapsing both areas, the empirical (namely, reality was much smaller than
previously believed) and the theoretical (monads were an even smaller part of
the reality that science was beginning to see empirically), Tarde pursued a
critical enterprise in MS: to establish a robust connection between progress and
groundbreaking discoveries in all sciences and his own scientific agenda of
making a case for the material existence of monads. The books opening left no
doubt of his triumphalism:
Leibnizs monads have come a long way since their father. By various independent
channels they now enter, according to the opinion of scientists themselves, the
heart of modern science. It is remarkable that all secondary hypotheses involved
in this great event are being established scientifically (33).
Tarde nevertheless knew that his own age was quite mechanistic, which deprived
people from believing in monads (52), and he also condemned a common prejudice:
the unknown was considered less intelligible (54).
Inventing Social Monads
To compensate for these shortcomings, Tarde revised classical monadology to
translate monads into sociological language. His path-breaking revision of Leibniz
was twofold: first, he made monads social, that is, he transformed them into a
suitable concept to refer to human affairs as social and, second, he conceived
of monads as a theoretical tool to overcome the duality of the world, especially
society versus the individual.
It could then be argued that Tardes call for a change in the perception of reality
was in fact dual: via monads and the social. Their coupling confirms that Tarde
was as committed as other leading intellectuals at the time (such as Durkheim) to
create and shape the limits of sociology as a true discipline of the social. Indeed,
as seen above, the use of monadology as a foundation of his sociological agenda
was far from being an esoteric enterprise. By choosing Leibnizs monadology,
Tarde tried to overcome the pervasive dualism (especially in its Cartesian version)
between body and mind and, more generally, between matter and spirit. He
criticized that, while science was reducing the scale of observation, it still did not
go beyond this dualism. He realized that a similar dualism the individual versus
society permeated the young discipline of sociology. So, a critical improvement
of the Leibnizian theory of monads, which he called neo-monadology, was his
alternative to overcome such dualism.
In Leibniz, monads were indivisible, closed, and immaterial. They acted as
spiritual forces and also differed from each other. Unlike Tarde, Leibniz believed
that monads were simple substances, without smaller parts; in other words, they
were true closed atoms that formed the universe but could not communicate
among them for they lacked external windows. Nevertheless, Leibnizian monads
condensed and reflected the totality, and were ordered by the law of pre-established
148
harmony that governed their interaction. Tarde decisively departed from Leibnizs
paradigm in opposing the idea of closed monads:
Many characters, many mysteries perplex the philosopher in particular. Can
we hope to solve them by designing open monads that inter-penetrate each
other instead of being external to each other? I believe, and I observe that,
on this side again, the progress of science, I mean not only contemporary but
modern, promotes the emergence of a renewed monadology. The discovery
of Newtonian attraction, of action at a distance and at any distance, of
material elements on each other, shows the attention that one must pay to their
impenetrability. Each of them, once regarded as a point, becomes a sphere of
action extended indefinitely (since the analogy suggests that gravity, like all
other physical forces, spreads itself sequentially), and all these interpenetrating
spheres are specific domains to each element, perhaps as specific domains
that, although mixed, we falsely take them for a single space (5657 my
emphasis).
For Tarde, seeking to transform monads into a foundation of sociology (as a

science of interpenetrating realms), the Leibnizian universe of closed monads was
a dead-end. Monads, on the contrary, were open, had contacts among them, and
interacted in an open universe. Monads met and cooperated in order to create the
world. In short, they were social:
Left to itself, therefore, a monad can do nothing. That is the central fact, and
it immediately explains another, the tendency of monads to get together (66
original emphasis).
It could be argued that Tardes epistemological recognition of monads interactive

nature developed out of the historical context of late nineteenth-century Europe,
when the social question became an everyday concern for scholars, activists,
and politicians, and out of the institutional need to create a science that could
make sense of realitys growing sociality (Donzelot 1984, Procacci 1993). Yet
Tardes neo-monadology was not a call in favor of social holism. On the contrary,
he recognized that certain dimensions of reality were non-social and aspired to
demonstrate that monads behaved socially and shaped society.
Since human beings were also social (the strong instinct of sociability
that provokes in men the desire to agglomerate (61)), Tardes groundbreaking
move was to equate the social life of monads to the social life of human beings.
For him, the society of monads resembled the society of humans:
In a society no individual can act socially or be in any way without the collaboration
of a large number of other individuals, mostly ignored by the first. Obscure
workers who, through the accumulation of small facts, prepare the development
of a large scientific theory formulated by a Newton, a Cuvier, a Darwin, form
149
somehow a kind of organism whose genius is the soul, and their work is the
cerebral vibrations of which this theory is the conscience We observe also
that the obscure workers I just mentioned can have as much merit, erudition,
strength of mind, as the glorious beneficiaries of their work. This is incidentally
the way to address the prejudice that leads us to judge as inferior to us all external
monads. If the self (le moi) is no more than a leading monad among myriads of
accompanying monads in the same brain, why do we believe in their inferiority?
Is a monarch necessarily more intelligent than his ministers or his subjects? (66).
For Tarde the social entailed cooperation or interaction among individuals, which
consequently led to the formation of a larger universe: society. Yet, another
departure from Leibnizs paradigm was necessary to transfer monadology to the
social world. It was necessary that complex entities could be monads too. When
applied to the social world, this meant that an individual could be a monad of society:
If we look at the social world, the only one known to us from within, we see
officers, men, more differentiated, more individually characterized, richer in
continual variations than the machinery of government, the laws and systems
beliefs, dictionaries and grammars themselves (69).
A social-shaped-by-individuals did not mean that Tarde favored ontological

individualism (or social holism). On the contrary, by claiming that individuals could
be understood as monads he actually sought to do away with the dualism of the
individual versus society. That dualism was sterile because for him monads showed
no duality in nature. In other words, Tardes monadological individuals were a
monistic unit. Society emerged as a result of the interaction of individuals, but of
individuals that behave like social monads. That is, they behave openly, interactively,
never completely isolated, and as part of the entire universe. As Tarde put it:
It is really surprising to see men of science, so engaged in repeating about
everything that nothing is created (rien ne se cre), implicitly admitting as
something obvious that simple reports of various beings can themselves become
new beings added numerically to the first. Yet this is what we admit, perhaps
without realizing it, when, the hypothesis of monads being rejected, we attempt
by means of another thing and notably by the game of atoms, to explain these two
capital appearances, a new living individual and a new me (67 original emphasis).
Consequently, when applied to the social, neo-monadology could not simply be

reduced to the search for the smallest material atom. Since an individual (who was
not, materially speaking, the smallest part) acted as a monad within a larger society,
Tardes neo-monadology ultimately became a metaphor of the social world, a
game of analytical scales. This distinction is central since Tardian sociology has
been incorrectly labeled as individualistic (Durkheim 1972, Latour 2002, Scott
2007, Tarde [1969] 2010).
150
Unitarianism, or Why Tardes Neo-Monadology is Not Individualistic

Presenting Tardes approach to monads as further confirmation of his individualistic
sociology is, I would argue, inadequate because, first it fails to understand the
theory and history of monadology as well as its philosophical context; second it
misinterprets the scope and ontology behind Tardian neo-monadology; and third
it is greatly influenced by the tendency to oppose Durkheim and Tarde as if they
neatly incarnated in scientific writing the dualism of society versus the individual.
Instead, my claim is that Tarde was a theorist of what I call unitarianism
(Santana-Acua 2015). Drawing on his neo-monadology, he theorized society
not as governed by agentic individuals, but rather by socialized and interactive
units. His analytical distinction between individuals and units is absolutely
crucial because, for Tarde, interactive units could encompass everything, from
entire nations to individuals. As mentioned above, Tarde equated the social life of
monads to the social life of human beings. For him, no individual (like no monad)
could act socially without collaborating with a larger number of other individuals.
Furthermore, Tarde rejected ontological individualism by arguing that individual
consciousness was activated via monads, which were involved in thought processes:
In this ultra-gaseous world, for example, the beam does not always walk in a
straight line; the more we get closer to the individual element, the more the
variability in the observed phenomena Thus, as society, as life, chemistry
seems to bear witness to the need for universal difference, the principle and the
end of all hierarchies and all developments (7778).
Rather than falling under the label of ontological individualism (arguably a

conceptual shortcut we still owe to the institutional triumph of Durkheimian
structuralism), Tardian neo-monadology seems closer to Adam Smiths and other
Scottish thinkers (such as Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson) understanding of
the social as the result of interaction among individuals, that is, as beings-inassociation (Santana-Acua 2015). In Smiths The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), the social was neither about fully rational but moral (that is, sentimental)
individuals nor about an impersonal force that constrained and structured
individuals lives. For Smith, humans exchange of sentiments was the basis of
sociality. Similarly, in Tarde, we can define [society] in our opinion [as] the
reciprocal possession, under extremely varied forms, of all by each (85). Society
then entailed human interdependence among different human beings and, like
nature, it was continuously changing and being replaced:
In any development sufficiently long, we observe a succession and interlacement
of phenomenal layers (couches phnomnales), alternately remarkable in their
regularity and caprice, permanence and transience of the reports they present
to us. The example of societies is very adequate to grasp this great fact and to
suggest at the same time its true meaning (73).
151
Therefore, contingency (fugacity, caprice, variability, difference, etc.), as it also occurs

in nature (77), embodied in Tarde one of the constitutive components of the social:
Men who speak all different accents, intonations, voice tones, gestures: that is
the social element, real chaos of discordant heterogeneities. Yet in the long run,
out of this confusing Babel emerge general patterns of language, formulated in
grammatical laws (74).
The real question then was: how did ordered patterns (e.g., language and grammar)
emerge from heterogeneous rather than homogeneous conditions (e.g., millions of
people speaking with different accents)? His answer was that human capacity to
fill out the space of difference constituted also the space for the emergence of
the social. Again, he saw no actual dualism between the individual and society,
but rather a continuum. In consequence, for Tarde, the social was a contingent
regularity in human interdependence across time and space, and social evolution
and forms were guided by permanent change and diversity:
[H]ere, in social change and social aggregations, to which we belong and
where we have the advantage of holding the two extremes of the chain
we see clearly that order and simplicity are simple terms, stills (alambics)
where deposits somehow the elementary diversity powerfully transformed
Diversity, and not unity, is at the heart of things: this conclusion can be inferred
from the general remark that a simple glance at the world and science allows us
to do. Everywhere an exuberant wealth of unheard variations and modulations
burst of these permanent themes called living species, stellar systems, balances
of any kind, and eventually it kills them and renews them entirely (76 & 78).
This constituted Tardes final departure from Leibnizs monadology. While the
German philosopher conceived of monads operating according to a pre-established
harmony, the French sociologist defined them as components of a diverse and
messy reality, constantly in the making, being assembled and reassembled.
Durkheims Alternative: Social Facts
As a baffled Charles Dickens wrote in the opening paragraph of Hard Times
([1854] 1869: 7), Facts alone are wanted in life and nothing but Facts should be
taught to boys and girls at school. By the mid-19th century the study of facts had
become a remarkably novel phenomenon. Dickens opening precisely captured the
growing reputation of a new unit of knowledge: the modern fact (Poovey 1998).
The fabrication of modern facts aimed to produce systematic knowledge from
descriptions of observed particulars, mainly as a result of the popularity of numerical
representation as the privileged means for gathering and presenting facts. In the
second half of the 19th century, a particular type of modern fact attracted increasing
152
attention: the social fact (Cabrera and Santana-Acua 2006, Poovey 2002, Procacci
1993). A key problem of the social fact was how to define its empirical contents,
so that it could be used to study society methodically and scientifically. This was
Durkheims main concern in The Rules of Sociological Method ([1894] 1973), in
which he offered his own definition of the social fact. Along with it, he advanced
alternative tools, such as social currents and social substratum (le substrat
social), which, like Tardes monads, did not become part of mainstream sociological
discourse (Terrier 2011). Only the tool of social facts became foundational to the
discipline and stuck in the long term.
Yet in the 1890s, Durkheims call for a sociology based on the study of social
facts was arguably more arcane than Tardes revision of the monads as social.
Durkheim argued that the social fact was a thing-in-itself and it had a life of its
own, which was independent of and different from the individual consciousness of
its carrier. That thing, the social fact, could not be seen in its purest form because
it was distinct from its individual manifestations. And yet, according to Durkheim,
the social fact was a real objective force; it had enough constraining power to
structure the actions of individuals even against their own will (e.g., an individual
who abandons himself to the behavior of a crowd). Their constraining power
became more apparent when individuals broke rules and laws. Hence, social facts
were primarily coercive, which was the main characteristic to recognize them:
their power of external coercion over individuals (Durkheim [1894] 1973: 21).
However, he obviated that the implementation of a punishment for breaking a rule
or law would not be carried out by the thing-in-itself (the social fact) but by actual
individuals. Tarde ([1890] 1993), who referred to social facts in dealing with units,
argued that the individual facts that [Durkheim calls] social are not the elements
of a social fact, they are only the manifestation of it (Vargas et al. 2008: 764).
Durkheim, in short, opted for emphasizing the coercive dimension in the making
of social relations, while Tarde ([1890] 1993) favored imitation. For Durkheim,
the best example of coercion as a foundation of the human beings socialization
was the education of children. Curiously enough, education is inextricably linked
to imitation, a Tardian theme (Vargas et al. 2008).
Tardian versus Durkheimian Sociology: Competing Discourses on the Social
The image of society Durkheim had in mind was not one of interaction, namely, of
a universe of interacting units. This image was closer to Tardes; society was the
material evidence of humans spontaneous order and grouping. For Durkheim, on
the contrary, society became a being that existed in itself, une ralit sui generis.6
While for Durkheim society was already present (as if its existence somehow
6Society is a reality sui generis. It has its own characteristics that cannot be found, or
cannot be found in the same form, in the rest of the universe. Therefore, the representations
that express it have a different content than purely individual representations and one can
153
predated that of the individual), Tarde did not take society completely for granted. In
fact, he was aware of its increasing pervasiveness in scientific and everyday lexicon:
It is remarkable that science tends strangely to generalize the notion of society
by a logical addition to its previous trends. [Science] talks about animal societies
cellular companies, why not atomic societies? Did I mention the societies
of planets, solar and stellar systems? All sciences seem destined to become
branches of sociology Then why not the molecule, for instance, could be a
society like the plant or the animal? (58 & 59).
Tarde ultimately understood society as a natural phenomenon (for him the social
and the organic did not become entirely isolated spheres) and more importantly as a
material object in search of its place inside the nascent discipline of sociology (like
Durkheim). But Durkheim sought to isolate the social from the organic sphere.
Despite these clear differences, it is worth emphasizing that research on the TardeDurkheim divide (a) has focused markedly on the institutional dimension and (b)
has overlooked crucial similarities between the two authors.
(a) Institutional dimension. Although it cannot be denied that there was an
evident institutional divide between Tarde and Durkheim,7 in my analysis of MS
I sought to demonstrate that it was more the outcome of a real epistemological
divide: their irreconcilable conceptions of the social. While in Durkheim the social
was a true objective force that structured individual action and society became a
being that existed in itself and, consequently, could not be reduced to an aggregate
of individuals, Tarde emphasized the individual (or unitarian) dimension in the
making of society via social interaction (or interpenetration of units):
[A] serious obstacle arises when we come to human societies. In this case we
are at home, it is we who are the real components of these coherent systems of
people called cities or states, regiments or congregations But no matter how
intimate, deep, harmonious a social group is, we never see to flow ex abrupto
in the middle of surprised associates (associs surpris) a real and not just
be assured in advance that the first ones add something else to the second ones (Durkheim
[1912] 1968: intro, sec. II).
7Whereas Tarde was an influential intellectual at the time and in 1900 reached the
summit of the French academic system by obtaining a chair at the Collge de France,
Durkheim, who fought for a long time to gain an important academic position in Paris,
obtained the chair of education at the Sorbonne shortly after, in 1902. The institutional
factor continues to be meaningful; the Collge de France remains mainly a research
institution, while Durkheim occupied a position that provided him with power over the
training of secondary school teachers. However, it is unclear how Durkheimian sociology
triumphed at the institutional level, since the generation of students he trained were
drafted to serve in the army (and many died) during World War I (Lukes 1985; Terrier
2011). Only throughout the 1920s, Durkheimians arguably won the institutional war and
Tardian sociology became a marginal trend.
154
metaphorically collective self; a wonderful result if the conditions were given.
No doubt there is always an associate that represents and personifies the whole
group or a small number of associates (the ministers of a government) who, each
in a particular aspect, individualize them no less fully (68).
(b) Similarities. By focusing on the causes underlying the Tarde-Durkheim divide,

