Abstract
In the last chapter attention was drawn to the way Sociology developed two different identities as it emerged from the tangled threads of late nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual history. These identities, the scientific and the humanistic, viewed the classic text differently. For scientific sociology, the classic belonged with the discipline’s pre-scientific condition and would become redundant when sociology came of age as a science. An alternative, broadly humanistic sociology was initially more sympathetic to its classic texts, but with the rise to prominence of the social constructionist thesis within the broad church of a postempiricist sociology, classics became as vulnerable as any other artefact to its iconoclastic aims. It was argued that while scientific and humanistic outlooks have had different reasons for diminishing the significance of the classics they share in common an attitude that valorises the present at the expense of the past.
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Notes
- 1.
Weber’s typology of action is more complicated than this; it includes not only traditional and instrumental action but also affectual and value rational action.
- 2.
Apart from Gadamer’s philosophical account in Truth and Method (1989: 265–307), Edward Shils’ Tradition (1981) and John B. Thompson’s ‘The Re-mooring of Tradition’ in his The Media and Modernity (1995), provide the most interesting sociological accounts. A shorter version of Thompson’s essay can be found in the collection edited by Heelas et al. (1996), which also contains essays orientated towards its title: Detraditionalization. This collection contains essays sympathetic to the importance of tradition, by Adam, Campbell, and Luke.
- 3.
Camic’s account of habit in sociology focuses on the USA where the discipline was gradually being institutionalised in the late nineteenth century, albeit in a fairly fragmented way. In Britain, apart from the The London School of Economics (LSE) and a few minor exceptions, sociology did not seriously enter mainstream university life until the early 1960s.
- 4.
Ravaisson’s De l’abitude to which I refer later, offered a very different view of habit and had been written in 1838, but has not come to the attention of the social scientific community until recently.
- 5.
Over the years, Weber’s work on the rationalisation and ensuing ‘disenchantment’ of the western world has received greatest attention. However, it is with Habermas’ re-working of Weber’s claims in his Theory of Communicative Action (1984, volume 1, section 2), that the wider sociological importance of the Weberian view of the emergent differentiation of the spheres of science, art, and morality becomes apparent.
- 6.
The most copious, (if abstract) critique of these positivist assumptions is to be found in Habermas’ essay ‘Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics’, which was a contribution to what became known as the positivist dispute in German sociology (Adorno et al. 1976). It focused on the contrasting ideas of Popper and Adorno as they bore on the philosophy of science and social science. In support of Adorno, Habermas compares the limitations of the methodological principles of a scientific sociology with the dialectical approach of Critical Theory.
- 7.
Historically speaking, for example, they recognised that the emergence of the ‘empiricist’ tradition had undermined earlier metaphysical forms of thought, but history had rendered that tradition anti-progressive because of its emphasis on the ‘given-ness’ of facts tending to reinforce the current status quo. See Horkheimer’s seminal essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1972).
- 8.
Details of this debate, including its intellectual background can be found in How’s The Habermas—Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social (1995); see page 101–102 for details of the central texts.
- 9.
The saying originates in L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between, in which it is the opening sentence.
- 10.
Perhaps the most successful development has been in feminist sociology via Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1957), which drew on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for its basic categories. De Beauvoir pointed out that women experienced the world in ‘male’ terms, which defined them as close to nature and thus lacking the transcending consciousness that Sartre puts at the heart of a human (though implicitly ‘male’) freedom. De Beauvoir’s work is echoed in that of others such as Griffin (1978), Smith (1988), and Bartsky (1992). Craib’s Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean Paul Sartre (1976) opened up the interface between Sartre’s overall philosophical outlook and sociology, though this line of thought has not been pursued by others.
- 11.
Some empirical evidence is adduced by Beck in Risk Society (1992) to the effect that traditional sociological categories such as class and gender have declined as sources of identity and he assumes that this obliges the contemporary subject to live a more reflexive life. In Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Giddens’ argument is largely speculative, concerned to build up an ideal-typical picture of the contemporary hyper-reflexive subject.
- 12.
There are differences in emphasis between Beck and Giddens; the latter focuses on a new kind of reflexivity as a characteristic of the human agent, where Beck talks of ‘reflexive modernisation’ in terms of institutions. In this, Beck’s account is problematic. It is unclear how institutions in themselves can be reflexive, when only agents have the power of reflexivity.
- 13.
It will be apparent that Giddens uses slightly different terms when referring to ‘structure’ than is familiar in sociology. For him ‘structure’ refers to the ‘rules and resources’ actors use in their daily lives; in effect structure is internal to actors (1984a: 25). The usual way structure is referred to in sociology, as something external to actors, Giddens uses in relation to the structural features of institutions.
- 14.
It should be noted that while I have sketched out the tendency within mainstream sociology there are other authors such as Eisenstadt, Mann, Skocpol, and Tilly who have sought to link sociology and history.
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How, A.R. (2016). On the Antipathy of Sociology to the Past. In: Restoring the Classic in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-58348-5_4
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