Abstract
In the previous chapter attention was focused on the nature of classicity and the manner in which it emerges through the working out of historical horizons. As such the focus was not on the classic text per se but on the process that underpins its possibility. While Gadamer (1989: 577) confirms that his account was ‘not concerned with some canon of content’ held by the classics, critics have nevertheless pointed to the role played by canons in what is to be regarded as worthy of special attention. According to critics not only do canons preselect what is to count as ‘great’ in a discipline, but they also effectively act as instruments of exclusion, tacitly removing from the curriculum voices that stand in contrast to those deemed canonical. Canons are seen as representing the interests of social and political power, reinforcing ethnic, gender, and class assumptions. Its exclusions and silences conceal the collusion classic authors have with the repressive hierarchies of their time. In ‘Why is Classical Theory Classical?’, R.W. Connell (1997: 1511–1157) uses the principles of social constructionism to present a particularly powerful challenge to the validity of the sociological canon, arguing that it is part of the discipline’s originary myth serving to unify and legitimise an otherwise fragmentary and morally dubious project. The story sociology mistakenly tells itself is that in response to the advent of modernity and its disruptive changes, the intellectual founders of the discipline produced exemplary texts which have defined the nature of sociology and should continue to do so. They have come to determine what is to count as an issue worth speaking of, as well as shaping the vocabulary in which it is spoken about. When academics and their students comb through the work of classic authors they perform a ritual of canonical reinforcement demonstrating their membership of, and deference to, the sociological tradition.
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- 1.
There is considerably more detail to Connell’s article that these comments suggest, including supporting empirical evidence about gender and ethnicity. The article is forty-six pages long.
- 2.
In response to Foucault’s unmasking of the human sciences, Habermas (1987: 272–273) notes that he drops this theme in his later work, as by the 1970s objectifying approaches no longer dominated the field, being replaced by hermeneutical and critical approaches where knowledge was not oriented towards manipulation. In his Knowledge and Human Interests (1971b) Habermas sets out the different ‘interests’ inherent in different kinds of knowledge.
- 3.
Collins notes that this division when expressed as the ‘imperial gaze’ is much more prominent in non-classic authors such as Charles Letourneau and Henry Hughes.
- 4.
Recent translations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism break with Parsons’ translation of ‘stalhartes Gehäuse’ as ‘iron cage’ replacing it with ‘hard shell’ or ‘steel hard shell’. These latter terms suggest that while modern reason is reified it is also a heritage that is passed on and thus capable of change. See Chalcroft (1994) and Baehr (2002: 184–204).
- 5.
As indicated here in brackets these broad strata are subdivided into further sub-strata.
- 6.
This is the title of a recent university document.
- 7.
Durkheim locates the origins of this anomie in the events of 1870: the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent revolutionary uprising of the Paris Commune. In literary theory this kind of reduction of creativity is more thoroughly developed. Tompkins (1985) and Brodhead (1986) locate the success of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the American literary canon in terms of his alliances with the nineteenth century New England intellectual aristocracy and his involvement with the Democratic Party machine of the time.
- 8.
His chosen founders of sociology were Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Marshall.
- 9.
See also Baehr’s (2002: 111ff) comments to this effect.
- 10.
Again, I owe this argument to Weinsheimer’s valuable essay (1991: 131), though I have adjusted it to deal with the sociological nature of this argument.
- 11.
By ‘beyond’ I mean that the function of higher education itself can change and thus make some canonical works redundant or bring others into play.
- 12.
A notable exception to this is to be found in Craib’s Classical Social Theory (1997). In this he places Simmel firmly with the famous three as part of the canon, analysing each in terms of how they address four dualisms: individual/society; action structure; social integration/system integration; modernity/capitalism-socialism.
- 13.
- 14.
The exception is The Philosophy of Money (1990), first published in 1900. He was also one of the few classic authors who wrote sympathetically on feminist issues; see Simmel (1984).
- 15.
In his Modernity and Self-Identity (1991: 242–244) Giddens has forty concepts that would be unrecognisable to Parsons et al.
- 16.
There is an earlier unpublished reference to the canon—see Baehr (2002: 155), which refers to Jon Gubbay and Howard Caygill’s work on the role of the canon in the teaching of sociology in the UK. In the introduction to his edited book, Reclaiming the Sociological Classics, Camic (1997: 2) refers to the canon in passing, noting that the processes of canonisation ‘are still little understood’. The essays focus on the still valuable qualities of classic authors; the one exception is by McDonald who writes to enlarge the canon to include more women authors.
- 17.
- 18.
Parsons choice of canonical authors was for Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto. Pareto has remained outside the canon, while Marx, in spite of Parsons, has duly entered it.
- 19.
Kermode (1987: 606–609) makes the point that since the advent of modern ‘scientific philology’ in the eighteenth century the Christian canon has been subject to a different kind of scrutiny. The modern emphasis on historical origins means that interpreting the bible has become less a matter of theology more one of philological archaeology. The Bible is not now thought of less as one inspired whole, but more a fairly random set of historical texts. However, this change in mind-set has not led to the dissolution of the Christian canon.
- 20.
In fact in part two of this address Wallerstein raises six sociological challenges to the baseline axioms of the famous three.
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How, A.R. (2016). Canons and Their Discontents. In: Restoring the Classic in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-58348-5_9
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