research has overlooked a central similarity, which paradoxically serves as a major
cause for the conflict: their disciplinary commitment. Having different agendas in
mind, both Tarde and Durkheim sought forcefully to institute sociology in France
as a science of the social. By transforming suicide into a true social phenomenon,
Durkheim sought to rescue it from psychological explanations. And Tarde in his
studies on criminology transformed crime into a social phenomenon. Opposing in
particular the theories of Cesare Lombroso, who defended the biological origins
of criminality, Tarde argued that the origins of crime were social. Another and
even more striking similarity is that both did not understand the social as a holistic
reality. Rather, reality was formed by non-social and extra-social dimensions
that did not interest sociologists but other disciplines (e.g., psychology).8 Hence,
Tarde and Durkheim shared a common and critical enterprise: to enlarge, fix,
standardize, and institutionalize the disciplinary boundaries of sociology. They
did so by advancing competing definitions of the social.
On Tardes Return. The Representation of Society:
From the Table to the Network
Why has Tardes sociology gained currency in the last two decades? It could be
argued that the spread of post-structuralism (Bauman 2000, Giddens 1990), the
epistemological rehabilitation of human agency (e.g., via Actor-Network Theory)
(Latour 2005), and the late 20th-century crisis of the social (Cabrera and SantanaAcua 2006) set new intellectual conditions that oriented research interest towards
a sociology such as Tardes, which is non-structural, attentive to questions of
agency, and critical of the taken-for-grantedness of the social. These conditions
have led to an international attempt (especially in France and the United States) to
unearth Tardian sociology and to apply it empirically.9
8At the same time we are English or French, we are mammals, and accordingly
we carry in our blood not only germs of social instincts that predispose us to imitate our
neighbors, to believe what they believe, to want what they want, but also the seeds of
non-social instincts, among whom are the antisocial ones. Certainly, if society had made
us entirely, it would have made us only sociable beings (81). See also MS, 76, 80, 90, and
96. In Durkheim, see e.g., Le Suicide (1897), especially book I, on the extra-social factors
of suicide.
9See Anonymous (2001), the special issue of Economy and Society on Tarde
(Anonymous 2007), Latour (2002, 2008), and Vargas et al. (2008).
155
Beyond the abovementioned conditions, I want to advance a more visual

and tangible reason for the renewed interest in Tardian sociology. Such interest
coincides with ongoing changes in the visual representation of the social. Unlike
Tarde, who claimed in 1893 that monads have not yet been seen, Durkheim
claimed a year later that statistics permitted observation of social facts in their
pure form. Fast-forwarding to the present, methodological developments in social
network analysis and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) over the last three decades
have offered an alternative understanding of social forces. These developments
represent social forces not as numerical graphs and tabulated statistical numbers
(as in Durkheim). Rather, they visualize social forces as single units or nodes (from
individuals to nations) connected by constantly changing social ties (the latter
could encompass from the spread of happiness through a network of individuals
to the flows of global trade relations among nations). This image of society as a
dynamic network of ties among single units rather than as a still statistical table,
that is, the image of society as single units connected by multiple and constantly
changing ties is arguably closer to the universe of interacting social monads Tarde
had in mind when he wrote Monadology and Sociology. Hence, it could be argued
that Tardes way of framing reality as social monads now offers a more fluid and
less structural understanding of social relations that matches recent and new ways
of visually representing society and social bonds as networked and dynamic.
In addition, without diminishing the importance of the previously discussed
institutional factors involved in promoting Durkheimian versus Tardian sociology,
it is worth taking into consideration a supplementary and less explored technical
reason. In the 1890s the lack of suitable means of representing a networked society
of single units (as it has now become pervasive thanks to network analysis and
computers) could have contributed to make Tardian sociology more daunting
technically and less appealing empirically than Durkheims tabulated reality of
statistical social facts, as epitomized by his classic study Suicide.
Yet to explain Tardes decline and Durkheims success, it has become standard
to argue (Durkheim 1972, Scott 2007, Tarde [1969] 2010) that Tarde was a theorist
of individualism at a time when individualism was under attack and, hence, his
return could be associated with a parallel return of individualism in the last three
decades. However, as this chapter sought to show, Tardes neo-monadology was
neither anchored in the notion of methodological individualism nor in that of social
holism. Instead, Tarde sought to question this and other sterile dichotomies via what
I call unitarianism his view of society as composed of socialized and interactive
units; and not of agentic individuals. This is why Tardes ideas have attracted
more attention among ANT scholars than among partisans of methodological
individualism. Key features of the ANT sensibility, as John Law and Vicky
Singleton (2013) put it, are (1) the concern with social flows and ties rather than
structures and (2) the task of avoiding easy dichotomies and taken-for-granted
concepts such as society and the individual (Latour 2005). This chapter contended
that, in Tardes neo-monadology, one can found elements of the ANT sensibility: an
understanding of social affairs as the result of interactive, interpenetrating monads,
156
in which the dualism between the individual and society does not work by default.
Likewise, Tardes neo-monadology did not locate causality in structural forces,
but rather in interdependence and interaction. The social units he referred to as
monads played such a role. They facilitated an understanding of the social as a nonindividualistic and autonomous space, full of permanent interaction and contingency;
in other words, they functioned as an extra-individual dimension that could not be
entirely governed by human beings. This unitarian approach was different from the
structuralist and constraining understanding of social facts embraced by Durkheim
and different from the individualistic understanding of society.
Finally, by showing how Tarde turned monads into social monads, this
chapter sought to reflect upon the idea of the sociological canon by analysing
how the non-structuralist tool of the monad departs from the canonical (namely,
structuralist) understanding of the social. Tardian social monads functioned
ultimately as an analytical tool that placed the source of individual action outside
the self. Durkheim pursued a similar strategy with his tool of social facts. Unlike
Durkheim, Tarde did not locate causality in supra-human structural forces, but
rather in peoples interdependence and interaction. Hence, this chapter suggested
that engaging with works outside the structuralist tradition is not only important
for learning about the disciplines history but more meaningfully because they
can provide researchers (as in the case of ANT and social network analysis) with
a different arena for sociological innovation.
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Chapter 10
Alasdair MacIntyres Lost Sociology

Neil Davidson
Introduction
Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps the most admired moral philosopher in the Englishspeaking world today. And, as one might expect, for most of his professional life
he has been employed by institutions of higher education to perform precisely
this role. Yet for a brief period in his career, a few years which encompassed
the upheavals of 1968, MacIntyre was employed as a Professor of Sociology at
the University of Essex at Colchester. The exceptional nature of this entry in his
CV is not, however, an aberration, but the institutional aspect of a phase in his
intellectual development which saw Macintyre interrogate and deploy the methods
and categories of sociology, and of the social sciences more generally, with a level of
sympathy unexpected in the light of his previous positions.
In his earliest publications, MacIntyre attempted to establish the inner
connections and similarities between Christianity and Marxism. His first major
work, Marxism: an Interpretation, famously argued that the two most relevant
books in the modern world are St. Marks Gospel and Marxs National Economy
and Philosophy, but they must be read together (MacIntyre 1953: 109). During
this phase of his thought MacIntyre had very little to say about sociology except
as we shall see to argue that Marx was not a sociologist. Around 1958, when
MacIntyre temporarily abandoned religious belief, he began to describe himself
as a Marxist and this self-identification lasted for approximately ten years. He
also began to discuss sociology in ways which were often highly critical, although
usually respectful towards the founding fathers Weber and especially Durkheim
(see, e.g., MacIntyre 1961 and MacIntyre 1965). Nevertheless, there was a clear
difference in the attitude he displayed towards sociology in his political writings
for the socialist press and his professional writings for academic journals: in the
latter it was taken with much greater seriousness.
From his public disavowal of Marxism and revolutionary politics in 1968,
however, sociology moved from being a subordinate element in his thinking to
the standpoint from which he now assessed both Christianity and Marxism as
ideologies. But by 1973, in a further dramatic reversal, MacIntyre had come to
regard sociology itself as essentially ideological and its practitioners at least as
complicit in undemocratic practices as the Marxist revolutionaries from whom
he now distanced himself. MacIntyres conversion to Roman Catholicism and
adoption of Aristotelianism in its Thomist form in the early 1980s coincided
160
with the publication of After Virtue, the work which both consolidated his global
reputation and extended his critique of sociology still further. Weberianism in
particular was now indicted, not only as an ideological barrier to comprehending
society, but as an actual programme for bureaucratic domination over it.
MacIntyres engagement with sociology has been as lost as was, until
recently, his engagement with Marxism, although the former is in fact inseparable
from the latter. Both critics and admirers relentlessly fixate on After Virtue and its
sequels, and consequently tend to relegate his earlier work to mere sketches for
them. Yet an understanding of those books, and in particular the extremity of their
anti-Weberianism, can only be achieved by examining MacIntyres work over a
longer timescale, starting with his Marxist phase.
The Unhappy Relationship of Marxism and Sociology
MacIntyres original position was in many respects a conventional one among
Marxists. The concept of Marxist sociology is now very familiar, but a cohort of
Marxist sociologists within Western colleges and universities only emerged during
the 1970s. Prior to that point there was a small minority of mainly North American
radical sociologists, of whom Wright Mills and Gouldner were the best-known; but
Marxist sociologists were extremely rare. In the UK during the 1950s and 1960s,
sociologists, even left-wing sociologists, tended to be suspicious of Marxism. As
one leading British sociologist, A.H. Halsey, wrote of his colleagues at the London
School of Economics, they were committed to a socialism that had no need of
Marxism and no need for communism precisely because it was so deeply rooted
in working-class provincialism (Halsey 2004: 84). Stuart Hall ploughed a lonely
furrow in the emergent field of cultural studies while John Westergaard, more
closely concerned with central questions of class, only published his substantial
work in the mid-1970s; and they were rare exceptions. If other Marxists were
employed as sociologists then their theoretical views found expression through
political activism rather than their academic work. Why was the discipline so
forbidding for total critiques of capitalist society?
As some Nanterre students explained during the French explosion of 1968, the
reason trainee sociologists like themselves were in the vanguard of the revolt was
not because their discipline encouraged them to question the existing order, but
for precisely the opposite reason: it was integrated into the structures of capitalist
power. They were rebelling against sociology as part of their rebellion against
the larger system which sociology helped to uphold (Cohn-Bendit, Dutiel, Gerard
and Granautier 1968). This is not to make the absurd suggestion that all sociology
has been intrinsically counter-revolutionary or supportive of capitalism, although
figures such as Spencer and Parsons clearly were; but the tendency is clear and can
be traced back to the founders themselves. Take their immersion in nationalism:
MacIntyre once noted of Durkheim and Weber: In 1914 when the barbarism of
bourgeois civilization erupted in World War I, each identified his own nation as
161
being enlisted in the cause of civilization and his nations opponents as being
enlisted in that of barbarism (MacIntyre 1974: 25).
At the end of the revolutionary period in the mid-1970s, Tom Bottomore,
another of the very few British Marxist sociologists, produced a short book called
Marxist Sociology. In it, he treated virtually everything Marxists had written as
illustrative of his title, although intellectual honesty led him to call a key section
Marxists against sociology (Bottomore 1975: 3148). This accurately reflected
the attitude of the Classical Marxist tradition, which had always been unremitting
hostile, from Marxs own intemperate dismissal (this shitty positivism) of
Comtes pseudo-encyclopaedic posturing onwards (Marx 1987: 292). Only
Bukharins attempt to redefine Marxism as a system of sociology in 1921 stands
out from the consensus (Bukharin 1925). But the mechanical formulations for
which this work is notorious indicate the problems involved in assimilating one
to the other. Bukharin was heavily criticized by Lukcs (1972) and even more
severely by Gramsci, who understood that sociology was in effect an alternative to
Marxism, not only incompatible with, but opposed to it: Has not sociology tried
to do something similar to the philosophy of praxis? In his view Bukharin had
effectively embraced the philosophy of non-philosophers: Vulgar evolutionism
is at the root of sociology, and sociology cannot know the dialectical principle
with its passage from quantity to quality (Gramsci 1971b: 426, Q1126). In
some respects this blanket rejection was unfair and can partly be explained by the
intensity of contemporary class conflicts which tended to militate against more
discriminating judgements. If we were to only select works from the two decade
before the First World War, Simmels essay on the effects of urbanism on modern
consciousness, or Webers on the reasons for the decline of Roman civilization
are scarcely minor or nugatory contributions to social thought (Simmel 1971;
Weber 1998). Beyond the politics of that particular conjuncture, Marxist distrust
of sociology was not because it was completely unable to produce any insights,
but rather because the methods it employed were designed to prevent overall
comprehension of the social world.
In After Virtue MacIntyre praises the Scottish Enlightenment figure Adam
Ferguson for seeing the institution of modern commercial society as endangering
at least some traditional virtues: It is Fergusons type of sociology which
seeks to lay bare the empirical, causal connection between virtues, practices and
institutions (MacIntyre 1985: 1956). MacIntyre is a undoubtedly right to admire
Ferguson; but contrary to these claims the latter was not a sociologist, any
more than his colleague Adam Smith was an economist, popular though these
classification are. Take, for example the effusions of Arthur Herman:
The Scottish Enlightenment embarked on nothing less than a massive reordering
of human knowledge. It sought to transform every branch of learning literature
and the arts; the social sciences; biology, chemistry, geology, and the other
physical and natural sciences into a series of organized disciplines that could
be taught and passed on to posterity (Herman 2001: 54).
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But to claim that the Scottish Enlightenment created these specialisms is to invert
the truth: academic specialization presents a world of fragments, something
which would have been alien to Smith and his contemporaries, who still required
scientific knowledge of the world as a whole. The subjects which Herman lists
were merely different ways of approaching human social development and their
boundaries co-existed and often overlapped, to say the least and extended to the
natural sciences. In the late 1780s Dugald Stewart wrote in a letter that he was
now employed in premeditating two Lectures the one on the Air-Pump, and
the other on the Immortality of the Soul (Veitch 1854: lvi, note). Not only did Sir
John Dalrymple write An Essay towards a History of Feudal Property in Great
Britain (1757), he was also a chemist who invented a process for manufacturing
soap out of herrings (Ridpath 1922: 1656, note 1). Strict disciplinary categories
did not exist during the lifetime of these thinkers, and their establishment, between
the 1830s and 1870s, was one indication that the Enlightenment had ended as an
intellectual movement expressive of the heroic phase of the bourgeois ascendancy.
The birth of the disciplines saw the end of totality as a characteristic of mainstream
theory. The most obvious example, Smiths The Wealth of Nations (1776),
illustrates what was lost. We can find in this work elements which would now be
allocated to economics, sociology and psychology, but also to history and
moral philosophy; but to read these categories backwards into it is to commit a
teleological error. Nor was Smith an early exemplar of interdisciplinarity; he saw
the world as a whole, and drew on the modes of thought some as yet untitled
necessary to understand it. As John Dwyer comments:
Writing during a period before psychology, economics, politics and sociology
had been hived off into separate disciplines, they were constantly confronted
with the need to make their findings square with a more comprehensive
human reality. Only with considerable difficulty could they assume an isolated
individual, an ideal market, a political model or social laws (Dwyer 1998: 197).
Interestingly, it is in MacIntyres recent thought that he makes this argument most

clearly: The established scheme of human knowledge in the Scottish seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was and to some limited degree this persisted into the
nineteenth century a unitary and more or less integrated scheme, the articulated
disciplinary parts of which involved continual reference to one another.
MacIntyre notes that this had implications for the professors, who had to be
widely knowledgeable outside their own special discipline (MacIntyre 1988:
250). Although written specifically about Scotland, which MacIntyre claims as
the site of a particular tradition, he in effect sees integration as characteristic
of Enlightenment thought as a whole, compared with that of the present. Today,
instead of practically effective social thought he argues that we have a set of
small-scale academic publics within each of which rational discourse is carried
on, but whose discourse is of such a kind as to no practical effect on the conduct of
social life (MacIntyre 2006: 185). The birth of the social sciences involved the
163
dismemberment of the master-category of Political Economy and the fragmentation

of knowledge about the social world into a series of discrete subjects, each dealing
with a particular aspect of social life. Why?
Weber himself argued that inescapable aspects of capitalist modernity were the
conjoined drives toward specialization and its accompaniment, professionalization,
in the academy as much as in the organization of the state or business enterprise.
From this perspective sociology is simply a specific example of a general process.
At one point Weber felt it necessary to apologize for straying outside his own
discipline, even though he regarded that as unavoidable:
however objectionable it may be, such trespassing on other special fields
cannot be avoided in comparative work. But one must take the consequences by
resigning oneself to considerable doubts concerning the degree of ones success.
Fashion and the zeal of the literati would have us think that the specialist can
to-day be spared, or degraded to a position subordinate to that of the seer. Almost
all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable view-points. But
dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of science (Weber 1976: 29).
Webers argument here is disingenuous, as the necessity for a serious and scholarly
approach to intellectual work is quite separable from the validity or otherwise of
the disciplinary fields within which such work is undertaken.
But disciplinary fragmentation was not simply a product of the specialization
internal to capitalist production it was also consequent on the changed position of
the bourgeoisie in relation to the other social classes. Knowledge of the world as
a whole was necessary for a bourgeoisie still struggling for power; once in power,
clarity was reserved for those mechanisms necessary to maintain the functioning
of the system. Although overstated, Lukcs nevertheless identified an important
aspect of the bourgeois world-view: The survival of the bourgeoisie rests on the
assumption that it never obtains a clear insight into social preconditions of its
own existence (Lukcs 1971: 225). Sociology was a response to the strains of
industrialization and the threat of working class revolution; but also specifically
conceived as an alternative to the Marxism which was associated with working
class politics (Anderson 1992: 5660; Therborn 1976: 13544). Sociology held a
special place in the new disciplinary firmament since it was the one which came
closest to reproducing the lost wholeness of Enlightenment thought, but in a
radically impoverished way.
Marxism, however, did retain the Enlightenment notion of totality. Marxist
analysis may focus on specific aspects of social life Marxs Capital is one of
the most sustained examples of such an analysis but it has to do so without
succumbing to the notion that the economic can be abstracted from the social
or the political: analysis of any particular aspect is only a moment in the whole.
In short, there is no Marxist sociology or Marxist economics or Marxist anything
else; there is just Marxism, although it will necessarily intersect with the subject
matter of these disciplines (Harvey 2001: 778; Ollman 2003: 13940). This does
164
not mean that Marxism is a theory of everything; it is rather an attempt to explain

