Abstract
In the previous chapter the issue surrounding the role of classic text in academic life was set out. Although the full picture is more complicated, two broad outlooks were identified between those critics who are hostile to the idea of a canon of classics and advocates who defend its continuing value. In the latter part of the chapter, attention moved to some of the specific criticisms levelled at the sociological canon, and an initial defence of it was presented. There is though, a wider context to the dispute, both societal and sociological, and before moving on to a more extended discussion of the character of classics and canons, I want to explore this context. The nature of the dispute reflects the developing identity of the discipline as one that at various times and in various ways has produced, accepted, or denounced its classics according to the way it understands itself as a discipline. An important related theme throughout this section is the way sociology tends to diminish the significance of the past, underestimate the importance of tradition, and thereby skew the way it conceives its classics. The classic, I shall argue, links the past and the present; it discloses how much we share with the past, and how much it continues in us.
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Notes
- 1.
For an excellent discussion of Wells’ relation both to the Webbs and sociology, see Lepenies 1988: 143–154.
- 2.
While Habermas has retained his belief in the importance of sociology being both scientifically and hermeneutically adequate, by the early 1970s he recognised that ‘emancipation’ did not follow straightforwardly from conjoining the two in a ‘hermeneutically informed functionalism’.
- 3.
Baehr (2002: Chapters, 1–2) makes this seemingly obvious but often overlooked distinction between the discursive founders of sociology who established the intellectual shape of the discipline, and its institutional founders. The latter were responsible for the institutional development of the discipline by establishing university departments or academic journals of sociology. As founder of the Anée socologique and as a founder of the intellectual tradition that bears his name, Durkheim was one of the few who managed to straddle both categories (Baehr 2002: 6–7). It is an important distinction as debate in this area often lacks clarity over exactly what the object of debate is, that is, who founded the discipline. It is a distinction that bears on my later discussion of classics and canons. In this, I shall argue that canons are the products of the institutional life of university education, whereas classics are matters of evaluation and their status invariably open to debate.
- 4.
The status of Simmel as a classic founder of sociology is much less clear-cut than Weber’s status, and is a more recent development. Levine (1981: 61) remarks that in the mid-1950s, when he was completing his doctoral research on Simmel, the latter was ‘widely regarded as an archaic amateur’. His failure was twofold. On the one hand ‘the only sociological knowledge worth having was produced by applying rigorous empirical procedures’, with Simmel ‘far too un-empirical to be taken seriously’. On the other hand, ‘the much smaller number who struggled to pursue theoretical questions in sociology found Simmel’s habit of thinking too playful, whimsical almost, and rejected him as a serious theorist’.
- 5.
Virtually the only institution in Britain that taught sociology before 1950 was the London School of Economics. The failure of sociology to embed itself in British universities in the early 1900s was, according to Abrams (1968: 4), because the impulse for social reform, which might have led to its institutionalisation, already had plenty of outlets and a relatively responsive political system (see Halsey 2004: 50).
- 6.
The assumption that Parsons did produce a unified conception of sociology even amongst functionalists has been challenged by Eisenstadt, who argued that ‘despite claims to the contrary, especially by opponents, the structural-functional school was neither uniform nor unchanging’, indeed, ‘within the school, many internal controversies, disputes and “openings”’ existed (Eisenstadt and Curelaru 1976: 180).
- 7.
Turner S. mockingly describes the period following the original publication of Merton’s essay in 1949, as ‘The Great Instauration’, echoing the work of the sixteenth century English philosopher Francis Bacon, who urged book burning as necessary for the emergence of the New Science.
- 8.
The picture is complicated by the fact that while Turner describes Parsons’ claims for scientific sociology as ‘absurdly triumphalist’, while Habermas (1987: 199–200), no friend of positivism, makes clear his admiration for Parsons as a social theorist, not a positivist.
- 9.
Parsons’ essay, ‘The Prospects of Sociological Theory’ (1950), delivered as the Presidential Address to the American Sociological Society in 1949, rejects the speculative thought of Spencer, but accepts the continuing relevance of Weber and Durkheim. The weakness of the kind of speculative thought characteristic of Spencer’s is that of ‘premature closure’, that is, of assuming that no further empirical clarification is necessary beyond his merely illustrative accounts of societies. Weber and Durkheim, Parsons (1950: 6) maintains, have shown the inadequacy of the “utilitarian framework” and highlighted the importance of social institutions to sociological enquiry.
- 10.
In this essay, Coser uses concepts derived from Marx to develop an explanation that accounts for the different kinds of support the Nazis gained from the German working class.
- 11.
I use the term, post-traditional, to describe the various relatively independent sociologies that succeeded the period of positivist hegemony, such as Marxist, Feminist, Poststructuralist, Postmodernist. I have not used the term postpositivist as the word ‘positivist’ has become too vague and automatically pejorative to be useful.
- 12.
Insofar as the thesis refers to the idea that individuals and institutions are socially produced rather than naturally given, then all sociology could be described as social constructionist. However, here it refers to the general emphasis given to explaining how everything, which appears ‘given’, is in fact the outcome of a social process. Its aim is to undermine all fixed, essentialist notions, notably in relation to gender.
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How, A.R. (2016). In Pursuit of Identity: Fragmentation, Conflict and Crisis. In: Restoring the Classic in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-58348-5_3
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