how historical change has taken place in the past and how human beings can make
history in the present, under conditions which the past has bequeathed to them
(Eagleton 1997: 345; Eagleton 2003: 334). Other theories or methods, often on
the borderline of social and natural science such as those associated with Darwin
or Freud, are necessary to explain aspects of existence for which Marxism has
no locus. Both evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis were compatible with
Marxism, but they were distinct from it.
The final difference between Marxism and sociology concerned the distinction
between is and ought or, more precisely, their respective attitudes towards science
(and facts) on the one hand and politics (and values) on the other. Weber
famously argued that the intrusion of the latter into the realm of the former was
a matter of scandal (Weber 1948: 1457). But the adoption of any set of political
values involved a necessarily arbitrary choice (Weber 2004: 355). Interestingly,
there is a strand in Marxist thought which takes a similar position, starting with
Engels:
When one is an economist, a man of science, one does not have an ideal. One
elaborates scientific results, and when one is, to boot, a party man, one struggles
to put them into practice. But when one has an ideal, one cannot be a man of
science, having, as one then does, preconceived ideas (Engels 1995: 183).
This is one of the actually quite rare occasions where Engels was being
genuinely undialectical. The dualism expressed here was, however, entirely
typical of the dominant neo-Kantian tendency of the Second International and
expressed most clearly by Hilferding in his 1911 claim that Marxism was only
a theory of the laws of motion of society, with no necessary consequences
for action: For it is one thing to acknowledge a necessity, and quite another
thing to work for that necessity (Hilferding 1981: 234). Equally typical was
the opposition of the Hegelian Marxist current which emerged during the First
World War in solidarity with the Russian Revolution, but Karl Korsch act
here as a surrogate for them this tendency. He noted, against Hilferding, that
historical materialism is incompatible with separate branches of knowledge
that are isolated and autonomous, and with purely theoretical investigations
that are scientifically objective in dissociation from revolutionary practice. If
the fluid methodology of Marxs materialist dialectic was simply transformed
into a number of theoretical formulations about the causal interconnection of
historical phenomena in different areas of society the consequence could only
be a general systematic sociology (Korsch 1970: 60, 62). He did not regard this
outcome as desirable.
The overall position was perhaps most clearly stated by Lucien Goldmann in
1957, in a critique of Maximilien Rubels claim that Marx had failed to resolve
a tension between revolutionary ethics and scientific investigation: Statements
and evaluations being indissolubly linked in Marxs work the value judgment
165
is never autonomous and independent of the analysis of facts, and thereby is not
ethical, while the statements are never objective and free from any particular
standpoint, and thereby are not sociological (Goldmann 1968: 20). Rubel had
also received similar criticism the previous year, for a collection of Marxs
writings co-edited with Bottomore. And here we can rejoin our main subject,
for the reviewer was MacIntyre himself, prefiguring Goldmanns position: The
attempt to present Marx as a scientific sociologist in the modern sense is like
presenting Hamlet as a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (MacIntyre
1956: 266). Yet, curiously, the period of his adherence to Marxism, which began
shortly afterwards saw him modify his position.
MacIntyres Initial Critique of Social Science
MacIntyres first major paper on social science itself was A Mistake about
Causality in Social Science, published in 1962, writes Stephen Turner (2003:
75). In fact, his first discussion of social science in general and sociology in
particular appeared two years earlier in a directly political intervention for the
New Left, two years into his Marxist phase. Breaking the Chains of Reason
made the case for Marxism as a method by defending it against the criticisms
of Karl Popper, who had claimed that Marxism was deficient on three main
grounds, all of which supposedly tended towards totalitarianism on the Russian
model. MacIntyre briefly dismantles these positions, which were at the time
treated as incontestable, not only within orthodox social science, but also on the
right-wing of the Labour Party.
First, Popper claimed Marxism was historicist, meaning that it claimed to have
discovered the underlying trends of historical development and could therefore
predict future patterns of events. But Marx did not believe that he had discovered
the inevitable course of human history, but a potential outcome made possible by
developments within capitalism:
Knowledge of the trends that are dominant is for Marx an instrument for
changing them. So his belief that he has uncovered the economic law of
motion of capitalist society is not a belief in an absolute trend, but a trend
whose continuance is contingent on a variety of factors including our activity
(MacIntyre 2008b: 150).
There are two issues here, both of which MacIntyre was to address in greater detail
over the next half-decade.
One is the identification of social trends. So, all history is the history of
class struggle is not a generalization built up from instances, so much as a
framework without which we should not be able to identify our instances; yet
also a framework which could not be elaborated without detailed empirical study
(MacIntyre 2008b: 151; Marx and Engels 1973: 67). MacIntyre had evidently
166
read the Grundrisse by the mid-1960s, before it had been translated into English
(MacIntyre 2008d: 3223). He was therefore aware that the general method
of Political Economy described by Marx there as obviously scientifically
correct begins with an abstract conception, proceeds by moving back and forth
between it and concrete examples in a process that deepens the original concept
and eventually arrives at a view of the concrete as a rich totality of many
determinations and relations (Marx 1973: 100102). MacIntyre himself wrote
the knowledge of man himself depends on grasping the individual as part of a
totality:
Yet we cannot grasp the totality except insofar as we understand the individuals
who comprise it. Marx wrote: A loom is a machine used for weaving. It is only
under certain conditions that it becomes capital; isolated from these conditions
it is as far from being capital as gold, in its natural state, is from being coin of
the realm. What are these conditions? They include both the existence of a
whole system of economic activity and the informing of human activities and
intentions by concepts which express the relationships characteristic of the
system. We identify a loom as capital or gold as coin only when we have grasped
a whole system of activities as a capitalist or monetary system. The individual
object or action is identifiable only in the context of the totality; the totality is
only identifiable as a set of relationships between individuals. Hence we must
move from parts to whole and back from whole to parts (MacIntyre 2008e: 313;
Marx 1977: 211).
The other issue is in relation to human self-activity. Shortly before Breaking

the Chains of Reason appeared in print, MacIntyre wrote, in a directly political
context, of how the social world cannot be treated as subject to objective and
insurmountable laws:
The Marxist standpoint starts from the view that this question is not a question
about a system outside us, but about a system of which we are a part. What
happens to it is not a matter of natural growth or mechanical change which we
cannot affect. We do not have to sit and wait for the right objective conditions
for revolutionary action. Unless we act now such conditions will never arise
(MacIntyre 2008a: 102).
As it stands this passage is susceptible to voluntarist interpretation, but four years

later MacIntyre refined his position, drawing explicitly on Goldmanns work on
the similarities between tragic and dialectical thought:
Both know that one cannot first understand the world and only then act in it.
How one understands the world will depend in part on the decision implicit
in ones already taken actions. The wager of action is unavoidable (MacIntyre
2008e: 314. See also, e.g., Goldmann 1968: 18).
167
This aspect of MacIntyres thought clearly has affinities with that of Antonio
Gramsci: In reality one can foresee to the extent that one acts, to the extent that
one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the
result foreseen (Gramsci 1971b: 438, Q1115).
The second of Poppers claims was that Marxism ascribed views and actions
to collective social actors, particularly classes, whereas in reality only individuals
could be said to possess these qualities. MacIntyre however argued that, as an
alternative to dealing with collectives, methodological individualism was
incoherent:
You cannot characterize an army by referring to the soldiers who belong to it.
For to do that you have to identify them as soldiers; and to do that is already to
bring in the concept of an army. For a soldier just is an individual who belongs to
an army. Thus we see that the characterization of individuals and of classes has
to go together. Essentially these are not two separate tasks (MacIntyre 2008b:
152).
The third of Poppers claims was that Marxism was partisan, seeking not to
discover partial scientific understanding, but to justify positions to which it was
already committed because of its historicism. MacIntyre argued that Popper is
wrong to demand objectivity, or as he puts it, a concern for means rather than ends.
On the one hand, means and ends cannot be separated in this way. On the other,
his claim is self-refuting:
For to assert that our concern can only be with the means and to add that the
result of that concern can only be limited and particular statements of social
correlation is already to be partisan. An example of what Popper takes to
be a genuine discovery of the social sciences is that You cannot have full
employment without inflation (the rider in our type of economy is not added).
If such limited discoveries are all that we can hope for from the social sciences,
it follows that we cannot hope to transform society as such; all that we can hope
to change are particular features of social life. To adopt this view of the means
available for social change is to commit oneself to the view that the only feasible
ends of social policy are limited reformist ones, and that revolutionary ends are
never feasible. To be committed to this is to be partisan in the most radical way
(Macintyre 2008b, 1523).
These arguments relate to social science methodology in general terms, but

Breaking the Chains of Reason also involved made a central criticism of
sociology in particular. All versions of the discipline, he argued, whether of
the right like Parsons or of the left like Wright Mills, shared a fundamental
determinism. Indeed, he was in some senses more critical of the latter who was of
course deeply critical of both the Grand Theory and what he called the Abstracted
Empiricism characteristic of the discipline because his elitism, his refusal to
168
ground his socialism in proletarian self-activity, tended to negate the otherwise

important critique of modern capitalism contained in his work (MacIntyre
2008b: 1546; MacIntyre 2008c: 2424). In the incandescent final paragraphs of
Breaking MacIntyre takes Keynes and Trotsky as great representative figures
exemplifying the contrast between bourgeois social science and revolutionary
Marxism, suggesting that intellectuals had to choose between them, including, of
course, himself.
The Sociological Turn
Against a general underlying positivism which, from Weber on, had assumed that
society could be analysed in the same way as nature, Breaking had asserted the
need for totality in this context, that society and nature do indeed have to be
understood in the same way, but historically and dialectically in both cases. Yet,
in relation to question of methodology, there was an ambiguity in MacIntyres
own position which emerged in the 1962 paper which Turner mistakenly argued
was his first major intervention in social science debates. Here MacIntyre took
seriously the theme of Winchs Idea of a Social Science (1958). In examining the
motives for action by particular groups, Winch argued, social science had to restrict
itself to elucidating their reasons adduced by the groups themselves, rather than
seeking underlying causes external to their own conceptual schemas. This was
useful to MacIntyre in that it allowed him to criticize Webers explanation for the
emergence of the Protestant work ethic, the details of which need not concern us
here (but see MacIntyre 1962: 55). MacIntyre did not accept the full extremity
of Winchs position, which would have relegated social science to a branch of
philosophy concerned with conceptual analysis, or his implicit relativism; what is
nevertheless of note is that this type of conception could co-exist with his Marxism.
Over the next 34 years, however, the former would impinge ever more strongly
on the latters terrain, although MacIntyre would develop specific criticisms of
Winchs own work (MacIntyre 1971a: 229). MacIntyres professional work as a
philosopher in particular begins to display a kind of dualism possibly influenced
by his reading of the early Lukcs in which positivism is deemed appropriate for
the natural sciences, but not for the social sciences.
It is clear that he had entertained doubts about the continuing validity of
Marxism from around 1965 (Davidson 2014: 1618). McMylor argues that
MacIntyre had made his sociological turn roughly between this point and 1968,
particularly in his work on secularization and atheism (McMylor 1994: 318).
In the course of one of these discussions about secularization, MacIntyre noted:
Within sociology at the moment there is a dispute between those who want to
stress that the analysis of a society and the explanation of its forms should be in
terms of its basic norms and values, and those, ranging from David Reisman at
one end of the scale and the Marxists at the other, who want to argue that either
technological or economic or demographic relationships are more fundamental.
169
MacIntyre then affirmed that his own position was both largely on the Marxist
side of the argument and incompatible with certain parts of classical Marxism:
It turns out to be false that, as Marx put it, The ruling ideas are always
the ideas of the ruling class. For the key ideas of British society, the ideas
typified by the secondary virtues, are ideas of the necessity of class compromise
and class co-operation, and that if the ruling class had tried, and when the ruling
class did try, to impose their own virtues and values on other groups, when for
instance they tried to use religion as a class weapon, they failed to make these
ideas the ideas of the community as a whole (MacIntyre 1967: 35; Marx and
Engels 1976: 59).
These formulations were not new in MacIntyres writings. All sorts of facts may
limit social consciousness, he wrote in International Socialism the year before
these lectures were delivered: But false consciousness is essentially a matter of
partial and limited insight rather than of simple mistake (MacIntyre 2008d: 2523).
But Marx and Engels early formulations on the ruling ideas redolent as they
are of a residual Enlightenment elitism were not the last word of Classical
Marxism on the subject. Here, as is the case in a number of areas, MacIntyres nonengagement with Gramsci, in this case in relation to his writings on contradictory
consciousness, forces him to look for explanatory frameworks outwith Marxism
which can in fact be found within it (e.g., Gramsci 1971a: 3334, Q1112).
What seems to have occurred is that MacIntyre, from a position of accepting
a dualist approach to the social and natural sciences in which positivism was
appropriate to the latter, moved to one in which it was also appropriate to the former
the very position he had originally rejected. In effect this was the methodological
expression of his lack of confidence in the explanatory power of Marxism and
abandonment of the category of totality. More significantly, however, MacIntyre
still drew on Marxist positions to argue for the essential historicity of certain
concepts, meaning that they become incomprehensible after the conditions which
gave rise to them have disappeared (MacIntyre 1971b; see also MacIntyre 1966:
18). In his critique of Baruch Knei-Pazs book on Trotsky, he wrote, there is no
way to do the history of ideas adequately without doing genuine history and, more
particularly, that the treatment of social and political ideas in abstraction from
those contexts from which they derive life is doomed to failure, something which
Trotsky knew very well (MacIntyre 1979: 114). The irony, however, that he used
this approach to explain what he regarded as the inadequacy of Marxism itself.
MacIntyres version of the Pascalian wager depended on the possibility of
the working class performing a revolutionary role, but he now no longer believed
that this was possible. Ironically, given his earlier critique of Popper, he seems to
have treated this failure in Popperian terms as an empirical refutation of the theory
of proletarian revolution. MacIntyre argued that hitherto Marxists had explained
away the failure of Marxs predictions either by claiming that time scale was
simply longer than had hitherto been supposed, or by a series of supplementary
170
hypotheses including those of the labour aristocracy and doctrinal corruption,

but these were ways of avoiding two painful facts: The first of these was that the
working class not just its leadership was either reformist or unpolitical except
in the most exceptional of circumstances, not so much because of the inadequacies
of its trade union and political leadership as because of its whole habit of life
(MacIntyre 1968a: 9091). MacIntyre adopted this version of the argument as the
sixties drew to a close:
It would be inconsistent with Marxism itself to view Marxism in any other way:
in particular, what we cannot do is judge and understand Marxist theory as it
has really existed with all its vicissitudes in the light of some ideal version of
Marxism. It follows that by the present time to be faithful to Marxism we have to
cease to be Marxists; and whoever now remains a Marxist has thereby discarded
Marxism (MacIntyre 1970: 61).
The point therefore, was not that Marxism had never been true, but that it no
longer was:
[Marx] envisages the concentration of workers in large factory units and the
limits set upon the growth of wages as necessary conditions for the growth of
[political] consciousness; but he says nothing about how or why the workers will
learn and assimilate the truths which Marxism seeks to bring to them. Indeed,
one might write the history of the age which Marxism illuminated so much more
clearly than any other doctrine did, the period from 1848 to 1929, as one in
which Marxs view of the progress of capitalism was substantially correct, but at
the end of which the Marxist script for the world drama required the emergence
of the European working-class as the agent of historical change, the workingclass turned out to be quiescent and helpless (MacIntyre 1970: 423).
There is, however, a second irony here, which MacIntyre believed explained
the failure of the working class and consequently of Marxism. MacIntyres
previously insistence on the capacity of human self-activity to transform the
world had mainly been in relation to the working class and one of his grounds
for distinguishing between the social and natural sciences (MacIntyre 2008d:
26061). He now argued that the capitalist class itself was in a position to
effectively regulate the economy and thus prevent the recurrence of crisis,
reducing the possibility of working class dissatisfaction and contributing to the
quiescence especially after 1945, when the ability of capitalism to innovate in
order to maintain its equilibrium and its expansion was of a radically new kind.
Consequently, not only has the future crisis of capitalism had for those who
wished to retain the substance of the classical Marxist view to be delayed,
there had to be additional explanations why, in the new situation, capitalism is
still liable to crisis in the same sense as before (MacIntyre 1968: 105). He did
not find these explanations convincing.
171
It is interesting, however, to examine one of the explanations he rejects.

MacIntyres argument against Marcuse was in part because the latter too easily
accepted the claims of US social and political scientists like Bell and Lipset
about a West in which class consensus reigned on the basis of apparently
endless growth, providing previously unimagined levels of welfare and mass
consumption, presided over by competing political elites. Not only did Marcuse
share the conventional view that fundamental conflicts had been resolved,
except at the margins of capitalist society; if anything he exaggerated the extent
of supposed social control even further, by imbuing it with a technologicaldeterminist character in which human aspirations were not merely suppressed,
but actually created. As MacIntyre pointed out, the problem with this was not
merely the elitist overtones why was Marcuse able to escape the domination
to which the vast majority of people were apparently subject? but that he
was, in all relevant ways, insufficient sociological in a positive sense: failing
to distinguish between liberal democratic and totalitarian regimes, especially
in their fascist form, and blind to the actual contradictions to which modern
capitalist societies gave rise among their working class populations nor least
by creating needs which they are incapable of meeting (MacIntyre 1970: 62
73). But perhaps the ferocity of MacIntyres rage at Marcuse is also partly
symptomatic of the fact that he too had decided that the working class was
incapable of liberating itself.
In Breaking the Chains of Reason he had concluded by quoting the
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted
the world, the point remains to change it (MacIntyre 2008b: 166; Marx 1975:
423). A decade later he concluded an essay on rationality be quoting them
again, in a rather different context: Happily or unhappily, the philosophers
cannot be restricted merely to interpreting the social sciences; the point
of their activity is to change them (MacIntyre 1971c: 259). The level of
ambition here is somewhat reduced, to say the least, but was this simply
MacIntyres inner Keynes triumphing over his inner Trotsky, as many of
his critics in effect claimed (Binns 1972: 412)? In fact, even after making
his shift towards sociology, MacIntyre could never completely commit to
it as an alternative to Marxism. For one thing, he could never completely
accept the very boundaries between aspects of social life enshrined in the
disciplines:
any given economic system, with its corresponding bodies of theory, always
involves a delimitation of the economic as contrasted with, say, the political or
the moral. But the concept of what belongs to the economic is indeed essentially
contestable (MacIntyre 1973b: 9).
As he notes, the boundaries of the economic constitute the essential difference

between bourgeois and Marxist economics; what he cannot bring himself to
recognize is Marxism rejects the very concept of the economic.
172
The tensions within his thought at this time are caught in a passage where he
clearly outlines the differences between Marx and Weber on the fundamental issue
of is and ought:
What Weber feared would result from the fusion of Is and Ought Marx believed
resulted from their separation. Yet in their different and incompatible ways
Marx and Weber are nonetheless alike in one crucial respect. Both see sociology
as not only the discovery of the facts about the social world, and even as the
ordering of those facts within a theoretical framework which will enable us to
understand and predict, but also and above all providing us with the kind of
grasp of social reality which will remove the hold on us of our own societys
characteristic forms of self-justification (MacIntyre 1968b: 400).
It is however intellectually incoherent simply to state that the standpoint adopted

by these thinkers can both provide insights: that may be true, but the positions are
antithetical to each other and cannot be maintained in tandem. MacIntyre resolved
this tension by discovering that Weberianism (and social science) and Marxism
(and revolutionary socialism) had more in common than was commonly supposed.
The Theory and Practice of Bureaucratic Domination
This discovery ensured that MacIntyres dalliance with sociology and the social
sciences more generally was relatively brief. In particular, around 1973 he began
to find in professional social science a parallel to the undemocratic practices
which he had earlier come to believe were intrinsic to contemporary revolutionary
organization, albeit from the other side of the barricades. The former constituted
a cohort of experts which drew up taxonomies and made predictions: his
taxonomic ordering represents a set of structures that determine the form of social
life in ways that ordinary agents do not perceive; and his predictions represent the
determinativeness of a future not available to ordinary agents. And, in a return
to the argument linking Parsons and Wright Mills, MacIntyre now claimed that
the concept of the expert does not appear merely in the work of the orthodox
political and social scientists; it is equally present in the work of their radical
opponents, not merely Lipset, but Gouldner also (MacIntyre 1973a: 33740).
But if radical sociology was complicit in the ideology of expertise,
revolutionaries themselves occupied the same prophetic or priestly role as the
fully orthodox. According to MacIntyre, they were likely to have five main
characteristics. First, an all-or-nothing existence, whose activities allow them,
second, to sustain a plausible social existence. Third, they must believe that their
activities have world-historical significance, justification for his revolutionary
beliefs, despite their apparent lack of significance in the world: In this way
miniscule Trotskyist groups can represent their faction fights as a repetition of
the great quarrels of the Bolshevik party. Fourth, the tension between activity
173
and aspiration give their lives life an inevitable precariousness: Joseph Conrad
understood this; so did Henry James; so, in his own way, did Trotsky. Fifth, and
finally, revolutionaries must feel their activities are justified by both history and
their own activity, but both are refutable by counter-examples: This requirement
is in obvious tension, however, with the revolutionarys commitment to make the
predictions derived from his theory come true (MacIntyre 1973a: 33741).
The professional social scientist claims to understand what is required to
maintain social stability; the professional revolutionary, what is required to
overthrow it; but both tend to be products of the same social class, united by a
common elitism. Both were also linked to a third group, the industrial managers:
The expert, whether professional social scientist, industrial manager, or
revolutionary, claims a special right to be consulted and a special right to be
maintained in a position where he is available to be consulted. The ideology
of expertise embodies a claim to privilege with respect to power (MacIntyre
1973a: 342).
For MacIntyre, revolutionaries were a Quixotic, dying breed. But the other two
groups were not, and they were closely linked, not as types, but as components
in a system of power. Few would disagree with the proposition that sociologists
cannot stand outside of the societies they seek to understand, but MacIntyre now
argued that, in certain respects at least, their work actually provided programmatic
material for state and industrial managers, whose activity they theorize: Molecules
do not read chemistry books; but managers do read books of organization theory
(MacIntyre 1998a: 64). These claims did of course lend further weight to his
argument concerning the difference between the natural and social sciences; but
methodology was not MacIntyres main concern at this stage in his argument,
which climaxed in the pages of After Virtue.
Here MacIntyre writes of particular social roles which are not merely
occupations, but recognizable characters, compelled to exhibit certain behaviours
in a way that say, a dentist, does not. Like the characters in Japanese Noh drama
or Medieval Mystery plays, we know what to expect from these characters
because their roles do not merely set limits on their action, but in a strong sense
determines it. Macintyre argues that the existence of these characters functions to
legitimate the societies of which they are a part, by which he does not mean that
they necessarily receive universal acceptance, but that even those who oppose
their social function have frame their opposition in relation to them. In this
context, MacIntyre refers, among other characters, to the Aesthete, the Therapist
and, of course, the Manager (MacIntyre 1985: 2331). This was not the first time
that the pages of MacIntyres work had been populated by characters embodying
certain positions. In Notes from the Moral Wilderness, written very early in
his Marxist career (19581959), MacIntyre wrote about the Stalinist, the Moral
Critic of Stalinism, the Liberal, the Marxist even; but these were characters
defined by their political choices rather than social positioning. Ironically, the
174
MacIntyre of After Virtue is in some ways closer to Marxs own approach in

Capital Volume 1, where he discusses the ways in which the Capitalist acts as
the social embodiment of capital, regardless of his personal wishes or rather,
the Capitalists do so, since the basis of capitalism in competitive accumulation
means that capitals always exist in the plural.
Under capitalist modernity, the type of bureaucracy represented by the Manager
is characteristic, not merely of the institutions of the capitalist state, but also of
capitals themselves, most obviously in the great multinational corporations; in
both cases managers claim to possess a special form of expertise:
Civil servants and managers alike justify themselves and their claims to authority,
power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of
social change. Thus there emerges an ideology which finds its classic expression
in a pre-existing social science theory: Webers account of bureaucracy.
the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient
way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate
mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in his (or later her)
ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge,
organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal law-like
generalizations (MacIntyre 1985: 86).
MacIntyre argues that although Webers account was drawn from analysis of the
organic, unplanned development of bureaucracy, above all in the classic form
displayed by the Prussian civil service, it was sufficiently accurate as a theorization
that it has been recognized as such, not only by sociologists, but by the bureaucrats
themselves, as expressed in the managerial and business textbooks which almost
universally employ this framework. In this sense then, Weber is, as Eric Olin
Wright presents him, a bourgeois Lenin, codifying but also extending the practice
of his class or at any rate the class he associated himself with in theory (Wright
1978: 1823). Weberianism was not only an analysis of bureaucracy, it was a
programme for establishing it. By this point, the most damning thing MacIntyre
could think to say about Marxists was this:
as Marxists organize and move towards power they always do and have
become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric; for
in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is
not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications
for authority which are not Weberian in form. And if this is true of Marxism
when it is on the road to power, who much more so when it arrives. When
Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends
to become Nietzschean fantasy. (MacIntyre 1985: 109, 262).
As this suggests, MacIntyre believe that people who are opposed to capitalism
or at least want it to be radically reformed share essentially the same social role.
175
Those who without abandoning the standpoint of civil society take themselves to
know in advance what needs to be done to effect needed change are those who
take themselves to be therefore entitled to manage that change. Others are to be
the passive recipients of what they as managers effect. This hierarchical division
between managers and managed is thus legitimated by the superior knowledge
imputed to themselves by the managing reformers, who have cast themselves in
the role of educator.
In this context MacIntyre refers to reformers like Owen and the Webbs, but also
(at least on occasion) to Lenin, suggesting that these characters include not
merely reformers but also revolutionaries (MacIntyre 1998b: 231).
Conclusion
MacIntyres embrace of what Knight calls revolutionary Aristotelianism in
After Virtue a position which the former later embraced allowed him to
escape from the paradox of seeking an alternative to Marxism in a body of
sociological thought and procedure which he came to identify with capitalist
bureaucracies, and this way actually moved in some respects back towards a
notion of totality closer to his original Marxist position (Knight 1996; Knight
2011; MacIntyre 1998c). Even though he has written of the need for practicebased local participatory community to understand and learn from both
Christianity and Marxism, he has not extended this to sociology (MacIntyre
2008g: 425).
MacIntyre originally embraced sociology as a substitute for the Christian
and Marxist perspectives which he came to believe could no longer explain
the world to his satisfaction, but found that it could not do so either: partly
because there is no single sociological theory which could provide that kind
of coherence; partly because in order to make any critical point, sociology
has to incorporate insights from other disciplines, which tends to call into
question the validity of the category of society detached from geography,
economy, polity or culture; partly because he found sociology as a practice to
be as oppressive as the traditions he had earlier embraced. These are certainly
problems for MacIntyre, but perhaps even more so for sociology.
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Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life, in On Individuality
and Social Forms, Donald I. Levine (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Therborn, Goran. 1976. Science, Class and Society: On the Formation of Sociology
and Historical Materialism. London: New Left Books.
Turner, Stephen P. 2003. MacIntyre in the Province of the Philosophy of the
Social Sciences, in Mark C. Murphy (ed.), Alasdair MacIntyre. Cambridge:
Veitch, John. 1854. Memoir of Dugald Stewart, in W. Hamilton (ed.), Dugald
Stewart, Collected Works, vol. 10. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable.
Weber, Max. 1948 [1918/1919]. Science as a Vocation, in Hans H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Weber, Max. 1976 [19041905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
London: George Allen and Unwin.
Weber, Max. 1994 [1919/1920]. The Profession and Vocation of Politics, in Peter
Lassman and Ronald Speirs (eds), Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Weber, Max. 1998 [1896]. The Social Causes of the Decline of Ancient
Civilization, in The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London:
Verso.
Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of A Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wright, Eric Olin. 1978 [1974]. Bureaucracy and the State, in Class, Crisis and
the State. London: Verso.
Chapter 11
Castoriadis and Social Theory:

From Marginalization to Canonization
to Re-radicalization
Christos Memos
Introduction
Koestlers (2005: 144) point that the most productive times for revolutionary
philosophy had always been the time of exile encapsulates well the state of
social thought in the years before and immediately after World War II. Over this
period, drastic changes took place around the globe and every aspect of social
life was influenced: economy, politics, standards of living, culture. Against this
background, many types of migration emerged, causing considerable impact
on societies and cultures. Amongst these, the migration of intellectuals grew in
volume and changed in character, particularly after the Nazis seizure of power
in Germany. The majority of the intellectual migrs moved from Hitlers Europe
to the United States and a smaller group fled to the United Kingdom. Although
the Germans influence and relatively large numbers was distinctive, this wave
of intellectual refugees included intellectuals from several European countries. A
large number of these illustrious intellectuals, who were forced to migrate prior
to 1940, were related to the social sciences: amongst so many others, economists
such as Joseph Shumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Wassily Leontief, Paul Baran,
Oscar Lange, Karl Polanyi and Franco Modigliani, as well as sociologists, political
scientists and philosophers such as Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo
Lowenthel, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, C.N. Friedrich,
Leo Strauss, Rudolf Carnap.
This forced expatriation concerned not only highly developed European
countries. In many developing countries scholars emigrated or were forced to
move from their countries to France, England or the United States. A typical
example of the latter was provided by Greece. During the period of the Second
World War some Greek intellectuals left the country, but the Greek migration
directed mostly to America was the smallest of all and entirely musical (Fermi
1971: 135). A considerable intellectual exodus from Greece to France took place
after the end of the Second World War, when Greece became one of the centres of
antagonism between the Soviet Union on the one hand and Great Britain and the
United States on the other. Due to Anglo-American intervention and the agreement
182
among the Great Powers, Greece was denied the right to freely decide upon its
own political and social system, thus remaining by force under the capitalist rule.
The British imperialist armed intervention and the conflict with the Greek popular
democratic movement resulted in the armed conflict of December 1944 (known
as Dekembriana), which was the prelude to the outbreak of the Greek civil war
(19461949). The military defeat of the left and resistance movement led to the
Varkiza Agreement, a peace agreement in name only. Instead of reconciliation,
non-violence and socio-political stability, the treaty signalled a new phase of
violence known as the White Terror period (19451946). Brutal right wing
violence, purges, rapes and atrocities were committed against the most progressive
and radical part of the Greek population. Thousands of people were prosecuted,
jailed and murdered and basic human rights and civil liberties were banned. Right
wing terrorism expanded into every aspect of Greek society and was coupled with
cultural decay and intellectual, scientific regression. Under these circumstances,
thousands of the poorest citizens fled to the mountains to survive. On the other
hand, some young Greeks, many of them of bourgeois origins, were given a
privileged way out from this tragic and critical situation.
In December 1945, approximately 220 young Greek intellectuals travelled on
a ship called Mataroa from Piraeus to France thanks to a scholarship provided
by the French government. This exodus could be viewed as the last part of the
intellectual migration that took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945. Among the
young immigrants were future leading Greek intellectuals, including the prominent
figure of Cornelius Castoriadis (19221997). Living and writing in post-war France,
Castoriadis contributed significantly to the flourishing of social and critical theory.
This chapter examines Castoriadiss trajectory from obscurity and the margins
of post-war French intellectual and political milieu to the misappropriation and
canonization of his thought after the 1970s and argues for a re-radicalization of his
thought. First, it considers his formative experience in Greece and examines how
the post-war French political, economic and ideological conditions and the group
and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie contributed to Castoriadiss radicalization, thus
consigning him, at the same time, to obscurity and marginalization. The chapter
goes on to investigate some reasons for the rising interest in the social and political
thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, expressed in both academic and political circles
after the 1970s and has led not only to his international recognition but also to a
triple diversion of the political and radical meaning of his theorizing. In the first
place, his work was nihilistically defamed, rejected and dismissed by the largest
part of the Marxist and radical Left. After the 1970s, Castoriadiss radical and left
critique of Totalitarianism, Marx and Marxism was misconstrued and misused by
the new philosophers. Over the last twenty years, his ideas have mostly been
praised and utilized in ways that deprived them of their original critical and radical
meaning or political significance. Castoriadiss project has been subjected to a
continuing canonization expressed through the construction of a new jargon. The
chapter concludes by arguing for a need to restore to Castoriadiss work its proper
political and radical problematic.
Castoriadis and Social Theory
183
Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie: Critical Theory in the Shadows

I was 30, came from America, and was searching in the ashes of 1946 for the
Phoenix egg, you were 20, came from Greece, from the uprising, from jail
You were Kostas Papaioannou, a universal Greek from Paris (Paz 1988: 537,
539). Octavio Paz, the Nobel prize-winning Mexican poet, wrote these verses
after the death of his friend philosopher Kostas Papaioannou, who was a friend
of Castoriadis and fellow-traveller on the Mataroa. Pazs poem also captures
succinctly the early years in Greece and the formative experience of Cornelius
Castoriadis. He was born on 11 March 1922 in Constantinople (Istanbul), and
grew up in Greece during the interwar period, where he received a first-rate
multilingual education, appropriate to his bourgeois background. From his
early years as a high school student, Castoriadis expressed a profound interest
in ancient Greek and Marxist philosophy. His intellectual inquiries led him
to political engagement, which was expressed through his participation in the
Greek communist movement. It was a period of intense political and ideological
conflicts that deeply influenced Castoriadiss later theoretical and political orbit.
The young Castoriadis experienced the Greek fascist regime of Metaxas (1936
1941) and the Nazi occupation of Greece. Later on, he decided to abandon
the Greek Communist Youth as soon as he realized that his efforts to alter the
chauvinistic policy, centralism and bureaucratization of the Greek communist
party (K.K.E.) were in vain.
He thus joined the Trotskyists and in particular, the anti-chauvinist group
led by Agis Stinas (19001987). Stinas was a leading member of the Greek
Communist Party, but later on he espoused Trotskyism and led several Trotskyist
groups that resulted from the fragmentation and numerous splits of the Trotskyist
Greek movement. Trotskyism and Stinass ideas had a strong and enduring
impact on Castoriadiss intellectual trajectory and determined his theoretical
problematic over the first twenty years of his life in France: the degeneration of
the Russian Revolution and the bureaucratization of the working class movement,
the role played by Lenin and Bolshevism and Trotskys unsatisfactory analysis
of the class character of the USSR. Because of their action, Castoriadis and his
Trotskyist comrades were persecuted by the Germans, the Greek Stalinists and
later on by the British army and the right-wing Greek government. In this respect,
in his formative years in Greece, Castoriadis became familiar with the actual
political function of both Stalinism and Trotskyism, and got a very strong taste
of the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the orthodox Marxism of the Greek
communist movement. More importantly, as a Trotskyist during the occupation
years, he ran the risk of being arrested and murdered by the Greek Stalinists,
inducing obsessions or traumas, which were to be mirrored in his later critique
of Marx and Marxism. Also and while Castoriadis was still living in Greece, he
expressed a strong interest in the phenomenon of bureaucracy by studying and
writing on the thought of Max Weber ( 1988). Later on in France,
the efforts he made to explicate the class nature of the USSR and interpret Soviet
184
society were determinedly influenced by Webers views. Castoriadis constructed

two ideal types that belonged to the same system of bureaucratic capitalism,
describing the USSR as total bureaucratic capitalism and the western societies as
fragmented bureaucratic capitalism.
Castoriadiss exodus to France in 1945 not only saved his life but also provided
him with the opportunity to continue his studies, combining his personal experience
in Greece with new theoretical concerns and influences. Based on this formative
experience, Castoriadis pursued his political commitment and remained active in
the Trotskyist movement by joining the French section of the Fourth international
(International Communist Party). It was there that he met Claude Lefort and along
with some other members of the party formed a small oppositional group. Lefort
very characteristically remembered his first encounter with Castoriadis:
I first heard him lecture to the Party on the USSR in preparation for the Third
Congress. His analysis overwhelmed me. I was convinced by him before he even
reached his conclusion. I would have never been able to articulate the economic
foundation that he provided for his conclusion. Castoriadiss arguments seemed
to me worthy of the best Marx, but the Trotskyists deemed them heresy (Lefort
19761977: 174).
In 1948, however, they left the French Trotskyist party, basically rejecting the
Trotskyist explication of the Stalinist phenomenon. One year later, Castoriadis and
Lefort founded a radical independent political and theoretical group and published
the first issue of the journal Socialisme Ou Barbarie in March 1949. This means that,
from his very first years in France, Castoriadis chose to pass through the Scylla of the
orthodox Marxists and the Charybdis of the liberal intellectuals and viewed himself
as a radical and independent scholar and, concomitantly, as a leftist opposition to
the Left. Going against the tide he successfully resisted both the pressure from the
ideological dominance of the French Communist Party and the marketization of
intellectuals. It is important to stress here that the French Communist Party reached
the peak of its influence and won five million votes in 1945 and by 1947 it consisted
of 900,000 members. Needless to say, the French communist intellectuals remained
anchored in their traditional Soviet-type Marxist interpretations of the world.
Against this background, Castoriadiss political and theoretical stance posited a
strong continuity with Max Horkheimers premise that the real social function of
philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent (1972: 264). In pursuing this
end, he challenged what was prevalent in the Marxist theoretical tradition in his
time: the orthodox Marxism of the second and third international. Based on Marxs
thought he attacked orthodox Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism.
He also resisted the reduction of Marxian thought to ideology and attempted an
uncompromising critique of the Soviet Union, when the vast majority of the socalled leftist intellectuals did not dare challenge the dominance of the orthodoxy of
the Communist Parties. It was, as Papaioannou would characterize this struggle, les
ides contre l ideologie (Papaioannou, 1969: 46).
185
For Castoriadis, the crisis and contradictions in orthodox Marxist thought

could not be overcome separately from the social reality of orthodox Marxism.
He launched his immanent critique of Marxism in an attempt at defending Marx
from the orthodoxy. The critical confrontation with Trotskys thought revealed
his inconsistencies and brought to the surface his claim that it was necessary
to re-examine the question of the class nature of the USSR. For Castoriadis,
more specifically, Trotsky was responsible for theoretical monstrosities and his
blindness to Stalinism was a blindness of its own origins: of the bureaucratic
tendencies organically incorporated into the Bolshevik party from the start
(Castoriadis 1988a: 8). These bureaucratic tendencies were clear both in the
analysis of the USSR and the structure of the Trotskyist parties. In Leforts
words, little by little the Trotskyist party appeared to me to be a microcosm,
which at its heart reproduced the models of behavior and social relations
typical of bureaucratic organization (Lefort 19761977: 175). Thus, instead of
analysing the nature of Stalinism and the bureaucracy and their implications,
Trotsky reiterated and reproduced conventional Leninist practices and
theoretical schemata. Similar to Leninism, Trotskyism disregarded the idea of
the autonomous action of the working class and its self-government and proved
to be a serious obstacle to a radical critique of the traditional revolutionary
organizations.
Drawing much of his inspiration from Russia (19171918), Spain (1936)
and Hungary (1956) Castoriadis argued that the content of the socialist
reorganization of society is first of all workers management of production
(Castoriadis 1988b: 95). In this sense, Castoriadis determinedly castigated
the Leninist notion of the Party, making the claim that the true creator of
totalitarianism is Lenin since it was Lenin himself who created the institution
without which totalitarianism is inconceivable and which is today falling into
ruin: the totalitarian party (Castoriadis 1997a: 65). Castoriadis brought to
our attention the fact that one of the focal points for a critical understanding
of the decline of the Russian Revolution was the struggle between the
Workers Opposition and the Bolshevik leadership. Contrary to the prevailing
mythology, for Castoriadis, it was not in 1927, or in 1923, or even in 1921 that
the game was played and lost, but much earlier, during the period from 1918
to 1920 (Castoriadis 1993a: 98). This struggle mirrored the two contradictory
elements of Marxism: the Workers Opposition represented the most radical
and subversive elements of the Marxist tradition, emphasizing and privileging
the self-organization, self-determination and self-emancipation of the working
class. Conversely, the Leninist position reflected Marxisms positivism, as well
as its own economistic and developmental logic, and played an instrumental
role in shaping the character and nature of the former Soviet Union. Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR: Four Letters, Four Lies (Morin 1998:
3). This claim summarizes Castoriadiss views regarding the actual character
of the Soviet regime in a nutshell. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that the
Russian question was and remains the touchstone of the theoretical and
186
practical attitudes that call for revolution, and this question was also the richest
vein, the royal road to the comprehension of the most important problems of
contemporary society (Castoriadis 1988a: 7).
Castoriadis endeavored to develop a rich and in-depth analysis of the Soviet
regime, not of course without inconsistencies and imitations. In these theoretical
elaborations, he underwent a number of conceptual turns that were depicted in
the different terms he used in order to conceptualize the peculiarity of the Soviet
regime: a new historical formation, a third historical solution, bureaucratic
society, total bureaucratic capitalism, total and totalitarian bureaucratic
capitalism and stratocracy. What could be considered as the lynch-pin that
linked all the above-mentioned designations is Castoriadiss persistence in
critically re-evaluating the USSR by stressing its distinctiveness as a new
social and historical formation. Working within Marxism, he contrasted Marxs
thought with the several modalities of Marxism claiming to incarnate it. This
juxtaposition and his critical confrontation with the historical and political facts
(e.g., the Hungarian Uprising of 1956) led him to make an effort to elucidate
and explore the stagnation and crisis of Marxism. Yet, in his numerous attempts
to make sense of the theory and practice of the Russian enigma, he came to
the point of realizing not only the discontinuity between Marx and orthodox
Marxism, but he was also led to argue that the problems and obstacles which
existed in the theory and practice of Marxism could be traced back to Marxs
own thought. In other words, dealing with the intractable issue of the nature of
the Soviet regime and indicating how Marxs meaning was misconstrued by
Trotsky and Lenin, Castoriadis worked within Marxism and moved from Marx
to Marxism and vice versa. Hence, he emphatically noted that Capital is to be
read in the light of Russia, not Russia in the light of Capital (Castoriadis 1997b:
228).
Seeking to identify Marxs responsibility for the metamorphosis of orthodox
Marxism to state ideology and reformist practice, Castoriadis raised penetrating
questions with regard to Marxs writings with a view to tracing the metaphysical
presuppositions and positivistic elements of his thought. His critique was premised
on two basic pillars: first, he recognized that Marxs deification of the concept
of technique determined Marxs theory of history and his analysis of capitalism;
and second, he argued that Marx was deeply immersed in the values of Western
humanism and in capitalist imaginary significations. Castoriadis articulated
a radical critique of Marxism and Marx during the 1950s and 1960s and was
automatically pushed by the Stalinist intellectuals and the French Communist
Party to the margins of intellectual debate. As Khilnani has pointed out,
after the defeat of fascism, in an atmosphere thick with accusations of
collaboration and betrayal, anti-Fascism was most easily displayed by support
for the Soviet Union. In this context, the anti-Soviet and revolutionary critique
made by those such as Castoriadis and Lefort could not gain much force
(Khilnani 1993: 135).
187
Castoriadis had great difficulties in taking French citizenship and was only
granted full French citizenship in 1970. Over this period, Castoriadis wrote
using pseudonyms such as Paul Cardan, Pierre Chaulieu, Jean Delvaux and
Jean-Marc Coudray, for fear of endangering his migr status in France
(Khilnani 1993: 130). As a group, Socialisme Ou Barbarie had a very restricted
influence and Castoriadis very eloquently described this marginalization:
We were absolutely isolated. There was a period when, after the outbreak
of the Korean war, we were less than a dozen in the group. And the audience
was extremely limited, residual ultra-leftist groups (Castoriadis 1990: 36).
Later on, the situation started to change and the political events and changes
that took place after the death of Stalin gave a new vigour to Socialisme Ou
Barbarie. In Castoriadiss words:
After 1953 with Stalin dead, the Berlin revolt, the Czechoslovakian strikes in
54, then Hungary and Poland in 56, the atmosphere started changing, and the
review gained some audience-never very important. At the time we were selling
about 1,000 copies of the magazine, which were read around. Then came the
Algerian war, and the stand we took against the Algerian war. There was a kind
of renaissance amongst the student youth at that time. People started coming
and the group grew. Some time in 1958/59, in the whole of France, including the
provinces, we were about 100. By 62, 63, 64 we could hold public meetings
in Paris with, say, 300 or 400 people. But all of this, as you see, was extremely,
limited (Castoriadis 1990: 367).
Yet, despite the isolation of the group, according to Hirsh, the journal
proved significant as the only vehicle for a systematic gauchiste critique of the
communist movement during the height of the Cold War. While many leftist
intellectuals (with Sartre in the lead) buried their qualms and sided with the
Soviet Union against the capitalist West, Socialisme Ou Barbarie continued a
critique of both sides (Hirsch 1981: 113).
Forty issues of the journal were published before 1965, when the cessation
of publication was announced, and the group ceased to exist in 1967. The
Socialisme Ou Barbarie group developed close relationships with the JohnsonForest Tendency (C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya) in the U.S.A and the
British group and journal Solidarity (Maurice Brinton). The critical endeavour
of the group also included a parallel effort to analyse and explicate the crisis and
dynamic of modern capitalist societies in order to re-invigorate the revolutionary
project. Their work was indisputably uncomfortable and annoying, notably for
the leftist and Communist parties. The Soviet regimes attempt to impose its
political and ideological dominance, based on its official dogma of MarxismLeninism and the Stalinist policy of the Communist parties in Western societies,
had created a context which marginalized and excluded every independent and
188
unorthodox radical thinker from public debate. As Primo Levi very forcefully
put it, uncomfortable truths travel with difficulty (Levi 1989: 129).
The Diversionists: From Marginalization to Totalitarianism to the
Construction of a New Jargon
In their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels envisioned the growth of the
rapidly rising working class movement as the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority (Marx
and Engels 1991: 44), whose constant quantitative and qualitative development
will rely solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working
class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion (Marx and
Engels 1991: 33). Autonomous and self-determining action, intellectual growth and
united action should constitute the core of the radical and subversive movement in
its social struggles to negate capitalist social relations and create a different system
of life and an alternative society. And all these fundamental elements should be
informed by free and independent critical thinking. Luxemburg captured this
point implicitly and categorically: Freedom is always and exclusively freedom
for the one who thinks differently (Luxemburg 1970: 389). Unfortunately, the
tradition of the anti-capitalist movement throughout the last century not only flies
in the face of Luxemburgs dictum, but appeared to confirm one of Lukcss, final
verdicts: we are all still Stalinists (Lukcs 1972: 56). Lukacss statement could
describe the state of intolerance, exclusiveness and hatred that marked a large part
of the post-world Left in France. Any open theoretical and political criticism of the
Soviet regime, Marxism or Marx was taboo and repressed. A distinctive theoretical
contribution was easily accused of being reactionary and often misused and
distorted not only by the right, but also by left parties and intellectuals. As
Albert and Hahnel have noted,
In a world where most who attack the orthodoxy do so from the right, it is easier
for leftists to line up in its defence. It is common as well for all critics to be
immediately labelled anticommunist, bourgeois, reactionary, or worse as
the case may be. Such sectarian name-calling is very potent. Lumping all critics
of the orthodoxy with those whose purposes are indeed reactionary this reverse
baiting effectively intimidates most leftist critics. It asserts that there can be
no justifiable criticism, only ill-motivated anti-communism, so that those that
venture critical analysis run the risk of simultaneously losing all revolution
credibility. The orthodoxy is sacrosanct and disbelievers are heretics, beholden,
one way or another, to the capitalist devil (Albert and Hahnel 1978: 7).
In post-war France under the political and ideological dominance of the French
Communist Party it was inconceivable for someone to criticize Stalin, let alone
Lenin. Intellectuals such as Sartre and Aragon did not dare criticize Stalin and
189
usually expressed their admiration for him. The party had managed to capitalize on
its own role in the Resistance and the fact that it was seen by the new generations
as being the only French political power that symbolized the heroic and glorious
victory of the USSR against Nazi Germany. As a result, a critical attitude towards
the USSR could be easily rejected, marginalized and designated as reactionary and
counterrevolutionary. As described by Khilnani, this situation was particularly the
case in France:
Contrary to the situation in Britain, where the much more immediately (and
differently) felt effect of writers like Koestler and Orwell made it perfectly
reasonable, if by no means mandatory, to reject the Soviet Union as a political
model and yet continue to remain on the Left, in France it was not until the
1970s that such a position became intellectually and politically sustainable
(Khilnani 1993: 129)
In most cases, the Marxist or radical Left approach to Castoriadis was a nihilistic,
ill-equipped and dogmatic denunciation and repudiation of his theorizing. Having
settled for decades for the role of revolutionary-by-proxy, cuckolded and
defeated as revolutionaries sans revolution (Vaneigem 1983: 215), traditional
Leftists and Marxists seem to have perceived nothing new as they had seen and
known it all before (Vinet 1992: 105). They decisively constituted a catalytic
factor in the marginalization of his thought, at least in the period before the
collapse of the Soviet regime. Castoriadiss contribution remained unknown and
was unwisely and crudely seen as reactionary. This development was facilitated
by Castoriadiss theoretical limitations, political contradictions and erroneous
judgments. In particular, Castoriadiss later unfortunate and unsound position that
the former USSR was a military and stratocratic society (see Castoriadis 1981 and
Castoriadis 19801981) in its own way, opened the door for the distortion of his
views and theoretical contributions. Leftists and Marxists not only defamed his
whole political and intellectual history, but also his flawed analyses came under
severe criticism, which placed Castoriadiss demonstration among the crudest
speculations of an obsolete Kremlinology having more to do with the demonology
of centuries past than with the modern study of social and political phenomena
(Rittesporn 1982: 22).
On the other hand, and given the historical and political context of the 1970s
and 1980s, Castoriadiss views gained a wider audience and at the same time were
distorted by the new philosophers (Bernard-Henri Levy, Andr Glucksmann,
etc.) and the Stalinists of anti-communism who emerged in France throughout
this period (Dews 1980; and Dews 1979). These Stalinists of anti-communism
consisted of an intelligentsia which was, almost by definition, considered to be on
the left that has packed up its bags and gone over to the other side. It now addresses
its criticisms, not to French society, but to those who dare to think of transforming
it (Delwit and Dewaele 1984: 324). More specifically, during the 1970s an attempt
was made by the new philosophers to misuse and misappropriate Castoriadiss
190
critique of the Soviet system, Marxism and Marx. The new philosophers revived
interest in the term totalitarianism, but they attributed to it a completely different
meaning than the Greek intellectual used. In the name of democracy and human
rights they attacked and ridiculed any radical anti-capitalist voice, identifying
it with totalitarianism and red fascism, regardless of the fact that Castoriadis
held that the defence of the Soviet Union was actually anti-revolutionary and his
critique was launched from the Left, in the name of authentic revolution (Khilnani
1993: 129). For them, any attempt to overthrow capitalism and transform capitalist
social relations would inevitably lead to red terror, blind violence and deification
of state power. Having placed the notion of totalitarianism at the centre of their
elaborations, and drawing upon thinkers such as Castoriadis, Arendt or Popper,
they put particular stress on the dissemination of their anti-statist, anti-radical and
anti-Soviet ideas. Likewise, Castoriadiss critique of Marx and Marxism was also
read and construed as being akin to the post-modernist view that rejects grand
narratives and advocates western forms of liberal and representative democracy.
Castoriadis not only rejected the new wave of diversionists (Castoriadis
1993b: 275), as he called the new philosophers approach to his work, but he also
reacted against the misuse and the distortion of his own ideas. For Castoriadis, it is
explicit that the function of the new philosophers fully plays into the interests of
the apparatuses (Castoriadis 1993b: 277) with a view to covering over in advance
the true questions by answers which have for their effect and their function to
stop dead in its tracks the movement of reflection and to take the edge off the
political and revolutionary critique of totalitarianism on the one hand, of Marxism
on the other (Castoriadis 1993b: 275). And Castoriadis goes on with his forceful
critique:
The new wave of diversionists does not ask: How is totalitarianism actually
engendered? Shamelessly pillaging through what a few of us have been working
out for the past thirty years, it hastily lifts from this work a few elements whose
meaning it distorts in order to say: Totalitarianism is Marx, is Hegel, is Fichte,
is Plato. It understands neither what thinking means nor the unfathomable
relationship historical thought and historical reality entertain. Diverting the
critique of Marx that we had made from a political, praxical, revolutionary
perspective a critique that was bringing out precisely the capitalist, Western,
metaphysical heritage of which Marx had remained prisoner, to discover thereby
what in Marx remained on the hither side of a revolutionary aim it tries to
draw from this critique the following absurd conclusion: it is precisely as a
revolutionary that Marx would have engendered the Gulag (Castoriadis 1993:
p. 276).
Amongst other things, what is at stake here is the manner in which Castoriadis
has been received, read and used by both the critical, radical and anti-capitalist
tradition and the existing social and theoretical order, the intellectual
establishment. After the nouveau philosophes, and more particularly, the years
191
following the demise of the former USSR, the work of Castoriadis was subjected
to a ruthless and peculiar academization and canonization. Over the last twenty
five years, the vast majority of Castoriadiss interpretations have focused almost
exclusively on Castoriadiss later psychoanalytical-philosophical writings, thus
unreasonably diverting attention from Castoriadiss political writings and the
radical content of his thought, which marked his whole theoretical itinerary. It
seems that, as was the case with numerous academics and intellectuals after the
movements of the sixties, the demise of the regimes in Eastern Europe provided
scholars with a minimum of ideological justification or a legitimation both
for the profound disregard of radical ideas and practices that followed the
collapse and for their own incipient privatization while also retaining some
sort of radical sensibility (Castoriadis 1997c: 53, 54). The philosophical
writings of the later Castoriadis, as happened with specific aspects of the work
of Gramsci or the members of the Frankfurt School, were convenient for a
retrospective legitimation of withdrawal, renunciation, noncommitment, or of
a punctilious and measured commitment (Castoriadis 1997c: 53). Indisputably,
Castoriadis left himself open to this treatment both because of the direction and
content of a large part of his later theoretical elaborations and due to the fact
that he unfortunately did very little to clarify that he aimed at a political and
revolutionary (Castoriadis 1993b: 275) critique of totalitarianism, Marxism
and Marx, from a political, praxical, revolutionary perspective (Castoriadis
1993b: 276). Inherent contradictions and limits of his thought were pushed to
the more conservative and apolitical extreme by the academic and intellectual
apparatuses. Castoriadis responded by challenging the distortion of his critical
project, though belatedly and unsuccessfully, and endeavored to champion the
radicalism of his theoretical endeavor. As he vigorously reminds us,
The workers movement began well before Marx, and it had nothing to do with
Fichte or with Hegel The question posed is not how to replace Marxism but
how to create a new relationship between thinking and doing, how to elucidate
things in terms of a practical project without falling back either into the system
or into doing just anything (Castoriadis 1993b: 276).
Unfortunately, once again after the 1970s, Castoriadiss political and revolutionary
critique of Totalitarianism, Marxism and Marx has been misconstrued by the new
wave of diversionists and new Stalinists of anti-Marx, anti-Marxism and anticommunism are produced among Castoriadiss adherents. This new diversion has
led to a distorted and misleading reception of Castoriadiss theorizing. One of the
main vehicles for this new diversion has been the construction of a new jargon.
Through this metamorphosis of Castoriadis, his thought ceased to be a moment of
critical reason and anti-capitalist struggles. It was reduced to a jargon, a new world
of magical words, technical terms and mechanical expressions. Castoriadiss later
philosophical language has been transformed into a mystification and has been
reified, thus making it being devoid of content, let alone political and radical
192
content. In many academic circles, for example, Castoriadis is known, read and
used as a psychoanalyst or his work has been standardized into reified and abstract
key concepts such as creative imagination, social imaginary significations, chaos,
creation ex nihilo, monad, self, body, psyche, magma, tragedy, ensemblisticidentitary logic, legein and teukhein, Anlehnung, the living being, paideia (see
Adams 2014). This reification is not simply the case of talking trivialities in
high-sounding language (Popper 1976: 296). It actually aims at a forgetting of
Castoriadiss radicalism in order for his thought to be eventually converted into an
academic discipline, to be canonized and kept isolated from contemporary social
and political struggles. A fashionable invocation of Castoriadiss standardized
catch-words domesticates radical thought in the service of the existing capitalist
reality, thus performing the systematic function of stabilization and reproducing
all those capitalist relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and
contemptible being (Marx 1992: 251). The construction of fetishistic concepts
takes the place of the grasping and penetrating critique and analysis of social,
economic and political capitalist relations. As Adorno would say ideology has
shifted into language (Adorno 2003: xix); this time Castoriadiss sacred words
turned out to be a positive and constructive endorsement of actual capitalist
relations of exploitation and domination. By downplaying the oppositional and
revolutionary aspects of Castoriadiss work, the new diversionists postulate
Castoriadiss critical theory as domesticated, bloodless and apolitical, and as
such, this domestication aims to become dominant and prevail. As a consequence,
the critical and radical content of Castoriadiss ideas has intentionally fallen into
oblivion and it travels with difficulty. Yet, as with wine, the capacity to travel
does not necessarily reflect the quality of the passenger (Craufurd and Goodwin
1973: 285).
Postscript: Reclaiming Castoriadiss Radicalism
In one of his later interviews conducted in 1985 and 1986, Castoriadis made it
explicit that what distinguished him from his contemporary scholars was his
persistence with the political project, namely the fact that he wanted to do
philosophy and politics at the same time (Castoriadis 1995: 31). Describing
his work as a constant struggle to remain faithful to the project of human
emancipation, Castoriadis endeavored also to clarify his relationship with
Marx:
Looking back, my fundamental political orientation is without doubt rooted in
the work and engagement of Marx The concern to combine understanding
with a project of change I have learned from Marx, or invented, I dont know
which. In this sense there is a bond between Marx and me. I privilege Marx over
the other great thinkers because he tries again to be a philosophical citizen and
citizen-philosopher (Castoriadis 1995: 31).
193
Castoriadis was first and foremost a political and radical thinker and the intended
oblivion of the largest part of his work is quite undeserved. It cancels Castoriadiss
critical and radical meaning and represents an abdication, abandonment and
concealment of the political character of his views. This is not to claim that the
later psychoanalytical-philosophical part of Castoriadiss work is not worthy
of scholarly and analytical engagement. This is simply to argue that this does
not justify the almost exclusive reading of Castoriadiss thought via these texts
at the expense of the whole body of his social and political writings. Reading
Castoriadis politically means, first of all, detaching his thought from the condition
of being used as part of the succession of fads, from its reduction to another of
the successive waves of the ruling systems complementary ideology, exactly
that which Castoriadis was explicitly and fiercely opposed to (Castoriadis 1993b:
272). Reinstating Castoriadis to his actual political substance implies separating
his critical theory from the dominant tendency of becoming fashionable and
involves critically confronting the compilation, misappropriation and distortion
of his own ideas (Castoriadis 1993b: 276). Giving back to Castoriadiss work its
proper radical problematic would amount to disengaging it from the idolatry of
words, the construction of a new jargon. As Castoriadis would say, the magic of
words is thus used to make the reality of things disappear (Castoriadis 1988c:
239). Even after the severe financial crisis of 2008, the fashionable, abstract,
philosophical and apolitical readings of Castoriadis appear to remain detached
from the social and political reality. The fashionable scholars of his work
resemble, as Castoriadis brilliantly put it,
those who discourse about the rights of man, the indeterminacy of democracy,
communicative action, the self-foundation of reason, and so on the Panglosses
who go on spouting their navel-watching rhetoric without ever allowing
themselves to be distracted by the sound and fury of effectively actual history
(Castoriadis 2003a: 76).
They ultimately neglect and bury the riches of Castoriadiss political and
intellectual heritage, deferring treatment of the vital questions he addressed.
Contrary to these approaches, Castoriadis championed critical reasons historic
role of provoking insubordination and destroying horrors (Agnoli 2003: 26).
Diametrically opposed to the approaches that apprehend the function of scholarly
work as being at the service of the established order, Castoriadis was adamant that
the role of the scholar ought to be critical and he argued against a generalized
pseudoconsensus and those intellectuals who are caught up in the system and
who, by abandoning and betraying their critical role, became rationalizers for
what is, justifiers of the established order (Castoriadis 2003b: 128, 130). In this
sense, Castoriadis went against the grain of the academics and intellectuals who
seek to catch previously marginal or subversive ideas and words, as ironically is
now happening with Castoriadiss work, and make them one phenomenon among
others, commercialized like the others with a view to completing the harmony
194
of the system (Castoriadis 2003b: 131). In one of his interviews in 1991 and in
answer to the question of what the role of the intellectual should be, Castoriadis
clarified and specified his positions eloquently: Uncompromising criticism
of existing realities and elucidation of the possibilities for transforming them
(Castoriadis 2011: 108).
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Castoriadis, C., 1997a. The Pulverization of Marxism-Leninism, in D.A. Curtis
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Castoriadis, C. 1997b. The Social Regime in Russia, in D.A. Curtis (ed.), The
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Castoriadis, C. 1997c. The Movements of the Sixties, in D.A. Curtis (ed.), World
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Chapter 12
Norbert Elias: Sociological Amnesia

and The Most Important Thinker
You Have Never Heard Of
Stephen Mennell
Norbert Elias died at his home in Amsterdam on 1 August 1990. Fourteen years
later, in April 2004 two friends, Maria Goudsblom and Elke Korte, went to visit the
spot where his ashes were interred at the Westergaarde cemetery in Amsterdam.
They asked an official where to find the place, but their search was unsuccessful.
Back in the office an official was awaiting them with a large envelope containing
copies of several wrongly addressed letters to the Norbert Elias Foundation that
had gone unanswered. From 1995 onwards the cemetery had asked every year
what to do with the gravestone and the urn, since the Foundation had paid the
necessary fees for only five years. Finally, in 2003, both had been removed to a
storehouse. The Foundation hastily paid up, and Elias was reinterred. This comical
episode can serve as an allegory for Eliass life.
Elias came close to being an irretrievable victim of sociological amnesia. One
hears anecdotes from the late 1940s and 1950s about people who, when they came
across his 1939 masterpiece, ber den Prozess der Zivilisation, assumed that he must
be dead. Some aspects of his life were clearly traumatic, but he was never directly at
risk of dying in the Holocaust. His academic career, however, was most certainly in
jeopardy for a very long time. Until the last decade of his life, Elias seemed reluctant
to talk about himself: he said that what was important were his ideas. By the 1980s,
though, he had become an intellectual celebrity, at least in Europe, and he then wrote
an intellectual autobiography and gave numerous interviews (Elias 2013a). The
outlines of his story are now familiar enough, and up to a point represent a tale
of the conquest of sociological amnesia. Belated recognition seemed both to open
the floodgates of his publications and to overcome his reticence about himself. The
same belatedness explains why the influence of Eliass ideas on the discipline of
sociology has been much more recent than his date of birth might lead one to expect.
Life and Difficult Times
Elias was born in 1897 in Breslau, then the main city of German Silesia but now
the Polish city of Wrocaw, into a secular Jewish family. He received an obviously
198
outstanding education at the Johannesgymnasium in the city, then at the age of 18

entered the German army and saw action in a telegraph company on both the
eastern and western fronts in the First World War. He saw people killed at close
quarters, and probably himself suffered shell-shock. Back in Breslau right at
the end of the war he was acting as a surgical orderly, and then enrolled in the
University of Breslau to read both medicine and philosophy. He always said that
his experience in the dissecting room was invaluable for his understanding of
how human beings worked, but he dropped medicine in favour of philosophy. His
doctorate was supervised by the neo-Kantian philosopher Richard Hnigswald,
from whom he said he learned a great deal but with whom he came to disagree
on some very fundamental philosophical assumptions, a disagreement that was to
have a profound bearing on his later sociological writings. The early 1920s also
saw attempted putsches against the new Weimar government, assassinations, street
fighting between the right-wing Freikorps and left-wing militias (Elias 2013b), as
well as hyperinflation that temporarily robbed Eliass father of his wealth and forced
Elias himself to take a job in industry.
At the beginning of 1925, when some stability had been restored both in the
country and in the family finances, Elias took himself off to resume his studies, in
Heidelberg and as a sociologist rather than as a philosopher. He was accepted as
a Habilitation candidate by Alfred Weber, and worked on the links between the
development of the sciences and the arts in Renaissance Florence (see the outline
found among Alfred Webers papers, Elias 2006b). But he also became close
friends with Karl Mannheim, and when in 1930 Mannheim was called to the chair
of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, Elias went with him as his official
academic Assistent. Frankfurt at that time provided a rich and lively intellectual
milieu, in which Elias came into contact with a large circle of rising stars in the
social sciences and humanities. The university rented space for Mannheim and his
staff in the building that was owned by the independent Institut fr Sozialforschung
the Frankfurt School, led by Max Horkheimer with Theodor W. Adorno among
its leading lights. Relations between the group around Horkheimer on the one hand
and Mannheim on the other appear to have been personally civil, but intellectually
fairly distant. It was, however, at this time that Elias encountered the writings of
Sigmund Freud in depth for the first time, and they had a profound influence on his
thinking as they did on that of the Frankfurt School.
One could reasonably have expected that from these foundations Eliass
academic career would have taken off rapidly and that he would have shortly
achieved distinction and prominence. Of course it was not to be. When Hitler
came to power at the end of January 1933, Eliass Habilitationsschrift was
hastily submitted and he was rushed through all the stages necessary to gain his
Veni legendi, apart from the required public lecture. He had abandoned work on
Renaissance science, and instead written a thesis entitled Der hfische Mensch,
which remained unpublished until it was enlarged and reworked for publication
almost four decades later in 1969 as Die hfische Gesellschaft The Court Society
(2006a). Elias hung around in Frankfurt a bit longer than many of his colleagues
Norbert Elias
199
long enough to witness the Nazi takeover of both the university and the city, which
was both violent and orderly later he would emphasize that it was a mistake for
sociologists to think of violence and orderliness as opposites. But then he went into
exile in Paris, where by 1935 he had both lost his money in a venture making toys
and definitively established that there was no prospect of securing an academic job
in France. This was the only time in his life when he actually went hungry. He was
rescued by friends who invited him to come to Britain, where he arrived in 1935
with scant knowledge of English and again little prospect of an academic career.
With a small grant from a refugee charity, he set to work on what became ber den
Prozess der Zivilisation. The first volume appears to have been finished in 1936,
the second by about 1938. It was printed back in Breslau by a Jewish printer who
also became a refugee before production was finished. Eliass father extricated
the unbound sheets and took them to Basel, where they were bound by an migr
publisher, Haus zum Falken. As Bryan Wilson was later to comment, 1939 was
not the most propitious year for the publication of a large, two-volume work, in
German, by a Jew, on, of all things, civilization (Wilson 1977). Elias sent copies
to many people, Sigmund Freud, R. H. Tawney and Thomas Mann among them.
Mann, at least, read it and noted his appreciation in his Tagebuch (1980: 440, 443,
445, 446, 447). But Walter Benjamin, a personal acquaintance of Eliass, refused to
review the book, on standard Marxist grounds (Schttker 1998). Though it is now
recognized as one of the twentieth centurys most important works of sociology in
a straw poll organized by Piotr Sztompka among members of the International
Sociological Association in 1998, ber den Prozess der Zivilisation was rated
one of the ten most important sociological works of the century at the time of its
publication it fell almost dead from the press. Few reviews and citations followed
until after its republication in 1969 (Goudsblom 1977).
Eliass experience of life up to 1939 ought to have protected him from the
misunderstanding that became common later, that his book presented a theory in
the Victorian manner about the inevitable long-term progress of human society.
Whether he could as yet be described as a victim of sociological amnesia is open
to question: amnesia means the loss of memory, and few sociologists had any
memory of his work that they could lose.
Eliass ill fortune was to continue for another decade and a half. He did secure
the lowly and strangely titled post of Senior Research Assistant at the London
School of Economics, but, shortly after the LSEs evacuation to Cambridge early
in the war, he was interned as an enemy alien for about eight months, first near
Liverpool and then on the Isle of Man, where he was in very distinguished company,
and from where he was released through the efforts of C.P. Snow. His mother
was killed in Treblinka. After the war, he scraped a meagre living giving adult
education classes in and around London. He also at this time played an important
part as a founder, with his friend from Frankfurt days Siegmund H. Foulkes, in
formulating the theory and practice of Group Analysis, now a very important form
of psychotherapy. Here, however, psychological amnesia set in: after Elias left
London, he was no longer active in the Group Analytic movement, and memories
200
of his early role began to fade among practitioners. Group Analysts came to know
little of Eliass sociology, and sociologists little of Group Analysis. Only in the
1990s did the two groups begin to encounter each other, and the writings of the
psychotherapist Farhad Dalal (1998) were notable in arguing that Group Analysis
needed in effect less Foulkes, and more Elias.
Finally, in 1954, Eliass prospects took a turn for the better. At the remarkably
advanced age of 57, he was appointed to his first secure academic post, at what
was about to become the University of Leicester. There, before his retirement
as Reader in 1962, with his friend and colleague Ilya Neustadt he built up a
distinguished department of sociology that was for a time the largest in Britain.
In another example of sociological amnesia, the standard histories of sociology in
Britain are extremely LSE-centric, largely neglecting the story of the astonishing
number of staff and students who passed through the Leicester department and
went on to become prominent sociologists. Elias put especially great effort
into teaching a distinctive introductory course for undergraduate students,
which was developmental in character, taking a long-term comparative view
of the development of human society. Yet the department was not intellectually
monolithic. While his approach inspired some, there were also strong opponents
among the younger staff appointed to the growing department: John Goldthorpe
from a Popperian standpoint and Percy Cohen as a functionalist anthropologist
both regarded Elias as an intellectual throwback to an earlier age.
Upon reaching the age of retirement, Elias spent two years as Professor of
Sociology and head of department at the University of Ghana. It is clear that a
principal motive was that it at long last gave him the title of Professor. For him
Ghana was an enriching experience, but his absence had detrimental effects in
Leicester. In 1961, the department had secured a large government research grant
for what was known as the Young Workers Project (Goodwin and OConnor
2014); Elias was the principal investigator, but quite a large number of younger
staff and students were involved among them Tony Giddens and Sheila Allen.
With Elias away, the project drifted and dissension set in. The collapse of the project
probably damaged the careers of some of the most junior research assistants, and
certainly some resentment persisted towards Elias. This was one more obstacle to
rescuing Elias from the incipient amnesia of British sociologists.
At the time of his appointment at Leicester, Elias had published remarkably
little by later standards: apart from his still unknown magnum opus, there were no
more than a handful of obscurely published essays in German (Elias 2006b), and
journal articles in English. The Leicester years saw few additions to his output.
The most important publication of those years, Problems of involvement and
detachment in the British Journal of Sociology 1956, was widely misunderstood
as yet another boring discussion of the problem of objectivity in the tradition
of Max Weber. In fact it was the first important statement of Eliass sociological
theory of knowledge and the sciences (Elias 2007, 2009); but this essay was not
much noticed either. A problem for English-speaking readers a problem that I
experienced myself on first acquaintance with Elias was that, without a thorough
Norbert Elias
201
knowledge of ber den Prozess der Zivilisation, it was difficult to understand the
significance of his other writings. Many people asked, Where is he coming from?
And, in view of the paucity of his writings in English, it was hard to appreciate that
he was a sociologist of the highest stature.
After Ghana, Elias returned to teaching postgraduates in Leicester, and at
this time he began to collaborate with Eric Dunning in developing or, rather,
one should say, creating the sociology of sport. He and his MA student John
Scotson also wrote The Established and the Outsiders (2008), but this book was
also underestimated; most reviewers saw it as a yet another in the long series of
community studies by British sociologists and anthropologists. In retrospect it
can also be seen as the beginning of Eliass elaboration of a distinctive theory of
power relations.
Then, in the late 1960s, when Elias was already in his 70s, there was a
remarkable upturn in his fortunes, the seeds of which had been sown some
years earlier. Copies of the first edition of ber den Prozess der Zivilisation
had remained on the shelves of some university libraries. As early as 1950 an
undergraduate student of social psychology in the University of Amsterdam, Johan
Goudsblom, found the book in the library and found it revelatory. He met Elias
in person at the World Congress of Sociology in Amsterdam in 1956, and they
kept in touch. By 1968 Goudsblom was Professor of Sociology at Amsterdam. In
Germany, Professor Dieter Claessens of Mnster and later Berlin was also aware
of Elias, and through him Elias was invited to speak (though not at all in a starring
role) at the conference of the German Sociological Association in Heidelberg to
mark the centenary of Max Webers birth. Elias was invited to both Mnster and
Amsterdam as a visiting professor. In 1969 ber den Prozess der Zivilisation was
republished by the Swiss publisher Francke. It was an expensive two-volume
hardback, but it found admirers among the rebellious students of the period, and
they began to produce samizdat pirate copies. This made a cheap paperback edition
an attractive proposition to the great Frankfurt publishers Suhrkamp, and after
hearing Elias speak at the launch of that edition the famous head of that house,
Siegfried Unseld, entered into a gentlemens agreement to publish everything that
Elias wrote subsequently. Die hfische Gesellschaft had also appeared in 1969 and
Was ist Soziologie? in 1970, both to some acclaim, and a period of near-poverty
for Elias came to an end when he was retrospectively made a Professor Emeritus
of the University of Frankfurt. Groups of graduate students took up Eliass ideas,
particularly in the Netherlands and Germany. Between 1978 and 1984 Elias was
a permanent Fellow-in-residence at the Zentrum fr Interdisziplinre Forschung,
Bielefeld, besides moving his permanent residence from Leicester to Amsterdam.
In France, members of the Annales school of historians took a keen interest in his
work (Burguire 2009; Joly 2012). Intellectual celebrity came to him very late
in life, but it came. And it appears that one effect of this instance ofsociological
amnesia being overcome was to release the floodgates of his writing. From having
published so sparsely before he retired, he became highly productive. No one
would have predicted in 1962 that his Collected Works would run to 18 volumes,
202
made up of 14 books, well over a hundred essays, and many interviews. (In the
German Gesammelte Schriften there is an additional volume, containing Eliass
poems and aphorisms (2004), which have not been translated into English.)
On the other hand, Eliass reception in the English-speaking world was more
belated and I think it is true to say more grudging. The belatedness is easy to
explain: the two volumes of ber den Prozess der Zivilisation were not published
in English translation until 1978 and 1982. The delay was in large part Eliass own
fault. His friend Patrick Gordon Walker (later British Foreign Secretary) had tried
to arrange a translation shortly after the war, and in the 1970s Eric Dunning had
completed a translation of the first volume, but it came to nothing. It is very hard
to say quite why Elias was such an obstacle to publishing his own work. He always
wanted to tinker with texts, rather than just resolving problems of translation, as I
found when (with Grace Morrissey) I translated What is Sociology?, which finally
appeared in 1978 after about a six-year delay (Elias 2012c). In the case of the
Dunning translation, Elias went so far as to intend to write a new section on the
changing social regulation of masturbation. Wisely, the eventual translator of most
of Eliass German works, Edmund Jephcott, avoided direct contact with Elias;
even so, the second volume of The Civilizing Process was delayed by four years,
during which Elias threatened but failed to write a long new introductory essay,
the sketches for which took the story of state-formation processes back to human
pre-history. The delays also affected the books and essays that Elias had written in
English. Quest for Excitement, the collection of essays on the sociology of sport that
he and Dunning had written jointly and separately, was finally published in 1986
after a substantial delay. The Collected Works edition of that book now contains
an extra essay, The genesis of sport as a sociological problem, part 2 (Elias and
Dunning 2008: 13449), which was omitted from the first edition because, as Eric
Dunning recalls, Elias had lost all the bibliographical references for it, and he
knew that if he insisted on that essay being made ready, there would most likely
be another delay lasting years. (For the Collected Works edition, I myself tracked
down the missing citations in the British Library and the Bibliothque Nationale
de France.) As I have suggested elsewhere (Mennell 2006), Elias was in some
mysterious way often his own worst enemy.
The question of Eliass somewhat grudging recognition within Anglophone
sociology is a more complicated question. I have already mentioned that in the
Popperian and structural-functionalist heyday of the 1960s when few Englishspeaking people were able to study his most important work in detail he was
seen as a throwback to Victorian progress theories in the mould of Herbert Spencer
or L.T. Hobhouse. Moreover, the influence of anthropology in British sociology
was very strong (anthropology has always enjoyed greater academic prestige
than sociology), and anthropologists still reel back in horror from anything that
reminds them of their own disciplines past role in the British Empire. The very
word civilization causes alarm bells to ring in their minds. Nor did Elias in
person do much to endear himself to anthropologists. Newly arrived in Ghana, he
delivered a lecture in which he said that anthropology was no longer appropriate
Norbert Elias
203
in West Africa, and sociology should take its place. Longstanding West African
hands, notably Sir Jack Goody, could not be expected to be very enthusiastic about
that. Goody has more recently at least engaged with Eliass work (Goody 2006:
15479), but it is a pity that the pesky word civilization has obscured the fact that
these two great social scientists writing from a developmental perspective have a
good deal in common (see Liston and Mennell 2009). The German anthropologist
Hans Peter Duerr has written no fewer than five volumes criticizing what he calls
the myth of the civilizing process (1988, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2002). In my view
(Goudsblom and Mennell 1997), the volumes are theoretically inconsequential, but
shortly before his death Elias wrote a brief response (2008) to Duerr in which he
pointed out what should have been obvious: that he had always used civilization
in a technical sense different from the everyday (and Victorian) sense. No doubt it
was an obstacle to the reception of his work in some circles, but he had not been
able to think of any word that better captured the range of connotations he needed.
Although Elias now has large numbers of intellectual followers right across
the world, who try to conduct research in the same theoreticalempirical way he
advocated, the United States has at least until quite recently remained a rather
blank space on the map of what has come to be known as figurational sociology.
Some years ago, in a witty email to Chris Rojek, Alan Sica summed up why
American sociologists dont make much Elias:
The reason Americans dont take to Elias is that he writes about European
historical and cultural change and American sociologists dont feel comfortable
with that sort of thing, except for [Jack] Goldstone and that small lot; and
because he is theoretically very adventurous and synthetic, and they dont go for
that; and because he trashed Parsons, who many of them liked back in the day;
and because he could be mistaken for a closet Freudian, which they dont like;
and because he brings up really obnoxious qualities of humankind, which they
particularly dont like; and because he wrote a helluva lot of stuff, which takes
a long time to read, they dont have time; and because figuration is a word that
has a distinctly effete connotations in this country, and sounds like art history
(quoted in Dunning and Hughes, 2013: 44).
One characteristic of American perceptions of Eliass ideas is the trivializing

identification of his theory of civilizing processes with what they call civility
in the banal everyday sense of people being polite to each other. In the USA,
the second volume of The Civilizing Process was even published under the
unauthorized and misleading title Power and Civility. To think of Elias as being
fundamentally concerned with civility as a static and (in Alfred Schtzs sense)
first-order concept is a gross error. In the first part of On the Process of Civilisation
he discussed how and why concepts of courtesy, culture, civility and civilization
developed over long periods of time among the European upper class, and how they
came to feel pride in what they had come to see as their innately superior patterns
of behaviour and feeling. But he then went on to ask how these emphatically
204
not innate (and not necessarily essentially superior) aspects of habitus came to
develop. And thus in the rest of the book he discusses the process of civilization
in an etic, technical, second-order sense of the term, while civility is never more
than an emic term.
Alan Sica was right in seeing the sheer bulk of the writings Elias produced by
the end of his life as a barrier to the close reading that is necessary to grasp the
sophistication of a major thinker. It is more difficult to make the investment of time
and effort in the modern neo-liberal publish-or-perish university; the leisurely way
in which Elias himself laid the intellectual foundations of his work over several
decades before publishing very much is no longer feasible. Nevertheless, even
in America, some recognize Eliass significance also. Steven Pinker, in his bestselling study of the long-term decline of violence in human society (2011: 59n),
asserted that Norbert Elias is the most important thinker you have never heard
of. Having spent a good deal of the last 40 years seeking to promote interest in
Eliass work and convince social scientists of its importance, I found that remark
mildly discouraging.
Does Renewed Amnesia Threaten?
What needs most to be remembered about the work of Norbert Elias? Of course, On
the Process of Civilisation. But, given the complexity and richness of that central
work, the risk is that it will be simplified and trivialized into a few banal notions
like civility unless readers also appreciate the broader intellectual programme
within which it was written. Elias deserves to be remembered especially for his
enormous powers of intellectual synthesis, which far outstripped those of another
would-be synthesizer, his contemporary Talcott Parsons (Mennell 1989).
In my own case, it was not On the Process of Civilisation that first inspired me,
but rather chapter 3 of What is Sociology? (Elias 2012c), entitled Game models.
This chapter ought to be compulsory reading for all first-year sociology students,
but it is not, and many professional sociologists could gain from reading it too.
The game models are prefaced by a model of a Primal contest, picturing
two warring small tribes competing for food in a territory, who have nothing
else in common, not even a language through which to communicated with each
other. Elias uses it to show how two groups ways of life, adapted to continuing
lethal conflict, can only be understood through their interdependence. The model
is related to Eliass insight from watching the Nazi takeover that violence
and order (in the sense of regularity) are not opposites. But, more important,
it is also intended to counter the assumption found in symbolic interactionism
and old-time functionalism that through interaction, people will form shared
norms and identifications. Eliass whole sociology is based on the ubiquity
of interdependence. We are all interdependent with vastly greater numbers of
people than those with whom we interact face-to-face, and a central idea of
On the Process of Civilisation is that longer chains and more complex webs of
Norbert Elias
205
interdependence exert increasing external constraint towards greater foresight and

more habitual self-constraint. And interdependence always involves a more or less
unequal, more or less fluctuating balance of power or, better, power ratio. (One
famous American sociologist was shocked when I told him that Elias had pointed
out that there is a power ratio even between a new-born baby and its mother.) The
games models themselves start with simple two-person games analogous to chess,
and work up to multi-person games on several levels. More importantly, each
group begins with the case of a very unequal balance of power, in which one side
can shape the outcome according to his or her intentions, and then considers what
happens when the power ratio is relatively more equal. The course and outcome
of the game then becomes less the implementation of any one sides plans and
intentions and more like something that neither side envisaged or intended, a
product of the interweaving of players plans and intentions:
From plans arising, yet unplanned
By purpose moved, yet purposeless (Elias 2010: 62).
One of my own earliest essays (Mennell 1977) argued how vastly superior was
Eliass handling of unintended consequences to that of Robert Merton, yet most
sociologists still identify that term with Merton, who quite failed to grasp its full
centrality to sociological understanding (Merton 1968: 47590; I hasten to add
that Merton remains one of my sociological heroes). Amnesia sometimes strikes
unjustly.
As the games become more complex and their course and outcome less
predictable, they become more opaque (Max Webers word for the same idea
was undurchsichtig). Players need to create a mental model of the games as a
means of orientation in making their moves, and these mental models often seem to
restore a degree of transparency. These models include the various kinds of social
ideology, which historically emerged from different social groupings in different
power positions. Thus the game models are linked to the tradition of the sociology
of knowledge from which Elias first emerged. Furthermore, they help to illustrate
the futility as Elias argues elsewhere in the same book of static modes of
conceptualization that prevail in much of sociology (2012c: 10817). He invokes
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that Standard Average European languages tend to
conceptualize processes through a substantive and a verb, in phrases like the wind
blows or the river flows, in arguing that too many sociological concepts lead
to daft chicken-and-egg problems. Think of individual and society, action (or
agency) and structure, macro and micro. And the game models also destroy
the methodological atomism that underlies a lot of loose sociological thinking,
including such essential tools as opinion surveys.
Reference to atomism brings us back to the starting point of Eliass career,
his dispute with the neo-Kantian philosopher Richard Hnigswald. It concerned
the fundamental principles of epistemology associated with the mainstream
of Western philosophy, and can be seen to have shaped Eliass entire view of
206
society. Elias as a young man writing his doctoral thesis (Elias 2006c) had not
reached his mature view of the matter, but developed it later with great clarity.
The standard philosophical question concerned how a single, isolated, adult
human being could be sure of any knowledge of the world outside his or her
own body. It was encapsulated in Descartess famous principle that cogito ergo
sum the only thing that could not be doubted was that he himself was thinking
and so he existed. Elias would later argue that it was no accident that a man of
his age like Descartes should take what he, Elias, called the homo clausus view
of the individual, because this corresponded to a mode of self-experience that
was emerging, at first among limited circles of Renaissance intellectuals. The
sense of being one person, somehow cut off from fellow human beings, was a
by-product of the civilizing processes that were unfolding at the time. The homo
clausus assumption was further developed by subsequent philosophers, from
Leibniz and Berkeley right though to such twentieth-century thinkers as Max
Weber, Karl Popper, Talcott Parsons and Jrgen Habermas, all of whose theories
rested on Kantian foundations. Kant was the crucial figure, for, in response
to David Humes epistemological doubts how could a person possibly have
discovered categories of thought such as time, space and causality? Kant
argued that these principles (and the moral categorical imperative) must be
innate and hard-wired, so to speak, in the human brain. Elias, as a mere doctoral
student, argued that this was implausible, and that such fundamental elements of
human knowledge could be understood only as the product of the accumulation
of knowledge over long chains of human generations. For his pains, Hnigswald
insisted that Elias tear out the last few offending pages of his thesis or not be
awarded the degree. It is clear that the censored conclusion of his thesis was
already pointing to Eliass future as an historically orientated sociologist. And
indeed, although some readers of late books such as The Society of Individuals
and The Symbol Theory (2012b) might regard them as philosophical in a
loose sense, Elias became dismissive of the continued value of philosophy as a
discipline (on this, see especially Kilminster 2007). He was the most radically
sociological of sociologists. And I myself regard his sociological theory of
knowledge and the sciences as of at least as great a lasting value as On the
Process of Civilisation and related writings.
Conclusion
The story of the strife over Eliass doctoral thesis is worth retelling because it
draws attention to a crucial way in which figurational sociology differs from
the majority of other schools of thought, in which there still lurks the ghost
of homo clausus, even when their proponents might possibly agree in the
abstract with Eliass critique. Certainly there have been other anti-Kantian
sociologists, such as Eliass good friend Pierre Bourdieu, and the whole Marxist
tradition inclines that way too. (I think there is a great deal of Marx in Elias,
Norbert Elias
207
even if Marxists usually cannot see it.) Yet it takes a great deal to deflect the
established momentum of sociological teaching. Everywhere students are taught
about the difficult relationship between agency and structure, and about
the many unsuccessful attempts to resolve it. Eliass view is that the apparent
dilemma is a nonsensical by-product of habits of concept-formation following a
static rather than processual model. Moreover, the question of human agency
is not one that can be answered by philosophers sitting cross-legged under a
Banyan tree. The scope of agency in any situation is a matter of the prevailing
power ratios between interdependent people, and those can only be investigated
through empirical research guided by theoretical (and historical) insights, the
results feeding back in turn to improve theory. And, looking further back, we still
continue to teach students such nonsense as Max Webers (1978: i, 226) views
on umbrellas and colliding cyclists, or his ludicrously inadequate classification
of types of action Zweckrational, Wertrational, Affektuell, Traditional. (My
apologies: I know it is considered bad form to criticize the sacred texts of Max
Weber.)
For all that I have called his work radically sociological, it does not appeal
only to sociologists. It has also been taken up by historians, political scientists,
criminologists, psychologists and psychotherapists, international relations
specialists, sports scientists and indeed it sometimes seems to appeal more
strongly to people working in the interstices of established disciplines than it does
in the mainstream of sociology.
One final thought: will sociological amnesia eventually gobble up the
discipline of sociology itself? Fragmentation seems already to have gone a
long way. Already, more sociologists work in university departments other than
those with Sociology in their title. Contrary to Eliass pleas, empiricists and
theoreticians seem to have less and less in common. Empirical research methods
have undoubtedly advanced greatly in the last half century, but people with
expertise in using them appear to be forming an academic community of their own
with little contact with theory, under such titles as social research. Quantitative
social research especially attracts plentiful funding from government agencies
and corporations, and so universities see good reason to invest in that area. Some
of this research is undoubtedly useful in steering short-term policies. How much
of it will prove of lasting and cumulative value for understanding the long-term
development and dynamics of human society the proper business of sociology
in Eliass view is more questionable. But quantitative research does meet John
Goldthorpes (1991) view of the business of sociology, the creation of its own
relics which in due course may be dug out of the data archives to be used by
historians and historical sociologists.
Meanwhile, all does not appear to be well in the theoretical domain.
Sociological theory, as we used to call it (Mennell 1974, for example),
transmogrified into social theory, a term that subsumes a good deal that Elias
would have called philosophoidal, dubiously linked to systematic empirical
investigation. If one looks at the changing contents of a distinguished journal like
208
Theory, Culture and Society (of which I am a long-serving advisor and supporter),
one sees a procession of changing fads and fashions. They do not always seem to
amount to cumulative additions to knowledge. It sometimes seems as if social
theorists are hoping that one more shake of the conceptual kaleidoscope will
settle into a pattern that explains everything. But understanding human society
involves hard graft, not quick fixes. Elias did not offer quick fixes. When faced
with criticisms of his own findings, he always responded, Then we must do more
research. I happen to think that his kind of all-encompassing historical social
psychology has too much to offer in understanding the emerging global society
and its problems for it to be allowed to be forgotten. The long-term processes
of the division of social functions, civilizing processes, habitus and conscience
formation, formalization and informalization processes (Wouters 2004, 2007),
the scientification of knowledge, state formation, the monopolization of
violence and of the means of orientation (and the decay of such monopolies) all
have a direct relevance to the future of humanity. As Loyal and Quilley (2005)
have argued, Eliass extraordinary powers of synthesis his unrivalled insight
into the interconnectedness of so many aspects of human society qualify his
work to serve as a central theory for the human sciences.
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Index
A
Abbott, Andrew 9
actor-network theory 94, 155
Addams, Jane 97
Adorno, Theodor 63, 65
agency 207
Albrow, Martin 20
Althusser, Louis 118
American sociology 2, 203
Angell, Norman 96
anthropology 49, 2023
Aron, Raymond 3, 1732
associational sociology 1279
atomism 2056
B
Baldamus, Wilhelm 212
Barber, Benjamin 19
Barcos, Martin de 108
Bellah, Robert 3840, 424, 478, 52
Bendix, Reinhard 23n9
Bernfeld, Siegfried 60
Beyond Belief (Bellah 1970) 38, 40, 424,
48, 52
Bierstedt, Robert 24
Bottomore, Tom 26, 161
Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 11921
Breaking the Chains of Reason
(MacIntyre 2008) 1658, 1712
British sociology 2, 125, 1326
Bruner, Jerome 50
Bruno, Giordano 144
Bukharin, Nikolai 161
bureaucracy 1725, 1834, 185
C
Calhoun, Craig 18
Calvinism 11011
Camic, Charles 9
capitalism 2, 112, 129, 170, 174
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory

(Giddens 1971) 29
Castoriadis, Cornelius 18294
Caute, David 108
Cline, Louis-Ferdinand 73, 745, 7684
characters 1734
Civil Religion in America (Bellah 1967)
40
civility 2034
civilization 2024
The Civilizing Process (Elias) 199, 201,
202, 203, 2045
class struggle 130
classical sociology 1, 3
Clignet, Remi 22
cogito ergo sum 206
Cole, G.D.H. 12537
Collins, Randall 10
Colson, Elizabeth 46
communism 58
Comte, Auguste 1, 8, 20
conflict theory 30
conscription 96
crisis of capitalism 170
cultural anthropology 49
cultural capital 115
cultural field 11920
cultural recycling 9
culture 456, 4950
D
Dahrendorf, Ralf 18, 2930
Dalrymple, Sir John 162
Darnton, Robert 51
Davis, Natalie Zemon 5051
Days of Wrath (Malraux 1935) 114
Death on Credit (Cline 1936) 81
Deep Play. Notes on the Balinese
Cockfight (Geertz 1971) 42, 47
Deleuze, Gilles 143
212
democracy 26, 129, 131

Democracy and Totalitarianism: A Theory
of Political Systems (Aron 1968)
25, 28
Descartes, Ren 206
Destouches, Louis-Ferdinand (Cline) 73,
745, 7684
Dickens, Charles 151
disarmament 64
disciplinary fragmentation 163
discourses 45
discursive analysis 5
The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on
Religion, Psychology, and Culture
(Fromm 1992) 60
Du Bois, W.E.B. 90, 934
Duerr, Hans Peter 203
Durkheim, mile 1, 19, 20, 130, 1514,
1556
E
economic infrastructure 19
economy of the field 5
education 115
Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society
(Aron 1967) 212, 28
Elias, Norbert 4, 56, 94, 111, 197208
Elster, Jon 22
Engels, Friedrich 164
pistmes 45
Ervine, St. John 133
Escape from Freedom (Fromm 1941)
615
Essai sur les liberts (Aron 1970) 23
The Established and the Outsiders (Elias
and Scotson 2008) 201
evolutionary biology 164
exemplars 38
external function 5
F
facts 1512
The Feminine Character: History of an
Ideology (Klein 1946) 73
Ferguson, Adam 161
figurational sociology 56, 94, 203, 2078
First Principles (Spencer 1862) 92, 93
Ford, Isabella 95
forgetting 1012
Foucault, Michel 45, 118
Foulkes, Siegmund H. 199200
France 12
French Communist Party 184, 1889
Freud, Sigmund 589, 62, 63
Freudo-Marxist syntheses 6061, 623
Fromm, Erich 9, 5770
G
game models 2045
Geertz, Clifford 38, 4042, 457, 4952
Gellner, Ernest 23
general will 12730
Genet, Jean 118
genetic structuralism 105
German sociology 2, 61
German Sociology (Aron 1964) 28
Germany 667
Ghana, University of 200
Giddens, Anthony 18, 2021, 22
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 101
Ginsberg, Morris 136n6
global conflict 30
Goldmann, Lucien 10521, 1645
Goodenough, Ward 46
Goody, Sir Jack 203
Goudsblom, Johan 201
Gramsci, Antonio 161
Great War 923, 95, 96
Greece 1812
Greek Communist Party 183
Greeley, Andrew M. 43
Group Analysis 199200
guild socialism 13032
H
Hall, John 234
Hall, Stuart 160
Halsey, A.H. 160
Hamilton, Richard 667
Heidegger, Martin 113
Herman, Arthur 1612
The Hidden God (Goldmann 1964)
10711, 120
Hilferding, Rudolf 164
Hill, Samuel S. 44
history of sociology 3
Index
Hobhouse, Emily 92
Hobhouse, Leonard 90, 92, 93
Hobson, John Atkinson 90, 92, 93, 945
homo clausus 206
Horkheimer, Max 59, 623, 184
Houseman, G. 133
Hull House 97
human agency 207
I
iconic cultural objects 38
Ideology as a Cultural System (Geertz
1964) 41
Immanuel Kant (Goldmann 2011) 1067
imperialism 912, 93
individualism 149, 155
industrial development 212
industrial managers 1734
Industrial Society 2930
The Industrial Society: Three Essays on
Ideology and Development (Aron
1967) 22n7, 28, 29
Institut (fr Sozialforschung) 59, 613
institutional dynamics 9
intellectual migration 1812
intellectual positioning 38
intellectuals 37
interdependence 2045
The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz
1973) 38, 42, 458, 4950, 52
interpretive social science 38
J
Jacobs, Aletta 97
Jansenism 108, 10911
Japan 39
jargon 1912
Journey into the End of the Night (Cline
1932) 745
justified sinners 109
K
Kant, Immanuel 1067, 206
Kardiner, Abram 64
Klein, Viola 7386
knowledge 6, 8
Korsch, Karl 60, 164
Kuhn, Thomas 8
213
L
La Lutte de classes: Nouvelles leons sur
les socits industrielles (Aron
1964) 24n11, 28
La Monadologie (Leibniz 1998) 1445
Latour, Bruno 143
Leavis, F.R. 119
Lefebvre, Henri 119
Lefort, Claude 184
Leibniz, Gottfried 1445, 1478, 151
Leicester, University of 200
Leninism 185
Levenstein, Adolph 66
Lvi-Strauss, Claude 12
liberal democracy 129
linguistic structuralism 118
Linton, Ralph 64
Lough, Thomas 25
loyalty 128
Lukcs, Georg 60, 113, 119, 161, 163, 188
Lukcs and Heidegger (Malraux 1977)
113
Lukes, Steven 21
La Lutte de classes: Nouvelles leons sur
les socits industrielles (Aron
1964) 24n11, 28
Luxemburg, Rosa 188
M
MacIntyre, Alasdair 23, 15975
McLaughlin, Neil 9
MacRae, D. 22
Madge, Charles 19
Main Currents in Sociological Thought
(Aron 1965) 18, 2021, 279
Malraux, Andr 11213
managers 1734
Mann, Michael 30
Mannheim, Karl 8, 73, 767, 846, 136n6,
198
Mans Fate (Malraux 1933) 11314
Mans Hope (Malraux 1938) 11314
Marcuse, Herbert 8, 65, 171
Martineau, Harriet 99, 100
Marx, Karl 2, 1920, 589, 90, 12930,
186
Marxism 60, 129, 15961, 1635, 16870,
1712, 174, 183, 1845, 186, 191
214
Marxist Sociology (Bottomore 1975) 161

materialism 589
mechanical Marxism 60
Merton, Robert 64, 205
The Method and Function of Analytic
Social Psychology (Fromm 1970)
60
Mexico 679
modernism 112, 113, 115, 118
Molire 110
La Monadologie (Leibniz 1998) 1445
Monadology and Sociology (Tarde 1999)
14550
monads 1412, 14350, 1556
More, Henry 144
Moscovici, Serge 142
N
nationalism 16061
neo-monadology 14551, 1556
networks 94, 1546
new jargon 1912
O
On the Process of Civilisation (Elias) 199,
201, 202, 203, 2045
ontological individualism 150
P
pacifism 92, 93, 968
paradigm revolutions 378
Parsons, Talcott 2, 38, 42, 64
Pascal, Blaise 1079, 111
Paz, Octavio 183
Peace and War: A Theory of International
Relations (Aron 1966) 24
Pearson, Karl 90, 99
Peretz, Martin 23n9
Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 95
Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick 95
Phdre (Racine) 1089
Piaget, Jean 105
Pinker, Steven 204
points of diffraction 5
political sociology 236
politics 164
Popper, Karl 165, 167
positivism 168, 169
Postgate, Oliver 137

power ratio 205
Preissig, Erhard 756
process theory 4
Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics
of Modern Society (Aron 1968)
223, 28
proletarian revolution 16970
psychoanalysis 164
Psychoanalytic Characterology and its
Relevance for Social Psychology
(Fromm 1970) 60
public intellectuals 989
public moralists 98101
Q
quantitative research 207
R
race 93
Racine (Goldmann 1956) 10711
Racine, Jean 10710
radical humanism 579
rationality 2
reflexive sociology of sociology 37
Reich, Wilhelm 60
religion 3940
Religion as a Cultural System (Geertz
1965) 412
representative democracy 131
research 9
revolutionaries 1723
Rex, John 223, 25, 30
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 112
Robertson, Roland 1920, 24
Rodner, Kim 22
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 127, 129
Runciman, W.G. 21
Russell, Bertrand 96
S
Santana-Acua, Alvaro 50
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 205
Saussure, Ferdinand de 77
scholarly innovation 38
schools of sociology 89
Schreiner, Olive 89102
Schumpeter, Joseph 26
Index
science 164
Scottish Enlightenment 1612
Semmelweis, Philippe-Ignace 75
Shaw, Martin 3031
Shepherd, William 46
Slotty, Friedrich 756
Smith, Adam 1612
social character 63, 659
Social Character in a Mexican Village
(Fromm 1970) 679
social facts 1512, 1556
social monads 1412, 14751, 156
social network analysis 94, 155
social psychology 5761
social realism 20
social scientists 173
social theory 2078
Socialisme Ou Barbarie 184, 187
society 1523
sociological amnesia 1113, 207
sociological habitus 67
sociology
American 2, 203
British 2, 125, 1326
classical 1, 3
establishment of 13
failure of 8
figurational 56, 203, 2078
German 2, 61
history of 3
meaning of 45
political 236
reflexive sociology of 37
schools of 89
of sociology 37, 8
of sport 201, 202
of war and global conflict 30
Sociology Teaching Materials 2631
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois1903) 93
South African War 912, 95
Soviet Union 1836, 18890
Spencer, Hebert 90, 912, 96, 98, 99
sport, sociology of 201, 202
Stalin, Josef 1889
Stewart, Dugald 162
Stil und Sprache des Louis Ferdinand
Cline (Klein 1936) 7684
Stinas, Agis 183
215
structural functionalism 9
Studies on Authority and the Family
(Institute for Social Research 1936)
612
suicide 154
symbolic realism 3940, 44, 479
T
Tarde, Gabriel 14156
teaching materials 2631
technological determinism 23
The Civilizing Process (Elias) 199, 201,
202, 203, 2045
The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on
Religion, Psychology, and Culture
(Fromm 1992) 60
The Established and the Outsiders (Elias
and Scotson 2008) 201
The Feminine Character: History of an
Ideology (Klein 1946) 73
The Hidden God (Goldmann 1964)
10711, 120
The Industrial Society: Three Essays on
Ideology and Development (Aron
1967) 22n7, 28, 29
The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz
1973) 38, 42, 458, 4950, 52
The Method and Function of Analytic
Social Psychology (Fromm 1970)
60
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois 1903)
93
The Working Class in Weimar Germany:
A Psychological and Sociological
Study (Fromm 1984) 66
theoretical systems 23
Tocqueville, Alexis de 20
Tokugawa Religion (Bellah 1957) 39
totalitarianism 19091
Trifles for a massacre (Cline 1936) 834
Trotsky, Leon 185
truth 10
Turner, Victor 51
U
ber den Prozess der Zivilisation (Elias)
199, 201, 202, 203, 2045
unintended consequences 205
216
University of Ghana 200

University of Leicester 200
USSR 1836, 18890
V
Valry, Paul 112
W
war and global conflict 30
Ward, Lester F. 1, 3
Weber, Max 1, 2, 61, 163, 164, 174,
1834, 207
Westergaard, John 160
What is Sociology? (Elias 2012) 204

WILPF (Womens International League for
Peace and Freedom) 95, 97
Winch, Peter 168
Womens International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF) 95, 97
Workers Opposition 185
The Working Class in Weimar Germany:
A Psychological and Sociological
Study (Fromm 1984) 66
Y
Young Workers Project 200

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sociological amnesia

Classical and Contemporary

The editors and contributors 2015

ISBN 9781472442345 (hbk)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

1 Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

2 British Sociology and Raymond Aron

3 Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines: Robert N. Bellah,

5 From Literature to Sociology: The Shock of Celines Literary

7 Lucien Goldmanns Key Sociological Problems and His

8 G.D.H. Cole: Sociology, Politics, Empowerment and

9 Social Monads, Not Social Facts: Gabriel Tardes Tool

10 Alasdair MacIntyres Lost Sociology

11 Castoriadis and Social Theory: From Marginalization to

12 Norbert Elias: Sociological Amnesia and The Most Important

sociology and asexuality. Matt is the author of Late Modernity, Individualization

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This page has been left blank intentionally

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

Trajectories: Success and Failure

boldness of theoretical premonitions and the lack, or insufficiency, of concrete

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

the problem of fragmentation that they were devised to overcome (Holmwood

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

of possibility for statements that are acceptable to and verified by a field of

The development of knowledge is a process, not a static system that is settled at

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

issue of who can be deemed forgotten or failed is a complicated definitional

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

need think only of the unchallenged dominance of Parsonian structural functionalism

role of academic disciplinarity as contributing to the failure of given sociologists

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

The role of disciplinary interfaces is also important in Kieran Durkins chapter

be a sociologist. While recognizing the work going on in the supposedly empty

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

intellectual field was shaped by a number of forces, including the anti-Marxism

Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

This page has been left blank intentionally

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

War and Industrial Society: A Reappraisal, Ralf Dahrendorf declared There

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

The problem is compounded, Robertson continues, by the fact that Aron

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

is portrayed. Instead, and despite many penetrating observations, one receives

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

A more caustic opinion of Arons political sociology was expressed by

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

(19651998; three folders). Collections occupying the middle range include

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

G. Kolankiewicz, John Scotts (Leicester, 199192) Sociological Analysis and

Society (1959)? Dahrendorfs sociological longevity is explained by the fact

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

British Sociology and Raymond Aron

Gellner, E. 1961. Time Machines, Time and Tide 3 February: 1767.

Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines:

As individuals who specialize in the production of cognitive, evaluative and

new paradigm, a new framework, or a new method (Bourdieu 1991). A key

Two Men, Two Books, Many Disciplines

1 Sociological Amnesia: An Introduction

2 British Sociology and Raymond Aron

10 Alasdair MacIntyres Lost Sociology